The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (42 page)

             
He was just warming up to his description of Archemounte, in dutiful payment, when low voices and the sound of steps on the stairway sent his companion vanishing guiltily into thin air.  Ari followed as fast as he could, barely able to get out of sight along the walkway before the newcomers topped out.  Part of the deal was forgetting the private ever existed if he was caught up here.  He had no idea what he was going to do if they kept coming his direction, but the thought fled when he made out their voices.  It was Melkin and Traive.  He stopped, listening.

             
“—But he was different,” Melkin was growling.

             
“A change of heart, doubtless,” Traive’s voice was at its driest.  “Kane can be quite explicit, I’ve been told.”

             
“He’d been that already, and Perraneus had paid him all the mind of a misbehaving hound.  He was just never that arrogant before—and not only was it out of character, it disappeared within, what, a week?  And suddenly, at the Kingsmeet, he was meek as a mouse.  If I hadn’t known him all these years, I would’ve questioned his mental stability.”  Melkin sounded morose, obviously delighted at just one more morsel to add to his overfull platter of puzzles.

             
“Perhaps,” Traive suggested, in a totally different tone of voice, “it was the news he brought…what he ‘foresaw.’  Raemon’s resurgence—with the power, for the first time, to destroy the other gods...well, that would be a sobering vision even for a madman.”

             
Melkin grunted sourly.  “I’m not saying I believe in prophecy, but I wouldn’t have minded if he ‘foresaw’ something else.  He was right about the Empress being involved in this whole thing, which I had trouble giving much credence to at the time—”

             
A woman’s shriek rent the air suddenly, and the conversation paused.  Below, the local domestic fowl population began a disturbed din of protest behind their thick screens, and a cloud of butterflies, nothing but flutterings of shadow wings in the deepening dusk, rose in a soft whir from the wall near Ari.  There was another scream, loud cries, a rushing of bodies.  A chaos of noise punctured the air of what had been a rather peaceful evening, then there was a crash of something breakable contacting stone Tor, and the strident sound of female shouting of a whole different tone echoed up from below.   

             
“Ah,” Traive said complacently.  For a moment, as the commotion very slowly ground to a lower decibel, they all stood quietly, two listening and one fervently grateful he wasn’t involved, and then Traive said mildly, “It should be safe now.”  He and Melkin moved back toward the stairs and Melkin said, “What was that about?”

             
Traive dipped his head with faint apology.  “The privates need a break in routine sometimes…”

             
Alone, Ari stared into the haze of jungle dusk, in the thrall of silence once more, bits of light marking fireflies and other unnamed motes of phosphorescence.  Nearby, a silent Sentinel that he hadn’t even noticed manned an enormous mounted crossbow, but he paid Ari no attention.  Perraneus…the mage had been different, Ari realized.  He hadn’t given the Kingsmeet much thought, preferring to push that particular memory into a box and close the lid, and its unintentional recall punctured through the soft peace of the evening.  Bitterly, he realized he was nothing but a moon-eyed calf, to think that he had known the Whiteblades just because he had dreamed of them in his babyhood.  Technically, he was still dreaming of them, but that just made him more ridiculous.  He was of Enemy blood, the people that worshiped Raemon, who was prophesied by certain mad magi to be looming up out of the near future desert with more power than ever.  His dream mother had said Il was pure…well, what would He have to do with him, then, cursed by all Realmsmen as offspring of the world’s single greatest evil?  If Il was so good and pure, how could he allow something like Raemon even to exist?  For that matter, Ari thought glumly, how could he allow something like Ari to exist?

             
There was a fresh breeze the next morning as they mounted up in the courtyard.  It had come to them in beguiling puffs here and there over the last few days, so brief you thought you were imagining its coolness.  But now it was a definite phenomenon, brisk and smelling of clean, open country, like a misplaced zephyr from the Crown Mountains far to their north. 

             
All the chatter and laughing (and bitter verbal assaults from the single put-out Northerner) came to a halt when the Torquelord escorted Traive and Melkin out.  Respectful Sentinels made their farewells and fled to various duties less conspicuous than under the Torquelord’s eye, and it was just the stagrider escort and themselves again, heading back out into the forest.  More than just the breeze was different this morning, though, and all of them could feel the air of anticipation.

             
They’d decided to overnight at the Band because Lirralhisa was still a full day’s ride away, but now that didn’t seem that long at all.  With the noise and bustle of town life on the horizon, Ari was already missing the jungle, the constant excitement, the concealment offered by its endless, dank, rich closeness.  Maybe…maybe when this was all over, when the Statue was found and the rumors laid to rest, he could come back here. 

             
They headed out as soon as the Torquelord was finished with Traive, even the stags restless under them, their delicate hooves prancing and pawing.

             
“Why are you putting ribbons on?” Rodge asked Rhuq.

             
“Honors,” the Sentinel corrected.  “Because we will be essentially on parade, my friends, and we want you to be proud of us.”  The other Sentinels were also pushing the thin green strips of cloth up their arms to just above the elbow.

             
The Northerners said nothing to that.  Their clothes were limp and discolored, there was sweat and grime lodged into every crevice of their beings, and they were baggy-eyed from lack of sleep, but it wasn’t the Imperial way to admit it.

             
They weren’t even an hour from the Tor when the jungle began to thin around them, melting away into one huge, gorgeous parkland.  The wind brought different smells now, cooking and animals and waste and the mustiness of human habitation.  It cooled Ari’s flushed face and ruffled his simmering hair and that old sense of adventure and curiosity began to kindle in him.

