Raoul grunted. “I wouldn’t be surprised. They probably smell it. Now what’s this scrawl? I can’t read Aiden’s writing.” They spent the rest of the morning at work, sorting through the endless details that had to be settled before the men of the King’s Own rode north to battle.
After lunch Kel saw to her horses, stabled in the building the Stormwing had turned into his momentary perch. There were hostlers, whose job it was to mind the hundreds of horses kept at the palace, but Kel preferred to see to her riding mount, Hoshi, and her warhorse, Peachblossom, herself. The work was soothing and gave her time to think.
Jump watched as she tended the horses. The scruffy dog had put in an appearance at Kel’s side about mid-morning, clearly recovered from having his morning’s sleep interrupted by Kel and a Stormwing.
Jump was not a typical palace dog, being neither a silky, combed, small type favoured by ladies, or a wolf- or boar-hound prized by lords. Jump was a stocky, short-haired dog of medium size, a combat veteran. His left ear was a tatter. His dense fur was mostly white, raised or dented in places where it grew over old scars. Black splotches covered most of the pink skin of his nose, his only whole ear and his rump. His tail was a jaunty war banner, broken in two places and healed crooked. Jump’s axe-shaped head was made for damping on to an enemy with jaws that would not let go. He had small, black, triangular eyes that, like those of any creature who’d spent a lot of time with Daine the Wildmage, were far more intelligent than those of animals who hadn’t.
“I need more information,” Kel murmured to Jump as she mucked out Hoshi’s stall. “And soon, before the king orders us out with the army. I certainly can’t tell the king I won’t go. He’ll want to know why, and I can’t talk about what happened during my Ordeal.”
Jump whuffed softly in understanding.
Her horses tended, Kel reported to the palace library. There, she and the other knights who were her year-mates (young men who had begun their page studies when she had) practiced the Scanran tongue. Many Scanrans spoke Common, the language used in all the Eastern Lands between the Inland Sea and the Roof of the World, but the study of Scanran would help those who fought them to read their messages and interpret private conversations.
After lessons Kel spent her time as best she could. She cared for her weapons and armour, worked on her sword and staff skills in one of the practice courtyards, ate supper with her friends, and finally read in her room. When the watch cried the time at the hour after midnight, she closed her book and left her room, with Jump at her heels.
The palace halls were deserted. Wall torches in iron cressets burned low. Kel did not see another soul. In normal times the nobility would be at parties; not this year. The coming war dictated their hours now. They retired before midnight after evenings spent figuring what goods and labour they could spare for the coming bloody summer. Even the servants, always the last to sleep, were abed. It was like walking in a dream through an empty palace. Kel shivered and grabbed a torch from the wall as she passed the Hall of Crowns.
It was a good idea. No lights burned in the corridor that led to her destination. The Chapel of the Ordeal was used only at Midwinter, when squires took their final step to a shield. Now it was shut and ignored. Still, the Chapel’s door was never locked. Kel shut it once she and Jump were inside. There was no need to post a guard: over the centuries, thieves and anyone else whose motives were questionable had been found outside the Chapel door, reduced to dried flesh and bone by the Chamber’s immeasurable power.
Once a year during her term as a squire, Kel had visited the Chamber to try her will against it. On those visits she had confined her encounter with it to touching the door.
To converse with the thing, she suspected that she had to go all the way inside once again.
Kel set her torch in a cresset near the altar. Its flickering light danced over the room: benches, the plain stone floor, the altar with its gold candlesticks and doth, and the large gold sun disc, the symbol of the god Mithros. To the right of the disc was the iron door to the Chamber of the Ordeal.
For a moment Kel could not make her legs go forward. She had never had a painless experience from the Chamber. In the grip of its power she had lived through the death of loved ones, been crippled and useless, and been forced to stand by as horrors unfolded.
“This is crazy,” she told Jump. The dog wagged his tail, making a soft thwapping noise that seemed loud in the silent Chapel.
“You wait here,” Kel said. She ordered her body to move. It obeyed: she had spent years shaping it to her will. She stepped up to the iron door. It swung back noiselessly into a small, dark room with no windows or furnishings of any kind.
