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

by P. C. Hodgell

  A small clot of darkness marked a figure standing on the main way, outside a family compound. Like all the rest in the fortress, its door was shut, the courtyard and house behind it dark. There was a slight movement, as if of a pale fist rising and falling.

  . . . tap, tap, tap . . .

  Was that cry “Let me in,” or “Let me out”?

  Kindrie glanced at Oreq, who shrugged. As an inmate of the college, he probably knew very little about what happened outside of it.

  A point of candlelight appeared in the courtyard. The street door opened a crack. The slight figure was pushed aside by a rush of men who had been concealed by shadows on the other side of the street. The candle jerked back and fell, extinguishing. Someone cried in protest or pain, perhaps both, a sound as quickly subdued as the light. The men emerged and shut the door softly behind them. Already, the first figure had drifted on like a sleepwalker to another door and was again raising its fist.

  . . . tap, tap, tap . . .

  That nightmare summons.

  The man in green stared up at this mysterious performance. Wilden was in trouble, and he was Randiroc, the absent Randir Heir, driven out by Rawneth, who had chosen after randon training at Tentir to live his life as a solitary in the wilderness, migrating as the seasons decreed with a flight of carnivorous butterflies. Still, this had been his home, and he was still, at some level, responsible for its inhabitants. No wonder he had been drawn here at this time. Then too, however, he was also responsible for these children who had been the guests of his fickle house.

  Everyone held his breath.

  Randiroc sighed, turned Mirah back to the road, and cantered off. The others followed.

  V

  AFTER THAT, it was a long, slowly traveled night. By himself, even Kindrie could have made better time, but confinement in the college without exercise had weakened the boys, and Loof complained at every jolt. All that had saved them from pursuit so far was that the ostlers had probably spent the night quaking behind their door, as had every other surviving inhabitant of Wilden.

  Birds began to chirp as false dawn lightened the eastern sky. Across the Silver, the randon college of Tentir came into view.

  “I’m tired,” whined Loof, “and hungry.”

  So was Kindrie. No doubt, everyone else among the fugitives felt the same, although no one else complained.

  “Would Tentir give us sanctuary?” he asked Randiroc.

  The Randir Lordan regarded the college, only just visible in the growing light. He had trained there. He was one of the elite who had earned his randon’s collar on his own merits, before the growing peculiarities of his Shanir blood and Rawneth’s ambition had made him an outcast.

  “A Coman is commandant there now,” he said.

  Kindrie didn’t understand the intricacies of randon politics. Jame had told him that house alliances weren’t supposed to matter at the college, but they did. The Coman were aligned to the Caineron, who in turn were allies of the Randir. The current commandant might well convince himself that these runaways were Wilden’s problem, to be held until reclaimed.

  “Wait here,” said the green man, and rode off across the bridge.

  “Aren’t we going, too?” asked Loof, his lower lip beginning to tremble.

  “You said you were tired,” Kindrie told him. “Rest while you can.”

  They had all dismounted. Kindrie sat down and slumped against a tree trunk with Spot’s reins looped around his wrist and the twins curled up in warm lumps on either side of him. He only meant to rest his eyes and jolted bones. It seemed mere moments later that he woke with a start to find Randiroc standing over him. The Heir had brought back baskets full of food. He must have bypassed the commandant altogether, Kindrie thought fuzzily, and gone straight to the kitchens where the staff would have denied him nothing.

  Oreq sat up, rubbed his eyes, and looked around.

  “Where’s Loof?” he asked sharply.

  True enough, the younger acolyte and his horse were gone, probably on their way back to Wilden. They might meet Rawneth’s agents on the road. If not, their arrival back at the Randir keep would surely spread the alarm.

  “Eat as you ride,” said Randiroc, distributing loaves of fresh bread, cold meat pies, and creamy cheese.

  He put Timtom (or was it Tomtim?) in the saddle before him while Kindrie did the same with his twin, and the three horses set off at a fast trot. Most of the food either jounced out of the riders’ hands or smashed against their lips—a messy feast, but the best Kindrie thought he had ever tasted. The growling in his stomach subsided and new strength began to flow into his tired limbs. It was a race now. What might happen to the boys if they were caught was probably nothing compared to his fate, much less that of Randiroc, whom Rawneth had so long pursued.