             
Everyone sat up straighter, even Rodge, who usually rode like a half-empty sack of grain.  After all the lowering, monotonous closeness of the weeks of jungle, the sudden space and light were invigorating.  There was even a horizon.  The Sirensong was almost a different river beside them, with a healthy bluish tint and nice, normal green rushes growing in lush profusion along its banks.  The tiny dragonflies of Cyrrh swooped and danced over its lily pads, everything catching the light so that the faint mist that drifted dreamily over the morning landscape seemed to sparkle.

             
The temperature was definitely cooler here, decidedly pleasant, and deciduous trees showing signs of fall color dotted the enormous leagues of lawn stretching out around them.  Cerise made an inarticulate sound, pointing off to the right at what looked like…a house.  As the mist lifted and more appeared ahead, closer to the road, the travelers could see they were whimsical things, these houses of Cyrrh.  Curved corners, irregular, rounded outlines, beautiful woodwork decorating every feature you could think of—one had a doorframe carved so exquisitely into a sitting gryphon that Ari did a double take, thinking it real.

             
More and more of them appeared as the day wore on, coalescing into wondrous little hamlets…and accompanied by people.  Without exception, they would stop and stare—not at the gorgeous stags, whose gold-tipped antlers caught the morning light, or the proud, straight-backed stagriders, but always at the Northerners.  At
Rodge
, no less, whose skin was so genetically deficient of pigment that he’d barely tanned a shade with all his weeks in the sun.

             
And there were girls.  Everywhere.

             
The boys were dizzy trying to follow them all with their eyes.  Golden girls with golden skin and big green eyes, with long hair that hung straight or curling or flowing in waves or tumbling down their backs.  You could smell their perfume and hear their quiet sing-song voices and tinkling laughs before you even came into a village.

             
Rodge, who had never in his life been the subject of female attention in any way resembling the positive, allowed after a few hours, “Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all.”

             
“Wait until you see the Heart of the Falls,” Rhuq said.  Rodge possibly hadn’t been referring to the geography, but he smiled agreeably. 

             
It was an effortless day, compared to any of their previous ones in Cyrrh, but it was made long by anticipation.  Ari didn’t see, as dusk settled in, how it could get any more beautiful.  His heavy misgivings had vanished, largely from the complete lack of attention he seemed to be drawing.  He never thought he’d be so delighted to be treated as almost invisible.  And the enchanting magic of the place…!  Leaves, yellow and orange and crimson and vermillion, swirled in the glistening evening air, backlit in the rosy grey dusk by the lights of the little cottages.  Huge moths, colored like nocturnal butterflies, flitted gently through a scene so dreamy, so homey, so warm that Ari felt a little sentimental for the hearth at Harthunters.  People talked and sang and played music and the air was full of contentment.

             
Then, they turned the corner around a stand of thick-trunked oak and the feeling of comfort vanished—replaced by thrilling awe. Before them, in a breath-taking vista, soared a high and awesome cliff face that stretched for leagues around a deep valley bowl as if embracing it.  Three enormous waterfalls plunged thunderously down it at the far end, cataracts of frothing lace in the distance and obscured by the thick mist of their fall near the valley floor.  The air was thick with water droplets and the deep, bass song of all that water, a magical sheen over the incredible, softly scintillating scene.  For to the left of the falls, the entire cliff face encircling that end of the bowl was covered in bits of winking light, as if all those leagues of stone were buried under an iridescent layer of the tiny dragonflies or set with innumerable gems.  It was like some jeweled crown of rock.   

             
Ari felt like an adventurer who’d found the city of lost treasure, like a man wandering the desert who’d finally found a clear, bright river.  Like he’d come home.

              They breakfasted the next morning with the Skyprincess.  They were all gathered in a little room, complete with a verandah and view of the falls, and still not quite used to the stunning, sparkling beauty of the Skypalace, when she floated gracefully into the room.

             
“I’m Kindhriada, Kindri,” she introduced herself to their gaping faces in a desultory voice.  She drifted aimlessly in, like a bored teenager, and after gazing disinterestedly at the loaded table, sank into a chair as if it had taken the last of her energy to do so.

             
The Northerners, most reluctant to stop stuffing the delicious food in their mouths and all a little taken back at the casual approach to formality in the Skypalace, murmured noncommittal and slightly awed greetings.  Even Cerise, whose formulas for protocol were normally a deep and abiding source of pride to her, was a little uncertain in the face of this almost medical-grade apathy.

 
              They were all of them tremendously well-rested, unlike the listless royalty across the table.  The fur-covered stone floors or muddy grass of the past few weeks’ bed downs had become high, carved wooden beds with soft mattresses and silken bed linens last night.  And that strained tension that was commensurate with traveling the jungle was completely gone, for they were dozens of yards off the ground, in the Skypalace of Cyrrh.

             
This wondrous structure was basically a warren of caves, though so finely hewn and gorgeously decorated it took some architectural snooping to figure it out, and a lot of dedication to keep in mind.  Every surface seemed to be covered with a brilliant tapestry or an ornate work of art—some woven of precious metal, some glittering with jewels—or a gilt mirror.  Ari had never seen so many mirrors in his life.  Harthunters had one, to his knowledge, and it was a great treasure.  They were everywhere in the Palace, not only visually confusing and unpleasant if one had vivid red hair and looked like a Sheelman, but also making the rooms and passageways seem larger than they were.  They hadn’t noticed it last night, but in the bright dawn, it became apparent that they were also so cleverly placed as to reflect light far into the depths of the caves.  It had been the candles they’d noticed last night, so ubiquitous that it seemed bright as day even deep in the cliff.  Unlike the smoky things of Merrani that tended to smell like rendered animal fat, these smelled sweet and nestled in beautifully decorated wall niches or hung from orbs of colored glass.  In the finest apartments, they were set in delicate, patterned lanterns of paper or silk, and in the throne room, close to a hundred of them must have hung in that chandelier.