Tejohn looked around. He looked to be in the same underground chamber, but the rough stone walls were oddly detailed. The firelight from the other room made them a complex arrangement of contour and shadow. The priest returned.
Tejohn took the bowl. “How long?”
“Ten days, my tyr,” the priest said. “I have clean clothes for you, and a bowl for washing. Let me set the water by the fire to warm. Stay here, please, for the moment. The next room will seem painfully bright to you. I’ll bring more water, too.”
Tejohn watched him hustle from the room. The young man’s tone and body language held an earnest desire to please that Tejohn had never seen from a palace servant, who were usually creatures of chilly efficiency. Of course, now that Tejohn had spent a short time as a servant, he knew chilliness was a mask for raw hatred.
Ten days? He stripped off the robe they had draped on him. Someone had kept him clean during the long healing process: a servant, or was that priest’s work? And how had they prevented him from dying of dehydration?
Tejohn drained the second bowl more quickly than the first, then was given a bucket of water and a rag. If the water had been warmed in some way, it wasn’t evident, but he wiped himself down, then put on the robe the young man brought him. His was pale gray where the priest’s was red.
“Let me refill your bowl,” the priest said.
“Thank you.” That seemed to surprise him. Tejohn continued, “What’s your name?”
“Beacon Javien, my tyr.”
“That’s not a Finshto name, is it? Where are you from?”
The young priest glanced around the room as though he was being trapped. Tejohn knew how he felt. “My tyr, my family were Redmudds. I was an acolyte at the temple on Red Hill when the grunts attacked. We thought we were safe on our islands, but no. The beacons put me on a northbound boat, and I received my final initiation from Beacon Veliender. He’s Redmudd, too, although...”
He stopped there and his face flushed with embarrassment. He must have thought he was rambling.
“Thank you for looking after me while I healed,” Tejohn said.
“It is our duty to aid and guide those who travel The Way,” the priest answered. “If you feel strong enough to climb stairs, my tyr, Beacon Veliender would like to break her fast with you.”
Tejohn felt weak and famished, but Fire take the idea that he would be carried again. “I would like that as well. Lead the way.”
The young priest was correct. The fire in the hearth of the next room wasn’t large, but it was painfully bright. His eyes, shut for ten days, watered and ached as though he was trying to look directly at the sun.
The room was still full of people, which Tejohn had not expected but should have. They were so quiet, like parents sitting beside a babe in a cradle, or mourners beside a deathbed. Were they waiting their turn on the sleepstone? Fire and Fury, he hoped all those people hadn’t waited ten days for him.
The stairs were dark. The light from the candle Beacon Javien carried cast strange shadows around them. Tejohn began to suspect it was enchanted. Everything beneath the temple seemed alien.
At the top of the stair, Javien knocked at a heavy oak door, then entered at the command of a woman inside.
The room was much larger than Tejohn had expected, almost as large as his indoor practice gym at the palace and full of fresh air. There were day beds, desks, and tables set around the room in no particularly sensible arrangement. And there, at the far side, was an older woman, her gray hair tied back into a bun, working at her desk by candlelight.
She was so far away--perhaps twenty paces or more--but Tejohn could see her so clearly! There was so much detail that Tejohn felt a moment of disorientation, as though he were standing directly in front of her instead of across the room, and he swooned momentarily. Javien caught his elbow to steady him.
“My tyr, this way,” Javien led him to a wooden bench and practically shoved him onto it. “You should have told me you felt weak. If you had fallen on the stairs--”
“I’m fine,” Tejohn said. The gray-haired woman hurried toward them. “I don’t feel weak, just disoriented. My eyes... My vision has changed.”
Javien looked alarmed, but the woman’s expression softened as her concern turned into understanding. She addressed the young priest. “Along with his injuries, Tyr Treygar was treated for extreme nearsightedness.”
“Ah,” the fellow answered. “I was not informed.” There was a hint of reproach in his voice.
