Amber and Ashes

by Margaret Weis

  “I just meant to scare the flea-bitten cur, that’s all. I wouldn’t have hurt it.”

  “That much is true,” Rhys said. “You would not have harmed Atta. You would now be lying on the ground with your throat torn out.”

  “I got carried away, that’s all,” Lleu continued. “I forgot where I was, thought I was on the field of battle.” He added stiffly, “May I have my sword and my knife back? I promise I’ll restrain myself.”

  Rhys handed over the knife. Retrieving the sword from the watchful dog, he gave it to his brother, who took hold of it with his left hand. Lleu eyed it, frowning. “I still think I should have cut through that stick of yours. Damn blade must be dull. I’ll have it sharpened when I return home.”

  “There is nothing wrong with the blade,” said Rhys.

  “Bah! Of course, there is!” Lleu said, scoffing. “You can’t tell me that twig stood up to a long sword!”

  “This ‘twig’ has gone up against countless swords for five hundred years,” Rhys replied. “See these tiny nicks?” He held up the stick for Lleu to examine. “Those were made by sword and mace and all manner of steel weapons. None broke it or even harmed it much.”

  Lleu looked put out. “You might have told me the blasted stick was magic. No wonder I lost!”

  “I didn’t know it was a question of winning or losing,” Rhys returned mildly. “I thought I was demonstrating a fighting technique.”

  “Like I said, I got carried away,” Lleu muttered. He wiggled his right hand. He could the move the fingers now and he thrust his sword back into the scabbard. “I think that’s enough demonstrating for today. When do you eat around here? I’m starved.”

  “Soon,” said Rhys.

  “Good. I’ll go wash up. I’ll see you at supper.” Lleu turned away, then thought of something else and turned back. “I heard that you monks live on nothing but grass and berries. That’s not true, I hope?”

  “You will have a good meal,” Rhys assured him.

  “I’ll hold you to that!” Lleu waved at him and walked off. Apparently all was forgotten, forgiven.

  Lleu even paused to apologize to Atta, scratch her on the head. The dog submitted to his touch, but only after a nod from Rhys, and she shook herself all over the moment Lleu departed, as though to remove any trace of him. Trotting over to Rhys, she pressed her muzzle against his leg and looked up at him with her expressive brown eyes.

  “What is it, girl?” Rhys asked, frustrated. He rubbed her behind the ears. “What have you got against him, besides the fact that he is young and feckless and thinks far too well of himself? I wish you could let me know what you are thinking. Still, there is a reason the gods made animals dumb.”

  Rhys’s troubled gaze followed the figure of his brother, strolling over the meadow. “We could not bear to hear the truths you might tell us.”

  hys did not immediately return to the monastery. He and Atta walked to the stream that provided water for both man and beast and sat down on the grass beneath the willow trees. Atta rolled over on her side and went to sleep, worn out from the rigors of a day spent guarding first sheep and then her master. Sitting cross-legged on the bank, Rhys closed his eyes and gave himself to the god, Majere. The sighs of the wind through the willow branches and the soft evening song of the finches mingled with the chuckling laughter of the stream to soothe away worried speculation about his brother’s odd behavior.

  Despite the fact that he had not lectured his brother and instantly turned his life around, as his father had hoped would happen, Rhys did not feel he had failed. The monks of Majere do not view life in terms of success and failure. One does not fail at a task. One merely does not succeed. And since one is always striving for success, so long as one continues striving, one can never truly fail.

  Nor did Rhys resent his parents thrusting this responsibility upon him—a son they had likely given no thought to for fifteen years. He could see they were desperate. He did feel badly in that he was going to have to tell them there was nothing he could do. He would speak to the Master first, of course, but Rhys knew what the elderly monk would tell him. Lleu was an adult. He had chosen his own path to walk. He might be persuaded through wise counsel and example, but if that didn’t change him, no one had the right to bar his way or shove him off the path or force him to shift direction, even if that path was self-destructive. Lleu had to make the choice to change, otherwise he would soon be back on the same road. So Majere taught, and so the monks believed.

