Wall of Shiuan com-2

by C. J. Cherryh

  He left the window unshuttered, despite the blindness of it and despite the occasional chill draft. So long accustomed to the sky above him, he found the closeness of walls unbearable. He watched the daylight grow until the sun shone straight down the shaft, and watched it fade into shadow again as the sun declined in the sky. He listened to the wailing of children, the sounds of livestock, the squealing of wheels, as if the gates of Ohtij-in were open and some manner of normal traffic had begun. Men shouted, accented words that he did not recognize, but he was glad to hear the voices, which seemed coarsely ordinary and human.

  A shadow began to fall, more swiftly than the decline of the day; thunder rumbled. Drops of rain spattered the tiny area of ledge visible beneath the window—drops that ceased, began again, pattering with increasing force as the sprinkling became a shower.

  And the last of the wood burned out, despite his careful hoarding of the last small logs and pieces. The room chilled. Outside, the rain whispered steadily down the shaft.

  Metal clattered up the hall, the sound of armed men. It was not the first time in the day: occasionally there had come sounds from within the tower, distant and meaning nothing. Vanye only stirred when he realized they were growing nearer—rose to his feet in the almost-darkness, hoping for such petty and precious things as firewood and food and drink, and fearing that their business might be something else.

  Let it be Roh, be thought, trembling with anxiety, the anticipation of all things at an end, only so the chance presented itself.

  The bolt went back. He blinked in the flare of torches that filled the opening door, that made shadows of the guards and the men until they were within the room: light glittered on brocade, gleamed on bronze helms and on pale hair.

  Bydarra, he recognized the elder man; and with him, Hetharu. The combination jolted against the memory of the night—of furtive meetings within this prison of his, of young lordlings and secrecies.

  Vanye stood still by the fireplace, while the guards set their torches in place of the stubs in the brackets. The room outside those interlocked circles of light was dark by comparison, the rainy daylight a faint glow in the recess, less bright than the torches. The character of the room seemed changed, a place unfamiliar, where qujal intervened, contrary to all his own intentions. He looked at the guards that waited in the doorway, the light limning demon-faces and outlandish scale. He looked on them with a slowly growing terror, the consciousness of things outside the compass of himself and Roh.

  “Nhi Vanye,” Bydarra hailed him, not ungently.

  “Lord Bydarra,” he answered. He bowed his head slightly, responding to the soft courtesy, though the guards about them denied that any courtesy was meant, though Hetharu’s thin, wolfish face beside his father’s held nothing of good will. Vanye looked up again, met the old lord’s pale eyes directly. “I had thought that you would have sent for me to come to you.”

  Bydarra smiled tautly, and answered nothing to that insolence. Of a sudden there was about this gathering too the hint of secrecies, the lord of Ohtij-in intriguing within his own hold, not wishing a prisoner moved about the halls with what noise and notice would attend such moving. Bydarra asked no questions, proposed nothing immediate, only waited on his prisoner, with what purpose Vanye felt hovering shapeless and ominous among the lords of Ohtij-in.

  And in that realization came a horrid suspicion of hope: that of ruining Roh, there was a chance here present. It was not the act of a warrior: he felt shame for it, but he did not think that he could reject whatever means offered itself. He made himself numb to what he did.

  “Have you come,” Vanye asked of the qujal, “to learn of me what things Roh would not tell you?”

  “And what might those things be?” Bydarra asked softly.

  “That you cannot trust him.”

  Again Bydarra smiled, this time with more satisfaction. His features were an aged mirror of Hetharu’s, who was close beside him—a face lean and fine-boned, but Bydarra’s eyes were pale: Morgaine’s features, he thought with an inward shudder, horrified to see that familiar face reflected in her enemies. No pure qujal had been left in Andur-Kursh. He saw one for the first time, and thought, unwillingly, of Morgaine.

  Ask yourself, Roh had said, taunting him, what you are sworn to.

  “Go,” Bydarra bade the guards, and they went, closing the door; but Hetharu stayed, at which Bydarra frowned.

  “Dutiful,” Bydarra murmured at him distastefully; and he looked at Vanye with a mocking twist of his fine lips. “My son,” he said with a nod at Hetharu. “A man of indiscriminate taste and energetic ambitions. A man of sudden and sweeping ambitions.”

