Power's Shadow

by Richard Parks

  Longfeather hesitated. “You do understand—he won’t come alone. He doesn’t trust us…well, he doesn’t trust who he thinks we are.”

  “Very sensible. Let him bring who he will. It won’t make any difference.”

  When Longfeather had gone, Prince Dolan turned to Marta. “I know you don’t trust him.”

  She smiled. “I don’t need to, this time. He’ll do as I say, out of fear if not common sense. The rest is on us.”

  Dolan looked thoughtful. “About that—naturally it’s in Wylandia’s interest to make certain the pilgrim trail is safe. The same for Conmyre and, well, pretty much all nine of the other kingdoms as well. Ten, if we count the Five Isles, and I suppose we soon must. What I don’t yet understand, and would like to, is why you’re taking this action upon yourself.”

  “Not entirely myself,” Marta pointed out. “You and your bodyguard have agreed to assist as well.”

  “True, but again, as my father’s representative, I also have an obligation. You, to be quite frank, do not. Please believe me, Lady Marta—this is not a complaint. I simply don’t understand, and I would like to.”

  Marta noted that Prince Dolan was very careful not to phrase his curiosity as a direct request, and she almost smiled. “The answer, Highness, is in the way you very carefully did not ask me for something…even something as simple as an explanation. Yet people do ask me for things, or my mother before me. Like her, once a request is made, I have no choice but to grant it, assuming the supplicant is willing to meet the terms of the Debt. That’s why Bonetapper does and Count Maton did serve me, through my mother. “

  Prince Dolan frowned. “If it please you, pray continue.”

  “You are wise in your phrasing, Highness. It is also why I have taken this upon myself. As you say—no one asked me to do this, and that is why I am free to do as I will. I choose to act simply because the choice is mine to make.”

  Dolan nodded. “Ah. I believe I do understand, though I think my eldest brother the heir would understand even better than I do—the poor sod has his life mapped out for him—whom he will marry, what he will wear, where he will go, and with almost no say in any of it. Whenever I am tempted to complain of my lot, I have only to think of him.”

  §

  Sela looked down the mountain trail. “They’re coming.”

  A moment later Bonetapper fluttered down to land on Marta’s shoulder. He whispered in her ear and she turned to Sela. “Bonetapper counts three.”

  Sela nodded. “As do I. Are we ready?”

  Prince Dolan glanced behind him at the crevice in the mountainside. “Yes. Are you sure you can do it?”

  “Oh, yes. Just don’t let Loken loose an arrow without orders.”

  “You can depend on that,” Dolan said.

  Longfeather had already identified the person they were to meet, of course, but Prince Dolan still managed a tone of shock and disgust as the three men walked up the path.

  “Master Galden,” Prince Dolan said. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  The thin, gray-bearded man leading the way up the trail stopped short as he came into full sight of them. “P-Prince Dolan. This is a great pleasure.”

  “I wouldn’t think so. We arrange a meeting with the person responsible for buying the stolen goods of murdered pilgrims and who do we find? The Elderman of Goandel himself.”

  Sir Kian and the prince’s other bodyguard, Devan, emerged from the fissure in the rock, swords drawn. Loken followed with his bow, standing to one side for a clearer line of sight to the three men. Master Galden’s escort, two ill-groomed and burly young men, immediately drew their blades, and Galden immediately put up a hand. “Now, now, let’s none of us be hasty. I don’t know what this…criminal,” he said, nodding his head at Longfeather, “Has told you, but I can assure you that I had nothing to do—“

  “Save your breath,” Prince Dolan said. “We’ve already verified that your manor contains stolen property.”

  “How could you possibly think that?” Galden asked, but his voice was as tight as a bowstring.

  Marta spoke up. “Because my servant is very good at entering places most people think secure,” she said. Galden turned his frown upon her and she continued. “My name is Marta. You likely wouldn’t have heard of me…yet, but I believe you knew of my mother. She was Black Kath of Lythos.”

