[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  She opened the door no farther than necessary, and slipped in through the gap. There was nobody in the darkened outer chamber, nor in the changing room.

  As she had half-expected, light showed around the edges of the bedroom door. She knocked, tentatively, and waited for an answer.

  "Come on in." It was Jen's voice.

  She entered and let the door close itself behind her. Jens's room was twice as large as the one she'd been given, and even more exquisitely decorated. The bed alone, with its tapestry hangings and high, arched canopy, was almost as big as the cabin the three of them had shared back on the Dusty; the padded crate in which they'd made their escape from Ophel would have covered no more than a corner of the mattress. The light she'd seen came from a shaded reading-glow on the bedside table. It cast a pool of stark white light onto the pillows at the head of the bed and threw the far corners of the room into darkness.

  Jens wasn't reading, though. As far as she could tell, he never had been. No text reader stood on the bedside table, and no print-on-paper material either. He lay gazing up at the underside of the canopy, and Miza saw at once that he was at least as wakeful as she had been. He turned as she came in and propped himself up on one elbow to look at her.

  "Gentlelady Lyftingil," he said. "What brings you in here at this hour?"

  He's only got the light on because he doesn't want to lie there by himself in the dark, Miza thought. The realization strengthened her resolve.

  "I couldn't sleep," she said.

  "Faral's room is down at the other end of the hall."

  She felt herself reddening—the curse of a fair complexion. "It's not that!"

  "Ever my misfortune," he sighed, and lay back again on the pillows. The leather-and-bone necklace he'd gotten from the oracle on Sapne lay against the golden-tanned skin of his chest. "What, then?"

  "It's… tomorrow morning they do the Golden Tower thing—"

  "I am not precisely ignorant of the fact. Believe me."

  "—and I couldn't get to sleep for thinking that I ought to apologize to you tonight, just in case—"

  "Right. Just in case I hit the pavement with a resounding splat and render the question of apologies completely moot."

  "Stop that!" she said. "You haven't even asked me what I came in here to apologize to you for."

  He closed his eyes. "All right. What was it?"

  "A bad idea, I think." She turned to go.

  "No—wait!" He sat up abruptly and held out a hand. "I'm the one who ought to be saying I'm sorry, for talking to you this way. It's no way for anyone to act, the night before they—"

  "Everything is going to be all right," she said. "The Exalted said so. He's spent piles of money making sure."

  "So has everybody else. And there's never been any way of making sure that the bribed stay bribed." Jens laughed without mirth. "And if they do… then I'm stuck with being the Highest of Khesat for the next fifty or a hundred years, which probably isn't as painful as diving headfirst onto a marble pavement, but it lasts a whole lot longer."

  He sounded unhappy, which wasn't surprising. She sat down on the edge of the bed next to him—all the chairs were off in the dark corners of the room—and said, "What will Faral do if they make you the Highest?"

  "Go home to Maraghai," he said. "If helping a friend ascend to the Jade Eminence counts as gaining enough fame for an allowable return."

  "It certainly ought to," she said. "But that's one of the things I wanted to say I was sorry about."

  "Faral?"

  She nodded. "Things haven't been easy between the two of you ever since we left Sapne, and I'm afraid that it's all my fault."

  "No, it isn't." She could see a faint flush of embarrassment spreading along his cheekbones and down his neck to his bare chest. "It's mine, for being jealous."

  "The next Highest of Khesat, jealous?"

  He gave her a crooked smile. "Gauche, isn't it? If the Council knew about it, do you think they'd find somebody else to haul up to the top of the Golden Tower?"

  "You could always ask them," Miza said.

  "If I thought it would do any good… but no friends of mine are on the Council, just allies of Kasander's."

  She looked down at her hands. "That's the other thing I meant to say I was sorry about."

  "That I don't have any allies on the Council?"

  "No. I'm sorry I was the one who made your friend Guislen go away. I didn't mean to do it. Will you forgive me?"