  The River Road wound back and forth, sometimes following the course of the Silver, sometimes cutting across a meadow when the river wandered off absentmindedly into convoluted meander-loops as it had between Shadow Rock and Wilden. The weather had turned clear and bright again. Early color daubed some of the foliage and a few host-trees launched their leaves into the air as they passed. Kindrie thought at first that the latter explained the sudden dapples on Mirah’s rump, then realized that the Heir’s attendant flight of jewel jaws had caught up with him. These were a special breed called “crown jewels,” whose wings took the hue of any surface upon which they rested. Mirah was stained a mottled green with a touch of harvest gold and dashes of scarlet. The carrion butterflies chose this last to imitate, spangling her flanks as if with fluttering spots of blood.

  Toward midday, Kindrie shared the fragments of a pigeon pie with the little boy sharing his saddle. No one suggested that they stop. Even so, they weren’t going as fast as they should. In bypassing the Tentir post station, they had foregone fresh mounts. These would run until they dropped, but no one wanted that, nor to be caught on foot.

  Late afternoon brought them under a range of cliffs with foothills that ran down almost to the river. Kindrie recognized the approach to Mount Alban, which itself was carved out of the cliff face. That, even, might be the college’s square observation deck, barely peeking over the intervening hills.

  “Horses,” said Randiroc.

  From the sound of them, they were coming fast up the road, already too close to out-ride. Then they rounded a curve. There were eight of them, seven mounted on black mares with wicked red-eyes and red rimmed, flaring nostrils. Cruel bits forced their jaws wide open so that they bared sharp, white teeth against the slanting light and each other. Jame had told Kindrie about such creatures, the vicious offsprings of mares and rathorn stallions. Thorns, she had called them. They were the favorite mounts of the Karnids in the Southern Wastes. What were these doing here, in Rawneth’s possession?

  The eighth equine was a stumbling, lathered post horse with Loof clinging to its back.

  “But I am loyal to our lady,” he was protesting. “I only want to go home!”

  The oncomers slowed, seeing their prey at bay before them.

  The Heir handed Kindrie the other twin. “Run,” he said, and rode forward to meet them.

  Their leader advanced a few steps and stopped. Her smile was as white and sharp as that of the beast on which she rode, it being the practice of Rawneth’s favored servants to file their teeth to cannibal points.

  “Well, well,” she said. “The Pretender. Lady Rawneth will be so pleased to see you.” Her eyes raised to Kindrie, her smile deepening. “And her favorite plaything, too. Tell me, little priestling, do you still scream in the night? Do you still cry? Shall we see?”

  Kindrie fidgeted with the reins, then gave up. It was stupid perhaps—probably—but he couldn’t leave Randiroc to face these people on his own. He slid down off Spot, leaving the twins astride, wobbling as his saddle-sore legs took the strain.

  “Take them to Mount Alban,” he told Oreq. “Send back help.”

  “You still finger paint, I see,” remarked the Randir, regarding
Mirah’s colorful coat. “And keep company with those winged vermin. A man of such talents, all of them worthless. What would your father say?”

  It occurred to Kindrie that he had no idea who the Heir’s father was. Presumably the previous Lord Randir. How, then, had Rawneth shoehorned her own son into power?

  Small, cold fingers gripped his hands to the left, to the right. Looking down on the twins’ white shocks of hair, he realized that while he had heard two horses clatter away, he hadn’t checked to see who rode them.

  Despair gripped him, followed by a spasm of nausea. Superb fighter though he was, Randiroc couldn’t defeat so many enemies on such mounts before help came, if it did. He was about to trade his life and the future of his house for a straggle of Knorth, three barely of the blood, the fourth widely considered to be a bastard.

  Kindrie’s gut convulsed again.

  Oh no, he thought. Not now.

