Springwar (52 page)

Sparing one final wistful glance at the phial, he returned it to the portable altar in which it was housed.

If Fate wanted his attention, Fate would tell him. But for now, it seemed, Fate spoke mostly through Avall.

R
rath had fallen into a crack.

Two cracks, actually. There was the literal crack in a slab of stone into which he’d just stumbled, as he made his way through the rocky wilderness that comprised the extreme south end of the rugged spur gorge that housed Priest-Clan’s main precincts.
That
crack had cost him no more than a scraped ankle, a bloody elbow, and a certain amount of dignity—that latter gone to waste, since no one had seen him anyway, nor would have, the way the rocks were piled around here, ornamented with clumps of hardy plants the same color as his robe, and the whole wreathed often as not with puffs of steam billowing from vents in the main gorge lower down.

The other crack was figurative. He’d regained consciousness at precisely the best moment to effect a disappearance. Exactly when no one was concerned with him.

Not with the elite of his clan imprisoned in the Hall of Clans, including his mentor, Nyllol, who’d introduced him to the Ninth Face.
Mentor indeed!
he snorted, as he picked himself up and assessed his skinny self for damage. Nyllol had used him ruthlessly, playing on his combination of ambition and naïveté to effect certain ends that were not Rrath’s own. But Nyllol wasn’t accessible now. And he doubted anyone else had energy to spare locating a young man who’d
escaped from the infirmary. Not when he was eking out an existence where no one would think to look—or dare.

Nor did he want to be found.

Not by his clan, for his clan contained a secret inner clan, and he had no way of knowing who was which. If the Ninth Face got hold of him, he’d never have peace again. There was no end of the things they could do to control him, and Rrath had had enough of being controlled. And if they even suspected he was no longer loyal to them, he would die quickly and invisibly, with no chance whatever of survival.

But the King was gone, so there was no way to beg royal protection in exchange for information. As for the remaining powers in the gorge—well, it was mostly Argen and Ferr, and the people he’d hurt most grievously were of those lines. Eellon might listen, but that would be all. And Eddyn—

He didn’t want to think about Eddyn—wherever he was. Eddyn who’d maybe been his friend and then tried to kill him, not once but many times. With cause, perhaps, for the first—but Rrath figured that only made them even.

Fear and ignorance were his friends, he concluded, as he started down the path, sparing a glance at the glowering sky. Ignorance, because few even among his own clan knew what was kept prisoned in the upper reaches of Priest-Clan’s gorge. And fewer, he suspected, actually thought about those prisoners. Which was just as well, with Nyllol incarcerated, since Nyllol had maintained charge of them.

Maintained for the last half year, rather. Before that, they’d been in Rrath’s care, under Nyllol’s supervision.

Those prisoners.

Those things everyone else feared.

Not that he didn’t fear them as well, but he had so much else to fear that they, in their predictability, were comforting by contrast. They were also the lone powerful things he, in some wise, controlled.

The beasts in the clan menagerie.

The geens.

The route he followed to their enclosure was a mirror of the one he’d taken half a year gone by when Nyllol had
asked him about his observations of the geens, and whether they were intelligent, and then followed those queries with more probing ones about how he felt about knowledge and power.

That path had taken him up from the hold proper, through a sort of rock garden, to a saddle in the rocks, beyond which, in the most steep-sided, dead-end canyon in all of Eron Gorge, lay the geens’ enclosure. But teeing off that saddle to the left was a tunnel that opened into another canyon, where the goats on which the geens were fed, were kept. Beyond
that
was wilderness. And caves, in one of which he’d chosen to dwell, with a few supplies filched from uninhabited suites under cover of night. As for food, he had vegetables and grain stolen from the stores intended for the goats, and goat-flesh itself, when he dared cook it, which he did at night on the smallest fires he could manage. He hadn’t spent a warm night in what seemed like forever. But spring was upon them now, and with it …

Change.

Somewhere.

Not here.

Now
was all he cared about. Eating, drinking, sleeping. Perhaps he was a little mad. Certainly he lived mostly in
now
. For the rest—he no longer cared.

Except about the geens.

The trail that was not a trail had leveled off into the upper pasture of the goat corral, and he hesitated beside a spur of rock before continuing. No one was about, save the usual herd of worn-out old bills and nannies. The crippled, the blind, the sterile. Too old to eat, too useless to milk or shear for wool. Like him, he supposed. Alive, but with no part in the world any longer.

One ambled up to nibble the hem of his tunic when he paused too long. He batted it absently, noting as he always did its odd, square-pupiled eyes. Wondering if that affected how it saw the world. Perhaps
he
had odd-pupiled eyes now. Certainly the world he saw wasn’t the one he’d seen a year gone by.

In any event, he didn’t want to linger—not in the daylight.
Someone was still feeding the goats—and the geens—after all. Probably some terrified half-boy like he’d been when he’d found his way to Priest-Hold: an orphan, because the whole generation ahead of him had died of the plague.

