Authors: Randall Garrett
*
Here, that’s enough of that,
* I said sternly, a little afraid that the play would blossom into a full-blown fight. *
Behave yourselves and come over here to say goodbye to Thymas. We’ll be leaving tomorrow.
*
That was good enough news to distract the cubs from their quarrel. They loped over to us and pressed their heads under my extended hands, their minds full of questions and excitement.
I turned to my left, to speak to Thymas, and realized belatedly that I had not mentioned the fact that I was mindlinked to the cubs. That he understood it now was patently obvious.
“The female, too?” he asked, after a moment.
Tarani, who was seated to my right, leaned forward to look around me at the boy. “Only I am bonded to Yayshah,” she said quietly.
Thymas was in shock, searching for words. “But—is it not too soon for them? Why—how—
three
?”
He did not have to say how unfair it seemed, that I should be mindlinked to three sha’um while so many of his men were now deprived of that so-important connection.
Thymas and Tarani and I had talked frequently in those six days, but our conversation had often been public, and had not seriously included the Ra’ira—past, present, or future—as a topic. Thymas knew we had found the sword, and were on our way to Eddarta to reclaim the jewel. But he had not heard about Raithskar and the situation there.
He learned of it then, as I described the vineh attack and the formation of the link with the two cubs. As it happened, the discussion led right into the topic I had been avoiding all evening. “We have to move on, Thymas. We’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
The boy stood up, and set his empty glass on a table we had brought out of the house, along with the chairs. Night had come, diffused moonlight providing only a dim gray illumination. Beside the door of the house was an oil lamp; Tarani used a striker to light it, and Thymas’s shadow leaped out into the clearing.
“I will tell the people in the morning,” he said. “It would be best, I think, if you left quietly. You know that our good wishes go with you.”
I stood up too. “If circumstances were different,” I began.
“They are not different,” he snapped, then softened. “I see you know me well, Captain. I
would
rather go with you than stay here. But I begin to believe as my father did—
does… .
The theft of the Ra’ira has signaled a time of change—perhaps the very change for which the Sharith have remained ready all these generations.” He frowned. “Yet we are less ready than ever—our Riders at half-strength, our people demoralized and discouraged.”
I pressed his arm. “Eddarta will fall to Tarani bloodlessly, we hope—but in any case through logic, and not by force. By the time the Sharith are needed as a weapon—which I hope will never happen—Thagorn will have recovered fully.”
He nodded—a little doubtfully it seemed. “What do you need for the journey?” he asked.
“Food and water,” Tarani said, coming up behind me, “we can take from the generous stores you have already provided. What we need from you, Thymas, is a friend’s farewell.”
She moved around my chair to kiss and embrace the boy.
I
should be jealous
, I thought. Instead, I was deeply moved; I stood up and put my arms around both of them, sharing their embrace.
We left Thagorn at dawn the next morning. The cubs were cheerful and excited, looking forward to a trip I knew would be exhausting and uncomfortable, but happily ignoring my cynicism. Keeshah was glad to be moving, and Tarani said that Yayshah had shown less reluctance to leave her half-built den than she had expected.
We headed east, and quickly left the valley greenery behind us. In Keeshah’s mind was an awareness that the Valley of the Sha’um lay north of us. In my mind was the terrifying memory of crawling along a gravelly slope through a blinding, poisonous smog.
The Well of Darkness, the volcanic depression that continually cloaked itself in its own sooty mantle, also lay north of us. Tarani and I had tried to use it to elude pursuit, and had failed. We had climbed out of the blackness to the rim of the Well to face Obilin’s attack—and to be rescued by Keeshah, who had sensed my need and broken free of the layer of instinct entrapping him.
The country between Thagorn and Relenor, the Refreshment House resting at the foot of the Zantil Pass, was not quite desert, nor was it green. The land was rocky and dusty, but fairly rich with the gray-leaved bushes which had adapted to desert existence. The first day’s traveling went smoothly. The second day, the ground shivered.
The cubs flattened themselves on the ground, and broadcasted fear so strongly and suddenly that I was caught by surprise. I fastened myself more tightly to Keeshah’s back, and screamed at him with my mind to run, and he was far away from the cubs by the time I found my senses again. There was fear in Keeshah’s mind, but nothing like the absolute terror the cubs were suffering.
