NOVEL NEXT I: Changeling (pt 3)
Ten miles away in the high hall of Dunford Stonekeep, Hautiger an-Velaker, Baron Sulk, Lord of Maightier and Enmath-in-Daria, closed his eyes and rubbed the crest of his nose with daintily weary fingertips. The wild tale pouring forth from his Perian host’s henchman owned no part of sense, but the essence of it was failure. Hautiger did not care how three armed men failed to capture a young girl, and felt that their creativity had been better employed in making results than excuses. Now he needed some excuse himself, for pursuing the matter without betraying the keenness of his interest.
He drained his cup and held it carelessly aside, and the boy scrambled to fill it. Only one boy to serve him; and a boy, at that: the brash new masters of Peria had so very much to learn yet of civilized ways.
Civilized: the Darian traced his host’s form with diplomatically veiled scorn, noting the coarseness of Kelmhal’s woolen tunic, red as bright blood and garishly trimmed in wild yellow fringe that matched his beard and hair. The singular garment ended at elbow and knee, baring Kelmhal’s hairy limbs bound in wide leather wrist-braces and soft fringed boots. Hautiger was sheathed in layer upon layer of patterned silks and fine linens, each garment subtly cut or folded back to display something of the one beneath; only his face was bare, from chin to false hairline, and what of his hands not hidden under many rings.
He sipped at his mead—a good brew, he conceded, having discovered that he liked it sweet, as the Geillari made it, better than the bone-dry Darian—and glanced about the hall. Pale polished granite, great blocks shaped and inlaid with a sweet skill their new owners believed was magical, soared overhead, throwing back whispering echoes that unnerved this superstitious race: not a little of Kelmhal’s bold reputation sprang from his temerity to dwell heedless among Sferan ghosts, and mock their insubstantial rage. Hautiger wondered if Kelmhal or his ancestors had discovered yet that one spot that must be here, in what the previous owners had called the Great Chamber, where every whisper converged, to be heard as clearly as if whispered in one’s own ear.
Room opened off from room through wide portals, half-covered now by hanging blankets of bright and rude pattern. The floor, a fine purple porphyry, sparkled with stars of Móriad-steel: the old Perians had had (and still had, where they endured) a fascination for constellations, and each great House took one as token. There by the vast hearth, the firelight struck sparks from the inlaid steel in the pattern of the Hunter, sign of the House of Morag—or would, but for Kelmhal’s big trestle-table above it, and the braided rushes and herbs the Geillari considered so necessary to proper housekeeping. Doubtless it was, on the packed-earth floors of the wooden halls they raised for themselves; Hautiger failed to be impressed by the weeds being new laid down in his honor.
Rude they might be, and seeming so out-of-place in their new homes—when they used them; yet they were formidable warriors, crafty and dogged; even their women trained to the spear, and fought by their men in almost equal numbers (though docile enough in the house, he noted). Moreover, they held loyalty to be a man’s sovereign virtue. Part of Hautiger’s errand in this land was to discover what might draw that loyalty; another part being, whose loyalty was most worth His Darian Majesty’s while.
It would be sweet to get home. Still, the hunting had been good sport; His Majesty of Daria, Rúmil an-Herumer, being a sporting man himself would be amused by the tales, at least, for Hautiger’s official report would be a disappointment. Kelmhal was not their man: the Haldr, the high chief of the Dunhaldring, king of Peria’s wild north coast, yes, but without influence beyond his own mountains. Nor was there point in trying to win Kelmhal’s overlord, Bruic, who ruled Anstrede, as near as Hautiger could make out, solely by virtue of his clansmen being too busy battling raider or neighbor to challenge him. Hautiger wondered how the Viscount Ruchier or Lord Grumarre, on similar errands elsewhere in this ravaged land, were faring. Personally he doubted that there was anyone in Peria yet who wielded enough power to be worth Daria’s interest.
Now Kelmhal at thirty-seven was yet a bachelor, and thereon hung this little fracas before him. Hautiger naturally had not subjected his gentle lady to the rigors of crossing the Dragon, to visit so rude a chieftain; yet neither was he inclined to spend his nights in chilly solitude. Kelmhal had been happy to discuss knowledgeably what his seat and his clan had to offer to the comfort of the flesh; and when rumor surfaced this morning of a girl, a whore’s foundling yet said to be a child of the Ceidha, thirteen-year-old bells chimed in Hautiger’s brain.
