The Dark Glory War (10 page)

I smiled and patted my horse on the neck. “I will go see my father, then, and return this horse to your manor before we go to the temple.”

Lord Norrington shook his head. “The horse is yours, young Hawkins, and the tack as well. That goes for you, too, Master Carver. That first night your quick action saved Master Playfair, yourselves and, most dear to me, my son. This is the least I can do to show my gratitude to you.”

Nay’s jaw dropped open. “My lord is too kind.”

Leigh scowled. “Ha! Saving me is only worth a horse and saddle?”

Norrington glanced at his son. “I said it was theleast I could do, Bosleigh; I did not say it was all I would do—but else is a matter for another time. Farewell to you both. Until I have the pleasure again.”

I nodded to him in a salute, then reined my horse around and rode toward my family’s house. I stopped at the closest stable and arranged a month’s stabling for the glint of moongold, then rushed off. A group of younger boys, one of whom had seen me earlier, crowded around the front door, but I shooed them off. They retreated reluctantly, with a larger one disdainfully dismissing the stories about my having killed a rabid drearbeast as obvious fantasy.

I knocked, then entered through the door and mask-curtain beyond. I caught my mother in a big hug as she came toward me from the kitchen. She clung to me fiercely, her silent sobs sending tremors through her body. I felt the dampness of her tears on my neck, so I kissed her ear and held her tightly. Eventually her grip on me slackened and she pulled back, brushing away tears with her thumbs, then wiping her hands on her apron.

“Are you hungry, Tarrant?” She turned from me and pointed toward the hearth. “I have beans bubbling and some bread baking. I didn’t know when you would be back. Your brothers are on alert and your father is at the Lord Mayor’s Hall planning what to do if the Northern Horde gets this far.”

“I’m fine, Mother. Just a few bruises, a few scrapes.”

She crossed to the black, cast-iron pot hanging in the hearth. She swung it out, lifted the lid with her apron guarding her hand, and stirred the fragrant brown thickness of beans. “I know that, Tarrant, but after what was said about your friend Rounce … Well, a mother worries.”

She turned back toward me, pot lid like a shield in one hand, glistening wooden spoon a sword in the other. “I will always be your mother and I will always worry. Know that. Know it is because I love you.”

I nodded. “I know.” I drew up a chair back from the table and sat. “How is Rounce?”

“One of the Baker girls took some bread to the family and said that Rounce is going to live. He won’t lose his leg because of some quick thinking out there.”

“Nay worked up a poultice.”

“Nay?”

“Naysmith Carver. I met him at the gala. He was an armorer’s apprentice, but he wants to be a warrior. I suspect now he’ll get his chance.” I smiled as my mother set a steaming bowl of beans in front of me. “Thanks, but I can wait for my father.”

“I don’t know when he will be back, so eat now.” A smile softened my mother’s expression. “Your father told me, when we got word about what had happened, that he’d expect you to be able to handle yourself. He said you would be fine. I didn’t doubt him, but …”

She hesitated, lost in remembrance of what she had feared, then she sniffed once, more angry than sad. “No matter, you’ll eat now …”

“Well, I am hungry. Camp food is fine, but …”

“That’s right, Tarrant Hawkins. All this warring and fighting and killing and the romance of it might fill your mind, but surviving means you need more, which includes substantial things in your life. Like beans in your belly.”

“And a mother who cares enough to see to it I get them?”

“Very good, Tarrant, very good.” She nodded carefully, then stirred the beans again. “Perhaps your father was not far wrong at all.”

Leigh, Nay, and I all met at the temple at sundown. I had with me a covered crock of beans that my mother insisted I take to Rounce’s family. One of Kedyn’s acolytes guarded it for me as the three of us bought charcoal and incense—paying good coin for it this time—and descended to offer our thanks to Kedyn for our success.

I knelt there solemnly, my shield arm across my chest and my sword arm pointing toward the ground. I began a standard prayer of thanks, but an idle draft wafted smoke into my face and I breathed deeply of it. I remember coughing, but felt a distance between myself and my body. I found myself drifting back over the events of our adventure, reliving the pains and fears, the exertion and exhilaration of the hunt and the kill. I recalled everything with incredible detail, remembering things I didn’t know I’d seen or heard. My fingers twitched as I felt the temeryx’s heart stop beating, and then my mind snapped back into the present.

