by Doyle, Debra
Mael looked at her curiously. “And for this you require my presence?”
“At the moment,” Klea said, “I only trust one person on this world other than myself. If that person is a Mage … well, Master Rosselin-Metadi had misgivings about the Khesatan Adepts, and if what I saw yesterday has any value, I think I share them.”
“I have, in my own way, seen things which give me pause,” Mael said. “It is not your Guild that causes the harm, but a vengeful ghost.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think that we’ve got helpless innocents in the Guildhouse of Ilsefret, either. If the Adepts on Khesat have betrayed their vows—to seek always the common good, to do no ill—then they will answer for it.”
Together they set out for the Guildhouse—listed in all the guidebooks and street maps as standing in Higedon Street, not far from the Clockmakers’ Tower. Before long Klea and Mael stood on the sidewalk in front of the gates, in a chill morning fog that seemed to come from the very stones of the plaza.
“To enter such a place,” said Mael, “still grieves me.”
“You survived the experience once before. Being an Adept isn’t catching.”
“Very well.” Mael settled his mask over his face, then stepped up to the door and struck the heavy ring-shaped knocker three times against the solid brass plate beneath.
The door did not open, nor did some sleepy-eyed apprentice come tardily to answer it.
“Perhaps the Adepts of Khesat sleep late,” Mael said.
“All of them?” Klea laid her hand upon the door knocker, then let the ring drop from her hand with a boom that echoed clear across the street. She grimaced. “They believe in serious door knockers in this town. Where do you suppose everyone is?”
“This morning they elevate the Highest,” Mael said. “I heard it on the early news at the Guesthome.”
Klea’s skin prickled. “Did you hear a name?”
“If they gave one,” Mael said, “it was not in the news that they make files of for outworlders.”
Klea shrugged. “What a curious place,” she said. “Well, Master Owen has entrusted to me the charge of keeping his nephews safe, and it is my opinion that they were planning to come to this world. To keep them safe requires the help of the Guild. Messages may have come for me from Master Owen, and they would have come here … .”
“What are you nerving yourself up to do?”
“This,” Klea said. She unshipped her staff from its thong along her back and held it up in both hands.
“I am the representative of Owen Rosselin-Metadi,” she said, “and in my place, he would do this!”
The staff blazed up blue-green in her hands, and she struck the lockplate with the end of it, driving forward with her shoulders. The doors bowed inward for an instant, then rebounded out, springing open in the process. Klea grabbed the knocker by its ring and pulled, opening the door a bit wider for her to enter.
“Somehow,” Mael said, “I think Master Rosselin-Metadi would have been more subtle.”
“I know him better than that,” Klea said, stepping in through the gap. “Are you coming?”
Mael followed Klea into the antechamber, then paused while she closed and re-locked the door. “The Adepts here may consider this to have been an unfriendly act.”
“My motives are pure,” Klea said. “Come on.”
The antechamber could have been located nowhere else except on Khesat: the tastefully understated furniture; the tiny glowing gems set into the walls at unexpected angles to form patterns of subtlety and grace; the faintest hint of perfume on the air.
“This way, I think,” Klea said.
She went up a short flight of marble steps, and turned left down a corridor. The corridor opened onto a stone cloister that surrounded a severe rock garden open to the sky.
“No one here,” she said. “Something is very wrong.”
“I agree,” Mael said, and unclipped his short staff. “This place is dead.”
In the small plain room at the base of the Golden Tower, Jens Metadi-Jessan D’Rosselin stood in the midst of the members of the Court of Raising, with the Presenter of the Highest before him. Jens had already removed his sable and silver morning-robe, and wore only the plain white and black of an Unacclaimed. The leather and bone necklace from the Sapnean oracle lay against his skin underneath the loose cambric of his shirt.
“Your pardon,” said the Presenter, as two burly fellows in the mauve livery of the Council of Worthies approached Jens and confined his wrists behind him in stout metal binders.
