The Golden Sword (30 page)

“Astria,” he continued, “is much changed. Celendra has brought in every star trader’s device she could imagine. It is said they have pleasure baths there now, where one floats without getting wet upon innumerable founts of some special water. Port Astrin is surely the blackest hole upon Silistra.”

“M’lennin must be thrilled,” I said, hate rising to temper the fear in me.

“M’lennin is upon M’ksakka. Dellin is Liaison First, and has been since Celendra took up Astria.” I sat up, and he narrowed his eyes at me. “He has taken the Slayer’s chain,” he continued. “Are you upset?” he asked, and then sat up also. I scraped away my hair from my face, wondering when I would have a moment to tend to it.

“No. I just thought of something. If you have him in your plan, as you intimated, and he resides in the Liaison First’s keep, I could be of help. There would have been no reason for them to have excised my print from the computer that sentried that place. I can walk in there whehever I want. The doors will still respond to my hand.”

“You are upset,” he said, pulling my hands as they worried a snarl at my neck. I shook off his grasp.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I am upset. That demonstration of yours upset me. The past does not upset me. I do not care about Dellin. I am frightened by what you showed me.”

“It was merely instruction into the nature of men,” he said gently, raising my face to his with a hand upon my throat.

“And not a warning?” I asked.

“We have been close upon such a situation before,” he admitted, and I knew he meant that time below Santha, when I had bargained with Raet for his life.

“Do not bind me this way. I must use what little skills I have to defend myself.”

“Someone must.” He answered only my first statement. I was totally at a loss. What I had done in his behalf, I could not undo. Nor could I forever keep from my skills, or keep him from knowing. I got up and roamed the room, telling myself that I had so little power yet, my worry was premature. I made one circle of Sereth’s keep; my right hand trailing upon the hilts of his racked weapons as I passed them. His eyes followed me as I made a second circuit. It is often my need to move when I think. I ran my fingers over the worn hilts that shone with the softness of metal in frequent use. They seemed ready to jump to my hand.

“Where is the cloak I wore when I came here?” I asked evenly, at a great cost. I stopped still, my arms crossed around me, waiting.

“In the chest.” His voice was frankly puzzled.

I got it from where he had neatly folded it, and carried it near to him, spreading the plain-looking brown width of it upon the browner floor. Taking the stra-hilted knife he had given me from its sheath, I knelt upon the cape. Sereth rolled to his side and propped his head upon his arm. I glared at him. He grinned widely. I cut away the stitches that bound the brown cloth around my father’s cloak, working carefully around the starburst clasps, first one, then the other. When every stich was loose, I lifted the top layer of brown material, and the Shaper’s seal glittered like the stars in the keep’s shifting light.

Sereth was up on his knees beside me. He leaned over the cloak, running his hand upon the cool-feeling scintillant spiral. He knew that sign. He sat back upon his heels, silently questioning.

I took the edge of the cloak and with it wiped the dulling agent from the sunburst clasp. Then I backed off it and took the black cape in my hands and swirled it over my shoulders. I fastened the chain between the clasps.

“This is my couch-gift to you,” I said solemnly. “But you must know what it is about. And you must accept, and not be angry. Promise me.”

“I promise,” he replied.

“Take up a blade you would not mind losing, and strike me anywhere the cloak covers me,” I directed him.

“Estri—”

“Do it. I will not be harmed.”

“I will not.”

But in the end, he did go and find an old, much-seasoned weapon, whose blade bore numerous nicks and chips.

He stood before me with it, hefting the hilt meditatively in his hand.

“You must strike with some little force,” I demanded, looking up at him with what I hoped was confidence.

“You are sure?”

“Doubtless.”

“There is no other way?”

“It might only work with a person inside.”

He shrugged, and brought his arm back and down so fast I could not have dodged it if I tried. I felt it touch, and a sort of a mild shock. The blade, like the one I had tried upon Chayin, shattered into tiny fragments, and for a moment they hung in the air, motes of metal dust. Sereth’s hand, the hilt still in it, glanced my shoulder. What he held, when he recovered himself and looked down awestruck, was but the stub of a hilt, only the amount enclosed in his fingers. He balanced it upon his palm a time, staring.