  It look him a moment to correct the situation. When he looked up again, it was to see the thorns shifting uneasily. Tail after tail jerked up and liquid filth poured down. Their riders hardly looked more comfortable, but with no such convenient way to relieve themselves. Then Kindrie saw that the paving stones of the River Road were breaking up and sinking as the ground liquefied under the thorns’ hooves.

  The twins’ fingers trembled in his grip. Somehow, they were doing this . . . with his help?

  Purge, he remembered a old healer telling him, with that smug smile of an elder imparting divine wisdom on a junior, who probably wouldn’t have the sense to profit from it. It’s good for the body as well as for the soul.

  The Randir leader spurred forward with a hoarse cry, breaking free of the soil’s hold, bearing down on Mirah. The mare wheeled out of the way. She and her rider seemed to be exempt from the general scourge, and lucky for them that they were as the thorn turned with frightening speed and launched herself back at them, fangs bared. She ran into a rising cloud of jewel-jaws. Blinded, maddened, the thorn bucketed off across the adjacent meadow, throwing her rider in the process.

  The others had sunk up to their necks in what was fast becoming a quivering midden.

  “Now that,” said a rough voice behind Kindrie, “is something . . . one doesn’t often see.”

  The haunt singer Ashe stood there leaning on her iron-shod staff while other scrollsmen and women, former randon all, panted up behind her.

  “You should go on . . . to the college,” said Ashe. “It seems that we . . . are still needed here.”

  “Take me with you!” Loof cried. He appeared to be standing on his saddle, his poor post horse having sunk completely beneath him.

  Randiroc looked down at him. “No,” he said, with the flicker of a smile. “You stink.”

  VI

  “ASHE HAS THREATENED to make a song about it,” said Kirien, refilling Kindrie’s wine glass. She laughed at his horrified expression. “She was joking. Probably.”

  They were sharing a late supper in her Mount Alban quarters. It had taken some time and much debate (all loud, meant to be overheard) as to whether the Randir intruders should be rescued or left to stew in their own excrement. Then it had taken even longer to extricate them. The thorns had fought like demons and terrorized the draft horses brought to haul them out of the muck, admittedly at the risk of throttling them. Meanwhile, the lead Randir’s mount had escaped into the hills, a promise of future trouble. Relationships between the Jaran and the Randir would not be . . . er . . . fragrant for some time to come, as Ashe put it, although she was probably the only one who hadn’t suffered from the stench.

  So far, it had been a somewhat prickly meal.

  “You ran away again?” Kirien had asked, on hearing of his hasty departure from Gothregor. As he had blurted out his story, however, she had become intrigued by the bake-master’s tale and by the technique Kindrie had used to deduce how hay-cough had spread to so much of the fortress.

  “It never occurred to me that the physical frame could be so altered by soul manipulation,” she said thoughtfully about the former. “That presents all sorts of interesting possibilities. If you explained it to Rowan, though, I trust that she will repeat your reasoning to Torisen. You can see, however, why he was upset. ‘You’re killing him!’ That was hardly tactful, given his state of mind.”

  “I know that,” said Kindrie, exasperated. “I was upset too, at the time.”

  “No doubt you were.”

  She put down the ewer and returned to her seat opposite him, across the table. Candlelight threw shadows under her fine, gray eyes and high cheekbones. He wondered if she too had been losing sleep, and why.

  “As for the hay-cough,” she continued, “I believe that I have read similar speculations in a native manuscript about the transmission of lung-warts among Rathillienites. I wonder if Index knows anything about that.”

  “Index may be a scrollsman, but he isn’t a healer.”

  “I never said that he was. However, herbs are his field, when he isn’t trying to wheedle Merikit lore out of your cousin Jame. Even then, he doesn’t heal the body through the soul. Neither do surgeons. There are reasons why your craft is valued above theirs.”

  Kindrie throttled back irritation at the mention of Index, who tended to assume superior airs with everyone, let alone with such a rag-tail, escaped priestling as he had at first been. After all, she had just paid him a compliment. It had been a hard few days, he reminded himself, to excuse his short temper, and his innards still didn’t feel quite right after the twins’ tweaking. Or maybe for some other reason.