  Vanye glanced beyond Bydarra’s shoulder, at Hetharu’s still face, sensing the pride of this man, who stood at his father’s shoulder and heard himself insulted to a prisoner. For an irrational instant Vanye felt a deep impulse of sympathy toward Hetharu—himself bastard, half-blood, spurned by his own father. Then a suspicion came to him that it was not casual, that Bydarra knew that he had reason to distrust this son, that Bydarra had reason to come to a prisoner’s cell and ask questions.

  And Hetharu had urgent reason to cling close to his father’s side, lest the old lord learn of meetings and movements that occurred in the night within the walls of Ohtij-in. Vanye met Hetharu’s eyes without intending it, and Hetharu returned his gaze, his dark and human eyes promising violence, seething with ill will.

  “Roh urges us,” said Bydarra, “to treat you gently. Yet he calls you his enemy.”

  “I am his cousin,” Vanye countered quietly, falling back upon Roh’s own stated reasoning.

  “Roh,” said Bydarra, “makes vast and impossible promises—of limitless arrogance. One would think that he could reshape the Moon and turn back the waters. So suddenly arrived, so strangely earnest in his concern for us—he styles himself like the ancient Kings of Men, and claims to have power over the Wells. He seeks our records, pores over maps and old accounts of only curious interest. And what would you, Nhi Vanye i Chya? Will you likewise bid for the good will of Ohtij-in? What shall we offer you for your good pleasure if you will save us all? Worship, as a god?”

  The sting of sarcasm fell on numbness, a chill, to think of Roh, a Chya bowman, a lord of forested Koris, searching musty qujalin records, through runic writings that Men did not read—save only Morgaine. “Roh,” Vanye said, “lies to you. He does not know everything; but you are teaching it to him. Keep him from those books.”

  Bydarra’s silvery brow arched, as if he found the answer different from his expectation. He shot a look at Hetharu, and walked a distance to the far recess of the room, by the window slit, where wan daylight painted his hair and robes with an edge of white. He looked out that viewless window for a moment as if he pondered something that did not need sight, and then looked back, and slowly returned to the circle of torchlight.

  “We,” said Bydarra, “we are the heirs of the true khal. Mixed-blood we all are, but we are their heirs, nonetheless. And none of us has the skill. It is not in those books. The maps are no longer valid. The land is gone. There is nothing to be had there.”

  “Hope,” said Vanye, “that that is so.”

  “You are human,” Bydarra said contemptuously.

  “Yes.”

  “Those books,” Bydarra said, “contain nothing. The Old Ones were flesh and bone, and if men will worship them, that is their choice. Priests—” The old lord made a shrug of contempt, nodding toward the wall, by implication toward the court that lay below. “Parasites. The lowest of our halfling blood. They venerate a lie, mumbling nonsense, believing that they once ruled the Wells, that they are doing some special service by tending them. Even the oldest records do not go back into the time of the Wells. The books are worthless. The Hiua kings were a plague the Wells spilled forth, and they tampered with the forces of them, they hurled sacrifices into them, but they had no more power than the Shiua priests. They never ruled the Wells. They were only brought here. Then the sea began
to take Hiuaj. And lately—there is Roh; there is yourself. You claim that you have arrived by the Wells. Is that so?”

  “Yes,” Vanye answered in a faint voice. The things that Bydarra said began to accord with too much. Once in Andur a man had questioned Morgaine; the words had long rested, in a corner of his mind, awaiting some reasoned explanation: The world went wide, she had answered that man, around the bending of the path. I went through. And suddenly he began to perceive the qujal–lord’s anxiety, the sense that in him, in Roh, things met that never should have met at all... that somewhere in Ohtij-in was a Myya girl, far, far from the mountains of Erd and Morija.

  “And the woman,” asked Bydarra, “she on the gray horse?”

  He said nothing.

  “Roh spoke of her,” Bydarra said. “You spoke of her; the Hiua girl confirms it. Rumor is running the courtyard: talk, careless talk, before the servants. Roh hints darkly of her intentions; the Hiua girl confounds her with Hiua legend.”