Jens raised an eyebrow. “Are those truly necessary?”
“After the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the Raising of Finuale the Sixth,” the Presenter said, his expression sad under his shaven brows, “they have been customary. They will be removed on the platform, if the cry is ‘huzzah.’
“As I have no doubt it will be,” he added, with a twitch that might have been a smile.
“Suppose I wished to flap my arms the whole way down?”
“Waferan Elderos already did that. You wouldn’t want to appear a mere imitator, would you?”
“I suppose not,” Jens said. He turned to the spiral stairway. “Let’s get going. Dawn isn’t going to wait.”
“One matter more.” The Presenter ran his hands rapidly over Jens’s body. “Once, not too long ago, someone brought along a parachute.”
Jens suppressed the nervous laugh that would otherwise have become a hysterical giggle before he could make himself stop. He drew a deep breath.
“I understand,” he said. “Shall we?”
He nodded to the stairway. The Presenter nodded back. Jens led, with the guards a step farther behind, and the Presenter following the entire procession.
It wouldn’t be so hard, Jens thought, if I didn’t have to lead the way. This is probably another one of those hidden tests of character. Rhal Kasander has promised that the crowd is well bribed. Everything’s in order. He says.
Each time they completed a circuit of the spiral they passed another fretwork window. The sky outside was growing light.
Dawn soon. When the sun touches the golden dome, then … well, no choice now. One way or another, I’m the Highest of Khesat. I wonder if the wrinkleskins on Maraghai will count that as fame?
There was the platform, surrounded by a waist-high stone railing, the arch above it wrought with cunningly carved leaves to look like a garden bower. Jens stepped through, and walked directly to the edge and looked out over Ilsefret. The streets were crowded as far as he could see, the Plaza of Hope obscured by close-set, upturned faces. Only the square of marble paving at the very base of the tower remained clear. There were stains on the marble from other Raisings, stains that had soaked into the stone and never washed out.
The fronts of the buildings around the plaza were still shadowed. He tried to make out the windows of Caridal Fere. Two figures, dark in silhouette against the lights within, stood in an embrasure. It was too far and too dark for him to see clearly. Faral and Miza, though, they had to be.
“Well, coz,” Jens said quietly, “now we come to the final parting.”
The two fellows in livery walked forward. They were pleasant-enough-looking lads, although they both seemed nervous.
Probably never threw a Highest from a golden tower before, Jens thought.
“Whatever happens,” he said, still quietly, “I have no grudge against you for this.”
The two nodded, showing that they heard, but they wouldn’t meet his eyes. The Presenter leaped up onto a stone platform at the right of the archway and turned to view the top of the Tower.
“Watching for the light?” Jens asked.
“Yes,” the Presenter said.
Jens craned his neck around to look at the Tower. The golden tip of the spire was brightening, catching the rising sun and throwing it forth again in a dazzle of reflected light.
“Are you ready?” the Presenter asked.
Jens considered. “I suppose I am.”
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“Then it’s time.”
The Presenter turned to the crowd below, and in a voice of iron, so loud that Jens could scarcely believe it came from so small a man, he called, “Behold the Highest!”
And from below came a sound, a growl at first, unintelligible. But it grew louder, and the voices began to chant in chorus, so that the words were plain.
“Bring him low! Bring him low!”
XIX. KHESAT
FARAL STOOD at the window of Caridal Fere’s apartment overlooking the Plaza of Hope, his shoulder braced against the embrasure. The sky was dark in the west, behind the Golden Tower. The plaza below was filled with a mass of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, jammed together. A low muttering rose from them, the combined sound of hundreds—thousands—of whispered conversations.
Miza stood at the other side of the window, looking miserable. She wore a long white gown that Faral would otherwise have thought was becoming. He was still angry with her, and there was a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looked in her direction.
“I was apologizing to him,” she said into the silence. It was the first thing she’d said to Faral since the servants of Caridal Fere had left them alone at the window.