  Ashe entered with a bowl of porridge. “This always . . . settles me,” she said, plunking it down on the table.

  “Thank you,” said Kirien. “I think, though, that the chicken was sufficiently bland.”

  “I didn’t know that she ate at all,” Kindrie said as the haunt singer left. “I mean, wouldn’t it just fall out?”

  “Ashe is . . . trying to be helpful,” said Kirien, with an exasperated look at the not-quite-closed door. “Now, about these boys from the Priests’ College . . .”

  “Will Mount Alban return them if Rawneth demands it?”

  “Of course not, unless they wish to go. We can always use new apprentices, especially ones with good memories. D’you realize how many ancient texts are apt to be lost, for lack of the will to remember them? And yes, some scrollsmen are finally coming to the admission, grudgingly, that some things need to be written down. Or, if that doesn’t suit your boys, Valantir and other opportunities await just across the river. In particular, we need to watch those twins. They show signs of an uncommon Shanir trait—although, come to think of it, one of your cousin’s ten-commanders has shown skills along similar lines.”

  Kindrie sipped his wine. He wondered if the flutter in his stomach was truly due to the twins or to general nerves. How many times had he imagined this scene, usually to a fractious end? He allowed the drink to untie his tongue although, he assured himself, he was by no means drunk.

  “When I was at Gothregor,” he said, carefully, “I talked to Lady Trishien, or rather she talked to me. In her opinion, I’ve been a fool. About you. About us.”

  Kirien set down her wine glass. Although her tone was light, her glance was keen. “She said much the same to me. What do you think?”

  Kindrie made a helpless gesture. Speak the truth and shame the shadows, he told himself. “All of my life, people have called me an idiot. As a novice, as an acolyte, as an escaped priestling. It appears to be a congenital weakness. That must seem odd to you. After all, no one has ever suggested that you are stupid.”

  Kirien gave a most unladylike snort. “According to the other matriarchs, Highborn girls aren’t supposed to be intelligent. It complicates their plans. Then too, my Randir mother died bearing me, so that makes me suspect breeding stock.”

  “Mine died too. Most people still consider me to be a bastard, although I’m not.”

  “I know. Then they dropped you into that foul pit of a Priests’ Coll
ege. I at least had Father, Great-aunt Trishien, and a host of other kinfolk, all eager to spoil me.”

  “Well, they didn’t succeed. In spoiling you, that is. I’ve never met anyone more unselfish.”

  She turned her head so that a silk curtain of hair concealed her face, but not before he had seen her blush.

  “Maybe you don’t know me so well after all,” she muttered. “When I want something, I usually get it.”

  Kindrie fought the urge to scramble back to safe ground.

  “Does it bother you?” he blurted out.

  “What?”

  “That you, that we both aren’t considered marriageable material?”

  “If we belonged to different houses, it would ruin us both. Nonetheless . . .”

  “‘Nonetheless’ nothing, and contracts be damned. Everyone here knows that you are a brilliant scholar and someday will be a fine leader, as much as you may not relish the prospect. People value you. The rest are . . . are just stupid.”

  Ashe reappeared at the door.

  “Go away,” said Kirien.

  She turned back to Kindrie. “You do see, though, why I might feel a bit unsure about . . . about, well, us. According to the Matriarchs, I can’t be trusted to breed true, even if I should want to, which I don’t. Breed, that is. Not now, at least. I was taught a thing or two by Aunt Trishien. The rest of the Council doesn’t even recognize me as female, nor will they sanction anything that I do, although they may well condemn it.” Her voice broke into a shaky laugh. “After all, this is hardly my area of expertise.”

  Kindrie felt his throat tighten. “And you think that it’s mine?”

  The conversation, he felt, was getting muddled, as was he. Too much wine. Too much . . . everything. He looked at his glass, which was somehow full again.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk?” he asked, more curious than upset.

  “Ashe suggested it.”

  Kindrie burst out laughing. “How many people d’you suppose are listening out in the hall, ready to . . . er . . . help?”