Return to Eddarta

by Randall Garrett

  I was alone in the house, sulking a little because my older brother was at the second testing, and my father had gone down to the city, to commission a Celebration gift for the next High Lord. He didn’t expect my brother, Usal, to be selected as the successor to the present High Lord. Everyone knew there were only two who had a real chance: Horinad, the son of the present High Lord; and Tinis, of the house of Rusal. Today they—and the other fifteen-year-old boys who had shown some outward sign of a mindgift—would know the answer for which they had waited for three years.

  The tiles absorbed my attention, and I began a game with them. I jumped with both feet from one to another. They were just large enough for one whole foot and another toe to rest on them comfortably. I straddled the distance between two of the tiles, but they were a little too far apart to make staying like that comfortable.

  The four tiles formed a rough square, and I began to imagine lines drawn between them, wondering how many ways they could be connected. I acted out the drawing I imagined by jumping between the tiles. Starting with the tile furthest from the wall, I “connected” the square around the tiles, going first in one direction, then the other. I “drew” crossed lines, starting with the first line toward the wall, then doing it again with the first line parallel to the wall… .

  The wall moved.

  The sound made me jump backward. I stepped on one of the mondeana and it slid out from under me. I landed with a painful jolt on my backside. I hardly noticed the pain, I was so excited. A strip of wall as wide as a man had pulled back and slid aside, revealing a narrow alcove with shelves carved into the back wall. I stared at the alcove, wondering who and how and why. And while I stared, I heard the same faint grating sound, and the wall closed up again.

  “No!” I shouted, finally roused from my trance. I ran to the wall, pushed at it, barely pulled my fingers out of the way as the wood-paneled section moved forward to blend in again with the rest of the long wall.

  I was crushingly disappointed, until I made the connection: the tiles must be the key. I struggled to remember the patterns I had used, and I recreated them carefully.

  The wall opened again, and I shrieked with delight. I grabbed a small table and dragged it to the opening and wedged it there. Once I had made sure that I wasn’t going to be trapped inside, I climbed over the table, so excited I could scarcely breathe.

  There were only a few things on the shelves: a pretty necklace, a pouch of old coins (the pouch tore as I lifted it, and I raked the coins into a haphazard pile on the lowest shelf), and a small piece of glazed clay. There were markings on the clay, and I climbed back over the table to take the clay into the light.

  It seemed to be part of a tile, the same color blue as the ones that moved. There were two separate markings—one a rectangle, and the other a crisscrossed set of lines with numbers marked inside the open areas. The lines reminded me of something… .

  The pattern of the tiles on the floor!

  18

  I looked more closely at the rectangle. There was a mark, close to one end, beside an area of the outline marked with a double scoring. I had been excited since finding the secret door; I went positively wild with glee when I figured out the diagram. It was a line sketch of the midhall, only slightly more narrow than it was long. The double scoring occurred on the diagram where there were doors in the room, and the mark inside the outline was beside the widest door—the front door of the house.

  I oriented the diagram and ran to a spot to the right of the door. I tested one of the blue tiles. Sure enough, it moved—not enough to be really noticeable if you merely walked across it, but it did move.

  Working with the crosshatched diagram, I located the exact tiles that matched the ones with numbers on them. There were twenty in all. I took a deep breath, stepped on the one marked “one” on the diagram, and followed the number sequence.

  Another section of the wall slid in and to the side, with very little noise.

  I yelled and jumped around the room. The door closed again while I was celebrating, but I was confident I could reopen it. I did, and my skin prickled when I looked inside. The second door opened, not on a closet, but on a stairway that led downward, to the right of the opening. The light from inside the room showed me only about ten steps; the rest was in darkness.

  I pulled my head out of the opening when I heard the door start to close again. Exploring that stairway, I decided with a shiver, was a task for another time. The closet, now—ah, that was a real find.

  I ran back over to it and climbed over the table to get inside. I examined the inside wall, and found two shallow, finger-width depressions, positioned vertically, one above the other. They held strips of bronze, mounted with a single pinning so that the short end would rotate into the depression when the longer end was pulled out. They were very close to the opening in the wall; I had to push hard against the door to slide it back from the table a little way. I kept my shoulder pressed against the door while I pulled out the bronze strips, then released the door slowly. Its edge pressed up against the bronze pieces and stopped. I picked up the table and moved it back where I had gotten it, feeling proud for having figured that out.

  Now I could move freely in and out of the closet, and I implemented the plan that had occurred to me the moment after I had recovered from the shock of the door opening. I ran to my room and pulled my sketches out from under the stack of folded clothes in the closet.

  I wanted to sit down and look through them, but my father was due back at any moment, so I just gathered them and raced back to the closet. I didn’t even take time to display them the way I had wanted to, when I saw the shelves. I just set them, still stacked, on one of the higher shelves. I started to close the door, then remembered the marked tile. After I had retrieved it from the far side of the room and put it on a shelf, I pushed on the door, reset the bronze stays into their slots, and stepped out into the midhall. The door slid into position behind the opening, then moved forward until it was flush with the wall.

  The moment that door was closed, relief and a feeling of security washed over me. I had lived in fear that my father would find the sketches. There were pitifully few of them now.