Kel trembled, cold to the bone with fear. At last she walked into the Chamber. The door closed, leaving her in complete darkness.
Suddenly she stood on a flat, bare plain without a tree, stream, or animal to be seen. It was all bare earth, with no grass or stones to interrupt the boring view.
“What is this place?” she asked aloud. Squires were forbidden to speak during the Ordeal, but surely this was different. In an odd way, this was more like a social visit than an Ordeal. “Do you live here?”
It is as close as your human mind can perceive it. The Chamber’s ghost-like voice always sounded in Kel’s head, not her ears.
Kel thrust her hands into her pockets. “I don’t see why you haven’t done something with it,” she informed the Chamber. “No furnishings, no trees or birds… If you’re going to bring people here, you ought to make things look a bit nicer.”
A feeling like a sigh whiffled through Kel’s skull. Mortal, what do you want? demanded the Chamber. Its face - the face cut into the keystone over the inside of the iron door - formed in the dirt in front of her. It was lined and sexless, with lips so thin as to be nearly invisible. The deep-set eyes glinted yellow at Kel. The task you have been set is perfectly clear. You will know it when you find it.
Kel shook her head. “That’s no good. I must know when and where. And I’d like another look at the little Nothing Man, if you please.”
Instantly the dirt beneath her was gone, the air of the plain turned to shadow, as if she dreamed again. She fell like a feather, lightly, slipping to and fro in the wind. When she landed, she was set on her feet as gently and tidily as she could have hoped.
During her Ordeal she had seen the Chamber’s idea of her task as an image on the wall in a corner of the grey stone room. Now she was living the image, placed in a room like a cross between a smithy and a mage’s workroom. Unlike her vision and then the dreams that had followed it, this place was absolutely and completely real. Behind her a forge held a bed of fiery coal. An anvil and metal-working tools lay nearby. Along one wall stood open cupboards filled with dried herbs, crystals, books, tools, glass bottles and porcelain jars. Between her and the cupboards was a large stone worktable with gutters on the sides. It was covered with black stains. To her left was another, smaller, kitchen-style hearth set into the wall. Its fire had burned out.
Kel inhaled. Scents flooded her nose: lavender, jasmine and vervain; damp stone; mould; and under it all, the coppery hint of old blood.
There he was, scrawny and fidgeting as he stood beside the worktable chewing a fingernail. Kel shrank back.
It is safe, the Chamber said. He cannot see you.
The Nothing Man was just as she remembered, just as he’d been in all those dreams she’d had since Midwinter. There was nothing new to be learned from this appearance.
In the shadows to Kel’s right, metal glinted. She gulped and backed up as a killing device walked out of the shadows, dragging a child’s body. The devices also looked just as she remembered, both from her Ordeal and from a bloody day the previous summer, when she and a squad of men from the King’s Own had managed to kill one. The device was made to give anyone who saw it nightmares. Its curved black metal head swivelled back and forth with only a thin groove to show where a human neck would be. Long, deep pits served as its eyes. Its metal visor-lips could pop open to reveal clashing, sharp steel teeth. Both sets of limbs, upper and lower, had three hinged joints and ended in its nimble dagger-fingers and -toes. Its whiplike steel tail switched; the spiked ball that capped it flashed in the torchlight.
The little man flapped an impatient hand. The machine left the room through a door on Kel’s right, towing its pitiful burden.
Moments after it was gone, a big man came in. He was tall enough to have to stoop to get through the door. His greying blond hair hung below his shoulders. A close-cropped greying blond beard framed curved, narrow lips. Brown eyes looked out over a long, straight nose. He wore a huntsman’s buff-coloured shin, a brown leather jerkin, and brown leather breeches stuffed into calf-high boots. At his belt hung axe and dagger. He stopped in front of the Nothing Man and hooked his thumbs over his belt.
“We just shipped twenty more to King Maggur. That leaves you with ten, Master Blayce,” he said, his voice a deep baritone. He spoke Scanran. “Barely enough to make it to spring.”
Blayce, Kel thought intently.
