The Carnelian Throne (9 page)

And another thought, fast upon the heels of that one—a thought that seemed meaningless at the time and proceeded Chayin’s appearance out of the dark by an eye-blink. Once, long ago, when I came to Sereth on Chayin’s arm, Sereth had said to me:
“Two men can share anything but the love of a woman.”
His face in that moment, his voice on that night, burned so brightly as to obscure my vision. And then another moment, seemingly unrelated: another speaking, the cahndor himself. Then another instance of my past experience burst in on me in a new and unsuspected sequence, as is often the way with the sorting talent, and I was shown, in a final avalanche of apprehension, one last moment: my father, Estrazi. Then that sorting-of-what-is took wings, and it was the future which Sereth and Chayin and I would build in this land that unfurled in flashes of tableau whose context and cast remained obscure. But the meaning was not obscure. Oh, no, the meaning was bright and clear and shivered before me in those colors only the prescient mind’s palette can conjure, and I heard my throat sigh a groaning sound and became aware of my hands, balled into fists, supporting my crouched weight, and the cahndor’s presence close by.

“What did you see?” And a rustle as he crouched. Raising my head, I peered through shadow at shadow.

Sereth’s dire olden words threatened to tumble from my mouth. But I withheld them, peering toward the scant pile of remains, shoreward, where he yet gathered minute fragments of the Aknet’s dead. He had snarled at Chayin, called him no judge of what men must do. And me, he had condemned .... So I answered Chayin another answer, no less true, from my revelation, that I might not make more real what I most feared.

“My father said to me, when I asked him to release us all on our own recognizance ...” I stumbled, wondering how to phrase this hurtful thing which Chayin must know to make use of what I had seen. I leaned close, peering into the crimson reflection from his eyes’ pupils. “When I asked him to sanction my union with Sereth, to grant us his grace, he said he would as soon not call upon us. But he also said:
‘There is no real respite. Your own natures will preclude it.’”

Chayin grimaced, a quick flashing in the dark as my eyes drew more from its depths. I heard two stones click as he shifted.

“Your Shaper father’s way with words is legend,” he said quietly, not amused at his own joke. Moderation of tone in the cahndor is a portentous omen.

“Come and give silence to my dead. You may not, cannot, do what you intend.”

“It is my choice,” I snapped, straightening abruptly, chagrined that he had so easily divined my intent. Shields up, mind inviolate, I awaited his retort.

It was slow coming, and when it did, it raised my hackles and set me irrevocably upon that path I had so recently glimpsed:

“What is choice? We freely choose to do exactly what owkahen dictates.”

“Am I a schoolgirl in need of lessons? Mi’ysten spawn, you badly underestimate your cousin.” That propinquity to which I referred was Chayin’s father’s, who in turn was son of my father’s brother. Both races, the Mi’ysten and the Shapers themselves, progenitors of solar systems, of galaxies, of universes and all they contain, command powers that in the time-space universes make them gods. And so had they been to millions of millions of lesser beings, for a duration of aeons. And we, Chayin and I who were their children in flesh as well as spirit, had inherited from our paternities some few slivers of those abilities. Sereth, too, had come upon the skills of his inheritance: though it was an inheritance diverse from ours, he had acquired its bequests in a similar fashion.

“Estri, never will I underestimate you.” I could see now the smile that pulled at Chayin’s full lower lip. And I shivered, and rubbed my palms along my arms. “Come and give silence to my dead. I assure you I am not wrong.”

He reached out, I shook him off. “Not wrong in what, cahndor? You give nothing, and expect all in return. What right have you to even conjecture over my activities? Or to judge them. I will go where I will and you may not stop me.” So soft I spoke to him, he knew that I did not jest. A contest between us two might rip the veils asunder, erode the very fabric of reality. He well knew it. Thus sobered, perhaps pained (for I could not read him—his skills there exceed mine), he still did not go and join Sereth, who must by now be in the formalized grieving aspect, cross-legged, head bowed before the remains of the slain. Or so I thought then.

“I need not try to stop you. Owkahen will!” Chayin retorted: “Two things, dhareness, and I will depart to my duty. First: You may not. Sereth will not allow it. You have seen him. Do not provoke the ebvrasea in its nest. It is night. At night he will soar, and hunt. His belly is empty.”

