Trial of Intentions (27 page)

“What was it?” Mendel's curiosity was piqued.

She gave them each a long look. “A letter,” she said. “Now, will you let me in?”

Her answer seemed to surprise them. And none of them spoke while her father considered her request.
He
led the Storalaith Merchant House, after all was said and done. It was a vast operation, with gatherers in most cities and towns across the Eastlands. In fact, to hear the merchant houses tell it—trade legends being what they were—Gemen had sent gatherers over the seas in merchant ships and into the Bourne itself.

Her father waved the tenderizer dismissively. “Very well. Let's get you your letter and the hell out of my warehouse. Bad for business,” he muttered.

As he started to stand, Mendel gently pushed his father back into his chair. “I'll see to it, Da. You finish the day's ledger, and your milk, too.”

“No horsing around back there,” her father admonished. “In and out.” He jabbed the tenderizer forward and back in emphasis. “And be mindful you're escorting your
regent
.”

Helaina tried not to let the snide way her father used her official title bother her. She had certainly had worse from others. And if she was honest, she'd expected it, even understood it. But that didn't lessen the sting of it one jot. Her father's skin bore the large dark spots of age. Though he still had a steady hand, he'd go to his earth soon. She might have just lost her last chance to reconcile with the da she still loved. The man who'd given her the keen wit and values that accounted—as far as she was concerned—for any of her success as regent.

Mendel motioned her to follow, and he disappeared through the rear kitchen door. She paused next to her father as she passed. She longed to bend and kiss him one last time, put her arms around him. Tell him she loved him. She sensed any of those things would be too much. The gulf between them had widened too far. Instead, she simply reached down and put a hand on his forearm, feeling the warmth of his aged skin. She didn't look at him as she did so. And he didn't look up. But neither did he pull his arm away.

The moment passed in a breath. And it broke her heart with the suggestion of closeness she had forfeited for thirty years. Her da.

She wondered. If she could go back, would she shun the call to be regent, and stay at her father's side?

Get moving, you old dotard. Looking back's a fool's game.

She stifled a grin as she left the kitchen for the Storalaith vault, since the pragmatism she scolded herself with belonged to her father—maybe the best thing she'd inherited from him.

Down a short hall Mendel waited at an iron door for her to catch up. This was the first, simplest barrier to the family depository. The thickly cast portal had a rather plain keyhole. By rote, Mendel inserted a key into the lock and turned.

But this was all show. As her brother performed the obvious task, he also subtly pressed a small section of the doorjamb a hand's length below the lock. This was the true key.

After they'd stepped through, Mendel closed the door promptly, and turned into a small antechamber. A few chairs were situated in the corners, where attendant tables laden with a few books and low-wick oil lamps stood. A decorative rug spun by a Reyal'Te weaver covered the floor from wall to wall. This room had been one of Helaina's favorites as a child—quiet, removed from the bustle of warehouse inventory and kitchen conversation. It was great for reading in peace any of the wonderful books they meant to sell—stock, her father called it.

Helaina smiled at the term—
stock
. Even as a child, she'd seen through her father's insistence that she view the books as collateral. The man had a passion for knowledge. He could have chosen a hundred other ways to earn coin. And many of his own family argued there were simpler needs to fill, merchandise they could move more quickly and at better margin.

Gemen Storalaith would have none of it. Much as it filled his coffers, too, he had it in his head that he was doing his clientele a service.
Trading in knowledge,
he'd say,
is ennobling
. He wasn't wrong, either.

Her smile soured. She'd inherited that same sense from the man. And it was that feeling that had led her to pass the Knowledge Law. She'd had her judicature counselors draft it, which meant it was filled with a bunch of six-plug words only an academy graduate would understand. But in essence: New information didn't
belong
to anyone; so it couldn't be sold. The profitability of her father's trade had taken a severe hit; the law required Storalaith to turn over any new
understanding
it sourced to the Library of Common Understanding. They'd been forced to do commerce in the grey area of scholarship that reevaluated existing knowledge. It was a specialized market. A good one. And her father was expert at it. But her law had crippled his growth and profit potential.

