Guardians Of The Keep

CHAPTER 11

The first time I participated in the madris, it had been a hurried business. The Dulcé Baltar and I and the seven Preceptors stood in the Chamber of the Gate next to the curtain of roaring white fire. All of twelve years old, I had feared nothing in my life until I understood that I was to step through that wall of flame into the Breach between the worlds, balanced on a thread of enchantment. My mouth had gone dry and my stomach had churned, my terror so overwhelming that I could not attend to the rite that was taking place.

The memory still confused me, for sometimes I envisioned Baltar, a solemn young Dulcé, who, though he was not a mote taller than me, had been lean and hard with powerful shoulders that emphasized my boyish stringiness. But sometimes Baltar wore another face, a rounder, older one, that burst into laughter, tears, worry, or delight with the ease and frequency of a child. I towered over him. It made me wonder if I had actually linked with a different madrissé-perhaps before my latest attempt to repair the Bridge-the one I could not yet remember. I could retrieve no name to go with the second face.

Exeget had performed my madris rite with Baltar, for I had not possessed the power required. With Bareil, of course, I was on my own. But he told me what to do, practicing the words with me until I had them right. “Give me a moment to prepare myself, my lord, and then you may begin.”

Bareil knelt on the plank floor of the tidy chamber, held his hands palms up and open in front of his breast, and fixed his gaze on something in the vicinity of the door latch. Gradually his eyes lost their focus, and the light of awareness faded from his face. When his withdrawal from conscious activity seemed complete, I placed my hands on either side of his head, as he had instructed me, and touched his mind. He had made himself completely quiescent and completely open.

“Kantalo tassaye, Bareil…”I began. Softly I touch thee.

To leave his mind so exposed was an incredible act of trust, for at that moment I could have filled him with anything: fantasies, delusions that bore the stamp of truth, sensations of pain or pleasure, desires that could induce him to murder or madness. I could revise his whole identity, his whole emotional bearing. But instead, I reached into the space he had left clear and uncluttered for me, and I carefully touched the centers of knowledge and memory, the places of instinct and reasoning, imprinting on each of them a trace of myself-a connection that would allow me to command their functioning.

Only one step of the madris did I skip, that part which would place my mark on his will, giving me the power to compel his obedience. He had not asked me to forego it, trusting that I would not command him when he wished otherwise. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself, for I could not say that I would never press him against his wishes. Better to leave the connection unmade, even if it left our bond incomplete.

For my part of the bonding rite, I simply gave the Dulcé a silent command to draw whatever he pleased from my own head. A sorry lot of miscellany that would be. The sensation was odd and unsettling, something like a thousand spiders scurrying across the skin with pricking bristles on their feet-only it was all inside my head. When it was done, I touched Bareil’s face to rouse him, helped him to his feet, and we clasped hands.

“Well done, my lord… my madrisson,” he said, smiling. “You are more than your memories. No memory can teach you to be so generous with your gifting or so careful in your mind’s touch. I am honored and humbled to be your madrissé.”

I tried to think of something equally kind to say, but he seemed to have used up all the eloquence in the room. “Thank you, Bareil. The honor is mine.”

Though I was anxious to question Bareil, I encouraged him to sleep for a while. He took no time at all to accept the offer. The madris is a draining ritual for a Dulcé, and he had stood at the brink of death a few short hours earlier.

“One more thing,” he said, as he moved to the bed, his eyelids already half closed. “You must destroy the portal that connects this place with Master Dassine’s house and the palace courtyard, lest someone follow us here. Command me, and I can tell you how to accomplish it.”

And so I did. By the time I had stepped down the passage to the spot where we had entered, fumbled my way through the destructive enchantment Bareil had given me, and returned to the sunny little room, the Dulcé was deeply asleep.

I spent the ensuing hours in the most elemental fashion- eating and wishing I could not think. Dassine, the child, the murderer… Several times that afternoon I came close to the precipice and had to tiptoe backward.

What was I to do about Exeget? If my old mentor had killed Dassine, then he would die for it. Yet such conviction in a matter of life-taking disgusted me. As I had relived the past in these months with Dassine, coming of age in the mundane world, traveling its poorest places and learning of suffering and the art of healing, I had come to the conclusion that for a Healer to take a life was unforgivable. And to do it for so crass a purpose as vengeance doubly condemned the act. But neither could I support mercy in this case.