  Most of the color drained out Galden’s face until he was almost as ash-gray as his beard, and Marta nodded.

  “Yes, I thought you might.”

  Galden took a step back, and the two henchmen moved to stand in front of them. “Your Highness, again I must protest. I am innocent, and your presence with this witch—“

  “Is better company than I have kept in most courts,” Dolan said. “Now tell your men to stand down.”

  Galden did no such thing. “Highness, you have no authority here. We are going to leave—“

  “Incorrect on both points,” Dolan said mildly. “Borasur-Morushe is part of the treaty governing the maintenance and security of the Pilgrim Trail. As my father’s representative, I must act on his behalf. Now stand down while you still have the choice. I will not warn you again.”

  “I repeat, we are going to leave. It would be wise not to stop us.”

  Marta exchanged a glance with Prince Dolan and then shook her head. “I’m afraid your judgment on what is and is not wise has already proven flawed, Master Galden.”

  First Law. What Power Holds, Weakness Frees.

  Marta shattered Master Galden’s hired thugs’ swords. One moment the two hirelings were holding rather nasty-looking longswords, and the next the two stood blinking, holding nothing in their hands but useless sword hilts. Bits of the blades littered the ground like silver coins catching the morning sun.

  “You were saying?” Dolan asked.

  Galden didn’t say anything. He had already attempted to draw his own weapon, found nothing but a hilt and just enough jagged shard of a blade to have kept it from falling from the scabbard to the ground immediately. The two hirelings likewise had nothing to say. They simply took to their heels down the mountain path, leaving Goandel’s Eldermaster blinking in the sun, alone.

  Marta saw Loken drawing his bow, and she held up her hand. “Let the servants go. However, if Master Galden so much as twitches, please feel free to put an arrow through his liver.”

  “Yes, Lady,” Loken said, and Marta turned back to Galden.

  “I wouldn’t try to follow your servants’ example,” she said. “Sensible as their actions were. Our archer is very skilled. Besides, if he should miss—unlikely—be assured that I won’t. Blades aren’t the only thing I can break.”

  Marta saw the moment when Master Galden surrendered to the inevitable. His shoulders slumped, the tension drained out of him faster than a rain through a sieve. “What am I to do?”

  “By rights I should have you hanged,” Dolan said, as if just making conversation. “But that would be very disruptive, and you’re a decent enough Eldermaster when you stick to your duties. However, I need to make certain that you do not go astray again and hanging is the only way I can be certain.”

  “There might be another way, Highness,” Marta said, and she turned to Galden once more. “Master Galden, I can spare you a hanging. Do you wish me to do so?”

  “Personally, I think I’d take the hanging,” Dolan said in that same jovial tone. “No offense intended, Lady Marta.”

  Marta ignored that. “I need an answer, Master Galden—do you want me to help you or not?”

  Galden muttered something and Marta scowled. “Speak up, man. Do you want me to save you from hanging?”

  “Yes,” he said weakly. “Save me. Please.”

  Marta sighed. “Well then. Let’s discuss it.”

  Later that evening, Marta discovered to her annoyance that she couldn’t sleep. She slipped out of her bed at the pilgrim’s inn and quietly padded over to the one window. The glazing was not especially good—the objects beyond the glass appeared a
bit dim and distorted, but she was able to make out the nearly full moon that cast shadows across town’s only road. For a moment she even thought she saw a lone citizen making her way from one side of the street to the avenue to the other, but between one blink and the next, the figure disappeared.

  My imagination?

  “What are you looking at?” The voice was a soft whisper.

  Sela stood beside her, looking out the same window, and Marta sighed. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

  Sela smiled. “Oh, I could. But when there’s someone moving about your room when you’re in a strange place, it’s best to be aware of them. I gather that something is troubling you?”

  “Yes,” Marta said.

  “I’m not sure if witches really have friends,” Sela said. “Even after the time I’ve spent with you, I can’t say for certain. But I do know that I’m probably as good as, or at least as close to being so as anyone might be. Am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re not wrong.”