We turned back. Yayshah was half-crouching over the cubs, shielding and comforting them with her body. Tarani was standing beside them.
“Is the Well of Darkness causing this?” Tarani asked. “The … volcano?”
“I think so,” I said, still trying to catch my breath after the rush of panic I had shared with the cubs.
“Does that mean—will it
erupt
?” Tarani asked worriedly, using the Italian term for a word the Gandalaran language had never needed to develop.
“I doubt it,” I said, hoping I was right. “It must be mildly active all the time, to keep replenishing that drift of ashy smoke. It’s just getting a little more active, that’s all.”
I had time to be grateful for Tarani’s accessing Antonia’s memories so that I could explain things clearly without much effort—because calming the cubs took all the patience and concentration I could muster. The tremor had lasted only a few seconds, and I could detect no further movement, but the cubs took a
lot
of convincing. Finally, they loosened their deathgrips on the rocky ground and nervously followed their parents as we moved on.
*
Have you felt that before?
* I asked Keeshah.
*Yes,*
he answered.
*
While you were in the Valley?
* I prompted him.
*
Yes,*
he said, and I began to breathe more easily. If the tremors had been going on since Keeshah’s cubhood in the Valley, then this one was nothing special to worry about.
We reached Relenor toward evening of the second day, and were welcomed with the same friendliness we encountered at every Refreshment House. For reasons I never have understood clearly, the Fa’aldu—desert dwellers who seemed to be able to draw water from out of nowhere, and guarded the secret carefully—had chosen to honor me as if I were a hero. Part of it lay with Balgokh, at the Refreshment House of Yafnaar, who had been the first person to see the revived Markasset. He had helped me, and had been aware of the difference in me. He was another, like Dharak, who seemed to sense imminent change, and he had alerted all the Fa’aldu to provide me (and Tarani) anything we needed.
Tarani and I had the privilege of dining with the Relenor family in the interior court of the Fa’aldu dwelling, rather than in the spartan guest quarters the Fa’aldu maintained for the use of travelers.
It had become a minor tradition that I traded stories for the meals the Fa’aldu so generously shared with me. Hold Lussim, the Elder of this Refreshment House, about trying to shelter Yayshah in Thagorn, and the tragedy that resulted. I took the story to Raithskar, to the birth of the cubs, and out into the desert. The family was shaken and awed by the idea of walking through a city so ancient, and the secret of the sword’s hiding place was a wonder to them. I had developed a real skill at the artful omission of fact, and managed to avoid any reference to Tarani’s true state and the effect of the sword on her two personalities.
They grieved over the loss of the third cub as if one of their own had died, and expressed deep concern over the state of things in Raithskar. I edged around the truth again, and let them believe that taking the sha’um from the city had reduced the danger to the citizens of Raithskar, and that the vineh illness would wear away in time.
They had known Tarani before meeting me, though their friendship had not been extended so completely to her. The announcement that we were going to Eddarta to proclaim her real identity as the rightful High Lord was greeted with amazement and a mixture of dismay and delight—delight at the newest twist of what was taking on the proportions of a romantic saga, and dismay that she was to become a fixture in Eddarta.
The Fa’aldu maintained a neutral position in the affairs of men outside the walls of Refreshment Houses, but they knew a lot about them, and were too normal not to make judgments. On the other side of the world, the Fa’aldu had violated their own tradition to offer succor and help to the slaves who escaped from Eddarta’s copper mines. They were unaware that the system they thought foolproof ended in Chizan—in death or a different sort of slavery for the people they “helped.”
The Fa’aldu in the Refreshment Houses west of the high crossings that divided Gandalara did not know of their kindred’s activity against Eddarta, but they shared the feeling of disapproval. Eddarta was a weighted society, top-heavy with the Lords’ wealth at the expense of the effort of the “common man.” And the Fa’aldu had an historical reason for disagreeing with the concepts governing Eddarta. The Refreshment Houses were the product of a generous King who had set up a fair system by which everyone could share the skill of the Fa’aldu, and they would be well compensated for their art. Eddarta was the product of the last King, a selfish King, who had fled from Kä and rebuilt his power in the form of an economic autocracy.
By Fa’aldu reasoning, there was nothing good about the Lords. To find out that Tarani, whom they respected and liked, was a Lord by birth was something of a shock.
