Gereint Enseichen gave a mild shrug. “I know events are in sweeping motion. I know that chance and opportunity turn around this man.” He nodded at Tan, but without taking his eyes off the prisoner. “I know Linularinum is responsible.”
“Linularinum! Responsible!” cried the man, and stopped, breathing hard. Collecting himself, he said in a more moderate tone, “Is it the proper owner of a jewel, or the thief who steals it, who is responsible for the man who covets and kills for it once it is out in the world?”
“Neither,” said Lord Beguchren. His light, cool voice drew all their attention; his gray eyes effortlessly held those of the prisoner. He moved a step forward, out of the Arobern’s shadow. “It is the man who does murder who is responsible, and neither the jewel’s owner nor the thief. Or would eminent scholars and philosophers argue otherwise, in Linularinum?” He paused for a heartbeat and then went on, even more quietly, “And who is responsible for what some strange and powerful legistwork might do? Or might fail to do? The legist who created the work with quill and ink and his mastery of language? The mage who hid it out of the view of ordinary men? The king who guarded it from one age to the next?”
“It’s too perilous to have out in the world!” shouted the Linularinan prisoner. He tried to get to his feet, but the soldiers hastily caught his shoulders and held him from rising.
“Of course it is,” murmured Beguchren, catching and holding his gaze. “What is it, man? What is this thing that is so perilous for anyone but a Linularinan to hold?”
The prisoner stared at the small, elegant Casmantian lord in very much the way a bird was said to stare at a serpent. He said in a quick, sharp tone, “Do you not understand? Not even yet? This was a working against—for—it was a working of natural law. Do you not perceive the terrible distortion of the world around this thief, as the world seeks the proper bindings of law? Do you not understand what desperate peril we are in, now the strands of natural law are breaking?”
“The proper bindings of law,” murmured Lord Beguchren.
The prisoner sat back on his heels and stared at Beguchren, furious, his bound hands raised in urgent supplication. “You must understand. A thousand years ago, we founded the age by binding into place the laws of earth and fire, and pressing aside the unbounded wild magic of mountains and forest. And then that fool”—he glared furiously at Tan, who looked merely blandly attentive—“that fool,” the Linularinan prisoner repeated, “undid half our bindings in a day. The rest will break in time. And you shelter him? From us? Give him to me—for all of us. Let us recast our bindings, if any legist of our age has such power—will you leave the law of the world unsettled and wild?”
“The law of the world,” Lord Beguchren repeated. He still spoke quietly, but his tone had become biting, cold as the gray heights of the mountains, and his storm-gray eyes were dark with fury. He took a step forward and said, “The laws of earth and fire, do you say? Gereint has described to me a certain strange quality he has recently found echoing behind the magecraft he has tried to work. We had assumed this strangeness was due to the cracking of Tehre’s Wall. Now I wonder whether both the breaking of the Wall and this disturbance to mage power might be due instead to a common cause.” He paused and then added, his voice dropping even further, “I wonder why Linularinum seems so untroubled by the threat the griffins pose to all our countries? Certainly Mariddeier Kohorrian seems perfectly ready to distract and weaken Iaor Safiad, and this at a time when one would expect him to see the necessity of supporting Feierabiand against griffin-fire.”
The Linularinan agent did not answer.
“Indeed…” said Lord Beguchren. “Indeed, one might almost wonder why it is that Casmantium has endured the continual threat of fire, why it is that Feierabiand’s border with the desert has now and again been breached and is now threatened again, and yet Linularinum has never seen so much as a grain of red sand blowing in the wind. Fire stays well clear of Linularinum. It always has. I wonder why that is? Just how have the legists of Linularinum written their binding law, this law that their clever kings have owned from the beginning of the age, and have hidden from the rest of us?”
“Only we—” said the prisoner, and stopped.
The Arobern, whose grip on the arms of his granite throne had tightened until his knuckles whitened, stood up at last. He seemed to loom massive as the mountains. The expression in his deep-set eyes went well beyond rage.
