David Weber
It was raining again.
It seemed to do an awful lot of that on the Sothoii Wind Plain, Kaeritha thought. Especially in the spring.
She leaned moodily against the deep-cut frame of a tower window and stared out across Hill Guard Castle's battlements at the raindrops' falling silver spears. The sky was the color of wet charcoal, swirled by gusty wind and lumpy with the weight of rain not yet fallen, and the temperature was decidedly on the cool side. Not that it wasn't immensely warmer than the bone-freezing winter she had just endured.
Thunder rumbled somewhere above the cloud ceiling, and she grimaced as a harder gust of wind drove a spray of rain in through the open window. She didn't step back, though. Instead, she inhaled deeply, drawing the wet, living scent of the rain deep into her lungs. There was a fine, stimulating feel to it, despite the chill—one that seemed to tingle in her blood—and her grimace faded into something suspiciously like a grin as she admitted the truth to herself.
It wasn't the rain that irritated her so. Not really. As a matter of fact, Kaeritha rather liked rain. She might have preferred a little less of it than the West Riding had received over the past several weeks, but the truth was that this rain was simply part and parcel of the real cause of her frustration. She should have been on her way at least two weeks ago, and instead she'd allowed the rain to help delay her travel plans.
Not that there hadn't been enough other reasons for that same delay. She could come up with a lengthy list of those, all of them entirely valid, without really trying. Unfortunately, "reasons" were beginning to turn into something entirely too much like "excuses" for her taste. Which meant that, rain or no rain, it was time she was on her way. Besides—
Her thoughts broke off as a tall, red-haired young woman rounded the passageway corner with a hurried stride that was just short of a trot. The newcomer, who came to an abrupt halt as she caught sight of Kaeritha, was both very young and very tall, even for a Sothoii noblewoman. At fourteen, she was already over six feet—taller than Kaeritha herself, who was considered a tall woman, by Axeman standards—and she was also beginning to show the curves of what promised to be an extraordinarily attractive womanhood.
Her expression was a curious blend of pleasure, half-guilt, and semi-rebellion . . . and her attire of the moment was better suited to a stable hand than an aristocratic young lady, Kaeritha thought wryly. She wore a worn pair of leather trousers (which, Kaeritha noted, were becoming more than a bit too tight in certain inappropriate places) under a faded smock which had been darned in half a dozen spots. It also showed several damp patches, and there were splashes of mud on the girl's riding boots and the thoroughly soaked poncho hanging over her left arm.
"Excuse me, Dame Kaeritha," she said quickly. "I didn't mean to intrude on you. I was just taking a shortcut."
"It's not an intrusion," Kaeritha assured her. "And even if it were, unless I'm mistaken, this is your family's home, Lady Leeana. I imagine it's appropriate for you to wander about in it from time to time if it takes your fancy."
She smiled, and Leeana grinned back at her.
"Well, yes, I guess," the girl said. "On the other hand, if I'm going to be honest about it, the real reason I'm taking a shortcut this time is to stay out of Father's sight."
"Oh?" Kaeritha said. "And just how have you managed to infuriate your father so badly that you find it necessary to avoid his wrath?"
"I haven't infuriated him at all . . . yet. But I'd like to get back to my quarters and changed out of these clothes while that's still true." Kaeritha cocked her head, her expression questioning, and the girl shrugged. "I love Father, Dame Kaeritha, but he gets, well, fussy if I sneak out to go riding without half a dozen armsmen clattering around behind me." She made a face. "And he and Mother are both beginning to insist that I ought to dress 'as befits my station.' " This time she rolled jade-green eyes with a martyred sigh, and Kaeritha was hard put not to chuckle.
"However annoying it may be," she said instead, with commendable seriousness, "they probably have a point, you know." Leeana looked at her skeptically, and Kaeritha shrugged. "You are the only child of one of the four most powerful nobles of the entire kingdom," she pointed out gently, "and men like your father always have enemies. You'd make a powerful weapon against him in the wrong hands, Leeana."
"I suppose you're right," Leeana conceded after a moment. "I'm safe enough here in Balthar, though. Even Father is willing to admit that, when he isn't being stuffy just to make a point! And," she added in a darker tone, "it's not as if I'm not a weapon against him anyway."
"I don't think that's exactly fair," Kaeritha said with a quick frown. "And I'm certain that's not how he thinks of it."
"No?" Leeana gazed at her for several seconds, then gave her head a little toss that twitched her long, thick braid of damp golden-red hair. "Maybe he doesn't, but that doesn't really change anything, Dame Kaeritha. You know as well as I do how many people want him to produce a real heir. The entire King's Council certainly goes on at him enough about it whenever he attends!"
"Not the entire Council, I'm sure," Kaeritha objected, her eyes widening slightly as she sensed the true depth of bitterness Leeana's normally cheerful demeanor concealed.
"Oh, no," Leeana agreed. "But the only ones who don't are the ones who have sons they think are just the right age to marry off to the heir to Balthar and the West Riding. Or think they're still young enough for the job themselves." She grimaced in disgust. "All the rest of them, though, use it as an excuse to go on at him, like a pack of mongrels snarling at a leashed wolfhound, because they know I make a safe excuse to gnaw away at his power base."
"Is it really that bad?" Kaeritha asked, and Leeana looked surprised by the question. "I may be a champion of Tomanak, Leeana," Kaeritha said wryly, "but I'm also an Axewoman, not a Sothoii. Tomanak!" She laughed. "As far as that goes, I'm only even an Axewoman by adoption. I was born a peasant in Moretz! So I may be intellectually familiar with the sorts of machinations that go on amongst great nobles, but I don't have that much firsthand experience with them."
Leeana appeared to have a little difficulty with the idea that a belted knight—and a champion of Tomanak, into the bargain—could be that ignorant of things which were so much a part of her own life. And she also seemed surprised that Kaeritha seemed genuinely interested in her opinion.
"Well," she said slowly, in the voice of one manifestly attempting to be as fair-minded as possible, "it probably does seem even worse to me than it actually is, but it's bad enough. You do know how Sothoii inheritance laws work, don't you?"
"That much I have down," Kaeritha assured her.
"Then you know that while I can't legally inherit Father's titles and lands myself, they'll pass through me to my own children. Assuming he doesn't produce a son after all, of course."
Kaeritha nodded, and Leeana shrugged.
"Since our enlightened customs and traditions won't permit a woman to inherit in her own right, whatever fortunate man wins my hand in matrimony will become my 'regent.' He'll govern Balthar and hold the wardenship of the West Riding 'in my name,' until our firstborn son inherits them. And, of course, in the most unfortunate case that I might produce only daughters, he'd continue to hold the wardenship until one of them produced a son." The irony in her soprano voice was withering, especially coming from one so young, Kaeritha thought.
"Because of that," Leeana continued, "two-thirds of the Council want Father to go ahead and set Mother aside to produce a good, strong, male heir. Some of them say that it's because of his duty to the bloodline, and others argue that a matrimonial regency always creates the possibility of a succession crisis. Some of them may even be sincere, but most of them know perfectly well he won't do it. They see it all as a club to beat him with, something he has to use up political-capital fighting off, like a constant drain on his position. The last thing he needs, especially now, is to give his enemies any more weapons to use against him! But the ones who are sincere may be even worse, because the real reason they want him to produce a male heir is that none of them like to think about the possibility that such a plum might fall into the hands of one of their rivals. And the third of the Council who don't want him to set Mother aside probably hope that they're the ones who will catch the plum."
Kaeritha nodded slowly, gazing into the younger woman's dark-green eyes. Tellian Bowmaster's marriage eighteen years before to Hanatha Whitesaddle had not only united the Bowmasters of Balthar with the Whitesaddles of Windpeak; it had also been a love match, not just a political alliance between two powerful families. That had been obvious to anyone who'd ever laid eyes on them.
And if it hadn't been, the fact that Tellian had furiously rejected any suggestion that he set Hanatha aside after the riding accident which had left the baroness with one crippled leg and cost her her fertility would have made it so. But that decision on his part did carry a heavy price for their only child.
"And how does the plum feel about being caught?" Kaeritha asked softly.
"The plum?" Leeana gazed back into Kaeritha's midnight-blue eyes for several silent seconds, and her voice was even softer than Kaeritha's when she finally replied. "The plum would sell her soul to be anywhere else in the world," she said.
The two of them looked at each other, then Leeana shook herself, bobbed a quick half-bow, and turned abruptly away. She walked down the passage with quick, hard strides, her spine pike staff-straight, and Kaeritha watched her go. She wondered if Leeana had actually intended to reveal the true depths of her feelings. And if the girl had ever revealed them that frankly to anyone else.
She frowned in troubled thought, then shook herself and turned back to the window as fresh thunder grumbled overhead. Her heart went out to the girl—and to her parents, for that matter—but that wasn't what had brought her to the Wind Plain, and it was past time that she got on with what had brought her here. She gazed out the window a few moments longer, inhaled one more deep breath of rain from her relatively dry perch, and then turned away and walked briskly towards the tower's spiral stair.
Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer Hradani looked up an instant before the library door opened. The red-haired human sitting across the gaming table from him looked up in turn, and then shook his head as the door swung wide and Kaeritha Seldansdaughter stepped through it.
"I wish you two would stop doing that," Baron Tellian complained in the tenor voice which always seemed a bit odd coming from a man who stood six and a half inches over six feet in height.
"And just what is it the two of us are after doing?" Bahzell inquired genially in the deep, subterranean bass which sounded not a bit odd rumbling up out of the deep chest of a hradani who stood over seven and a half feet in his stockings.
"You know perfectly well what," Tellian replied, setting the black pawn he had just picked up back down on the chessboard. "That." He waved at Kaeritha, still standing in the doorway and smiling at him. "You could at least pretend that you have to wait until the other one knocks, like normal people!"
"With all due respect, Milord," the third individual seated in the library—also a hradani, although he was actually a few inches shorter than the human—said, never looking up from the book in his lap, "I don't believe anyone's ever been foolish enough to suggest that there was anything 'normal' about either of them."
"But they could at least try, Lord Brandark," Tellian objected. "Damn it, it's uncanny . . . and it worries my men. Phrobus! It worries me, sometimes!"
"I apologize, Milord," Kaeritha said with a small smile. "It's not really anything we do, you know. It just . . . happens."
"Aye," Bahzell agreed, and the smile he gave the baron was much broader than hers had been. "And come to that, I've not heard yet that champions of Tomanak weren't supposed to be after being 'uncanny.' "
"That's because they are," Brandark said in a slightly more serious tone, looking up from his book at last and cocking the foxlike ears he shared with his fellow hradani. "Uncanny, that is. And the truth is, Milord," he went on as Tellian turned his head to look at him, "that it's so unusual to have two champions as houseguests at the same time that very few people have ever had the opportunity to watch them being uncanny together."
Tellian considered that for a few seconds, then nodded.
"You have a point," he conceded. "But then, everything about the current situation is on the unusual side, isn't it?"
"It is that." Heartfelt agreement rumbled in Bahzell's deep voice as he leaned back in his chair—specially built by Tellian's master woodworker to Bahzell's size and weight—and gazed across the neat ranks of chessmen at the human host who was technically his own paroled prisoner. "And I hope you won't be taking this wrongly, Baron, but it's in my mind that there's more than a few of your folk who'd sooner see my head on a pike over your gate than see my backside sitting in this chair."
"Of course there are," Tellian agreed. "Just as quite a few of your father's subjects would prefer to see my head on a pike, if our positions were reversed. Surely you didn't expect anything different when less than two hundred hradani took several thousand Sothoii warriors 'prisoner,' did you?"
"Of course not," Bahzell said. "Not that that's after making it any more pleasant—or keeping my shoulder blades from itching whenever daggers are about—now that it's here."
"On the other hand," Kaeritha observed mildly, "nobody ever said being a champion of Tomanak would be an endless pleasure jaunt, either. Or, at least, no one ever said so to me, anyway."
"Nor to me," Bahzell admitted, and his foxlike ears twitched in wry amusement as he recalled the conversation in which the God of War had recruited one Bahzell Bahnakson as the first hradani champion of any God of Light in the past twelve millennia. "Pleasure jaunt" was one phrase which had never passed Tomanak's lips.
"I can well believe that." Tellian shook his head. "It's bad enough being a simple baron without having a god looking over my shoulder all the time!"
"That's as may be," Bahzell said, "but I'm thinking it wasn't all that 'simple' for you, either, when we ran up against each other in The Gullet."
"Oh, I don't know about that." Tellian leaned back in his chair and smiled. "If nothing else, at least I assured that I'll go down in history. After all, how many men have ever managed to surrender to a force they out numbered twenty or thirty times over?"
All four of them chuckled, but there was an undertone of seriousness to the laughter. The unauthorized invasion of hradani lands which Mathian Redhelm, one-time Lord Warden of Glanharrow, had led down the narrow passage known as The Gullet, could all too easily have ended in catastrophe for all concerned. But Tellian's solution to avoiding that catastrophe, after overtaking Redhelm, had struck many of his fellow Sothoii as . . . a less than ideal one. His "surrender" of the entire invasion force to Bahzell and the first hradani chapter of the Order of Tomanak was also the only thing which had prevented the massacre of that same chapter and, almost certainly, of the undefended citizens of the city of Hurgrum. Yet it had put Tellian—and Bahzell—in positions which were more than a bit awkward.
Officially, Tellian and the entire force he had surrendered remained Bahzell's paroled prisoners. Everyone considered that no more than a ludicrous fiction, but there was little anyone could do about it so long as Bahzell and Tellian presented a united front and insisted upon maintaining it. Which, given the millennium or so of mutual hatred between Sothoii and Horse Stealer, was also the only way to maintain the fragile peace between their two peoples. Both Bahzell and the baron were determined to keep up the pretense for as long as it took to give that peace some stability, but all too many on both sides—human and hradani alike—would have loved to see them fail. And at the moment, Tellian was under far more fire from his Sothoii peers than anything Bahzell had to put up with from the hradani.
"I have a feeling that you'll go down in history for more than just that, Milord," Kaeritha said after a moment. "But I'm afraid that it's past time I was off on one of those 'pleasure jaunts' Bahzell and I were never promised."
"Ah?" Bahzell cocked his head. "And has himself been talking to you again, Kerry?"
"Not directly." She shook her head. "On the other hand, He doesn't speak directly to me as often as He seems to speak to you."
"Perhaps," Brandark murmured in the tone of one in whose mouth butter would adamantly refuse to melt, "that's because it doesn't require something quite that, um . . . direct to get through to you."
"I wouldn't know about that," Kaeritha said primly, and her blue eyes twinkled as Bahzell made a rude gesture at his friend. "But," she went on, "He does have His own ways of getting messages through to me. And the one I'm getting now is that I've been sitting around your house too long, Milord."
"My house has been honored by your presence, Dame Kaeritha," Tellian said, and this time his voice was completely serious. "I would be most pleased for you to remain here however long you like. And while I know a champion's duties take precedence over all other considerations, could you not wait at least until the rain stops?"
"Does the rain ever stop on the Wind Plain, Milord?" Kaeritha asked wryly.
"Not in the spring," Bahzell replied before Tellian could. "It may be after pausing a bit, here and there, though."
"Bahzell is right, I'm afraid," Tellian confirmed. "Winter weather is worse, of course. They say Chemalka uses the Wind Plain to test her foul weather before she sends it elsewhere, and I believe it. But spring is usually our rainiest season. Although, to be fair, this spring has been rainier than most, even for us."
"Which I'm sure will be doing wonderful things for the grass and crops, assuming as how it doesn't wash all of them away before ever they sprout. But that won't be leaving you any dryer right this very moment, Kerry," Bahzell observed.
"I've been wet before." Kaeritha shrugged. "I haven't melted or shrunk yet, and I probably won't this time, either."
"I see you're serious about leaving," Tellian said, and she nodded. "Well, I'm not foolish enough to try to tell a champion of Tomanak her business, Milady. But if He insists on sending you out in such weather, is there at least anything I can do to assist you on your way?"
"It might help if you could tell me where I'm going," Kaeritha said ruefully.
"I beg your pardon?" Tellian looked at her as if he half suspected her of pulling his leg.
"One of the more frustrating consequences of the fact that He doesn't talk to me as directly as He does to Bahzell here," Kaeritha told him, "is that my directions are often a bit less precise."
"Well, Bahzell does require as much clarity—not to say simplicity—as possible," Brandark put in with a wicked grin.
"Just you be keeping it up, little man," Bahzell told him. "I'm sure it's an impressive splash you'll be making when someone kicks your hairy arse halfway across the moat."
"This castle doesn't have a moat," Brandark pointed out.
"It will as soon as I've finished digging one for the occasion," Bahzell shot back.
"As I was saying," Kaeritha continued in the tone of a governess ignoring her charges' obstreperousness, "I haven't really received any specific instructions about exactly what I'm supposed to be doing here."
"I should think that helping to destroy an entire temple of Sharna and to establish a brand-new chapter of your order amongst Bahzell's people—not to mention playing some small part in preventing that idiot Redhelm from committing all of us to a disastrous war—constitutes a worthwhile effort already," Tellian observed.
"I'd like to think so," Kaeritha agreed with a small smile. "On the other hand, I was already headed this direction before Bahzell ever came along. Not that I knew exactly why then, either, of course. But one thing I do know, Milord, is that He doesn't normally leave His champions sitting around idle. Swords don't accomplish much hanging on an armory wall. So it's time I was about figuring out whatever it is He has in mind for me next."
"You've no clue at all?" Bahzell asked.
"You know Him better than that," Kaeritha replied. "He may not have actually discussed it with me, but I know that whatever it is, it lies east of here."
"With all due respect, Dame Kaeritha," Tellian pointed out, "three-quarters of the Wind Plain 'lies east of here.' Would it be possible for you to narrow that down just a bit more?"
"Not a great deal, I'm afraid, Milord." She shrugged. "About all I can say is that I'm probably within a few days' travel—certainly not more than a week's or so—of where I'm supposed to be."
"While it would never do to criticize a god," Tellian said, "it occurs to me that if I attempted to plan a campaign with as little information as He appears to have provided you, I'd fall flat on my arse."
"Champions do require a certain . . . agility," Kaeritha agreed. "On the other hand, Milord, that's usually because He's careful to avoid leading us around by the hand." Tellian quirked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged again. "We need to be able to stand on our own two feet," she pointed out, "and if we started to rely on Him for explicit instructions on everything we're supposed to be doing, how long would it be before we couldn't accomplish anything without those instructions? He expects us to be bright enough to figure out our duty without His constant prompting."
"And himself is after having his own version of a sense of humor, as well," Bahzell put in.
"And that." Kaeritha nodded.
