The Free
Page 13
The Spiral Garden, the famous ornament that ascended the oval building on a continuous rising terrace, normally put at least a faint smile on Morue’s face with its profuse greenery and ebullient flowers. Its presence, in unchanging defiance of the cycle of seasons, was a rather indulgent piece of ostentation. A constant visible reminder of the School’s continuation. And of its power, since it required diligent and selfless Clevers to keep a garden abundant even through winter.
Morue had herself played an occasional role in that achievement. She was a Vernal Clever, attuned most closely to that entelech that came to prominence in the spring months and shaped much that was green and vital. That was what it took to make the Spiral Garden grow: the Vernal entelech, tapped and shaped to bestow unseasonal life.
Today, as she walked amongst the bare, unattended market stalls towards the Home, she could not summon a smile. Not even as she caught the scent of jasmine drifting down from the Garden. Continuation. That was the difficulty. The Garden declared it, yet she was one of the few who knew how unsafe that declaration had become of late. A mere two months into her rule as Mistress of the School, and already she was wondering if she might be the last to hold that office. Pity everyone living in these formerly Hommetic lands, should that prove the case. There was not much time left to save them.
Lurro, her manservant, hurried to get ahead of her and pull open a side door.
The great stairway of the Home echoed the Spiral Garden outside. It coiled up the inner wall of the building. Morue climbed it slowly, favouring her sore ankle. She had slipped on a step the day before and twisted it. That set a wart of irritation upon her mood, for it felt too much like the injury of an old woman and Morue did not – would not – consider herself to be old. Her mother had lived to seventy-five, her father almost as long; at fifty, she could tell herself she had time aplenty yet. Of course, neither of her parents had been a Clever. They, unlike their daughter, had not had to pay the punishing toll that path exacted.
Lurro walked at her side. She might have taken his arm to steady herself, but that was a concession – to him, to her age – she was not willing to make. Her walking staff was concession enough.
Past the refectory, the scholars’ hall, the dormitories. Up and up. The Home was quiet. Teaching and training were much reduced, these last few weeks. There were Clade guards on the stairs, scattered up them like statues, but the thirty scholars spent much of their time out of sight in safe, inactive seclusion. A sad state of affairs, given the School’s origins. It had begun, long ago, as a place for the finding and training of Clevers. That it had, over the many years since, accumulated more powers, more influence in all manner of areas did not to Morue’s way of thinking change the fact that the scholars remained at its heart.
There had been thirty-five of them when the first spark of what had become the Council’s rebellion was lit. Two had simply disappeared, carried off by the chaos. Another had slipped out one night to explore the exciting, tumultuously transforming world, and duly been killed in a riot. One – to Morue’s profound shame – had died in an entelech-fuelled brawl between rival gangs of scholars when the world’s transformations had birthed factions within the School itself. And the last: she had been executed for that murder. Slain by the very School that had sworn to train and nurture her, for that was what the law required, and in matters relating to Clevers, the School was law, judge, executioner.
Atop the Home was Morue’s own apartment, reserved for the Mistress or Master whenever they were visiting. Her predecessor’s taste had been in a luxurious vein. She found the array of rugs and silks, tapestries and gold that greeted her as she entered more than a little distasteful. She had much reduced the ostentation of the main residence she had inherited, in the School’s Keep at Armadell-on-Lake, but had not yet found the time to do the same here.
Sullen was waiting there, sitting in an elaborately carved ebony chair. His uncouth presence was a dissonant note amidst such finery, with his half-braided hair, his worn warrior clothes, his great sword resting against the arm of the chair. He looked nothing like the disciplined Clade men he commanded.
He did not rise when she entered. He was presumptuous. But then, he had earned a degree of presumption.
“Mistress,” he said quietly.
She nodded, and handed her staff to Lurro. He took it and the Land set he carried under his arm to a closet. Sullen watched him as he passed. The two men did not like one another. That did not concern Morue. Although he could exude a certain charm and air of reason when he so wished – he could hardly have commanded the loyalty and service of the rest of the Clade otherwise – she had never encountered anyone who truly liked Sullen, and if she ever did, she would most likely suspect them of some derangement of the senses.
“You’ve been playing Land again?” Sullen asked.
“Yes. With Krurtik.”
She found it fattened up Krurtik’s sense of importance to be seen playing Land with the Mistress of the School. He was a crude man, formerly castellan of Harvekka’s Harbour Tower, but like others such the revolt had elevated him. He was, by default, now master of Harvekka and a member of the rebel’s Council. The School required such friends if it was to survive and retain its influence.
“Did you win?” asked Sullen.
“The Mistress always wins at Land,” Lurro said as he closed the closet doors.
“You can leave us, Lurro,” she told him.
“You’re certain, Mistress?” he asked with a little bow.
“Yes.”
“One of the —’ Sullen began as soon as Lurro was gone from the chamber, but Morue held up a stern finger of warning.
