The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8)

by P. C. Hodgell

  Spring 60—Summer 15

  I

  AS THEY TRUDGED ACROSS the muddy former garden, Jame glanced up at the keep, oldest of Gothregor’s structures, which stood between the inner ward and the forecourt of the Women’s Halls. Light streamed through the surviving stained-glass windows of the third-floor Council Chamber. Tori must be entertaining the Karkinoran emissaries. A dark silhouette stood framed by the central panel that depicted the Knorth’s rathorn crest. Jame knew instinctively that it was her brother. Was he watching them pass below, hungry and tired, driven out of his hall? She almost called out to him, but choked back the words. He seemed to wait a moment, then turned and retreated into the chamber’s interior.

  Feeling miserable, she plodded on. Ever since she had returned to Rathillien, fleeing the Master’s House and Perimal Darkling, her one goal had been to rejoin her twin brother. They belonged together. Even as squabbling children, she had known that, and thought that he did too. Since her return, however, he had pushed her away again and again, and Kindrie too: She had learned that the Shanir healer was still at Mount Alban, apparently in no hurry to return.

  Someone’s stomach growled. The others chuckled, but Jame knew they must all feel just as hungry. What kind of a leader was she, who couldn’t keep her own troops fed?

  Their quarters were located in the thickness of the outer wall, a long, narrow chamber with cots lining one wall and windows the other, overlooking the inner ward. As they entered, Jorin’s ears pricked. Jame’s quarters were at the far end of the hall, set off by a wooden partition. The ounce disappeared through its doorway. When Jame caught up with him, he was under her bed, all but for the tip of his twitching tail. From beneath the frame came a muffled shriek.

  Brier moved quickly past her, with Damson a pace behind her. Picking up the bed by its head and foot, they swung it away from the wall. All the cadets stood in the doorway, staring at the figure curled up on the floor, trying to fend off the ounce’s inquisitive nose and dabbing paw.

  “Jorin, back.”

  Jame helped the girl to her feet. She was dressed, or rather almost undressed, in a welter of white ribbons, the fashionable sleeping attire of a young Highborn lady. A lacy mask shadowed rather than concealed her face.

  “Why, Lyra, I didn’t know that you were at Gothregor.”

  Caldane’s young daughter surged forward, tripped over a stray ribbon, and fell into Jame’s arms, jolting her sore shoulder and almost knocking her over. As she steadied them both, she nodded to Brier over the girl’s shoulder. The Southron cadet withdrew from the tiny room and discreetly shut the door after her. Jame sank down on the displaced bed, still holding Lyra.

  The young Highborn was almost in tears.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!” she cried. “Everything has been so dull here, until now. I’ve been in the Women’s Halls all spring. Kallystine says I must learn how to be a proper lady, but I want to be like you and have adventures!”

  Kallystine had once been Torisen’s limited-term consort, before one of her potions had backfired and withered her face. Jame hadn’t heard anything more about her over the past two years.

  “Great-grandma Cattila is ill,” explained Lyra, looking suddenly doleful. “Sister Kallystine has taken over her duties until she’s better.”

  The Caineron Matriarch was possibly the oldest woman Jame had ever met, short of the Earth Wife herself, who sometimes acted as Cattila’s spy, or Ear. At her age, she might well be dying. Kallystine must be back in her father’s favor to have claimed the matriarch’s role, even temporarily.

  “That still doesn’t explain why you were hiding under my bed,” she said.

  Lyra’s expression changed again, stricken by sudden recollection. She gripped Jame’s arms, making her wince. “They’re coming! They’re coming! Oh, please don’t let them take me away! I was so miserable there, until you rescued me, with only Gricki for company. The Prince was kind, but I hardly ever saw him. And then he changed.”

  Jame sorted this out. “Gricki” had been Lyra’s half-breed servant in the palace at Karkinaroth, before she, Jame, had accidentally bound him and given him a new name. Graykin was still in Kothifir, acting as her spy-master. The hapless prince had been Odalian, whose place the changer Tirandys had taken before the battle at the Cataracts.

  “You’re afraid that the new prince’s agents mean to take you back to Karkinaroth.”

