The Golden Sword (34 page)

Chayin walked to the desk, where their food lay, and touched the coldness with his finger. He also had taken time to battle-dress. He even wore his high boots.

“Doubtless, you can do better than this, Estri,” he said to me, giving the slab of meat a desultory prod. Chayin was greatly eased. He even smiled.

So I took the meal I had made them and threw it away, and made another. I served them, with exaggerated crellishness, where they sat talking together, near to Dellin. They took no notice.

When they had finished, Sereth went to the master board. He had just activated the visual display when the call code sounded. He slapped the board quiescent and dived out of range as Chayin jerked Dellin’s chair before the desk. Kneeling beneath the desktop, out of sight, Sereth drew his blade with one hand, and reached up to activate the receiver with the other. Chayin stood upon my left, Lalen upon my right, though I had not seen him cross the room.

“How are you feeling?” purred Celendra’s voice, The light her image threw flickered across Dellin’s half-healed face.

“Better,” he managed.

“You look terrible,” she said sharply.

“I passed out in the hall. I will be fine,” His eyes watched a face we could not see. I saw him shiver. Beneath the desktop, Sereth’s blade rested naked between Dellin’s bound legs. “What do you want?”

“Just to see if you were ill. I see you are ill. Have you any word?”

“No, croaked Dellin.”

“What?”

“No word from them. But do not worry.”

“That is easy for you to say,” Celendra snorted. “You see no more than your hand before your face. I want you to call me, tomorrow mid-meal. I have great unrest. Perhaps by then you will be well enough to leave your couch.” And she broke the connection without even a tasa.

Dellin slumped in his bonds, white-faced.

“So”—Sereth laughed—“Celendra called him upon your schedule, Estri. To see how he was feeling.” And his laughter infected Lalan and Chayin. I found myself smiling. The jiasks would get there tomorrow, and we would be informed by Celendra of her exact reaction. We did not even have to wait for her to call us. She had ordered Dellin to call her! Chayin hugged me against him. For a moment I was eye-to-eye with the uritheria on his bicep. It leered at me. Then he let me go.

Sereth went and again set up visual screening, that we might see any approaching us. The day was exhausted before he turned away from it.

“Let us take a walk,” he said stretching. “I am stiff from sitting.” He led me unresisting back down the hall of marble, into the corridor of star steel, down the steps into the outer court. The extravagance of Astrian dusk turned him as copper as I. I sniffed the air, sweet and clean after the keep’s alien odors. It caressed the skin, told stories of the life it carried. I breathed summer sarla and name bloom, and the pungent ripeness of, this fertile land whispered all around. As I watched, the constellations made their stately entrance into the newborn night. Yellow criers took song, while swamp kephers kept the time and a hundred species, waiting, hummed and buzzed and whistled.

Sereth’s hand was cool and reassuring on my waist. My father’s cloak rustled upon his shoulders. Through Mlennin’s fastidious gardens we circuited. The second time around the outer court, he pushed me gently to the grass within a circular harinder brake. We lay there long, looking at the stars.

And that was where Lalen, breathing heavily, found us.

“Dellin speaks again with the woman. Chayin sent me for you.” He said this last to empty air; Sereth was gone, running. Lalen reached down and lifted me like a small child and half-dragged me beside him. He was, I reminded myself as I struggled to pace him and retain my arm, responsible for me.

“Let me go!” I demanded as I stumbled while he impelled me up the steps. “I warned you.” I sighed, and caused his grip to drop from my arm. I walked up the stairs, and he made way for me. I smiled to myself as he fell in beside me. His consternation was evident. He did not ask, and I did not enlighten him.

“What, exactly, did she say, from the beginning?”

Chayin recited it for us. Wiraal had arrived early. Celendra could do little else than serve them. The significance of a visit by so many Parsets was not lost upon her. She demanded his aid, and he referred her to the Slayers, to her own Day-Keepers. She fumed. Dellin pointed out that he could not be implicated in the disposal, out of hand, of twenty-two Parsets, at this moment. He suggested she bide her time until the ships came. She snarled at him. Chayin’s dark face bore a huge grin as he dutifully repeated every curse. In the end, Celendra had agreed. After all, Parsets are men, like any others, she had acknowledged. With that profound statement, she had broken the link.