Tejohn looked around the room. Every desk, every candle, every wax tablet... It was all so elaborate. For his entire life, most of the world had been little more than colorful blurs, but now… It was as though a mist had blown away.
Everything was so detailed and specific. The grain of wood on a bench, the way a stylus and tablet lay beside each other, unique and discrete... Tejohn hadn’t imagined that the world contained so much information.
“I understand it can be disorienting,” the woman said, her voice deep and soothing. “You aren’t the first.”
“I could have done this years ago,” Tejohn said, unable to keep the resentment from his voice. “I knew my eyes were weak, but I had no idea the world was so...” He couldn’t finish that sentence. He wasn’t even sure what he wanted to say. Full. He had no idea the world was so full.
“There aren’t enough scholars or sleepstones to fix everyone’s vision or hearing, and with the way things have gone, it looks like there never will be.”
Movement off to the right caught Tejohn’s eye. An old fellow roused himself off a day bed and, after a quick glance at Tejohn, shuffled out through a side door. For a moment, Tejohn was embarrassed to have woken him, but he quickly realized that none of the other priests had hushed their voices. “I don’t remember waking up,” Tejohn said in the same tone. “I was on the sleepstone for ten days, but I don’t think anyone woke me for water.”
“You’re correct, my tyr,” the woman said. She had watched the old fellow step out of the room but now turned her attention back to Tejohn. “In fact, medical scholars will sometimes refuse to treat someone with injuries as extensive as yours, or will let them die on the stone. Severely injured patients can not be woken and moved during their sleep without harming them further. At the temple, we’ve developed a clever machine that will drip liquid, ever so slowly, into the sleeping person’s mouth. Water, diluted fruit juice, thin broth, it doesn’t matter. It’s never enough to drown or choke the patient, but it does wet their lips.”
“Why not share this clever machine with the Scholars’ Guild?”
She smiled. “That could be awkward, since they do not know we have sleepstones nor the skill to create them. As priests of the temple, we have tried to guide them toward the idea, but without success.”
Doctor Twofin, the scholar who instructed the prince in magic, had admitted that the Scholars’ Guild had secrets they kept from everyone, even the royal family. That was right before he had betrayed Tejohn and dropped him from a flying cart, leaving him broken and at the mercy of his enemies. The servants had secret societies of their own, he had also learned, that they called cabinets, because they were a source of necessary things. And now the priests of the temple as well?
Tejohn began to think he was the only person without a secret agenda…but no, that wasn’t true. The prince had given him a mission to complete, one Tejohn was not always free to talk about.
The old fellow returned through the side door again and moved toward the wall. No, there wasn’t a wall there. Tejohn hadn’t noticed it before, but where the wall should have been was open space.
As if his return was a cue, the older woman suggested they have breakfast together on the eastern deck. Sunrise would begin soon. Tejohn agreed, waving off Javien’s help. She turned to the young man. “Soup first, I think, considering. The rest when the kitchen is ready. We’re starting the day so early. And wake Ulmasc; we need her now.”
Beacon Javien hurried down the stairs, and the wom
an led Tejohn onto the terrace. “I would like to know the name of the person I’m speaking with,” he said simply.
“How unspeakably rude of me,” she said. “I was so caught up in worrying about you that I forgot my manners. My name is Beacon Veliender.”
“Ah,” Tejohn said. They had reached a table at the edge of the terrace. Veliender gestured to a seat that would allow him to have the best view of the coming sunrise. “That’s another Redmudd name, isn’t it?”
She gave him a crooked smile. “You could say that. It is, in fact, even older than the name Redmudd. Many, many years ago, when my clan surrendered their broken spears to the Peradaini, the...tyrants showed their fealty by changing their names to the Peradaini translation.”
“So, Veliender means ‘red mud’?”
She spread her hands. “Actually, it means ‘dirt soaked with blood,’ but the days when my people thought of themselves as deadly warriors are generations past. Battlefield losses will do that.”