  The bell rang, announcing the supper hour. Rhys did not move. Monks were required to be present at breakfast, where any business relating to the monastery was discussed. The supper hour was informal and those who preferred to continue to meditate or work were permitted to do so. Rhys knew he should attend, but he was loathe to leave his peaceful solitude.

  His brother and parents would be there and they would expect him to sit with them. The meeting would be an uncomfortable one. They would want to talk to him about his brother, but they would feel reluctant to discuss Lleu in the presence of the other monks. And so their conversation would be limited to family matters: his father’s business concerns, his mother’s news of the birth of her latest grandchild. Since Rhys knew nothing about any of this, and truthfully did not care, he would have nothing to contribute. They would not be particularly interested in his life. Talk would falter and eventually die off into strained silence.

  “I am better employed here,” Rhys said to himself.

  Rhys remained with his god, the two of them joined, the mind of the human freeing itself from the body to touch the mind of the deity, a touch the Master likened to the tiny, flailing hand of a newborn babe finding and tightly clutching at one finger of the enormous hand of his father. Rhys presented his concerns about Lleu to Majere, allowing his many questions to sift through his mind and that of the god, hoping to find answers, hoping to find some way to help.

  He sank so deeply into his meditative state that he lost all track of time. Gradually, a nagging twinge, like the beginnings of a toothache, became annoying enough that he was forced to pay attention to it. Feeling true reluctance and sadness at being forced to return to the world of men, he parted from the god. He opened his eyes, sensing that something was wrong.

  At first, he could not think what. Everything seemed right enough. The sun had set, darkness had fallen. Atta slept peacefully on the grass. No barking dogs, no alarm from sheep fold or barn, no smell of smoke that would have indicated a fire. Yet something was wrong.

  Rhys jumped to his feet, his sudden movement startling Atta, who flopped over onto her belly, ears pricked, eyes wide.

  Then Rhys knew. The bell for the weapons practice had not rung.

  Rhys doubted himself a moment. His inner clock might well have been thrown off by his deep meditative state. Yet a glance at the position of the moon and the stars confirmed his reckoning. In all the fifteen years he’d lived at the monastery and in all the years the monastery had been in existence, the bell for practice had rung nightly at the same hour without fail.

  Fear gripped Rhys. Routine was an important part of the discipline practiced by the monks. A break in routine might be commonplace anywhere else. A break in the monk’s routine was shattering, catastrophic. Rhys picked up his emmide and he and Atta returned to the monastery at a run. He had well-developed night vision from having to practice with his weapons in pitch darkness during the winter months, and he knew every inch of ground. He could have—and once did—find his way back home through a dense fog in the blackest night. This evening, Solinari’s silver light brightened the dark sky and the stars added their own pale radiance. He could see the way clearly.

  He almost ordered Atta back to the sheep fold. He decided, as the command was on his lips, to keep her with him, at least until he knew what was wrong.

  He arrived back at the monastery grounds to find all peaceful and quiet—a bad sign. The monks should have been in the compound, either listening to one of the masters as he demonstrat
ed a technique or practicing with their partners. He should be hearing the sound of thwacks from emmide and quarter staff, the grunts of exertion, the thuds as one partner felled another. And all the time, the voices of the masters chiding, correcting, praising.

  Rhys looked swiftly about. Yellow light streamed from the windows of the dining hall where the monks took their meals. That in itself was all wrong. At this time of the night, the lights were doused, the tables scrubbed down, wooden trenchers and crockery, kettles and pans cleaned and ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. Rhys headed in that direction, hoping for some logical explanation. The thought came to him that the Master might be talking to his family and that he might have kept the other monks from their practice because he required their assistance. Such an occurrence was completely out of the norm, but not out of the realm of possibility.

  The main door led to the monastery’s common room. Rhys saw through the windows that it was dark, as it would be this time of night. He shoved open the door and was about to enter when Atta made a strange sound—a kind of frightened whimper. Rhys looked down at her, concerned. The two had worked together for five years and he’d never heard her make that sound. She stared into the darkened room. Her body shivered and she whimpered again.

