Warautumn (13 page)

Krynneth stared at them with absent interest. “Jump,” he said, increasing his vocabulary again.

Merryn raised a brow. “You keep that up, we’ll be able to talk like real people before long.”

“Jump,” Krynneth repeated tonelessly.

The brow lowered as quickly as it had lifted. “Maybe, but not now.”

“No?”

“No,” she echoed patting his hand. “They were in the fire, Kryn,” she went on, speaking aloud partly for his benefit, but equally as much for her own: to hear a human voice that was
not giving orders or sounding afraid. And because talking helped clarify her thoughts. “They don’t look the same, and given their capricious nature, we’ve no guarantee they would act the same, either. If they’re like Avall thinks: somehow alive, the fire could have killed them. If not … well, jumping isn’t the first thing that would occur to me to do with them, anyway.”

She scowled at that, wondering what the first thing
was
. “I suppose the right thing to do would be to see if I can bond with one of them—probably Strynn’s. Then try to bond with you. That way”—she gnawed her lip. “That way, maybe I could … fix you.”

She broke off abruptly, wondering whether she had said too much, given that she was still not certain whether Krynneth should be considered an ally or a foe. In either case, she would have to keep an eye on him. Prove himself he might—eventually; but until then, she would have to watch every move he made—which would make even simple acts a drudgery.

As for jumping—well, the gems could certainly jump one to a person or place. But she could think of only one place to which it would be useful to jump, and that was to wherever the geen with the sword was.

Which might, in fact, be possible—if she took the remaining two pieces of regalia with her. But which could also get her killed in a heartbeat if the sword wound up amid a nest of geens. Granted, she seemed to have achieved some rudimentary rapport with one of the creatures, but that was nothing to rely on. Besides which, there was Krynneth. If she jumped away, she would be stranding him on his own, and the Night Guard code of honor would not let her do that. Yet if she took him with her, it might be to his doom.

Of course he might die anyway—they both might. But she was still on a royal quest, and if she so chose, she could look on the last few days as a merely an unplanned diversion. She had intended to go west, anyway. And this
was
west. Beyond that, the only real criteria she had established as far as a viable hiding
place for the regalia was concerned were that it be as far from human habitation as possible—even deserted habitation, which ruled out anywhere nearby, since there was no reason this hold could not be resettled—and that there be some kind of identifying landmark sufficiently near at hand that it could be recovered at need in future years.

In any case, her course of action was set for her: Whether she liked it or not, she had to retrieve the sword. If she was lucky, the geen had dropped it close by—What earthly need did it have for a weapon, after all?

But suppose the beast was as mad as Rrath had been
. Human minds could only endure the full power of the gems under certain circumstances, so what would one do to a geen?

Well, for one thing any aberrant conduct could easily result in the thing getting itself killed by its fellows—especially if it turned on them. Even better, the blade itself could have turned on the beast with fatal results, in which case she was lucky again, and might not have to travel far to find out for sure.

Now
that
was a comforting notion—but even so, it was not one she was prepared to address at the moment, what with night coming on and neither she nor Krynneth having been fed in over a day. She helped herself to another quaff of wine and rose, turning to yank Krynneth up with her. He rose easily.
Too
easily, perhaps.
Had he lost that much weight? And how much had she lost lately, on a diet of camp fare and water?
Fortunately, food wasn’t a problem in the short term, what with the hold, the Ixtians’ supplies, and an ample cache of freshly dead horse. And while the latter notion held little appeal, she had eaten horse before, and the alternative was to waste a ready supply of meat.

Whichever alternative she chose, she had to build a cook fire—one well away from sight or scent of the bodies. She also needed to investigate the house in search of a place to sleep for the night. There were geens thereabouts, after all; and with the stables now in ruins—Well, there was absolutely no way she was going to sleep outside tonight.

As for tomorrow …

Food, first, in large quantities. Then …

Tracking she supposed.

Or—

A bath?
It would consume a hand at most, if they hurried, and make up for that in comfort. Besides which, there was the small matter of Krynneth, who hadn’t bathed since sometime before she had met him, and that had been over an eight ago. Yes, tomorrow morning, like it or not, and quest be damned, she was going to get him into the river, then into some clean clothes, if she had to pillage the Ixtian dead to do it.

In the meantime—

“Eat?” Krynneth queried hopefully.

“Yes,” she sighed. “That’s a good idea. Do you think you could find some firewood? I’ll go see if there’s anywhere to cook inside, though I don’t think it’s very likely, else these lads wouldn’t have set up out here.”

“Yes,” Krynneth repeated. Which settled a great many things for the nonce.

“But what
I
want to know,” Zeff said emphatically, and not for the first time that evening, never mind that day, “is where in three worlds was Avall?”

“Not on the siege tower; that’s all we know,” Ahfinn replied wearily, dodging deftly aside as Zeff swept by on his latest round of pacings. Those took him by a small table on which bread, wine, and cheese were always arrayed. He paused there to refill a goblet he had already refilled twice—then turned in place to glare at his adjutant, eyes blue as his Ninth Face tabard, but far, far colder.

“I knew
that
much a finger past sunrise,” Zeff snapped. “I’ve spent the rest of the day scanning their camp from our top gallery with the best distance lenses I have, and learned nothing—and curse them, too, for not cutting down more trees. I could see the top of what might be the Royal Pavilion but nothing at all of who goes in and out there.” He took a long draught of wine for emphasis.

Ahfinn availed himself of that opportunity to refill his own goblet, though he was drinking more slowly than his Chief. He hated it when Zeff got like this; then again, whatever else
he was, Zeff was also human—and it was human to vent one’s frustrations. He only hoped Zeff didn’t realize how much he was revealing about himself in the process. Information was power, after all, and Ahfinn had acquired quite a lot of information about his Chief of late—if not a clear notion of the extent of that Chief’s hold on sanity.