He didn’t want that child—whoever it was—to see him. Then he’d have to kill it, and that would draw attention.

With that in mind, he skirted left, through the shadows that lined the canyon and so came to the near end of the tunnel. He didn’t enter it, however, but eased farther left, where a half-hewn stair snaked up the slope beside it, ending a dozen spans above his head. He climbed it nimbly, agile for one who had been ill so long. Nor was he even slightly winded when he reached the top. He crouched there briefly, feeling more breezes beating at his body than were typical in the closer quarters at his back. They brought scents, too: smoke, and the sulfur stench of the steam from the hot springs that heated the gorge. And, ever so slightly, baking bread. Unfortunately, that made his mouth water and his stomach growl, and so he scurried left again, down the slope of the rock dome, to where he could look down on the geens’ enclosure.

It was maybe two shots long and half of one wide, with a stream along one side and enough spotty growth to provide needed cover for the reptiles. Also enough cover to support a modest population of small animals that supplemented the geens’ diet of derelict goat.

On which one of the beasts was feeding now, a haunch grasped in one knotty forearm. It nibbled at it absently, exactly like a man gnawing a roast fowl’s leg.

They were actually no larger than a good-sized man—about Eddyn’s size, perhaps—and shared more than size with him, too, Rrath thought sourly. Essentially lizardlike, they nevertheless walked on their hind legs, which put their fanged heads a span above the ground. Their long tails were mostly for balance, and their eyes were in the front of their heads, like most predators. Their skin was smooth and mottled, rather than scaled, and made high-quality leather. And their claws were dark blackish green—and prized in Ixti for use as dagger hilts.

Why were they here?

Officially because Priest-Clan maintained a scholarly function as well as a spiritual one. Which, though it put them in competition with Lore, also helped validate their existence among the increasing ranks of unbelievers.

And perhaps for a second reason.

Canon taught that anything that had intelligence also had a soul. Dolphins had been given their own god, just in case, because their actions were ambiguous. But in recent years increasing attention had been devoted to certain other animals that seemed to display traits that while not distinctly human, yet did not seem to be entirely derived from instinct. Reason and the use of tools were two of these. And maybe language.

Or memory, or loyalty, to judge by how the birkits had acted when they’d attacked his Ninth Face companions back at the station. Avall, and maybe the rest, could speak to them mind to mind—of that he was almost certain. But geens seemed even more warily alert than birkits. And if he could somehow access
their
wicked little minds …

Well, he might not
need
Ninth Face allies any longer.

And so he watched and waited, sprawled upon his rock.

Eventually the second geen appeared. The male. It spared what looked almost like a contemptuous glance at the feasting female, as though to say,
Fool of a woman! Why dull your teeth on stale meat when we will soon have fresh?

Disgusted, it ambled off toward the south side of the canyon, which brought it directly under Rrath. Apparently its goal was the shade there, for it curled up in a compact ball, all its elaborate armament of claws and fangs obscured, save the row of hand-sized spiky plates down its back.

Rrath edged closer.

A stone moved under his hand. He flinched back, but didn’t fall. The stone did, however, landing directly atop the geen’s head. It uncoiled at once, leaping to its feet faster than even Rrath—who’d observed them steadily for over a year—could imagine.

And not only upright, it leapt up the cliff—straight toward him.

The walls were sheer—fortunately—so the beast could
find no purchase. But even so, the movement brought its head uncomfortably close to Rrath’s own before it fell to earth again.

Terrified yet exhilarated, he eased back to his former perch.

The geen was looking up at him, teeth bared.

Impulsively, Rrath bared his in return, trying to look as fierce as flat face and minimal dentition allowed.

To his surprise, the geen cocked its head.

Their eyes met.

For a long time they stared at each other.

Rrath wasn’t sure what the geen was thinking, but he no longer had any doubt whatever that something besides raw instinct lurked behind those intense yellow eyes. It was exactly like staring down a bully or a rival. An establishment of power hierarchy.

Rrath knew that. And he suspected the geen knew as well.

Knew that one-on-one and naked, the geen could rend his life away in instants.

Knew that with any number of longer-range weapons, Rrath had the best of it.

And that Rrath controlled the food.

And maybe that Rrath regarded them with something besides fear and loathing.

For almost a finger they remained that way. Barely blinking, not moving. Only when the female flung the shank bone at her mate did he turn away. And even as he pranced off to meet her, he looked more than once over his shoulder.

I
t doesn’t look like a battlefield
, Avall told himself, as he shifted to a more comfortable position on his perch: a bare stone shelf three spans wide, high above Ormill Vale. Pines ringed the place, and spring flowers bloomed amid the laurel thickets that masked that part of the ridge. A lightning-blasted stump to his left made decent cover, now that he’d obscured his gaudy livery with a gauze-thin cloak and hood the same anonymous gray-brown as the rocks. The sky blazed overhead, impassive.