The Lords had begun this war. A thousand years ago Notole, Parven, and Ziddari, three close friends, all of them powerful Dar’Nethi sorcerers, had discovered a new method of gathering power for sorcery, more efficient, they said, than the slow accumulation of experience, the acceptance and savoring of life that we called the Dar’Nethi Way. They had devised a way to borrow the life essence from plants or trees or animals, and once they had used it to build their power, to return the essence to its source, leaving the source richer, more beautiful, more complete than it had been before. In joy, excitement, and deserved pride in their talents, they claimed that with such an increase in our abilities, we Dar’Nethi would be able to heal the sorrows of the universe.

But our king and his Preceptors, as well as many other wise men and women, judged that such practice was a dangerous and risky perversion, a temptation too easily distorted. All of nature was balance: light and dark, summer and winter, land and sea, intellect and passion, even as our god Vasrin was both male and female, Creator and Shaper. If the return of essence enriched the source, then something else must be diminished-and thus the balance of the world disrupted. Every enchantment had its price, and King D’Arnath forbade them to continue until we understood the cost of what they did.

Disappointed, but not ready to forego their greatest accomplishment, the three proceeded in secret, planning a monumental working designed to convince everyone of the innocence and rightness of their ideas-using themselves as the objects of their enchantment. But, as the wise had predicted, it all went wrong. Catastrophe. Oh, the three had indeed become immensely powerful, even immortal, so the stories said-Lords, they called themselves. But they had not returned anything of beauty to the world. They had left themselves, our beauteous land, and the universe itself corrupt and broken. Untold thousands of our people who had been in the path of their destruction had been transformed into soulless Zhid. All the realms of Gondai had been destroyed in the Catastrophe or the war that followed, only the High King D’Arnath’s royal city and the nearby Vales of Eidolon enduring, surrounded by a desert wasteland.

How could it be wrong to destroy the Lords or the tools they used to draw the rest of us into their corruption? If Exeget had killed Dassine, then he would kill others, and I was sworn to protect the people of both worlds. The argument left my skull ready to crack.

At dusk, I woke Bareil. Odd to be on the shaking end of it, rather than the shaken. “The sun is taking itself off, Dulcé,” I said, “and I think we must do the same.”

“You’ve let me sleep too long.”

“I’ve just recently been reminded of how blessed it is to get a full measure.”

“So what to do, my lord?”

“I must find out about this child.”

“Command me.”

I shared out bread and cold chicken from the pack, and filled two cups with hot, pungent saffria from the small urn sitting on the table. As we ate, I commanded Bareil, “Detan detu, madrissé. Tell me of the child that is lost.” Such were the proper words to unlock the knowledge of a Dulcé.

He considered for a moment. “I’m sorry, my lord, but I know nothing of a child that is lost.”

“Abducted, then. Any abducted child?” One had to be very specific when trying to access information that was not at the front of the Dulcé‘s mind. “Or any connection of an abducted child with me or with my family?”

“There have been many cases of children abducted by the Zhid, but nothing to distinguish one from another.” Deep in thought, he pulled a bite of meat from the chicken leg. “Throughout history the Zhid have tried to abduct royal children as they do other Dar’Nethi children. None of those attempts have been successful. In the years before Master Exeget took you under his protection, there were three attempts to abduct you. I know of no specific connection of any abducted child with you or your family.”

I came at the problem from a different tack. “Tell me of the place called Zhev’Na.”

Bareil laid down his bread and set his cup aside. “Since the Catastrophe, we have called the ruined lands Ce Uroth-the Wastes-or, as those who serve the Lords say, the Barrens. Zhev’Na is the stronghold of the Lords in the heart of Ce Uroth. Dassine believed it was one of the great houses ruined by the Catastrophe, but even if that is true, no one knows which one or where to find it.”

So Dassine knew, or feared, that the Lords had taken this mysterious child. But Bareil had already told me that he knew nothing of any child taken by the Zhid.

“Do we know why the Zhid capture children?”

“To steal an enemy’s children has a profoundly demoralizing effect. It destroys his hope for the future and often will make him act rashly. In addition, Master Dassine surmised that children are especially susceptible to the corruption of the Lords. Some Zhid commanders are Dar’Nethi who were captured as children and raised in Zhev’Na under the tutelage of the Three. Only when they came of age, their minds twisted by the life they had led, were they made Zhid-the most wicked of all their commanders. And, of course, the Zhid can no longer produce children of their own, a condition that manifested itself in the early centuries of the war. The enchantments of the Lords are in opposition to creation-to life-so Master Dassine explained it.”