  Something terrible lay ahead. Not outlaws or marauders or thieves. Not a bear bumbling into the building, as had once happened. The dog would know how to react to that. This was something she didn’t understand, and it was terrifying.

  He took a slow and cautious step inside.

  All was quiet. No voice rose and fell in wise counsel. No voices could be heard at all. A foul smell, as of a sick room, hung in the air.

  Rhys’s instinct was to rush in to see what had happened. Discipline and training overrode this impulse. He had no way of knowing what lay ahead. He gestured to Atta to “walk up” and she slowed her pace, dropped into a crouch, and crept along at his side. Rhys gripped his emmide and moved stealthily into the common room, his bare feet making no sound.

  The common room opened into the dining hall. Lights shone from within and, although he could see nothing except the end of a bench, he could hear a faint sound, an odd sound, a kind of muttering mumble. He could not make out words, if words there were.

  He eased ahead cautiously, listening and keeping watch on the room ahead. Atta could be trusted to warn him if someone or some thing was about to leap at him from the darkness. He had no sense of anything lurking in this room, however. Danger lay in the light, it seemed, not in the shadows. The sickening smell grew stronger.

  He reached the dining hall. The stench caused him to gag and he put his hand over his nose and mouth. The mumbling voice was louder now, but it was so low that he could still not make out what it was saying, nor could he identify the person speaking. Standing just inside the entryway, so that he could see without being seen, Rhys looked into the dining hall.

  He stood, appalled.

  Eighteen monks lived in the monastery. Their numbers had been greater in times past, upwards of forty in the years following the War of the Lance. The monastery’s population had dwindled during the Fifth Age, when there had been only five, and was only just now beginning to recover. The monks dined in brotherly companionship at a large rectangular table made of a long wooden plank arranged on wooden trestles. The monks sat on wooden benches, nine on either side.

  This day, there were only seventeen monks, for Rhys had chosen to skip dinner. There had been the guests, however—Rhys’s parents and his brother. They would sit with the monks at the table, share their simple repast. Twenty people, all told.

  Of those twenty, nineteen were lying dead.

  Rhys stared at the terrible scene in shock, his discipline shattered all to pieces, his reason scattered like leaves in a gale. He looked about in bewilderment, unable to take in the horror, unable to comprehend what had happened.

  Though he could tell after one despairing glance that all were dead, he ran to the Master and knelt down beside him, placing his hand on the man’s neck in a desperate hope that the faint beat of life might yet remain.

  He had only to look at the elderly monk’s twisted body, the frightful contortion of the facial muscles, the swollen tongue and the purged contents of his stomach to know that the Master was dead and that he had died in agony.

  All the monks had died the same horrible death. Some, it seemed, had risen the moment they felt the first symptoms and tried to reach the door. Others lay near the bench where they had been seated. The bodies of all the monks were hideously contorted. The floor was foul and slimy with vomit. That and the swollen tongues revealed the cause of their death—they had been poisoned.

  Rhys’s parents were dead, as well. His mother lay on her back. The expression frozen on her dead face was one of sudden, horrendous knowledge. His father lay on his stomach, one arm thrust out, as though in his final moments, he had tried to seize hold of someone.

  His son. His youngest son.

  Lleu was alive, and to all appearances, hale and healthy. His was the voice Rhys had heard mumbling and muttering.

  “Lleu!” Rhys said, his mouth dry, his throat so tight that he did not recognize the sound of his own voice.

  Hearing his name, Lleu ceased to mumble. He turned to face his brother.

  “You didn’t come to dinner,” said Lleu.

  He eased himself up off the bench, stood up. His voice was calm. He might have been in his own kitchen, chatting with a friend. Not standing in the midst of mayhem.

  He’s mad, Rhys thought. The horror has driven him insane.

  Yet, for all that, Lleu didn’t have the look of madness.

  “I didn’t feel like eating,” said Rhys. He needed to remain calm, try to find out what was going on.

