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

by P. C. Hodgell

  “No trick. Rather a tragedy. Are you no better than he?”

  That seemed to rattle Caldane. He pushed back his chair and struggled to rise. Gorbel, who so far had stood back, moved to assist him to his feet.

  “You Knorth. You think you know so much and are worth so much more. Again, all by our accused god’s will! My father died in the White Hills. I was left to fight for the survival of my house in the shambles that he left, all because Ganth’s madness took him. Well, never again. Your day is done. None of your house is left except for you and this succubus of a sister. Have you slept with her yet? How long until you do? That was the end for Gerridon and the Dream-weaver. Don’t say that hunger doesn’t live on in your blood.”

  “I remember now: your son attacked Tagmeth. He should not have done so.”

  Caldane backed away. The other lords on his side of the table hastily rose to make room for him with a great scraping of chair legs. Wine glasses tipped over one after the other with no hand near them, and a decanter shattered. Jame glanced uneasily up at the window where cullet crumbled and fell.

  “Did you sanction that assault?”

  “No, no . . . it was Tiggeri’s idea. Heh. Boys. And what of it? Tagmeth by rights belongs to the Caineron, and we will have it yet, when that witch brat of yours leaves.”

  “Who says that she will? By my reckoning, this past winter makes the keep hers. Perhaps I will give her permission to bind more Kendar to garrison it. Why not? How many of your vaunted numbers are actually bound to your sons?”

  “You’re insane, just like your father! I knew it . . . we all knew it . . . and madness is contagious. Stay away from me!”

  Torisen poked him in the chest with a long forefinger.

  “Boo.”

  “Hic!” said Caldane, and looked aghast.

  His feet scuffed the floor, desperately seeking traction.

  “Hic!”

  As Caldane floundered, he began to rise, watched with astonishment by the other lords. None seemed to remember that this had almost happened two years ago when Jame had first been presented as Torisen’s heir. Then, Gorbel had held his father down until the seizure had passed. Now the Caineron lordan sprawled on the floor, wheezing from a flailing parental elbow to the pit of his stomach.

  “HIC!”

  The Caineron began to rotate. His cloth-of-gold coat inverted over his downturned head, leaving pudgy, wool-clad legs to thrash in midair. There was a draft in the hall, coming from the stairs, breathing out between the multicolored panes of glass. Caldane bobbed in the latter direction. He bumped up against the window like a gaudy bee in a bottle but couldn’t see enough to catch the glass’s edge. Here was an opening. He bobbed against it, then through, then away, screaming.

  Gorbel scrambled to his feet, clutching his stomach, still short of breath.

  “Which way did he go?”

  “Up,” Jame said. “Don’t worry. Eventually even your father has to run out of hot air—or is it gas?”

  “Huh.”

  Gorbel plunged down the stairs. Below, he could be heard shouting for a horse.

  “I suggest,” said Lord Brandan, “that we call a recess.” He was regarding Torisen askance with concern. “Immediately.”

  Chapter XVII

  Blood on the Floor

  Winter 100

  I

  AS THE HIGH COUNCIL filed out, some lords hustled, complaining, by others. Torisen leaned against the table.

  “My head hurts,” he said, and began to cough. Dark blood spattered the ebon surface between his scar-laced fingers.

  Jame caught one arm as he sagged, Burr the other. Between them, they helped him up the nearest stair to the study, clumsily, single-file, for the way was narrow. Not good, thought Jame; they should have gone by the southwestern tower to the bedchamber. Burr apparently realized this as well and kicked open the door leading to the catwalk between the two western towers. They lurched out onto the spidery way—no problem normally for those not affected with height-sickness—but with Torisen lurching from side to side between them, even Jame felt dizzy.

  The ward below seemed to be full of randon, looking up—with what hopes, what fears? She caught the Commandant’s dark, intent gaze. Had he guessed what a snake pit his lord had designed for him, for them all?

  “It would spoil the surprise if I told you. Then, too, perhaps things won’t turn out as I fear they may.”

  But they had. Damn Caldane anyway, that selfish, jealous, stupid man.

