“I’ve summoned Medicus Piar,” he said. “I think you should lie down until he arrives. You hit your head hard.”
Keir shook her head and then wished she hadn’t. It throbbed fiercely in response to the motion. But she couldn’t focus on herself now. Mustn’t. Too much else was at stake. Although what that ‘else’ was still eluded her. She was muddled. She had to get unmuddled, or the chance to shape events would pass her by.
“Gael, what happened?”
Gael’s lips pressed straight. “I am responsible for the miscarriage of our attempt to communicate our new knowledge to Lord Carbraes. Not you. Not Adarn.”
“I don’t think you are,” she murmured, still trying to string two thoughts together coherently.
Gael’s chin jerked. “I allowed myself to become abstracted and preoccupied in the aftermath of our discovery. Had I retained my wits – or taken two moments to regain them – I would have noticed that Adarn was tiring. And that his excitement made him unaware of his growing fatigue.” Gael’s lips pressed even straighter. “He did not tremble for nerves or enthusiasm.”
Keir pieced it together. “His grip slipped. He grabbed harder, which caused him to overbalance. And then he fell, taking the gong and Uwen with him.” She swallowed. “If I’d just been less afraid of offending Dreas’ dignity – or Carbraes’ idea of his dignity – I’d have had him lie on the terrace stones. And he’d be alive.” She fought down a sob. She’d not lost a patient before. Pater had said it would happen eventually. It had to happen, since humans were not immortal. Except she’d not lost Dreas. She’d killed him herself, ripping his heart node right out of his energea lattice.
“Keir.”
Gael’s voice pulled her out of the sucking descent of her thoughts.
“Now is not the time to analyze where we went wrong or how to apportion blame. Thinking coherently in the immediate wake of disaster is not possible. It’s like doing a tally when the ingots are being issued. You must wait until all of the metal has gone out, and again until it has returned at day’s end, and then you may ascertain where you stand. Not before.”
She stared at him blankly. He was right, of course. He would be. He knew tallying. Had taught her. And he would know how the tallying of metals might apply to the tallying of responsibility. She could plumb her guilt later. Must plumb it later. Right now she must set it aside. If she could. There was another matter which must be sifted now, or it would not be sifted at all.
“Gael. Will you obey Lord Carbraes?”
Gael frowned. “What?”
“The regenen ordered you to destroy the gong. Are you going to do it?” She felt impatient with his slowness.
“Oh.”
“You must not,” she insisted.
Gael’s vague gaze grew sharp. “I made the mistake of allowing events – and people – to hurry me. I will not make that mistake again.”
“You’ll delay then?” she probed.
“No. I will think, and then I will decide my next step.”
“Gael –”
He interrupted her. “Keir. Stop.”
She bit her lip. She had to get him to agree to a delay. The second trial of the cursed gong had gone as wrong as could be – she swallowed down another incipient sob – but the boost the gong’s lodestone could give to a healer’s abilities was too valuable to sacrifice needlessly. It seemed she was a healer still, despite her truldemagar, despite the truldemagar of her patients. She could not bear to lose something so potentially useful, something that could never be replaced once it was destroyed.
She took a deep in-breath and forced her voice to come out steady. “If you do decide to destroy it, will you consult me before you do so? Please?” The last word escaped her control.
Gael’s eyes darkened. “I will promise nothing.” He read her too well. She had wanted him to promise. But Gael clung to reason when the world went topsy-turvy, precisely because he knew himself vulnerable to emotion. She knew this. She must approach him reasonably, logically. Which was her usual approach. A healer had to stay cool in the midst of turmoil, lest she make some grave error. As she had with Dreas.
Stop it, Keir, she told herself. Now, more than ever she must hold to clear thinking. She could not afford to become mired in guilt or grief.
“I do not ask you to promise,” she said. And she hadn’t, no matter how much she had wanted him to. “I ask you to consider rationally, and to weigh the loss of the good that must accompany the riddance of the bad.”
Before Gael could answer, a knock sounded on her door and Medicus Piar entered, tidy and efficient.