  “Why else are they here? When they came through before, going north, they brought me all sorts of pretty trinkets, but they talked over my head to the Matriarchs as if I were a child or an idiot. How Karidia smirked and simpered. Everything must be just as dear Kallystine desires. Oh, she made me so mad!”

  The Coman lord was part Caineron. Karidia, the Coman Matriarch, clearly believed that any additional alliance or favor done to that powerful house reflected some of its glory onto tiny Kraggen Keep, her own home. She was about as annoying a person as Jame had ever met, like a small dog that wouldn’t stop yapping.

  “Have you heard from your father that he’s made a new contract for you?”

  Lyra sniffled. “Why would he tell me? You know how Highborn ladies get passed around, like sweets after dinner. It shouldn’t be that way, should it?”

  “Of course not. Still, there’s something odd about all of this.”

  Someone tapped on the door. “Ten, Five says that there’s a bunch of people headed this way,” said Erim, outside, keeping his voice low. “She thinks one of them is the Coman Matriarch.”

  Lyra gave a little shriek. “Oh, she knows I’m here! I thought I was so clever, sneaking out, but I must have been seen. Don’t let her have me! Oh, please!”

  Jame held her, thinking. She couldn’t deny that Lyra was here—that would be a lie, the death of honor. There wasn’t a back way to smuggle her out, either. Refuse to hand her over? The Coman had no right to a Caineron, whatever Karidia thought, but then neither did a Knorth. At the least, it would cause a fracas, and then Tori would have to get involved. She didn’t want to meet her brother again under such conditions.

  Someone knocked on the dormitory’s outer door. Then came a pause, then a barrage of petulant rapping, then Brier’s steady, courteous voice.

  “Matriarch. To what do we owe this honor?”

  “I know that chit is here. Produce her at once!”

  “What chit?”

  “Lyra Lack-wit, as if you didn’t know!”

  “Why should a Caineron be in the Knorth barracks?”

  “Because she idolizes that hoyden your lord has been fool enough to make his lordan. A disgrace to all Highborn ladies, that wretched girl. Everyone knows that all Knorth are mad, and you were fool enough to desert the Caineron for them. For shame, you turn-collar! Now let me pass!”

  Yap, yap, yap.

  Jame could almost see the Coman Matriarch stomping an impatient foot on the threshold—something not so easily done given her tight underskirt. With luck, she would fall over.

  Lyra was clinging to her. “Don’t let her take me. Oh please, don’t! Something bad is going to happen tonight. I just know it!”

  Jame made up her mind.

  “Lyra, be quiet,” she said, giving the girl a shake. “Listen. This is what we’re going to do.”

  II

  BRIER HELD HER POSITION, patiently blocking the door while the plump little matriarch shouted up into her face. Over Karidia’s head, she regarded the Coman guards who had accompanied her from the Women’s Halls. They were all female, of course, and singularly blank of expression. What would they do if their mistress ordered them to invade the Knorth barracks? Brier knew what she would do if they tried and silently told them so, eye to eye.

  A rustle of cloth made her look over her shoulder just as a slim figure muffled in a hooded cloak slipped forward between the watching cadets. Gloved hands held the garment shut. White ribbons fluttered around its hem.

  Brier raised an eyebrow, but stepped politely out of the way.

  Karidia poun
ced upon her prey and led her away with a tight grip on her arm, scolding incessantly.

  III

  “. . . AND STAY THERE!”

  The bedroom door closed, the lock clicked. Karidia yapped some more through the keyhole, then went away.

  Jame let the cloak drop to the floor. She was fairly sure that Lyra’s bed clothes shouldn’t be wrapped so haphazardly around her or tied with such hasty, clumsy knots, but there hadn’t been much time for finesse. Doubtless Lyra had maids to help her in such matters of dress, but Karidia had sent them all away, leaving only a few candles lit against the coming night. Jame tugged at a loop, which came apart in her hand. She felt like a badly wrapped package, and more naked than if she had been stripped to the skin.