  “Hold on,” she murmured to her brother’s bowed head.

  The walk jittered to a rapid footstep. Jame let go of Torisen but had only half turned before the other was upon her.

  “Apostate, traitor, freak . . .”

  Killy slashed at her. The knife ripped her embroidered coat open across the shoulder (oh, so many memories unraveling) and skidded off the ivory beneath.

  Killy struck again, wildly askew.

  . . . not even competent as an assassin . . .

  “Highlord!” he cried past her, through a mask of tears and snot and shattered illusion. “I would have died for you!”

  “Killy, stop it. Please.”

  He gaped at her. Could compassion disarm him?

  You shouldn’t exist, Char had said.

  Her people had been starved of reality for so long, leaving so many desperate for meaning.

  With a sob, Killy gathered himself to strike again. The catwalk lurched. Trinity, if he should cut its cords. . .

  Panicked disbelief widened his eyes as he stumbled.

  “No,” he said, and again, louder: “No!”

  With a thin shriek he lost his balance and toppled over the outer guideline. Jame didn’t see him hit the ground, but she heard the crunch seventy feet below. Blood and brains spattered the stones in a halo of red and gray. Just outside their range stood Damson, scowling down at his broken body. Then she looked up.

  Well?

  “Well,” breathed Jame, and lunged to catch Torisen’s arm.

  She and Burr got him into the southwestern tower and into bed, although still fully clothed. He shuddered and curled up on the spare mattress. His skin burned with fever. Another spasm of coughing wracked him.

  “Help me,” Jame told Burr as she struggled out of her tattered coat, then forced herself to stand still as the Kendar undid the byrnie’s laces. Freed, she lay down on the bed and threw her arms around her brother. His hand, groping, caught her braid and clutched it. How many Merikit lives were knotted into it? Enough, surely, to anchor him, and there she was at its root, and he in her arms.

  The way to the soulscape led through dreams, and that through sleep.

  Trinity, how, frantic with worry as she was? Maybe she should ask Burr to hit her on the head with a brick.

  Still, ten days awake . . . not the longest Torisen had gone, but still much too long.

  She let his need draw her down, into a ruin of dreams mixed, like broken glass, with memory:

  “Blackie hasn’t been quite himself since the end of winter.”

  Tori with his back turned toward her, hands clasped tightly behind him. “So you’ve come at last.”

  Oh, I would have come sooner, if only you had asked . . .

  “Here, son. Drink to my health.”

  A drop of blood quivering on a knife’s point over a glass of wine.

  A plate crawling with maggots.

  “Destruction begins with love. The power that seduces, that betrays. . . They are creatures of the shadows, poisoning men’s dreams, sucking out their souls . . . Cursèd be the lot of them . . .”

  “Who, Tori?”

  “Shanir. Women. You.”

  And he looked at her through Ganth’s sick, raging eyes.

  No!

  Jame blinked hard.

  (“ . . . but I never cry . . .”)

  She was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, a closed door at her back, a circular courtyard at her feet. Beyond the latter’s outer gates, gray hills rolled up to
a sullen, sunless sky. The wind combed through the coarse grass there as if through the pelt of some long-dead creature, and it stank.

  Never, forever, whined the grass. Forever, never . . .

  “Why didn’t you answer my letters?” she asked the boy at her side.

  “What letters . . . oh. Those.”

  “I wrote one every tenthnight, for nearly a year. A lot happened.”

  “It would.”

  He sounded exhausted, but also amused, and very young. However, this was not the helpless, hopeless child whom she had met in this place before, who more recently in a dream she had seen huddling on its doorstep. For the first time in years, they were nearly the same age.

  Torisen coughed again. Behind the door at their backs, the hall of the Haunted Lands’ keep made a nasty chuffing sound like congested laughter:

  Huh, huh, ha. . .

  “You seemed to be doing all right,” he said when he had caught his breath. “Better than ‘all right.’ I envied you.”

  “Oh,” said Jame, and felt as if he had knocked the wind out of her. A winter’s worth of petty resentment gone, just like that. “Did you mean what you said when you told Caldane that you might let me bind other Kendar to garrison Tagmeth? Can you even do that? I’m not yet of age.”