The Knowledge Law had been the right thing. It made Helaina extremely popular with the people. And she liked to believe that maybe somewhere in his heart, her father was proud that she'd tried to help make enlightenment more widely available. But she'd lost her family because of it, and hadn't sat at the kitchen table for chilled milk since.

Mendel approached a second door. This one had no lock at all, just a handle. And when he knocked, it sounded as thin and light as balsa wood. But she listened in sweet memory to the tap.
Tap
.
Tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap. Tap.
The same chiastic rhythm repeated three times.

Nothing happened. After a few moments, Mendel looked back at her, smiling. “Do you remember?” he asked, his eyebrows arching.

After a half moment to remember, she returned a grin, then repeated the rhythmic knock. But this time in its proper pattern: Left. Left, right. Left, right, down. Down right. Right.

Beneath her knuckles, the door swung slowly open on hinges that used gravity to pull it back. She smiled, happy to have remembered on her own.

The short hallway beyond chilled her skin. Cold stone surrounded them on every side; another dim, low-wick oil lamp burned at the corridor's end. Here forward, all was thick granite. She and Mendel came to the last door. She marveled now at the piece of genius stonework—practically seamless, set on a near-soundless caster system, graven with a simple undecorative word:
SO.

So
was a Dimnian word meaning “speech-song,” and an archaic connotation at that. This last door could be unlocked only by the sound of the voice. But the ingenuity of the lock went beyond mere
so
. The door had been attuned to the voices of the Storalaith family. Speech, it turned out, had qualities that followed family lines. Like a tonal fingerprint. It was as distinctive and different as one cloud is from the next. And for the price of a very old Masson text, Gemen Storalaith had bought the service of a Dimnian who knew the art of fastening the door with a speech-lock only a Storalaith could open.

Mendel parted his lips to speak. Helaina put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. She wanted to do it. She felt like a child again, and that didn't seem so bad a thing. He smiled and gestured grandly for her to take over.

Helaina stepped closer to the door and said, as they always had, “Don't let me in.”

The childish joke of it made them both laugh, since the door, of course, rolled back at the sound of her voice.

Once the half-stride-thick granite slab had opened fully, her brother picked up the oil lamp and they went in. “Don't let me out,” Mendel said, and the portal rolled shut again—vault doors were never left open.

Mendel lit several oil lamps to brighten the vault, as Helaina noted the receiving desk set beside the door, where a handy copy of the ledger was kept. Her father was a stickler for such redundancies.

Then she looked up, and came to an abrupt stop. Her father's trade had expanded. Where he'd begun with texts, the vault now showed tidy sections of various information goods. In one corner a tall cherrywood rack—much like a wine rack, but deeper—held a vast assortment of maps.

Next to the map rack stood a table laid out with dozens of different kinds of ores and minerals. She hadn't mastered mineralogy, but she'd gotten streetwise in their value and uses. Her father had no interest in platinums and golds and qualens, it would seem. Useful as those metals were in commerce, it appeared they hadn't the
leading
qualities these ones did.

Helaina caught whiffs of aqua fortis, strong water, and vinegar—reactants that could be used to test mineral authenticity.

Beside the table stood a large cabinet with glass doors. Inside it, on tall shelves, were glass bottles with cork stoppers. The bottles held powders and liquids in various quantities. She knew her father better than to think he'd peddle false nostrums to the ignorant, or even useful ones to the sick—nostrums weren't his trade. Mendel saw her quizzical stare and crossed to the cabinet, opened the left door, and drew down a bottle. He opened it and dabbed a finger in a pale magenta powder, then put his finger in his mouth.

“Rhubarb powder. Good drink flavoring.” He grinned.

