by Carol Berg
The bloody sword tip teased at my lips. “I cannot slay you, my king, but I’ve silenced the witnesses to your claim. And when the two outside the door come at my call, they’ll find you tongueless. You’ll not put me in such an awkward position again.”
I smiled then, as will any gambler as he sweeps the coins into his purse. “I would advise you to pull back the gold curtain before you act so rashly, Guardian.”
The color fled from his face. He stepped away and flicked aside the curtain that separated us from the audience hall. The sword clattered to the floor.
I craned my neck to see.
Vroon had managed what I asked of him. Filling the vast hall was a sea of faces: misshapen, grotesque, ugly, some beautiful, too, atop malformed bodies. All silent. All listening. Every one of them my witness.
“You cannot kill them all,” I said.
“Behold the One Who Makes Us Bounded!” cried Vroon, standing proudly in the first row. The cheers did not die out for more than an hour.
And so it was I gained myself a kingdom, and the most unlikely subjects any ruler had ever governed. Unfortunately, I had not found any answers as yet, only a fistful of new questions.
CHAPTER 16
I didn’t kill the Guardian, nor did I allow any of my more bloodthirsty subjects to do so. I might need him to help me unravel the mystery of the Source and get it to answer my questions. So I had six Singlars take the bitter man to his apartments and confine him there, and I commanded Ob not to leave his side.
While they took him away, I stood on the dais of the audience hall, thanked the residents of the Tower City for saving my life, and asked Corionus the mapmaker to record the identity and description of each one present on the vast walls of the audience hall. “On the third light from this one,” I said, “each of you will receive the name of your choosing. Until that time comes you must tell everyone you meet what treachery has been done in the name of greed, and that no more of that will be tolerated in this kingdom. From this hour, all judgments of the Guardian are overturned. I will rehear all grievances beginning on the first light after the naming day.”
They cheered and wept and babbled among themselves.
“Listen to me! One more matter of importance… is there one among you who is a healer?”
The cheers and chattering faded away. No one moved to speak.
“Surely someone eases your pains or cares for wounds or sickness…”
Some of the Singlars shifted uneasily.
“It is forbidden for us to take such service of another,” called out a youth. “That one would be flogged for changing the course laid out by the Source.”
“The Guardian said it was an evil thing,” said a bent old woman.
“No longer,” I said, already questioning my decision to keep the villain alive. “Healing sickness and hurts will reap no punishment. I promise. By the Source, I swear it. My companion - the tall traveler - has great need of healing. If anyone is skilled in such matters, I would be very grateful for help.”
A murmuring rose in the middle of the crowd, and a woman stepped, or was pushed, forward. She wore a veil wrapped about her head, covering all of her face except her eyes, which she cast down.
“Know you of healing, madam?” I said, trying not to let my urgency frighten her.
She dipped her head shyly, but voices rose from every side of the audience chamber.
“Her hands know much for easing those of us who are unstraight.”
“She gave me potent waters to clear my breathing when I could not.”
“When the graver’s fastness crushed his legs, she worked him whole again.”
“With caring she walks.”
“You are much praised,” I said to her, “and very brave to do such kindness when it was forbidden. Would you look at my friend? Help him, if you can?”
She bowed.
Dismissing the Singlars, I hurried the woman up the stairs and threw open the door to my bedchamber. No sooner had I stepped across the threshold than I felt an uncomfortable prick in my back. A duck, a spin, and a hammering blow with my stiff arm, and the knife clattered across the floor.
Roxanne sagged against the wall, cradling her right arm, but looking more relieved than hurt. “Blessed holy Annadis.” The princess’s voice was shaking.
I lifted the Singlar woman up from the floor where she crouched with her arms thrown over her head. “I’m sorry. This lady princess was just a little too - ”
I broke off. One of the Guardian’s claw-handed maintainers lay sprawled on the floor. I nudged the body with my boot and rolled him over onto his ugly face. No question he was dead. Most likely the bloody, well-placed hole in his back had done it.