He waited silently while she arranged a stool before her own chair, and unwrapped her headscarf to make a cushion. She lifted her leg with both hands and set it gently down upon that soft support. She sighed with relief, and then gestured for Sullen to continue.
“One of the Free – a Clever – killed a man,” he said.
“That is hardly unheard of,” Morue observed.
She was disappointed. When she’d received Sullen’s request for her presence, she had hoped it would be some matter relating to the Bereaved. Hope was too small a word for what she had felt, in truth.
“He did it in Creel of Mondoon’s camp,” Sullen went on, “under a truce flag and without the protection of a contract.”
“Ah. Well, the truce flag’s neither here nor there; that’s Creel’s concern, if he sees fit to enforce it. But for the rest… Did this Clever use the entelechs?”
“Seems so. Man died of burns.”
“Which of the Free was it?”
“Kerig.”
Morue wrinkled her nose.
“A Vernal. It is unlikely he would use fire.”
“Man’s dead, and burned, nevertheless. Seems clear Kerig caused it, one way or another.”
Sullen’s voice was entirely flat. Disengaged. Yet Morue knew he would, in this matter, be most acutely interested. He was, after all, the only man living who could truthfully say he had killed a Captain of the Free. His deeds would have made him famous – infamous, more aptly – were they not a secret known to only a handful. The struggle between School and Free had never been treated, by either of the contestants, as a fit matter for public discourse. Both had too much to lose, should they forfeit the King’s favour, or allow themselves to be drawn into open, unrestrained conflict. Sullen had risked all of that at White Steading.
Every nuance of the human soul, every subtlety of the personality it displayed, was an expression of the four entelechs that had woven themselves into its form. When they were unbalanced in some way, it was rarely of great consequence. A slight preponderance of the Aestival in a soul might breed a hot temper; a moderate excess of the Vernal an ebullient, light-hearted manner. On those rare occasions when a more profoundly unbalanced soul arose, there was seldom much that could be done. In most cases collapse, utter degeneracy, madness, ungovernable misery would be the result.
Sullen was different. He had somehow – Morue had no idea how – harnessed that void at his core without diminishing it. He had turned what in others would be a deforming burden into a tool that he could wield in service of a sharp and calculating mind. It made him amongst the most valuable of all the School’s servants. Morue’s servants. He was no Clever – none of the Clade that he led were – but without him, she would never have emerged victorious from the struggles within the School unleashed by the rebellion. It had been, until Sullen decided to take Morue’s part, a struggle conducted through debate, argument, conspiracy. Sullen changed that, and delivered her victory over the corpses of her opponents. Most of them, at least. Sadly not all.
Had he not done so, Kasuman would be Master now, and the School would have become a dull and compliant adherent to Crex’s cause. The King would very likely have unleashed the Bereaved against his own people, with the School’s connivance. That, Morue remained certain, would have been a disastrous crime. One worth a great deal of savagery to avert. One not yet averted.
“What of the Bereaved?” she asked quietly.
The faint, instantly suppressed twitch of irritation at the corner of Sullen’s eye did not go unnoticed. He resented the change in topic. He was not wholly imperturbable, though his voice remained a study in tranquillity.
“No trace. No new word.”
Morue stamped her good foot. The effect was somewhat diminished by the thick rug overlying the floorboards.
“All else is distraction,” she snapped.
“Better than five hundred of the Clade are out hunting. There is little more to be done, unless you want me to tell the Council that we have lost the Bereaved. They would be delighted to join the search, no doubt.”
“And the School would be swept into history overnight,” Morue growled. “What need have they for us, if we do not have the Bereaved? It would become a prize for whatever petty warlord found it. And how long then, do you suppose, before its plagues were feasting on these lands? Or perhaps the Orphans learn of our weakness and descend upon us before anyone even finds the Bereaved. They are watching, you may be sure; and nobody – not even you, Sullen – would find conquest by the Orphans to be anything but a waking nightmare.”
Sullen shrugged.
“You know more of such things than I do, Mistress. I concern myself with the immediate. I understand the importance of finding and killing Kasuman, retrieving the Bereaved. All that can be done to further that cause is being done. There is nothing else, without more men. A great many more men.”
“And now you want to challenge the Free with what men you have left,” Morue muttered.
It was not as easy as she would have wished to master her temper. It was fear, she knew. Fear for the future of the School; for the future of the people it existed – in her mind – to protect. Since the first days of the Hommetic Kingdom, the Bereaved had been the one and only sure protection against the Empire of Orphans. Its appalling capacities had been the Kingdom’s armour, kept and husbanded by the School. On behalf of the King, some – kings amongst them – had assumed; on behalf of the people, Morue had always thought. Now it was lost to them, stolen away by the very man Morue had warred with for leadership: Kasuman.
The rightful Master of the School, by many accounts, but hopelessly misguided in his fervent loyalty to Crex. He had traded adherence to the people, the School and their interests for adherence to the King. That Kasuman had not already unleashed the Bereaved, now that he had carried the Permanence away, was a source of constant surprise to Morue. She awoke every day expecting to hear word of plague, of corpse fires, of death unbounded. The absence of such word gnawed at her gut almost as much as its arrival would.