I glanced up and followed the incense ribbon from my charcoal shield as it rose and washed over Kedyn’s face. The smoky trail twisted and writhed, seeming to carry to him all I had experienced. I didn’t expect a sign that Kedyn noticed me or cared about me, and I got none. The gods seldom meddled in the affairs of men, preferring to leave that sort of activity to the godlings andweirun —spirits of place that inhabit the world. Even so, I took my recollections as a sign that my prayer for Control might well have been answered.

I stood, bowed, and made my way back up to the main temple level. There I found Nay and Leigh speaking with a cadaverously slender priest. Kedyn’s priest wore a black robe of rough-spun wool; he had shaved his head, but wore a mustache and goatee as dark as his robe. He held my pot of beans under one arm and, with the other hand, beckoned me close.

He kept his voice low. “Forgive the intrusion, Master Hawkins, but I have been asked to conduct you from here. As I have explained to the others, your celebrity has preceded you. You were seen coming in here and, even now, an anxious crowd has gathered outside to question you about the events of the last two days. If you will follow me?”

The priest turned and Leigh immediately set off after him. Nay and I exchanged glances, shrugged, then joined the procession. The priest led us off through an arched doorway and down stairs that took us below street level. They ended in a corridor that stretched out to the right and left, though the priest cut back beside the stairs and under them to a hidden corridor. What I had assumed to be solid block steps were, in fact, stone slabs that had been cantilevered into the wall, providing the open space. I plunged into the darkness with the others.

A bit further down the corridor, which was only lit by the dim glow of fungi on the ceiling, I saw the priest’s silhouette. He pointed further along. “There is a circular stairway that leads down and out. Keep your hands on the central axis as you descend.”

Leigh led the way, with Nay next and me bringing up the rear. I was a couple steps into the dizzying descent when I realized the priest was not behind me and that he still had my mother’s beans. I turned and started back up the steps. I saw the opening into the corridor I’d walked down closing and the bright green image of a bird with wings unfurled and upswept on the wall. In a heartbeat the image vanished and I realized that the whole stairwell cylinder had shifted ninety degrees as we were descending. Had I not turned around and seen what I did, I would not have noticed the shift.

From below I heard Leigh’s voice. “Not quite what I expected as a way out.”

“Nope.”

I descended quickly and came out into a small room. Once I left the stairwell, the cylinder turned again, cutting us off. Opposite us appeared to be an image of the bird again, this time looking as if translucent green stone had been carved to fill holes cut into the wall. Its glow built to brightness, illuminating the trio of hooded robes hanging on the wall. The robes took on a greenish cast because of the light shining on them, but I suspected they were really as white as our moonmasks.

Nay turned to regard the both of us. “Any idea what is happening?”

I shook my head.

Leigh’s eyes narrowed. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? We’ve attracted the attention of a Society.”

“A Society?” Nay’s shoulders slumped a bit. “They exist, sure, but no trade is marked by this symbol.”

Leigh held up a hand and waggled a finger at Nay. “Those are the Lesser Societies, Nay, the public ones. Every trade has one and accepts only the best of the guild into them. They grew up after the Great Revolt, as a response to the Major Societies. Before the revolt took hold, long before it, secret societies brought together the leaders of the day, allowing them to talk and plot. Some say the societies even predate the Estine Empire. I don’t know if that is true, but the empire’s incompetent leadership certainly necessitated their spreading and flourishing.”

“Everyone knows that, Leigh.” Nay folded his arms across his chest. “That’s where the wearing of masks originated, but after the revolt, they were done.”

“Not exactly. Instead of vanishing, they spread, moving into nations that had never even been part of the Estine Empire. The societies are a means for people of differing nations to exchange ideas even though their nations might be hostile to each other. They serve as shadowy embassies that can circumvent official conflicts as needed.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What do they want?”

Leigh smiled. “Us, apparently.”

