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

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Me,” rasped Ashe.

  “And me,” piped up Index.

  “And me,” said a deep voice with a chuckle in it—the Director of Mount Alban himself.

  Kirien marched over to the door and firmly closed it.

  “You’re welcome,” came a chorus of voices from outside, followed by the sound of retreating laughter.

  Kirien’s hand twitched. “T’cha,” she said, exasperated, and drew out her chalkboard. “Now Aunt Trishien is trying to send me a message.”

  “Don’t answer her.”

  Kirien threw the tablet across the room, where it shattered against the opposite wall.

  “Well,” she said, rather helplessly, leaning back against the door. “Hopefully our well-wishers are out of earshot or they’ll think that we’ve resorted to chucking crockery at each other. What now?”

  Kindrie rose, pleased to find that he was still relatively steady on his feet. He touched her face, felt her breath and lips warm against the palm of his hand. So beautiful . . .

  “You’re the scholar,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “You tell me.”

  They tried to kiss, and bumped noses.

  “Obviously, this requires more experimentation,” said Kirien, with a tremulous laugh. “Let us be fools together, then, in the name of research.”

  Chapter VIII

  Autumn’s Eve

  Summer 120

  I

  THE FIRST FURROW for the sowing of the winter wheat wasn’t ready to plough until the last afternoon of summer.

  Of all the relatively clear patches near Tagmeth, this slope down to the Silver south of the keep on the east bank had seemed the most promising, and even then it had taken most of the season to prepare. First, they had had to clear the saplings and bush; then, the stones; then the weeds, helped by a rooting herd of young swine. Even now, it looked a poor thing, thinly covered with soil and a top-dressing of manure.

  Not for the first time, Jame wondered how the original settlers at Tagmeth had sustained themselves. Perhaps, like the later Caineron colonists, they had depended on supplies from keeps downstream or even from the Central Lands. Still, they must have suffered shortages as the Kencyrath now did, the rare rich water meadows and bottom lands notwithstanding. Tagmeth still had its mysteries, and she was running out of time to solve them.

  Farmer Fen and his helpers were assembled at the north end of the field behind the keep’s only plough and a team of oxen. For some reason, they had asked Jame to stand in the turning space or headland at the southern end of the first proposed furrow. How odd, she thought. As if Fen needed her to mark where he should go. As if she knew where to direct him. For that matter, why launch the sowing of the winter wheat so late in the day? True, only now after feverish last-minute activity had they managed to prepare the ground. It had something to do, she supposed, with this being the last day of summer and tonight being Autumn’s Eve, when the dead were remembered. Perhaps traditional Kendar considered it an ill omen to cross from one season to the next with this work not even begun. Then too, how long could it wait?

  Stray, drifting snowflakes dusted her eyelashes and melted like cold kisses on her lips. Uphill, some trees were already bare while others blazed crimson and gold or even still stood green. The weather had turned frosty early this year. True, the chill might not last unbroken until winter, but what if the field froze before it could be sown?

  Fen seemed to be making a speech to the assembled farmhands. He gestured to the field, then apparently to her, then raised his whip. The Kendar cheered.

  Crack.

  The oxen leaned into their yoke, set their great, flat hooves, and trudged forward. The metal blade bit into the earth. The first furrow-slice curled away to the plough’s right toward the River Road and the Silver. Fen was steering carefully: all subsequent furrows would be guided by this one. In time, soil washing down the hillside would level this field somewhat, but it would never be ideal.

  Halfway to her, some fifty feet away, the oxen faltered. Fen flicked his whip over their heads, without effect. They stopped. Now they were trying to turn in opposite directions at that glacial pace common to their kind, with all of its corresponding massive strength. The yoke groaned and snapped.

  What in Perimal’s name . . .?

  Something snorted down the back of Jame’s neck. She turned to find herself nose to nose with Death’s-head. The rathorn colt was a mess, his coat clotted with burrs as if he had rolled in an acre of weeds. More clustered on his barrel behind the elbows and in front of the stifles, where they must prick him every time he moved. When he irritably twitched his matted tail, it scourged his muddy sides below the ivory plates like a flail.