  My hands tensed into fists as I remembered the day my father had found me beside the city gate, drawing a picture of the vleks pulling the rafts through the river gate. He had dragged me home and beaten me. “How dare you disgrace our family by doing artisan work in public?” he had raged. He had demanded all my drawings, and had forced me to tear them into shreds and burn them. He had become more gentle then, but I still didn’t understand what he had tried to tell me. “You are of the Seven Families, son,” he had said, kneeling beside me. “Our family has enough artisans as landservants to produce any image you would like to have. What you were doing is their work, and by doing it yourself, you deprive them of their trade.”

  He had ended by forbidding me ever to sketch again, and the incident frightened me enough that I had obeyed him, for a time. But there was a force inside me that I simply could not control. Something drove me to begin to sketch again, fearfully, and in secret. I tried to be ashamed, but the pleasure of releasing that force was too great. So I hid the paper and ink and brush, and I checked my closet every day to make sure the sketches had not been discovered.

  Only now, I could stop worrying about that. I would continue to keep my supplies in my room. The risk of having them found was worth the convenience of having them available. And I would use the pile of folded trousers as a temporary hiding place. But the bulk of my work, my guilty treasure, was safely hidden.

  My head jerked around at the sound of Usal’s voice, shouting. The front door slammed open, and he ran in. I stared at him, open-mouthed. He was more dressed up than I had ever seen him. I was seeing him for the first time as a man, not a boy. And he was pale and shaky—more upset than I had ever seen him.

  “Where is Father?” he asked me. When I didn’t answer right away, he grabbed my shoulders and shook me.
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  “H-he’s in the city,” I stammered. “B-back soon.” My brother pushed me away and began to pace up and down the room, nearly running. “Usal, what happened?”

  “What happened?” he repeated. “Horinad was named High Lord successor.”

  That sparked my curiosity, in spite of Usal’s agitation.

  “What about Tinis?” I asked. “Everyone said—you even said—that he would test higher than Horinad.”

  “He said he did,” Usal told me, with a grim tone in his voice that frightened me. “He stood up and told the Lords so, just after they came back into the waiting room and announced Horinad was the one. He said they had changed the test scores, because they were afraid of him. He—he—“

  Usal choked up and couldn’t go on. I went over to him and touched his arm, alarmed for him, afraid of what he would say, unsure how to comfort him. His other hand whipped around and caught my wrist in a painful grip. I withstood the pain, because of the look in Usal’s face. He wasn’t seeing me, or the room. He was looking into the waiting room, remembering.

  “Some of us … laughed at him, but I got scared right away.” I nodded, believing and agreeing. Usal knew Tinis very well, and had good reason to respect his power.

  I saw their point,” my brother continued. “I mean, Tinis has always been so arrogant, always trying to prove that he’s better than anyone else. Some of us were glad to see him beaten. If it had been anyone besides Tinis, I might have laughed too. But I knew Tinis wouldn’t leave it there.

  “He—he had a sort of fit. Started screaming—I’ve never seen him so angry. Then he got this peculiar look on his face and just stared at the six Lords, where they were standing in a clump.

  “Merthyn was the first,” Usal said. His hand still held me, and I could feel him trembling. “Merthyn’s eyes went all strange, and he pulled out his dagger and—and—and c-cut his own throat.”

  Usal swallowed.

  “Stop,” I whimpered, not knowing whether I meant stop talking or stop hurting my wrist. He didn’t hear me.

  “Then Hissem,” he said. “Then Linel. Three Lords dead in less time than it takes to walk across this room. Blood everywhere, running like rivers around our boots.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and seemed a little calmer when he spoke again.

  “Horinad was the only one who understood what was happening. When another Lord drew out his dagger, he yelled ‘Tinis, stop it,’ and we all jumped on Tinis and started hitting him. He didn’t even try to defend himself; he just kept staring in that funny way. We finally knocked him out, but by that time Turenad was dead, too.”

  “Four Lords? Dead?” I whispered. My brother nodded grimly. “What did they do to Tinis?”

  “Somebody called in the High Guard, and they carried him off. I don’t know what they will do, but I know what I hope they’ll do.” His eyes focused, and he finally looked at me again. It was creepy. “I hope they kill him,” he said fiercely. “Because I know him. If they let him live …” He shuddered.

  I was pulled away from the boy’s memory. I resisted fiercely, struggling to get back to that youthful mind, with its pureness of fear and delight and creativity.

  It is time to leave, Tarani’s mindvoice told me.

  But—yes, Recorder, I said.

  We retraced our course, coming back, I somehow knew, to the exact same place where we had entered the All-Mind.

  Calm yourself, Tarani urged me, and I tried. The boy’s intense feelings had left me in turmoil. They faded gradually until Tarani said: We shall now return to ourselves.

  The brightness faded.

  And I shall withdraw my mind from yours… .

  A sensation of landing, and sudden coolness.

  “Rikardon?” said Tarani’s physical voice, sounding weak.

  “Yes, I’m here. I’m back,” I assured her.

  “Good. We should rest for a time.”