  Vanye shrugged lest he seem concerned, his heart beating hard against his ribs. “The Hiua set herself on my trail; I think her folk had cast her out. Sometimes she talks wildly. She may be mad. I would put no great trust in what she says.”

  “Angharan,” Bydarra said. “Morgen-Angharan. The seventh and unfavorable power: Hiua kings and Aren superstition are always tangled. The white queen. But of course if you are not Hiua, this would not be familiar to you.”

  Vanye shook his head, clenched his hand over his wrist behind his back. “It is not familiar to me,” he said.

  “What is her true name?”

  Again he shrugged.

  “Roh,” said Bydarra, “calls her a threat to all life—says that she has come to destroy the Wells and ruin the land. He offers his own skill to save us—whatever that skill may prove to be. Some,” Bydarra added, with a look that made Hetharu avoid his eyes sullenly, “some of us are willing to fall at his feet. Not all of us are gullible.”

  There was silence, in which Vanye did not want to look at Hetharu, nor at Bydarra, who deliberately baited his son.

  “Perhaps,” Bydarra continued softly, “there is no such woman, and you and the Hiua girl are allied with this Roh. Or perhaps you have some purposes we in Ohtij-in do not know yet. Humankind drove us from Hiuaj. The Hiua kings were never concerned with our welfare, and they never held the power that Roh claims for himself.”

  Vanye stared at him, calculating, weighing matters, desperately. “Her name is Morgaine,” he said. “And you would be better advised to offer her hospitality rather than Roh.”

  “Ah,” said Bydarra. “And what bid would she make us? What would she offer?”

  “A warning,” he said, forcing the words, knowing they would not be favored. “And I give you one: to dismiss him and me and have nothing to do with any of us. That is your safety. That is all the safety you have.”

  The mockery left Bydarra’s seamed face. He came closer, his lean countenance utterly sober, pale eyes intense: tall, the halflings, so that Vanye found himself meeting the old lord eye to eye. Light fingers touched the side of his arm, urging confidentiality, the while from the edge of his vision. Vanye saw Hetharu leaning against the table, arms folded, regarding him coldly. “Hnoth is upon us,” Bydarra said, “when the floods rise and no traveling is possible. This Chya Roh is anxious to set out for Abarais now, this day, before the road is closed. He seems likewise anxious that you be sent to him when he is there, directly as it becomes possible; and what say you to this, Nhi Vanye i Chya?”

  “That you are as lost as I am if ever you let him reach Abarais,” Vanye said. The pulse roared in him as he stared into that aged qujalin face, and thought of Roh in possession of that Master Gate, with all its power to harm, to enliven the other Gates, to reach out and destroy. “Let him ever reach it and you will find yourself a master of whom you will never free yourself, not in this generation or the next or the next. I know that for the truth.”

  “Then he can do the things he claims,” said Hetharu suddenly.

  Vanye glanced toward Hetharu, who left the table and advanced to his father’s side.

  “His power would be such,” Vanye said “that the whole of Shiuan and Hiuaj would become whatever pleased him—pleased him, my lord. You do not look like a man that would relish having a master.”

  Bydarra smiled grimly and looked at Hetharu. “It may be,” said Bydarra, “that you have been well answered.”

  “By another with something to win,” said Hetharu, and seized Vanye’s arm with such insolent violence that anger blinded him for the moment: he thrust his arm free, one clear thread of reason still holding him from the princeling’s throat. He drew a ragged breath and looked to Bydarra, to authority.

  “I would not see Roh set at Abarais,” Vanye said, “and once your own experience shows you that I was right, my lord, I fear it will be much too late to change your mind.”

  “Can you master the Wells yourself?” Bydarra asked.

  “Set me at Abarais, until my own liege comes. Then—ask what you will in payment, and it will go better with this land.”

  “Can you,” asked Hetharu, seizing him a second time by the arm, “manage the Wells yourself?”

  Vanye glared into that handsome wolf-face, the white-edged nostrils, the dark eyes smoldering with violence, the lank white hair that was not, like the lesser lords’, the work of artifice.

  “Take your hands from me,” he managed to say, and cast his appeal still to Bydarra. “My lord,” he said with a desperate, deliberate calm, “my lord, in this room, there was some bargain struck—your son and Roh and other young lords together. Look to the nature of it.”