The Linularinan prisoner flinched back from the king, for which Mienthe did not blame him at all. She would have backed away herself except she could not move. But then the prisoner abruptly reached down with both his bound hands, sketching a swift line of writing on the stone floor with a fingertip. The letters that followed his tracing finger were sharp, angular, jagged things, nothing like ordinary letters. They were black, but not the shining black of fresh ink. They were a strange, bodiless, empty black, as though the man were carving narrow but bottomless cracks right into the stone, so that the blackness at the heart of the earth showed through.
To Mienthe, it seemed that the whole world abruptly tilted sideways. She did not lose her balance; it was not that sort of tilt. But everything seemed to stutter and pause, and the cracks ran swiftly out across the stone and yawned wide—she thought someone was shouting and someone else was cursing and someone else was screaming, or maybe that was all the same person. She seemed caught in a timeless moment that did not contain alarm or movement, around which urgent sound pressed but into which it did not intrude. She seemed to watch the empty black letters slashed into the stone lengthen; they sliced out like knife cuts toward Tan. But Mienthe felt neither frightened nor rushed. She seemed to have all the time in the world to move; indeed, she seemed to be the only person in the world who was moving, or who could move. She stepped dreamily through the slanted world to intercept the black writing before it could reach Tan, and stooped, and drew a spiral on the floor to catch the sharp letters. Then she straightened and stood quietly, watching.
The black letters reached her spiral, and rushed into it, and the deep-cut writing swept down and around and around and down and disappeared into the depths of the earth, and the polished stone closed over the place where they had been, and suddenly time, too, rushed forward, and the world slammed back toward its ordinary level with a tremendous silent crash. Mienthe staggered.
Before she could fall, Tan caught her elbow with one strong hand, steadying her until she could recover her balance. He was not looking at her, however, but at the Linularinan agent—a mage, Mienthe realized belatedly. Or, no, with that strange writing, a legist, of course. Then she followed Tan’s gaze, and found it did not matter, not for any immediate practical purpose. In startlement or terror or outrage, one of the prisoner’s guards had cut his throat. A great wash of crimson blood ran across the stone, filling the deep-carved letters the agent had drawn into the stone and trickling across the floor of the hall.
There was no sign, now, that the carved letters had ever sliced out toward Tan. But there was a crystalline spiral set directly into the stone a step away from where he stood with Mienthe. It was no wider than a man’s hand at its widest diameter: A perfect spiral of smoky quartz set right into the polished granite, turning and turning inward until the fine pattern in its center became too fine to see. Tan glanced down at this spiral, his brows drawing together in bemusement. Then he looked at Mienthe. There was no surprise in his face. He only gave her a little, acknowledging tip of his head: Did it again, didn’t you? As though he’d have expected nothing less. Mienthe blushed.
The Arobern, too, stared at the spiral for a moment. Then he turned his head to look at the dead man and the blood, and at last at the guardsman who had killed him.
The man ducked his head in uncertain apology and came forward to offer the hilt of his bloody knife to the king. “If I was wrong—” he began and stopped, swallowing. Then he drew a quick breath and met the Arobern’s eyes. “Lord King, if I was wrong, then I beg your pardon.”
The guardsman, looking much happier, bowed his head and backed away. Other men came deferentially forward to take away the body and clean up the blood. There was a surprising amount of blood. Mienthe tried not to look. She stared down at the crystalline spiral she’d drawn instead, though it pulled at her eyes and made her dizzy. It was still better than looking at the blood.
“It was your blow that protected me,” Tan said to Mienthe in a low voice. “So I’ll thank you for that.”
Mienthe shook her head. She rubbed her foot cautiously over the spiral. It gleamed dully, a spiral of ordinary smoky quartz that might have been there since the stone was carved and carried into this house and laid down to be part of the room’s floor. Tears prickled unexpectedly in her eyes, and she blinked hard. “I do things,” she whispered. “I feel things, and I don’t know why or how. There’s something in me that makes me do things, but it isn’t me and I don’t know what it is.”