The bird image took on a golden hue. A disembodied voice echoed distantly as if speaking to us from the bottom of a well. “You stand on the threshold of your future. Strip away your old selves and don these robes to become the men you are meant to be.”

Leigh leaned back against a wall and began to tug off his boots. He looked up when he’d gotten the first one off, then tossed it aside. “Well, take off your clothes and put on the robe.”

“Are you sure we want to do this, Leigh?” I nervously fingered the lacings on my shirt. “We don’t even know who they are.”

“We don’t, Hawkins, but we know some of the people they must be.” He started on his other boot. “What have we done to attract this attention? We’ve been out on that hunt, killing temeryces—which is a wonderful word to rhyme, by the way—and vylaens and gibberkin. Everyone in Valsina probably has heard some variation of a rumor about what we’ve done, but these people wouldn’t invite us here based on rumor. We’re here because they know what we did.”

I nodded and pulled the hem of my tunic from the top of my trousers. “Which means they spoke with someone who knew what we did, like your father or Heslin.”

Nay smiled and sat down to kick his boots off. “And they took us from the temple. Only a few people knew we were going there and when.”

“Exactly.” Leigh slipped off his pants, tugged off his tunic and peeled stockings from his raw feet. Standing naked except for his mask, he reached for a robe. “Two nights ago they watched us, last night they evaluated us, and tonight they want us. We’ve come far in just three days of a Moon Month, my friends. Just imagine where we will end up in a lifetime.”

We stood before the glowing golden bird emblem, wearing only the robes we had been given and our moonmasks. I certainly had no idea what to do next, and the voice did not return to help us. I started to reach a hand toward the symbol, to see if I could feel heat from it, but Leigh moved quickly to preempt me. He touched the symbol, then withdrew his hand quickly, as if he’d stuck a finger on a needle.

The stone panel slid slowly upward, revealing a small chamber that would only accept one of us. Nay and I took a step backward, inclining our heads toward Leigh. He stood stock still for a moment, then looked at us, blinking away surprise. His blue eyes became crescents, then he nodded and stepped into the chamber.

The wall again descended.

I heard no scream, no sounds of his struggling to get out, which did hearten me. It made no sense, after all, for our hosts to go to the lengths they did just to kill us when a dagger in the dark or poison in wine would have been less troublesome. Despite that line of logic, I couldn’t shake a flesh-puckering sense of foreboding.

Nay waved me forward, but I shook my head. “You go before me.”

“Not sure if they want someone of my low birth.”

“If they didn’t want you, you’d not be here. The priest could have separated us easily enough, or they could have taken us at another time.” I smiled easily at him. “Besides, Naysmith comes before Tarrant in the alphabet, as does Carver before Hawkins. If you precede me, we make it easy on whoever keeps their records.”

Nay frowned. “By that reckoning, Leigh should have been last. Then again, he is a Norrington.”

“Just assume his first name won it for him; it’s easier that way.” I nodded to him. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

Nay touched the emblem and the wall swallowed him.

I hesitated for a moment, taking one last look around the room, and at the piles of clothes that we had worn into the place. We had been directed to shed that which marked us as who we had been, so we could become the men we were meant to be. I knew the Moon Month was part of that process, but stepping through the wall became an active rather than passive move. It made things come faster than I expected, and while part of me was pleased to be moving forward quickly, another part of me hoped I wasn’t running so fast I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my legs.

I pressed my hand against the emblem and kept it there despite the tingling pains trickling into my fingers. It was a petty victory over Leigh, and one only made possible by seeing how he had reacted, but I was glad to have won it. Leigh had been a life-long companion and friend. His self-centered nature was something I had lived with forever, and I had learned to ignore the trivial and warn him away from the malignant manifestations of it, but there were times he could get under my flesh. I stored up little victories like this to salve my soul when he annoyed me.

I stepped into the chamber and the wall sank to the floor behind me. It closed me in a tight chamber that felt hot and the air heavy. I could breathe, but as I expanded my chest, both it and my back touched the front and rear walls respectively. I could move my arms only an inch or two and shift my feet about the same. As the air thickened, I felt as if I’d been buried alive, and part of me wanted to scream.