"I'll take your word for that," Tellian said. "You two are the first of His champions I've ever personally met, after all. Although, to be honest, I have to admit that I harbor a few dark suspicions about how typical the pair of you are." Bahzell and Kaeritha both grinned at him, and he shook his head. "Be that as it may," he continued, "I'm afraid that I can't really think of anything to the east of here—within no more than a few days' travel, at least—that would seem to require a champion's services. If I did know of anything that serious, I assure you that I'd already have been trying to do something about it!"
"I'm sure you would, Milord. But that's frequently the way it is, especially when the local authorities are competent."
"I'm not sure I'd consider someone who could let that idiot Redhelm come so close to succeeding 'competent,' " Tellian said a bit sourly.
"I doubt that anyone could have stopped him from making the attempt," Kaeritha objected. "You could scarcely have stripped him of his authority before he actually abused it, after all. And once you discovered that he had, you acted promptly enough."
"Barely," Tellian said.
"But promptly enough, all the same," Bahzell said. "And, if you'll pardon my saying so, I'm thinking that betwixt us it was effective enough, as well."
"It certainly was," Kaeritha agreed. "But my point, Milord, is that champions frequently end up dealing with problems which have succeeded in hiding themselves from the local authorities' attention. Often with a little help from someone like Sharna or one of his relatives."
"You think whatever it is you're here to deal with is that serious?" Tellian sat up straight in his chair, his sudden frown intense. "That there could be another of the Dark Gods at work here on the Wind Plain?"
"I didn't say that, Milord. On the other hand, and without wanting to sound paranoid, Bahzell and I are champions of one of the Gods of Light. Tomanak doesn't have that many of us, either, so we tend not to get wasted on easy tasks." She grimaced so wryly that Tellian chuckled. "Of course, a great deal of what we do in the world requires us to deal with purely mortal problems, but we do see rather more of the Dark Gods and their handiwork than most people do. And the Dark Gods are quite accomplished at concealing their presence and influence."
"Like Sharna in Navahk," Brandark agreed grimly.
"Well, yes, but—" Tellian began, then stopped. His three guests looked at him expressionlessly, and he had the grace to blush.
"Forgive me," he said. "I was about to say that that was among hradani, not Sothoii. But I suppose that sort of 'It couldn't possibly happen to us' thinking is what does let it happen, isn't it?"
"It's certainly a part of it," Kaeritha said. "But infections are always hard to see before they rise to the surface, and one of a champion's functions is to bring things to a head and clean the wound before it gets so bad that the only alternative is amputation."
"A charming analogy." Tellian grimaced, but it was obvious he was thinking hard. He leaned back in his chair, the fingers of his right hand drumming on the armrest, while he pondered.
"I still can't think of anything that seems serious enough to require a champion," he said finally. "But as you and Bahzell—and Brandark—have all just pointed out, that doesn't necessarily mean as much as I'd like to think it does, so I've been trying to come up with anything that may have seemed less important to me than it actually is. If you can delay your departure for perhaps another day or two, Kaeritha, I'll spend some time going over the reports from my local lords and bailiffs to see if there is something I missed the first time around. Right off the top of my head, though, the only ongoing local problem I'm aware of is the situation at Kalatha."
"Kalatha?" Kaeritha repeated.
"It's a town a bit more than a week's ride east of here," Tellian told her. "I realize you said you were within a 'few days' of whatever your destination is, but you could probably make the trip in five days if you pushed hard on a good horse, so I suppose it might qualify."
"Why is it a problem?" she asked.
"Why isn't it a problem?" he responded with a harsh chuckle. She looked puzzled, and he shrugged. "Kalatha isn't just any town, Milady. It holds a special Crown charter, guaranteeing its independence from the local lords, and some of them resent that. Not just because it exempts the Kalathans from their taxes, either." He smiled crookedly. "The reason it holds a free-city charter in the first place is because Lord Kellos Swordsmith, one of my maternal great-great-grandfathers, deeded it to the war maids—with the Crown's strong 'approval'—over two centuries ago."
Kaeritha's eyes narrowed, and he nodded.
"The war maids aren't so very popular," he said with what all of his listeners recognized as massive understatement. "I suppose we Sothoii are too traditional for it to be any other way. But for the most part, they're at least respected as the sort of enemies you wouldn't want to make. However much they may be disliked, very few people, even among the most convinced traditionalists, are foolish enough to go out of their way to pick quarrels with them."
"And that isn't the case at the moment with Kalatha?" Kaeritha asked.
"That depends on whose version you accept," Tellian replied. "According to the local lords, the Kalathans have been encroaching upon territory not covered by the town charter, and they've been 'confrontational' and 'hostile' to efforts to resolve the competing claims peaceably. But according to the war maids, the local lords—and especially Trisu of Lorham, the most powerful of them—have been systematically encroaching upon the rights guaranteed to them by their charter for years now. It's been going on for some time, but there's always something like this. Especially where war maids are concerned. And it's worse in Kalatha's case—inevitably, I suppose. Kalatha isn't the largest war maid free-town or -city, but it is the oldest, thanks to my highly principled ancestor. I like to think that he didn't realize just how much of a pain in the arse he was going to be dumping on all of his descendants. Although, if he didn't, he must have been stupider than I'd prefer to think."
Kaeritha had started to ask another question, but she paused almost visibly at the baron's tone. It would have been too much to call it bitter or biting, but there was a definite edge of sourness to it. So instead of what she'd been about to ask, she nodded.
"I agree it doesn't sound like an earthshaking problem," she said. "On the other hand, I have to start somewhere, and this sounds like it might very well be the place. Especially since each of Tomanak's champions has his—or her—particular . . . specialties, call them."
Tellian furrowed his brow in apparent puzzlement, and Kaeritha chuckled.
"Any of us are expected to be able to handle any duty any of His champions might encounter, Milord, but we each have our own personality traits and skills. That tends to mean we're more comfortable, or effective, at least, serving different aspects of Him. Bahzell here is obviously most at home serving Him as God of War, although he's done fairly well serving Him as God of Justice, as well. For someone who's most at home breaking things, anyway."
She grinned at Bahzell, who looked back affably, with an expression which boded ill for the next time they met on the training field.
"My own reasons for joining His service, though," she went on, returning her attention to Tellian, "had more to do with a burning thirst for justice." She paused and frowned, eyes darkening briefly with old and painful memories, then shook herself. "That's always been the aspect of Him I'm most comfortable—or happiest, anyway—serving, and my talents and abilities seem best suited to it. So if there's a legal dispute between this Kalatha and the neighboring nobility, it certainly seems like a logical place for me to start looking. Can I get a map to show me how to find it?"
"Oh, I can do better than that, Milady," Tellian assured her. "Kalatha may hold a Crown charter, but Trisu and his neighbors are my vassals. If you can wait until the end of the week to depart, I'll make some additional inquiries and provide as much background information as I can. And of course I'll send along letters of introduction and instructions for them to cooperate fully with you during your visit."
"Thank you, Milord," Kaeritha said formally. "That would be very good of you."
"That was delicious, Tala—as always," Kaeritha said with a deeply satisfied sigh. She laid her spoon neatly in the empty bowl of bread pudding and patted her flat stomach as she leaned back in her chair, smiling at the sturdy, middle-aged hradani woman who'd been sent along by Prince Bahnak of Hurgrum as his son's housekeeper.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it, Milady," Tala said in a pronounced Navahkan accent. "It's always a pleasure to cook for someone who knows good food when she tastes it."
"Or devours it—in copious quantities," Brandark observed, eyeing the empty platters on the table he shared with Kaeritha and Bahzell.
"I didn't seem to notice you shirking your share of the devouring, Milord," Tala replied dryly.
"No, but there's more of me to maintain," Brandark replied with a grin, and Kaeritha grinned back at him. At six feet two inches, Brandark was of less than average height for even a Bloody Sword hradani, far less one of the towering Horse Stealers like Bahzell. But that still left him a good three inches taller than Kaeritha, and he was far more massively built. Indeed, his shoulders were almost as broad as Bahzell's.
"Aye," Bahzell agreed. "For a sawed-off runt of a hradani who's after sitting on his arse with a pen and a bit of parchment all day, you've a bit of meat on your bones, I suppose."
"I'll remember that the next time you need some obscure Sothoii text translated," Brandark assured him.
"Speaking of obscure Sothoii texts," Kaeritha said as a smiling Tala withdrew, "I wonder if you've come across a copy of the war maids' charter in your forays through Tellian's library, Brandark?"
"I haven't been looking for one," the Bloody Sword replied. "I've done a little research on the entire question of war maids since you and Tellian discussed them this morning, but I've really only scratched the surface so far. I assume there's probably a copy of the charter and its amending documents somewhere, though. Would you like me to take a look for them?"
"I don't know." Kaeritha grimaced. "It's just that I've realized that I'm really pretty appallingly ignorant where any detailed knowledge about the war maids is concerned. Tellian's suggestion that whatever I'm supposed to be dealing with concerns them and their prerogatives may well be right, but my training in Sothoii jurisprudence is a bit shakier than my training in Axeman law. If I am supposed to be investigating the war maids' claims, it would probably be a pretty good idea to know what their prerogatives are in the first place."
"I'm not so sure that laying hands on a copy of their original charter would be enough to be telling you that," Bahzell put in. He leaned back in a chair which creaked alarmingly under his weight.
"Why not?" Kaeritha asked.
"The war maids aren't so very popular with most Sothoii," Bahzell said in the tone of one speaking with deliberate understatement. "Not to be putting too fine point on it, there's those amongst the Sothoii who'd sooner see an invading hradani army in their lands than one of the war maids' free-towns."
"They're that unpopular?" Kaeritha looked surprised, and Bahzell shrugged.
"An invading army is likely to be burning their roofs over their heads, Kerry. But roofs can be rebuilt, when all's said. Rebuilding a way of life, now—that's after being just a mite harder."
"And that's exactly how your typical conservative Sothoii would see having a batch of war maids move in next door," Brandark agreed.
Kaeritha nodded in acknowledgment, yet there was still a baffled edge to her expression. As she'd told Leeana, she'd been born a peasant in Moretz, which was at least as feudal a society as that of the Sothoii, but she'd fled that land when she'd been even younger than Leeana was now. And she'd also been educated in the Empire of the Axe, where women enjoyed far broader choices and possibilities then were generally available to Sothoii women.
"Kerry," Bahzell said, "I'm thinking you've too much of the Axewoman in you. You, if any, ought to have realized by now how hard any Sothoii is after finding it to wrap his mind round the very notion of a woman as a warrior."
Kaeritha nodded again, more emphatically, and Bahzell chuckled. If he found his position in Balthar difficult as a hradani, Kaeritha had found hers only marginally less so. Tellian's men had taken their cue from their liege lord and extended to her the same deference and respect any champion of Tomanak might have expected, but it was only too obvious that they found the entire concept of a female knight—not to mention a knight who was also a champion of the war god himself—profoundly unnatural.
"Well, for all that our folk've spent the best part of a thousand years massacring one another," Bahzell continued, "there's much to be said for the Sothoii. But one thing no one is ever likely to be suggesting is that they've an over abundance of innovation in their natures, especially where matters of tradition and custom are concerned. Don't let Tellian be fooling you. For a Sothoii, he's about as radical as you're ever likely to meet, and well educated about foreign lands, to boot. But your typical Sothoii is stiffer-necked then even a hradani, and the real conservatives are still after thinking the wheel is a dangerous, newfangled, harebrained novelty that will never really be catching on."
Kaeritha chuckled, and Brandark grinned.
"I won't say there isn't an element of the pot and kettle in that pithy description," the Bloody Sword said after a moment. "But there's a lot of accuracy in it, too. And the very existence of the war maids is an affront to those conservatives' view of the way their entire society—or the rest of the world, for that matter—is supposed to work. In fact, the war maids undoubtedly wouldn't exist at all if the Crown hadn't specifically guaranteed their legal rights. Unfortunately—and I suspect this is what Bahzell was getting at—calling that royal guarantee 'a charter' is more of a convenient shorthand then an accurate description."
Kaeritha cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged.
"It's actually more of a bundle of separate charters and decrees dealing with specific instances than some sort of neat, unified legal document, Kerry. According to what I've learned so far, the original proclamation legitimizing the war maids' existence was unfortunately vague on several key points. Over the next century or so, additional proclamations intended to clarify some of the obscurity and even the occasional judge's opinion were bundled together, and the whole mishmash is what they fondly call their 'charter.' I haven't actually looked at it, you understand, but I'm familiar enough with the same sort of thing among the hradani. When something just sort of naturally grows up the way the war maids' 'charter' has, there's usually a substantial degree of variation between the terms of its constituent documents. And that means there's an enormous scope for ambiguities and misunderstandings . . . especially when the people whose rights those decrees are supposed to stipulate aren't very popular with their neighbors."
"You have a positive gift for understatement," Kaeritha sighed, and shook her head. "Just what rights do the war maids have? In general terms, I mean, if there's that much variation from grant to grant."
"Basically," Brandark replied, "they have the right to determine how they want to live their own lives, free of traditional Sothoii familial and social obligations."
The Bloody Sword scholar tipped back in his chair, folded his arms, and frowned thoughtfully.
"Although they're uniformly referred to as 'war maids,' most of them aren't, really." Kaeritha raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "The Kingdom of the Sothoii is a lot more feudal than the Empire of the Axe. Virtually every legal right up here on the Wind Plain is associated in one way or another with the holding of land and the reciprocal obligation of service to the Crown, and the war maids are no exception. As part of the core charter which originally recognized their existence, their free-towns are obligated to provide military forces to the Crown. In my more cynical moments, I think that obligation was included as a deliberate measure intended to effectively nullify the charter, since it's hard for me to conceive of any Sothoii king who could honestly believe that a batch of women could provide an effective military force."
"If that was after being the case, then the king in question was in for a nasty surprise," Bahzell put in, and Brandark chuckled.
"Oh, he was that!" he agreed. "And in my less cynical moments, I'm inclined to think King Gartha included the obligation only because he had to. Given how much of the current crop of Sothoii nobles is hostile to the very notion of war maids, the opposition to authorizing their existence in the first place must have been enormous. Which means his Council probably could have mustered the support to block the initial charter without that provision. For that matter, the opponents to the measure would have been the ones most inclined to believe that requiring military service out of a bunch of frail, timid women would be an effective, underhanded way of negating Gartha's intentions without coming out in open opposition.
"At any rate, only about a quarter of all 'war maids' are actually warriors. Their own laws and traditions require all of them to have at least rudimentary training in self-defense, but most of them follow other professions. Some of them are farmers or, like most Sothoii, horse breeders. But more of them are shopkeepers, blacksmiths, physicians, glassmakers, even lawyers—the sorts of tradesmen and craftsmen who populate most free-towns or -cities up here. And the purpose of their charter is to ensure that they have the same legal rights and protections, despite the fact that they're women, that men in the same professions would enjoy."
"Are they all women?"
"Well," Brandark said dryly, "the real war maids are. But if what you're actually asking is whether or not war maid society is composed solely of women, the answer is no. The fact that a woman chooses to live her own life doesn't necessarily mean she hates all men. Of course, many of them become war maids because they aren't very fond of men, and quite a few of them end up partnering with other women. Not a practice likely to endear them to Sothoii men who think the entire notion of women making decisions for themselves is unnatural. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that any woman who chooses to become—or, for that matter, is born—a war maid isn't going to fall in love with a man and choose to spend her life with him on her own terms. Or at least to dally with one from time to time. And war maid mothers do tend to produce male children, just like any other women. Of course, those two facts lead to some of the thornier 'ambiguities' I mentioned earlier."
"Why?" Kaeritha leaned forward, elbows on the table, her expression intent, while she cradled her wineglass in her hands, and Bahzell hid a smile. He'd seen exactly that same hunting-hawk expression when she encountered a new combat technique.
"There's always been some question as to whether or not the war maids' charter automatically extends to their male children," Brandark explained. "Or, for that matter, to their female children, in the eyes of some of the true reactionaries. When a woman chooses to become a war maid, her familial and inheritance obligations to her family are legally severed. Even your true sticks-in-the-mud have been forced to admit that. But a fair number of nobles continue to assert that the legal severance applies only to her—that whatever line of inheritance or obligation would have passed through her to her children is unimpaired. For the most part, the courts haven't agreed with them, but enough of them have to mean that it's still something of a gray area. I suppose it's probably fairly fortunate that most 'first-generation' war maids come from commoner stock, or at most from the minor nobility—the squirearchy, you might call them. Or maybe it isn't. If the higher nobility had been forced to come to grips with the question, the Crown courts would have been forced to make a definitive ruling on the question years ago.
"At any rate, the exact question of the legal status of war maids' children is still up in the air, at least to some extent. And so is the question of their marriages. Their more diehard opponents argue that since their precious charter severs all familial obligations, it precludes the creation of new obligations, which means that no war maid marriage has any legal validity in their eyes. And there really is some question, I understand, in this instance. I doubt very much that Gartha had any intention of precluding the possibility of war maid marriages, but Baron Tellian's senior magistrate tells me that some of the controlling language is less precise than it ought to be. According to him, everyone knows it's a matter of technicalities and reading the letter of the law, not its spirit, but apparently the problems do exist. And, to be perfectly honest, from what he said—and a couple of things he didn't say—I think the war maids have done their own bit to keep the waters muddied."
"Why would they do that?" Kaeritha asked. "Unless . . . Oh. The children."
"Exactly. If war maid marriages have no legal standing, then every child of a war maid is technically illegitimate."
"Which would take them out of the line of inheritance, unless there were no legitimate heirs at all," Kaeritha said with a nod of understanding, but her expression was troubled.
"I can follow the logic," she continued after a moment, "but it seems awfully shortsighted of them. Or maybe like the triumph of expedience. It may prevent their children from being yanked away from them and drawn into a system they wanted out of, but it also prevents them from extending the legal protections of their own families to those same children."
"Yes, it does," Brandark agreed. "On the other hand, their own courts and judges don't see it that way, and for the most part, the charters which create their free-towns extend the jurisdiction of their judges to all of the citizens of those towns. The problem comes with legal cases which cross the boundaries between the war maids' jurisdiction and those of more traditional Sothoii nobles."
"Tomanak," Kaeritha sighed. "What a mess!"
"Well, it isn't after being just the tidiest situation in the world," Bahzell said. "Still and all, it's one the Sothoii have been working at for two or three centuries now. There's those as have some mighty sharp axes to grind, but for the most part, they've learned how to be getting on with one another."
" 'For the most part' still leaves a lot of room for potential trouble, though," Kaeritha pointed out. "And somehow, I don't think He would be sending me off to deal with a crop of Sothoii who were 'getting on with one another.' Do you?"
"Well, as to that," Bahzell replied with a crooked smile, "no."