Tejohn glanced at the old man, who was sitting at the next table. He stared off into the distance as though deaf to everything they said, ignoring them. Could he hear what they said and would he join them to break their fast? Tejohn had always heard that the priests had no hierarchy within their temples; everyone was a “Beacon” and no one was in charge. Of course, he didn’t believe it really worked that way for a moment, but this was the face they presented to the world. Perhaps the old fellow was the head of the temple.
A red glow had appeared over the horizon. Tejohn stared out into it, watching it spread across the sky. He’d seen the sunrise many times in his life, of course, but this was an entirely new experience. Laoni should be here beside him, he thought. The sudden strength of his longing for her startled him.
Bowls of steaming soup were set in front of them, and the smell of the eel broth made his mouth water. Beacon Veliender handed him a slender wooden spoon. “Considering your recent convalescence, let’s not worry too much about propriety, my tyr.”
She began to eat with gusto, and Tejohn did the same. There was very little actual eel in the soup, but the rice, onions, and carrots were very welcome. Still, he did his best to eat politely, only lifting the bowl to his lips and scraping the wooden bottom when it was nearly finished.
The old fellow had also received a bowl, but he ate sparingly.
As the servants--Tejohn noticed they wore white robes, not red like the priests or gray like his--brought apricots and rice, a young woman in red hurried into the room, a stack of wax tablets in her arms and a stylus tucked behind her ear. She had large, watery eyes and a weak chin. “I’m sorry, Beacon Veliender. I came as quickly as I could.” She set the stack precariously on the edge of the table and sat.
“I think,” Beacon Veliender said, turning toward Tejohn, “that it is time for us to have our conversation.”
“You want news,” Tejohn said.
“I do,” the priest responded. “Everything.”
He glanced at the young woman, her stylus suspended over the tablet. “And why is she here? To share everything I say?”
“Not to share,” Veliender said. “To remember.”
Tejohn shook his head. “What I have seen is not for Finstel ears.”
“The King’s soldiers are still searching the streets for you, although most assume you have already escaped the city. The only reason we dare to sit out on the terrace is because the temple and the attached buildings have already been searched. More than once. To take your story to the king now would be an admission of treason.”
“Unless,” Tejohn said, “the king arranged for all this.”
“Ah!” Her surprise appeared genuine. “Of course! A daring midnight rescue from the king’s own dungeon, and here we are, offering you food... You suspect this is a ruse of King Shunzik’s, yes? To make you tell all your secrets willingly.”
“I do. But I am still grateful that I have been permitted to look out over the city with new-found eyes, until they are put out forever.”
“Is that what you think will happen to you? Torture and blindness?”
Yes. Tejohn did not look away from the glowing sunrise. “Grateful am I to be permitted to travel The Way.”
They did not speak for a while. Tejohn no longer felt hungry, but he forced himself to finish his rice and drink the heavily diluted wine.
But the view! Maybe it was his close call with death or his certitude that he was going back to Shunzik’s dungeons, but this view of the city, with its low flat roofs revealed by the rising sun in slow, specific details, and the thin clouds blowing toward the horizon, astonished him. He could never have expected a gift like this, and he savored it.
The whole world was being devoured, and he had failed to save it. Soon, he would be back in chains, screaming under the torturer’s white-hot brand. Until then, he had this. This.
Veliender pushed her empty bowl away. “According to the stories circulating now, Banderfy Finstel is the one who broke through the Bendertuk shield wall at Toram Halmajil.”
“What does that matter?”
“When we tell our children the story of our people, do we lie to them? Or do we tell them the truth, like people of honor? Do we heap false praise onto the lives of our forbearers simply because it benefits us today? I would hope not. The things we have done matter, even if the grunts hunt us to extinction. Did you follow Banderfy through the shield wall?”
Tejohn glanced at the weak-chinned woman sitting on the other side of him. Her stylus was poised above the tablet as though waiting for the command to begin.