“What is that?” The princess pointed a trembling finger at the ox-hided corpse.
“He was a man, a vicious, bloodthirsty servant of the former ruler of this place, but a man, nonetheless.”
“I thought… I thought it was just nightmares or my imagination when I saw them in the dungeon. I was sure it was the bad light or bad food. I didn’t know they were real.”
Before I could answer, she screamed. “Behind you!”
She shoved me to the side, dropped to the floor, and scrambled across the tiles toward the knife.
I whirled around, crouched and ready, but instead of hurling myself at the newcomer, I sprang toward the princess and caught her arm before she could launch the knife. Her target was Zanore.
“I told you that you’re a long way from Montevial,” I said, catching her wrist and removing the knife from her hand. “A lot of things will appear strange, and a lot of people won’t look like those you’re accustomed to. That’s the way it is here. It was good you killed that one, for he meant no good for you and Paulo. But don’t kill anyone else just because they look odd. This is my friend, Zanore.”
I tried not to show how relieved I was that Zanore had not come to the room any earlier. I needed to be more careful with my orders.
Roxanne wrenched her arm away, picked herself up off the floor, and flounced into a chair, her face a deep scarlet.
“Do you understand, Your Highness?”
She sniffed and averted her face. Straightened her back. Crossed her arms. Tucked her shaking hands out of sight quickly.
I had no time to play courtier. “What is it, Zanore?”
Zanore did not seem flustered by the commotion. “I’ve come to serve you as you require, my king. The good Vroon said you might have need of me.”
“Thank you. If you could just wait a bit… ” I left him at the door and hurried over to the bed, where the veiled woman had begun running her fingers over Paulo. One by one, she peeled away my crude bandages to examine his cuts and bruises, feeling every bone and muscle from his head downward. When she pressed her fingers on his bruised belly, he cried out sharply, though he didn’t wake. Quickly she brushed her palms across the discolored skin, and he quieted again. When she unwrapped his hands, she shook her head before rewrapping them carefully.
“Can you help him?”
“The cutting and pounding marks will ease of themselves,” she said. “The bones of his middle I can work to make whole and strong. The milk of the knotted tree with forked leaves will I bring to close the bleeding inside that makes him hurtful, emptying him so that he may eat and drink again and be well. But the hands have taken disease in their wounding, and I have nothing to appease it. If the disease does not go away, I cannot work the bones, and he will be forever unhanded.”
It was very hard to make out her words. She spoke softly, and seemed to lose half the sounds through her veil, but I understood enough.
“Disease in his hands… Festering, you mean, sepsis, mortification that makes them hot and putrid and filled with poisonous fluids?”
She nodded.
“Have you no medicines here, no herbs: woundwort, wild indigo, pond lily?” My mother’s Dar’Nethi friend Kellea had taught me something of plant medicines.
“I know nothing of thes
e.”
Of course she wouldn’t know them. So few things grew in the sunless Bounded, except…
“Perhaps I can find something to help. Do what you can while I’m gone. Send Zanore here for anything you need.”
As I started for the door, the princess jumped from her chair and dodged in between me and the exit. “You’re not leaving again. Not with creatures like these about.”
“I’ll come back.” I motioned her to move aside.
“Your friend might wake up. He woke while you were gone before. He asked for you. ‘Young master.’ I suppose that’s you.”
“What else did he say?”
“I told him you’d gone to kill a man, and he said you’d likely come back a king.”
I gave her a second chance to get out of my way.
She stood her ground between me and the door. “Are you going to kill someone else?”
“I hope not.”
“Aren’t you awfully young to be killing people and such?”
“You seem to have done a most efficient job at killing this morning, and I am exactly one year, ten months, and five days younger than you.” I took her by the shoulders and moved her aside, leaving her with her mouth agape.
