Voice of the Lost : Medair Part 2 (16 page)

The look he gave her then reminded Medair forcibly of her location: deep under Falcon Black with two Decian guards for escort.  "You consider yourself above reproach?  What of Tarsus?  You didn't so much as attempt to discover the truth of his story.  Why was that?  What happened to all this 'not taking sides' guff you were spouting in Finrathlar?  Lasted until the Lord High here gave you a come-hither look?"

"It lasted until Athere was attacked."

"And then you decided a White Snake sat the throne better than your Emperor's rightful heir.  And killed half Decia.  And you think you can convince me that was the right thing to do?"

"No."  Medair sighed, then looked away as Illukar moved, lowering his hands.  His face was that particularly expressionless mask which he wore when he was withholding all opinion.  "I'm not trying to convince you that it was the right decision, because it wasn't; not for Decia."  Her voice wavered and she took a calming breath, her eyes on the guard standing behind Illukar, who made no effort to hide his hatred.  "It was right for Palladium, however.  It's taken me a long time to accept that Ibisians aren't my enemy any more, that my war is long over.  Your war is over now, Captain."

"Forgive and forget?  It doesn't work that way,
Herald
."

"I know."  She couldn't begin to explain her struggle to rise above her own hatred.

Vorclase shook his head, and turned his attention back to the tunnel along which, if all went to plan, the heir to a dead Empire would soon be driven.  Illukar's fingers brushed the back of Medair's hand and she tried to smile at him.  A day was a very short time to have been together, and she wanted to touch and talk to him about things which had nothing to do with war.  Constrained by the importance of their mission and the antipathy of the Decians, all she could do was stand at his side and wait for Tarsus.

oOo

After only a short eternity, she heard the scrape of a boot on stone, the sound of panting breath, and there he was.  He staggered to a stop, arms full of faintly glowing glass, and stared at the people who blocked his way.

No-one had mentioned how young Tarsus was: not more than sixteen years, with curling dark hair, a smudged face and a jutting chin.  With that jaw, he could well be of Grevain Corminevar's blood, though the resemblance was not otherwise remarkable.  And he was terrified, teetering on the verge of both hysteria and exhaustion.

Eyes wide, he whirled, only to find the guards who had pursued him approaching, swords drawn.  For a moment it looked like he would try to run through them.  Then he took a deep breath, visibly pulling himself together, and pivoted on his heel.  His dark eyes found Vorclase's.

"I would never have believed that you would stand at the side of a White Snake, Jan," he said.  A Decian accent, and a careful way of speaking which was apparent despite his ragged breathlessness.

Vorclase looked briefly wry, not unaware of ironic repetition.  "So I can read the lay of the land," he said, unexpectedly gruff, and Medair realised that he cared for this boy.  "War's over; we lost.  Sendel will scuffle about trying to keep the country out of Palladian hands.  And you're still alive.  I want to keep you that way."

"By handing me to a White Snake?"  The boy shook his head, grieved.  "You are trusting, Jan."

"Desperate."  Vorclase broke the line, stepping forward with a hand held out.  "I'll do what I don't like if the result's worth the effort.  Put that thing down, lad.  Don't you see what it's doing to you?"

Tarsus glanced down at the heavy piece of glass he held against his chest.  The size of a dinner plate, with a frame of dark wood, it seemed relatively innocuous until he clutched it closer and it sank through cloth and flesh to give them a brief glimpse of pink and white and something which fluttered and pulsed.  The sight didn't seem to faze the youth; he simply moved it out of his chest, then tightened his fingers on the frame.  Into the frame.

"You're delivering this to them as well," he said, earnestly.  His gaze shifted to Illukar, who was standing quietly at Medair's side, and Tarsus looked him up and down with open horror.  "A thing of such power, to White Snakes.  Jan, you have run mad."

His disbelief was palpable and, as he glanced down at the glass again, a bright shimmer flashed across its surface.  That was all that happened, and Medair could barely sense the whisper of power which meant he must have tried to activate it.  The effect on Tarsus was more notable: he shuddered and staggered, sweat bringing a slick and waxy sheen to his skin.

