The White-Luck Warrior (40 page)

Inrilatas crouched naked some four paces from the chair, his arms about his knees. The dim light did not so much illuminate as
polish
him, it seemed. The young man watched them with a kind of blank serenity.

We must discover what he wants us to do,
the secret voice whispered.

For certainly Inrilatas wanted
something
from him. Why demand his presence otherwise?

His uncle released his hand the instant the Door creaked shut behind them. Without so much as looking at either brother, he reached into his left sleeve and extracted a wooden wedge from beneath the antique vambrace. He dropped it clattering to the floor, then kicked it beneath the base of the door...

Locking them in.

Inrilatas laughed, flexing arms as smooth and hard as barked branches. "Uncle Holy," he said, bending his head to press his left cheek against his knees. "Truth shines."

"Truth shines," Maithanet replied, taking the seat provided for him.

Kelmomas peered at the wooden butt jammed into the black seam between the floor and the portal. What was happening? It had never occurred to him that Uncle Holy might have plans of his own...

Shout,
the secret voice urged.
Call for her!

The boy shot a questioning look at his older brother—who simply grinned and winked.

Raw for the rain, distant thunder reverberated through the cell window. But for the little boy, the crazed proportions of the circumstances that seized them rattled louder still. What was happening?

"Do you
intend
to murder Mother?" Inrilatas asked, still staring at Kelmomas.

"No," Maithanet replied.

We have missed something!
the voice exclaimed.
Something has—

"Do you intend to
murder
Mother?" Inrilatas asked again, this time fixing his uncle in a cart-wheeling gaze.

"No."

"Uncle Holy. Do you intend to murder
Mother
?"

"I said, no."

The boy breathed against the iron rod of alarm that held him rigid. Everything was explicable, he decided. Inrilatas played as he always played, violating expectations for violation's sake. His uncle had stopped the door for contingency's sake... The little boy almost laughed aloud.

They were all Dûnyain here.

"So many years," Inrilatas continued, "piling plots atop plots—could it be you have simply forgotten how to stop, Uncle?"

"No."

"So many years surrounded by half-witted peoples. How long have you toiled? How long have you suffered for these malformed children with their stunted intellects? How long have you suffered their ignorance—their absurd vanity? And then Father, that slovenly ingrate, raises one of them
above
you? Why might that be? Why would Father trust a
whore
over the pious Shriah of the Thousand Temples?"

"I know not."

"But you suspect."

"I fear my brother does not fully trust me."

"Because he
knows
, doesn't he? He knows the secret of our blood."

"Perhaps."

"He knows
you
, knows you better than you know yourself."

"Perhaps."

"And he has seen the flicker of sedition, the small flame that awaits the kindling of circumstance."

"Perhaps."

"And have the circumstances arrived?"

"No."

Laughter. "Oh, but Uncle Holy, they
have
arrived—most certainly!"

"I do not understa—"

"Liar!"
the wild-haired figure screeched.

The Shriah did not so much as blink. His face bathed in wavering orange light, Maithanet enveloped Inrilatas in Dûnyain scrutiny, a gaze that seemed to tinkle like coals. It was a profile Kelmomas had seen thousands of times, stitched into banners if not in flesh. High of cheek, virile, the strength of his jaw obvious despite the thickness of his beard.

He is our first
true
challenge,
the voice whispered.
We must take care.

Inrilatas's eyes glittered in the gloom. He crouched the same as before, his chains hanging in arcs across the floor. If their uncle's scrutiny discomfited him, he betrayed no sign of it.

"Tell me, Uncle Holy. How many children did grandfather sire?"

"Six," the Shriah replied. There was a toneless brevity to the exchange now, as if they had shed the disguises they used when interacting with normal men.

"Were any of them like me?"

A fraction of a heartbeat.

"I have no way of knowing. He drowned them at the first sign of peculiarities."

"And you were the only one that expressed... balance?"

"I was the only one."

"So grandfather... He would have drowned me?"

"Most certainly."

The stark appraisal of a Dûnyain, directly to the point, careless of pride or injury. In an arena packed with the blind and the beggared, he and his family were the only sighted players. They played as the blind played—goading, commiserating, flattering—simply because these were the moves that
moved the blind
. Only when they vied one against another, the young Prince-Imperial realized, could they dispense with the empty posturing and play the game in its purest, most rarefied form.

"So why," Inrilatas asked, "do you think Father has spared me?"

The Shriah of the Thousand Temples shrugged. "Because the eye of the World is upon him."

"Not because of Mother?"

"She watches with the rest."

"But you do not believe this."

"Then enlighten me, Inrilatas. What do I think?"

"You think Mother has
compromised
Father."

Another fraction of hesitation. Maithanet's gaze drifted in and out of focus.

Inrilatas seized the opportunity. "You think Mother has blunted Father's pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought."

Again the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples hesitated. Perhaps Inrilatas had found the thread. Perhaps Uncle
could
be unmasked...

Perhaps Maithanet should be counted weak in their small tribe.

"Who has told you these things?" his uncle demanded.

Inrilatas ignored the distraction. "You think Father
risks the very world
for his Empress's sake—for the absurdity of love!"

"Was it her? Did
she
tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?"

"And you see
me
," the naked adolescent pressed, "the fact that I have been caged rather than drowned, as the most glaring example of your elder brother's folly."

Again Kelmomas watched his uncle's eyes fall out of focus then return—an outward sign of the Probability Trance. It wasn't fair, he decided, that he should be born with all these gifts yet be denied the training required to forge true weapons out of them. What
use
was Father to him, so long as he let him flounder? How could the Aspect-Emperor be anything but his son's greatest threat, greatest foe, when he always saw more, more deeply?