I spat a word I had learned among the crew on the Aknet’s decks.

“Estri, you have seen! He grows stranger and stranger, while the weight of Silistra upon his shouders grows ever more great. Of more importance than any one life is the good that could be done upon all Silistra by the consolidation of the northern and southern holdings. And yet reality grows ever more singular for him: more and more he is one and we two another. So many have given so much that this alliance be made, and it seems that at its very inception it will be blighted by doubt and fear.

“What he said to me, to us: it is not untrue. You and I have the Shapers within us. We see the results of the action at hand. And from the emotions of a specific moment, we must often seem removed, cruel, calculating. You thought nothing of sending hundreds to their deaths when you battled my father; nor of putting the helsar plague upon the land—yes, so do some now call those devices of nature which open a man to the power he shares with his universe. I must seem to him little better—I do not flinch at what actions my preference for certain futures demand of me in the ever-mutable present. And we see no harm, no acts lacking in fitness, in what we do. But he does. He takes chaldra very seriously; he
is
the law. Think back. And think of what he is: painstakingly bred mongrel, the descendant of all Silistra, the quintessence of racial mixing. Yet he is trapped by the very society designed to emancipate him: these same self-strengths that drove him, that enabled him to become what he is, to possess you and freedom from the servitude he so despised appall him. He has broken laws that he himself created. And he fears his own nature. In us he sees something he conceives as a lack of compassion, a coldness, an inhumanity that his mind cannot accept, because it senses in itself the like. He—”

“Chayin,” I interrupted. “He is more a killer than either of us. And genetic mixes like his produce atavists, not moralists. I studied him. You know him. He is not one to blanch at the sight of blood, nor to turn from necessities by reason of qualms.” I objected, but I recollected Sereth, leaning over a wounded girl in the battle that had won him the dharen’s sword. And a thousand other occasions on which he took extensive care as to the welfare of those he had caused to become unfortunates. “I fail to see what bearing this has on my tending Deilcrit’s wounds,” I said at last.

“Estri, do not defend yourself to me. Who is more bloodied among us, is it? There is blood aplenty to go around. Or guilt, if any of us should choose to drag so weighty a stone into owkahen’s raging torrent. And as for Deilcrit, I have told you: he will live, to embroil himself so deeply in our affairs that even you will be sated. I have seen it.”

“And of course I am not strong enough to bear whatever foreknowledge your forereading has bequeathed you. You have done ill before with such—”

“Have I? I have done what has been needed, as have you. I say to you this: do not do
more
than is needed. And I am telling you, Sereth will kill you both if you evince inordinate interest in this jungle boy. After what he has been through to claim you and his regency, he will cede neither one light.”

I sat very still, abashed, frightened. Chayin was incensed, and his thick voice shook with his attempts to keep it to a whisper: “He should not have to. He and I should be sufficient, if one man is not.”

“You dare speak so to me?”

“I dare what pleases me. Take heed, Estri. You have suffered before by reason of wisdom you would not hear. Be moderate. Be loving. Be a consolation unto him in this need. He has seen your father, Estri. He has heard from Estrazi’s own lips that he has been manipulated. His hatred for serving another’s purpose knows no limits. You cannot take the chance of straying to the wrong side of the boundary that defines his sense of fitness; it is clear, stringently defined, and he will kill you if you cross it.”

I said nothing. This was not the first time Chayin had warned me of Sereth. Though the best of us all at forereading the time-coming-to-be from the probabilities owkahen presents to the sorting mind, when concerned with Sereth, he was consistently inaccurate. As, I am afraid, was I.

“And now I will tell you why you
cannot
blithely obviate space, work your healing on this Deilcrit, and return by the same method.” Then he pointed, his arm a dark shadow against the gray of the sky, and said: “The sun is coming up. Therefore, we have lost at least a quarter of the night, perhaps four enths. Therefore, to paraphrase your father: the time precludes it.”

I groaned, and slapped my thigh so hard it stung.