It was impossible, of course. The ship that had borne old King Herumer’s dangerous daughter and her half-fay bastard to a watery death in the depths of the Dragon Sea, had itself foundered with all hands: none had survived. Still, he wanted very much to see the wench, just to quiet the bells. The agent who shattered that vessel had cost Hautiger dearly.
And the fools had blown it. Drunk too much at an inn—no, these barbarians had no such thing; it would be the local chief’s home and ‘mead-hall,’ he believed—so that it was no task at all for a girl-thing with even a scrap of spirit to overpower them, as this fellow seemed to be insisting had happened. Why flaunt your inebriated incompetence, ale-wit?
A sudden violence jerked him from his covert sneering: Kelmhal had seized his hapless lieutenant’s shirt-front in a commanding fist. Hautiger recoiled: such a move was mortal insult on his side of the Sferyn, even between man and master. But the assaulted Geillath, far from objecting, only dropped his head back, slightly, a gesture the Darian regarded as disgustingly submissive but which for the Geilla betokened his absolute fealty to his lord.
Kelmhal stared hard into his man’s face. Hautiger made a quick double-take, and straightened attentively. Was Kelmhal—? Yes, by the gods! The Darian smothered a little smirk that doubted his host’s capabilities; but he watched nonetheless with a greedy interest, for Kelmhal had what Hautiger never would.
The Geillan war-bands, wolf-packs bringing down an ancient lion of the mountains, came to Peria for gold, they came for glory, and they came for magic. They found them all; and none of it quite what they fancied. The wealth mocked them: splendid houses they feared to dwell in, rich fields whose crops waned under their untutored plows, artistry and beauty that neither made nor maintained itself. The blood-price of glory was grievously high, and drove them to a fury of vengeance and an ever-higher price. As for magic—they knew the tale:
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Ages ago, when the Second Perians were barely more than the naked children of the gods, Uralia, High Priestess of the World Mother, of her authority forbade the destruction of a dragon’s egg, but instead tended it with hot sands from her tribe’s altar-hearth, and guarded it with such fragile spells as the gods had given humankind. After seven years it broke forth, twice as long as a tall man yet scarcely as thick as his thigh, and utterly black. Its talons, already the length of Uralia’s forearm, shimmered like pearls in the dust; and the tongue, lolling out between icicle-teeth in the huge ungainly head, was forked, blue, veined in black. And each great baleful eye glowed with a light more purple than the sky beyond the sunset.
The thing glistened in its birth-slime, which Uralia wiped clean with her hair. And when the tribe would not offer so much as a squirrel for meat for the hatchling horror, Uralia fed it with her own body, silent and unflinching as the dreadful beast devoured all but her long black hair.
Then it turned to her people and spoke like grating stones in their simple tongue, a cryptic phrase long graven at every Sferan lintel-stone:
“Life gives aye for life; now, honor for honor.”
Summoning Uralia’s twelve children by name, it breathed its fire upon them, and they were not burned, though their rabbit-skin wrappings fell as ashes to the ground. To the cowering tribe the monster spoke again: “Behold your masters. Uralia’s children, and their children’s children, shall command yours so long as my power endures. And this shall be their token.”
The dragon called Listas, the youngest, a child not yet come to womanhood, to take her mother’s obsidian knife and cut the fist-sized pupil from the dragon’s left eye. Black, searing blood spewed over the child’s hand, but she did not tremble or falter, but cut clean. As bidden, she placed a drop of the blood on the tongue of each of her siblings, and her own, and magic burned into them: they spoke without words, from mind to mind; brought forth fire from nothingness; shifted their bodies to whatever form they desired; they flew.
Then they stood once more before the dragon, awed to silence. Spreading her newborn’s gossamer wings, then she roared her name: “I am Marennin!” and soared above the sunset, and was gone.
Uralia’s children turned, naked and majestic, and their people grovelled before them, beholding the last of Marennin’s signs. Whatever they had been before, blond or brown or ruddy of hair, brown or blue of eye, all twelve had changed: their hair, their mother’s black; their eyes, the midnight-purple of the dragon’s; and ever after, whatever shape they took, still their eyes remained the same dark and amethyst hue, and so the High-Sferan born would aye be known.
Listas washed clean the stone from the dragon’s eye and held aloft an orb as large as the eldest brother’s fist. From its depths burned a violet flame that cast strange shadows among those who from that day called themselves the Sfer-iare, the People of the Dragon.