It wasn’t what Faral had expected to hear. “You were …”
“I didn’t think I’d get another chance.” She drew a shaky breath, and he realized that she had been crying not long before. “So I went to say I was sorry for naming Errec Ransome’s ghost and sending it away, and for … well, for me and you.”
Faral shook his head, not understanding. “For me and you?”
“Because I’d come between him and one friend already.” Faral glanced at her. She gave a wavery half-smile. “And he said he was sorry for being jealous, and we agreed to forgive each other. And we shook hands on it.”
“Oh,” said Faral, feeling numb. Now it was too late.
He turned back to the window. The sky had grown noticeably lighter in the last few minutes. He could see, a long way off at the other side of the plaza and hundreds of feet above him, some motion amid the shadows under the golden dome.
The people below saw it too. The crowd quieted. Faral could feel the tension as they looked up at the little group standing so high above.
Then the spire at the top of the Golden Tower blazed with the reflected light of the rising sun. At the same moment, a voice cried out, echoing off the housefronts, ringing out in spite of the distance:
“Behold the Highest!”
“Huzzah!” Faral shouted in reply. The servants of Caridal Fere had explained the ritual to him—the words of the Presenter and the words that the crowd would shout in reply. “Huzzah!”
He shouted as loud as he could. He could hear Miza shouting huzzah as well. But then it came to him, the people in the crowd weren’t shouting huzzah at all. They were crying out, in rhythmic chorus, “Bring him low!”
Miza drew a sharp breath and turned to Faral. She took a step toward him, holding out her arms. At that same moment, a figure fell from the tower, four hundred feet down, and landed with a sodden crack on the stones below.
Faral was already moving, leaving Miza to follow after him. He strode back through the private apartments, to the inner rooms, then across to the other windows.
He stepped through the door. There was Rhal Kasander, there was Caridal Fere, there was Gerre Hafelsan in another of his highly colored morning-robes.
“You!” Faral said, seeing Gerre.
“Yes,” Hafelsan replied. “That was well done, wasn’t it?”
The voices from the Plaza of Hope sounded in Jens’s ears like the roar of the sea.
“Bring him low! Bring him low!”
The two men in the livery of the Council of Worthies stepped forward. Jens waited, expecting at any instant to feel the grip of their hands on his body, and then the lifting and the sudden descent … . I wonder if Cousin-once-removed Rhal was lying all the time about the bribes? …
Then, like an arrow of fire, a blaster bolt came sizzling out of the archway at the top of the stairs. It struck the nearer of the two men in livery, dropping him with his hand only an inch away from Jens’s shoulder. Before the body hit the floor of the tower, another bolt took out his fellow.
The shooter stepped forward. “I have my orders,” he said to Jens, “and they’re to bring you back.”
Jens stared. If this was a reprieve, it was like nothing he could have imagined. “And who the hell are you?”
The man stepped forward and grabbed Jens’s shoulder. “I’m Kolpag. My partner’s Ruhn. And we’ve got orders.”
Before he had finished speaking, the Presenter leapt from his platform out of sight beyond the stone archway, and came down with all his weight on Kolpag’s back. Kolpag twisted under the smaller man and heaved him outward, over the railing, to fall into the crowd below.
Then Kolpag turned back to Jens. “You’re coming with us to Ophel,” he said, and shoved him through the archway.
Jens fell awkwardly onto the landing at the top of the spiral stairs, where another man was waiting—This one must be Ruhn, he thought. But why do they want me on Ophel?
“Everything arranged below?” Kolpag asked.
“I sure hope so,” Ruhn replied. “Let’s get this little bastard out of here. The longer I stay on this planet the more it makes my teeth hurt.”
Kolpag turned to Jens. “Stand up. I’m going to take those leg irons off of you, so you can move quicker. But if you do anything at all besides what we tell you, I’ll stun you and carry you. It’s all the same to me. Ready to go?”