Vorclase took the opportunity to take a few more steps forward, but Tarsus backed into the wall as the Captain approached, lifting the heavy glass to chin-level.  The Decian guards stirred and Vorclase gestured for them to be still.

"I'll break it," Tarsus said, in a faint, breathless voice.  "Get back, Jan, or I'll smash it at your feet."

"Would that be bad?" Vorclase asked Illukar, as he took a reluctant step away.

"It could be disastrous," Illukar replied, then released the set-spell he had prepared.  Tarsus flinched away with nowhere to go, and briefly the glass merged with his chest again.  And nothing else happened.

Tarsus looked down at himself and smiled with uncertain triumph.  "You can't touch me, White Snake!" he said, eyes wide and voice incredulous.  "Farak protects her own."

"The device absorbed the casting," Illukar said, glancing at Vorclase.

"Well, that's helpful."  Vorclase was disgusted, but spared little of his focus.  "Tarsus, we can't stand here all day.  Tell me what you want us to do."

"Leave."  The young man was collecting himself together again.  "Leave me, clear me an exit and give me a horse."

"That's what I'm trying to arrange, boy."  Vorclase sounded frustrated.  He looked at Illukar.  "Better than stalemate."

"The device must remain," Illukar replied, sedately.

"I will
not
give it up!  Not to a White Snake!"

"It must be unmade," Illukar said, ignoring the affront in Tarsus' voice.  "It is fashioned from wild magic, it draws on wild magic.  You, who would rule Palladium, must see the only course open."

The youth looked uncertain, shifting the glass in his arms.  "Wild magic?"

"I won't pretend that there are not reasons for Palladium to wish you dead, or at least in custody," Illukar said, blunt and cool.  "Still, you have my word that you may leave, if that is your wish.  But not with the device."

Tarsus stared, dark eyes wide.  He looked terribly young, hopelessly driven.  What had he done, after all, to reach this point?  Controlled by Estarion, raised to hate Ibisians, to believe Palladium his by right?

"How can I possibly trust you?" Tarsus asked now, cradling the glass into his chest once again.  "You are my enemy."

"I am Illukar Síahn las Cor-Ibis."  Illukar said his name as if it was important to fix it in Tarsus' mind.  "I have no animus toward you."

Strange how so profoundly Ibisian a speech could have the desired effect.  Tarsus was considering it.  Medair took a slow breath as he looked from Illukar to Vorclase and back.

"Were you there?" he asked abruptly, his voice high and strained.  "At the slaughter?"

"I was on Ahrenrhen Wall," Illukar replied.

"Then I brought you here."  Tarsus took a sideways step, toward the middle of the tunnel.  "I meant to get the heir, the one called Islantar.  You would have bargained for his life, wouldn't you?"

"Certainly."

Tarsus looked down.  "He has what is mine," he said, forlornly.  "What I would have, now, if the Horn had not sounded."  He looked with sudden suspicion at Medair, standing at Illukar's side.  "Were you the one who took that from me?" he asked, flatly.  "Were you?"

Medair hesitated, aware that Tarsus' anger had returned in full.  Denial might be worse than the truth, especially if Vorclase took it into his head to correct her.

"I sounded the Horn of Farak," she said, not wanting it to sound like an admission.  This boy had been out there, when the Decian army had been cut down.  He had been in the midst of that incredible slaughter, when certain victory had turned into overwhelming defeat.  She had killed all who stood with him, who claimed to be fighting for his cause.  If he had held a weapon, she would have killed him as well.  This boy who might be Corminevar.

For a moment, it looked like Tarsus would simply throw the glass at her.  He flushed with furious betrayal, but his disbelief seemed stronger than his anger.  "How could you?" he asked, voice breaking.  "How could you turn your face from the true Corminevar line to side with White Snakes?"

He pressed the glass so deeply into his chest that Medair could see his spine: a pale, sinuous gleam in a bloody mount.  It was a horrible, immensely distracting sight.  If he let go of it now, she thought, it would be completely inside his chest.  They would have to cut him open to get it out.  And she did not want that, did not want this boy to die.  True Corminevar or not, there had to be something she could do to alter the course Estarion had set.

"Why do you want the Silver Throne?" she asked, slowly.  "Why do you want to rule Palladium?"