  After we startled the household staff by requesting a midmorning snack twice the size of our breakfast—and ate it all—Tarani and I set out for the house we thought had been Gharlas’s. I was faintly surprised that no one wanted to tag along, and I realized that my reaction was colored by Ricardo’s conditioning to expect heads of state to have a personal guard with them at all times.

  Tarani had shared my experience with the boy’s life-memory. She had been about to drag me away after the boy shut the closet door, but she had sensed my curiosity at the entry of the brother, and had allowed me some extra time. I was grateful. Zefra had mentioned that Pylomel had learned not to show his power through an example from his father’s generation. Learning of Tinis from the boy had felt like finally scratching an itch I had never really noticed before.

  We hurried along the cobbled walkway, which wound through garden areas to provide a link between the widely spaced homes. The house Gharlas had lived in was still unoccupied, and we had no trouble getting inside. The condition of the midhall—a tapestry torn, tables overturned—told us that no one had bothered to clean the place up after Gharlas died. The sight called up a chilling memory of the fight that had happened in this room. Tarani, Thymas, and I—we had come very close to death that night.

  Tarani shuddered. “I would judge the closet to be about … here,” she said, and knelt to test the tiles. “Do you remember the sequence?”

  “I might,” I said, “but if a ten-year-old boy could strike the right combination by accident, we can certainly figure it out by trial and error. I expect this combination is pretty simple. After all, Troman kept the other key written down, so he wouldn’t lose it. Would he lock the key away if there were a good chance he’d forget the combination?”

  “No, I suppose not. Here,” she said, standing up and pointing. “These four.”

  Those tiles might have been big enough for a boy’s feet, but they barely accommodated my toes. After some experimentation, I discovered I could move the tiles by standing with the ball of my foot centered on them, leaning forward slightly.

  “I’ll try the boy’s last pattern first,” I said, stepping carefully and feeling a bit awkward.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried a combination of eight. Then, judging that eight was probably too many, I tried the boy’s last five steps, then his last six—and the wall moved.

  Tarani was inside the closet almost before the wall stopped moving. It went to the far wall, hesitated, and started sliding forward again. There was just enough time to fish out the bronze stays to keep the door open.

  We turned to face the shelves; they looked hugely different from the boy’s memory. Gharlas had removed most of the treasure from the High Lord’s vault, replacing the items one by one with fakes. The real treasure was here, heaped and piled and stuffed into the shelves.

  “If that book exists,” I said, “it ought to be here.”

  Tarani took the bottom of the six shelves, and I took the top one. Most of the items were jewelry, gold or silver settings weighted down with huge gemstones. We couldn’t exactly rummage through those stacks; we had to move each item from one pile into another.

  The high shelf was less crowded than the others, and it didn’t take me long to pile-shift my way from one end of it to the other. When I moved the last item—a filigree gold box—my hand hit something flat that didn’t feel like stone.

  “I’ve found something,” I said, and Tarani stood up.

  I groped, and gathered, and finally brought down a half-inch stack of flat paper in different sizes. I turned the top one over.

  It was a sketch of a vlek team, drawing a raft through the river gate. It was a good sketch. Tarani took it from my hand and held it to the light.

  “How barbaric, that his father should try to stifle this gift,” she said. “I shall add this to my list of changes.”

  She handed the drawing back to me and went back to digging through the bottom shelf. I noticed, on looking carefully, that each shelf had a little stack of paper at one end.

  The boy had his own art galler
y on display in here, I thought sadly. Until the “boy”—Gharlas’s uncle—passed on, and left his treasure and his secret to his greedy nephew. Gharlas probably just shoved these aside, to start piling up his stolen treasure.

  I couldn’t resist looking at the sketches I held. These, from the top shelf, seemed to be the boy’s early work and, except for the vlek drawing, they were portraits, some full-body, some faces only. They were remarkably good, never mind that the artist was only ten years old at the time.

  The portraits had the subjects’ names written on them. Considering the general attitude toward the arts in Lord City, they had to have been drawn from memory, or after long and clandestine study. The boy’s father was there, showing a fond sternness that I was sure the boy had softened some.

  The last two portraits interested me most, considering the last event I had shared with the artistic boy. Both were full-body studies, with a believable background of garden pathway. One was Horinad, who had the extreme height that had marked his son, Pylomel, and was softened slightly in his granddaughter. The face showed a striking resemblance to Indomel’s, except that it was fuller, and there was a trace of humor around the mouth.

  The boy must have done these before the fiasco at the testing, I thought. Horinad looks about fifteen here; that fits. I reset Horinad‘s portrait to the bottom of the stack I held. Now, let’s have a look at the mysterious Tinis.

  “I found it,” Tarani said, and stood up. She held a thick sheaf of paper, held together with a strip of leather threaded in and out of small punctures. “Did you hear me, Rickardon? I have the evidence we are seeking—or at least part of it.” She touched an edge of the first sheet carefully. “It is fragile, and much too long to read here,” she said. “Shall we close the door, and take the book back to our rooms?”

  When I didn’t reply, she transferred the book into one hand and tugged at my tunic sleeve with the other.

  “Rickardon? Were you not eager to find this book?”