Warautumn (14 page)

Perhaps Zeff could have—if he had dared use the gem.

But Zeff had
not
dared: not since the episode with Avall—and if Zeff dared not, there was no doubt whatever about whether Ahfinn dared.

Maybe if they found more gems …

Sparing one final glance at Rrath—a glance marked by the rare privilege of actually seeing the man breathe—Ahfinn shook his head sadly, returned to the corridor outside, and re-locked the door.

As he approached Zeff’s chambers, the sound of voices reached him. He paused at the portal, listening. A messenger had just arrived, so it sounded: one of the Fellows newly returned from Tir-Eron, if he heard right—and that was a neat trick, too, given that Gem-Hold was effectively surrounded. Still, the Face knew of entrances that the Royalists did not, and that knowledge had served them well so far. The question was, did he announce himself or simply remain in place, listening?

The former, he decided.

Straightening his tabard, Ahfinn rapped a courtesy cadence on the door and reentered his Chief’s chambers.

Instead of glaring, Zeff ignored him, intent as he was on a dark, slightly built young woman clad in the tight black garb
of those whose duty it was to come and go from the hold unseen. By the ritual cup of greeting still clasped in her hand, she had only just arrived. She looked tired but alert. Ahfinn doubted that he had missed much more than ritual.

“And now,” Zeff addressed the woman, motioning her to a seat and claiming one himself, as did Ahfinn, “how fare things in Tir-Eron?”

The woman’s face was sober. “Things could … fare better.”

Zeff raised a brow. “How so?”

The woman took a deep breath. “On the surface, affairs proceed decently if not well. That is, people—the low clans—go about their lives much as before. Rather, I should say those from Eron Gorge and north go as before, as much as they can without the implicit leadership provided to them by the Chiefs. What we had not reckoned on was the extent of displacement in the south, nor on the number of refugees who must be fed, housed, and the pains in their souls attended to. Our stores, already stretched thin, are now, I fear—”

“—Overtaxed,” Zeff finished for her. “The question is, has there been direct dissent?”

“Not to say, though we have observed meetings of Common Clan and clanless—and dispersed them quickly with appropriate arrests. But there also seems to be at least one covert effort afoot to systematically assassinate our guards, generally those in remote locations. Mostly they just turn up dead with no mark on their bodies we can find—if we can find those bodies before the fish or the flames do, which seems never to be the case.”

“And the Chiefs?”

“Which Chiefs? Ours, or the others?”

“Both.”

The woman shifted position, staring at her drink. “As far as the other Chiefs are concerned, after Mask Night, we have had little success in … accounting for those we have not accounted for already. Nor, unfortunately, have we identified where those survivors might be gathering, though surely they must be doing
so—all of which means that we must be on guard at all times.”

Zeff steepled his fingers before him. “And why do you suppose this is? This problem with the rank and file?”

The messenger looked up at him. “May I be frank?”

“You may.”

“Because we reckoned on the people being angry at the High Clans for withholding access to The Eight, but in fact what seems to have affected them far more strongly is this rumor that Avall has proven that the soul and the body are not bound together. That alone—proof that the soul exists—seems of greater import to them than any sort of access to The Eight we can provide.”

“In other words,” Ahfinn broke in, “the fact that they have more reason to suppose there is something to life … hereafter gives them less reason to question the facts of their life in the here and now.”

“That, in essence, would seem to be the case,” the messenger conceded carefully.

“Not what we wanted to hear,” Zeff growled. “I—” He froze abruptly, cocked his head, and glanced toward the door. “Someone’s coming—in a hurry, by the tread.”

Ahfinn followed his Chief’s gaze, but by then a knock had sounded in urgent cadence. “Come!” Zeff called at once, his face dark as thunder. Ahfinn pitied anyone who used that cadence frivolously.

The door opened immediately, to admit a short, wiry young man whose clean novice robe did not mask a dirty and sweaty body. “Forgive me, Chief,” the lad began, glancing around quickly, his gaze pausing briefly on the messenger. “Forgive me, I say—but you wanted to be told at once, no matter what.”

Ahfinn’s heart double beat, both from the news and the light he saw waken in Zeff’s eyes. “You’ve reached the mines!”

The novice nodded, barely suppressing a grin. “We have. And, sir—the news is even better than that. We have—we think we have—discovered a few more magic gems!”

Zeff was on his feet at once, all anger and apprehension fled from his face. “Ahfinn, go with this lad immediately. Tell them I will be down as soon as I can make myself ready. Fate seems to have rolled the dice again; it remains to see how much of our fate that higher Fate has altered.”

Avall was running.

He did not recall beginning, only that he was doing so now.

Effortlessly.

His legs marked out impossibly long strides across an endless plain of sand—sand laced ever more frequently with hard earth and short, sturdy grass that turned yellow or tan a hand above the earth, but which still evinced a comforting green about its roots, even in what seemed to be the silver-blue of moonlight. Small animals dived here and there among those shadowed shoots, and for some reason they made Avall hungry enough to reach down now and then and scoop one up. If he ate them, he did not recall.

There were birds, too: a few, that rose from among that low growth. And every so often there were snakes and lizards: moving shadows among the still. Never mind the insects that rose chirring in his wake as he rushed along.

Tirelessly.

Never pausing.

Running.

Running at the head of the pack.

The light of a single moon beat down on him, and the stars whispered that it was not yet morning. He wondered why he wasn’t sweating. The wind whipped along his sides, touching more of him than it ought.

Something glittered in one hand, flickering in and out of sight.