Something
had certainly changed since Zeff had tried to wrest the secret of the gems from Avall. And changed again since yesterday, when he had called the lightning, then snatched defeat from victory’s jaws.

“Think, Chief,” Ahfinn ventured finally, trying to look as serious as his youth allowed. “Avall had minimal food once we brought him here. He was also plied with imphor wood and—forgive me—physically abused. Any of those things alone could have worn his stamina to a nubbin even without what happened.”

Zeff rounded on him, his lean face dark as thunder. “And what
did
happen?”

“You were there as well as I was,” Ahfinn retorted. “Avall was clamped to the tabletop; there was that … confusion with the sword; then Kylin grabbed Avall’s hand, whereupon he simply … 
wasn’t
—nor was Kylin. We’ve chosen to call it magic because that’s how we’re conditioned to term such things; but it could just as well have been anything from a very clever conjurer’s trick to intercession by The Nine.”

“If The Nine could free him,” Zeff sniffed coldly, “it would mean he has Their favor absolute, in which case we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

Ahfinn shrugged beneath his own blue surcoat—wool, where Zeff’s was velvet. “They’re capricious. They don’t always agree. Perhaps it’s a test.”

“It
is
a test!” Zeff flared, claiming a seat on the padded bench built into one wall. “A test of patience. The fact is, Avall vanished yesterday, hasn’t been seen since then, and hadn’t obviously returned this morning. That tells me a number of things. Rationality dictates that he and Kylin somehow returned
to their camp, since that would be their nearest place of refuge, as well as being where their friends are. It also tells me that Avall could have been injured in … transit or became sick thereafter. He could even have been killed—what Kylin did certainly looked to
me
like the work of a desperate man, and such things often go awry. For that matter, they could simply have vanished completely. We could have witnessed a very spectacular suicide-regicide, for all we know. And that’s the problem, Ahfinn: We know nothing.”

“We know that Avall didn’t reappear this morning,” Ahfinn replied with a carefully contrived calm he hoped would be contagious. “Even that fact, tenuous as it is, gives you more time in which to find new gems. We also know that Rann didn’t reappear, which I find interesting.”

“Rann is Avall’s bond-brother,” Zeff spat. “If Avall
was
injured, it would be perfectly consistent with Rann’s character to abandon everything else to nurse him.”

“Which would also explain Vorinn’s presence on the tower.”

“And Tryffon’s and Preedor’s and Veen’s. But the rest—I don’t know, Ahfinn; those two particular absences just seem odd.”

“There’s still an army,” Ahfinn offered, “one that’s only going to get bigger while ours can only remain the same.”

Zeff scowled. “Conceded. But then we may ask another question. When Avall and Kylin vanished, Kylin had the Lightning Sword—without its proper gem, apparently, but which still worked after a fashion even with the ‘wrong’ one. Why, therefore, hasn’t anyone been out there wielding it against us? That’s why I had most of the hold folk out on display today: to prevent anyone using the Lightning Sword on us. Fortunately, as far as we can tell, it’s the only actual weapon among the three.”

“Agreed,” Ahfinn sighed. “So where are we, then?”

“Waiting,” Zeff replied sourly. “Exactly like our foes.”

“We could always try to revive Rrath again.”

Zeff glared at him. “Another exercise in frustration? Are you trying to drive me mad?”

Ahfinn chose not to answer. “I’ll check on him if you like.”

The glare did not diminish. “Suit yourself—only get out of my sight.”

Ahfinn sketched a bow and withdrew. He did not, however, exit Zeff’s quarters; rather, he opened a door to his left that let onto an empty corridor lined with identical round-topped doors. He walked straight to the third one on the right, fumbled briefly with a large bronze ring at his waist, chose one from the dozen keys clustered there, and thrust it into the lock. A pause to compose himself before entering, and he slipped into the chamber beyond: one of a series of small, austere rooms that permeated this part of the hold—rooms that had been built as a matter of course but had not yet had any particular function assigned to them, thus their sparseness. Which made them perfect as cells—or sickrooms—in which capacity this one presently served.

Rrath—Rrath syn Garnill, to use the full name of the young man who lay faceup on a plain white cot against the opposite wall—had not moved in any obvious fashion since Ahfinn had last looked in on him two days earlier, nor had he changed for the better. Never large, even by Eronese standards, Rrath seemed to have shrunk in all dimensions since he had been brought here by the same band of Ninth Face soldiers that had captured Avall back at the Face’s primary citadel. That was odd, too, Ahfinn considered. Usually when one wasted away one simply got thinner and thinner until no meat remained on one’s bones for the soul to consume, whereupon one died. Rrath, however, merely seemed to be … diminishing. He was almost certainly shorter than when he had first arrived.

Ahfinn shuddered as he stared down at the man.
Nine, but it was cold in here!
Maybe he should talk to Zeff about installing a brazier to knock the chill off the room. Maybe that would aid Rrath’s recovery.

Somehow he doubted it.

Rrath was victim of.… of himself, he supposed. Why, he hadn’t even been a Fellow of the Face for a year yet; only since the previous autumn, when old Nyllol had recruited him. But he
had
been a remarkably fast riser—perhaps too fast. Certainly if he had behaved with more circumspection they might have retrieved Avall’s magic gems long since. As it was, Rrath had fallen in with Avall’s brilliant but fatally flawed cousin, Eddyn, and everyone in the Face knew how that had ended: with Eddyn dead, with the gems out of reach in the regalia, with Avall on the Throne, and with Rrath having—briefly—worn the regalia—which had promptly driven him mad, then forced him so far into himself that not even the Royal Healers—not even Avall, with intercession from one or the other of the gems, so he had heard—could recall him.