  "If you'll forgive me," he said. He smiled and reached out a hand to take hers, free-spacer fashion, as he had with Captain Amaro back in the Dusty's hold. "Done?"

  She smiled back at him and met his grip. "Done."

  The more Faral thought about what he had witnessed in Kasander's study, the less he liked it. By the time he entered the guest wing, he was almost running, with the invitation out of his pocket and ready in his hand. He ran through the darkened outer rooms of Jens's suite and up to the bedroom door, knocked perfunctorily once to warn of his approach, and pushed the door open.

  The room was lighted, and Jens was lying in the bed.

  "Jens," Faral began, "there's something…"

  Then he faltered. Someone else was on the bed beside Jens—Miza, with her red hair down and loose over the shoulders of her robe. Their hands were clasped, and she was smiling.

  "Oh," Faral said, turned, and shut the door behind him.

  He walked down the carpeted passageway to his own quarters, unable to see clearly for the dark cloud hanging in front of his eyes. He felt like he'd been kicked in the guts, and all his assorted viscera removed and replaced by cold swamp water with bugs in it. He held the cream-colored invitation from Rhal's study in his hand, crumpling it into a tiny ball as his hand worked without his direct control.

  A patter of light footsteps, running, came from behind him.

  He stopped and turned as a hand touched his arm. It was Miza.

  "Faral," she said. "It isn't what you think—"

  "Then what would it be?" Faral asked and turned away, pulling himself from her grasp. He resumed walking.

  "Faral, please!"

  Faral ignored her and continued walking. He went on to the darkened library all the way at the end of the hall. He sat at a polished table, not bothering to turn on the light, and watched out the window as the vornatch trees blew in the dark winds of the estate.

  A while later, Jens knocked on the door and entered, wearing a formal robe of black silk and silverthread, patterned with lilies. Without speaking, he laid a long, handwritten letter on the table beside Faral, then turned and left. Faral took the letter, and tore it into tiny pieces, unread, without looking away from the vornatch trees.

  And that was where the servants of the Exalted of Tanavral found Faral in the predawn hours, when it came his time to rise and enter the City, there to view from the windows of Caridal Fere his cousin's enlargement.

  Mistress Klea Santreny and Mael Taleion left the Castledown Acres Guesthome in the predawn light.

  "I need to go to the Khesatan Guildhouse," Klea said, "to see if any messages are waiting for me—and to send some messages of my own."

  Mael looked at her curiously. "And for this you require my presence?"

  "At the moment," Klea said, "I only trust one person on this world other than myself. If that person is a Mage… well, Master Rosselin-Metadi had misgivings about the Khesatan Adepts, and if what I saw yesterday has any value, I think I share them."

  "I have, in my own way, seen things which give me pause," Mael said. "It is not your Guild that causes the harm, but a vengeful ghost."

  "Maybe. But I don't think that we've got helpless innocents in the Guildhouse of Ilsefret, either. If the Adepts on Khesat have betrayed their vows—to seek always the common good, to do no ill—then they will answer for it."

  Together they set out for the Guildhouse—listed in all the guidebooks and street maps as standing in Higedon Street, not far from the Clockmakers' Tower. Before long Klea and Mael
stood on the sidewalk in front of the gates, in a chill morning fog that seemed to come from the very stones of the plaza.

  "To enter such a place," said Mael, "still grieves me."

  "You survived the experience once before. Being an Adept isn't catching."

  "Very well." Mael settled his mask over his face, then stepped up to the door and struck the heavy ring-shaped knocker three times against the solid brass plate beneath.

  The door did not open, nor did some sleepy-eyed apprentice come tardily to answer it.

  "Perhaps the Adepts of Khesat sleep late," Mael said.

  "All of them?" Klea laid her hand upon the door knocker, then let the ring drop from her hand with a boom that echoed clear across the street. She grimaced. "They believe in serious door knockers in this town. Where do you suppose everyone is?"

  "This morning they elevate the Highest," Mael said. "I heard it on the early news at the Guesthome."

  Klea's skin prickled. "Did you hear a name?"