As the daylight faded, lingering in the pearly glow given off by the paving stones of the city, I tried a hundred more questions, sideways, backward, arranging and rearranging them to elicit any scrap of information about one particular unlucky boy. To no avail. Dassine had made no references to any living child save the child I had been.

The luminous commard outside the window emptied and fell quiet. Bareil told me that even with the more peaceful times of the past few months, people were not accustomed to going about freely at night. The Seeking of the Zhid- the creeping invasion of the soul that led to despair-had always been strongest in the dark hours. Watchers yet manned the walls at night, but had neither seen any sign of the Zhid nor felt their Seeking since I had returned from the mundane world after doing… whatever I had done there.

“Stars of night, what does he expect of me?” I flopped onto the rumpled bedcovers, burying my face and my confusion. Dassine had said Bareil was the one who could help me. He must have thought it would be easy, or he would have slipped in some further word of instruction, even in his last distress. I rolled to my back. “Detan detu, madrissé. Tell me the ways Master Dassine gave you to help me. Anything more than the expected things like answering questions and leading me around the city.”

Bareil nodded. “Master Dassine has allowed me to know the reasons for your present condition, and the means he has used to cause it and to remedy it. He has permitted me to know what things it might do you harm to know before you remember them properly, and what things would be of more benefit than harm. He has given me the purposes and instructions for the use of the device which we collected-the pink stone-and the second device which you must allow me to hold safe until the time is right for me to explain its history. He has entrusted me with the knowledge of shifting the exit point of the Bridge and several other such matters which may be spoken only in your presence, else my tongue will become mute for the duration of my life. He has entrusted me with the complete story of his sojourn in the Wastes, which he has told to no other living person, and how you must use his knowledge to chart your course for the future. He has entrusted me with the knowledge of those men and women that he mistrusts and those whom he trusts. Shall I go on?”

“Stars of night, Bareil…”

“My madrisson honored me with such confidence as no one has ever given a Dulcé.”

“Do either of these devices-the pink stone or the other one-have anything to do with a child or any of the matters we have discussed?”

“Not that I can see, my lord. It seems I can be no help to you in the matter of the child.”

Staring at the smoke-stained plaster of the ceiling, I thought back to Dassine’s words yet again, reciting each one exactly as he had burned it into my head. Holy stars! I sat up. How could one man be so unendingly thickheaded? I had been misstating them all along. Only one can help, he had said. Bareil… your guide. But he hadn’t said that Bareil and the person who could help were one and the same. “Dulcé, who in Avonar did Dassine trust?”

“Trust? No one, my lord, save myself. He often said it.”

“None of the Preceptors?”

“Most especially none of the Preceptors. He has long suspected that one or more of his colleagues is a tool of the Lords.”

That would explain a great deal. “Outside Avonar, then. Did he trust anyone outside of Avonar that might have knowledge of this matter?”

“I know of only one person that he trusted unreservedly, my lord, or whom he told anything of his work with you.”

“Who was that?”

“Lady Seriana.” The Dulcé looked away and closed his mouth tight. Dangerous ground that, and Bareil knew it. She had undone me once.

“She is across the Bridge.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Is it possible that she might have knowledge of this mystery?”

“It is possible, though I have no direct information that says it to be true.”

“And you know of no one else who might?”

“The Preceptors might. It is my presumption that Master Exeget might.”

“You mean that Dassine may have learned of the abduction from Exeget before the attack?”

“I was told nothing of this matter, my lord. Though I’m sure there are matters which Master Dassine did not discuss with me, I believe he would have made sure I knew anything of vital importance to you… if he had the opportunity.”

“But why would Exeget give him such important information and then have him killed?”

“I agree that such actions make no sense at all. Perhaps Master Exeget was taunting Master Dassine. I don’t know.”

There was a great deal more I wanted to learn from Bareil, but more than anything, I wanted to act. I had thought and questioned, lived in memory and dreams and confusion for so long that I was about to burst from the desire to ride, to run, to fight, to stretch my muscles for anything more than easing the cramps of too-short sleeping.