It was still raining when Kaeritha left Hill Guard—of course.
At least it wasn't a torrential downpour, she told herself encouragingly as she started down the steep approach road to Baron Tellian's ancestral keep. The Wind Plain was actually a huge, high plateau which, for the most part, was one vast, flat ocean of grass. There weren't very many hills on it, so, over the centuries, those which did exist had exhibited a distinct tendency to attract towns and fortifications. Hill Guard had come into existence in exactly that fashion the better part of eight hundred years ago when Halyu Bowmaster, the first Lord Warden of Balthar, had looked about for a suitable spot for the capital of his new holding. Now the city of Balthar sprawled out for several miles from the castle which brooded down over it from above.
The Sothoii weren't great city builders. For the most part, their people continued to follow the pastoral lifestyle of their ancestors. While the Wind Plain remained the heart of their realm, they had also acquired extensive holdings to the east, below the towering plateau. Those lower regions enjoyed a far milder climate, and a substantial portion of the huge Sothoii horse and cattle herds were wintered in those more salubrious surroundings. But the huge stud farms where the magnificent Sothoii warhorses were bred and trained remained where tradition insisted they must—atop the Wind Plain. And for whatever reason, the Sothoii coursers flatly refused to live anywhere else.
Horses—and coursers—required a lot of space, and the Sothoii population by and large was scattered sparsely about the Wind Plain, watching over its vast herds. That produced a lot of villages and small towns, but not very many cities. Which, conversely, meant that what cities there were tended to be quite large.
They were also well maintained, and Kaeritha moved briskly along the wide, straight avenue on the new mount Tellian had insisted upon giving her. She'd argued about accepting it, but not, she was guiltily aware, very hard. Any Sothoii warhorse was worth a prince's ransom, and the mare Tellian had bestowed upon Kaeritha was a princess among her own kind. Smaller and lighter than the heavier cavalry horses of other lands, the winter-hardy Sothoii warhorse was perfectly suited to the swift, deadly archery-dominated tactics of the people who had bred it. Indeed, only the coursers themselves excelled its combination of speed and endurance.
And unlike Kaeritha, the warhorses seemed perfectly content with the Wind Plain's soggy spring weather.
She chuckled damply at the thought and reached down to pat the mare's shoulder. The horse flicked her ears in acknowledgment of the caress, and Kaeritha smiled. The mare's dark chestnut coloring, even darker at the moment thanks to the rain, probably accounted for her name, but Kaeritha still felt that naming such an affectionate creature "Dark War Cloud Rising" was just a bit much. She'd promptly shortened it to "Cloudy," which had earned her a rather pained look from Tellian. His stable master, on the other hand, had only grinned, and from the readiness with which Cloudy answered to her new name, Kaeritha suspected that the stable hands had employed a similar diminutive before she ever came along.
A packhorse trotted along at Cloudy's heels. Even he, although far more plebeian than the aristocratic warhorse, was a magnificent creature. He would have been happily accepted as a superior light cavalry mount anywhere but among the Sothoii, and Kaeritha knew she had never been better mounted in her entire life. Which, she reflected, was saying something, given the care the Order of Tomanak took when it came to equipping their god's champions.
Despite Balthar's size, there was very little traffic as she approached the city's East Gate. The weather undoubtably had a little something to do with that, she thought, looking past the open gate to the rain blowing across the road beyond and rippling the endless spring grass of the Wind Plain. Sothoii roads were not, by and large, up to Axeman standards. Few highways outside the Empire itself were, of course, but the Sothoii's efforts came up shorter than most, and Kaeritha felt an undeniable sinking sensation as she contemplated the one before her. It was straight enough—not surprisingly, given the flat, unobstructed terrain of the Wind Plain—but that was about all she could say for the broad line of mud stretching out before her.
The officer commanding the gate guard saluted her respectfully as she passed, and she nodded back with equal courtesy. Yet even as she did, she wondered how the officer might have greeted her if not for the gold and green badge of the Order of Tomanak Tellian's seamstresses had embroidered across the front of her poncho.
Then she was through the gate, and the gentle pressure of a heel sent Cloudy trotting down the last bit of slope towards the waiting road.
Steam rose gently from the stew pot. More steam rose from the far from occasional drops of rain which found their way through the open side of the lean-to Kaeritha had erected to protect her cooking fire. Centuries of Sothoii had planted trees along the lines of their roads, mainly to provide windbreaks, but also for the purpose to which Kaeritha had put this dense patch of trees. Although it was still spring, the branches above her were densely clothed in fresh, green leaves, which offered at least some protection to her campsite. And, of course, there was firewood in plenty, even if it was a bit on the damp side.
The blanket-covered packhorse was picketed beside the brawling, rain-fed stream at the foot of the slight rise on which she had encamped. Cloudy wasn't picketed at all—the idea that she might require picketing would have been a mortal insult to any Sothoii warhorse—but she'd ambled over and parked herself on the up-wind side of the fire. Kaeritha wasn't sure whether that was a helpful attempt to shield the fire from the rainy wind or an effort to get close enough to soak up what warmth the crackling flames could provide. Not that she was about to object in either case.
She stirred the stew again, then lifted the spoon and sampled it. She sighed. It was hot, and she knew it was going to be filling, but one thing she had never been able to do was cook. She was going to miss Brandark's deft hand at the cook fire, and the mere thought of Tala's cooking was enough to bring a glum tear to the eye when she contemplated her own efforts.
She grimaced and sat back on her heels under the cover of her open-fronted tent. She'd positioned the tent and her fire with the careful eye of hard-won experience. The lean-to she'd constructed, and a rising swell of ground, served as reflectors to bounce the fire's warmth back into her tent, and only a little of the smoke eddied in along with it. Given the general soddeness of the Wind Plain, she was as comfortable—and as close to dry—as she was likely to get.
Which wasn't saying a great deal.
She got up and began moving additional firewood under the crude lean-to, where it would be at least mostly out of the rain and the cook fire could begin drying it out. She was just about finished when Cloudy suddenly raised her head. The mare's ears came up, pointed forward, and she turned to face back towards the road.
Kaeritha reached up under her poncho and unbuttoned the straps across the quillons of her matched short swords, then turned casually in the same direction.
Cloudy's hearing was considerably more acute than Kaeritha's. Kaeritha knew that, yet how even the mare could have heard anything through the steady drip and patter of rain surpassed her understanding. For a moment, she thought that perhaps Cloudy hadn't heard anything, but then she saw the rider emerging ghostlike from the rainy, misty evening gloom and knew the mare hadn't been imagining things after all.
Kaeritha stood silently, watching the newcomer and waiting. The Kingdom of the Sothoii was, by and large, peaceful and law-abiding . . . these days, at least. It hadn't always been so, though, and there were still occasional brigands or outlaws, despite the ruthless justice nobles like Tellian dealt out to any they caught up with. Such predators would be likely to think of a lone traveler as easy prey, especially if they knew that traveler was a woman . . . and didn't know she was one of Tomanak's champions. As far as Kaeritha could tell, there was only one rider out there, but there might be more, and she maintained a prudent watchfulness as the other slowly approached her fire.
The possibility that the stranger might be a brigand declined as Kaeritha got a better look at his mount. That horse was almost as good as Cloudy, and no prudent horse thief would dare to keep such a readily recognizable and remarked animal for himself. Which didn't bring her any closer to being able to guess what the newcomer was doing out here in the rain with night coming on.
"Hello, the fire!" a soprano voice called, and Kaeritha closed her eyes as she heard it.
"Why me?" she asked. "Why is it always me?"
The cloudy night vouchsafed no reply, and she sighed and opened her eyes again.
"Hello, yourself, Leeana," she called back. "I suppose you might as well come on in and make yourself comfortable."
The Lady Leeana Glorana Syliveste Bowmaster, heir conveyant of Balthar, the West Riding, and at least a dozen other major and minor fiefs, had mud on her face. Her red-gold braid was a thick, sodden serpent, hanging limp down her back, and every line of her body showed her weariness as she sat cross-legged across the fire from Kaeritha and mopped up the last bit of stew in her bowl with a crust of bread. She popped it into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed contentedly.
"You must have been hungry," Kaeritha observed. Leeana looked at her questioningly, and she shrugged. "I've eaten my own cooking too often to cherish any illusions about my culinary talent, Leeana."
"I thought it was quite good, actually, Dame Kaeritha," Leeana said politely, and Kaeritha snorted.
"Flattering the cook isn't going to do you any good, girl," she replied. "Given the fact that you look more like a half-starved, half-drowned, mud-spattered rat then the heir of one of the kingdom's most powerful nobles, I was willing to let you wrap yourself around something hot before I began the interrogation. You've done that now."
Leeana winced at Kaeritha's pointed tone. But she didn't try to evade it. She put her spoon into the empty bowl and set it neatly aside, then faced Kaeritha squarely.
"I'm running away," she said.
"That much I'd already guessed," the knight told her dryly. "So why don't we just get on to the two whys?"
"The two whys?" Leeana repeated with a puzzled expression.
"Why number one: why you ran away. Why number two: why you don't expect me to march you straight home again."
"Oh." Leeana had the grace to blush slightly, and her green eyes dropped to the fire crackling between them. She gazed at the flames for several seconds, then looked back up at Kaeritha.
"I didn't just suddenly decide overnight to run away," she said. "There were lots of reasons. You know most of them, really."
"I suppose I do." Kaeritha studied the girl's face, and it was hard to prevent the sympathy she felt from softening her own uncompromising expression. "But I also know how worried and upset your parents must be right now. I'm sure you do, too." Leeana flinched ever so slightly, and Kaeritha nodded. "So why did you do this to them?" she finished coldly, and Leeana's eyes fell to the fire once more.
"I love my parents," the girl replied after a long, painful pause, her soft voice low enough that Kaeritha had some difficulty hearing her over the sound of the rain. "And you're right—they are going to be worried about me. I know that. It's just—"
She paused again, then drew a deep breath and raised her eyes to Kaeritha's once more.
"Father received a formal offer for my hand the night after you left Hill Guard," she said.
It was Kaeritha's turn to sit back on her heels. She'd been afraid it might be something like that, but that didn't make having it confirmed any better. She thought of several things she might have said, and discarded each of them just as promptly as she recalled her earlier conversation with Leeana.
"Who was it from?" she asked instead after a moment.
"Rulth Blackhill," Leeana said in a flat voice. Kaeritha obviously looked blank, because the girl grimaced and continued. "He's Lord Warden of Transhar . . . and he'll be fifty years old this fall."
"Fifty?" Despite herself, Kaeritha couldn't quite keep the surprise out of her voice, and she frowned when Leeana nodded glumly. "Why in the world would a man that age believe even for a moment that your father might consider accepting an offer of marriage on your behalf from him?"
"Why shouldn't he?" Leeana asked simply, and Kaeritha stared at her.
"Because he's three times your age, that's why!"
"He's also incredibly wealthy, a favorite of the King's chief minister, a member of the King's Council in his own right, and related by both blood and marriage to Baron Cassan," Leeana replied.
"But you said he's almost fifty!"
"What difference does that make?" Leeana asked. "He's a recent widower with four children, two of them boys, by his first wife, and the youngest is less than a year old. So it's obvious he can still sire children—preferably sons."
She said it so reasonably that Kaeritha had to bite her own tongue hard. For just a moment, she was furious with Leeana because she did sound so reasonable. But then she made herself step back a full pace from her own anger. Leeana's tone was that of someone who knew that the world in which she had been raised would find what she was saying reasonable, not that of someone who agreed with it.
"Do you really think," the knight asked quietly after another brief pause, "that your father would let someone that age have you?"
"I don't think he'd do it willingly," Leeana said in a very low voice. "In fact, I think he'd probably refuse to do it at all. But I can't be certain. And even if he did refuse, it would only make things worse."
She stared into Kaeritha's eyes, her own pleading for something. Sympathy, Kaeritha thought, but that was only a part of it. Possibly even the smallest part. No. What Leeana wanted wasn't sympathy—it was understanding.
"What do you mean, 'worse'?" she asked.
"Rulth Blackhill is a greedy, powerful man," Leeana replied. "He's ambitious, and he's very closely allied with his cousin and brother-in-law, Baron Cassan. And Baron Cassan and Father . . . don't get along. They don't like each other, they don't agree on most matters of policy, and Baron Cassan is the leader of the faction at Court most opposed to anything resembling 'appeasement' of the hradani. In fact, it was Cassan who almost convinced the King to deny Father's petition to strip Mathian Redhelm of his wardenship, and Blackhill supported him. The two of them—and the ones who think like them—would love to see Father's heir married off to one of Cassan's allies."
Her young face was taut with distaste and anger, and Kaeritha nodded slowly. Of course, unless this Rulth Blackhill was unlike any other man she'd ever met, the thought of bedding someone as lovely as Leeana would probably figure in his thinking as well, the knight thought sardonically. But this might not be the best time in the world to be bringing that up.
"I'd think that Cassan would realize that all of that would make your father even less likely to accept Blackhill's offer," she said instead.
"He probably does," Leeana agreed. "In fact, he's probably counting on it."
"Now you have me really confused," Kaeritha admitted.
"Cassan hates Father. He also wants to discredit Father with the King and his Council in any way he can. And however I might feel about marrying someone Blackhill's age, it's a perfectly appropriate match by most standards. Given the fact that everyone knows Balthar and the entire West Riding is going to face a succession crisis when Father dies—unless he's prepared to set Mother aside and marry someone else who can give him sons—there would be enormous pressure from several members of the Council for him to accept it. They'd argue that Balthar is too important for the succession to be left up in the air when such an appropriate marriage to a nobleman of mature years who's already demonstrated his own abilities—and potency—stands ready to resolve it. So if Father does refuse the offer, it may cost him dearly in terms of political support. Especially when he's already upset so many people by his 'surrender' to Prince Bahzell."
Kaeritha shook her head.
"That's too complicated and devious for my poor peasant-born brain to wrap itself around," she said. Leeana looked at her, and she snorted. "Oh, I don't say I disbelieve you, girl. And intellectually, I suppose I can even understand the twisty sort of thinking that would go into something like that. I just can't understand it on any sort of personal level."
"I wish I didn't," Leeana told her. "Or that I didn't have to, at least."
"I can believe that," Kaeritha said. She put some more wood on the fire, listening to the hiss as the flames began exploring its damp surface. Then she looked back up at Leeana.
"So someone you don't like and certainly don't want to marry has asked your father for your hand, and you're afraid that if he refuses the offer it will make serious problems for him. That's why you ran away?"
"Yes." There was something about that one-word reply that made Kaeritha cock an eyebrow. It wasn't a lie—that much she was certain of. Yet somehow she was certain it wasn't the entire truth, either. She thought about pushing harder, then changed her mind.
"And how does running away solve any of those problems?" she asked instead.
"I'd have thought that was obvious, Dame Kaeritha," Leeana said in a surprised tone.
"Humor me," Kaeritha said dryly. "Oh, I think I can figure out your basic strategy. I don't flatter myself that you followed me just to place yourself under my protection, champion of Tomanak or not. So I suspect that what you're really doing is heading for Kalatha with some scatterbrained, romantic notion of becoming a war maid in order to avoid your unwelcome suitor. Is that about right?"
"Yes, it is," Leeana said just a touch defensively.
"And have you really considered all you'll be giving up?" Kaeritha countered. "I've been a peasant, Lady Leeana. I doubt very much that your lot would be quite that hard among the war maids, but it would be very, very different from anything you've ever experienced before. And there won't be any going back. Your birth and family won't protect you any longer—in fact, for all intents and purposes, you'll be dead as far as your family is concerned."
"I know," Leeana said very, very softly, staring into the fire once more. "I know." She raised her eyes to Kaeritha again. "I know," she repeated for a third time, jade eyes brimming with tears. "But I also know Mother and Father will always love me, whether I'm still legally their daughter or not. Nothing will ever change that. And if I go to the war maids, I take the decision out of Father's hands. No one can possibly blame him for refusing to allow Blackhill to marry me if I'm no longer his daughter. And," she managed a crooked smile, "the disgrace of what I'm doing should put me so far beyond the pale that not even someone as ambitious as Rulth Blackhill would consider offering me honorable marriage."
"But you're not yet fifteen years old," Kaeritha said. She shook her head sadly. "That's too young to make this sort of decision, girl. I haven't known your father as long as you have, but I know he'd agree about that. You may be doing this for him, but do you really think he'd want you to?"
"I'm fairly certain he wouldn't," Leeana admitted with a sort of forlorn pride. "He'll understand it, but that isn't the same as wanting me to do it. In fact, I'm pretty sure he and his armsmen aren't too far behind me by now. If he catches up, he'll figure that he doesn't have any choice but to take me home again, whether I want to go or not. Because he loves me, and because, like you, he's going to argue that I'm too young to make this decision.
"But I'm not too young according to the war maids' charter. I have the legal right to make that decision myself if I can reach one of their free-towns before Father catches up, and once it's made, he can't make me go home again, no matter how much he loves me or I love him. And if he can't make me go home, Blackhill and Cassan can't use me against him anymore, ever."
A tear broke free at last, spilling down her cheek, and Kaeritha drew a deep breath. Then she let it out again.
"Then I suppose we'd better turn in," she said. "I'm sure we can both use the sleep . . . and we'll have to make an early start if we're going to see to it that he doesn't catch up with us."
At least the rain had stopped when they broke camp in the morning. That was something, Kaeritha told herself as she swung lightly up into Cloudy's saddle and settled the butt of the quarterstaff she carried instead of a more traditional lance into the holder on her right stirrup. In fact—she sucked in a deep, lung-filling draft of clear, cool morning air—it was quite a bit.
She'd watched Leeana as unobtrusively as possible as they went about preparing to take the road once more. The girl had been almost painfully ready to undertake any task, although it was obvious that she'd never been faced with many of those tasks before in her life.
Like any Sothoii noble, male or female, she'd been thrown into a saddle about the same time she learned to stand up unassisted, and her horsemanship skills were beyond reproach. Her gelding, who rejoiced in a name even more highfaluting than "Dark War Cloud Rising," answered perfectly amiably to "Boots," and Kaeritha wondered if any Sothoii warhorse actually had to put up with its formal given name. However that might be, Boots (a bay brown who took his name from his black legs and the white stockings on his forelegs) was immaculately groomed, and his tack and saddle furniture were spotless, despite the wet and mud. Unfortunately, his rider was considerably less adept at others of the homey little chores involved in wilderness travel. At least she was willing, though, as Kaeritha had noted, and she took direction amazingly well for one of her exalted birth. All in all, Kaeritha was inclined to believe there was some sound mettle in the girl.
