Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three

by Neumeier, Rachel

  “We might wish to heed the lady’s sense of urgency,” said Gereint Enseichen, winning a grateful smile from Mienthe.

  “I think we can,” said the Arobern. He looked sternly at Tan and then transferred that heavy frown to Mienthe. “We shall expect some resistance; we shall expect some fighting. You will both assure me that you will stay close by the honored mage, do you hear? You will not ride ahead, no matter this sense of urgency. You will not fall behind no matter that you feel you have cause for alarm. Yes?”

  “Yes!” declared Mienthe, trying to press the king and the whole company into motion with sheer willpower. Her grip tightened on her reins; her horse jigged sideways and spun in an impatient circle when she checked him. She longed to let the animal go, kick him into a gallop, fling him straight ahead at the town that lay so quietly before them.

  “Yes,” muttered Tan, his eyes on the damp road, steaming now in the sun. He swung reluctantly into the saddle. When Gereint took a step toward him, he flinched and backed his horse several steps.

  The mage paused and looked at Tan for a moment without speaking. Then he went, still in silence, to mount his own tall horse.

  * * *

  Tiefenauer was not a great city, with tall mansions of fine dressed stone and wide avenues paved with tight-fitted blocks of stone. Its streets were narrow and cobbled, its buildings tight-packed and mostly of painted cypress and oak. Cheap gray paint was favored in the poorer areas of the town because it was cheap, with dark red or tawny yellow for those who were more daring; white where families could afford to have their houses painted every year. The white buildings had shutters and doors of scarlet or bright green or sunny yellow, and vines with purple or crimson or orange flowers tumbling from their balconies.

  In most of the town, homes were small and mostly set above equally small shops: tailors and cobblers and dressmakers all along one long, narrow street; furniture-makers and harness-makers and metalsmiths near the horse-market; butchers and sausage-makers in the south of town and fishmongers along the river; bakers and confectioners and apothecaries and all sorts of small crafts on the north side. In the middle of town was a wonderful fountain, three levels of falling water leaping from top to bottom with hundreds of green copper fish. Beside the fountain stood a huge oak, in the wide square where twice a week the market was raised, and beyond the square the low hill with the sprawling great house atop it.

  It was in the square that the bulk of the Linularinan forces were set, and in the gardens around the great house. But there were Linularinan soldiers all through the town, occupying the apartments above the shops and making free of the shops themselves.

  “But not too free,” the townsmen had said, with the grudging air of men bound despite their wishes to be fair. The glazier had added, “They’ll let anyone out of Tiefenauer who wishes to go, which is a good many. There hasn’t been much looting and less wanton pillage and no firing the buildings. While I was still there—I have a business to look after, but I sent my wife to her cousin down near Saum—but while I was still in Tiefenauer myself, I saw the Linularinan officers flog one of their men for theft and,” he said with a grim nod of satisfaction, “they hanged a man for raping a girl, as well they might.”

  “A gentle occupation. They don’t want your folk to hate them for generations,” the Arobern had said, which was obvious.

  “They only want that book—and Tan,” Gereint Enseichen had added. “They must know the book is there. And Lady Mienthe is right: They haven’t found it. But I can’t imagine what’s prevented them. If it’s a twentieth-part as obvious as Tan himself, a blind mage should be able to walk right to it.”

  “So perhaps it isn’t a twentieth-part as obvious,” Tan had said, an edge to his tone. “Shall we stand here discussing it from one noon to the next, or shall we get on?”

  They had gone on. Mienthe had no idea what the Arobern planned to do about the Linularinan soldiers in the houses or the ones in the square; she hadn’t been able to make herself pay attention. She knew that Tan was near her, but she was barely aware even of Gereint Enseichen, though the mage rode close on her other side. All her attention was focused on the great house, on the book, on the pressing need to get to it and do—something. She could picture the book clearly in her mind’s eye, but she could not picture what either she or Tan or Gereint might do with it. But she could not think about anything else. Images of the book occupied nearly the whole of her mind. She could have drawn every curve and line of its decorated cover; she could have told out how many pages it contained. She felt the textures of leather and fine thick paper against her fingers. She thought if she had been looking for it, she would inevitably have gone straight to it, with the same certainty with which the river knew which way to go to reach the sea. And, of course, she was looking for it, and when she was at last permitted to go freely forward, she headed for it with exactly that certainty.