  Bydarra’s face went rigid with some emotion; he thrust Hetharu aside, looked terribly on Vanye, then turned that same look toward his son, beginning a word that was not finished. A blade flashed, and Bydarra choked, turned again under Hetharu’s second blow, the bright blood starting from mouth and throat. Bydarra fell forward, and Vanye staggered back under the dying weight of him—let him fall, in horror, with the hot blood flooding his own arms.

  And he stared across weapon’s edge at a son who could murder father and show nothing of remorse. There was fear in that white face: hate. Vanye met Hetharu’s eyes and knew the depth of what had been prepared for him.

  “Hail me lord,” said Hetharu softly, “lord in Ohtij-in and in all Shiuan.”

  Panic burst in him. “Guard!” he cried, as Hetharu lifted the bloody dagger and slashed his own arm, a second fountain of blood. The dagger flew, struck at Vanye’s feet, in the spreading dark pool from Bydarra’s body. Vanye stumbled back from the dagger as the door opened, and there were armed men there in force, pikes lowered toward him. Hetharu leaned against the fireplace in unfeigned shock, leaking blood through his fingers that clasped his wounded arm to his breast.

  “He—” Vanye cried, and staggered back under the blow of a pikeshaft that sent him sprawling and drove the wind from him. He scrambled for his feet and hurled himself for the door, barred from it by others—thrown aside, seized up the dagger that lay in the pool of blood, and drove for Hetharu’s throat.

  An armored body turned the blade, a face before him grimacing in pain and shock: more blood flooded his hands, hot, before the others dragged him back and crashed with him over a bench. The blows of pikestaves and boots overwhelmed him and he lay half-sensible in a pool of blood, his own or Bydarra’s, he no longer knew. They moved his battered arms and cords bit into his wrists.

  Shouts echoed. Throughout the halls there began a shriek of alarm, the sounds of women’s voices and the deeper mourning of men. He listened to this, on the edge of consciousness, the shrieks part of the torment of chaos that raged about him.

  He remained on the floor, untouched. Men came for Bydarra’s body, and they carried it forth on a litter in grim silence; and another corpse they carried out too, that of a man-at-arms, that Vanye dimly realized was to his charge. And thereafter, when the room was clear and more torches had been brought
, men gathered him up by the hair and the arms, and bowed him at Hetharu’s feet.

  Hetharu sat, while a priest wound his arm about with clean linen soaked in oils; and there was in Hetharu’s shock-pale face a taut and wary look. Armed men were about him, and one, bare-faced, his coarse bleached hair gathered back in a knot, handed Hetharu a cup of which he drank deeply. In a moment Hetharu sighed, and returned the cup, and leaned back in the chair while the priest tied the bandage.

  A number of other lords came, elegant and jewelled, in delicate fabrics. There was silence in the room, and the constant flow of whispers in the corridor outside. As each lord came forward to meet Hetharu there was a slight bow, an obeisance, some only scant. It was the passing of power, there in that bloody cell—many an older lord whose obeisance was cold and hesitant, with looks about at the armed guards that stood grimly evident; and younger men, who did not restrain their smiles, wolf-smiles and no evidence of mourning.

  And lastly came Kithan, waxen-pale and languid, attended by a trio of guards. He bowed to kiss his brother’s hand, and suffered his brother’s kiss upon his cheek, his face cold and distant the while. He stumbled when he attempted to rise and turn, steadied by the guards, and blinked dazedly, and stared down at Vanye.

  Slowly the distance vanished in those dilated pale eyes, and something came into them of recognition, a mad hatred, distraught and violent.

  “I had no weapon,” Vanye said to him, fearing the youth’s grief as much as Hetharu’s calculation. “The only weapon—”

  An armored hand smashed across his mouth, dazing him; and no one was interested in listening not even Kithan, who simply stared at him, empty-eyed, unasking what he would have said. After a moment someone took Kithan by the arm and led him out, like a confused child.

  Women had come, pale-haired and cold, who bowed and kissed Hetharu’s hand and returned on silent feet to the corridor, a whisper of brocade and a lingering of perfume amid the oil and armor of the guards.