And there had better be, the champion thought more grimly as she watched Leeana swing nimbly up into Boots' saddle. Kaeritha found herself unable to do anything but respect Leeana's motives, but the plain fact was that the girl couldn't possibly have any realistic notion of how drastically her life was about to change. It was entirely possible that, assuming she survived the shock, she would find her new life more satisfying and fulfilling. Kaeritha hoped she would, but the gulf which yawned between the daughter of one of the four most powerful feudal magnates in the entire kingdom and one more anonymous war maid, despised by virtually everyone in the only world she had ever known, was far deeper than a fall from the Wind Plain's mighty ramparts might have been. Surviving that plunge would be a shattering experience—one fit to destroy any normal sheltered flower of noble femininity—however assiduously Leeana had tried to prepare herself for it ahead of time.
Of course, Kaeritha had never had all that much use for sheltered flowers of noble femininity. Was that the real reason she'd agreed to help the girl flee from the situation fate had trapped her into? A part of her wanted to think it was. And another part wanted to think that she was doing this because it was the duty of any champion of Tomanak to rescue the helpless from persecution. Given Leeana's scathing description of Rulth Blackhill it was impossible for Kaeritha to think of a marriage between him and the girl as anything but the rankest form of persecution, after all, and Tomanak, as the God of Justice, disapproved of persecution. Besides, Leeana was right; she did have a legal right to make this decision if she could reach Kalatha.
Both of those reasons were real enough, she thought. But she also knew that at the heart of things was another, still deeper reason. The memory of a thirteen-year-old orphan who had found herself trapped into another, even grimmer life . . . until she refused to accept that sentence.
For a moment, Dame Kaeritha's sapphire-blue eyes were darker and deeper—and colder—than the waters of Belhadan Bay. Then the mood passed, and she shook herself like a dog, shaking off the water of memory, and gazed out through the cool, misty morning. The sun hovered just above the horizon directly in front of them in a molten ball of gold, with the morning mists rising to enfold it like steam from a forge, and the last of the previous day's clouds were high-piled ramparts in the south, their peaks touched with the same golden glow, as the brisk northerly wind continued to sweep them away. The road was just as muddy as it had been, but the day was going to be truly glorious, and she felt an eagerness stirring within her. The eagerness to be off and doing once again.
"Are you ready, Lady Leeana?" she asked.
"Yes," Leeana replied, urging Boots up beside Cloudy. Then she chuckled. Kaeritha cocked her head at the younger woman, and Leeana grinned. "I was just thinking that somehow it sounds more natural when you call me 'girl' than when you call me 'Lady Leeana,' " she explained in answer to Kaeritha's unspoken question.
"Does it?" Kaeritha snorted. "Maybe it's the peasant girl in me coming back to the surface. On the other hand, it might not be such a bad thing if you started getting used to a certain absence of honorifics."
She touched Cloudy very gently with a heel, and the mare started obediently forward. Leeana murmured something softly to Boots, and the gelding moved up at Cloudy's shoulder and fell into step with the mare, as if the two horses were harnessed together.
"I know," the girl said after several silent minutes. "That I should started getting used to it, I mean. Actually, I don't think I'll miss that anywhere near as much as I'll miss having someone else to draw my bath and brush my hair." She held up a dirty hand and grimaced. "I've already discovered that there's quite a gap between reality and bard's tales. Or, at least, the bards seem to leave out some of the more unpleasant little details involved in 'adventures.' And the difference between properly chaperoned hunting trips, with appropriate armsmen and servants along to look after my needs, and traveling light by myself has become rather painfully clear to me."
"A few nights camping out by yourself in the rain will generally start to make that evident," Kaeritha agreed. "And I notice you didn't bring along a tent."
"No," Leeana said with another, more heartfelt grimace. "I had enough trouble getting a few days' worth of trail rations smuggled into the stable and stowed away in Boots' saddle bags without trying to bring along proper travel gear." She shivered. "That first night was really unpleasant," she admitted. "I never did get a fire started."
"Hard to do without dry wood," Kaeritha observed, carefully hiding the deep pang of sympathy she felt as she pictured Leeana—a pampered young noblewoman, however much she may have wanted and striven to be something else—all alone in a cold, rainy night without a tent or as much as a fire. It must have been the most wretched night of the girl's entire existence.
"Yes, I found that out." Leeana's grin was remarkably free of self-pity, and she actually chuckled. "By the next morning, I'd figured out what I'd done wrong, so I spent about an hour finding myself a nice, dead log and hacking half a saddlebag or so of dry heartwood out of it with my dagger." She held up her right palm, examining the fresh blisters which crossed it with a rueful chuckle. "At least the exercise got me warmed up! And the next night, I had something dry to start the fire with. Heaven!"
She rolled her eyes so drolly Kaeritha had no choice but to laugh. Then she shook her head severely, returned her attention to the road, and asked Cloudy for a trot. The mare obliged, with the smooth gait which was steadily becoming addictive, and they moved off in a brisk, steady splatter of mud.
Yes, Kaeritha thought, treasuring green eyes that could laugh at their owner's own wet, cold, undoubtedly frightened misery. Yes, there is some sound mettle in this one, thank Tomanak.
"Father isn't far behind now."
Kaeritha looked up from the breakfast fire. Leeana was standing beside the road, her raised arm hooked up across Boots' withers while she stared back the way they'd come the day before. Her expression was tense, and she stood very still, only the fingers of her right hand moving as they caressed the gelding's soft, warm coat.
"What makes you so certain?" Kaeritha asked, for there had been no question at all in the sober pronouncement.
"I could say it's because I know he had to have missed me by the second morning and that it's easy to guess he's been pushing hard after me ever since," the girl said. "But the truth is, I just know." She turned and looked at Kaeritha. "I always know where he and Mother are," she said simply.
Kaeritha chewed on that for a few moments, while she busied herself turning strips of bacon in her blackened camp skillet. Then she whipped the bacon out of the popping grease and spread it over their last slabs of slightly stale bread. She dumped the grease into the flames and watched the fire sputter eagerly, then looked back up at Leeana.
The girl's face was drawn, and Boots and Cloudy were both beginning to show the effects of the stiff pace they had set. Of course, Leeana and Boots had covered the same distance in twenty-four hours less than she and Cloudy had, but she'd been pushing hard herself ever since the girl caught up with her. The baron and his wind brother Hathan were both wind riders. However furious and worried he might be, Tellian was too levelheaded to risk riding in pursuit with only Hathan—the Lord Warden of the West Riding would be too juicy a target for the ill-intentioned to pass up—but he and his wind brother would be setting a crushing pace for the rest of his armsmen, and Kaeritha knew it.
"What do you mean, you know where they are?" she asked after a moment.
"I just do." Leeana gave Boots one more caress, then stepped closer to Kaeritha and the fire and accepted her share of the bread and bacon. She took an appreciative bite of the humble repast and shrugged.
"I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be mysterious about it—I just don't know a good way to explain it. Mother says the sight has always run in her family, all the way back to the Fall." She shrugged again. "I don't really know about that. It's not as if there have been dozens of magi in our family, or anything like that. But I always know where they are, or if they're unhappy . . . or hurt." She shivered, her face suddenly drawn and old beyond its years. "Just like I knew when Moonshine went down and rolled across Mother."
She stared at something only she could see for several seconds, then shook herself. She looked down at the bread and bacon in her hand, as if seeing them for the first time, and gave Kaeritha a smile that was somehow shy, almost embarrassed, as she raised the food and bit into it again.
"Do they always 'know' where you are?" Kaeritha asked after moment.
"No." Leeana shook her head. Then she paused. "Well, actually, I don't know for certain about Mother. I know that when I was a very little girl, she always seemed to know just when I was about to get into mischief, but I always just put that down to 'mommy magic.' I do know Father doesn't have any trace of whatever it is, though. If he did, I'd have gotten into trouble so many times in the last few years that I doubt I'd be able to sit in a saddle at all! I'd never have gotten away with running away in the first place, either. And I can tell from how unhappy and worried he feels right now that he doesn't realize they're no more than a few hours behind us."
Her eyes darkened with the last sentence, and her voice was low. The thought of her father's unhappiness and worry clearly distressed her.
"It's not too late to change your mind, Leeana," Kaeritha said quietly. The girl looked at her quickly, and the knight shrugged. "If he's that close, all we have to do is sit here for a few hours. Or we can go on. From the map and directions your father's steward gave me, Kalatha can't be more than another two or three hours down the road. But the decision is yours."
"Not anymore," Leeana half-whispered. Her nostrils flared, and then she shook her head firmly. "It's a decision I've already made, Dame Kaeritha. I can't—won't—change it now. Besides," she managed a crooked smile, "he may be unhappy and worried, but those aren't the only things he's feeling. He knows where I'm going, and why."
"He does? You're certain of that?"
"Oh, I wasn't foolish enough to leave any tear-spotted notes that might come to light sooner than I wanted," Leeana said dryly. "In fact, I left right after breakfast, and I sent both of my personal maids off to visit their parents the night before. I didn't tell either of them the other one had the evening off, either, so no one was likely to miss me until sometime after breakfast the next day. Father is a wind rider, you know. If I hadn't managed to buy at least a full day's head start, he'd have forgotten about waiting for his personal bodyguard and he and Hathan would have come after me alone. And in that case, he'd have been certain to catch up with me, even on Boots.
"Since he didn't, I have to assume I did manage to keep anyone from realizing I'd left long enough to get the start I needed. But Father isn't an idiot, and he knows I'm not one, either. He must have figured out where I was going the instant someone finally realized I was missing, and he's been coming after me ever since. But, you know, there's a part of him that doesn't want to catch me."
She finished the last bite of her bread and bacon, then stood, looking across at Kaeritha, and this time her smile was gentle, almost tender.
"Like you, he's afraid I'm making a terrible mistake, and he's determined to keep me from doing it, if he can. But he knows why I'm doing it, too. And that's why a part of him doesn't want to catch me. Actually wants me to beat him to Kalatha, because he knows as well as I do that the war maids are the only way I'll avoid eventually being forced to become a pedigreed broodmare dropping foals for Blackhill . . . or someone. Mother was never that for him, and he knows I'll never be that for anyone. He taught me to feel that way—to value myself that much—himself, and he knows that, too."
"Which won't prevent him from stopping you if he can," Kaeritha said.
"No." Leeana shook her head. "Silly, isn't it? Here we both are—me, running away from him; him, chasing after me to bring me back, whether I want to come or not—and all of it because of how much we love each other."
A tear glittered for an instant, but she wiped it briskly away and turned to busy herself tightening the girth on Boots' saddle.
"Yes," Kaeritha said softly, emptying the teapot over the fire's embers and beginning to cover the ashes with dirt. "Yes, Leeana. Very silly indeed."
"You have to be out of your bloody mind!"
The gray-haired woman on the other side of the desk stared at Kaeritha and Leeana in disbelief. The bronze key of her office hung on a chain about her neck, and her brown eyes were hard, almost angry.
"I assure you, Mayor Yalith, that I am not out of my mind," Leeana replied sharply. She and Kaeritha were tired, mud-spattered, and worn to the bone from long days in the saddle, but she was obviously fighting hard to hang on to her temper. Equally obviously, her life as the daughter of the Baron of Balthar had not exactly suited her to dealing with attitudes like Yalith's.
"Madwomen seldom think they're out of their minds," the mayor shot back. "And whatever you may think, and however much you may believe that the war maids are a way out of some social inconvenience, there are aspects of this situation which could only lead to disaster."
"With all due respect, Mayor," Kaeritha put in, intervening for the first time, "this girl is not talking about 'some social inconvenience.' She is talking, unless I was very much mistaken when I read King Gartha's original proclamation granting the war maids the right to exist, about the exact thing you and your people are supposed to guarantee to any woman."
"Don't you go quoting the charter to me, thank you, Dame Kaeritha!" Yalith shot back. "You may be a champion of Tomanak, but Tomanak's never done anything for the war maids that I ever heard about! And the war maids are scarcely a convenient bolthole for some pampered noblewoman—the daughter of a baron, no less!—to use just to avoid an engagement when her family hasn't even accepted it yet!"
Kaeritha started to speak again, quickly, despite her awareness that her own anger would only guarantee that Yalith would refuse to listen to anything she said. But before she could open her mouth, Leeana laid a hand on her forearm and faced the mayor of Kalatha squarely.
"Yes," she said quietly, holding Yalith's brown eyes with her own jade stare. "I am avoiding an engagement my family hasn't accepted. I'm not aware, though, that the war maids are in the habit of asking a woman why she seeks to join them—aside from making certain that she isn't simply a criminal trying to avoid punishment. Was I mistaken?"
It was Yalith's turn to bite off a hot return unspoken. She glared at Leeana for several tense seconds, then shook her head curtly.
"No," she admitted. "We aren't 'in the habit' of asking questions like that. Or, rather, we do ask them, but the answers don't—or shouldn't—affect whether or not we grant someone membership. But I trust that you're willing to admit that this is not a usual situation. First, I'm quite certain you're the highest-ranking young woman who's ever sought to become a war maid, and the gods only know where that might end. Second, the most common reason women who later regret asking to become one of us sought us out in the first place is to escape an arranged marriage. We always make a special effort to be positive women like that are certain in their own minds of what they want. And, third, this is the worst possible time, from Kalatha's perspective, for us to be antagonizing someone like Baron Tellian!"
"I'll want to speak to you about that later, Mayor Yalith," Kaeritha put in, snapping the mayor's eyes back to her. "For now, though, I don't think you need to fear antagonizing Tellian. I don't expect him to be happy about this, and I don't know what his official position is likely to be. But I do know he isn't going to blame you for doing precisely what your charter requires you to do just because the applicant in question is his daughter."
"Oh no?" Yalith snorted in obvious disbelief. "All right, then. Let's say you're right, Dame Kaeritha—about her father, anyway. But what about Baron Cassan and this Blackhill? If they're hunting this young woman—" she jabbed a finger at Leeana "—as greedily as the two of you are suggesting, how do you think they're going to react if the war maids help her slip through their filthy little fingers? You think, perhaps, they'll send us a sizable cash donation?"
"I expect they'll be as pissed off as hell," Kaeritha said candidly, and despite Yalith's own obvious anger and anxiety, her earthy choice of words lit a very slight twinkle in the mayor's eyes. "On the other hand," the knight continued, "how much harm can it really do you? From what Leeana's told me, Blackhill and Cassan are probably already about as hostile to you war maids as they could possibly get."
"I'm afraid Dame Kaeritha is right about that, Mayor Yalith," Leeana said wryly. Yalith looked back at her with another, harsher snort, and the young woman shrugged. "I'm not trying to say they won't be angry about it, or that they won't do you an ill turn if they can, if I manage to drive a stake through their plans by becoming a war maid. They certainly will. But in the long term, they're already hostile to everything the war maids stand for."
"Which is a marvelous reason to antagonize them further, I'm sure," Yalith replied. Her sarcasm was withering, yet it seemed to Kaeritha that her resistance was weakening.
"Mayor Yalith," Leeana said quietly, "the war maids antagonize every noble like Blackhill or Cassan every single day, simply by existing. I know I'm a 'special case.' And I understand why you feel concerned and anxious at the thought of all the complications I represent. But Dame Kaeritha is right, and you know it. Every war maid is a 'special case.' That was exactly why the first war maids came together in the first place—to give all those special cases someplace to go for the first time in our history. So if you deny my application because of my birth, then what does that say about how ready the war maids truly are to offer sanctuary to any woman who wants only to live her own life, make her own decisions? Lillinara knows no distinctions among the maidens and women who seek Her protection. Should an organization which claims Her as its patron do what She will not?"
She locked eyes once again with the mayor. There was no anger in her gaze this time, no desperation or supplication—only challenge. A challenge that demanded to know whether or not Yalith was prepared to live up to the ideals to which the mayor had dedicated her life.
Silence hovered in the office, flawed only by the crackle of coal burning on the hearth. Kaeritha sensed the tension humming between Yalith and Leeana, but it was a tension she stood outside of. She was a spectator, not a participant. That was a role to which a champion of the war god was ill-accustomed, yet she also knew that this was ultimately not a battle anyone could fight for Leeana. It was one she must win on her own.
And then, finally, Yalith drew a deep breath and, for the first time since Leeana and Kaeritha had been ushered into her office, she sat down behind her desk.
"You're right," she sighed. "The Mother knows I wish you weren't," she went on more wryly, "because this is going to create Shigu's own nightmare, but you're right. If I turn you away, then I turn away every woman fleeing an intolerable 'marriage' she has no legal right to refuse. So I suppose we have no choice, do we, Milady?"
There was a certain caustic bite in the honorific, yet it was obvious that the woman had made up her mind. And there was also an oddly pointed formality in her use of the address, Kaeritha realized—one which warned Leeana that if her application was accepted, no one would ever extend it to her again.
"No, Mayor," Leeana said softly, her voice accepting the warning. "We don't. Not any of us."
"Baron Tellian is here. He demands to speak to you and his daughter."
Yalith of Kalatha gave the messenger a resigned look, then glanced at Kaeritha with a trace of a "look what you've gotten me into" expression. To her credit, it was only a trace, and she returned her attention to the middle-aged woman standing in her office doorway.
"Was that your choice of verbs, or his, Sharral?"
"Mine," Sharral admitted in a slightly chagrined tone. "He's been courteous enough, I suppose. Under the circumstances. But he's also quite . . . emphatic about it."
"Not surprising, I'm afraid." Yalith pinched the bridge of her nose and grimaced wryly. "You did say he was close behind you, Dame Kaeritha," she observed. "Still, I would have appreciated at least a little more time—perhaps even as much as a whole hour—to prepare myself for this particular conversation."
"So would I," Kaeritha admitted. "In fact, a certain cowardly part of me wonders whether or not this office has a back door."
"If you think I'm going to let you sneak out of here, Milady, you're sadly mistaken," Kalatha's mayor replied tartly, and Kaeritha chuckled.
It wasn't an entirely cheerful sound, because she truly wasn't looking forward to what she expected to be a painful confrontation. On the other hand, once Yalith had made her decision and the initial tension between them had eased a bit, she'd found herself liking the mayor much more than she had originally believed she ever might. Yet there was still an undeniable edge there, rather like the arched spines of two strange cats, sidling towards one another and still unsure whether or not they should sheath their claws after all. She wasn't certain where it came from, and she didn't much care for it, whatever its source. But there should be plenty of time to smooth any ruffled fur, she reminded herself. Assuming she and Yalith both survived their interview with Tellian.
"I suppose you'd better show him in, then, Sharral," Yalith sighed after moment.
"Yes, Mayor," Sharral acknowledged, and withdrew, closing the door behind her.