When he looked up at me, it was with a boyish, excited expression I had never seen upon him. I had been afraid that he would be angry, that he would refuse it.

“That kind of help,” he said, “I will gladly accept.”

I took it from my shoulders and handed it to him. He would doubtless need it. I, surely, did not. The protection I sought was not from steel or gol. He took it from me, and put his arms around me. I was content, even happy. I pushed away all else, that I might remember what passed between us unshadowed. But the shadows of the future always cloak the past, and in doing so, change it.

He looked well in the Shaper’s cloak, though he took it off almost immediately and replaced it in the wooden chest. It seemed to me, in my wishful thinking, that he looked almost born to wear it. But Estrazi had told me: Sereth was not for me. Yet I set my hest against him. I took those moments to reinforce—what I had done, to make a bastion against the chill winds that whined shrill songs in my ears.

“You are sure,” asked Sereth, crossing the room to slide aside a hidden panel by the door, “that you do not need it?”

“I am sure,” I said.

“This,” he said, closing the panel, “is my couch-gift to you, and one for me as costly as that cloak to you. We have an enth, alone. None will disturb us. I would speak seriously with you.” And with that he came and sat opposite me, his back upon the dais that still bore my Parset gear.

“First, briefly, about Lalen. He has been, a good number of years, a slave. Such can do strange things to a man’s mind. I had to see what he would do. I wanted you to realize, also, where such a man would put you. If he falls, in your service, you need not even blink. But I think he will not fall. He will protect himself. A man must do that, first. His hand will be stronger, his head clearer, then perhaps even mine, for it is his only task to see that you live.” He slid down upon his spine and looked up at me.

“I see,” I said. I knew that look upon him. I waited.

“When I met you, my life was settled. I had, in my own eyes, success. I had women, children, land, threx. Position and power—all a man wants. I had the Seven’s sword.

“I misjudged some few actions, and I lost it. When I drew upon Vedrev, I had no clear thought. And when I found myself with so many swords in my service, it was too late. I did not want this.” He waved his, hand. “Alone I might have gone to Dritira, or Galesh, and made some new life. I cannot leave these men, who left so much for me.”

He took a deep breath and blew it sibilantly between his teeth.

“I speak to you of this with some difficulty,” he said finally. “I have always kept my own counsel. This is a precipitous life, with no clear purpose, or any proper ending. We are marginally safe in the Parset Lands. Elsewhere ...” His voice trailed off.

“When I conceived plucking Celendra out of Astria, it was a simple undertaking. Something to fill the time, I thought it, and another small strike against the Day-Keepers who continually harass me. I wanted Chayin‘s Parsets to hide among, and we would have walked in there and taken her out from under their very noses.” He smiled wanly. “However, things are greatly changed. All has become very serious, and the dangers are no longer slight.” And his voice turned even softer, and I leaned forward to catch his words.

“You must decide what you would do if I do not survive this. And consider, that if I do, there is always the next time. Chayin and I will doubtless come to contest over you eventually. Men can share anything but love of a woman. Should, for one reason or another, you pass again into his hands, I would, were I you, rest there content. In many ways, you two are a more likely match. And one could do worse than Nemar.”

I found my vision badly blurred, and I pulled up my knees and rested my head upon them.

“I am not doing this right,” he muttered, suddenly standing. He put his hand upon my head, and I leaned against him, my face pressed to his leg. “I am no provider,” he said in a whisper. “Behind me I left four women, three children, and a grandchild whose sex I do not even know. Before me is only conflict. And someday, death at a stronger hand. And I was content with that, until you came here. I am no longer content.” I watched my tears run down his thigh, over a bare area worn free of hair.

He pulled my arms from about his leg and knelt down to take my shaking shoulders in his hands.

“You must understand. It—is not a good thing, when a man who wields death comes to hold his life dear. It weakens. In my weakness, I fear for you.” He sought to quiet me, but I would not be quieted for a long while. When my convulsions ceased, he still held me, whispering things he had only before said to me in the heat of passion.