Sereth was not pleased. Wiraal was too early to suit him. He knew Celendra. He had timed the arrival of the jiasks in Astria with that of certain other sections of his total force.

“It is too long between,” he said softly. “We will have to go in there now, take her, keep her there, and quiet, until Jaheil and the tiasks arrive. I do not like it. I cannot give her enough time to figure things out.” He slammed his hand upon the desk.

“Chayin! That man of yours needs a lesson. ‘By’ is not the same as ‘on.’ If he were one of mine, I would do without him.”

The woman, alone, posited upon the gold square of prime mover, on the board of catalysts.

Though her legs tremble, she is supported by what comes to be between them.

One who submits to the bidding of the First Weather is upheld by gale and breeze, and the very mountains make haste to provide her a resting place upon their summits.

The weak is surmounted by the strong, and thus comes to contain its strength.

Only that which may be conceived can be done. It’ is necessary to prepare expectation concomitant with the fruitfulness of the time.

Adjuration: That which is born to fill a need is always strong enough, for the demands of the time provide helpers as they are needed. The principle of replication is raised here to its purpose. What profit to that force, if in its hour it quails and trembles? The seed when placed finger-deep in warm loam, commences the duty for which the time has prepared it. Though it may tremble when first it is buried in the earth, shut away from air and light, it knows its purpose. So must it be with the Viable. The seed does not draw back from the cracking of shell or the putting forth of blind shoots, lest it should lose them. The seed knows that to reach the light once again it must thrust upward until it breaks the surface asunder, and that at that moment of success it will be other than that which undertook the task. The seed does not fear the loss of its seedness, but recognizes the transformation as its destiny and goes to meet its fate with confidence, for within it is the conception of rebirth.

—excerpted from Ors Yris-tera 285

We stood knee-deep in the sewers that feed into the Litess. Above us was Well Astria herself, open, vulnerable. She was a high-couch woman, not built to withstand siege. Below us were the undertunnels through which we had come here, unobserved.

We had left Dellin, bound and gagged, in his outer court. The Liaison’s keep we sealed. It might stay sealed forever, as we had erased all entry prints from it, retroactive to our exit. The building had no friends, and would open itself to no one. None would make use of the tools within, at least not for a long time.

Our makeshift plan was much changed. Chayin had taken a different route than we, and by now he had surely bought his well token and reserved Celendra for this night, as Wiraal was supposed to do the next evening. He would be moving among his men, in the common room, spreading new orders. If he had found Celendra, he would be, even now, with her in my own chamber, where the ceilings had been muraled by the finest gol-etchers upon Silistra, and the sky came tinted through the translucent roof.

I sighed, and wrinkled my nose, wishing I were Parset and could fold my nostrils against the smell.

As a child, I had not been bothered by the smell. These watery, phospher-mold-covered stone conduits had been my refuge, my secret world. I ran my hand along the stones, seeking. One did not waste gol upon sewers. I recalled the raft I had assembled here, piece by surreptitiously acquired piece, on which I had poled my way through my fantasies when so young the sluggish water had been waist-high upon me.

We could probably have taken the stairs just behind us, and walked Astria’s back corridors unobserved. I judged it between eighth and ninth bell, busiest enth of the evening in any Well. The girls would be in the common room, bedecked, awaiting their patrons’ pleasure. The dining, drink, and drug chambers would be filled. It was the choosing hour.

Know you Astria? She is not as Arlet, where Liaisons’ and Day-Keepers’ school and Slayers’ hostel all exist within the outer walls. All that we need is brought to us from our dependent city, Port Astrin, south from here, where the Litess meets the Embrodming Sea. Between Astria and the port, upon the easterly banks of the Litess, lie the Day-Keepers’ school and the Slayers’ hostel, at a distance of some sixty and seventy neras, respectively.

I did not take us up those stairs, which would have led into the couching keeps. My fingers found what I sought at the level of my shoulder. I could barely make it out—the first stra rung of eighty, set into the stone, limned faintly with moss.