  “Friends usually tell friends when they are troubled,” Sela said. “That’s how the relationship is supposed to work.”

  “This has been entirely too easy,” Marta said, almost before she was aware that she was going to say it.

  Sela smiled. “Really? And just how many people and monsters—don’t think I’ve forgotten about the craja—have tried to either kill or thwart us since we began this journey?”

  Marta almost laughed then. “I see your point, but it doesn’t affect mine. I only meant that certain aspects of my search—and by that I mean the ways that it directly connects to me rather than you—have been a little too…convenient, shall we say?”

  “Clear as a stream in flood through a manure pile,” Sela said.

  “First there was my meeting with you. Then our encounter with Longfeather.”

  “I remember,” Sela said grimly.

  “Yes. Rather unpleasant, but necessary because it was only then that two of the swords could be brought together in my presence to create that harmonic event that I recognized as the echo of a Law of Power.”

  “Happenstance?”

  Marta scowled “I’ve found that the longer one remains on the Arrow Path, the less one tends to believe in such a thing as coincidence. But let us say that it was such a thing. Then there was the journey to the Five Isles, where not only was Boranac eager to make a deal, the price of the transaction turned out to be exactly what we had gone there for in the first place—and recall, I have no power over what the price will be. Next was our meeting with Prince Dolan—unplanned, unexpected, yet it too pointed us along what I believe to be the correct path, including discovering that at least one sword, whose location I thought I knew, is missing.”

  Sela looked thoughtful. “When you put it that way, coincidence begins to sound a little farfetched. Yet what about Master Galden?”

  “The price was that he remain exactly where he is and do exactly what he was doing—minus acting as a go-between for a bandit gang selling their spoils, of course. That is good for both the pilgrim road and Goandel…and Master Galden, since the bounds of the Debt guarantee that we will know if he strays again, just as I knew with Longfeather, and so he avoids hanging. If he fits into this in any other way, I don’t yet see it.”

  “What about the…Power? You say is the mistress of the Arrow Path.”

  “Amaet. Oh, I know her handiwork well enough, and she is the one who determines the price of the Debt. Yet I’m starting to think that, perhaps at least in this matter, there is another player behind the scenes.”

  “The witch following us?”

  Marta shook her head. “I think she has her part to play, whatever that may prove to be. But directing events? No.”

  “Who then?” Sela asked.

  Marta thought of the sending she had met at the place where Taleera of Amurlee had lived. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll rest easily until I find out.”

  “Well, I think we should both try. Dawn will come soon enough and we have a long way to go.”

  Marta followed Sela back to the bed they shared at the inn. Soon Marta heard Sela’s steady breathing as her companion drifted off to sleep. It took Marta a bit longer, but she finally followed Sela to that place, too.

  §

  Marta found herself back at the distorted glass window, staring at the moon again. Sela followed her there, only it wasn’t Sela and Marta knew that fact beyond question. She glanced back at the bed and found Sela there, along with herself, both in sleep.

  “Amaet,” she said softly.

  “I wondered if you had figured that out,” Amaet said.

  Marta looked into Sela’s smiling face, knowing that it was Amaet’s cold gaze turned upon her and she felt a little sick.

  “How could I not know you?” Marta said, and the smile on Sela’s face grew wider, and there was hard, pitiless edge to it that Marta had never seen before, even when Sela had spoken of Longfeather. Even when she would have gladly killed him.

  “I don’t mean that,” Amaet said as she joined her beside the window and looked out through the same distorted glass. “I meant about someone working to guide you…other than myself, of course.”

  “So it’s true then.”

  “I’ll say this for you—you’re clever. So was your mother. I think she’d have been the first to tell you that it wasn’t always an advantage.”

  “Is that what you came here to tell me?” Marta asked.

  “Is that the question you really want answered?” Amaet said, still smiling that cruel smile.

  “You know it isn’t. I want to know who else is following me. But I will not ask you that. The price would be too high.”