So. Two choices. We could find Exeget and force answers from him, or we could seek out the Lady Seriana and discover if she knew anything of the mystery. My earlier conflict about the merits and justice of revenge induced me to choose the latter. Confronting the lady might damage my mind a bit, but I could not rid myself of the disturbing suspicion that confronting Exeget, with the image of the dying Dassine still so clear in my head, might do considerable damage to my soul.

“The Bridge, then,” I said. “I will speak to the lady first.”

Bareil bowed. “Command me, Lord.”

“Detan detu, madrissé. Tell me what I must do to cross the Bridge and find the Lady Seriana.”

“First, you will need the pink stone…” In a quiet monologue, Bareil told me the words to raise the light of the stone, telling the lady we were on the way, and then how to reverse the enchantment so that I could set the exit point of the Bridge to the place where she was to be found. When he had schooled me enough, he motioned me to the door. I took our pack from him and followed.

We left the guesthouse in a more conventional manner than we had entered it, down the stairs and through a large room-a salon, Bareil had called it-that was quite different from the common rooms of inns in the Four Realms. This was a soft-lit, quiet place with many small groups of men and women engaged in lively discussions or storytelling, or testing their skills at sonquey-a game of strategy played with square tiles of red and green, finger-length bars of silver, and a dollop of sorcery. At another table, two men and a woman bent their heads over a pattern of exquisitely painted lignial cards, representing Speakers, Singers, Tree Delvers, and others of the hundred Dar’Nethi talents. The woman was pregnant, likely calculating the prospects of her coming child’s magical gifts. A burly man served out mugs of saffria and ale, and laughter rolled through the room from here to there like summer showers. No fights. No filth. No grizzled veterans building the edifice of their valor larger with each tankard. No contests of manhood proving only that the stink of ale, sweat, piss, and vomit was the price of good humor. Steady-burning lamps hung about the room, and their light had nothing to do with fire. In fact, there was no smoke at all, save the marvelous emanations of a roasting pig, generously dripping its fat into the firepit in one corner of the room. If I could have borne the thought of sitting still another moment, I would have insisted on a plate of it.

Bareil pulled up the hood of his cloak and looked neither right nor left as we walked through the room. Having been the madrissé of a Preceptor for thirty years, perhaps he would be recognized. I, on the other hand, had less occasion to worry; few people had ever laid eyes on the present Heir of D’Arnath, or so I understood. But I pulled up my hood, too, as if in preparation for stepping into the cold night.

“We must take the long way around and come up behind the palace,” Bareil said, as soon as we were in the street. “It is not time for you to walk in the front gate.”

We passed like shadows through the soft glow of the city, hurrying past wonder after wonder: tiny yellow frost flowers with petals like crystal, blooming in a window box; a faint bluish eddy in the air over a well, where you could hold your freezing fingers and have them pleasantly warmed; an unfrozen pond whose dark waters reflected the complete bowl of the heavens, but nothing else, no structure, no tree, not even my own face as I peered into it.

“My lord, please,” said Bareil, tugging at my arm. “We must get out of the streets. Those who wish you harm will be watching.”

On we sped, crossing a district that had been reduced to skeletal towers and blackened rubble, where only vermin and wild cats could find refuge. We climbed narrow lanes that wound steeply up the hill past the palace, past sights that spoke of the long years of war: deserted houses, ruined shops and bathhouses, neglected gardens, crumbling bridges and dry pools. Even the intact bathhouses were closed and locked. What had once been a favorite recreation for Dar’Nethi had fallen out of favor. Many people felt it unseemly to enjoy the pleasures of recreational bathing when thousands of our brothers and sisters were enslaved so cruelly in the desert Wastes.

We padded through a university, its cloistered walkways broken up by weeds, its lawns and gardens long overgrown, entangling fallen statuary and broken stone benches in an impenetrable blanket of briars. At one end of a weed-choked quadrangle stood a ruined observatory. The domed roof that had once housed seeing devices used to study the heavens had caved in long ago, and many of the intricate carvings of heavenly objects that banded its walls were damaged beyond repair. The overgrown sculpture garden, the site of Dassine’s murder, lay quiet.

Bareil said the palace was defended against hidden portals, so we would have to enter by one of its five gates. Almost an hour after leaving the inn, we stood across a courtyard from two slender towers that sheltered a single thick wooden gate into the palace precincts. This courtyard, tucked away behind the palace, almost hacked out of the rock of the mountainside, was not one of the commonly used entries, Bareil told me, but one used for prisoners being brought to the palace for trial or the royal family’s personal visitors who wished to be discreet. No guard was in sight.