“I thought,” Sullen said quietly, “that if there was even a chance of hamstringing the Free, you would not be the one to let it pass.”
“In other times, you would be right,” Morue said irritably.
Her irritation, her anger, her every sentiment was wasted on Sullen. The man was impervious to the moods of others. She was not sure he even recognised their gradations sometimes.
“Whether I’m here or not makes no odds to the finding of Kasuman,” Sullen persisted. “Let me go to Creel’s camp. I’ll find out what happened.”
She stared at him. He stared back, unblinking, with those dead eyes. Had he not done such service to the School over the years, and to Morue herself more recently, she would have been rid of him before now.
“You’ve told me many times the free companies were a canker in the kingdom,” Sullen said. “The worst threat to lasting peace. That extinguishing them, one after another, was the School’s greatest contribution to that peace. There’s only the Free left. The only Clevers outside the School’s command or discipline, thanks to that charter of theirs.”
“Please do not goad me with my own words,” Morue said. “And you and I – you more than anyone – both know that their charter did not stop us pursuing them, when times were more predictable. When our position and power gave us the freedom to act, even without Crex’s approval.”
Sullen smiled. Much as a corpse-eating lizard would smile, Morue suspected.
“The Free are my only failure, Mistress. The only time I have failed the School. I might remedy that now. Their charter may be no more, since the royal line that issued it is extinct. But if Kerig has killed a man without the protection of a contract, he’s put himself beyond that charter in any case. He’s just another Clever committing a crime: under our authority, for trial, judgement. Execution.”
“If the Council permits our continuing exercise of that authority.”
“They can’t withhold a permission we don’t request. If we act as if we retain authority, we retain it. That’s in the nature of times such as these.”
It always troubled Morue when she was reminded that Sullen’s pretended lack of subtlety was just that: pretence. Even she could now and then be lulled into forgetting how sharp was the mind behind those impassive eyes.
“I will not permit the School to be trapped into open war with the Free, not when there is so much trouble already bearing down upon us. The Clamour overmatches us no less than does the Bereaved, in hostile hands.”
“Perhaps,” Sullen said levelly. “I only ask to go to Creel’s camp. Establish the truth of what happened. Make a show of the School’s right to address such matters.”
“Whom did Kerig kill?”
“One of the Weaponsmith’s followers. It’s the Weaponsmith who asks us to intervene, not Creel. When one Clever invokes the School’s laws against another, we must act, must we not?”
There was a dark determination within him that Morue did not entirely understand, could not imagine herself into. None but a fool, she thought, would want to live even a moment in Sullen’s head. It made it impossible for her to fully trust him. Yet she needed him and his ferocity. At least until some kind of peace and order was restored.
And he was right, in the end, that the Free were – and would always be – a challenge to that peace and order, and to the secure authority of the School. The mercenary companies had ever been a malign influence, an open invitation to violence and ambition for anyone who could afford their services. The Free, the last of them, more so than any other by virtue of its sheer power.
“The Free will be gone from Creel’s camp by now, I imagine,” she murmured.
“Not beyond our reach. Kasuman’s assassins fell short of perfection. Sestimon Trune still lives, after all. Time’s past when he might have tracked Kasuman for us, but if I can get him to the camp quickly, the traces are probably still fresh enough that he could point the way to Kerig. His wounds are all but healed. He wou
ld probably survive the journey.”
“You will not engage the Free in battle,” Morue said sharply. “Not for the sake of a single Clever.”
Sullen shook his head, the beads in his hair sliding over one another.
“I’ll find out what happened. If there’s guilt in the air, I’ll find out where the guilty man is.”
“And if there is any word of the Bereaved, you will go at once in its pursuit.”
“Of course, Mistress. At once.”
13
Ifs Are Hares
Just outside Curmen, uphill, stood a mean little farmhouse. Its fields of grass, marked out with old walls of yellowish stone, were greener than the dry turf cloaking the hillside. There were no animals to be seen in them, though. It was nothing but sense, to hide precious animals away when the land was thick with folk eager to carry them off. Drann could imagine his father doing the same. Likely was doing the same, with what few animals the family kept, in that faraway village in the north.
But it was not cows or sheep that Drann and Akrana sought now. It was horses. Ordeller had said there might be some here. Yulan wanted them. He had sent Akrana to get them, and Drann along with her because everyone else was busy readying for what would be a fast, hard march.
The sun was a sliver, edging over the eastern horizon. Drann’s eyes were already leaden – he had stolen just an hour or two’s sleep in the last part of the fraught night – and the dull, cold air was working hard to drag them closed entirely. He was glad he had his spear, only because it gave him something to rest a little of his weight upon, to push himself forward with.
Even Akrana, stiff and stern as ever, betrayed hints of her weariness in the dark shadows beneath her eyes, the slight sluggishness in her movements. She was not entirely inhuman and invulnerable then. She was not talking to Drann, either, and for that he was not sorry.