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After the children of Uralia’s children, magic was indeed passed down in the blood—if erratically. Knowing what to do with it was not.
Hautiger noted Kelmhal’s fingers flex, his lips move in a charm kept close under his breath, noted them with a distant professional interest. For those who wielded magic by blood, the actual gesture or words meant nothing, were nothing but a focusing device. For the merely trained wizard, however, they were considered crucial. Hautiger had only the rudiments of training; his lady wife, on the other hand, possessed both the blood-power and far more training than Kelmhal dreamed existed.
For Kelmhal, that blood-magic, the heirloom of his ancestor’s bloody marriage to the Moraigh heiress of Dunford, manifested in part as an ability to perceive another man’s thoughts, if he chose. He seldom chose: most thoughts of most men bored him, even when they made sense, and he wished often enough that he could shut out their spoken babbling and boasting as easily. He did not advertise his distaste, but used men’s fear of his Sferan power just enough to get what he wanted. Now, one of his hearthwards lay dead, one wounded, and one too excited to give a coherent accounting. Kelmhal poured all his skill and power, cobbled out of three decades’ trial and error, into the hapless Kelmric’s mind. Kelmric shivered in his grasp, but endured the assault on his psyche as faithfully as the one on his shirt.
After a long moment, Kelmhal released him with a little shove of disgust: the images in Kelmric’s mind were no more ordered than his spoken words; nor did Kelmhal know how to distinguish what a man had truly seen from what he only believed he had seen. Rothesay’s boyish appearance puzzled him.
“So a little girl—” he retreated to speech.
“She wasn’t little, I keep telling you! —My lord. Skinny as a rail, but every bit as tall as me, Lord!”
“Whatever!” snapped Kelmhal, already exasperated to distraction.
“A tall one, eh?” Hautiger intervened. Cherusay had been of middling height; but the reputedly Ceidhan father would have sired a tall child, if tales spoke true; tall, and more. “Is she comely?” he inquired ardently, glad for a chance to pursue one interest under the veil of another.
“Oh, beautiful—!” the rattled man retorted, his tone conveying both the degree of her pulchritude and the improbability of his ever voluntarily coming within arm’s reach of her again. Imitating his master’s imitation of imperial ways, he too spoke the High Sferan speech, though the Darian found Kelmric’s accent almost impenetrably thick.
“But where does a bratling kin-thrall girl get a sword, Kelmric? You’re sure it wasn’t a stick?” Kelmhal grappled with whichever fragment of the puzzle stumbled into mind.
“It was a sword, my lord,” Kelmric repeated, through gritted teeth. “And a man’s sword, no dainty Da—” He broke off, glanced guiltily at his lord’s Darian guest, and stammered. Hautiger disdained to notice. If the new Perians did not distinguish between the grace of a court sword and the weight of one reserved for battle, should he rub their noses in their crudity?
“A good, solid sword,” Kelmric went on awkwardly. “Disarmed Forld with it, near took off his shoulder—and then she strikes, fwick, fwick!” He mimed two quick blows. “Could ha’ took out his eyes, but she didn’t.”
Kelmhal smacked the tabletop, rattling the wine bowls, and rounded on the fourth man present. “Sounds like one of your accursed breed, Cúrullan!”
The man so addressed lounged at his ease by the hearth, evincing no interest in the wrangle. He affected most un-Geillan raiment of unrelieved black, without so much as a shimmer of satin to betray movement or intent to move; but steel at hilt and pommel winked about him like stars in the night. Two pairs of stilettos openly adorned each forearm in black wrist-sheaths, four more brazened the tops of his tall boots, a sword swung at each hip. A cruel scar marred his brown face from the corner of his lip to his ear, mute marker of a time when he had received almost as good as he had given. Once upon a time, years ago in Herumer’s court, Hautiger had seen Herumer’s acknowledged master assassin sit just so, aloof from the bright courtiers and idly stropping a tool of his trade. This Cúrullan, too, kept his hands busy, and though it was no knife that glinted in the firelight, unaccountably Hautiger took the more care not to turn his back on him. He was embroidering.
Earlier, catching Hautiger’s fascinated stare, the fellow had turned his work to display it for him. Out of the black cloth in the hoop, a hummingbird shimmered at the edge of life out of fiery gossamer silks wrought in stitches of matchless delicacy: Sferan artistry had not been wholly crushed under conquering Geillan boots. Hautiger snorted. Two centuries of occupation and war, which the Sfera of Peria had steadily if stubbornly lost, and still the brawling Geilla worshipped the meanest scrap of the once-glorious civilization his own invasions helped pull down.