It opened again, less than two minutes later, and Baron Tellian strode through it. It would have been too much to call his expression and body language "bristling," but that was the word which sprang immediately to Kaeritha's mind. He was liberally bespattered with mud, and—like Kaeritha's own—his bedraggled appearance showed just how hard and long he'd ridden to reach Yalith's office. And in his effort to overcome her own two-day lead on him. Even his courser must have found the pace wearying, and she suspected that most of his armsmen—those not mounted on coursers—must have brought along at least two horses each to ride in relays.
"Baron," Yalith said, rising behind her desk to greet him. Her voice was respectful and even a bit sympathetic, but it was also firm. It acknowledged both his rank and his rightful anxiety as a parent, but it also reminded him that this was her office . . . and that the war maids had seen many anxious parents over the centuries.
"Mayor Yalith," Tellian said. His eyes moved past her for a moment to Kaeritha, but he didn't greet the knight, and Kaeritha wondered just how bad a sign that might be.
"I imagine you know why I'm here," he continued, returning his gaze to the mayor. "I'd like to see my daughter. Immediately."
His tenor voice was flat and crisp—almost, but not quite, harsh—and his eyes were hard.
"I'm afraid that's not possible, Baron," Yalith replied. Tellian's brow furrowed thunderously, and he started to reply sharply. But Yalith continued before he could.
"The rules and customs of the war maids are unfortunately clear on this point, Milord," she said in a voice which Kaeritha considered was remarkably calm. "Leeana has petitioned for the status of war maid. Because she's only fourteen, she will be required to undergo a six-month probationary period before we will accept her final, binding oath. During that time, members of her family may communicate with her by letter or third-party messenger, but not in person. I should point out to you that she was not aware upon her arrival that she would be required to serve her probationary time, or that she would not be permitted to speak to you during it. When I informed her of those facts, she asked Dame Kaeritha to speak to you for her."
Tellian's jaw had clenched as the mayor spoke. If there had been any question about whether or not he was angry before, there was none now, and his right hand tightened ominously about the hilt of his dagger. But furious father or no, he was also a powerful noble who had learned from hard experience to control both his expression and his tongue. And so he swallowed the fast, furious retort which hovered just behind his teeth and made himself inhale deeply before he spoke once more.
"My daughter," he said then, still looking directly at Yalith, as if Kaeritha were not even present, "is young and, as I know only too well, stubborn. She is also, however, intelligent, whatever I may think of this current escapade of hers. She knows how badly her actions have hurt her mother and me. I cannot believe that she would not wish to speak to me at this time. I don't say she would look forward to it, or be happy about it, but she is neither so heartless nor so unaware of how much we love her that she would refuse to see me."
"I didn't say she had refused, Milord. In fact, she was extremely distressed when she discovered it would be impossible for her to do so. Unfortunately, our laws permit me no latitude. Not out of arrogance or cruelty, but to protect applicants from being browbeaten or manipulated into changing their minds against their free choice. But I will say, if you will permit me to, that I have seldom seen an applicant who more strongly desired to speak to her parents. Usually, by the time a young woman seeks the war maids, the last thing she wants is contact with the family she's fled. Leeana doesn't feel at all that way, and if it were her decision, she would be here this moment. But it isn't. Nor is it mine, I'm afraid."
Tellian's knuckles whitened on his dagger, and his nostrils flared. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.
"I see." His tone was very, very cold, but for a man who had just been told his beloved daughter would not even be permitted to speak to him, it was remarkably controlled, Kaeritha thought. Then his eyes swiveled to her, and she recognized the raging fury and desperate love—and loss—blazing within them.
"In that case," he continued in that same, icy voice, "I suppose I should hear whatever message my daughter has been permitted to leave me."
Yalith winced slightly before the pain in his voice, but she didn't flinch, and Kaeritha wondered how many interviews like this one she had experienced over the years.
"I think you should, Milord," the mayor agreed quietly. "Would you prefer for me to leave, so that you may speak to Dame Kaeritha frankly in order to confirm what I've said, and that Leeana came to us willingly and of her own accord?"
"I would appreciate privacy when I speak to Dame Kaeritha," Tellian said. "But not," he continued, "because I doubt for a moment that this was entirely Leeana's idea. Whatever some others might accuse the war maids of, I am fully aware that she came to you and that you did nothing to 'seduce' her into doing so. I won't pretend I'm not angry—very angry—or that I do not deeply resent your refusal to allow me to so much as speak to her. But I know my daughter too well to believe anyone else could have convinced or compelled her to come here against her will."
"Thank you for that, Milord." Yalith inclined her head in a small bow of acknowledgment. "I'm a mother myself, and I've spoken with Leeana. I know why she came to us, and that it wasn't because she didn't love you and her mother or doubted for a moment that you love her. In many ways, that has made this one of the saddest applications ever to pass through my office. I'm grateful that despite the anger and grief I know you must feel, you understand this was her decision. And now, I'll leave you and Dame Kaeritha. If you wish to speak to me again afterward, I will, of course, be at your service."
She bowed again, more deeply, and left Tellian and Kaeritha alone in her office.
For several seconds, the baron stood wordlessly, his hand alternately tightening and loosening its grip on his dagger while he glared at Kaeritha.
"Some would call this poor repayment of my hospitality, Dame Kaeritha," he said at length, his voice harsh.
"No doubt some would, Milord," she replied, keeping her own voice level and as nonconfrontational as possible. "If it seems that way to you, I deeply regret it."
"I'm sure you do." Each word was carefully, precisely spoken, as if bitten clean-edged from a sheet of bronze. Then he closed his eyes and gave his head a little shake.
"I could wish," he said then, his voice much softer, its angry edges blurred by grief, "that you'd returned her to me. That when my daughter—my only child, Kaeritha—came to you in the dark, on the side of a lonely road, running away from the only home she's ever known and from Hanatha's and my love, you might have recognized the madness of what she was doing and stopped her." He opened his eyes and looked into her face, his own eyes wrung with pain and bright with unshed tears. "Don't tell me you couldn't have stopped her from casting away her life—throwing away everything and everyone she's ever known. Not if you'd really tried."
"I could have," she told him unflinchingly, refusing to look away from his pain and grief. "For all her determination and courage, I could have stopped her, Milord. And I almost did."
"Then why, Kaeritha?" he implored, no longer a baron, no longer the Lord Warden of the West Riding, but only an anguished father. "Why didn't you? This will break Hanatha's heart, as it has already broken mine."
"Because it was her decision," Kaeritha said gently. "I'm not a Sothoii, Tellian. I don't pretend to understand your people, or all of your ways and customs. But when your daughter rode up to my fire out of the rain and the night, all by herself, she wasn't running away from your heart, or your love, or from Hanatha's love. She was running to them."
The unshed tears broke free, running down Tellian's fatigue-lined, unshaven cheeks, and her own eyes stung.
"That's her message to you," Kaeritha continued quietly. "That she can never tell you how sorry she is for the pain she knows her actions will cause you and her mother. But that she also knows this was only the first offer for her hand. There would have been more, if this one was refused, Tellian, and you know it. Just as you know that who she is and what she offers means almost all those offers would have been made for all the wrong reasons. But you also know you couldn't refuse them all—not without paying a disastrous political price. She may be only fourteen years old, but she sees that, and she understands it. So she made the only decision she thinks she can make. Not just for her, but for everyone she loves."
"But how could she leave us this way?" Tellian demanded, his voice raw with anguish. "The law will take us from her as surely as it takes her from us, Kaeritha! Everyone she's ever known, everything she ever had, will be taken from her. How could you let her pay that price, whatever she wanted?"
"Because of who she is," Kaeritha said quietly. "Not 'what'—not because she's the daughter of a baron—but because of who she is . . . and who you raised her to be. You made her too strong if you wanted someone who would meekly submit to a life sentence as no more than a high-born broodmare to someone like this Blackhill. And you made her too loving to allow someone like him or Baron Cassan to use her as a weapon against you. Between you, you and Hanatha raised a young woman strong enough and loving enough to give up all of the rank and all of the privileges of her birth, to suffer the pain of 'running away' from you and the even worse pain of knowing how much grief her decision would cause you. Not because she was foolish, or petulant, or spoiled—and certainly not because she was stupid. She did it because of how much she loves you both."
The father's tears spilled freely now, and she stepped closer, reaching out to rest her hands on his shoulders.
"What else could I do in the face of that much love, Tellian?" she asked very softly.
"Nothing," he whispered, and he bowed his head and his own right hand left the dagger hilt and rose to cover the hand on his left shoulder.
He stood that way for long, endless moments. Then he inhaled deeply, squeezed her hand lightly, raised his head, and brushed the tears from his eyes.
"I wish, from the bottom of my heart, that she hadn't done this thing," he said, his voice less ragged but still soft. "I would never have consented to her marriage to anyone she didn't choose to marry, whatever the political cost. But I suppose she knew that, didn't she?"
"Yes, I think she did," Kaeritha agreed with a slight, sad smile.
"Yet as badly as I wish she hadn't done it, I know why she did. And you're right—whatever else it may have been, it wasn't the decision of a weakling or a coward. And so, despite all the grief and the heartache this will cause me and Hanatha—and Leeana—I'm proud of her."
He shook his head, as if he couldn't quite believe his own words. But then he stopped shaking it, and nodded slowly instead.
"I am proud of her," he said.
"And you should be," Kaeritha replied simply.
They gazed at one another for a few more seconds of silence, and then he nodded again, crisply this time, with an air of finality . . . and acceptance.
"Tell her . . ." He paused, as if searching for exactly the right words. Then he shrugged, as if he'd suddenly realized the search wasn't really difficult at all. "Tell her that we love her. Tell her we understand why she's done this. That if she changes her mind during this 'probationary period' we will welcome her home and rejoice. But also tell her it is her decision, and that we will accept it—and continue to love her—whatever it may be in the end."
"I will," she promised, inclining her head in a half-bow.
"Thank you," he said, and then surprised her with a wry but genuine chuckle. One of her eyebrows arched, and he snorted.
"The last thing I expected for the last three days that I'd be doing when I finally caught up with you was thanking you, Dame Kaeritha. Champion of Tomanak or not, I had something a bit more drastic in mind!"
"If I'd been in your position, Milord," she told him with a crooked smile, "I'd have been thinking of something having to do with headsmen and chopping blocks."
"I won't say the thought didn't cross my mind," he conceded, "although I'd probably have had a little difficulty explaining it to Bahzell and Brandark. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that anything I was contemplating doing to you pales compared to what my armsmen think I ought to do. All of them are deeply devoted to Leeana, and some of them will never believe she ever would have thought of something like this without encouragement from someone. I suspect the someone they're going to blame for it will be you. And some of my other retainers—and vassals—are going to see her decision as a disgrace and an insult to my house. When they do, they're going to be looking for someone to blame for that, too."
"I anticipated something like that," Kaeritha said dryly.
"I'm sure you did, but the truth is that this isn't going to do your reputation any good with most Sothoii," he warned.
"Champions of Tomanak frequently find themselves a bit unpopular, Milord," she said. "On the other hand, as Bahzell has said a time or two, 'a champion is one as does what needs doing.'" She shrugged. "This needed doing."
"Perhaps it did," he acknowledged. "But I hope one of the consequences won't be to undermine whatever it is you're here to do for Scale Balancer."
"As far as that goes, Milord," she said thoughtfully, "it's occurred to me that helping Leeana get here in the first place may have been a part of what I'm supposed to do. I'm not sure why it should have been, but it feels right, and I've learned it's best to trust my feelings in cases like this."
Tellian didn't look as if he found the thought that any god, much less the War God, should want one of his champions to help his only child run away to the war maids particularly encouraging. If so, she didn't blame him a bit . . . and at least he was courteous enough not to put his feelings into words.
"At any rate," she continued, "I will be most happy to deliver your message—all of your message—to Leeana."
"Thank you," he repeated, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with an edge of genuine humor as he looked around Yalith's office. "And now, I suppose, we ought to invite the mayor back into her own office. It would be only courteous to reassure her that we haven't been carving one another up in here, after all!"
At least Chemalka seemed to have decided to take her rainstorms somewhere else.
Kaeritha grinned at the thought as she stood on the porch of the Kalathan guesthouse with a mug of steaming tea and gazed out into a misty early morning. Tellian and his armsmen had refused the war maids' hospitality and departed late the previous afternoon. Kaeritha felt certain that the baron hadn't declined Yalith's offer out of anger or pique, but it had probably been as well that he had. Whatever he might feel, the attitudes—and anger—of several of his retainers would have been certain to provoke friction and might well have spilled over into an unfortunate incident.
Her grin vanished into a grimace, and she shook her head with an air of resignation before she took another sip of tea. Tellian's warning that many of his followers were going to blame Kaeritha for Leeana's decision and actions had proved only too well founded. All of them had been too disciplined to say or do anything overt about their feelings in the face of their liege lord's public acceptance of the situation, but Kaeritha hadn't needed to be a mage to recognize the intense hostility in some of the glances which came her way. She hoped their anger with her wasn't going to spill over onto Bahzell and Brandark when they got back to Balthar. If it did, though, Bahzell would simply have to deal with it. Which, she thought wryly, he would undoubtedly accomplish in his own inimitable fashion.
She drank more tea, watching the sun climb above the muddy fields which surrounded Kalatha. It was going to be a warmer day, she decided, and the sun would soon burn off the mists. She'd noticed the training field and an extensive weapons salle behind the town armory when she passed it on the day of her arrival, and she wondered if Yalith's guard captain would object to her borrowing it for an hour or so. She'd missed her regular morning workouts while she and Leeana pressed ahead as rapidly as possible on their journey. Besides, from all she'd heard, her own two-handed fighting technique was much less uncommon among war maids. If she could talk some of them into sparring with her, she might be able to pick up a new trick or two.
She finished the tea and turned to step back into the guesthouse to set the mug on the table beside her other breakfast dishes. Then she looked into the small mirror—an unexpected and expensive luxury—above the fireplace. Welcome as the guesthouse bed had been, the communal bathhouse had been even more welcome. She actually looked human again, she decided, although it was still humid enough that it had taken her long, midnight-black hair hours to dry. Most of her clothes were still drying somewhere in the town laundry, but she'd had one decent, clean change still in her saddlebags. There were a few wrinkles and creases here and there, but taken all in all, she was presentable, she decided.
Which was probably a good thing. It might even do her some good in her upcoming interview with Yalith.
Then again, she thought ruefully, it might not.
"Thank you for agreeing to see me so early, Mayor," Kaeritha said as Sharral showed her into Yalith's office and she settled into the proffered chair.
"There's no need to thank me," Yalith replied briskly. "Despite any possible . . . lack of enthusiasm on my part when you handed me a hot potato like Leeana, any champion deserves whatever hospitality we can provide, Dame Kaeritha. Although," she admitted, "I am a bit perplexed by exactly what a champion of Tomanak is doing here in Kalatha. However exalted Leeana's birth may have been, I don't believe we've ever had a war maid candidate delivered to us by any champion. And if that was going to happen, I would have expected one of the Mother's Servants."
"Actually," Kaeritha said, "I was already headed for Kalatha when Leeana overtook me on the road."
"Were you, indeed?" Yalith's tone was that of a woman expressing polite interest, not surprise. Although, Kaeritha thought, there was also an edge of wariness to it.
"Yes," she said. Her left elbow rested on the arm of her chair, and she raised her hand, palm open. "I don't know how familiar you are with champions and the way we get our instructions, Mayor Yalith."
Her own tone made the statement a tactful question, and Yalith smiled.
"I've never dealt directly with a champion, if that's what you mean," she said. "I once met a senior Servant of the Mother, but I was much younger then, and certainly not a mayor. No one was interested at the time in explaining how she got her instructions from Lillinara. Even if anyone had been, my impression is that She has Her own way of getting Her desires and intentions across, so I assume the same would be true of Tomanak or any of the other gods."
"It certainly is," Kaeritha agreed wryly. "For that matter, He seems to tailor His methods to his individual champions. In my own case, however, I tend to receive, well, feelings, I suppose, that I ought to be moving in a particular direction or thinking about a particular problem. As I get closer to whatever it is He needs me to be dealing with, I generally recognize the specifics as I come across them."
"That would seem to require a great deal of faith," Yalith observed. Then she wrinkled her nose with a snort of amusement at her own words. "I suppose a champion does need rather more 'faith' than the most people do, doesn't she?"
"It does seem to come with the job," Kaeritha agreed. "In this instance, though, those feelings He sends me already had me headed in this direction. As nearly as I can pin things down at this point, Kalatha was where He wanted me."
"And not just to escort Leeana to us, I suppose."
"No. I had some discussion with Baron Tellian before I left Balthar, Mayor. Frankly, the reports from his stewards and magistrates which he shared with me lead me to believe that relations between your town and its neighbors are . . . not as good as they might be."
"My, what a tactful way to describe it." Yalith's irony was dry enough to burn off the morning's mist without benefit of sunlight. She regarded Kaeritha without saying anything more for several more seconds, then leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest.
"As a matter of fact, Dame Kaeritha, our 'neighbors' are probably almost as angry with us as we are with them. Although, of course, my town council and I believe we're in the right and they aren't. I hope you'll forgive me for saying this, however, but I fail to see why our disagreements and squabbles should be of any particular interest to Tomanak. Surely He has better things to spend His champions' time on than refereeing fights which have been going on for decades. Besides, with all due respect, I should think that matters concerning the war maids are properly the affair of Lillinara, not the War God."
"First," Kaeritha said calmly, "Tomanak is the God of Justice, as well as the God of War, and from Tellian's reports, there seems to be some question of exactly what 'justice' means in this case. Second, those same reports also seem to suggest that there's something more to this than the same sort of quarrels which usually go on between war maid communities and their neighbors."
Yalith seemed less than pleased by the reminder that Tomanak was God of Justice—or perhaps by the implication that in that capacity he might have a legitimate interest in a matter which she clearly considered belonged to Lillinara. But if that was the case, she chose not to make a point of it. Yet, at least.
"I suppose there may be a bit more to it this time," she conceded with a slightly grudging air. "Trisu of Lorham has never been particularly fond of war maids in general. His father wasn't, either, but at least the old man realized we aren't going away and that he had to learn to live with our presence. Trisu only inherited his title three years ago, and he's still young . . . and impatient. I sometimes think he actually believes he can make himself sufficiently unpleasant to convince us to all just—" she wiggled the fingers of one hand in midair "—move away and leave him in peace."
She grimaced, then drew a deep breath and shook her head.
"On the other hand, I doubt even Trisu could really be stupid enough to think that's going to happen. Which means he's making such an ass out of himself for some other reason. My own theory is that it's simple frustration and immaturity. I've been hoping he'll simply outgrow it."