In half an hour I returned with a fistful of herbs, leaves, and roots. It had taken no trick at all to find my way back to the garden. Running my hands around the stone circle opened the passage as before. I had been pleased to find many plants I recognized. Some others I just seemed to know would be helpful, though they did not resemble any Kellea had taught me.
The veiled woman was amazed at the variety of things I brought her and my explanation of their uses. Once we had boiled, cooled, pressed, or squeezed enough of them to do some good, and dressed Paulo’s hands with the medicines, she rolled him to his side and began kneading his back and stomach muscles. “While you were away, I gave him tree milk,” she said. “Now I must work him so it may nourish and heal him. Soon he will bring up all the blood that’s pooled inside.”
Though still out of his head, Paulo groaned at her every touch.
“She’s killing him.” The princess had moved to my table and was making short work of the apple-like fruits sitting in a wooden bowl. “You seem to think of nothing else but him, yet you’re letting her torture him. And there’s a dead creature… excuse me, a dead man in the room with us, and probably more of them on the way, and you stand there like a post.”
Paulo moaned again. A trickle of blood rolled out of his mouth. Zanore was kneeling by the bed, and the woman motioned to him to hold a basin close to Paulo’s face.
I grabbed the woman’s wrists before she touched Paulo again. “Have you done this before?”
“Oh yes, great king. Many Singlars are given punishment, and such injury as this is not rare. The tree milk draws the blood together in his belly so he can be rid of it. Perhaps it would be better if you would leave us for a while. Come back before unlight and see the change. I care for him as if he was yourself.”
“She wants you to go so she can steal from you,” said the princess, who’d come to peer over my shoulder. “You should set someone to watch her. Anyone who won’t show her face is up to no good.”
I released the woman’s wrists and watched her work. Her hands moved carefully and gently, not at all unsure. Paulo groaned and brought up more blood along with a pinkish milky liquid. The woman bathed his face tenderly.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said to the healing woman. “We’ll leave you alone for a while. Zanore will stay close and fetch you anything you wish.”
“I will apply the yellow root oil to his hands as you have instructed me,” she whispered, lowering her eyelids. “I bless you for your trust, Majesty.”
“Why don’t you speak up?” said the princess. “You’re hiding something… fooling this boy, so that his friend will die, and I’ll never get out of here.”
In a move so quick I couldn’t prevent it, Roxanne snatched away the woman’s veil.
With a moan of quiet distress, the woman crossed her arms and held them up before her face, but not before we saw that which made the princess run to the washing basin and vomit. I fought one of the hardest battles I’d ever engaged in not to do the same.
The Singlar woman had no face, nothing but bone and cartilage below her eyes. What little skin she had was almost transparent, a thin layer over strips of muscle that allowed her jaw to work. No lips, no cheeks, no nose… she was paralyzingly horrid.
The woman stepped backward toward the door. No wonder, that. She might as well have been stripped and flogged. What could repair such an act?
“Tell me, have you a name that you desire? I need something to call you. You are one of my Witnesses, and I promised you a name.”
She shook her head, keeping her arms curled over her face and her tear-filled eyes cast down. But she stopped moving away.
Swallowing my gorge, I pulled her arms down. Carefully, I took the trailing ends of her veil and wound them around her head as she’d had them. “Near my home, very far from here, grows a rare plant called nithea. It is very plain, no flower, only thorns. But if you dig deep, you discover that its root is bright red, long and silky - quite beautiful. When you open the root and spread it over a wound, it takes the pain away and makes the wound heal with no scar. If you would permit me, I would give you the name Nithea.”
She sank to her knees, her head bowed.
I raised her up quickly. “Take care of my friend, Nithea. Send Zanore for me if he wakes.”
Then I took the pale princess by the arm and propelled her into the passageway. “If you ever again lay your hand on one of my people without my permission, I will cut it off. Do you understand me?”
She tried not to answer, but I held her tight until she nodded her head.
“Paulo was right. I am the king of this desolation, and I plan to get you out of it and back where you belong as soon as possible. But until then, you are my guest, and you will behave like it whether anyone is paying attention to you or not. You will treat every servant, every beggar, and every person, no matter what their appearance, with the respect you expect for yourself. This is not Leire.”