“I won’t hear Banderfy’s reputation sullied,” Tejohn said. The woman made tiny scratches into her tablet. Were those his words? “He was a good commander and an honorable man. It was a privilege to serve under him.”
“We don’t want to dishonor him,” Veliender said. “Only tell the truth. Did you follow him through the shield wall or did he follow you?”
“He followed me,” Tejohn said. It was an uncomfortable thing to say; boasting was something commanders did, and Tejohn had never been much of a commander. “I would have died if he hadn’t, and we would have never gone on to liberate King Ellifer from Pinch Hall. The victory was his, no matter who split the wall first.”
“That’s what our history will record.” Veliender nodded at Ulmasc, and the scribe finished making marks on her tablet and set it aside in favor of a fresh one. Again, she held the stylus over the wax and fell still. “But there are other questions we must record, such as what happened on the first day of Festival.”
The day the grunts invaded. Tejohn closed his eyes, the memory of the initial attack suddenly overwhelming him. He’d been there and seen it, of course. He hadn’t been close enough to see it in the same detail he could see now, but it was enough. The flames, the screaming, the violence, all were as vivid as that same day more than two months before.
Glancing back at the city below, he could see more and more detail as the day grew bright: chimneys, puddles on roofs, beggars skulking down streets, and much more. If his vision had been fixed before that day, would his memories of the attack be more vicious and explicit? Would he have seen Queen Amlian’s expression at the moment she died?
He couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, even if he wanted to. Veliender refilled his cup.
“There are a great many stories circulating through the population about that day. Some say the Evening People came through the portal with grunts on long leashes, like hounds. They say Ellifer cringed from them, and the Evening People showed their contempt by setting the creatures free.” Tejohn snorted in disbelief but said nothing. The priest continued. “In other stories, he stabbed his wife in the leg so the grunts would feast on her while he fled in terror.”
“Too clumsy,” Tejohn snapped at her. “If you want to goad me, you’ll need to be more subtle than that.”
She bowed her head. “Still, this is the story the King’s people have been spreading. I told you that people tell lies about the pa
st to benefit their present. If no one corrects a false history, Ellifer Italga will be remembered as a coward and a fool.”
“Song knows what he did.”
“But no human will,” the priest insisted. “Not unless the history can be corrected by someone who was there.”
“Song knows,” Tejohn insisted. “That’s good enough for me.”
“As a beacon,” Veliender said, trying a new line of attack, “it is my duty to aid and guide the people of Kal-Maddum. All of them. I can’t do that if I don’t know what’s really happening in the world.”
Tejohn laughed slightly, but there was no life or enthusiasm behind it. “Everyone has a duty, from the most powerful king to the meanest servant, but only priests and soldiers declare theirs to the world like a badge of honor.”
She sighed. “Very true.”
They were quiet for a moment. Fire and Fury, could he really tell this story to people who were almost certainly enemies to him and to his king? The more he thought about it, the less sense it made to keep it secret. Even if he could not complete the mission Lar Italga had given him, perhaps someone else would.
“There were no leashes,” he said. Immediately, the scribe began to scratch on her wax tablet. He assumed they would tell him if he needed to speak more slowly. “There were no Evening People, either. The courtyard was decorated for the start of Festival, and the king and queen stood on the dais. When the portal opened, there was a pause that seemed to take forever. Then The Blessing charged through. That’s what the grunts call themselves. The Blessing.”
Tejohn told the story just as he remembered it. He described the grunts, described the fight as well as he could, then the escape from the city, with the spears utterly overwhelmed and Peradain burning behind them. He told them about the stay at Fort Samsit, the plan to fly to Tempest Pass to revive a spell that could defeat the grunts, and how that mission failed.
He told them everything, leaving out one detail: that Lar Italga, King Ellifer’s only heir, was bitten by a grunt and had become one himself. In this telling, Lar suspected treachery from one of his people and vanished during the night, determined to carry on his quest alone.
The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way Page 6