  “That hasn’t stopped you so far.”

  “Huh. Brier. And you should know: There was one before her. Caldane’s bastard son Graykin—not that that was my idea either. It just happened, as with Brier.”

  He glanced at her askance. What a nice face he had had as a boy, if thin and anxious. How many years together they had lost. “You are dangerous, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry.”

  Voices muttered behind them, the first querulous, the second slyly insinuating.

  “. . . betrayed, betrayed . . .”

  “By your own son, too. By what right does he claim your place, that ingrate, that coward? You made him. You can unmake him. Now, your daughter . . .”

  “That filthy little Shanir. Who is she, to look so like her mother? An imposter. A cheat. . .”

  “Yes, yes. Even now she sneaks, she spies, she listens. Everyone is against you, and always has been. Poor, poor Grayling.”

  Torisen shuddered. “I said that I wouldn’t listen, but how could I help it? They wanted to drive me mad and almost did; but then I got stubborn and decided not to let them. That meant trying to understand their taunts. I also thought about what you said—did you say it, or did I only dream it?—about the ability to bind Kendar being a Shanir trait.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, logically that makes sense. Not all Highborn can do it, just as not all are Shanir. But those that can, well, those also tend to be the lords. Including me. Including Father. So much self-loathing, for what? It only cripples us. I think that, but then I feel . . . I feel . . . as I was taught to feel. Are some things inherently loathsome? Father says so. But he hates himself. And he’s mad. We always knew that, didn’t we?”

  Jame wasn’t sure. He had simply been their father, with only the decency of the Kendar for contrast. Then too, since Tentir, she had seen another side of him as both an abused son and brother. One judged by what one knew—or thought that one knew.

  And here was a further doubt:

  “Tori, this is a dream. Do you mean what you say, or are you only saying what I want to hear?”

  He made as if to pinch her. His fingertips skated on ivory.

  “Oh,” said Jame, regarding her gauntleted hand. More rathorn scales ran up her arm and down the slight swell of her chest, although, now that she thought about it, she felt a distinct draft up her back, where a young rathorn had no armor. That last convinced her: They had descended into the soulscape.

  “I’ve wanted to say these things to you for a long time,” said her brother.

  “Why didn’t you? Why did you drive me away?”

  “Because they wanted me to hurt you, and I was afraid that I would. Things kept happening. Everything around me started to rot. There was that freak storm, then a plague of locusts, then a murrain on the cattle, then the hay-cough. Kindrie says I nearly killed that child Bo. Other Kendar did die. I think . . . I think . . .”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘There are three of us Knorth now.’” He gave a shaky laugh, coughed again, and wiped a smear of blood off on the back of an unsteady hand. “I can guess what that means although I can hardly believe it. The Tyr-ridan, after all this time. . . You said we weren’t ready. Ancestors know, I’m not. You can only be Destruction.”

  “That needn’t be a bad thing.”

  “No, depending on what needs to be destroyed. Kindrie is a healer. Preservation. Also with its dubious side.”

  “If not, why our cherished recourse to the White Knife?”

  “Yes. That leaves me. Creation. But to create isn’t necessarily good either, is it? Mold, disease, rot. . . Whatever I am, I can’t control it, especially in its destructive aspect. Right now, I’m more dangerous than you are.”

  “We could put that to the test.”

  “Let’s not. I’m glad we finally talked, though, especially now. I think that I may be dying.”

  He leaned forward, head bowed, and choked as if about to cough out his lungs. Drops of blood spattered the pavement at his feet.

  Heh, ha, ho . . . ! chortled the hall.

  Jame held him until the paroxysm subsided. “Get Kindrie,” she heard herself say to Burr back in the tower. “Quick.”

  “D’you know who is in your soul-image beside Father?” she asked her brother.

  “I didn’t . . . until I heard her speak . . . in the Council Chamber.” Breath and speech both came hard to him, and he was already exhausted. “Then I ordered her out. Why is she still there? How did she get in . . . in the first place?”

