The Birthgrave (46 page)

He spoke offhandedly; I wondered how much it cost him to speak in this way, with the foundations of his ambition rocking under him. The Warden gasped and began to splutter something.

Vazkor cut him crisply short. “Your condolences are premature, sir. I am not yet dead.” The Warden's unmasked face paled to a sludgy yellow, and he was quiet. “You must understand,” Vazkor continued, “that Kmiss, Ammath, So-Ess, Za, and Ezlann have combined forces to smash the valley armies. They are also sending a small detachment to these mountains in order to smash me. About two hundred men—a great amount, it seems, but then they were not sure how many troops I had brought with me. Eshkorek has not yet sent men against me, but she will, no doubt, when pressed.”

The captain of Vazkor's guard got to his feet, giving vent to some curse on Eshkorek's faithlessness.

“Overlord—”

“No need for panic, captain. I have kept one security. There is a charge that not the gods but I—by some incredible means—struck down Asren Javhovor. They have said they consider the evidence against him—his attempted murder of the goddess—was false, and they have elected their new lord out of the Ezlann royal house as a proof. Now, gentlemen, Asren Javhovor is still alive.”

Startled exclamations along the table, except from the Warden, of course, who stared uneasily at his rings.

Vazkor waited for the outcry to subside. Then he said, in a very cool and measured voice: “What Asren tried to do was foolish. His loyal people would have killed him themselves, torn him apart in the streets, if they had been given his body when he collapsed. But the goddess was merciful, and desired no vengeance. I had him declared dead, and then I sent him here, where he has been a prisoner under the authority of the Warden ever since. When our guests arrive, I shall tell them this, and present them with Asren. Most probably they will elect him overlord in place of their present choice. The grateful Asren will then reinstate me as High Commander of his armies.”

“Can you trust him?” the captain asked.

“Completely,” Vazkor said. “Asren's mind has become somewhat—unstable, shall I say? And please do not forget, my divine wife has some influence.”

They glanced at me warily. He did not look at me at all. He imagined I would see the foolishness of speaking now, of telling them whose influence would truly direct Asren in the next moves of this game. It was a curious situation. Vazkor's men did not know it was he who had destroyed Asren's mind, and, though they could not fail to see, when he produced him, what Asren had become, there was no fear they would betray Vazkor's manipulation—it was in their own interests that he succeed. As for possible traitors—how powerless. Myself—but I would be silent. Mazlek—but he was mine and would do as I did. The old woman and the girl—perhaps, but they were witless. Only the Warden presented any danger. I glanced at him, and he seemed abruptly aware of his trouble. As he quivered there in his seat, Vazkor turned to him.

“There are certain diplomatic errors in our present situation. It would be more fitting, Warden, if you were to return to your City of Eshkorek Arnor, before the next stage begins. Your presence here must be an embarrassment both to your master and yourself.”

It was obvious the man could not believe his luck. He bowed and thanked Vazkor profusely for such tactful kindness.

Vazkor rose, holding out his arm for me. Two of his men fell in behind us as we mounted the stairs to his room. Inside, he shut the door, and indicated for me a chair by the low-burning fire. I did not go to it.

“The Warden,” I said, “will naturally perish before he reaches the City.”

“Naturally,” he said, “and his men.”

“It is possible someone may find their bodies.”

“Not at all. This tower is well-equipped to take care of such things.”

I said nothing, and he drew off the wolf mask, and put it on the table.

“I think you understand now why Asren has been kept here all this while.”

“I understand. And I oppose you, Vazkor. You have done enough. He is not your horse to ride to market on.”

“When they are at the door, my sister, you may think differently.”

“Let it end here, then,” I said. “Both of us possess enough Power to go free with our lives.”

“I have used my life,” he said, “and I shall not stop now. I am not a wanderer. I know my road.” He sat down in the chair I had refused, and looked at me. His face was quite blank, completely closed, his eyes a steady bar of darkness that seemed to have no break. “Even you, my sister, see your life as a succession of units, a river, in which the men and women you meet are like islands. But you're wrong. Your vision is confined in the narrowness you have made. We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less. The mountain road which led us here was built by a dead people none of us would remember otherwise. What we create is the only part of us which can survive, or has the right to. Man is nothing, except to other men.”