He turned minutely, aware that others ran behind him and altered their courses to suit.

His shadow slid around and ran before him, long across the plain in the silver light.

But it was not
his
shadow.

Not the shadow of a middle-sized, neatly built young man.

This shadow was longer and taller. It had thick-thighed legs with three-toed claws for feet and a torso that was heaviest toward the hips. The arms were roughly the same size as his own, though the head was longer.

And there was a tail, tapering from a thick base to a sharp whip that stuck out straight behind as he ran. His back was a zigzag ridge of hand-sized plates.

He was hungry.

But it was a craving for more than food. Something had awakened in his brain that had not been present before: something profound and bright—something that filled spaces, where before there had been nothing but base desire.

He wanted, he realized, to
know
things.

And that desire flowed into him from a strange new place, from the shiny thing in his hand, in fact. And that hand hurt, he noticed, yet it was a pain he would never relinquish. It was like the exquisite pain when one’s mate bit one during copulation. Or the pain in the base of one’s teeth when they clamped down on a rival’s neck and sent him down to doom.

The sword did all that.

The
sword
 …

He paused, looked at the long shadow that extended from his right hand. And then at that hand itself.

At bright steel and dulling brass.

And an odd leather gauntlet.

No, that was his hand.

His … 
hand
 …

And then he knew.

He was a geen
.

A geen with a sword.

No, a geen with
that
sword.

Which was impossible.

“No,” he whispered into a moonlit darkness that was wavering into light.

Reality shattered. Moonlight swept away, replaced with rippled rock lit by the last orange flicker of the watchfire. Flat sand swirled and spun and became hard stone. He fell, except that there was no falling, only a realization of lying where he had always been: cloak-wrapped on a rug, with Rann’s back warm beside him. No footsteps followed him: raspy hiss across dry earth; but snores replaced them: a hand’s worth of uneven, uncertain cadences. His hand clinched on nothing.

No sword.

No sword …

He opened his eyes in truth and saw the cave.

He was also sweating, and the dream still hovered there at the edges of his mind. Too real, it had been. Far too real. It had to mean something, yet the only thing that made sense at the moment was its literal meaning, and that he dared not ponder.

He sat up slowly, not wishing to wake Rann. The cave mouth was a blot of star-spangled blackness framed with stone limned dull red by the fire. Bingg’s back was a cutout far to the right, facing outward, blocking the only exit from their sleeping place. The boy’s head had dropped forward, however. Probably he was asleep. Probably Avall should rise and chastise him. Maybe even take the rest of his watch, though he had done one of his own already.

But Bingg was only a boy.

Or at least not yet a man, though his body had started the
change, and he had undergone the prescribed one night of release with an unclanned courtesan.

Something told Avall that his cousin would never have a typical boyhood. It also told Avall that Bingg would probably not protest that loss overmuch.

But what about that dream?

It had to be prophetic, but if it meant what he thought it did, it threatened dire news indeed.

If only he had some way to contact Merryn!
But the only possible means to that end had been shattered past repair. And that assumed it was sane.

“No,” came a whisper close beside him. Startling him from a reverie that had already begun to draw him down to sleep again.

He glanced around, determined that it was not Rann who had spoken, which left—to his surprise—Kylin.

Kylin, who had said nothing since his initial outburst of doom-laced, singsong, quasi-poetic ranting. And now a word. A word one often said while dreaming, granted, but the way affairs had fallen out of late, Avall had no surety that anything in his mind—or anyone else’s—was sacrosanct. The Eight knew that his stronger thoughts and emotions slopped over into Rann’s often enough. And vice versa. Had the same thing just occurred between him and Kylin?

And what were they going to do with the poor little harper, anyway?
He was already blind. He had no harp, so he was now cut off from the only thing he was truly fit to do in any active sense. He couldn’t keep watch, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t fight to defend himself,
could
eat if one put food in his mouth, but that was all.

His would not have been a good situation in Tir-Eron with a phalanx of healers to attend him. Here in the wildest part of the Wild, it was unthinkable.

There were only two alternatives. Kylin would die—or he would revive.

The former was far too easily accomplished.

The latter …

Natural healing—which might never happen, and even if it did occur, might take longer than they dared tarry on the island.

Or unnatural.

And the only kind of unnatural healing Avall knew of was the gem.

The shattered gem.

The broken gem.

But still the gem.

And there might never be a better time to try it than now, when no one was awake to interrupt him. When the world was calm and quiet. When Kylin was himself in repose, but not so far gone that he had forgotten language. When Kylin’s brain, while perhaps injured, had not had time to close off those parts of itself that still functioned behind a wall of ever-thickening scars.

Scarcely daring to breathe, Avall slid out of the cloak, waiting long enough to make sure that Rann’s breathing did not alter. A quick slide of hands across the rug found the pouch that contained the gem shards. He dragged it to him. Between the firelight and that of the lone moon still in the sky, he could identify the shard he wanted: the smallest of the greater ones. The
safest
one. But maybe, also, the one he needed.

One final moment of risk, and it would be over—or else it would be begun, depending on how one tallied such things.

By common consensus, they all slept with knives close to hand, so it was no problem to locate his particular weapon; yet even as he snared it, he wondered if blooding was really necessary. His palm was still lightly scabbed from his earlier effort, and Kylin’s bore the crusty sign of his gripping of the sword. Gnawing his lip, Avall scraped away at the scab in his palm with the knife, and was rewarded with the merest trickle of red. In the end, he had to cut Kylin’s hand anyway, but only barely: a slight enlargement of the wound already present.