  So Mienthe did not know what disposition the Arobern made with his men, or with the militia companies; she did not know what arrangements he came to with the townsmen and surrounding farmers or even whether there was fighting in the streets of the town once they arrived. She noticed vaguely that she had gone largely blind. Or not really blind. It was not a malady of the eyes, but of the attention. She would blink and find quite a large block of time lost. She knew they were outside the town and then that they were in it, between gray-painted buildings, in a narrow alley that smelled of warm rain and steaming cobbles and horse dung and baking bread, with the angle and quality of the light quite different. Then she blinked again and only the cobbles were the same, for the buildings were painted white and the smells did not include bread but did include the fragrance of tumbling trumpet flowers, and the shadows were long and the air much cooler. Yet she had no sense of passing time: All her sense of time seemed to have narrowed to a single pressing urgent now.

  She lost track of Gereint Enseichen, only noticing occasionally that he had seized her wrist to hold her back. Once when this happened, she stepped sideways and around in a neat circle that took her out of his hold and let her walk forward again, only then she found that Tan had not come with her, so she had to turn back to find him.

  She neither noticed nor remembered to wonder whether any of the Arobern’s men or townspeople had come with her. Tan was the only person she really noticed, and then only in his absence. She needed him to come with her, and when the world bent around her and behind her then she knew he had paused. If he would not come with her, then she, too, was constrained to pause. In those moments she tried to find him, take his hand, pull him forward after her. But he resisted her tug.

  There was shouting, she noticed vaguely. And then she thought so again; she did not know if time had passed or if she was still caught in the same moment, but the shouting seemed to have become more violent and nearer at hand. Tan was refusing to follow her. Mienthe blinked, confused by the sweep of motion and color all around them; nothing would resolve to sensible form. She turned her head, but nothing she saw made sense. But Tan had a hard grip on her hand, and the book was now very close, it was right over there. She closed her own hand on Tan’s and pulled him hard, around and into a circle that led around the violent motion and through brilliantly colored shadows, and there was the book—She pulled back the rug and shifted the wardrobe out half a step, leaned into the gap, tapped firmly against the upper edge of one panel of the wood that decorated the wall, and the panel swung open just a crack, and she pried it open just that little bit farther and reached into the dark gap behind the panel and the book fell neatly into her hand.

  And the moment crashed into time, or time expanded to engulf the moment, and Mienthe found herself standing in her own apartment, her own bedchamber, with the last of the afternoon sunlight slanting in through her window, and the smell of smoke and dust hanging heavy in the air, and, not so far away, a clamor of shouting and screaming and the clash of weapons. Startlement made her gasp, and then rising fear might have made her cry out in ear
nest, only when she whirled about she found Tan standing in the middle of her room with a finger held to his lips and an expression of stifled hilarity in his eyes.

  For a long, stretched moment, Tan was absolutely certain that Mienthe, having brought them by some strange mageworking right past who knew how many Linularinan soldiers and straight into the great house and her own room, would at this inopportune moment recover her senses and cry out some word of triumph or even, given her dazed expression, astonishment. As he could quite clearly hear the loud, authoritative voices of Linularinan soldiers directly without the room, this would hardly serve.

  He had, however, for the first time in days—for the first time since Ehre, indeed—a wild desire to laugh. He felt very alert, and tremendously alive, and terribly frightened. He tried hard not to laugh. He bit his lips instead, and held out his hand.

