A Handful Of Men - The Stricken Field Part 28

"Why did Keef kill her lover?"

"Huh?" She looked hard at Woom's steady amber eyes and the inquiry in them.

"Teal won't tell. It's the heart of the legend, but he won't say. Or can't. Maybe he doesn't even know. Keef slew the man she loved. Why?"

Love and sorcery . . . "I don't know."

He was right, though. Why had the first Keeper slain her lover? That was the heart of mystery, and no one ever said why it had happened, why it had to happen. How strange that Woom should have seen that and she had not. And he had morea"

"What's the Keeper, Thaile? What is she? Why is she different?"

Chill and horror . . .

"I don't know that, either." The pain came rus.h.i.+ng back. "I think you do," he said solemnly.

"No! No, I don't!" She didn't want to know that. She would know that soon enough. Woom never would.

Poor Woom in his sweat-soaked s.h.i.+rt! Just an ordinary adept, barely more than a mundane, destined at best to be a very ordinary sorcerer all his days.

Behind him, the image of the Keeper was beckoning, transparent and faceless.

"Come to me, Thaile. You don't need directions now."

"Yes. No."

Thaile stood up. "Sorry, Woom. I mustn't talk about such things. I have to go." She walked away without waiting for an answer. He did not call out to her, as most men would have. She came to the Way and told it to take her to the Keeper, and in a moment she was gone from the Woom Place.

4.

She did not know where the Keeper lived, but she did not have to know. No longer need she be familiar with a place to make the Way take her there. Now she could control the Way.

The moon was rising. She could have managed as well in the dark, but she admired the beauty of the silver light angling down through gaps in the forest canopy. The trees became even larger, damp and monstrous. Soon the black jungle cut off the moonlight completely, but the Way went on. It was very narrow, very twisted, winding between the great trunks, a tunnel through foliage. There was no sound except the soft pad of dripping water.

The Way ended at a mossy cliff, thick moss completely burying the stones beneath. There was a great building here, wrapped in jungle, but it was s.h.i.+elded. She left the white gravel and had to take several squelching steps over soggy humus to reach an alcove and an inconspicuous little door. The flap creaked open for her on corroded bronze hinges.

Inside was brighter, and empty. The moon shone through vacant windows that still held a few remnants of stone tracery and stained gla.s.s to hint at their former glory. The ceiling was intact, though, preserved by sorcery, along with most of its ribs and carvings. The floor was a barren plain of uneven flags, but something had kept it clear of dust and leaves through all the silent centuries. The air was still, as if frozen.

She knew what place this must be. In a far corner was power. It radiated up from the floor, but it was cold power, dark power. If this was the Chapela"and it must be the Chapela"then that was Keef's grave. Thaile resisted the urge to approach it, refusing the call.

She had tried to go to the Keeper. Instead she had gone to the very heart of Thume, the resting place of the first Keeper. Did Keef rest? Remembering the wraith that had guided her in the Defile, Thaile wondered. Her guess about that wraith might be wrong, of coursea"but she did not think it was.

She looked around at the emptiness. At one end two doorways led out to a vestry and the main entrance. There was nothing else, no altar or holy balance, no lamps. The G.o.ds had forsaken this place. The Good and Evil were not wors.h.i.+pped here.

She had made no mistake. This was a test. Again she surveyed the curiously misshapen and asymmetric hall, although her mundane eyes could see only shreds of moonlight on stone. Two corners held doors; one held Keef's grave. The fourth corner was empty.

She recalled the duplicate cottage she had visited so briefly at the Woom Place. There had been two Places, set apart in the same Place. That was the answer, then. The Chapel was in the occult Thume. What occupied this s.p.a.ce in the mundane Thume?

She stepped sideways.

The Chapel remained unchanged, and Keef's grave, also, but now a cl.u.s.ter of furniture stood in that fourth corner: a desk, a chair, a high shelf of books, a closet. A beda"why a bed? The Keeper never slept. Perhaps she sometimes rested. She was sitting at the desk now, waiting.