“And when you rule Eddarta,” Lussim asked quietly of Tarani, “what will you do?”
“The present High Lord, my natural brother Indomel,” Tarani said, “has the Ra’ira.” The group gasped. That the Ra’ira had been stolen from Raithskar was common knowledge; Lussim and his people knew that I had been pursuing the thief on the last occasion I had stopped here. Obviously, they were not blind to the history of the stone, or the possible significance of its being in the hands of a descendant of the Kings.
“I shall send the Ra’ira back to Raithskar, where it belongs,” she said. “And I shall begin a change in Eddarta, away from the rule of whim and toward fair treatment. I am not so much a fool to think I shall change the attitude of the Lords completely and immediately, but I can make a beginning. That,” she said, “is my only purpose in claiming my rightful place.”
The Fa’aldu around the dinner table broke out into a bustling noise of approval, while I, seated directly across from Tarani, stared at her in open-mouthed shock. She stared at the empty plate in front of her and refused to meet my eyes, and I recovered my composure.
Later, in our room—a guest room in the Fa’aldu quarters, rather than in the transients’ cubicles—I repeated her words that had alarmed me at the dinner table. “‘
Send
the Ra’ira back to Raithskar?’”
She sat down on the huge salt block that, covered with a pallet, served as a double bed. “Rikardon, please understand—I feel confused and uncertain. Until I was asked the question, until I spoke the words, I had not realized that I expect to—to stay in Eddarta for a time. Shall I win the acclaim of the Lords, deliver them and all of Eddarta from Indomel’s crafty selfishness, only to seize the Ra’ira and abandon them again? Would not that be as selfish an act as anything Indomel might do?” She looked up at me, her eyes troubled. “When the Ra’ira is ours, and any possible danger from Indomel is prevented, will that not satisfy the task?”
“And what about the vineh, still terrorizing the people of Raithskar?” I demanded. My voice was shaking. I was very much afraid I would hear the very words she spoke next.
“You and Keeshah could return the stone to Raithskar,” she said. “Without the cubs, you could make the trip quickly, deliver the Ra’ira to the Council, and—and return to Eddarta. Rikardon,” she asked, pleading, “you
would
return to me in Eddarta?”
Tarani was as elegant and poised a woman as I had ever met, but she was young in biological age. All the anger I felt—which was, I was sure, an expression of fear of that proposed separation—faded before the protectiveness she inspired in those infrequent moments when she looked young and vulnerable, and let me see that she needed me.
She told the truth about not thinking this through before,
I thought.
She’s just had a glimpse of what it may really be like to become High Lord, and the responsibility is scaring her out of her wits.
I sat beside her and put my arm around her shoulders. She turned her face against my chest and held me, trembling. We sat like that for a long time, and my thoughts rambled anxiously along lines toward the future.
Don’t worry about it until it happens
, I told myself.
As usual, I found it hard to listen to my own good advice.
We took leave of Lussim and his family early the next morning. Keeshah carried a freshly killed glith across his shoulders. Yaysha had a similar burden, and, as we climbed toward the Zantil Pass, my attention was thoroughly occupied with reminding the cubs that the food was for later.
Yoshah and Koshah were showing more endurance than I had hoped for. Apparently those first few weeks of growth had been a natural spurt, enough to get them large and coordinated enough to hunt for themselves. From here on out, it looked as if they would acquire their full size more gradually. We had allowed them to fast for the two days it had taken us to get from Thagorn to Relenor, and they seemed little harmed by it. They had eaten two heavy meals, and would have another before we tackled the Zantil Pass.
The Korchi mountain range separated the two large sections of Eddarta. They formed a rough triangle with its northernmost point merged into the Great Wall and its east-west base line formed by the Chizan crossing. There were two high passes, the Zantil on the west and the Zantro on the east, with an arid, hollow area nearly at the midpoint of the triangle’s base. That hollow held Chizan, a city run exclusively by an element called the “rogueworld” in other cities. Travelers paid highly for anything they wanted, from water to gaming tokens, to hired assassination. A roguelord named Molik had controlled the city until Thymas killed him. The head man now was Worfit, a roguelord who had started out in Raithskar. Markasset had known him. I knew him. We were
not
friends. It had been Worfit and his men who had chased Tarani and me into the Well of Darkness, but Keeshah’s appearance had daunted them.