And then he asked me about the cloak. I told him all that he wanted to know about it, and about Estrazi and Raet, though it discomfited me to do so.

At the end of it, I begged him excuse me, that I might walk awhile alone in the corridors, until I found myself eased.

He went to the door and slid aside the panel and played with it. The door, so instructed, opened. He kissed me lightly upon the forehead. I walked past him, wordless.

After a time, wandering aimlessly, I came upon Chayin, who was alone. His expression told me how I must look—red-eyed and swollen-faced and bedraggled. He leaned his arm upon the wall, between two of the torches that lit the passage.

“Do you have your pouch?” I asked him, after enduring his wordless scrutiny. I could not have passed by him; he commanded the corridor.

“He does not want you to have it.” His face seemed dark after Sereth’s, in the flamelight. But he got it out and tossed it to me.

I tasted uris, the first time since I had awakened. It was an intensely pleasurable experience. My nerves steadied, my anguish receded. I did not toss it to him, but brought it, and handed it back. He looked down into my face; his fingers traced the tracks of my tears down my cheek.

“He is not as you expected him to be, is he?” he said, gentle.

I shook my head against the tears that again threatened my sight.

Chayin drew me to him and held me. I sensed him exploring my memories, but did not move to stop him. “It is almost over,” he said to me. “You can be strong this little while longer. Soon, all will be very simple. The new time brings with it a different balance. I have thrown the yris-tera again. Everything, it seems, has a solution.” He put me back from him. How quickly he had grown strong, freed of his affliction.

“It does not seem that way to me.” I sighed.

“Only because you are so busy appearing less than you are.” His eyes held dark concern for me. “The ending of that, too, comes fast upon us.”

“I must get back,” I said, to extricate myself.

“Go, then.” He flashed his bright smile. “Do not worry,” he called after me. “When you need me, you will not have to call.”

It was shadowed and musty in the undertunnels, with only a scant bowl of light here and there above the central channel, which ran unending to the limits of sight. Off it branched other tunnels, strings of light, six of them. A gray place it was, and full of ghosts. This was Day-Keepers’ domain, or should have been. The glassy gray floor was slippery under my booted feet. I turned to watch Sereth, in an alcove set into the tunnel wall. Chayin, garbed as I in the weapon-concealing brown leathers we had worn from Frullo jer, peered over Sereth’s shoulder. I moved my left leg, heard a click, and bent down to set the razor-moons better in their sheaths. Lalen, leaning, insolent but alert, against the smooth glassy wall, watched me. He, as Sereth, wore circlet armor, and each of us bore weapons enough for three. I hoped we would not need them all.

“But where are we going?” I had asked him, for I had been excluded from all their final planning.

“To pay Dellin a visit,” Sereth had answered. It was Amarsa second second. Wiraal could not possibly reach Astria by threx before second sixth.

I shook my head in wonder at the Ebvrasea’s inscrutability. A sort of grating sound bounced around the undertunnel, and a section of the channel flooring withdrew into itself, revealing another level beneath. Up from those depths came a silver oblong shape, most reminiscent of a M’ksakkan hover. When three-quarters of its rounded, windowless bulk was above the surface upon which we stood, it ceased rising. I heard the metal screech again, as the channel floor closed itself up.

Sereth laughed softly, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him darken the alcove. As he stepped from it, it closed behind him, leaving no sign that anything other than featureless gray wall had ever been there. He touched a small box in his hand, and there was a humming sound.

Lalen, with a soft exclamation, pushed himself away from the wall. Chayin, at Sereth’s right, came and turned me by the shoulders. I knew what I would see. Almost, I resisted. Then I let him turn me. The oblong metal sphere lay open to us, inviting. It looked, from where I stood upon the platform, much like the keeps above our heads.

Lalen came up behind me, peering over our shoulders. He, too, felt uneasy here.

“Come, you two,” said Sereth indulgently. “It is perfectly safe. Certainly safer than any threx.”

So I let him coax me to jump across that yawning gap, a full two hands’ widths, and onto the resilient loam-colored flooring of the oblong’s interior.