Keir’s concern for the fate of the gong evaporated abruptly for a nearer concern: if the physician examined her thoroughly, as a responsible physician should, he would discover the secret of her gender very quickly.
She glanced at Gael, silently willing him to perceive the danger.
He nodded back, and she admired the adroitness with which he guided Piar into checking her skull – bruised, but no more, the skin not even broken – and her eyes and reflexes and coordination. No feeling of the limbs, no tapping of the internal organs.
She was safe.
Piar prescribed an herbal draft, administered it, and then left her to rest.
“Shall I take over this evening’s tallying?” Gael asked her.
She hesitated, checking the sensations in her body. The bruises at her hip and shoulder had joined the throbbing of her head, but her weakness was passing. With a little sleep – and Pater had taught her how to catnap at will; a healer sometimes had long nights – she’d feel stronger still. “No. No, I’m feeling much better. Will you send a messenger to wake me when it is time?” Her lips twitched as she remembered when their roles had been reversed, Gael the injured one, and she the one urging care and caution. Did he perceive her as being as unreasonable as she had deemed him to be then?
His eyes narrowed. “You’ll lie abed and send the messenger back, if you discover that you need more rest,” he requested.
“I will,” she answered.
He nodded and stood. “Then I’ll leave you.”
At the door, he paused. “And Keir?”
She lifted a brow, trying not to show how shaken she remained.
“I promise to think over my decision regarding the gong most carefully.”
She knew she could trust him to do that. Gael would not have hurried to Belzetarn’s high terrace with the gong, nor allowed her to do so, had he faced that decision at any time other than the moment after his personal miracle – the restoration of his drifting nodes to their origin points. Gael would not have killed Dreas by accident.
She slept before she could cry.
* * *
Gael hated to leave her.
Stepping from the light airiness of her chamber into the close stones of the Regenen Stair was like exchanging the pleasure gardens of Hadorgol for its catacombs. Except that the tunnels among Hadorgol’s tombs were superior to any place inhabited by trolls. But that wasn’t the cause of his reluctance. He wanted to assure himself that she did, in fact, sleep. That she didn’t brood. Dreas’ death was a terrible thing, and Gael could tell that Keir had not accepted his assertion that she was not at fault. She held herself to blame.
He’d wanted to stay and argue her into letting him shoulder the responsibility, but she needed rest. And she could not sleep and listen while he gave voice to his persuasions. He would talk with her later. When it was time to send that messenger to wake her, he’d go himself.
In the meantime, he needed to see how Arnoll’s preparations were proceeding. And he needed to decide what in Cayim’s hells he would do with that ill-fated gong. He pondered the matter as he descended the spiraling steps, down and down and down.
He understood Keir’s point of view. She was more a healer than she’d ever been a notary. He felt that in his bones as he’d not before. Indeed, he felt it literally, with his repositioned nodes tugging his inner framework to greater strength because of Keir’s
work upon him.
He and Keir had wondered if the lodestone, embedded within the gong’s central boss, would still multiply a mage’s – or a healer’s – energea, the way it had before it was so embedded. Well, it did. They’d learned that thoroughly today, although at great cost.
Of course Keir would wish to heal others as she had healed him. And who was he to deny her the tool that would permit this? Who was he to deny others ailing that relief?
He almost had to accede to Keir’s wishes.
And yet.
How many others would die – or be seriously injured – as they learned the lodestone’s parameters, as they discovered what else might go wrong and how to avoid it? Already Carbraes had lost someone irreplaceable. The regenen would never again find a friend so dear, a friend he’d known from boyhood. Never again would Dreas eat beside Carbraes, sit beside him on the terrace, walk with him on the ramparts. That was the personal loss. The military loss was just as great. Who now would lead Carbraes’ legions?
Gael dodged along one of the balconies over the middle place of arms to the Lake Stair, wanting to emerge directly into the armor smithy, not the blade smithy. One of the opteogints was training, hacking at the butts with much shouting and clanging.