I had no answer. There was no purpose in answering. I did not even marvel that he had spent so much of his philosophy on me. I put my hand on the door to go.

He said, “How long before the child comes?”

“Sixty days—eighty days—I think I have lost count. The month named for the peacock in Ezlann, so you said.”

“You understand that now it is officially Asren's progeny,” he said to me. “For the moment at least. A detail, but you should try to remember.”

“There was a woman at Belhannor. A village healer. I did my best to be rid of what you gave me, but I failed. The result of my efforts may not be very beautiful.”

“The child will be perfect,” he said. “I am surprised you cannot see that. Your organs heal themselves from mortal wounds, and yet you expect your womb to succumb to a village abortion.”

Oddly, I had not thought of this, had not compared these separate yet related facts before. I realized I had stupidly still half-believed I would not bear. I opened the door and went out. It was dark, very dark, on the stairways of the tower,

Through the evening I heard the Warden's preparations for his flight from the tower. He was to leave at dawn with all his few men. But not for Eshkorek Arnor. I did not know what Vazkor had planned for him—did not know if he or his guard would see to it.

Determined to sleep, to blot out any sound or sight of violence, I lay awake until the first red claw marks of the sun opened the sky.

There had been nothing. Yet neither were there hoofbeats on the bridge, riding away to the City.

The innocence of silence was too profound.

4

I took Asren to walk on the tower battlements, as I had not done since Vazkor's men were posted there. It was a warm bright day, the blue wheel of the sky turning itself slowly overhead. Asren had become brave with the mouse, and was letting it run from one arm to the other, stroking it whenever it stopped still for a moment.

Perhaps thirty feet away the solitary sentry stood, his back to us, curious eyes averted. I had not felt safe to speak before.

“We must leave the tower,” I said softly to Mazlek. “Very soon, before the army of the new overlord arrives.” I told him of Vazkor's plans, and Mazlek said nothing, but his right hand clenched on the parapet, clenched and unclenched rhythmically. “I do not know how we can do it,” I said. “Possibly at night. We can deal with the stray guards we may meet, but any uproar will bring Vazkor. I do not think I can fight Vazkor, his powers are superior to mine—I have told you this already. And the moat—how can we cross it without using the bridgeway, which will make more noise than anything else?”

Mazlek shook his head.

“Perhaps there are underground passages here, as in Belhannor, goddess. Most strongholds have them as a final means of escape during siege or attack. But it would be difficult to trace them. Vazkor's wolves are not to be bought.”

“The old woman,” I said, “she may know, and she is too simple to betray any questions to him.”

The sentry stretched, removed his helm, scratched at his blond hair, and subsided once more into immobility.

“And beyond this place,” I said, “where can we go? No longer any shelter in the Cities.”

“Eastward from the mountains there are rock plains and areas of forest, marshes to the southeast and south, and then the sea. A wild land, good to be lost in if any were coming after,” Mazlek said.

“Deserted land?”

“Almost, goddess. A few tribal peoples, savage and war-mad, krarl against krarl, though, reportedly, they do no harm to out-clan strangers.”

“Then that is the desolation we must go to, to be safe for a time.”

It seemed a gray hopeless future for all of us, but there was no other way. Escape, the imperative need, left no margin for despair.

We walked around the oval enclosure, to lend authenticity to our presence there. The sentry's eyes flickered over Asren as we passed, surprised, amused, totally unsympathetic, a man watching a half-wit capering at a fair. Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.

We returned through the little door into the stone gut of the tower.

“I'll bring her tonight, the old one,” Mazlek said, “when her work's done.”

I nodded.

The mouse, darting on Asren's shoulder, looked up at us from blood-drop eyes.

* * *

The day dragged its heels as I waited for her to come. The light in the windows thickened, blue as stained glass. A slender moon watered the peaks with highlights and shadows.