Thaile walked to her, half the length of the Chapel, thinking "What a horrible Place." Not even a rug. As she drew near, she saw a thick book lying on the desk and recognized it. Beside it stood a slim silver vase holding a single white lily. That was sad.

As always, the Keeper was shrouded in a dark robe; her cowled head was bent over her hands. Thaile arrived and sank to her knees on the icy, greasy stone. The head lifted, but the face within was dark and s.h.i.+elded. Not even eyes showed.

She felt strangely calm. "'The Little Keeper" the novices called her, so Woom had said, and Woom never joked. She knew the book, although its voice was m.u.f.fled now and its text concealed from her. Her name was in that book. She was important, she mattered! Perhaps now she would find out how, and why.

"Your power is beyond belief," the familiar rustling voice said. "Baze swears he told you only the one word."

"He did, ma'am."

"You have not learned a fourth elsewhere? No pillow whispers?"

"No!"

"Do not raise your voice to me, child! I can still apply discipline. You can suffer more and yet be useful. Mayhap another visit to the Defile is needful."

Thaile shuddered. "Threats demean you," she said with all the courage she could muster.

"Insolence!" the Keeper said, but more gently. "You have yet much to learn, and time is short. Time is desperately short. Had you come to the College when you should . . ."

Memories stirred. "What?"

"Never mind." The hidden eyes were studying her. Doubtless the power she could sense was reading her thoughts. "So with three words you have been working sorceries. You clamored all over Thume like temple bells and some of what you did was true sorcery. And with only three words! There is no record of that since . . . for a long time."

"Since Keef?"

"Since Thraine. Oh, Thaile, Thaile, do not be stubborn and willful! The Evil is almost upon us. The atrocities have begun, and now the Usurper stirs. The dragons are rising!"

The last words p.r.i.c.kled gooseb.u.mps on Thaile's arms. "Dragons?" she whispered.

Yesterday a.n.a.lyst Teal had sent her off by herself to read a dismal, gruesome book about the Dragon Wars. It had brought back memories of the Defile and being slain in torment by the heat of a dragon. She knew about dragons. Her flesh crawled. She jumped as a something began to hiss overhead, then realized it was a burst of rain falling on the roof, wind las.h.i.+ng the trees.

"He is raising the dragons!" the Keeper cried, her voice breaking with horror. "From Gralb nest and Kilberran nest, even the few still at Haggan, and of course the Wurth blaze, the greatest of them all now. The worms brighten the sky. May the G.o.ds be merciful!"

"Coming here?"

"No, not yet, but he plans a fiendish mischief with them, and great slaughter, a needless evil such as your mind will not conceive. Shall I show you? Close your eyes."

"No, please! Please don't! I believe!"

The Keeper sighed. "I hope you do. I hope I am reading the prophecies correctly, else I am about to make a grievous error."

"Error, ma'am?" Thaile trembled at the thought of the Keepera"the Keeper!a"making an error.

"Error. My instincts tell me I am, and the auguries are black, yet the prophecies say I must do what needs be done. We shall see before the night is out, I think. You must go now and keep a Death Watch."

"No! I just became a mage. I cannot yet control the power you have given me."

The Keeper sighed. "One tameing is as easy as two. In the Outside, when a sorcerer dies, he usually bequeaths all his words at once. Men go from mundanes to sorcerers in an instant. Do you wonder that so many go mad?"

Thaile did not want to go mad. She was not supposed to answer the question, though.

"Your Faculty will sustain you," the old voice murmured. "Go back to the Way. Raim will call you on it."

"Raim?"

"An archon. He is keeping the old man alive until you get there."

Thaile rose unwillingly, very shaky. "And child!"

"Ma'am?"

"Be very careful he tells you only one word!" Five words destroyed.

Thaile tried to speak, and failed. She went. The Chapel was empty, the Keeper and her furniture gone. She scurried off to the door, ignoring the lament from Keef's grave.