Keir’s dream of healing trolls was worthy, but she might kill more than she healed in pursuit of it. Searing memory brought Carbraes’ grief-ravaged face before Gael again. Hope was not the same as certain, reliable results. And if Gael were to decide that Keir was right, what then? He’d been given a direct order by his regenen. Along with a dire consequence should he fail to obey. How could he preserve Keir’s lodestone, if Carbraes executed him forthwith? A dead guardian was no guardian at all.
Leave it, he told himself. Let it settle. Your thoughts will clear if you don’t keep stirring them.
The glow of the forges in the dim vaults of the smithies, the smell of hot metal and burning charcoal, and the ringing of hammers comforted him when he strode out of the passage from the Lake Stair, but the rhythm of the smiths was subtly different. They had that finishing-up-the-last-project rush that should come later in the day. Arnoll had obviously succeeded in adjusting the schedule as required.
“All well here?” Gael asked as the armor smith bustled up.
Arnoll grimaced. “I thought the regenen had placed a guard on that damned thing.”
Gael’s heart skipped a beat. Had the gong’s resonance, when Uwen and Adarn dropped it, penetrated all the way from the tower top to the smithies?
“Were there injuries?” Gael demanded. Tiamar, he hoped not. Please not.
“We were lucky,” said Arnoll. “None this time, but why in Cayim’s hells was the gong out of your locked storeroom?”
Gael met Arnoll’s gaze warningly. “Not here,” he said.
Arnoll grunted. “Half the smiths and scullions want to watch tomorrow as we destroy the thing. The other half are requesting leave to visit Errkaleku” – an outlying camp – “so that they can be as far away as possible when we do the deed.” Arnoll snorted. “I can’t say I blame them.”
Gael checked a nod. “They have reason,” he murmured.
Arnoll peered at him searchingly. “Oh?”
“Not now,” Gael reiterated.
“Mm.” Arnoll scanned the area. “The smiths are wrapping up, as you can see. We’ll be using the blade smithy on the morrow, since Olix’s forge burns the hottest. I’ll have the scullions carry down one of the cedar tubs from the bailey sauna later.”
“We’ll be ready?” asked Gael.
“We’ll be ready,” Arnoll confirmed.
“Do you need anything from me? Anything that I can do?”
The smith’s lips quirked. “No. Go check on Nathiar.”
Gael repressed a smile. Arnoll was quite right, of course. The magus was his next destination.
A flicker of movement on the far side of the armor smithy, at the tunnel to the Cliff Stair, caught Gael’s eye. He frowned. No one used that stairway at this time of day. Did some troll playing truant from his proper duties lurk there? Watching others at work while one sat idle was always a popular pastime.
Gael leaned in close to Arnoll, muttering, “There’s a lurker spying on your smithy – or on us. I’m going to feint toward the annealing smithy and catch him.” He didn’t care about a shirker, but a spy . . . was another matter.
Arnoll’s brows rose. “The sooner we finish this business, the better.”
“Send word to me, if you encounter any hitch,” said Gael.
Arnoll nodded. “I’ll start the bladesmithy’s forge heating in the morning and send a boy to fetch you, another to bring Nathiar, when it is time to begin the real work.”
Gael clapped his friend on the shoulder – “Good” – and stepped away.
“Gael?” Arnoll called after him.
Gael paused.
“Get a night of sound sleep.”
Gael nodded, and moved off, threading his way among the anvils and counters toward the neighboring smithy. The various decanens greeted him as he passed. He smiled and waved, appreciative of their goodwill.
In the annealing smithy, he headed for the back wall. The annealing smith – a gruff troll with short black hair – followed him.
“My lord Secretarius, how may I help you?”
“Just passing through, Savren,” Gael reassured him.
The smith faded back as Gael reached the tower wall. Gael edged along it, glad of the massive pier that hid the opening of the passage to the Cliff Stair. If a troll did indeed lurk there, Gael could not see him. But neither could he see Gael.
Gael eased around the stone pier.