  Lyra’s quarters were full of expensive trinkets and luxurious appointments, as one would expect for the daughter of a rich house. Jame wandered about it, examining a handful of gems casually scattered across the top of a dressing table, a golden bird that ruffled metallic feathers as she passed, and a bent silver flute. Lyra would appear to be an impatient student of music. Likewise, a pack of gen cards with simpering images had been thrown into one corner and dismembered clothes into another—attempts, it seemed, to transform court dresses into divided skirts such as the Brandan Matriarch wore, to the chagrin of her colleagues.

  Jame wondered what she was doing here. Short of turning Lyra over to Karidia, it was the only solution that had come immediately to mind. True, in the morning the ruse would be exposed unless she escaped during the night, but that would only postpone the hunt.

  More than that, though, she felt that there was something odd about Lyra’s sudden contract, if indeed there was one. Surely Karidia would have mentioned it. A prospective bride hiding under a bed should have provoked some comment, assuming that the matriarch was sharp enough to see the irony.

  However, if Lyra was right . . .

  The curse of the girl’s position in the Women’s Halls was that there was no Caineron Matriarch to protect her, even less so if Cattila was sick at home and the reins had fallen to Kallystine. The Matriarchs collaborated on some things, but each was primarily out to profit her own house. When Jame had been an inmate of the halls over that terrible winter three years ago, of course there had been no Knorth Matriarch nor even any other Knorth ladies to support her. She had been put entirely in Kallystine’s power with the aim, she guessed, that she be baited into showing the worst of her nature. The sudden appearance of a mysterious Highborn Knorth must have alarmed the Matriarchs, given what the Kencyrath had suffered from that house during her father’s reign as highlord.

  In the end, though, it was Kallystine who had betrayed herself.

  Jame touched her cheek. Through Lyra’s dainty mask she would feel the scar left by Kallystine’s razor-ring. There had been fears, at the time, that such a vicious, unprovoked attack would lead to a blood feud between the Knorth and the Caineron, but subsequent events had over-shadowed the injury. Jame herself seldom thought about it. She had never been nor expected to be a beauty, so why fret?

  But Lyra was so young, so innocent, so vulnerable, and no favorite of her older half-sister.

  Well, she would sort things out in the morning. Perhaps the Jaran Matriarch Trishien would tell her what was going on, or even the Brandan Brenwyr, if she was in residence.

  Jame tried Lyra’s bed, but it was so soft that she felt swallowed by it. Instead, she chose a white bear skin on the hearth and curled up on it under her cloak.

  Uneasy sleep led to dreams. Someone lay under the cloak with her, back to back. Tori, she thought. They had always fitted together, whatever posture they took. Her long, black hair flowed over her shoulders and down his chest, now as it had then when as a child Tori had sometimes wrapped himself in it. Shifting tension on her scalp told her that he was fingering its ends. It felt as if they had been arguing for hours, in circles.

  “. . . what do you know of leadership?” he was saying. “You may be a randon cadet, but whenever you can, you’ve handed over your duties to someone else—Brier Iron-thorn at Tentir, Marigold Onyx-eyed at Kothifir. You’ve missed many lessons, once twenty days of them at a time. You’re always running off, Perimal only knows where, leaving your ten-command, your entire house, to fend for themselves. No wonder the randon question your competence, or at least your commitment.”

  They did? With a sinking heart, she remembered that tomorrow was Summer’s Day, when her fate for the next year would be decided. When Tori would decide it.

  “You had Tentir. I would have given anything for that. And you threw it away.”

  Tug.

  “I did not! Anyway, there are other things besides lessons and barracks duties.” She tried not to sound defensive, wanting to turn the conversation. “And I seem to be the only one doing anything about them. ‘Fear the One, await the Three, seek the Four,’ or so the Arrin-ken say.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Tug.

  Had she explained this to him before? He had so much power over her, but knowledge was power too, and she hadn’t shared everything she knew or guessed. Perhaps, if she did, she could break through this new, strange barrier between them.