5.

Inos emerged from the front door of the inn and paused to look up and down the main street of Highscarp. It was a quaint little place, reminiscent of Krasnegar in some ways. The moon shone peacefully over rooftops; candlelight and firelight gleamed in the windows. The night air was wonderfully refres.h.i.+ng after the heat and stink of the tavern.

A party of legionaries had come out ahead of her and was now making its way unsteadily along the road, but there was no one else in sight. She knew that gnomes tended to be nocturnal, and she had expected to see some of them around. This was gnome country, after all, even if it was also part of the Impire.

Behind her, the raucous drunken singing rose to a crescendo in the chorus of "I Loved a Hot Little Gnome." The chorus was obscene, but most of the verses were even worse. As a hostelry for gentlefolk, the Imperor's Head left much to be desired. Just about everything, in fact.

She had spent the whole day in a b.u.mpy, smelly, grossly overcrowded stagecoach, listening to meaningless chatter from witless wives of Imperial officers and fending off their prying questions. Shandie and Raspnex had ridden on the roof, and suffered even more, no doubt. All the male pa.s.sengers had been required to walk up the hills. Even the Impire could not build straight, flat roads across Guwush.

Even the Impire could not guarantee the safety of its highways there, either. The stage traveled with a mounted escort.

And after all that, the Imperor's Heada"four women to a room, and a thousand fleas apiece. The food could only have been cooked by gnomesa"carrion souffle, frica.s.see of offal. In retrospect, Dwanish had been a pleasant vacation. She would go uphill, she decided.

The door flew open and a man almost cannoned into her. "Inos!" It was Shandie.

Wearing a sword.

"Just where do you think you're going?" he demanded angrily.

"Needed some fresh air. Remember it? I thought I'd take a stroll."

He snorted. "Take a stroll? Here, in Highscarp?"

"Where else? Why, is that unwise?"

"You'd be lucky to live long enough to be raped."

"Oh." Inos tugged her cloak around her and took another, hard look at the empty street. "Well, thanks for the warning. It seems peaceable enough."

"Believe me, it isn't! They'd come out of the alleys like swarming rats. Even the legionaries go round in groupsa"haven't you noticed?"

"No, I hadn't." She laughed. "Glad you mentioned it! I'll settle for the fresh air."

"You're welcome." He folded his arms. Obviously he was going to stand guard while she breathed.

Neither spoke for a while, and the silence darkened into melancholy.

"Wasn't Highscarp the scene of a battle a few years ago?" she asked, seeking a safe topic.

"Yes."

His tone alerted hera"not a safe topic. "One of yours?"

"One of mine. A glorious victory!"

"Why do you speak of it like that? Wasn't it?"

He took so long to answer that she was just about to apologize for asking. Then he said, "Yes, it was. We guessed that they lost ten thousand men, but it was probably more. It set Oshpoo back a long way." After another pause he went on. "We'll pa.s.s the field in the morning, just over the first bridge. I don't suppose there's anything to see there now except a monument."

"A monument to . . .?"

"To the gallant legionaries who died serving the Impire, of course."

Inos recalled some of the stories that had filtered through to Krasnegar, months later. Highscarp had been a notable victory. The imps had partied for days, her imps.

"There will be more battles soon, you think?"

"Sure to be. I don't know what he's waiting for."

Oshpoo. The rebel. She supposed he was Oshpoo the Patriot to the gnomes. Shandie had been very reticent the last few days.

"You should not have come with us!" Inos said sharply. "You should have taken s.h.i.+p with the others."

"I'm in no more danger than you are. Probably we should all have taken s.h.i.+p."

"But if we do manage to contact the People's Liberation Army, and you're recognizeda""

"I said don't worry! The best we'll manage will be a letter."

She felt unconvinced. How would the gnomish rebels feel about the general who had inflicted such a devastating defeat on them?

"How do you feel about Highscarp now?"