The King's Justice: Two Novellas
Page 25
Everywhere we were greeted warmly by persons of every station, sometimes with applause, occasionally with effusive shouts. Nevertheless Excrucia frowned incessantly, a woman who wished to reclaim her reputation for plainness, and thereby to pass unnoticed. And I received both common greetings and extravagant commendations with an increasing chill. Wherever we gazed—at the courtyard increasingly crowded with men at training, at the much augmented number of guards within the house, at the stone walls among the wooden structures of Venture, at the tense alacrity with which commands were obeyed on all sides—I witnessed evidences of the theme that the Majordomo had disclosed.
The peace of Indemnie had been replaced by preparations for war. Its prosperity had been dedicated to the service of those preparations.
This was an alteration in which I had played no small part, and though I did not regret what I had done, I could not regard its outcome—apart from my place at Excrucia’s side—with any satisfaction. Much that I had treasured had been lost ere I knew that I treasured it. Now I did not require entrails and blood to foresee that Indemnie’s future—once a blank wall of doom—had become a succession of perils and culling.
Perhaps such an outcome had been inevitable from the first. Perhaps prosperity and peace were unnatural, and uncertainty and strife were the fate of all the world’s folk. Nevertheless I had participated in delivering the world’s fate to Indemnie. For that reason, I no longer regarded the use that I had made of my gifts with any clear sense of good purpose and worthy service.
When Excrucia and I were entirely recovered, I resolved to pursue a new ambition. I had once tasted chrism—and thereafter I had witnessed augury in an entirely changed manifestation, a chicken with its heart still beating after death. If chrism could work such an alteration in me, or in my impure blood, it could do as much or more for others of my gift-kin. For that reason, my goal became to form an academy for hieronomers, a place to discover and refine the effects of nature’s catalyst upon our ability to scry.
Inimica Phlegathon deVry IV had become a woman altogether changed, no longer manipulative, willful, or cruel, but rather devoted to the freedom—indeed, the survival—of her people. Therefore she would require more precise and insightful auguries if she hoped to find her balance between the attractions of peace and the necessities of strife.
To serve that balance, hieronomy itself must become altogether changed. As I had.
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