“Here,” I said, and my voice echoed back to me. Sereth’s hand touched the rung. I could feel Lalen’s bulk, ever behind me. “At the top is a stra trap, which may be lifted. These crawlways exist only in the older buildings. They are seldom used.”

Sereth swung lightly up the first rungs. High above us, twelve floors, lay the Keepress’ chamber, in the oldest and highest tower, which was once the whole Well. Now the Well curled around, her gleaming towers much multiplied, encircling a nera of open ground, but still was the first business of Astria pleasure and replication, carried on in this tower alone.

We climbed. I counted the slippery rungs. Once I lost my foothold, and my heel struck Lalen’s head as I hung by my hands’ grip. His fingers grabbed my ankle, steadied my weight, guided my foot back to the rung. I pressed my face against the cool stone, thinking of the fifty-rung drop.

When I had gained the seventy-first, Sereth lifted the trap. Light poured in through the opening, blinding after enths in the mold-lit dark. There should have been no light there. I scrambled the remaining rungs, disdaining caution.

Sereth’s hand reached down. I took it, and crouched beside him in the crawlway, bright with strung power globes and filled with cables like huge black Slitsas upon the got. I looked around in wonder. Astria was much changed. Above me were pipes of stra and copper—the plumbing that had been once the primary reason for these passages.

Sereth must have read my face. He pulled me gently away from the trap as Lalen’s head appeared in it. The two of them lowered it soundlessly into place. “The Keepress’ chamber,” he reminded me gently.

“The Keepress’ chamber,” I repeated, dazed. How dare she string lights in my crawlways? And for what conceivable purpose? Every torch sconce in Well Astria was a precious stone, sculptured by a master's hand. Sereth pushed me, hardly more than a nudge. The glare of the naked globes did ugly things to his skin and to the scar upon his cheek. I shook off my feelings, and, half-crouched, led us down the crawlway. I found my smallness an advantage; the men had to go on their hands and knees, slowly. Lalen’s shoulders brushed the walls. I took us up an ascending passage, then right upon level surface, then again right into a sloping, curving tightness that would lead, directly, to my old keep. Even in the olden days of this tower’s building, when we were so few and fresh from war that none would raise hand to another, it was thought that the Keepress might need her own exit.

It was slow going. My knees hurt, and my palms stung. Lalen cursed continually the close walls that abraded him. When we reached the passage landing, a small level space before a wall of amber gol, the stra door set into it was locked tight from the inside.

I sat between them, where they huddled upon the landing. The door was crouched-woman-sized; I hoped Lalen could squeeze through it. We waited.

After a time we heard voices beyond the wall. All that could be told from them was that one voice was male, the other female. Sereth, needlessly, put his fingers to his lips. Lalen drew his gol-knife.

The voices changed their tenor, grew faint. Perhaps a quarter-enth passed. I shifted my weight. Sereth hissed at me.

At that moment there was a creaking, and the low stra door was swung back from the inside, exposing a Parset rug that did not belong there. Crouched upon it, peering at us, was Chayin. Torchlight flickered over his hugely grinning face. She had had the grace to leave the sconces, then. I crawled through first, at the cahndor’s wordless invitation, wondering what had become of my white-upon-white floor tapestry, that one I had commissioned in exotic Galesh.

Then I saw Celendra. In mid-crawl, I saw her, and rose up on my knees. She lay upon that red mat she must have brought with her from Arlet, all bound up in her Arletian love chains. They are women’s chains, strong enough, yet light. They would not chafe her black and shapely wrists like crell chains. Objectively, I admitted that she was very lovely, lying there, bound and gagged with her own thigh-length black hair. Chayin had balled a great wad of it and forced it into her mouth, taking more of her silken mane and binding it across her mouth, then tying a great knot at the back of her dusky neck. Her gold-green eyes stared over her gag, terrified. I did not blame her, Chayin can be truly terrifying. He had bound each hand to her ankles, between which she had a handbreath slack of links, as is often done with pleasure chains. She was leashed to the foot of my Astrian couch, on six links of tether.

It struck me funny. I knelt, laughing softly, until Sereth pushed me out of his way. I fell to my side and lay there, smiling. When Celendra saw him, she closed her eyes. Trembling, she bowed her head to the extent her leash allowed it.