Jens pulled himself to his feet, encumbered by the wrist binders and the hobble chain. Kolpag worked on the locks of the hobble briefly, and took it off.
As soon as Jens felt the links fall away from him, he turned and sprinted for the stairway. If he could only get out of sight around the first curve … A stinging blast took him in the spine and he fell limp to the stone floor.
“That’s a quarter stun,” Kolpag said. “Higher power hurts more. Don’t do anything stupid again.”
No one is going to believe that I didn’t arrange for this myself, Jens thought as he was dragged backward down the stairs, the heels of his slippers bouncing on each tread as they went.
“I think we’ve lost them,” Bindweed said.
She and Blossom stood at the edge of Ilsefret’s main plaza, beneath the historic Golden Tower. They had been waiting there, blasters fully charged and discreetly concealed, ever since watching the two men from the Green Sun enter the Tower some hours earlier. That had happened while the streets were still dark, before the plaza had started to fill with pedestrians, and neither of the two operatives had come out again later—though there was no telling, Bindweed had to admit, about things like back doors and underground passageways.
“Maybe,” said Blossom. “But whatever’s going to happen here looks like it might be interesting—I think this is the Acclamation of the Highest that we saw mentioned.” She broke off and pointed. “Look there.”
“Where?”
“Behind us—see that window, third from the right, past the arch? Who does that look like?”
Bindweed looked. “Hard to see with the light behind them, but from the shoulders on him I think it’s Faral Hyfid-Metadi.”
“And the other one is Miza from Huool’s,” said Blossom. “But no Jens. I don’t like that at all. Not when our friends from the Green Sun were trying their clumsy best to snatch him and his cousin both out of our shop.”
“No,” said Bindweed. “It isn’t good.”
She and her partner remained silent, watching. After a few minutes she glimpsed what might have been movement up at the top of the Golden Tower. A figure in white and black, his fair hair showing plainly in the predawn light, stepped into view above the tower railing.
“Blossom,” said Bindweed quietly. “I think I’ve got a fix on Jens.”
The crowd fell silent in anticipation. The sun rose, the first spear o
f light passing high above and striking the tip of the Tower. A voice lifted above the plaza, calling out a phrase in Khesatan.
A low grumble rose from the crowd, a steady, rhythmic chanting, growing louder and louder. Then there came another sound, in a language that Bindweed knew very well indeed.
“Karpov ’75 blaster,” she shouted at Blossom over the noise of the crowd. “Open-bell model, firing full-power bursts!”
“That’s what I thought,” her partner shouted back. “It’s coming from the Tower. Let’s go.”
They started forward. The crowd slowed them—nobody was moving out of the way of a pair of elderly tourists, not today. Before they could reach the foot of the tower the crowd roared out, and a white-clad figure came hurtling from the balcony. Then, in spite of themselves, Bindweed and Blossom were surging forward with the rest of the crowd toward the point of impact.
Soon enough they came in view of the body. The white robes it had worn were crimson now. Members of the crowd were lining up to dip their handkerchiefs in the rivulets of blood that flowed from the broken body. The partners looked at each other.
“That’s not Jens,” Bindweed said.
“Right. Which means that he needs a backup.”
“No.” Bindweed put her hand on her partner’s arm. “We can’t go inside the Tower. We’d be trapped, and in no position to help anyone.”
Blossom’s cheeks were bright red with frustration. “Where then?”
“The Green Sun men spent most of yesterday stashing hovercars near this plaza,” said Bindweed. “You cover one, I’ll cover another, and we’ll see what comes of it.”
The underground parking area near the Golden Tower was large and echoing, its roof supported by stout pillars and lit with overhead tubes. The walls were made of stone, intricately carved in arabesques and patterns of stylized fish and worms. When Jens had seen them for the first time that morning, arriving by hovercar from the town house of the Exalted of Tanavral, he’d thought the carvings a gruesome conceit. Now, as he was dragged past them with the effect of the quarter stun barely starting to wear off, he found them even less appealing.