  Somewhere near at hand, a soldier called out and another answered: a formal sign and countersign, by the sound, as was the Linularinan practice in uncertain territory. Mienthe’s eyes widened at the sound. She glanced over her shoulder, hesitated one more instant, and then darted across the room to Tan. She clasped the book—the book for which they had spent so much effort—in both her hands. For a moment Tan thought she might fall back into that trance of movement and magic that had so recently held her. But then she blinked, life and awareness returning to her eyes, and instead offered the book to Tan.

  He did not touch it, but took her by the elbow and nodded aside, at the farthest doorway that led out of this room, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” Mienthe whispered, and ran that way.

  The doorway proved to lead straightaway into a tiny, windowless corner room that was probably meant to be a maid’s room, but fitted out not with its own narrow bed and tiny dresser but with a neat little writing desk and shelves of expensive books and little keepsakes. An illustrated herbal lay open on the desk, undisturbed, as it had no doubt lain since they had all fled so precipitously from this house.

  The tiny room was surely as far from enemy soldiers as they might well find themselves. Mienthe closed the herbal and set it aside, then placed the blank Linularinan book down on the desk. She ran a fingertip over the curves and loops of its tooled leather cover and then looked rather blankly at Tan.

  “You know what to do,” Tan murmured to her.

  Mienthe only shook her head. “I thought I would,” she whispered back—she did not know that a whisper carried better than merely a low voice, but it should not matter, back in this corner as they were. She looked frightened and uncertain, and that was much worse. She whispered, “I thought I would know what to do, but all I see now is a book! All the rest is like, like a dream—misty, fading—We’re here, we have this book, and now I don’t know anything—”

  “Shh,” murmured Tan, touching her shoulder to quiet her. “All will be well. Everything will be well. Shh. Let me just see this odd creation now. The key to our hope and all our enemies’ desire, and yet it is so very small.”

  Mienthe did not recognize the quote, of course. She only nodded, looking uncertain.

  Tan did not try to explain. He only began to reach out—then caught himself and nodded to the young woman instead. “Open it for me, will you, please, for all kindness.”

  Mienthe managed a nervous little smile and a nod, and flipped the book open herself. She flipped past several of the heavy, ivory-colored sheets, each as empty as a cloudless sky. She said, “Maybe if you were to write in it—if you were to have nothing in your mind, but only touch a quill to its pages—do you think you might write out what you… what you have? What you hold in your mind?”

  “What passes for my mind,” Tan murmured absently. “Perhaps.”

  “But I don’t have any quills—”

  Without a word, Tan extracted a packet of quills from an inner pocket, held it up with a minor flourish, and set it down by the book.

  Mienthe turned another blank page, and another. She shook her head. “There’s nothing. It’s so strange. It’s almost as though there was never anything here at all.”

  Tan made a wordless comforting sound, not really attending. He took a quill, a small but neatly made crow’s feather, out of the packet and tested it on his thumb. The ink was black, a good, flowing ink without grittiness or stutters, contained within a well-made quill, exactly what one would expect from the Casmantian king’s own mage. Or ex-mage. From Lord Beguchren Teshrichten, in either case, from whom Tan had acquired the packet of quills. He looked at the book, considering. But when he moved to touch it, to write in it, he could bring himself to do neither. He had a reasonless but intense dread of the book, especially of setting ink to its empty pages. He knew he could not possibly bring himself to write anything at all in it.

  “Well?” Mienthe asked anxiously, forgetting to whisper.

  Tan shook his head. He laughed, though quietly. “So far out and as far back, and what have we to show for all our weary steps? We are come not even to our beginning, but beyond that. We are looking over ground we shall have to recover to come back to the place where we began—”

  “Write something!” said Mienthe sharply.

  Tan shook his head again. “I can’t. I daren’t. I don’t know how. This isn’t a book, Mie, it’s something else that’s just in the shape of a book. If it’s legistwork, it’s nothing I recognize, not even now.”