  He snorted again, impatiently, as if to say, “Do something.”

  “What have you done to yourself?” she demanded of him.

  The fragment of a previous night’s dream returned to her: the yackcarn bull romping ahead with his tail straight up, swerving, the burdock-choked gulley opening up under her hooves . . . no, under his . . . falling, rolling, tangling . . .

  “He tricked you, didn’t he? God’s claws, where is Chingetai with his host of avid hunters?”

  That was a good question. The summer solstice was long past, the season on the turn toward the autumnal equinox. Earlier on, she had expected the Merikit virtually any day and had wondered how she would explain their advent to her own people. She still didn’t know what she would say when they did at last arrive.

  A rider from the keep had pulled up next to Fen and now bent from the saddle to speak to him. The farm-master listened, then threw up his hands in exasperation or despair, impossible to tell which. He waved the rider away and came trudging across the unbroken field toward her.

  “Sorry about that,” Jame said as he neared, indicating the truculent rathorn.

  The colt bared his fangs and hissed through them.

  Go away.

  Fen stopped at a wary distance.

  “I didn’t catch his scent,” Jame added, “but obviously the oxen did. Can the yoke be repaired?”

  “More like replaced, lady, and, as it turns out, we’ll have all winter to accomplish that. Someone has tampered with the seed wheat.”

  “Oh no. More thistles mixed in, as with the rye?”

  “This time, the bastard pissed on them. Repeatedly. The entire batch is stinking and moldy.”

  Jame swore under her breath. She had hoped against hope that all of the previous misfortunes had been accidents, however unlikely, all the way back to those at Gothregor. However, one didn’t urinate by chance with such accuracy, over and over. Someone wanted Tagmeth, wanted her, to fail.

  “And,” continued Fen mercilessly, “the storage room is hopping with those wretched mice.”

  This was a separate issue, or so Jame hoped. The rodents had first appeared one night near midsummer or that, at least, was when they had first come to her attention by invading her bedchamber. She had woken to repeated thuds and had seen Jorin bounding around the room in soaring leaps. That he was trying to catch something became evident when a morsel of gray fur landed on her stomach and stared at her with dark, beseeching eyes. Above that were a pair of startlingly large ears, below, twitching whiskers, tiny forelimbs, elongated hind ones, and a tail longer than its entire body. Then it was gone and Jorin had landed in its place, all forty pounds of him. While she struggled to regain her breath, she had seen the mouse spring around the room—six feet high, ten feet at a jump—while the ounce scrambled to catch up.

  . . . bounce, pounce, bounce, pounce . . .

  So on and on until this tiny invader had leaped through the doorway, down the stairs, and Jorin had bounded after it, missing his footing as soon as he was out of her sight and tumbling all the way down.

  Hopping mice were native to the Southern Wastes.

  And now they had spread to Tagmeth’s larder.

  Fen looked up the hillside, so painstakingly prepared, and sighed. He began to fish things out of his capacio
us pockets: a ball of twine, bent nails, half a sandwich, a live, protesting dormouse, and finally an iron curry comb, which he tossed to her.

  “Here. You’ll need this.”

  As he plodded off, Jame turned back to Death’s-head, who snarled at the comb.

  “What, d’you expect me to groom you with my teeth?”

  At first the rathorn twitched and grumbled with each freed burr. Then he began to relax.

  Jame worked methodically from his head to his tail, teasing out the sticklers and tangled hair first with the comb, then with her own extended claws. With the arrival of cold weather, she had started to wear gloves again, which gave her fingers some protection but not at the tips, which had been slit open. In a way, she welcomed the punishing sting under her nails. It seemed to her that it was her fault so much had gone wrong at Tagmeth. If she hadn’t dragged everyone so far north into this wilderness, they would have had friendly neighbors and help, if needed. But no: she had deliberately chosen isolation the better to prove herself to her brother and to the Randon Council. Now all of her people were about to pay the price for that arrogance. She remembered Marc telling her about that terrible winter of famine in his home keep, when he had tried to sustain his little sister on a gruel made of melted, dirty snow, bugs, and worm-ends. That had been at Kithorn, only some twenty miles north of where she now stood. Then, the Caineron had blocked any supplies sent to the stricken garrison. So they would surely do again.