  “More even than you know. Still…what is the Second Law?”

  “’What Cannot be Taken, Can be Given.’”

  “So you must concede that I may choose to answer your question at my whim, or my choice, and incur no obligation for yourself.”

  “It is possible,” Marta said.

  “But you don’t believe that it will happen, do you?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, I did say you were clever. You are right, Marta—I am not going to reveal to you the name of the other interested party. In fact, I wouldn’t tell you even if you were willing to accept the obligation of asking.”

  That made Marta pause. Even if…?

  Marta almost asked the question aloud, but she managed to stop herself. Amaet just smiled.

  “’Yes, Marta—‘why’ is the real question, isn’t it? The one that matters. You can stop biting your tongue now—that one I will answer under the terms of the Second Law. But you’re going to have to ask.”

  “All right—why won’t you tell me?”

  Amaet smiled again, and Marta heard the echo of the stranger in Taleera’s grove in her answer.

  “Because, lambkin, you wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

  §

  As expected, once their party was well past Goandel, the pilgrim road to the Kuldun Monastery began to climb as it twisted back into the White Mountains. The road was only a little wider than that of the Snake Pass, and now there were drop-offs to one side or the other depending on which side of which mountain they were climbing, and the horses were straining to keep the wagons moving up the incline. Marta’s wagon held most of her attention as she worked to keep the wagon riding in the ruts and not veering too close to either edge. Behind her she could hear the swearing of the second driver as he essentially did the same. Marta didn’t mind—the fear of sudden death kept her attention off the dream…most of the time.

  Amaet knows that I would—must—believe her with a question answered under the terms of the debt. So what is the real reason she didn’t want to tell me?

  Marta put the new question aside as she was forced to carefully navigate past a large boulder that had fallen into the road. Soon after they reached the plateau that served as the waystation for this part of the pilgrim road. It wasn’t exactly spacious, but there was room t
o unhitch the wagons and give the horses some very needed food and rest. Loken went ahead to scout the next section of road while Akan and Devan got a fire going to prepare a meal for the party. Prince Dolan and Sir Kian were heads down over a map spread out on a flat rock. Weary as she was, Marta was less interested in the map and more focused on the chance to simply stand up. Sela just rubbed her lower back and groaned.

  “How much further?”

  “Another day to the next waystation. By noon the following day we should reach the barrier.”

  “Barrier?”

  “We’ll have to request permission to enter the monastery itself. They’ll accept our offerings, but not everyone is allowed in.”

  “Suppose we aren’t granted permission?” Sela asked.

  “We leave our offerings at the gate like most of the pilgrims.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not in the least,” Prince Dolan said. Neither woman had heard him approach.

  He does need watching, that one, Marta thought.

  “The Kuldun Monastery is a special institution,” Dolan continued, “Kingdoms and ordinary folk alike depend on its archives and the information the monks distill for them like some other institutions distill brandywine. For supplying those services they are rewarded directly by the Crowns and pilgrim offerings. Such offerings usually allow one to make a request, which may be answered or not, but nothing guarantees a non-official delegation such as ourselves entry into the monastery grounds proper.”

  Sela frowned. “But you’ve been here before, haven’t you? Were you allowed in?”

  “Oh, yes…well, usually. I too have been refused entry on occasion. I think I know the reason in those cases. However, the monks do not share their rationales, so I cannot be sure.”

  “So this could be all for nothing?” Sela asked.

  “Not for nothing,” Marta said, “A refusal itself may tell me something I need to know. Still…we’ll see.”

  The time came for the answer to that question came precisely two days later almost to the hour as they approached a stone wall blocking the mountain road. In the wall sat a massive gate. Beyond the wall they could see a collection of imposing stone structures nestled into the side of the mountain, some so closely in harmony with the stone that it was difficult to tell where the building ended and the mountain began. Others so precariously that, to Marta’s way of thinking, it was amazing that stiff breeze hadn’t blown them off the mountain into a thousand foot drop to the bottom of the gorge years ago.