She remained silent, her pale face rigid, her lower lip trembling.
* * *
We found Vroon, and I dispatched him to install Roxanne in guest apartments as befit her rank, leaving instructions that she was to be clothed and fed and allowed to go anywhere she liked, but that she was never to be left unguarded. The rest of the day I spent securing my position in the Blue Tower.
I had Vroon interview all the tower servants, weeding out any who demonstrated too much loyalty to the Guardian. The maintainers I dismissed entirely, forbidding the Singlars to exact revenge on them for their crimes in the name of the Guardian, but threatening to revoke that protection at the least provocation. In their place I installed twenty Singlars that Vroon designated as trustworthy, men and women who had stood witness in the audience hall. I granted these Witnesses their names along with their duties and believed, somehow, that no sovereign would ever enjoy troops so loyal as these. By “unlight,” the hour when the lamps went down, I’d done all I could do.
I returned to my apartment to check on Paulo and found him sleeping peacefully under Nithea’s eye. I bade the woman good night, but before I could find a new bed of my own, a servant brought an urgent message from Vroon, asking me to come to the Guardian’s rooms. I hurried up the stair to the third level, through an open foyer, and down a passage toward several Singlars, who stepped aside and bowed when I arrived. My leathery friend Ob stood just inside the doorway. With a thud that shuddered the walls, he dropped to his knees, crossing his thick arms across his chest. His voice boomed in massive distress. “Failed.”
“Failed… Has the Guardian escaped?” My mind was already racing to the Source. Would the Guardian damage it? Set it against me with lies?
But Ob shook his red-tufted head. “Dead.” With Ob’s word, the world itself mourned. His wide should
ers were trembling.
I squeezed past the bulky Singlar into the Guardian’s large, sparsely furnished bedchamber. Evidently the Guardian had decided he would rather be dead than give me a decent answer. He lay on his bed, wearing his gold circlet. His blue robes were smooth and orderly, his hands folded primly across his chest, holding the ruby-studded key. The only discordant note in his presentation was the black swollen tongue lolling out of his mouth.
The untimely death of one’s adversary was not the best way to begin a reign. I had wanted to expose the Guardian’s misdeeds to all the Singlars before deciding what to do with him. But hiding his death would be very difficult. I picked up a small gold flask that lay on the floor beside the bed and sniffed it. The faint odor was sickly sweet. Moving closer to the dead man, I bent over and sniffed his mouth. Not at all nice. “Handle this carefully,” I said, giving the flask to Vroon who had followed me into the room.
He took it gingerly, scrambled around the floor until he found the glass stopper that had rolled under the bed, and closed the flask. Ob knelt by the door, head bowed, quivering in shame.
“Vroon, how do you dispose of dead bodies here?”
“We dig them into the ground, Majesty. Under a tappa field, so they are still part of the Bounded.”
Though I left the gold circlet on the Guardian’s head, I removed the ruby key from his cold hands and dropped it in my pocket. Then I turned to the leathery man.
“Ob, stand up.” I spoke as a commander, briskly and without sympathy.
The leathery man lumbered to his feet, standing as straight as possible with his deformed back, and kept his eyes pinned to the floor. The Singlars in the passage drew close to the door. Vroon stepped forward, anxious. “My lord, please - ”
I held up my hand to silence Vroon. Softness could ruin a strong man. I needed Ob strong. “Ob, I charge you to dig the Guardian into the ground as is your custom. Bury this poison flask with him. Choose two Singlars to help you. Make no honor or special ceremony out of what you do, but do not hide it. And to all who ask, you will answer clearly and willingly that the Guardian took his own life out of selfish pride and shame at his failure to heed the Source in the matter of the king. Some may be angry at his death and make accusations against me. But you will not fight them or hurt them in any way, except to save your life or that of your assistants. Do you understand your orders?”