The question had confused him.  He shifted the glass again and now it was his pulsing heart they watched.  How he held the thing at all, she couldn't guess.  It was like no artefact she'd ever seen.

"Because it is my birthright," he said.  Utter sincerity.  True or not, he believed it.  And he was as out of place as she was, in the Palladium of today.

"And did you agree with Estarion, that the only way for Palladium to achieve peace is by killing all of Ibisian blood?"

"Yes."  Tarsus looked at Illukar briefly and his eyes hardened.  "Yes, it's the only way.  The rift is too deep, their crime too great."

"How much of Palladium do you think would be left, after that?"

"Enough," Tarsus replied, with only the faintest hint of uncertainty.

"And do you think they'd forgive you?"

"What?"

"You would be the invader, you see."  Medair tried to fill her voice with the same inescapable certainty which had kept her from using the Horn a year ago.  "You would have killed their friends, wrested the throne by force.  No matter how true your bloodline, there is no just path to forcing your way onto Palladium's throne.  Five hundred years ago, the cause would be just, but it's too late.  That was what I had to accept, when I came to Athere, centuries late.  That Palladium is Ibisian now."  She couldn't keep the sorrow out of her voice.  That fact would always hurt.

"You're wrong," Tarsus said, with a frantic pitch to his words.  He backed into the wall again.  "There are many in Palladium who would throw the White Snakes down, who would see them crushed into the dirt."

"Yes."  Medair looked at him across that gulf of hate.  "There are.  But why do you think that they're the ones who should choose the present?  How more or less right are they than the ones who love the Palladium of today?  Why should the will of the ones who can't accept, who dwell in the past instead of living–"

"Stop talking!"  Tarsus ran at her, tears streaming down his face, the glass raised as if to strike her down.  Everyone moved at once, hoping to wrest the thing from him before he remembered himself and made good his threat to smash it.  "You're wrong!" he shouted, as Illukar moved between them.   "You're–"

The bloom of power was overwhelming, as like to the Conflagration as anything Medair had experienced.  Bright light flashed, and she heard Illukar gasp, then the world dropped out from beneath her feet once again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

She was sliding.

In the first moment Medair was completely disoriented, as she fell down a steep, rocky slope.  She seemed to be underneath some sort of huge overhang, for she could see hills and blue sky to either side of her but only blackness above and shadow beneath.  Around her she could hear men's startled voices, almost entirely drowned by a massive grinding and an explosive fracturing of rock.

Struggling to control her descent, Medair bounced and somersaulted, catching glimpses of flood-lands to her right and a city to her left.  She realised she was tumbling into the saddle between two hills and her startled mind struggled to translate the noise which so deafened her.  It was from the stony roof above, as it ponderously followed her down the slope.

In the next few moments, panic fired her to heroic efforts, but she couldn't get upright, and found herself heading directly into the centre of the saddle.  The great slab of rock above was night falling in the most tangible way, and it was closing the distance, pummelling her with volleys of shattered stone.  Frantically she struggled to change her course.  She had to get out from beneath before it ground her into paste, but it seemed to stretch for miles in all directions.  There was no way.

In the moment after that, a hand caught at her arm.  Illukar, typically upright, pulled her almost to her feet.  He hurled them both left, out of her tumbling course, and together they half-ran, but mostly fell, down a chute full of dust and a rebounding hail of rocks toward a rapidly narrowing line of sunlight.  Medair's lungs were full of sand and her veins thick with acid mud and she couldn't see, could scarcely think, but she knew when they slid out from the shadow of that mammoth weight.  She could feel Illukar's hand still tight in hers as she fell some ten or fifteen feet to a slippery slope of grass with mercifully few rocks to bruise them during another tumbling slide.  Behind and above them came a thooming clap of thunder, the death-knell of a mountain, and then something which was only silence in comparison.  Dust and small rocks sifted liberally over them as they slid into a soft bed of clover and were still.

oOo

Medair knew she was alive because she hurt.  She had a great many sources of pain to consider, though only her left arm came close to unbearable.  Scratches, bruises, bumps and grazes and one broken bone.  Her head spun and her chest seemed resolved to disown her.  The world around her was dust-blurred and distant and her ears were clogged with dirt.