  Talk. Keep his attention. Wait.

  “When you stormed out and slammed the door behind you, you must have accidentally trapped her inside. That was just after I got to Gothregor, wasn’t it? We shared that terrible dream in Lyra’s quarters, when you were nearly possessed. ‘Foolish, foolish child. As if it were given to you of all people to know the truth.’ And you told her that you refused to listen, refused to be driven mad. ‘The door is shut,’ you said. I thought you meant the inner one, but it must have been the outer. Later that night when we talked, you were much calmer. You even thought it was funny that the Karkinorians had tried to kidnap me which, granted, was amusing. Then you told me to leave Gothregor. I didn’t understand at the time.”

  “Yes. I didn’t trust myself. And the randon wanted proof.”

  “I haven’t talked to cousin Holly yet, but he told me that he dreamed he saw someone walk out of the mist from Wilden when you were at Shadow Rock. She’s a dream-stalker and a soul-walker, Tori, who apparently needs to be close to her prey. And there you were. You must be stronger than she is, though, or she would have done a lot more harm than she has. Trinity, to have spent such a year and not to have been destroyed by it. . .”

  Torisen struggled to his feet. “That’s not enough. I want her gone. Now.”

  He leaned against the door. Obedient to his will, it opened inward a crack with a mighty screech of rusty hinges.

  “Rawneth! Bitch of Wilden!” he cried to the seething shadows within. “Come out!”

  Darkness rose against the crack, forcing it more open still. A chittering flood of black spiders spilled out, each the size of a child’s clenched fist with nine scrambling legs that seemed to shift from body to body. Jame backed up, not sure if she should flee before this obscene tide or stomp it into oblivion. When the edge of it ran over her toes, she stomped. The rest swarmed down the steps into the courtyard. There, arachnid clambered on top of arachnid. A swaying form straightened and rose, swathed in gray spun silk. Atop it, multifaceted eyes leered through a mask of fiddling limbs.

  “Sssooo, little lost children.” The voice rustled and crackled, chitinous, dry. “At last I am free. What will you do now?” />
  “Send you away,” said Torisen. “Again. Go.”

  “Ah, ha, ha, ha. What a bleak soul you possess, little lord, but how much I have learned during my time there.”

  “Father talked to you, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes. Poor, lonely Grayling, betrayed by everyone. While he still lives, in whatever form, you are nothing. You never were. And you call yourself Highlord? What will your precious Council say when I tell them how you deserted your liege lord?”

  Jame laughed, although she was growing angry, on the edge of a berserker flare. Descending the stairs, she began to circle the nightmare figure. It twisted to face her, but only from the feet up. “What proof will you give them? ‘A dead man told me.’ And our father is dead, whatever you say, slain by the changer Keral. Only his madness lives on.”

  “Yessss. Within your brother. Little girl, you would do well to ally yourself with me. Better you than that hag-faced doll, Kallystine, as a consort for my son. Think what a child you might bear.”

  “I am thinking. It turns my stomach. Your son is a changer too, isn’t he? Have you ever asked yourself where that blood came from?”

  The spider legs that framed Rawneth’s mouth writhed into the travesty of a crooked smile. “I know full well. Did I not see my lover’s face alter in the Moon Garden, when my dear Kenan was conceived?”

  “I believe you that it changed, from the semblance of my foul uncle Greshan to that of the Master, Gerridon. Consider this, though: What if it changed again, afterward?”

  Mandibles clicked in irritation.

  “Obscene. Pernicious. As if I could be fooled.”

  “Couldn’t you?”

  The silk shroud twisted, winding tighter and tighter around the seething torso. Black, many-jointed legs started to wriggle through it in a grotesque fringe.

  “No. You will say anything to support your brother’s false claim. I am too clever for you.”

  “Tell yourself that, and begone. The dead await you in the Graylands. Kinzi, Aerulan, all the other Knorth women slain at your word.”

  “Ha. And what proof have you of that? We checkmate each other, girl. Secrets are power. Never doubt, though, who will win.”

  “Oh,” said Jame, taking another quarter turn. “I don’t.”