Tan shook his head and, to Mienthe’s surprise, took her hand in both of his. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s all you. You simply have a gift you haven’t yet recognized. But it’s guiding you well, Mie, don’t you think? You’ve done all the right things so far, and which of the rest of us can claim as much? Until you learn to recognize and understand your gift, you might simply try trusting it—and yourself—a little.”
Mienthe stared at him. Then she tried to smile.
“Quite so,” said Lord Beguchren, approaching unexpectedly. “One does wonder what sort of gift you hold, Lady Mienthe, but it seems one might do far worse than trust it.” He knelt to trace the quartz spiral with one fingertip. Then, rising, he lifted a frost-white eyebrow at her.
He was still very angry, Mienthe knew that. Although she knew he was not angry with her or with Tan, she did not know what to say to him. She did not know what she thought about anything. She was shaking and found she couldn’t stop. Tan put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against his solid weight gratefully.
The Arobern had been glowering down at the bloody granite and the crystalline spiral. Now he turned abruptly and said to Gereint Enseichen, “Assist my guardsmen, if you please. If there is another Linularinan agent in Ehre, I think this may be a matter of some urgency. Also see to the safety of your own household. I will assuredly ask you and your lady wife to extend hospitality to my guests.”
“Yes,” agreed the tall mage, inclining his head. He smiled reassuringly at Mienthe and went out.
The king said, to Mienthe and Tan and Lord Beguchren, “Come.”
Mienthe thought drearily that the Casmantian king was going to want to go over everything again, and she knew she didn’t want to. This day had been unpleasant enough living through it just once. Tears pressed again at her eyes. Tan tightened his arm around her shoulders, and she thought of his voice asking tartly, Whose cousin are you? She straightened her shoulders, blinked hard, lifted her head, and followed the Arobern.
The king guided them no farther than down a short hall, to a much smaller and less formal chamber with thick rugs on the floor and cushions on the chairs. He waved to the chairs without ceremony and said shortly to Lord Beguchren, as soon as they were all seated, “Well?”
The small lord hesitated. Then he opened his fine hands and said, “From what that… person… described, I surmise it is possible to reorder the natural law of the world to a degree I would have previously believed impossible. I surmise that the honored Tan may be able to effect such a change.”
Tan said sharply, “It would be pleasant to think so, no doubt.” He was rubbing his knee, an absent, unmindful gesture that was utterly out of character. Mienthe guessed by that how very disturbed he was by everything that had happened. She rose from the chair she’d just taken and went to lean on the back of his chair, resting her hand on his shoulder. The muscles were rock-hard under her touch. But he looked up at her and managed a small nod.
Lord Beguchren only said smoothly, “If Tehre’s Wall shatters, then an effort to alter and bind natural law might seem suddenly very wise indeed, no matter with what doubt any of us may now regard the prospect. It does not seem wholly beyond the bounds of possibility that the honored Tan might be able to, if I may be forgiven the term, ‘rewrite’ a certain element of the natural law of the world. A small element, a trivial item that would not disorder the world to any great extent… I wonder, for example, whether he might be able to use this book and the work he holds himself to more thoroughly subordinate fire to earth.”
There was a pause. Tan did not look at the Casmantian lord, or at the Arobern. He looked at Mienthe. She thought he needed something from her, but she had no idea what he wanted her to say and could only gaze back at him.
There was a subdued cough at the door, and a guardsman said apologetically, “Lord King, forgive me. We have had another messenger through the pass. A courier—a royal courier, from Feierabiand.”
The Arobern scowled but laughed at the same time. He waved an impatient hand. “Of course I will see the courier. At once.” He threw a harried glance around the room, ran a broad hand through his short hair, and said to Mienthe, to the rest of them, “Of course you must stay. You must all stay.”