Right into the hunter standing in its shadow. He was a hunter, clearly, with his leather breeches, soft-soled knee-high boots, and the game bag across his back. He did not belong here. And knew it, too. He scrambled backward from the mild impact of Gael’s shoulder, hastening for the deeper refuge of the tunnel.
Gael put all of his authority into a low command. “Stop. Right. Now.”
The troll broke into a run, swift on his quiet footfalls, breaking into the light shed by a trio of arrowslits at the base of the stairwell.
Hells! The last thing Gael wanted was a chase, but only guilt would impel flight under the circumstances, and Gael needed to know if that guilt concerned the gong or the preparations in train for its subdual.
He pitched his voice to carry, still low, because he preferred not to involve the smithy scullions.
“You do not want me asking after you at the hunters’ lodge. Stop. Now.”
One foot on the lowest step, the troll halted abruptly, his whole carriage sagging. He turned as Gael came up to him, showing a visage twisted with fright, but showing no signs of the truldemagar: nose straight, eyes clear, skin firm. Was he human after all? A Ghriana spy disguised as a hunter? Gael frowned.
“Why were you spying on the armor smithy?” he asked.
The hunter’s lips parted, then shut as his jaw bunched.
Gael came closer, breathed, “I will know.”
The hunter hunched. “Wasn’t,” he mumbled.
“The bailey and the woods are the hunters’ preserve. Why are you in the tower?”
“I – I – I –”
Was that a wobble in the hunter’s voice? He couldn’t be a Ghriana spy. No spy would be so unprepared, nor so unnerved. Gael opened his inner vision to be sure – he was getting quite practiced at doing so in the flow of events – wanting to check the hunter’s nodes. That the nodes were adrift was immediately obvious, but Gael’s attention fastened on the anomaly sparkling on the hunter’s right hand.
Smeared across the curling arcs and demi-nodes was a lace of very familiar energea: the lattice left by Gael in a hidey-hole in the wall of a clogged latrine.
Gael’s own hand thrust out to grip the hunter’s bony wrist. “Open your inner sight,” he growled.
The hunter flinched, but his eyelids fluttered shut and his breathing slowed. In. Out. In. It took him
a while. Gael watched the dust motes spiraling in the diffuse light from the arrow slits. The sounds from the smithies were muffled here at the foundations of the Cliff Stair.
The hunter’s eyes flew open. “What – where – how did that –?” he stuttered.
Gael smiled sourly. “I found the two ingots of bronze you stole. I replaced them in the vaults where they belong. And I left a . . . trap . . . in their place.”
So. One of his loose ends had come home to roost at a most inopportune time. He’d not precisely forgotten the matter of the theft, but all his focus lay elsewhere, gathered to cope with the gong and its complications. He did not welcome this intrusion of the older problem, but he could hardly neglect it in this moment.
“What is your name?” he demanded, still gripping the hunter’s wrist.
“H – Halko,” faltered the hunter.
Gael studied him. Halko’s build was slight and lean, his coloring dark. He might have seemed fierce had he not been shaking.
“You stole twice and looked to steal again this evening,” mused Gael. “Why? You are not a thief by nature.”
Halko swallowed, but did not answer.
“Someone forced you to it,” continued Gael, tallying the clues. “And that someone would have to be the castellanum.” It could be no one else.
Halko’s eyes widened. “How did you – how did you –?”
“I’ve been piecing this puzzle together for some time now,” said Gael. “I have nearly the full pattern of it, I believe. Suppose you help me with the last details.”
“What will happen to me?” asked Halko, his anxiety in no way abated.
“That depends” – Gael paused, the better to intimidate the troll – “on how much you help me and how well you convince me that I can trust you to follow my subsequent orders.” If he could dominate his thief through force of manner, he would not need to resort to harsher measures.
“I’ll – I’ll tell you everything,” stammered Halko.
“I think you will,” drawled Gael.
Halko’s nervous glance darted down the passage to the smithies.
Gael let the hunter’s wrist go. “Walk with me,” he said, starting up the stairs at an easy pace.
The Tally Master Page 34