  "If they gave one," Mael said, "it was not in the news that they make files of for outworlders."

  Klea shrugged. "What a curious place," she said. "Well, Master Owen has entrusted to me the charge of keeping his nephews safe, and it is my opinion that they were planning to come to this world. To keep them safe requires the help of the Guild. Messages may have come for me from Master Owen, and they would have come here…"

  "What are you nerving yourself up to do?"

  "This," Klea said. She unshipped her staff from its thong along her back and held it up in both hands.

  "I am the representative of Owen Rosselin-Metadi," she said, "and in my place, he would do this!"

  The staff blazed up blue-green in her hands, and she struck the lockplate with the end of it, driving forward with her shoulders. The doors bowed inward for an instant, then rebounded out, springing open in the process. Klea grabbed the knocker by its ring and pulled, opening the door a bit wider for her to enter.

  "Somehow," Mael said, "I think Master Rosselin-Metadi would have been more subtle."

  "I know him better than that," Klea said, stepping in through the gap. "Are you coming?"

  Mael followed Klea into the antechamber, then paused while she closed and re-locked the door. "The Adepts here may consider this to have been an unfriendly act."

  "My motives are pure," Klea said. "Come on."

  The antechamber could have been located nowhere else except on Khesat: the tastefully understated furniture; the tiny glowing gems set into the walls at unexpected angles to form patterns of subtlety and grace; the faintest hint of perfume on the air.

  "This way, I think," Klea said.

  She went up a short flight of marble steps, and turned left down a corridor. The corridor opened onto a stone cloister that surrounded a severe rock garden open to the sky.

  "No one here," she said. "Something is very wrong."

  "I agree," Mael said, and unclipped his short staff. "This place is dead."

  In the small plain room at the base of the Golden Tower, Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin stood in the midst of the members of the Court of Raising, with the Presenter of the Highest before him. Jens had already removed his sable and silver morning-robe, and wore only the plain white and black of an Unacclaimed. The leather and bone necklace from the Sapnean oracle lay against his skin underneath the loose cambric of his shirt.

  "Your pardon," said the Presenter, as two burly fellows in the mauve livery of the Council of Worthies approached Jens and confined his wrists behind him in stout metal binders.

  Jens raised an eyebrow. "Are those truly necessary?"

  "After the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the Raising of Finuale the Sixth," the Presenter said, his expression sad under his shaven brows, "they have been customary. They will be removed on the platform, if the cry is 'huzzah.' "

  "As I have no doubt it will be," he added, with a twitch that might have been a smile.

  "Suppose I wished to flap my arms the whole way down?"

  "Waferan Elderos already did that. You wouldn't want to appear a mere imitator, would you?"

  "I suppose not," Jens said. He turned to the spiral stairway. "Let's get going. Dawn isn't going to wait."

  "One matter more." The Presenter ran his hands rapidly over Jens's body. "Once, not too long ago, someone brought along a parachute."

  Jens suppressed the nervous laugh that would otherwise have become a hysterical giggle before he could make himself stop. He drew a deep breath.

  "I understand," he said. "Shall we?"

  He nodded to the stairway. The Presenter nodded back. Jens led, with the guards a step farther behind, and the Presenter following the entire procession.

  It wouldn't be so hard, Jens thought, if I didn't have to lead the way. This is probably another one of those hidden tests of character. Rhal Kasander has promised that the crowd is well bribed. Everything's in order. He says.

  Each time they completed a circuit of the spiral they passed another fretwork window. The sky outside was growing light.

  Dawn soon. When the sun touches the golden dome, then… well, no choice now. One way or another, I'm the Highest of Khesat. I wonder if the wrinkleskins on Maraghai will count that as fame?

  There was the platform, surrounded by a waist-high stone railing, the arch above it wrought with cunningly carved leaves to look like a garden bower. Jens stepped through, and walked directly to the edge and looked out over Ilsefret. The streets were crowded as far as he could see, the Plaza of Hope obscured by close-set, upturned faces. Only the square of marble paving at the very base of the tower remained clear. There were stains on the marble from other Raisings, stains that had soaked into the stone and never washed out.