But Chayin was inexorable: “In getting here, a good portion of the night’s duration slipped from our grasp, lived. Deikrit lived those hours, as did all others in sequential time. But we did not. The last time you obviated space, what was it—three days? And the next—you do not know how long you might languish between the moments. You cannot control the effect. How long might it be for us, for Deilcrit, while you spend an eyeblink shunting the nonsequential circuits? It could be a day, or ten, or a full pass of the moon that goes by. Then what might lurk in the clearing you seek? When might you set foot there? Making your way back here to us: how long for that? When you arrive here, subjectively passing a heartbeat’s time, might it not be three days, or thrice that, or a season that has passed for us? What would you expect us to do? Wait here until you return at some unspecifiable date? If something went wrong, we would have no way of knowing short of fore-reading, which would be difficult in the extreme under such conditions. And as for concealing this misplaced mercy from Sereth—”

“Stop!”
I cursed my arrogance, my stupidity, my shortsightedness. Once having conceived the plan, while Chayin first informed us that Deilcrit lived, I had been so busy keeping traces of my intent from my mind that I had not come to grips with the practicalities. Obviation of space is a little like setting up consonance with a congruence plane: one exits sequentiality, which then contracts, becoming so vague and dreamlike that any entrance into it is a good entrance. Or had been, so far, for me, novice in the extreme. It was possible that I could make a perfect transition, obviate space between the moments, and lose only a breath’s worth of sequential time, but it was not likely. I knew it to be true. Chayin was right: I had not yet perfected my skill.

“Your will is my life.” I sighed bitterly.

His fingers brushed my cheek, traced my lips. “Estri, it could yet go as I long ago conceived it. If all else fails, know that between us there can never be misunderstandings such as even now bar us both from him. And know too that Nemar and the Taken Lands have not forgotten you. My people would welcome you with arms outstretched.”

Not, until then did I take my eyes from his and see Sereth, staring down on us, limned in the first cloud-split, bloody rays of sun’s raising.

Chayin followed my stricken gaze, and after a moment of dumb silence, scrambled to his feet. They stood that way, taking each other’s measure anew, while the leaden-clouded sky absorbed the cinnabar light of dawn and then slowly greened as the mists of night took flight.

It seemed to me that they might have stood that way, opposed and immobile, forever. With constricted heart, I insinuated myself between them, pressed myself against Sereth. After a time, his arm went around my waist and we sought our duty before Chayin’s Parset dead.

But there were no words. Not from any of us. Aghast at what might be the consequences of our importunate speech, neither Chayin nor I ventured to break peace before him; and he, in whom silence bespeaks rage beyond expression and volatility in the proximity of which even my father might tread with care, let us suffer therein.

So discomfited, seated before the pitiful remains of the Aknet’s crew—a paltry pile scarce the height of my calf containing barely enough chunks of meat and limb to construct a single man—I could not give our dead the enquieted mind which is their due honorific. No, my thoughts would not be still, but rather raged futile threats and impotent denouncements at the time.

Owkahen, thy jest does not amuse me. I will have this man if I must remake the whole nature of time to find ys together therein. And if I cannot find it, I will construct a moment in which we may live untroubled that life I can conceive but cannot see.

So overweening did I dare to be in the face of eternity’s wellspring.

Chayin had made his position clear: He would let Sereth slay me, if it came to that: as always, as it had been from the days when we first met, from the beginning. He considered the Silistran alliance more valuable than any life, his inferno-forged trust with Sereth most sacred, worth any price even if that price was my own continued existence. So did I.

Sometimes, when my mind aches and I am weary, I wonder if any of us will ever learn.

The cessation of pain was all the luxury in the universe. Deilcrit sought it. And in the blackness behind closed lids, he found that the pain had an ebb, and a flow, and holding his breath through the dizzying combers of agony, he found comfort in the receding of sensation that followed every torturous thrill which racked him. In those moments, he exhaled, and each exhalation brought him a whisper of consciousness more. He extracted his body’s assessment of its condition from the red-gold nausea that hung like an undulant curtain between him and his selfness: he was alive, and he hurt. The contours of his wound were for a time his total being; his reality a depth and breadth of scourged flesh, of scratched bone and severed nerve. The jagged hole was a mountain range in which he wandered like some zealous surveyor whose stomach lurched each time he raised his eyes and regarded the vastness of this valley torn from his muscles’ contours.