"With all due respect, Mayor Yalith," Kaeritha kept her voice as level and uninflected as possible, "from his own reports—and complaints—to Baron Tellian, he seems to feel he has legitimate cause for his unhappiness with Kalatha." She raised one hand in a pacifying gesture as Yalith's eyes narrowed. "I'm not saying you're wrong about his underlying hostility, because from the tone of his letters, you're certainly not. I'm only saying that he clearly believes he has legitimate grievances over and above the fact that he simply doesn't like you very much."
"I'm aware of that," Yalith said a bit frostily. "I've heard about water rights and pasturage complaints from him until, quite frankly, I'm sick of it. Kalatha's charter clearly gives us control of the river, since it passes through our territory. What we do with it is up to us, not to him. And if he wants us to make a greater share of our water available to him, then he's going to have to make some concessions to us, in return."
Kaeritha nodded—in understanding, not agreement, although she wasn't certain Yalith recognized the distinction. Given the quantity of water which had fallen out of the sky over the past several weeks, the thought that Kalatha and the most powerful of the local nobles were at dagger-drawing over the issue of water rights might have struck some as silly. Kaeritha, however, had been born and spent her earliest years in a peasant farming community. That meant she was only too well aware of how desperately important such issues could become when soggy spring gave way to the hot, dry months of summer. On the other hand, it was entirely possible—even probable, she suspected—that the quarrel over water was only an outward manifestation of other, more deeply seated enmities.
"From his arguments to Tellian's magistrates," she said after moment, "it seems fairly evident Trisu doesn't agree that your control of the river is as straightforward and unambiguous as you believe it is. Obviously, he's going to put forward what he believes are his strongest arguments in that respect, since he's trying to convince the courts to rule in his favor. I'm not saying he's correct or that his arguments are valid—only that he appears to believe they are."
Yalith snorted derisively, but she didn't say anything, and Kaeritha continued.
"To be honest, at the moment I'm more interested in those return 'concessions' to which you just referred. Trisu has complained to Tellian that the war maids have been hostile and confrontational towards his efforts to work out a peaceable compromise solution to his disputes with you. As far as I'm aware, he hasn't gone into any specifics about just how you've been hostile and confrontational. Do you suppose that would have anything to do with the concessions you want from him?"
"Hostile and confrontational, is it?" Yalith glowered. "I'll 'hostile and confrontational' him! We've been as reasonable as we can be with such a pigheaded, greedy, stubborn, opinionated young idiot!"
Despite herself, Kaeritha found it difficult not to smile. Yalith's evident anger made it a bit easier, since it was obvious her resentment of Trisu burned much deeper and hotter than she wanted to admit to Kaeritha . . . or possibly even to herself. At the same time, the knight could see how even a man considerably more reasonable than she suspected Trisu was could feel that the war maids were just a trifle hostile towards him.
"I'm sure you have," she said after a second or two, when she was confident she could control her own voice. "What I need to know before I move on to Lorham is exactly what concessions you've been seeking."
"Nothing that earthshaking," Yalith responded. "Or they shouldn't be, anyway. We want a right-of-way across one of his pastures to a stud farm which was donated to us six or seven years ago. We want a formal agreement on how the river's water will be divided and distributed in dry seasons. We want a guarantee that our farm products—and farmers—will receive equal treatment in local markets from his factors and inspectors. And we want him to finally and formally accept the provisions of our charter and Lord Kellos' land grant—all of their provisions."
"I see." Kaeritha sat back and considered what Yalith had just said. The first three points did, indeed, sound as if they were less than "earthshaking." She was only too well aware of how simply and reasonably someone could describe her own viewpoint on an issue which was bitterly contested, yet she was inclined to think it must be the fourth point which lay at the heart of the war maids' current confrontation with the Lord of Lorham.
"What specific provisions are in dispute?" she asked after a moment.
"Several." Yalith grimaced. "King Gartha's charter defines specific obligations to local lords from which war maids are to be exempted, and, to be fair, Trisu and his father and grandfather have generally accepted that. They've been less interested in enforcing the provisions which require those same local lords to grant war maid crafters and farmers equal protection and treatment in their markets.
"That's bad enough, but it's also been going on literally for generations, and we'd managed to live with it. But another serious dispute has arisen in the last few years concerning the water rights I spoke of and the integrity of the surrounding land which Lord Kellos originally granted to us. Lord Kellos' grant defined specific boundaries and landmarks, obviously, but Trisu's family—and, for that matter, some of the other local lords, although not to the same degree—have been encroaching upon those boundaries for years. In fact, Trisu's father built a grist mill on what is clearly our land, and Trisu has refused to acknowledge that Lord Darhal was in the wrong when he did. In fact, Trisu insists that he owns that land and always has, despite the fact that the original grant puts the boundary almost half a mile beyond the mill. That's just one instance of the way in which our boundaries are being routinely violated.
"Another point is that the grant clearly specifies that we're exempt from tolls on the use of roadways crossing Lorham. Lord Kellos and Trisu's great-great-grandfather did some horsetrading back and forth over the exact boundaries of our holdings, and Lord Rathman gave us the exemption in return for a couple of offsetting concessions from Lord Kellos. But Lord Trisu's father began charging us the tolls about thirty years ago.
"Admittedly, this isn't a point we've made an issue out of before, since the tolls Lord Darhal levied weren't all that high. More to the point, they were clearly intended for the maintenance of the roads in question, and we were using them to transport our goods and produce. But Trisu began raising the tolls immediately after he became Lord of Lorham. He's obviously trying to use them to raise additional revenues, over and above the cost of maintaining the roads themselves. We may have been willing to pay a toll we weren't legally obligated to pay so long as the funds were being used to repair and maintain roadways that benefitted us, as well as Lorham. But we are not prepared to subsidize other parts of his treasury while he's violating our boundaries and attempting to deny us our legitimate water rights.
"There are several other, minor points—most of them procedural, really. Some of them, to be completely honest, probably aren't worth fighting over. But they're part and parcel of our overall quarrel with him, and we're not prepared to concede any of them without getting something in return. But there is one additional, major problem."
The mayor paused, and Kaeritha quirked an eyebrow.
"As I said, our charter clearly and unambiguously provides that our craftspeople, farmers, traders, and anyone else who may be a citizen of Kalatha or any of the free-towns which were founded later are guaranteed the same rights as any other citizens of the Kingdom, regardless of whether they're men or women. Trisu doesn't seem to think that that applies in Lorham."
"In what way?" Kaeritha asked, leaning forward and frowning intently.
"Our merchants and some of our farmers have been harassed in local markets, and Trisu's magistrates have done nothing about it," Yalith replied. She waved a hand in a back-and-forth gesture. "That, in itself, isn't all that important. There's always going to be some bigoted farmer or townsman who's going to give women doing 'man's work' a hard time, and war maids can't afford to be too thin-skinned when it comes along. But it's symptomatic of a more serious problem."
"What sort of problem?"
"There have been . . . incidents concerning the temple of Lillinara at Quaysar," Yalith said. It was obvious she was picking her words carefully, and also that she was trying hard to restrain a volcanic surge of anger. She paused, and Kaeritha waited for the mayor to be certain she had control of her temper before she continued.
"As a follower of Tomanak, not Lillinara, you may not be aware that the temple in Quaysar has special significance to the Mother," she said, after a few moments. "It's not an especially large temple, but it's a very old one. Quaysar itself is a tiny town. In fact, the town proper has pretty much disappeared over the last fifty or sixty years. What's left of it has been effectively absorbed by the temple itself. But the Quaysar Temple has always been especially important to the war maids—just as Kalatha itself has been, despite our small size—because it was at Quaysar that our original charter from King Gartha was first officially and formally proclaimed. You might say Quaysar is the 'mother chapter' of all war maids everywhere and that Kalatha is the 'mother free-town' to match it. Quaysar is also located in Lorham, unfortunately. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons Lord Kellos originally granted Kalatha to the war maids and why the Crown recognized it as a free-town was our proximity to Quaysar."
"I wasn't aware of that," Kaeritha murmured. "Tellian told me Kalatha was your oldest free-town, but I didn't know about Quaysar or its importance to you."
"There's no reason why you should have," Yalith pointed out. "Obviously, we would have preferred to have been able to include Quaysar under our charter. Unfortunately, the lords of Lorham have always been much less sympathetic to us than Lord Kellos was. It didn't seem to matter much, though, given the respect and autonomy enjoyed by any temple. Whether Trisu or his ancestors approved of war maids or not, surely no sane person was going to harass or insult the temple of any god . . . or goddess. Or so we thought."
"You mean he has done that?" Kaeritha demanded sharply.
"I mean," Yalith said grimly, "that he's repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect—I would even say contempt—for the temple at Quaysar. He's insulted the Voice of Quaysar in personal conversation. He's made it clear to her that he is not impressed by the fact that she speaks for the Mother. For that matter, he's all but openly stated that he doesn't believe she does speak for the Mother at all."
Kaeritha was shocked. Different rulers always evidenced different degrees of reverence and respect, and some people seemed to believe that if they worshiped one god—or goddess—all of the others were irrelevant. But what sort of idiot openly showed the sort of disdain and contempt Yalith was describing? Regardless of what he himself believed or disbelieved, such an attitude was guaranteed to offend and infuriate his subjects.
"That's all bad enough," Yalith continued in a flat, bitter voice, "but it isn't all. Two of the Voice's handmaidens were sent from Quaysar to Kalatha with a message from the Voice to me. They never arrived."
This time, Kaeritha was far more than merely shocked.
"Mayor Yalith, are you suggesting—?"
"I'm not prepared to suggest that Trisu personally had anything to do with their disappearance," Yalith interrupted before Kaeritha could complete the question. "If I had any proof—or even strongly suggestive evidence—of that, I can assure you that I would already have charged him with it before Baron Tellian, as his liege, or demanded that the case be investigated by the Crown Prosecutor. But I do believe that whoever was responsible—who must have shared Trisu's attitude towards war maids generally to have done something so insane—probably took his cue from Trisu. And I am not at all satisfied with Trisu's so-called 'investigation' of the incident. He claims he can find no evidence at all to suggest what happened to the Voice's handmaidens. Indeed, he's gone so far as to suggest that they never disappeared at all. That the entire story is a fabrication."
Kaeritha frowned. There had been no mention of this incident in any of Trisu's correspondence with Tellian or his magistrates. In the wake of what Yalith had just told her, that omission took on ominous overtones.
"The Voice hasn't been able to determine what happened to her handmaidens?" she asked after a moment.
"Apparently not," Yalith said heavily. She sighed. "All the Voice can discover is that both of them are dead. How they died, and exactly where, she cannot say."
A chill ran down Kaeritha's spine. The murder of the consecrated Servants of any temple, and especially that of two acolytes sworn to the personal service of a Voice of Lillinara, was an incredibly serious matter. The fact that Trisu wasn't tearing Lorham apart stone by stone to find the guilty parties was frightening.
And perhaps it's also the reason Tomanak needed one of His champions involved, she thought grimly.
"How long ago did this happen?" she asked crisply.
"Not very long," Yalith replied. She glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall. "A bit less than six weeks ago, actually."
Kaeritha's mood eased just a bit. If the murders had happened that recently, then it was at least possible that Trisu hadn't mentioned it to Tellian because he was still investigating it himself. After all, if it had happened in Lorham, it was Trisu's responsibility to solve the crime, not Tellian's. If he was unable to do so, he had the right—and, some would argue, the responsibility—to call upon his liege for assistance, but he might simply feel he hadn't yet exhausted all of his own resources.
Sure. He might feel that, she told herself.
And the fact that it had happened that recently undoubtedly explained why nothing had been said to Tellian by Yalith or the Voice at Quaysar. Kalatha held a Crown charter. That meant that, unlike Trisu, Yalith was not one of Tellian's vassals, and as such, she had no responsibility to report anything to him. Nor, for that matter, was Tellian legally obligated to take any action on anything she did report to him, although he undoubtably would have acted in a matter this serious which involved or might involve one of his vassals. As for the Voice, Trisu was the appropriate person for her to turn to for an investigation and justice. If he failed to provide them, only then was she entitled to appeal to his liege.
"Perhaps now you can see why I was surprised to see a champion of Tomanak rather than one of the Mother's Servants," Yalith said quietly.
"To be honest, so am I, a little," Kaeritha admitted, although she privately thought that the Servants of Lillinara were a little too intent on avenging victims rather than administering justice. All the same, she was surprised Lillinara hadn't dispatched one or more of them to deal with the situation. The Silver Lady was famed for the devastating retribution she was prepared to visit upon those who victimized her followers.
"Perhaps," she went on slowly, thinking aloud, "if Trisu is as hostile towards you as you're saying—hostile enough to extend his feelings towards the war maids into public disrespect for Lillinara—She and Tomanak felt it might be better for Him to send one of His blades. The fact that I'm a woman may make me a bit more acceptable to you war maids and to the Voice, while the fact that I serve Tomanak rather than Lillinara may make me acceptable to Trisu despite the fact that I'm a woman."
"I hope something does, Dame Kaeritha," Yalith said soberly. "Because if something doesn't bring about a marked improvement in what's happening here in Kalatha and Lorham sometime soon, it's going to spill over."
Kaeritha looked at her, and she grimaced.
"Kalatha's status as our oldest free-town means all war maids tend to keep up with events here, Milady, and I just explained why Quaysar is important to all of us. If Trisu and those who think like him are able to get away with running roughshod over us here, then they may be inspired to try the same thing anywhere else. That would be bad enough, but to be perfectly honest, I'm actually more concerned about how the war maids will react. Let's be honest. Most of us aren't all that fond of men in positions of authority, anyway. If Trisu proves our distrust is well founded, it's going to cause our own attitudes to harden. I can assure you that at least some of the war maids are just as bitter and just as prejudiced against the Trisus of the world as Trisu could ever be against us, and some of those women are likely to begin acting upon their bitterness if they feel we've been denied justice in this case. And if that happens, then everything we've accomplished over the past two hundred and fifty years is in jeopardy."
Kaeritha nodded, blue eyes dark as she contemplated the spiraling cycle of distrust, hostility, and potential violence Yalith was describing.
"Well, in that case, Mayor," she said quietly, "we'll just have to see to it that that doesn't happen, won't we?"
Thalar Keep, the ancestral seat of the Pickaxes of Lorham, was a considerably more modest fortress then Hill Guard Castle. Then again, the town of Thalar (calling it a "city" would have been a gross exaggeration) was far, far smaller than Balthar. Still, the castle, with its two curtain walls and massive, square central keep, was of respectable antiquity. Indeed, it looked to Kaeritha's experienced eye as if the outer walls were at least a couple of centuries younger than the original keep.
There was nothing remotely like finesse about the castle's architecture or construction. It was uncompromisingly angular, laid out with an obvious eye for fields of fire for the archers expected to man its battlements in time of emergency. Whoever had designed it, though—assuming anything like an actual "design" process had been part of its construction—had clearly been less concerned about what an enemy with capable siege engineers might have done to it. It was dominated by a higher ridge to the east, beyond accurate bow range but well within reach for the sort of ballistae someone like the Empire of the Axe might have deployed. Nor was the castle moated. It was built on what appeared to be an artificial mound, too, rather than bedrock, which would have been highly vulnerable to mining operations.
Of course, she mused as Cloudy carried her up the very slight slope towards Thalar, the people who'd built that castle had probably had their fellow Sothoii, or possibly Horse Stealers, in mind. Neither the cavalry-oriented Sothoii nor the relatively unsophisticated hradani would have been in much of a position to take advantage of the weaknesses evident to Kaeritha.
Despite its small size, compared to Balthar, Thalar appeared to be relatively prosperous. There were few houses over two stories in height, but all of the dwellings Kaeritha could see appeared to be well maintained and clean. Despite the incessant spring rains, the local farmers had managed to get their fields plowed, and the first blush of green crops showed vividly against the furrows' rich, black topsoil. And, of course, there were the endless paddocks, training rings, and stables of Trisu's home stud farm.
There were laborers in the fields, and most of them paused to look up and study Kaeritha as Cloudy trotted past. Like Thalar itself, they seemed to be sturdy and well fed, if not wealthy, and almost despite herself, Kaeritha was forced to concede that first appearances suggested that Trisu, whatever his other failings, took excellent care of his people and his holding.
The road up to Thalar Keep was at least marginally better maintained than the muddy track Kaeritha had followed across the Wind Plain. She was grateful for that, and so was Cloudy. The mare picked up her pace as she recognized journey's end. No doubt she was looking forward to a warm stall and a bucketful of oats and bran.
Kaeritha chuckled at the thought, then drew rein as she approached the castle's outer gatehouse and a bugle blared. Her eyebrows rose as she recognized the bugle call. It was a formal challenge, a demand to stand and be recognized, and it was unusual, to say the least, for a single rider to be greeted by it. On the other hand, she could see at least six archers on the wall. Under the circumstances, she decided, compliance was probably in order.
She and Cloudy stopped just beyond the gatehouse's shadow, and she looked up as a man in the crested helmet of an officer appeared on the battlement above her.
"Who are you? And what brings you to Thalar Keep?" the officer shouted down in a nasal bass voice. It was unfortunate that his natural voice made him sound querulous and ill-tempered, Kaeritha thought.
"I am Dame Kaeritha Seldansdaughter," she called back in her clear, carrying soprano, carefully not smiling as his helmeted head twitched in obvious surprise at hearing a woman's voice. "Champion of Tomanak," she continued, fighting not to chortle as she pictured the effect that was likely to have upon him. "Here to see Lord Trisu of Lorham on the War God's business," she finished genially, and sat back in the saddle to await results.
There was a long moment of motionless consternation atop the battlements. Then the officer who had challenged her seemed to give his entire body a shake and whipped around to gabble orders at one of the archers. The archer in question didn't even wait to nod in acknowledgment before he went speeding off. Then the officer turned back to Kaeritha.
"Ah, you did say a champion of Tomanak, didn't you?" he inquired rather tentatively.
"Yes, I did," Kaeritha replied. "And I'm still waiting to be admitted," she added pointedly.
"Well, yes—" the flustered officer began. Then he stopped. Clearly, he had no idea how to proceed when faced with the preposterous, self-evidently impossible challenge of a woman who claimed to be not only a knight, but a champion of Tomanak, as well! Kaeritha understood perfectly, but she rather hoped the average intelligence level of Trisu's officers and retainers was higher than this fellow seemed to imply.
"I'm getting a crick in my neck shouting up at you," she said mildly, and even from where she sat in Cloudy's saddle she could see the fiery blush which colored the unfortunate man's face.
He turned away from her once more, shouting to someone inside the gatehouse.
"Open the gate!" he snapped, and hinges groaned as someone began obediently heaving one of the massive gate leaves open.