  The fronts of the buildings around the plaza were still shadowed. He tried to make out the windows of Caridal Fere. Two figures, dark in silhouette against the lights within, stood in an embrasure. It was too far and too dark for him to see clearly. Faral and Miza, though, they had to be.

  "Well, coz," Jens said quietly, "now we come to the final parting."

  The two fellows in livery walked forward. They were pleasant-enough-looking lads, although they both seemed nervous.

  Probably never threw a Highest from a golden tower before, Jens thought.

  "Whatever happens," he said, still quietly, "I have no grudge against you for this."

  The two nodded, showing that they heard, but they wouldn't meet his eyes. The Presenter leaped up onto a stone platform at the right of the archway and turned to view the top of the Tower.

  "Watching for the light?" Jens asked.

  "Yes," the Presenter said.

  Jens craned his neck around to look at the Tower. The golden tip of the spire was brightening, catching the rising sun and throwing it forth again in a dazzle of reflected light.

  "Are you ready?" the Presenter asked.

  Jens considered. "I suppose I am."

  "Then it's time."

  The Presenter turned to the crowd below, and in a voice of iron, so loud that Jens could scarcely believe it came from so small a man, he called, "Behold the Highest!"

  And from below came a sound, a growl at first, unintelligible. But it grew louder, and the voices began to chant in chorus, so that the words were plain.

  "Bring him low! Bring him low!"

  Chapter XIX.

  Khesat

  « ^ »

  Faral stood at the window of Caridal Fere's apartment overlooking the Plaza of Hope, his shoulder braced against the embrasure. The sky was dark in the west, behind the Golden Tower. The plaza below was filled with a mass of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, jammed together. A low muttering rose from them, the combined sound of hundreds—thousands—of whispered conversations.

  Miza stood at the other side of the window, looking miserable. She wore a long white gown that Faral would otherwise have thought was becoming. He was still angry with her, and there was a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looked in her direction.

&
nbsp; "I was apologizing to him," she said into the silence. It was the first thing she'd said to Faral since the servants of Caridal Fere had left them alone at the window.

  It wasn't what Faral had expected to hear. "You were…"

  "I didn't think I'd get another chance." She drew a shaky breath, and he realized that she had been crying not long before. "So I went to say I was sorry for naming Errec Ransome's ghost and sending it away, and for… well, for me and you."

  Faral shook his head, not understanding. "For me and you?"

  "Because I'd come between him and one friend already." Faral glanced at her. She gave a wavery half-smile. "And he said he was sorry for being jealous, and we agreed to forgive each other. And we shook hands on it."

  "Oh," said Faral, feeling numb. Now it was too late.

  He turned back to the window. The sky had grown noticeably lighter in the last few minutes. He could see, a long way off at the other side of the plaza and hundreds of feet above him, some motion amid the shadows under the golden dome.

  The people below saw it too. The crowd quieted. Faral could feel the tension as they looked up at the little group standing so high above.

  Then the spire at the top of the Golden Tower blazed with the reflected light of the rising sun. At the same moment, a voice cried out, echoing off the housefronts, ringing out in spite of the distance:

  "Behold the Highest!"

  "Huzzah!" Faral shouted in reply. The servants of Caridal Fere had explained the ritual to him—the words of the Presenter and the words that the crowd would shout in reply. "Huzzah!"

  He shouted as loud as he could. He could hear Miza shouting huzzah as well. But then it came to him, the people in the crowd weren't shouting huzzah at all. They were crying out, in rhythmic chorus, "Bring him low!"

  Miza drew a sharp breath and turned to Faral. She took a step toward him, holding out her arms. At that same moment, a figure fell from the tower, four hundred feet down, and landed with a sodden crack on the stones below.

  Faral was already moving, leaving Miza to follow after him. He strode back through the private apartments, to the inner rooms, then across to the other windows.