  “Fair warning,” Sheth Sharp-tongue had told her. “M’lord won’t give up Tagmeth easily.”

  That was why they were still here, on this of all days, facing this of all nights.

  Autumn’s Eve was when the lord of each house visited its death-banner hall and named all of the dead staring back at him through the weave of their mortality. Most would be Highborn, with a few notable Kendar mixed in. The rest of each Kendar family would gather together in remembrance of their own dead. Names linked each to his or her house. To be forgotten, even in death, was to crumble away from the only immortality that the Kencyrath craved.

  Jame had walked the Gray Lands where such lost souls lingered, decaying shells of their former selves. The blood on a banner flakes away. A lord stumbles, unable to remember a face, a name long passed, and a soul is set wandering, roofless and rootless, thinly keening even after it forgets what it has lost. Truly, dumb neglect could strike as deep as any living curse.

  Certain Kendar had petitioned her to return to Gothregor and their families, just for one night of remembrance. She had consulted with Brier and Marc, who had both agreed: if they weakened the garrison even by so few, Caldane would take notice and Tagmeth would fall. Jame wanted them to regard this keep as their home. Perhaps some did, but many still wavered, or so she believed. Their lord dwelt far to the south. How much strain would their bond to him take before it broke, and what could their so-called lady offer them in return? Jame had overheard the grumbles. Brier Iron-thorn and Marcarn Long-shanks had thrown in their lots with her, even if only the former was bound to her. Other Kendar apparently clung to them, in a chain that she previously hadn’t recognized. As for the rest, why should they suffer? That must be how the trickster had felt, unleashing his sordid flood on the winter wheat.

  Sun and moon had both set, the latter a thin crescent waning to the dark. Stars began to wink overhead, a great spangle of them like diamonds cast into a blue velvet bowl. Death’s-head glimmered in the gathering dusk. His ivory-crowned head drooped almost to his knees. Jame freed the last burr. She stood for a long time, her hand on the rathorn’s warm shoulder, watching the jewels turn above them.

  Against that, why did any of this matter? she wondered.

  Then again, how could it not?

  Too much rested on her. On them. The end of all things, or at least their change into something ghastly. Did their ancestors ask for this? Did they know what it involved? Probably not. Words from an unseen mouth. Promises, implied. Weapons withheld . . .

  Unless they are us, Tori, Kindrie and me, she thought. But we are only mortal. A breath of wind could kill us—unless the Arrin-ken are right that that would take another Kencyr. So. Death from the hand of a friend, a relative, a lover. Enemies will have to stand in line. But what can I do about it? Only take one step at a time and hope that I tread true, for the sake of those whom I love.

  She slapped the rathorn’s neck. Death’s-head woke from his doze with a startled snort and nearly fell over.

  “Silly boy,” she told him, and started the long walk back to Tagmeth.

  II

  IT WAS FULL DARK and snowing hard by the time Jame reached the keep. The guard at the river gate informed her that everyone else was at dinner in the mess hall. When she thanked him by name, he seemed startled, which amused her.

  She crossed the upper end of the pasture and passed through the second gatehouse into the inner ward where the Caineron yondri still had their camp. To her surprise, however, the site was empty. She wondered if the first snowfall had finally convinced them to leave, then, more doubtfully, if Marc had invited them in to share the Autumn’s Eve feast, now in progress.

  The campfire at the center of the encampment had gone out, but smoke still rose from its ashes, or rather from under them, and the surrounding snow had melted. Jame squatted to look more closely. The remains of logs lay across a metal grill, which in turn was positioned over a hole in the ground. Smoke ascended from below, mixed with flickers of light, a muffled murmur of voices, and the tantalizing smell of roast pork.

  How very curious.