Kaeritha waited patiently, hands folded in plain sight on the pommel of her saddle, until the gate was fully open. Then she nodded her thanks to the still flustered officer and clucked gently to Cloudy. The mare tossed her head, as if she were as amused as her mistress by the obvious consternation they'd caused, then trotted forward with dainty, ladylike grace.
The unfortunate officer from the battlements was waiting for her in the courtyard beyond the gatehouse by the time she emerged from the gate tunnel. Seen at closer range, he was rather more prepossessing than Kaeritha's first impression had suggested. Not that that was particularly difficult, she thought dryly.
His coloring was unusually dark for a Sothoii, and he stared up at her, his brown eyes clinging to the embroidered sword and mace of Tomanak, glittering in gold bullion on the front of Kaeritha's poncho. From his expression, he would have found a fire-breathing dragon considerably less unnatural, but he was at least trying to handle the situation as if it were a normal one.
"Ah, please forgive my seeming discourtesy, Dame . . . Kaeritha," he said. There was a slight questioning note in his pronunciation of her name, Kaeritha noticed, and nodded pleasantly, acknowledging his apology even as she confirmed that he had it right. "I'm afraid," the officer continued with a surprisingly genuine smile, "that we're not accustomed to seeing champions of Tomanak here in Lorham."
"There aren't that many of us," Kaeritha agreed, amiably consenting to pretend that that had been the true reason for his confusion.
"I've sent word of your arrival to Lord Trisu," he continued. "I'm sure he'll want to come down to the gate to greet you properly and in person."
Or to kick me back out of the gate if he decides I'm not a champion after all, Kaeritha added silently. On the other hand, one must be polite, I suppose.
"Thank you, Captain—?"
"Forgive me," the officer said hastily. "I seem to be forgetting all of my manners today! I am called Sir Altharn."
"Thank you, Sir Altharn," Kaeritha said. "I appreciate the prompt and efficient manner in which you've discharged your duties."
The words were courteously formal, but Sir Altharn obviously noticed the gently teasing edge to her voice. For a moment he started to color up again, but then, to her pleased surprise, he shook his head and smiled at her, instead.
"I suppose I had that coming," he told her. "But truly, Dame Kaeritha, I'm seldom quite so inept as I've managed to appear this morning."
"I believe that," Kaeritha said, and somewhat to her own surprise, it was true.
"Thank you. That's kinder then I deserve," Sir Altharn said. "I hope I'll have the opportunity to demonstrate the fact that I don't always manage to put my own boot in my mouth. Or, at least, that I usually remember to take my spurs off first!"
He laughed at himself, so naturally that Kaeritha laughed with him. There might be some worthwhile depths to this fellow after all, she reflected.
"I'm sure you'll have the chance," she told him. "In fact, I—"
She broke off in mid-sentence as four more men, one of them the messenger Altharn had dispatched, arrived from the direction of the central keep. The one in the lead had to be Trisu, she thought. His stride was too imperious, his bearing too confident—indeed, arrogant—for him to be anyone else. He was fair-haired, gray-eyed, and darkly tanned. He was also very young, no more than twenty-four or twenty-five, she judged. And as seemed to be the case with every male Sothoii nobleman Kaeritha had so far met, he stood comfortably over six feet in height. That would have been more than enough to make him impressive, but if his height was typical of the Sothoii, his breadth was not. Most of them tended—like Sir Altharn or Baron Tellian—towards a lean and rangy look, but Trisu Pickaxe's shoulders were almost as broad in proportion to his height as Brandark's. He must, she reflected, have weighed close to three hundred pounds, and none of it was fat.
He was unarmored, but he'd taken time to belt on a jewel-hilted saber in a gold-chased black scabbard, and two of the men behind him—obviously armsmen—wore the standard steel breastplates and leather armor of Sothoii horse archers.
"So!" Trisu rocked to a halt and tucked his hands inside his sword belt as he glowered up at Kaeritha. She looked back down at him calmly from Cloudy's saddle, her very silence an unspoken rebuke of his brusqueness. He seemed remarkably impervious to it, however, for his only response was to bare his teeth in a tight, humorless smile.
"So you claim to be a champion of Tomanak, do you?" he continued before the silence could stretch out too far.
"I do not 'claim' anything, Milord," Kaeritha returned in a deliberately courteous but pointed tone. She smiled thinly. "It would take a braver woman than me to attempt to pass herself off falsely as one of His champions. Somehow, I don't think He'd like that very much, do you?"
Something flashed in Trisu's gray eyes—a sparkle of anger, perhaps, although she supposed it was remotely possible it might have been humor. But whatever it had been, it went almost as fast as it had come, and he snorted.
"Bravery might be one word for it," he said. "Foolishness—or perhaps even stupidity—might be others, though, don't you think?"
"They might," she acknowledged. "In the meantime, however, Milord, I have to wonder if keeping a traveler standing in the courtyard is the usual courtesy of Lorham."
"Under normal circumstances, no," he said coolly. "On the other hand, I trust you will concede that women claiming to be knights and champions of the gods aren't exactly normal travelers."
"On the Wind Plain, perhaps," Kaeritha replied with matching coolness, and, for the first time, he flushed. But he wasn't prepared to surrender the point quite yet.
"That's as may be, Milady," he told her, "but at the moment, you're on the Wind Plain, and here what you claim to be is not simply unusual, but unheard of. Under the circumstances, I hope you'll not find me unduly discourteous if I request some proof that you are indeed who and what you say you are." He smiled again. "Surely, the Order of Tomanak would prefer that people be cautious about excepting anyone's unsubstantiated claim to be one of His champions."
"I see." Kaeritha regarded him thoughtfully for a long moment. It would have been handy, she reflected, if Tomanak had seen fit to give to gift her with a sword like Bahzell's, which came when he called it. It was certainly an impressive way to demonstrate his champion's credentials when necessary. Unfortunately, her own blades, while possessed of certain unusual attributes of their own, stayed obstinately in their sheaths unless she drew them herself, no matter how much she might whistle or snap her fingers for them.
"I've come from Balthar," she said, after a moment, "where Baron Tellian was kind enough to offer me hospitality and to gift me with this lovely lady." She leaned forward to stroke Cloudy's neck, and smiled behind her expressionless face as the first, faint uncertainty flickered in those gray eyes. "He also," she continued blandly, "sent with me written letters of introduction and, I believe, instructions to cooperate with me in my mission." Those eyes were definitely less cheerful than they had been, she noted with satisfaction. "And if you should happen to have anyone here in the keep who is injured or ill, I suppose I could demonstrate my ability to heal them. Or—" she looked straight into Trisu's eyes "—if you insist, I suppose I might simply settle for demonstrating my skill at arms upon your chosen champion, instead. In that case, however, I hope you won't be requiring his services anytime soon."
Trisu's face tightened, its lines momentarily harder and bleaker than its owner's years. The people who had described him as "conservative" had been guilty of considerable understatement, Kaeritha thought. But there appeared to be a brain behind that hard face. However angry he might be, his was not an unthinking reactionism, and he made his expression relax.
"If you bear the letters you've described," he said after a moment, with what Kaeritha had to concede was commendable dignity under the circumstances, "that will be more than sufficient proof for me, Milady."
"I thank you for your courtesy, Milord," she said, bending her head in a slight bow. "At the same time—and I fear I owe you an apology, because I did make the offer at least partly out of pique—if there are any sick or injured, it would be my pleasure as well as my duty to offer them healing."
"That was courteously said, Milady," Trisu replied, still more than a bit stiffly but with the first genuine warmth she'd seen from him. "Please, Dame Kaeritha—alight from your horse. My house is yours, and it would seem I have a certain unfortunate first impression to overcome."
Kaeritha's initial impression of Sir Altharn had been misleading. Her first impression of Lord Trisu, unfortunately, and despite his promise to overcome it, had not.
It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Trisu's brain; it was simply that he chose not to use it where certain opinions and preconceptions were concerned. Kaeritha could see only too well why Yalith and the war maids found it so difficult to work with him. However determined one might be to be diplomatic and reasonable, it must be hard to remember one's intention when all one wanted to do was strangle the stiff-necked, obstinate, bigoted, prejudiced, quintessential young Sothoii reactionary on the other side of the conference table.
His obvious native intelligence never challenged his opinions and prejudices because it was enlisted in their support, instead. That might not prevent him from being an excellent administrator, as was obvious from the condition of his lands and the people living on them. But it was a serious handicap when he was forced to deal with people or events he couldn't hammer into submission to his own biases.
On the other hand, perhaps it's time someone jerked him up short, she thought as she settled into her place at his right hand at the high table in Thalar Keep's great hall.
"I fear Thalar's hospitality must appear somewhat modest compared to that of Balthar." Trisu's words were courteous enough, as was their tone, but there was a challenging glint in his eyes. Or perhaps there wasn't. It was always possible, Kaeritha reminded herself, that her own prejudices were unfairly ascribing false attitudes and motives to him.
"Balthar is considerably larger than Thalar, Milord," she replied, after a moment. "But it's been my experience that simple size has less to do with hospitality and the gracious treatment of guests than the graciousness of the host. Certainly no attention to my own comfort has been omitted here in Thalar."
She hid an inner grimace at the stiltedness of her own turn of phrase. Trisu seemed to have that effect on her. But what she'd said had been only the truth, at least in physical terms. The fact that Trisu's retainers and servants took their lead from their lord's own attitudes probably explained why there had been a certain lack of genuine welcome behind their courteous attentiveness, but good manners forbade her from mentioning that.
"I'm pleased to hear it," Trisu said, looking out across the crowded tables below them as serving women began bringing in the food. Then he returned his attention fully to Kaeritha.
"I've read Baron Tellian's letters, Dame Kaeritha," he said. "And I will, of course, comply with his wishes and instructions." His smile was thin, and his gray eyes glittered. "Lorham stands ready to assist you in any way we may."
"I appreciate that," she replied, forbearing to observe that it was marvelous that it appeared to have taken him no more than the better part of seven hours to work his way through all two of the letters Tellian had sent along.
"Yes. But that's for tomorrow. For tonight, allow my cooks to demonstrate their skill for you." A serving maid deposited a stuffed, roasted fowl before him, and he reached for a carving knife. "Would you prefer light meat, or dark, Milady?" he inquired.
Trisu's office was on the third floor of his family's somewhat antiquated keep. Once she saw it, however, Kaeritha's initial surprise that he hadn't moved to more spacious and comfortable quarters elsewhere faded as quickly as it had come. It was part and parcel of the man's entire character. One look at the office itself, with its spartan, whitewashed walls decorated without softening with shields and weapons, made it abundantly clear that no other place else could possibly have been as comfortable to Trisu, however much more spacious it might have been.
The armsman who had ushered her into Trisu's presence, withdrew at his lord's gesture, and the office door closed quietly behind him. Sunlight spilled in through the narrow, diamond-pane windows behind Trisu's desk, and for all its trophy-girt walls, the square, high-ceilinged room did have a certain airy warmth.
"Good morning, Dame Kaeritha. I trust you slept well? That your chambers were comfortable?"
"Yes, thank you, Milord. I did, and they were." She smiled. "And thank you for seeing me so promptly this morning."
"You are, of course, welcome, although no thanks are necessary. Duty to my liege lord—and to the War God, as well—requires no less." He leaned back in his high-backed chair and folded his hands atop one another on the desk before him. "At the same time," he continued, "I fear Baron Tellian's instructions, while clear, were less than complete. In what way may I assist you?"
"The Baron was less than specific," Kaeritha conceded. "Unfortunately, when he wrote those letters, before I set out, neither he nor I were certain what I would discover or what sorts of problems I might find myself dealing with."
He raised an eyebrow, and she shrugged.
"Champions of Tomanak often find themselves in that sort of situation, Milord. We get used to dealing with challenges on the fly, as it were. Baron Tellian knew that would be the case here."
"I see." Trisu pursed his lips as he considered that. Then it was his turn to shrug. "I see," he repeated. "But may I assume that since you've sought me out and presented the Baron's letters, you now know what problem you face?"
"I believe I've discovered the nature of the problem, at least, Milord." Kaeritha hoped her tone sounded more courteous than cautious, but she was aware that his obvious prejudices had awakened a matching antipathy in her and she was watching her tongue carefully. "It involves your ongoing . . . dispute with Kalatha."
"Which dispute, Milady?" Trisu inquired with a thin smile. His response was just a bit quicker than Kaeritha had expected, and her eyes narrowed. "Several matters stand in contention between the war maids and me," he continued. The words "war maids" came out sourly, but Kaeritha would have expected that. What she didn't care for was something else in his tone—something which seemed to suggest he anticipated less than complete impartiality out of her.
"If you'll forgive my saying so, Milord," she said after a moment, "all of your disputes with Kalatha—" she carefully refrained from using the apparently incendiary "war maids" herself "—are the same at the heart."
"I beg to differ, Dame Kaeritha," Trisu replied, his jaw jutting. "I am well aware that Mayor Yalith chooses to ascribe all of the differences between us to my own deep-seated prejudices. That, however, is not the case."
Kaeritha's expression must have revealed her own skepticism, because he gave a short, barking laugh.
"Don't mistake me, Milady Champion," he said. "I don't like war maids. I think their very existence is an affront to the way the gods intended us to live, and the notion that women—most women at any rate—" he amended as Kaeritha's eyes flashed, although his tone remained unapologetic "—can be the equal of men as warriors is ridiculous. Obviously, as you yourself demonstrate, there are some exceptions, but as a general rule the idea is ludicrous."
Kaeritha made herself sit firmly on her temper. It wasn't easy. But at least the young man sitting across the desk from her had the courage—or arrogance—to say exactly what he thought. And, she admitted after a moment, the honesty to bring his own feelings openly to the table rather than attempt to deny them or dress them up in fine linen. In fact, and although she found herself hesitant to rush to assign virtues to him, that honesty seemed to be an integral part of his personality.
Which undoubtedly makes him even more difficult to live with, she thought wryly. But it also makes me wonder how he can be maintaining his position so strongly now when he must know inside that he's in the wrong. Is it that his prejudices against war maids are strong enough to overcome that innate honesty of his?
"I don't much care for 'general rules,' Milord," she said when she was certain she could keep her own tone level. "I've found that, for most people, 'general rules' are all too often little more than an excuse for ignoring realities they don't care to face."
She held his eye across the desktop, and neither gaze flinched.
"I'm not surprised you should feel that way," he said. "And I imagine that if our positions were reversed, I might feel much as you do. But they aren't reversed, and I don't." The words weren't—quite—as challenging as they might have been, Kaeritha noted. "Because I don't, I chose to say so openly. Not simply because I believe I'm right—although, obviously, I do—but so that there should be no misunderstanding on your part or mine."
"It's always best to avoid misunderstandings," she agreed in a dust-dry voice.
"I've always thought so," he said with a nod. "And having said that, I repeat that my . . . difficulties with Kalatha have very little to do with my opinion of war maids in general. The fact of the matter is that Kalatha is clearly in violation of its own charter and my boundaries and that Mayor Yalith and her town council refuse to admit it."
Kaeritha sat back in her chair, surprised despite herself by his blunt assertion. He'd taken the same position in his correspondence with Tellian's magistrates, but Kaeritha had read the relevant portions of Kalatha's original charter and Lord Kellos' grant in Yalith's office before riding to Thalar. The mayor and Kalatha's archivist, Lanitha, had pointed out the specific language governing the points in dispute, and Kaeritha had been grateful for the guidance. Her own command of the written Sothoii language was far inferior to Brandark's, and the archaic usages and cramped, faded penmanship of the long-dead scribe who'd written out Gartha and Kellos' original proclamations hadn't helped. But she'd been able to puzzle her way through the phraseology eventually, and it was obvious that Yalith's interpretation was far more accurate than Trisu's assertions.
"With all due respect, Milord," she said now, "I've read King Gartha's original proclamation and the terms of Lord Kellos' grant to the war maids. While I realize many of the subsequent points in dispute between you and Kalatha have arisen out of later customary usages and practices, I think the original language is quite clear. On the matter of water rights, high road tolls, and the location of your father's grist mill on land which belongs to Kalatha, it would appear to me that the war maids are correct."
"No, they aren't," Trisu said flatly. "As any fair reading of the documents in question amply demonstrates."
"Are you suggesting that a Champion of Tomanak would not read evidentiary documents fairly?" Kaeritha was aware that her own voice was both colder and harder than it had been, but she couldn't help it. Not in the face of his bald denial of the documents she'd read with her own eyes.
"I'm suggesting that the documents clearly say the opposite of what Mayor Yalith claims they say," Trisu replied, refusing to back down. Which, Kaeritha, admitted to herself, required a certain moral courage on his part. Whatever his reservations about women warriors might be, he'd had ample proof the day before, when she healed three of his sick and injured retainers, that she most certainly was a champion of Tomanak. And only a man absolutely certain of his own ground—or a fool—would so flatly challenge a direct, personal servant of the God of Justice.
"Milord," she said after a pause, "while I would normally hesitate to contradict you, in this instance I fear you are incorrect." His mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed, but he said nothing, and she continued. "Once I reached Kalatha and realized where the dispute lay, I took particular care to examine the originals of the relevant documents. Admittedly, my command of your language is less than perfect, but as a champion of Tomanak, I've been well trained in jurisprudence. It took me quite some time to feel confident I'd read the documents correctly, but I must tell you that, in my opinion, Mayor Yalith is correct . . . and you aren't."
A silence hovered between them. It was very quiet in the sun-filled, whitewashed room, but Kaeritha sensed the fury blazing incandescently within her host. Yet for all his prejudices, he was a disciplined man, and he kept that fiery temper securely leashed. For the most part.
"Milady Champion," he said at length, and despite his control, there was a bite in the way he pronounced "champion" which Kaeritha didn't care for at all, "I make all due allowance for the fact that our language is not your native tongue. As you yourself have just pointed out. However, I, too, have copies of the original charter and grant in my library. They were made at the same time, by the same scribe, as the documents you examined at Kalatha. I am quite prepared, if you so desire, to allow you to examine them, as well. I am also prepared to allow you to discuss—freely, and in private—my interpretation of them with my senior magistrate. Who is also my librarian and, I might point out, served my father before me, and whose interpretation is identical to my own. As I say, any fair reading not prejudiced by . . . differences of opinion as to proper ways of life, let us say, must come to the same conclusion."
Kaeritha's jaw clenched, and she was forced to throw a leash on to her own temper at the pointed emphasis of his final sentence. Yet even through her own anger, she felt a fresh sense of puzzlement. As she'd told him, she was at least as thoroughly trained in matters of law as most royal and imperial judges in the King Emperor's service. To be sure, she was more familiar with Axeman law than that of other countries, but the Code of Kormak was the basic foundation of all Norfressan law, not just the Empire's. And there was no way in the world that anyone could possibly stretch and strain the language of the documents in question to support Trisu's bald contention. Yet she'd already come to the conclusion that he was an intelligent man, despite his prejudices. He must know the language wouldn't support his position . . . so why was he offering—indeed, almost demanding—that she examine them?
