Law of the Broken Earth (36 page)

But the gates of Tihannad were guarded now, and all but hidden by the crowd of folk waiting to be admitted. Jos saw at once that very few folk were leaving, or at least not heading south; all efforts were bent toward getting in.

Lord Bertaud paused when he saw the crowded roads and the press at the gates, his eyebrows rising. He might
have been wondering, as Jos certainly was, whether the folk pressing into Tihannad expected walls of stone and timber to defend against griffins who rode upon the wind. Though perhaps it was not the walls themselves but the lake so near those walls that was expected to ward away fire. Perhaps it even would.

“I would have thought Tiearanan would be the retreat of choice,” Bertaud commented, gazing down toward the press at the gates. “Though perhaps it is, for those who are able to climb that steep road at speed. These may be local folk who fear they may not come swiftly enough to any more-distant shelter.”

Jos only nodded distractedly, and Kairaithin did not even seem to hear these comments. After a moment, Bertaud shrugged and led the way down across the slope of the mountain toward the town.

For a few minutes, they walked in silence. Jos thought about the wall, and a little about Kes, but that was too painful and he tried to think about other things—anything else—only then he thought,
So here we are, walking down toward Tihannad
, and that was such a strange, uncomfortable thought that he hardly knew what to do with it. Six years alone in the high mountains had surely unfit him for human company, and what would he possibly do now in a clamorous town? A
Feierabianden
town crowded with fearful farmers who hoped their walls or their lake would protect them.

Lord Bertaud would hardly have brought Jos trailing at his heel to any purpose. Only the exigency of the moment had compelled Kairaithin to shift them all, and he had brought them here. But though that was well enough for Lord Bertaud, Tihannad was no place for Jos.

His steps slowed, and then stopped. He looked uncertainly up into the broken country of stone and ice, east and north, back toward the high pass and his abandoned cottage. His fire would burn without ceasing, but would his goat and all the foolish chickens know how to make their way from meadow to meadow along the silver length of the nameless river, down to warmer country and better pastures? The goat, perhaps, he thought, but probably not the hens or the vain white cock.

But he could hardly make his way back up through that rugged pass on foot and alone and without anything at all in the way of supplies. Even if he could, when the Great Wall finally shattered and the griffins came through the pass, he doubted whether they would spare anything they found in their way, man or goat or bird. Probably they would tear every stone apart from every other stone merely with the fiery wind of their passage.

Kairaithin, too, had halted. He had followed Jos’s gaze, up and east and north, but there was nothing a man could understand in his eyes. Jos wondered what the griffin mage was seeing. Not these mountains, nor a small abandoned stone cottage. Fire, and the Wall, and the red dust where the king of the griffins had lunged forward just that little bit too fast…

Jos regarded the griffin mage with worry. Kairaithin did not seem to have recovered his emotional balance, whatever that properly comprised, from the brief, shocking battle by the Wall. He seemed stunned, perhaps by his failed attempt to destroy Kes; or by his awareness that the Great Wall must surely break; or, most likely of all, from the awareness that the king of the griffins was dead and that Kairaithin himself had killed him.

Jos had expected Kairaithin to leave them here above Tihannad once he had brought them here, to let them make their own way down to the lake and into the town. He had expected the griffin mage to take himself away alone to some deserted bit of desert where he might think or curse or worry or consider the new span of his options, or whatever it was that a griffin might do at such a moment of personal loss. He had little idea what that might be, but he did believe that Kairaithin felt the king’s death as a personal loss, and far more bitterly for how it had happened.

Instead, the griffin mage had followed the men down along the side of the mountain toward the lake, as though, Jos thought, he simply could not imagine where else he might go. Now, standing with his face raised to the high mountains, his expression closed and still, he looked, for the first time, not only drawn and weary but also old.

Then Lord Bertaud looked over his shoulder and impatiently snapped at both of them, “Come!”

Jos flinched, more in startlement than in alarm. But, after all, where else could he go? He took a step after the Feierabianden lord.

But, to his surprise, Kairaithin also flinched and lowered his head and came, like a servant or a dog. Jos had not precisely expected a flash of anger or offended pride; he had not thought about that command or its tone enough to expect anything. But he was deeply shocked by the weary compliance he saw in the griffin mage’s bowed head.

It seemed to shock Bertaud as well, for he turned quickly and came back toward them—toward Kairaithin, because he was not looking at Jos. He began to reach out
a hand as though he would touch the griffin mage, grip his arm or his shoulder. But then he stopped and his hand fell back to his side. But the intensity of his gaze seemed to compel a response from Kairaithin, who lifted his head and met Bertaud’s eyes.

They stood on the cold windswept stone of the mountain, the two of them, Feierabianden lord and griffin mage, as though for that moment they were the only two living creatures in the world. Jos could not understand what he saw between them. He thought it was neither friendship nor enmity, but perhaps some strange kind of understanding that owed something to both.

Bertaud said quietly, “I beg your pardon.”

“You need not,” Kairaithin answered. He bowed his head again, and this time Jos saw that he did this with a kind of deliberate effort, yet not precisely unwillingly. He said, “Everything I have done has led to this moment. All the important choices fell to me, and I was wrong, and wrong again, and all that has come or will come now is due to my lack of foresight.”

“No,” said Bertaud at once, forcefully. “Six years ago, if you had not made Kes into a creature of fire, everything that you feared for your people would have happened exactly as you foresaw it. Your diminished people could never have faced both Feierabiand and Casmantium, and it would have come to that eventually. Those Casmantian cold mages were determined to destroy you all, and they would have done it. I believe they would, if not right at that moment, then very soon—”

“I should have foreseen what a weapon I made, when I made Kes—”

“You did! Of course you did! Why should you mind
giving your people a potent weapon? It was me you didn’t foresee, and how could you have? How could anyone have?”