  A ramp just within the shell keep led down to the cellar, now converted into a small subterranean stable against harsher weather to come. Jame had been here before, making sure that Bel-tairi’s winter quarters were fit to receive her. However, the stalls only underlay the keep, so they weren’t the source of the smoke. Brier had said something about a second, half-flooded level that extended beneath the ward and the pasture. The entrance should be just about here. Yes. Set against the southern wall of the stable, behind a bale of hay, was a small, round door. It opened inward—silently, on greased hinges—onto a short flight of shallow stone steps. Halfway down, Jame bent to peer into the cavity beyond. It appeared to be a long, low-ceilinged natural cave. The walls ran with water. So did the floor, except where a section of the roof had fallen to create an island in the midst of the flood. In the middle of this relatively dry space was a framework of branches with leaping flames at its heart and a suckling pig suspended above them. Smoke rose to a ragged hole in the ceiling above which, no doubt, were the remains of the campfire in the inner ward.

  Half a dozen people or more sat around the fire below, frozen, their faces turned toward her. As quiet as the door had been, she guessed that they had felt the tell-tale draft when she had opened it.

  “Hello, Must,” she said.

  The young Caineron yondri stood, fists clenched at her sides.

  “We didn’t steal the pig,” she said, and stifled a cough. It was warmer here than above, but still perniciously damp. “Your steward gave it to us to honor Benj.”

  “Who . . . oh.”

  That, presumably, was the Kendar whom Fash had speared in the back.

  “I’m sure Marc did,” she said. After all, that was exactly the sort of thing her old friend would do. She herself had completely forgot about the only death so far suffered at Tagmeth. “Does he know, though, that you’re roasting his gift underground?”

  “No one does—except, now, you.”

  “I’m surprised you could get a fire to burn in such a wet place.”

  Must shrugged, still wary. In her experience, Highborn who began by speaking quietly often ended up shouting abuse. “Sometimes when we gather firewood on the upper slopes, we find fallen ironwood branches. It took weeks above ground to kindle even the smallest of these. Down here, they won’t burn as long as an ironwood trunk—”

  Hardly, thought Jame, given that a prime fire timber took centuries to consume.

 
; “—but we reckon they’ll at least get us through the winter. If you don’t drive us out.”

  There, again, was the dilemma. Unwilling to expel them when they had nowhere else to go, she had given them tacit permission to camp in the inner ward, and kind-hearted Marc had provided them with the means to do so. Now they had crept even deeper into the fabric of the keep, like foxes going to earth. What did it hurt, though, that they were here? She hadn’t offered them the bond. As things stood, that might never lie in her power. But, if so, was it fair to give them even so much encouragement as this? Her own people wanted them gone. At least one of her people wanted her gone too—unless the trickster was here below, a Caineron agent posing as a yondri, set on Tagmeth’s destruction. It would be a relief to think so (not one of us), but if so, he (or she) hadn’t been at Gothregor when the trouble had started—unless those earliest incidents had truly been accidents.

  G’ah. It all made her head hurt.

  Shapes shifted. Shadows moved. Jame realized that there were more people here than she had thought.

  “Everyone, come out,” she said sharply, unconsciously shifting into the voice of command.

  (First quiet words, then abuse . . .)

  Pebbles rattled down. Somewhere farther back, a stalactite fell with a great splash. After the tense pause that followed, Kendar emerged from the shadows of the rough island as if its very rocks had come to life. Ten, twelve, eighteen at least.

  “Must . . .” Jame said, in a warning tone.

  Must braced herself and swallowed. “Some are from Restormir. The rest come from Wilden.”

  Jame scrambled to make sense of this sudden invasion. “Randir yondri?”

  One stepped forward, a boy as nervous as Must, although better at hiding it. “Lordan, we were bound to a Randir Highborn, a good man. But then the trouble started. Lady Rawneth . . . we think she’s gone mad. By day life is much the same as always, but by night . . . She walks through the streets of Wilden, knocking on doors. If one opens, her men rush in and kill whomever they find. That was what happened to our master, all because he couldn’t resist her summons.”