“It’ll do, Stenmun,” Blayce replied. His voice was a stumbling whine, his Scanran atrocious. “Maggur knows - “
Suddenly Kel was back in the Chamber’s dreary home. She spared a glance around - did she see a tree in the distance? - before she turned to glare at the face in the pale stone. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Look, Maggur Rathhausak is king now. He’ll march once Scanra thaws out. The king will be sending the army - that includes me - north as soon as he can. You have to tell me where to look so I can leave before that happens! If I go now, I won’t be disobeying the king. We mortals call that treason.”
I cannot, the Chamber said.
Kel disagreed with a phrase she had learned from soldiers.
I am not part of your idea of time, the Chamber told her. Apparently her language had not offended it. You mortals are like fish swimming in a globe of glass. That globe is your world. You do not see beyond it. I am all around that globe, everywhere at once. I am in your yesterdays and tomorrows just as I am in your today, and it all looks the same to me. I only know you will find yourself in that one’s path. When you do, you must stop him. He perverts life and the living. That must not continue. Its tone changed; later, Kel would think the thing had been disgruntled. I thought you would like the warning.
Kel crossed her arms over her chest, disgusted. “So you don’t know when I’ll see that piece of human waste. The Nothing Man. Blayce. Or that warrior of his, what’s his name? Stenmun.”
No.
“And you don’t know where they are.”
Your ideas of countries and borders are meaningless tome.
“But you thought I’d be happy to know the one who’s making the killing devices, who’s murdering children, will come my way. Sometime. Somewhere.”
You must right the balance between mortals and the divine, the balance that is my reason to exist. That creature defies life and death. I require you to put a stop to it. Your satisfaction is not my concern.
Kel wanted to scream her frustration, but years of hiding her emotions at the Yamani court stopped her. Besides, screaming was a spoiled child’s response, never hers. And as a knight at eighteen, she was supposed to act like an adult, whatever that meant. She tried one last time. “The sooner, the better.”
You will meet him, and you will fix this. Now go away. The iron door swung open.
“Can I at least talk to people about this? Tell them that you showed me this?” she demanded.
If you think they will believe you. You are not considered to be a seer or a mage, and your own mages know the name of Blayce already. They just cannot find him.
Kel responded with another word learned from soldiers and walked out of the Chamber.
The news of Maggur’s coronation in Scanra sped the process of gathering Tortallan fighters and supplies. Preparation for war filled the hours at the palace. Every knight who was not already detailed was summoned to the throne room. The king, queen and their advisers told the knights that they were now in military service to the crown for the length of the war, and gave them their instructions. Kel remained under Lord Raoul’s orders for the moment. She readied her own gear as she helped him assemble all that his men would require.
Weather mages turned their attention to the northern mountains. A week later they told the monarchs that while it would be hard going, Tortall’s army could move out. The next day the warriors readied for departure in the guesthouses and fields around the Great Road North, assembling knights, men of the King’s Own, six Groups of the Queen’s Riders, ten companies of soldiers from the regular army, and wagon after wagon of supplies. It would take three times longer to reach their border posts than it would if they waited another two weeks for the sleet, snow and mud of the northern roads to clear. It would be worth the trouble if they could be in place when the Scanrans came to call.
At dawn on the first morning of the last week of March, the army’s vanguard of knights and lords of the realm set off on the muddy road north. Kel rode Hoshi, with Jump in one of her saddlebags and sparrows clinging to every part of her and her equipment. On the bluffs north of the city she murmured a soft prayer to Mithros for victory and one to the Goddess for the wounded to come. She was starting a prayer to Sakuyo, the Yamani god of jokes and tricks, when Lord Raoul snarled a curse. She looked at him, startled: he was riding just in front of her with the King’s Champion, Alanna, the realm’s only other lady knight, and Duke Baird of Queenscove, chief of the realm’s healers and father of Kel’s best friend Neal. Everyone else turned in the saddle to see what could make the easy-going Raoul so angry. He pointed a finger that shook with rage.
Below them lay the city of Corus, sprawled on both sides of the Olorun River. Across from them on the high ground south of the river lay the royal palace, its domes and towers clear in the growing light of sunrise.