  Mienthe’s lips pressed together, and her jaw set in that determined expression with which she faced down mountains and kings. She said, “We’ll take it back to Gereint Enseichen. All the way back to Beguchren Teshrichten, if we have to. He’ll know what to do with it.”

  She did not suggest how they might get out of this house and back across town; well, more than likely she did not remember anything of the twisting, difficult route they’d followed to get in. Or how they’d still be trapped outside this house now, save for that strange spiraling path she’d drawn across light and shadow to bring them the last little way, at the end… She flipped the book shut with a sharp, decisive movement.

  Tan said suddenly, the pattern leaping out at him for the first time, “There’s a spiral on the cover.”

  Mienthe blinked, and looked.

  Tan traced the pattern for her in the air, the tip of his finger hovering above the leather. There was a spiral, when one looked for it—or not just one, indeed, but several: interlocking spirals set into the patterned leather among the circumscribed arcs of circles and ellipses. Some of the spirals were raised and turned right, but at least one was concave and turned left.

  Mienthe traced the first spiral herself, with no need to be cautious about touching the book. She said, “Earth.”

  Tan looked at her, wanting to ask what she meant, fearing to interrupt whatever inspiration she might have discovered.

  “Earth,” Mienthe insisted, and traced the next spiral, a smaller one that interlocked with the first and then twisted away in its own direction. And the next, small and twining about the second. “Fire,” she said. “And wind.” She found another, this one pressed deep into the rich leather. When she touched it, her fine eyebrows drew together in something like pain. “Oh. The wild heights.”

  “Mie—”

  “Yes,” the young woman murmured. She stood up, took the crow-feather quill out of Tan’s hand, walked back into the apartment’s main sitting room, swung chairs aside every which way, kicked aside a rug, and bent to draw a spiral right on the naked boards of the floor.

  Tan wouldn’t have interrupted for the world. He hauled a couch out of her way; then, after a moment’s consideration, stood it on end and leaned it into the little writing room. Then he stood in the doorway, watching with tense fascination as Mienthe completed the first big outer circle and began to bring the spiral inward.

  There was a faintly audible alarmed shout. Tan jerked his head up, listening. The shout was repeated, nearer, he was almost certain. Mienthe did not seem to notice, but Tan was afraid the alarm might very soon press itself on her attention. He
wished he knew what drawing spirals on the floor was going to do, or, which might be a more urgent question, how long it might take to do it. He had no weapons, and no particular skill with them even if he found a sword tucked away among the gowns in Mienthe’s wardrobe. Chairs propped under the doorknobs of the outermost apartment door and then the sitting room door were all very well, but would hold professional soldiers for no more than moments—Mie might have found inspiration somewhere, but nothing useful occurred to Tan, and the shouting was now distinctly closer—

  “Tan!” Mienthe called urgently from the sitting room, having either forgotten the need for quiet or justifiably concluded the precaution was now no use. “Tan! Oh—there you are, good. Get in the center. No, with the book!” She pressed it into his hands and pushed him toward the middle of the spiral that now nearly covered the floor: A dozen long, perfectly smooth turns ran away from the wall toward the center of the room. The black lines glistened as though with fresh ink, but not the best-made quill in the world could ever have held so much or drawn out such a broad, heavy stroke. And then in the next moment the black lines did not look like ink at all, but like shadows, like deep cracks that cut straight through into the heart of the world. He tried to follow the spiral inward with his eyes but found the center hard to see, as though it was very far away. The illusion that the overall spiral led downward as it turned inward was very powerful, even though when he looked across it rather than along its curving length, he could see perfectly well that the floor was level.

  “Don’t cut across the line!” she added.

  “Don’t cut the line?” Tan muttered. He cast a glance toward the door, which someone had just struck a reverberating blow. “Mie—”

  “What?” She did not seem to notice, not even when the door shook in its frame under another blow. She stared instead at the widely spaced curving lines of the spiral. Her expression was intent, not blank as it had been out in the town. But was the difference good or bad?