The courier was a young woman, no older than Mienthe, who looked just as tired as Mienthe felt and twice as travel-ragged. She glanced at the rest of them, but was clearly too weary to be curious and turned at once to the Arobern, bowed, and held out her white courier’s wand.
“Yes,” said the Arobern. “I will assuredly hear you. What message does Iaor Safiad send to me?”
“Lord King,” said the courier in a faint voice, then took a breath and continued more strongly, “His Majesty Iaor Safiad sends me to say to you: He believes the Wall will not hold, that it is impossible it should hold, and that as it is the fifth day since the warning was given, we are even now within the period of greatest peril. He bids me say: The griffins have a new king who is furious and intemperate. This king of theirs scorns men and detests all the country of earth. His Majesty says that the king of the griffins will not likely stop in Feierabiand. He warns you to look east as well as north and guard the passes through the mountains.” The woman stopped, swallowed, and added in a faint voice, “That’s all. Will there be a response?”
The Arobern said, “Honored courier, I must consider. If there is a response, I will tell it to you in the morning. Go. Rest. My household will see to your comfort.”
The courier bowed once more—she staggered a little as she straightened—and allowed herself to be led away.
Mienthe stared at the Arobern, stricken and wordless.
“My friend,” the Arobern said to Beguchren Teshrichten, “what is in your mind?”
The elegant lord inclined his head. He said, “Here in this extremity, where fire threatens to burn across all the world, an unlooked-for weapon has flung itself into our hands.” He met Tan’s eyes and went on, quietly, “You are pursued. You have enemies. Well, so do we all. It seems to me we may well consider how we may confound all our enemies at once, and if we also forever shift the balance between earth and fire to favor earth, is that not also very well?” He turned to the Arobern. “Shall we not send agents to recover this book? Shall we not bring it here and see what the honored Tan might make of it?”
“What say you?” the king said to Tan.
Before Tan could answer, Mienthe said quickly, “But—” She stopped as everyone looked at her, but then remembered Tan saying, You might try trusting yourself a little, and went on, “But, Lord King, if you will pardon me, is it wise to send a small number of men through the pass, when we have no idea what they might find? Even if Linularinum doesn’t have its own agents in the way, which I’m sur
e it does, wouldn’t it take a terribly long time for men to go all the way to Tiefenauer and then come all the way back here? From the—the word about the Wall and the griffins, can we take so much time?”
The Arobern tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Very well! What do you wish me to do?”
“I want you to send an army into Feierabiand!” Mienthe declared. “You have one; of course you do, with all the, the warnings flying back and forth across the mountains! So you have an army ready, haven’t you, and here it is, right at the mouth of the pass, just where we need it to be! I want you to send an army through the pass and press back the Linularinan forces and confound their mages and make a safe road for Tan to go himself back to Tiefenauer—and me, of course—and then we can get the book and see how useful it might be.”
Tan was staring at her, looking appalled by this idea. “A wise man does not leave be the hart at bay to pursue a glimmering fantasy by moonlight, nor forsake his house of stone to build a palace of sunbeams,” he said, with some force. “I admire your boldness, but you cannot possibly set all your hopes on—”
“I’m not!” exclaimed Mienthe. “If the Arobern sends an army to the Delta, then at least Linularinum will be out of the Delta, which is one thing we want.” She turned back to the Arobern himself. “And if you do that, then you’ll have an army in place to help block the griffins before they can come into Casmantium, which has to be something you want, and if Lord Beguchren is right about that book and about Tan, then we can stop the griffins entirely, and we all want that, don’t we? So why not do everything at once?”
There was a slightly stunned pause.
The Arobern himself broke it, rising to pace several strides away and then turn and come back. He moved with sharp energy, glowering at Mienthe with uncommon ferocity. “I thought of exactly what you say, yes?” he growled. “But you have forgotten: I cannot take men through that pass and march them through Feierabiand, because Iaor Safiad has my son in his court and within his reach! Do you think he will stop to ask me what I do, when he sees the spears of my soldiers flashing in the sun?”
Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three Page 29