“This gate is sealed except when it is needed,” said Bareil. “Guards are unnecessary except under a direct assault.”

“Then how are we to get in?”

He smiled up at me, and whispered, “This is your house, my lord. The locks and seals will know you.”

I hadn’t considered that I could just walk in. I was not stealing into a place where I had no legitimate business. If I wanted, I could stroll through the front doors of this place and proclaim myself home-though I didn’t think that would be clever.

We slipped around the shadowed edges of the courtyard and came to the great wooden door banded with steel. When I laid my hand on the thick latch, barbs of enchantment pricked my arm all the way to the shoulder.

“Press down as you would on any door handle,” said Bareil. “It should open to your hand.”

I did so. Nothing happened.

The Dulcé frowned. “I don’t understand. No one could change the locks without your permission, and you used this gate many times when you were a boy.”

True… In my first nine years, no one had ever really cared where I was or what I did, but fussy courtiers and tutors would forever attempt to ingratiate themselves with my father by reporting on my ignorance and undisciplined behavior. So I had sneaked away from them, down the narrow stair through kitchens and barracks and through the open doorway into the cluttered courtyard that lay on the other side of this very gate, knowing that everything I wanted awaited me just beyond it: freedom and adventure, weapons, combat, fear, blood, and death… war. Out on the walls of Avonar my friends the soldiers stared over the walls at the misty gray wall that was the Zhid encampment, gulped from flasks of ale, and laughed. I had wanted to laugh at fear and blood and death. No one in the palace would teach me how, but my friends, the soldiers, had. Yes, this was my door, in my house.

I pressed down again. This time the brass handle moved smoothly and quietly, and the massive gate swung open without the slightest pressure from my hand.

Now I led Bareil. Across the courtyard, through the labyrinthine way to the stair behind the kitchens. Only a few voices echoed through the passages-guards and servants who cared for the palace itself and functionaries who performed the hard daily work of governing. No royalty had lived in the palace since I’d been taken to Exeget when I was nine.

Our destination was not the living quarters I had so rarely graced, but the Chamber of the Gate, buried deep in the roots of the mountain underneath the palace. Downward and inwards, through minor galleries and guest quarters, past armories and long-silent ballrooms, into the ancient heart of the palace, burrowed deep into the rock. The stone of these corridors had not been cut and laid by any mason, even one who could cut with his singing or polish with a brush of his hand. Rather the walls were native stone that had been shaped and smoothed until the sworls of jasper and lapis shone of their own colored light. My steps accelerated.

I thought we’d made a wrong turn when the passage we traversed ended in a blank wall. But before I could turn to Bareil, the stone shifted-a mightily unsettling sight-and revealed a door of age-darkened wood that swung open at my touch. I had forgotten the door wards. Beyond the door lay the circular chamber of white and rose, its ceiling lost in white frost plumes. Only when I stepped through the door could I see the Gate-a towering curtain of white flame, rippling, shifting, shimmering, reaching exuberantly for the heights in the uncertain light. Cold fire that left the room frigid and sparkling like the clearest of winter mornings. Rumbling fire, exploding geysers of flaming brilliance that created constantly shifting patterns. Though the fire didn’t terrify me as it had when I was twelve, it still took my breath away. This was the legacy of my ancestors, one endpoint of a link that spanned the universe itself. My soul swelled and thrilled and wept all at once with the glory of it.

Bareil gave me the rose-colored stone. As he had instructed, I roused it to glowing life, creating a pool of warmth in the hollow of my hand. Then, with will and power, I shaped the path of the Bridge that lay beyond the Gate, so that it would lead me to the stone that matched the one I held.

“Shall I await your return, my lord? No one will alter the Gate path while I live.”

I had to leave the pink stone behind to keep the return path open. If anyone removed it from the chamber or reworked my enchantment, then I would have to travel to the Exiles’ Gate-the mundane world’s counterpart of this, the Heir’s Gate-in order to return to Avonar. That might be a journey of many days, depending on where the Lady Seriana was to be found. But I dared not get separated from Bareil and the information he carried.

I shook my head, unable to speak while I held the enchantment in my mind. Motioning him to leave the stone and stay close, I stepped through the curtain of fire and onto the Bridge that was my singular inheritance.