  Lleu lifted a bowl of soup and held it out to his brother. “You must be hungry. You had better have some dinner.”

  Rhys’s heart constricted. He knew in that moment what had happened, just as his mother and father had known before they died. But the why of it was as far beyond Rhys’s reach as the dark face of Nuitari. Behind him, he heard Atta growl, and he put out his hand in a warding gesture, commanding her to stay where she was.

  Rhys kept his gaze fixed on his brother. Lleu’s robes were in disarray; he had scratches on his face and chest. Perhaps his father had managed to lay hands on his murderous son before death took him.

  Lleu’s chest was bare and there was a curious mark on it—the imprint of a woman’s lips branded into his flesh. Rhys noted the mark as being strange, and that was all. Horror drove it out of his mind, and he forgot about it.

  “You did this,” said Rhys, his voice cracking. He gestured at the dead.

  Lleu glanced around at the bodies, turned his gaze back to his brother. Lleu shrugged, as if to say, “Yes. So what?”

  “And now you want to poison me.” Rhys’s hand clasped his stiff so tightly that his fingers began to cramp. He forced himself to relax his grip.

  Lleu considered the matter. “It’s not so much a question of ‘want’ as ‘need’, brother.”

  “You need to poison me.” Rhys worked to keep his tone cool and level. He knew now that his brother was not insane, that there was some sort of terrible rationale behind the killings. “Why? Why have you done this?”

  “He would have stopped me,” said Lleu. He turned his gaze to the body of the Master. “The old man there. He knew the truth. I saw it in his eyes.”

  Lleu looked back at Rhys. “I saw it in your eyes. All of you were going to try to stop me.”

  “Stop you from doing what, Lleu?” Rhys demanded.

  “From bringing disciples to my god,” Lleu answered.

  “Kiri-Jolith?” Rhys asked in shocked disbelief.

  “Not that prattling killjoy,” Lleu scoffed. An expression of awe softened his face. His voice was reverent. “My lord Chemosh.”

  “You are a follower of the God of Death.”

  “I am, brother,” said Lleu. He tossed the bowl of soup back down on the tabl
e and rose from the bench. “You can be one of his followers, as well.”

  Lleu opened his arms. “Embrace me, brother. Embrace me and embrace endless life, endless youth, endless pleasure.”

  “You have been deceived, Lleu.”

  Rhys shifted his feet, clasped his staff in both hands, and eased himself into a martial stance. Lleu was not wearing his sword; the monks would have forbade him from bringing a sword into the monastery. He was in the throes of religious ecstasy, however, and that made him dangerous.

  “Chemosh does not want you to have any of that. He seeks only your destruction.”

  “On the contrary, I already have everything I was promised,” said Lleu lightly. “Nothing can harm me.”

  Turning back to the table, he lifted up a soup bowl and held it for Rhys to see. “That’s mine. Empty. I ate the water hemlock as did the rest of these poor fools. I had to eat it, of course, otherwise they might have been suspicious. They are dead. And I am not.”

  This could have been a lie, bravado, but Rhys guessed from his brother’s tone and his expression that it wasn’t. Lleu had spoken the truth. He’d ingested the poison and was unscathed. Rhys thought suddenly of the dog bite, the absence of blood.

  Lleu tossed the bowl carelessly back onto the table. “My life is one of pleasure and ease. I know neither hunger nor thirst. Chemosh provides all. I want for nothing. You can know the same life, brother.”

  “I don’t want that life,” said Rhys. “If ‘life’ is what you call it.”

  “Then I guess you had better die,” said Lleu in nonchalant tones. “Either way, Chemosh will have you. The spirits of all those who die by violence come to him.”

  “I have no fear of death. My soul will go to my god,” Rhys replied.

  “Majere?” Lleu chuckled. “He won’t care. He’s off somewhere watching a caterpillar crawl up a blade of grass.” Lleu’s tone changed, became menacing. “Majere has neither the will nor the power to stop Chemosh. Just as this old man lacked the power to stop me.”