I sat on my bed, the curtains thrust well back, Asren beside me. Something had made him afraid; he cried and clung to me, and now I held him in my arms, and could not move because he would begin to cry again.

A soft knock came on the door. Mazlek entered, and the old woman followed, and stood gazing at me. She had taken off her mask, presumably at Mazlek's instruction, but her face was like a half-formed dough, pale, expressionless, and without depth. Round watery eyes blinked and blinked at me, and then at the man I held.

“I am to come for him?” she said. “The girl not to your liking?”

“No,” I said, “it has nothing to do with that. I want to ask you something.”

She blink-blinked at me.

“The cellars,” I said, “and under the cellars—are there any other passages?”

“Passages,” she said. She blinked. “Passages.”

“Passages which lead out of the tower. A way out.”

“The moat-bridge,” she said.

“Apart from the moat-bridge.”

She blinked.

“Under the tower,” I said, “a passage under the tower which leads out into the mountains.”

Asren stirred against me, and her eyes slipped from my masked face to him.

“Pretty one,” she said, and clucked as if to a pet animal.

Mazlek seized her shoulders, and spun her to face him.

“A passage out of the tower,” he hissed at her, and shook her. She squeaked and struggled.

“No way—no way!”

“Let her go, Mazlek,” I said wearily.

He took her and thrust her outside, shutting the door on her round staring.

“This is useless,” I said. “We are in a trap.”

“I'll search the cellars,” he said, “and below. There has to be some way, goddess.”

“Yes, there has to be, Mazlek. And soon.”

I turned to Asren, and saw he had fallen asleep against me. I reached to touch his hair, and, in that moment, I felt something thrust inside me, sharp, insistent, and very real. It was the first movement I had felt, the first proof I had had that the thing which swelled under my belly was animate, and I shuddered at the feel of it, as if I carried death, not life.

* * *

Mazlek searched, then. The cellars, the foul dungeon ways, the vaults and underground places of Tower-Eshkorek. And there was no exit to freedom, at least, none that he could find.

Four days had passed in that search. And on the fifth, about noon, a bell began to clang from the head of the fortress, a terrible sound, the most ancient noise of panic and expected violence.

Asren screamed, and the startled mouse leaped from his wrist, and up the curtains of the bed. I hurried to him, trying to shut the clamor out of his ears with soft words. Incredibly, my instincts of protection had dwarfed him, so that he seemed small enough for me to lift up and cradle in my arms.

Soon Mazlek came, to tell me what I did not need to be told. Vazkor's sentry had made out the marching column a few miles away: the soldiers of the new overlord would reach us before nightfall.

* * *

It is easy to judge afterward, when all decisions are theoretic, in the quiet, when the outcome no longer matters. Perhaps I should have left the game to Vazkor, should have given up Asren to be his instrument for the short time it was necessary. There were other days ahead, beyond that time, when I could have fled with him, out of the shadow's reach. And he would have understood, after all, nothing of the use to which he had been put.

And yet I could not let it happen, this final degradation, this final eclipse of his being. Asren, who had seemed to me in the Temple at Ezlann at once too innocent and too aware to have been drawn in. . . .

There were many men, more than two hundred, all in all, I think. They settled about the tower, and lit their night fires to shine on the mixed liveries of the five Cities of White Desert, and of Eshkorek Amor, for she too had sent her quota of power in the end. They did nothing, simply sat around us in a ring, letting us see what was possible to them.

Vazkor's man rode out to them when the moon rose, nervous, for all his supposed immunity as a messenger; he knew very well they had half a mind to shoot him on sight. Still, the archers held their hands, and he got to their commander and delivered Vazkor's words: that he held Asren alive, had protected him here, as his lord, since the night of the mob in Ezlann, that Asren would speak for him. There was some confusion in the camp. The commander—a prince of Za who had known Asren well—demanded he be shown an hour after dawn at a low window in the tower. If the appearance did not take place, or he was unconvinced, their cannon would open fire on the fortress, and not cease until they had razed it. This arranged, he let the messenger go.