  “You know the Four,” she said, “or at least you saw the Burnt Man once, at Kithorn, and you met the Earth Wife in her lodge. She was the one hanging by her feet from the rafters while I tried to jar her molten fat back into place. The other two are the Falling Man and the Eaten One. The Arrin-ken went looking for them. The Dark Judge has some sort of an alliance with the Burnt Man, Mother Ragga is friends with the Caineron Matriarch, and Timmon’s half-brother Drie got swallowed by his lover, the Eaten One. I’ve encountered all four, but don’t really have an understanding with any of them. To them, the Kencyrath is as much an invader as Perimal Darkling. They speak for Rathillien, but in a confused way. Each was an individual who found him- or herself cast into one of these roles according to the nature of their imminent deaths when our temples activated on this world.”

  “Are you saying that we created them?”

  He sounded dubious, and a bit scornful. Jame began to regret telling him anything.

  Tug.

  “Ow. Tori, stop it. In a sense we did, the way that the uncontrolled power of our temples made the New Pantheon gods possible, except that the Four rose out of the Old Pantheon, the gods worshipped on Rathillien before we came.”

  “This is getting complicated. I imagine that the Three are the Tyr-ridan, who speak for our own wretched god, or will when they deign to show up.”

  Jame gulped. “Tori, there are three of us Knorth now. I—I think I’m a potential nemesis, about to become Destruction incarnate.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all. Then who, pray tell, is the One?”

  She noted that he skipped over the other two potential Tyr-ridan, Creation and Preservation. However, a nervous tremor ran through him. That was unusual, as she knew from their childhood when they had often shared a bed. This was a dream. They had often shared those as well. Something more was going on this time, though, and that made her increasingly uneasy.

  “The One is the Voice of Perimal Darkling, which Gerridon is under pressure to become,” she said, all the time testing the link between them. They were currently in the dreamscape. Dared she probe beneath that to the soulscape? The thought made her shudder. Just keep talking. “You see, the Master is running out of Kencyr souls to maintain the immortality he gained by betraying us all during the Fall. Perimal Darkling will sustain his eternal life if he agrees to speak for it, but that also means being consumed by the shadows.”

  Torisen twitched again. In her mind, his voice began to take on a peculiar undertone, as if someone sought to speak with or through him. “The randon say he led the Karnids against Kothifir. Why is he still fighting for Perimal Darkling if he doesn’t want to serve it?”

  “It isn’t quite like that. He will do anything to avoid paying for the Fall. You talked to him when you were a boy serving i
n Kothifir, didn’t you? You know he has no honor or conscience. He wants Rathillien and the Kencyrath for himself, to make a stand against the shadows. He will sacrifice anything and anyone to obtain that goal.”

  “Then there are three forces: the Three-faced God, Perimal Darkling, and Rathillien. Each is seeking its own voice, its own manifestations.”

  “Yes. It will come down to individuals acting for greater powers. Oh, Tori, don’t you see? It all seemed so far away, so long in coming, but come it will, soon, and we aren’t ready!”

  He laughed, with a sob caught on his voice.

  The undernote swelled into a throaty, avid whisper.

  “Foolish, foolish child. As if it were given to you of all people to know the truth. Oh!”

  And Tori’s voice returned, half strangled.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up! What good is that, or anything else, if the Kencyrath falls apart first? It needs a strong leader. Now. Father says . . . Father says . . . you will destroy me if you can. Destruction begins with love. I love . . . I love . . . no! I refuse to be driven mad or to harm my sister. I refuse to listen.”

  “What? Tori, stop it! You’re hurting me!” He had wrenched at her hair, jerking her head back. She clutched it to ease the strain.

  “The door is shut, the door is shut!” he cried, pulling harder.

  They twisted face to face. His hands were knotted in her hair; she barely restrained hers from clawing through his beard, into his eyes. Wake up, wake up, wake up . . .

  And so abruptly she did, alone, tangled in the cloak, cold with sweat.

  IV

  THE ROOM WAS DARK, the candles burned out. It took Jame a moment to remember where she was. Parts of the dream were already beginning to fade, as tightly as she tried to hold on to them. Something important had happened—hadn’t it?—but what? Oh, schist.

  “A dream,” she muttered. “It was only a dream.”

  But something had woken her. A sound. The soft click of a key in a lock.

  The air currents in the room changed. Feet shuffled. Several muffled figures had entered the apartment and now loomed over her.