Most of the scraps. King Kelmhal had introduced this black Cúrullan as “my pet Runedaur,” and made it clear to Hautiger that Dunford maintained good relations with the Order, as another tradition out of her ancient days when she was known as Anvedras Silverlost. One of Cúrullan’s functions at Kelmhal’s court was to read for him what remained uncharred of the old books of Anvedras, and the names of her defenders who fell to Kelmhal’s remote grandfather. Then his bard-priests could honor the Sferan dead with their own and so, perhaps, quiet the whispering ghosts: it had occurred to Kelmhal that these, too, were ancestors. Hautiger wondered if Cúrullan had explained the architecture and Kelmhal failed to understand; or if he merely catered to the Geillath’s superstitions.
Yet though Kelmhal might keep fair with Colderwild, most of the invaders, Hautiger believed, no matter how settled, at their fondest avoided the dark knights; and more commonly, as the Sferiari were pushed further into the remote hills, dared to hate them openly. It might seem politically inexpedient in these times to make alliance with a Runedaur-friendly lord. Yet with common human perversity, some of those who hated the Order most were quickest to hire, or attempt to hire, its considerable, and expensive, power.
Cherusay had tried. Daria still wondered—avidly—just how she had intended to pay.
Now Cúrullan did not look up at his lord’s charge, but only growled, “Not to me.”
“Well, damn it, man, don’t just sit there! I’ve got a man dead, Kelmric says; that much is clear, though little else is. Chuck that bloody girl-craft and make yourself useful!”
Hautiger, foreigner though he was, winced superstitiously at his host’s bold rudeness, convinced that Kelmhal suffered a serious confusion as to which of them was the pet. Cúrullan himself paused to look up at the coast-king with discomfiting thoroughness. Then, sighing, he rose and came over, to lay a hand on the Geillath’s broad shoulder.
“Kelmhal, ywyst,” he said, his growling voice warmed by a kindliness Hautiger was not fool enough to believe, “sit.” Kelmhal sat. “Kelmric?” At the Runedaur’s waved suggestion, Kelmric plunked down promptly and watched the knight with round eyes. “Now, attend me,” Cúrullan went on patiently, levelling a skeletal finger at Kelmric’s chest and then sweeping it up in a wide arc that just missed his nose, till he pointed back at himself; and no one of the three marked that the Runedaur now commanded the complete attention of them all.
“I shall ask you a few questions, friend Kelmric. Take care,” and a breath of threat cooled his voice, “take care to answer only the question asked! Volunteer nothing! Only if it seems that you cannot answer as asked, then speak, to correct my error but no more. Got it?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Good lad.”
In a few quiet minutes, barring only a couple of outbursts from the agitated carl, swiftly choked back at the warning snap of Runedaur fingers, the tale of Kelmric’s adventure from his departure from Dunford to his return, lay plain and unbelievable before them. Cúrullan turned back to his hoop.
“Wait just a bloody minute!” Kelmhal barked. “That’s preposterous! That’s impossible! How did the girl do that? Where did that sword come from?”
“Beats me,” said Cúrullan. “I thought you wanted to get his story straight.”
“I want a story that makes sense, damn it!”
The Runedaur roared with sudden laughter. “Do you! Sense comes more expensive than you know, Kelmhal!”
“Teodhan drown your mystic’s prattle! What do you make of it, as a warrior?”
“How shall a warrior not be a mystic? Never mind, never mind! I make this,” he grinned, and shrugged: “something—odd—happened in Harrowater. And the explanation’s as likely to come calling here as a coney is to hop on your meat-spit.”
Kelmhal drew a deep breath of patience. Then to Kelmric he said quietly, “Assemble a company to return to Harrowater in the morning. I want to know what all this means by tomorrow evening. You’re in command.”
“Yes, my lord. As you will, my lord.” Kelmric bowed low and left, a downcast man. Cúrullan marked the tight set of his shoulders with masterful interest.
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Night stirred languorously. “So, the little gift has passed on,” She purred. “It’s been a long time idle; I think.” Her companion offered no comment. He never did, of course: it was, She thought, one of His most appealing traits. One of them. Instead He traced what could be thought of as a finger delicately over the outline of what might as well be a breast; and She writhed in pleasure, and turned to Him again.