"I
fear
that you might be..." the Shriah said. "I admit as much. But if
you
can see this, Inrilatas, then your
father
has seen it also—and far more completely. If he sees no sedition in my fearing, why should you?"

Once again his uncle tried to seize the initiative with questions of his own. Once again, Inrilatas simply ignored him and pressed on with his interrogation.

"Tell me, Uncle, how will you have me killed when you seize power?"

"These tricks, Inrilatas. These tactics... They only work when they are hidden. I see these things the same as you."

"Strange, isn't it, Uncle? The way we Dûnyain, for all our gifts, can never
speak
?"

"We are speaking now."

Inrilatas laughed at this, lowered his beard-hazed cheek to his knees once again. "But how can that be when we
mean nothing
of what we say?"

"You conf—"

"What would they do, you think, if Men could
see
us? If they could fathom the way we don and doff them like clothes?"

Maithanet shrugged. "What would any child do, if they could fathom their father?"

Inrilatas smiled. "That depends upon the father... This is the answer you want me to speak."

"No. That is
the
answer."

More laughter, so like the Aspect-Emperor's that goose-pimples climbed across the boy's skin.

"You really believe that we Dûnyain differ? That, like fathers, some can be good and some bad?"

"I know so," Maithanet replied.

There was something
coiled
about his brother, Kelmomas decided. The way he lolled his head, flexed his wrists, and rocked on his heels created an impression of awkward, effeminate youth—a
false
impression. The more harmless he seemed, the young Prince-Imperial understood, the more lethal he became.

All of this,
the secret voice warned,
is simply for show.

And that was the joke, Kelmomas realized: Inrilatas truly meant nothing of what he said.

"Oh, we have our peculiarities, I grant you that," the adolescent said. "Our hash of strengths and weaknesses. But in the end we all suffer the same miraculous disease: reflection. Where they think, one thought following hard upon the other, tripping forward blindly, we
reflect
. Each thought
grasps
the thought before it—like a starving dog chasing an oh-so meaty tail! They stumble before us, reeling like drunks, insensible to their momentary origins, and we
unravel
them. Play them like instruments, plucking songs of love and adoration that they call their own!"

Something was going to happen.

Kelmomas found himself leaning forward, such was his hanker. When?
When?

"We all
deceive
, Uncle. All of us, all the time. That is the gift of reflection."

"They make their choices," Maithanet said in a head-shaking tone.

"Please, Uncle. You must speak before me the way you speak before Father. I
see your lies
, no matter how banal or cunning. No choices are made in our presence. Ever. You know this. The only freedom is freedom
over
."

"Very well then," the Holy Shriah replied. "I tire of your philosophy, Inrilatas. I find you abhorrent, and I fear this entire exercise simply speaks to your mother's failing reason."

"Mother?" his older brother exclaimed. "You think
Mother
arranged this?"

A heartbeat of hesitation, the smallest crack in Maithanet's false demeanour.

Something is wrong,
the voice whispered.

"If not her, then who?" the Shriah of the Thousand Temples asked.

Inrilatas at once frowned and smiled, his expression drunk with exaggeration. His eyebrows hooked high, he glanced down at his little brother...

"Kelmomas?" Maithanet asked, not with the incredulity appropriate to a human, but in the featureless voice belonging to the Dûnyain.

Inrilatas gazed at the young Prince-Imperial as if he were a puppy about to be thrown into a river...

Poor boy.

"A thousand words and insinuations batter them day in and day out," the youth said. "But because they lack the memory to enumerate them, they forget, and find themselves stranded with hopes and suspicions not of their making. Mother
has always loved you
, Uncle, has always seen you as a more human version of Father—an illusion you have laboured long and hard to cultivate. Now, suddenly, when she most desperately needs your counsel, she fears and hates you."

"And this is
Kelmomas's
work?"

"He isn't what he seems, Uncle."

Maithanet glanced at the boy, who stood as rigid as a shield next to him, then turned back to Inrilatas. Kelmomas did not know what he found more terrifying: the unscalable surfaces of his uncle's face or his brother's sudden betrayal.

"I have suspected as much," the Shriah said.

Say something...
the voice urged.

Inrilatas nodded as if ruing some tragic fact. "As mad as all of us are, as much heartbreak we have heaped upon our mother, he is, I think, the
worst
of us."

"Surely you—"

"You know
he
was the one who killed Samarmas."

Another crack in his uncle's once-impervious demeanour.

It was all the young Prince-Imperial could do to simply stand and breathe. All his crimes, he had committed in the shadow of assumption. Were his Uncle to suspect him capable—of murdering Samarmas, Sharacinth—he would have quickly seen his guilt, such were his gifts. But for all their strength, the Dûnyain remained as blind to ignorance as the world-born—and as vulnerable.

And now... Never in his short life had Kelmomas experienced the terror he now felt. The sense of flushing looseness, as if he were a pillar of water about to collapse in a thousand liquid directions. The sense of binding tension, as if an inner winch cranked at every thread of his being, throttled him vein by vein...

And he found it curious, just as he found this curiosity curious.

"Samarmas died playing a foolish prank," Maithanet said evenly. "I was there."

"And my little brother. He was
there
also?"

"Yes."

"And Kelmomas, does he not share our gift for leading fools?"

"He could... in time."

"But what if he were
like me
, Uncle. What if he were
born
knowing how to use our gifts?"

Kelmomas could hear all three of their hearts, his beating with rabbit quickness, his uncle's pounding as slow as a bull's—his brother's dancing through the erratic in-between.

"You're saying he murdered his own brother?"

Inrilatas nodded the way Mother nodded when affirming unfortunate truths. "And others..."

"Others?"