Fall of Angels

L

NYLAN FASTENED THE ship jacket and pulled on the crudely lined boots that he wore everywhere, even inside the tower. His fingers crossed his stubbly chin, but the chill was so great, even with the heat from the bathhouse stove, that he had not shaved, but only washed his face and hands, before hurrying back up to the tower’s top level to dress for the cold day ahead.

The heat from the furnace removed the biting chill of the wind that howled outside the tower’s walls, but Nylan’s breath turned into a frosty cloud when he stepped away from the heated center of the tower and up to the sole top-level armaglass window to check the sealing. He half rubbed, half scraped away the frost to look outside, but cold air rolled off the glass, and frost re-formed almost as fast as he removed it. Through the little area he could keep clear, he could only see white-white and more white.

For more than two days, the white barrage had continued, and Nylan wasn’t certain how much of the snow was new and how much just snow picked up by the roaring wind and flung-and reflung-against the walls.

Most of the exterior tower walls had a spotty coating of ice on the inside stone, except in the kitchen and the furnace room. Kyseen and Kadran had plenty of guards-especially the newer ones-ready to saw and split wood in return for a place around the stove. The number of people willing to work on partitions and stools, or other wooden necessities, in the workroom off the furnace had never been higher.Could it be the warmth? Nylan grinned at the thought, even as he readied himself to head down to join them.

Ryba was below somewhere; she hadn’t said where she was going, but, with the storm still going, she was somewhere in the tower.

A figure huddled by the furnace duct on the fifth level. Nylan paused on the steps. “Relyn?”

“Ser?” The red-haired man stood with his cloak wrapped around him. “A man can never get warm here. It’s too cold to do anything except be miserable, and just warm enough so that you never quite freeze.” He jerked his head toward the single shuttered window. “I can’t even leave. Twenty steps in that, and they’d find me frozen in a block of ice come spring.”

Nylan sat on a step, and Relyn sat on the other edge.

“Why are you up here?” asked the engineer.

“It’s the only place where I can be alone. Sometimes …” Relyn shook his head.

“I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten close to one of the guards.”

“It is … hard … to think about, as you put it, getting close to someone who could kill you with one blow.”

“Why?” asked Nylan. “Anyone you sleep with anywhere could kill you.”

“You always bring up disturbing points, Mage. At home, when I had a home, should anyone have killed me, they would have been tortured and then killed.”

“If anyone killed you here, she’d be punished. What’s the difference?”

“It is different,” pointed out Relyn.

“I suppose so. Here you have to trust someone else, under a … ruler … you don’t know. I think that means you’ve never really trusted anyone.” Nylan stood up.

“Mage … were you in Carpa, I would challenge you.”

“For what? Is the truth so terrible? Most people with power always say they trust people, and what they mean is that they only trust them so long as they control them. True trust occurs only when you have no control.”

“I’d rather have control.”

“We all would … but even that’s an illusion a lot of the time.” Nylan recalled Ryba’s struggle with her visions. “Even for rulers. If a ruler taxes his people too heavily, some will revolt, and he must kill them.”

“As he should,” declared Relyn.

“But dead men pay no taxes, and now the ruler must tax the others more heavily to pay the soldiers because there are fewer men to tax. And he will need more soldiers because people will be even more unhappy. More soldiers require even more taxes, and that makes people even less happy. Do you see where that leads?”

“But …” Relyn looked up at Nylan.

“Control is not what it seems, young Relyn. If you kill a man, you make an enemy out of his family. How many enemies can a ruler afford? Do you see the marshal eating better food than her guards?”

“No.”

“Does she wear jewels or great trappings of wealth?”

“No.”

“Will her guards follow her anywhere?”

“I think they would.”

Nylan smiled. “Think it over.” He walked down the steps, wondering why he had bothered. What he had said would certainly have upset anyone in Relyn’s position, and the young noble was probably very upset. But what good had it done? His head throbbed slightly. Why? Because what he’d said wasn’t quite true? Ryba did have one thing the others didn’t-power. It might be power out of necessity, but it was power. Nylan shook his head. He couldn’t even present provoking thoughts that might be misleading without getting a headache, or so it seemed.

Nylan rubbed his forehead as he walked down the steps past the great room, empty except for Ayrlyn, gently strumming the lutar-probably refining or working on another song. He paused for a moment, watching the redhead struggle with a chord or a phrase, but she did not look his way.

He turned toward the south door, where chill windsseeped through the cracks, and a fine layer of snow covered the stones behind the door, shifting with each gust that buffeted the tower.

Nylan resumed his descent, thinking about the cradle he was crafting. But Dyliess would need somewhere to sleep, and a cradle made sense.