Helaina laughed softly. She knew the cabinet held more than culinary ingredients, but before she could ponder it further, her attention turned to the dead.

On the left wall hung several large anatomical sketches. Beside them, from a series of spikes driven into the stone, hung intact skeletons. The sizes and shapes varied; these were the bones of different races—human, Tilatian, Far, Mal, Dimnian, and others. She was no anatomist, but she'd swear on there being at least those races. What disturbed her most, though, were the sketches themselves. They'd been marked up in odd places.
Strategic places.
It looked to her like the biological frailties of each race had been meticulously noted—information that had a certain buyer.

Looking around, she had the sudden realization that Storalaith had moved beyond simply acquiring and reselling understanding. It had gone into the business of discovery. They were using what could be learned in the books, and advancing the knowledge themselves.

The wall opposite the door stretched from one corner to the other with bookshelves, save a bureau over to the right.

This had been the meat of her father's trade when she'd still been a part of it. She ambled close and began perusing titles. A forlorn smile rose on her lips as she saw volumes by Shenflear and Hargrove and Malekel and Ara and Deleni—books almost certainly a violation of the Knowledge Law.

She pulled herself away from the books. She needed to focus on her task.

Rather than wait for Roth to make a move, she'd decided to take an offensive posture. She would reassert the office of regent, and her own regency, and do so by publishing … the letter.

Helaina went to the bureau. She opened the third drawer and pressed a hidden panel, revealing a hollow in the drawer from which she pulled an envelope.

Mendel had replaced the glass bottle in the cabinet, and stood back while Helaina removed with gentle, trembling fingers a letter, and laid it on the bureau's marble top while she read:

On this, the fourth day of the fourth cycle of the year 899 in this Fifth Era, I, King Nevil Sadon, end the line of Kings in the kingdom of Vohnce. I do this not because I have no heir. Rather, I admit that too often in our great realm's history have my forebears taken too much liberty as Lords of these lands simply because they were born in the line of succession. And we can no longer afford the inconsistent rule that proceeds from the unpredictable disposition of a single man.

Neither, though, will I relegate ruling power to the farmer who knows nothing of war and politics. It is not fair to him, nor to the rest of the people he would need to lead.

So I frame a new government, where in place of a King, Recityv and Vohnce shall have a Regent, whose responsibilities shall be like unto a King's but moderated by a Council, and a system of Courts. All this I will set forth in detail with my advisors, so that we may avoid confusion as we embark upon a reform of how we build prosperity, protection from invaders, as well as an industrious people.

The Regent will be appointed by recommendation from a new High Council, comprised of representatives from all the orders of influence and industry. That same High Council will then serve for the balance of their lives, so that the winds of change in the economies and fraternal politics of our many important brotherhoods do not blow us hither and yon.

So begins our new future. Each of you now has a voice. And you may trust your Regent to hear them all with fairness and sympathy and grace.

May you know fair skies.

Your King and Brother,

Nevil Sadon

Then just below this copy of King Sadon's Epistle of Change, the following had been scrawled:

We, the High Council, in the year 431 of the Seventh Age, do appoint Helaina Storalaith as Regent of Recityv and Vohnce, with all the rights and powers of that office. Under her leadership, we will dispense fairness and mercy, and will stand as an example to all other realms.

This we do in line with the Epistle of Change issued by King Nevil Sadon.

Beneath it were the names of all the council members, save a Child's Voice, which was a role that had, until recently, fallen out of favor.

Helaina's letter of succession.

She'd been a very young woman when it had been signed. She could still remember how ill-prepared and anxious she'd been. Her predecessor had reassured her:
Ruling is having the conviction that you are right.
And if she passed away before she had the chance to impart that same wisdom to whomever would eventually follow her, the Council would perform the selection process just as it had done with her. It was more tidy if she could hand over the keys, but not necessary. A majority vote would see a new regent installed. But only when she was ready to step down.