“You call
griffins
?” Jos exclaimed, utterly shocked by this sudden realization—Feierabiand for calling, yes, very well, but calling
griffins
?

Then, as both Bertaud and Kairaithin turned toward him, he understood just how foolish he had been to cry this realization aloud to the listening mountains. Six years alone had been too many—he would never have exclaimed aloud when he’d been practicing proper spycraft, no matter how shocked he’d been—he took a step back.

Kairaithin, his mouth tight, the expression in his black eyes unreadable, began to lift his hand.

Jos took another step back, knowing there was no point to it, no flight possible, nothing to say. He had in one flashing moment—too late—understood what it would do to the griffins to know that they could be commanded like dogs, and understood as well that no one in the world knew they could be, except those standing here on this mountain above Niambe Lake. It was impossible that any oath of silence could possibly satisfy Kairaithin. He took a hard breath, straightened his shoulders, and looked the griffin mage full in the face. He saw no mercy there. He did not expect to, for he knew that mercy was not something griffins understood. He found himself thinking of Kes, beautiful and inhuman and just as merciless as a griffin. He tried to think of her, instead, as she had been years ago, when she had been merely human. He could remember, though with some effort, the shy, graceful girl who had shunned company—though not his—and liked
to run barefoot in the hills. He shut his eyes to better hold her image before his mind’s eye.

“No!” snapped Bertaud.

Jos opened his eyes.

The griffin mage had stopped, his hand only half raised. He was looking at Bertaud.

“He won’t speak of it.” Bertaud did not look at Jos, only at Kairaithin. “It’s not his fault he realized. We were careless—I was careless. But he’s accomplished at keeping secrets, and he’ll tell no one. Whom would he tell, and to what purpose?”

“He will cry it from the rooftops of your human town; to everyone and in every direction of the wind he will call it out. He will do it to compel you to act.”

“
Events
will compel me to act! Unless we find another choice! Another wind to ride, not one that rises from anything that has yet happened!”

“Great secrets are always safest if no one knows them—as anyone accustomed to secrets is well aware!”

Jos couldn’t quite keep from flinching. For a long moment they all stood in silence. Jos did not move. He tried not even to breathe. But Lord Bertaud and the griffin mage were glaring at each other; for the moment they both seemed to have forgotten him.

He found himself turning over this new and shocking revelation in his mind—Lord Bertaud could call griffins, so he could command them to cease their attack, only he did not want to command them. Because—and if Jos had not been so closely acquainted with griffins over the past year, he would never have understood this—because they could never accept being commanded. The knowledge that they could be called to heel by a man would
destroy
them—in fact, if they knew that it was possible for a man to command them, they would probably become even more determined to kill everyone and tear down all the country of earth.

Several odd comments he had not quite understood, from both Bertaud and Kairaithin, suddenly fell into place.

He said suddenly, without truly knowing beforehand that he was going to speak at all, “What if you get Tastairiane by himself? What if you demonstrate to
him
what power you hold? No, better, not merely a demonstration and a warning; what if you simply command him to turn away from this wind, to bid Kes leave be the Wall, to keep his people in their desert?”

Both Lord Bertaud and Kairaithin turned to stare at him. Jos tried not to flinch—he had not exactly meant to make himself the renewed focus of their common attention, only the idea had occurred to him—likely he had not understood properly—there was probably some very good reason that wouldn’t work—

Bertaud said at last, “Kairaithin?”

“A dangerous wind,” the griffin mage said, not looking at him. He was looking at Jos, but now with something like his accustomed fierce power in his fiery black gaze. “As goes the Lord of Fire and Air, so go the People of Fire and Air. If Tastairiane Apailika is filled with fury and despair, then fury and despair will burn through the country of fire. But…”

Bertaud said nothing. Jos thought he was probably trying not to exclaim,
Well, that’s all right, then!
Though perhaps not. Jos had lived in Feierabiand for many years, more than long enough to know how violently a man who
could call an animal hated to do anything to harm that animal. How much more intense would that revulsion of feeling be if you could command not animals, but a fierce and beautiful people? A people who would surely die if they knew they were constrained, either in violent resistance or simply in outraged bursts of fire and sand?

“But no king is eternal,” said Kairaithin, continuing his earlier thought. “At some time in the future, Tastairiane Apailika will no longer be the Lord of Fire and Air, and at that time, so long as the People of Fire and Air remain, another king might set a new and better direction.” His eyes were on Bertaud’s. He said, “I do not know how I may come at Tastairiane Apailika, or how I may bring him alone to you. But I will try. If you give me leave.”

Lord Bertaud said flatly, “Go.”

Kairaithin blurred away into the air and the cold sunlight, and was gone.

Bertaud stood rigid for a moment, looking at nothing; at the slant of the cold light across the lake, perhaps. Then he shuddered and rubbed his hands across his face, and looked up at last at Jos.

Jos did not speak. He did not know what to say.

“Your suggestion might prove a good one,” Bertaud said at last. “I thank you. I certainly bear you no ill will. But I don’t know whether I should have stopped him. You understand the price of forbearance? You must
never
even imply that there is a shadow of a chance that you might ever tell
anyone
—you must swear to me you will
never
—”

“I understand,” Jos assured him fervently. “I promise you, lord.” He hesitated. Then he said, “You know I don’t hate them? I’m afraid of them, but I don’t hate them and
I don’t want them destroyed, and I don’t know how many other men could swear to that, but I can. I do. I’ll tell no one, lord. I do swear it. I’m sorry I ever guessed, except as it may let Kairaithin take down that bastard Tastairiane. I wouldn’t be sorry if
he
were destroyed.”