She made herself sit very still and draw a deep, tension-cleansing breath. Trisu's anger was resonating with her own, threatening to undermine the impartiality any champion of Tomanak must maintain when called upon to consider matters of justice. She knew that, and so she knew she must proceed carefully and cautiously. Besides, she reminded herself as she felt the white-hot heat of her own initial anger cool ever so slightly, he had a point. She'd examined Kalatha's documents; she had a moral obligation to examine his, as well, and to listen to his magistrate's construction of the language involved. The chance that she'd misunderstood or misinterpreted the originals was minuscule, but it did exist, and it was her responsibility to be absolutely positive she had not.
"Milord," she said finally, keeping her voice very level, "you've assured me that your own opinions—or prejudices—are not the basis for your disagreements with Kalatha and the war maids. I, in turn, assure you, that any 'differences of opinion' I may hold have not been and will not be permitted to influence my reading of the law or of the evidentiary documents. I will examine them again, if you so desire. And I will discuss them with your magistrate. In the end, however, my interpretation of them will be based upon my reading of them, not yours. And if I come to the conclusion that they support my original belief that Mayor Yalith's reading of them is correct, then I will so rule as Champion of Tomanak."
Trisu's gray eyes glittered. There was anger in them, but not nearly so much as she'd expected. Indeed, that hard light seemed born of confidence, not temper. Which only increased her sense of confusion.
If she ruled formally in this case as Tomanak's champion, her decision was final. That was one reason champions so seldom made formal rulings. Most of them, like Kaeritha herself, preferred simply to investigate and then to recommend rulings to the appropriate local authorities. It prevented bruised feelings, and it allowed for local compromises, which any champion knew were often a truer path to justice than cold, unparsed legalism. Yet Trisu seemed unfazed by the possibility of an adverse decision which would absolutely and permanently foreclose any revisiting of the dispute. Indeed, he seemed to welcome the possibility of a ruling from her, and she wondered if he had deliberately set out to goad her into exactly this course of action.
"The ruling of Scale Balancer's champion must, of course, be final," he said at length. "And, to be honest, Milady Champion, even if you should rule against me, simply having the entire matter laid to rest once and for all will be a relief of sorts. Not that I believe you will."
"We'll see, Milord," Kaeritha said. "We'll see."
"Here it is, Dame Kaeritha."
Salthan Pickaxe was some sort of distant cousin of Trisu, although he was at least twice Trisu's age. That sort of relationship between a lord and his chief magistrate was scarcely unheard of, but Kaeritha had been more than a bit surprised by Salthan. He was much more like Sir Altharn then his liege, with a lively sense of humor hiding behind bright blue-gray eyes and a thick, neatly trimmed beard of white-shot auburn. He was also, she'd been amused to note, much more gallant then his cousin. Indeed, he seemed quite taken by the combination of Kaeritha's dark black hair and sapphire eyes. Which, to be fair, was such an unusual combination among Sothoii that she'd become accustomed to their reaction to her exotic attractiveness.
But Salthan was also at least as intelligent as Trisu, and he seemed just as mystifyingly confident as his cousin.
Now he took a heavy wooden scroll case from its pigeonhole and eased its contents out into his hand. He was obviously well accustomed to dealing with documents which were no longer in their first youth, but it was unhappily apparent that not all of the keepers of Lorham's records had been. Kalatha's documents were, by and large, in much better shape than Lorham's, and it showed in the care Salthan took as he slowly and gently unrolled the scroll.
Age-fragile parchment crackled, and Kaeritha felt a tingle of that unease any archivist feels when her examination of ancient materials threatens them with destruction. But Salthan got it open without inflicting major additional damage. He laid it out on the library table, then adjusted the oil lamp's wick and chimney to provide her with the best possible light.
It was as well he had, Kaeritha thought, leaning forward and squinting at the document before her. It was, as Trisu had said, a duplicate copy of Lord Kellos' original grant to the war maids, and it was even more faded and difficult to read than the original. No doubt because of the indifferent care it had received, she thought. Still, she could make out the large numeral "3" in the margin, which indicated that it was the third copy made, and she recognized the crabbed, archaic penmanship of the same scribe who had written out the original.
She ran her eyes down the section which set forth the boundaries of the grant, looking for the language which defined the specific landmarks around the river and the disputed gristmill. It was the least ambiguous and archaic of the entire document, and she might as well start with the parts that were easiest to follow. Besides, the exact boundaries were at the heart of the issue, so—
Ah! Here they were. She bent closer, reading carefully, then stiffened.
That can't be right, she thought, and reread the section. The words remained stubbornly unchanged, and she frowned in puzzlement. Then she opened the document pouch she'd brought with her and extracted the notes she'd written out so meticulously in Kalatha's library. She opened them and laid the neatly written pages on the table beside the scroll, comparing the passage she'd copied with the document before her on a word-for-word basis. It was absolutely clear and unambiguous.
" . . . and the aforesaid boundary shall run from the east side of Stelham's Rock to the corner of Haymar's holding, where it shall turn south at the boundary stone and run two thousand yards across the River Renha to the boundary stone of Thaman Bridlemaker, which shall be the marker for the boundary of the Lord of Lorham."
That was the exact language from the original grant at Kalatha. But the language in the document Salthan had just laid before her said—
" . . . and the aforesaid boundary shall run from the east side of Stelham's Rock to the corner of Haymar's holding, where it shall turn south at the boundary stone and run one thousand yards to the north side of the River Renha, the agreed-upon boundary of the Lord of Lorham."
It wasn't a minor ambiguity after all, she thought. It was a flat contradiction. If the document before her was accurate, then Trisu was completely correct—the disputed gristmill on the southern bank of the Renha was on his property and always had been. For that matter, Kalatha's claim to undisputed control of the river's water rights was also nonexistent, since the river would lie entirely within Trisu's boundaries. But how could it be accurate? Surely the original grant must supersede any copy in the event of differences between them, and the one before her could only represent a bizarre mistake.
Yet that was preposterous. True, it was a copy, not the original, yet it was scarcely likely that the same scribe who had written out both documents would have made such a mistake. And it was even less likely that such an error could have been missed in the intense scrutiny all copies of the original grant must have received by those party to it.
Unless one copy was a deliberate forgery, of course . . .
But how could that be the case? If this was a counterfeit, it was a remarkably good one. Indeed, it was so good she couldn't believe anyone in the Lorham could have produced it in the first place. However good Salthan might be as a librarian, turning out such a flawless false copy of a document over two centuries old must be well beyond his capabilities. So if a forgery had been produced, who had produced it, and when?
She carefully hid a grimace at the thought, wondering how in the world anyone would ever be able to answer those questions. But answering them could wait at least until she'd determined that they were the only ones which required answers.
She considered her options for a few more seconds, then looked up at Salthan with a painstakingly neutral expression.
"Thank you," she said, tapping the scroll very carefully with a fingertip. "This is exactly the section of Lord Kellos' grant I wanted to see. Now, if you please, Lord Trisu also mentioned that you have a copy of King Gartha's proclamation, as well."
"Yes, we do, Lady," Salthan replied. "In fact, it's in rather more readable condition than Kellos' grant. Let me get it for you."
"If you would," she requested, and leafed through her other notes for the sections of the war maid charter relevant to the other points in dispute between Trisu and his neighbors that she'd copied in Kalatha.
Salthan opened the proper case and unrolled a second scroll, just as carefully as he'd unrolled the first one. He was right; this document was much more legible than the Kalatha land grant, and Kaeritha bent over it, eyes searching for the sections she needed.
She read through them one by one, comparing the language before her to that she had copied in Kalatha, and despite all of her formidable self-control, her frown grew more and more intense as she worked her way through them. Then she sat back and rubbed the tip of her nose, wondering if she looked as perplexed as she thought she did.
Well, she thought, it just may be that I'm beginning to understand yet another reason He sent me to deal with this instead of Bahzell or Vaijon. He does have a way of choosing His tools to fit the problem . . . even when we poor tools don't have a clue why it has to be us. Or exactly where we're supposed to go next.
"I appreciate your assistance, Sir Salthan," she said after a moment. "And I think I may be beginning to understand why your and your lord's interpretation of the documents is so fundamentally different from that of Mayor Yalith. There does seem to be a degree of . . . discrepancy now that I've had a chance to lay my notes side by side with your copy. I don't pretend to understand where it came from, but it's obvious that until it's resolved, it will be impossible for anyone to rule definitively in this case."
"I couldn't agree more, Milady," Salthan said soberly. Trisu's magistrate was sitting across the table from her now, his blue-gray eyes intent . . . and troubled. "Unlike you, I haven't had the opportunity to compare the documents to one another, but I know these copies have been here in this library from the day they were first penned. Under the circumstances, I think My Lord and I have no alternative but to believe they're accurate, and, unlike his late father, Lord Trisu is not the sort of man to tolerate the infringement of his rights or prerogatives. Which is why, after he'd asked me to research the language and had seen the relevant passages for himself, he began to press Kalatha over these matters."
"No doubt you're right," Kaeritha said. "On the other hand, Sir Salthan, I can't quite escape the suspicion that he's a little more irritated over the apparent violation of his rights or prerogatives when the suspected violators are war maids."
"Probably—no, certainly—you're right, Dame Kaeritha. And he's not alone in that regard, either. But does that truly have any bearing on whether or not our interpretation is correct in the eyes of the law?"
"No," she said, although she was guiltily aware that part of her wished it did. On the other hand, champions of Tomanak were still mere mortals. They had their prejudices and opinions, just like anyone else. But they also had a unique responsibility to recognize that they did and to set those prejudices aside rather than allow them to influence their decisions or actions.
"Are you familiar, Sir Salthan," she continued after a moment, "with the sorts of abilities Tomanak bestows upon His champions when he accepts Sword Oath from them?"
"I beg your pardon?" Salthan blinked, clearly surprised by the apparent non sequitur. Then he shrugged.
"I'm scarcely 'familiar' with them, Milady. I doubt that very many people are, really. I've done some reading, of course. And to be honest, I did a little more research when Lord Trisu told me a champion had come to visit us. Our library, unfortunately, isn't especially well stocked with the research books I needed. The best anything I had could do was to tell me that Tomanak is less . . . consistent from champion to champion than many of the Gods of Light are."
" 'Less consistent,' " Kaeritha murmured, and smiled. "That may be as concisely as I've ever heard it put, Sir Salthan. There are times when I wish He was more like, oh, Toragan or Torframos. Or Lillinara, for that matter. Their champions all seem to get approximately the same abilities, in greater or lesser measure. But Tomanak prefers to gift each of His champions with individual abilities. For the most part, they seem to mesh with abilities or talents we already had before we heard His call, but sometimes no one has any idea why a particular champion received a specific ability. Until, of course, the day comes when he—or she—needs that ability."
"And is this such an occasion, Milady?" Salthan asked, his eyes more intent than ever.
"Yes and no." Kaeritha shrugged. "I've had the need for almost all of the abilities He's granted me at one time or another already. But I have to admit that I should have begun to suspect there was a specific reason He'd sent me to deal with this problem. Especially when Lord Trisu reminded me that the controlling language itself is in dispute."
"I wish I'd had the opportunity to examine the Kalathan originals," Salthan said a bit wistfully. "It's been obvious from the beginning that there was a fundamental contradiction between what I was reading here and the language Mayor Yalith and her magistrates were citing. But without the chance to see the originals for myself, there was no way for me to judge how accurate—or, for that matter, honest—their citations were."
"Well, I have had the opportunity to examine them," Kaeritha told him. As she spoke, she stood and crossed to a another table, under the library window, where she had placed her sheathed swords when she and Salthan entered. No champion of Tomanak ever left the sword—or swords—which was the emblem of her authority behind when engaged upon official duties. Now she unbuttoned the retaining strap on the sword she normally wore at her left hip and drew the glittering, two-foot blade.
Salthan raised an eyebrow in surprise as she drew steel, and then she smiled, despite the gravity of the moment, as his other eyebrow rose to match it when her sword suddenly began to glow with a blue nimbus bright enough to be clearly visible even in the well-lit library.
"As I say," she continued in a deliberately blasé tone, "I have had the opportunity to examine them. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me then just how thoroughly I should have 'examined' them."
She sat back down, facing him over the original table once more, and laid the sword flat before her, its glittering blade across both the scrolls Salthan had located for her.
"And now, Sir Salthan," she said in a far more formal voice, "I have a request to make of you as Champion of the Keeper of the Scales."
"Of course, Milady," the Sothoii said quickly, and Kaeritha noted his tone and manner carefully. She was gratified by his prompt acquiescence, but she was even more gratified when she was unable to detect any sign of hesitation or indecision. Clearly he felt no more hesitation about accepting her authority than he would have felt accepting the authority of any male champion.
"This is primarily for the record," she told him, "because you are the primary custodian of these documents." She turned her sword slightly, angling the hilt in his direction. "Please place your hand on the hilt of my sword."
He obeyed, although she felt dryly amused by the fact that this time he did hesitate ever so slightly. Not that she blamed him. This was undoubtedly the first time anyone had ever invited him to lay hold of a sword wrapped in the corona of a god's power.
She waited until his initial gingerly touch settled into something a bit more confident when no lightning bolt sizzled down from the rafters to incinerate him where he sat. Then she nodded.
"Thank you," she said, as encouragingly as she could without stepping out of her own magisterial role. "And now, Sir Salthan, will you attest for me, in the presence of the God of Justice, that to the best of your personal knowledge, these are the original copies of the proclamation of King Gartha and the Kalathan land grant of Lord Kellos which were originally placed in the custody of the Lords of Lorham?"
"To the best of my personal knowledge, they are, Milady," Salthan said in a calm, formal voice, his eyes never wavering under her intent regard. The blue light clinging to her sword never wavered, either, she noted. In fact, it grew stronger.
"And also to the best of your personal knowledge, they are authentic and unchanged. There have been no additions, no deletions, and no alterations?"
"None, Milady," Salthan said firmly.
"Thank you," she repeated, and nodded for him to remove his hand. He did so, and if he sat back in his chair with a bit more alacrity than he had leaned forward, Kaeritha didn't blame him a bit.
She looked down at the documents before her, then lifted her sword across her open palms, holding it between her and the scrolls.
All right, she thought, closing her eyes while she reached out to that ever-present link connecting her to the blazing power of Tomanak's presence. It took me a while to get the hint. I'm sorry about that, although I suppose I could point out that having Leeana along was enough to distract anyone. But now that I'm here and You've more or less used Salthan to rub my nose in it, suppose You tell me whether or not these documents are forgeries.
She sensed a distant, delighted rumble of divine laughter . . . and approval. Then she opened her eyes again and looked down at her sword.
Which, she was no longer the least bit surprised to see, continued to glow a bright, steady blue.
Kaeritha Seldansdaughter sat in the chamber Lord Trisu had assigned to her in Thalar Keep and gazed out the window at a cloudless sky of midnight blue spangled with the glitter and glow of Silendros' stars. It was a clearer sky then she'd seen any night since arriving on the Wind Plain, and she had never seen the stars brighter or larger than they looked tonight. A crescent nail-paring moon glowed purest silver in the eastern sky, and she studied it with an intent frown, wondering what Lillinara thought She was doing to let this situation get so out of hand.
Well, she told herself scoldingly, that's probably not entirely fair. It's not as if She were the only god with an interest in this affair. But what in the world is She thinking about? And why hasn't She spoken to Her Voice at Quaysar about it?
That was the heart of the entire question. Of course, it would have helped if it had occurred to Kaeritha to test the authenticity—or, at least, the accuracy—of the documents at Kalatha. She should have, if only in the name of thoroughness, although to be fair to herself, she'd had absolutely no reason to doubt them. And even now she was certain that Yalith and her council saw no reason to question them. And why should they? They knew they had the original, controlling documents in their possession.
Unfortunately, Tomanak Himself had seen fit to assure Kaeritha that the copies in Trisu's possession were most definitely not forgeries. One of those special abilities she'd mentioned to Salthan was that no one could lie successfully to her while touching her sword, and that no false or misleading document or planted evidence could evade her detection when she held the blade and called upon Tomanak. Which meant Trisu's documents were not simply genuine, but that they accurately set forth the original language and true intent of both Gartha and Kellos. Kaeritha had seen enough in other investigations she'd conducted to be unwilling to rule very many things categorically out of consideration, but she was not prepared to question His personal assurances.
Which meant that somehow, impossible as it manifestly must be, the original documents at Kalatha were the forgeries.
So far, Kaeritha had not shared that conclusion with Trisu. And she had invoked her champion's authority to extract Sword Oath from Salthan to keep the results of this afternoon's examination and investigation to himself. Which meant that effectively no one but she realized where the unpalatable chain of evidence was leading her. Nor did she intend to share that with anyone else until she saw a clearer path through the maze before her.
She let her mind wander back an hour or two to this evening's after-dinner conversation with Trisu.
"And has your investigation thrown any fresh light on my differences with Mayor Yalith?" Trisu asked as he toyed with his glass. Like many Sothoii nobles, he was particularly fond of the expensive liqueurs distilled in Dwarvenhame and the Empire of the Axe. Kaeritha liked them just fine herself, but she also entertained a lively respect for their potency. Which was why she had contented herself with wine rather than the brandy Trisu had offered her.
"Some, Milord," she said.
He leaned back, cocking an eyebrow, and regarded her thoughtfully.
"May I take it that whatever you and Salthan discovered—or discussed, at least—this afternoon has at least not inspired you to immediately rule against me?"
"It was never my intent to 'immediately rule' for or against anyone, Milord," she said mildly. "I would prefer, at this point, not to be a great deal more specific than that, although honesty and simple justice do compel me to admit that, so far at least, the situation is considerably less cut and dried than I had assumed initially."
"Well," he said with a slight smile, "I suppose I must consider that an improvement, given your original comments to me." Kaeritha's temper stirred, but she suppressed it firmly, and he continued. "And I must admit," he went on, "that I'm gratified to see exactly the sort of impartiality and willingness to consider all the evidence which I would have expected out of a Champion of Tomanak. The more so because I have something of a reputation for stubbornness myself. I know how difficult it is for anyone, however honest or however good his—or her—intentions, to truly consider fresh evidence which appears to contradict evidence he's already accepted as valid."
For a moment, Kaeritha wondered if somehow Salthan's oath had slipped. But even as the thought crossed her mind, she dismissed it out of hand. She didn't believe the magistrate would have knowingly or intentionally violated it under any circumstances. More than that, even if he'd been inclined to do so, he couldn't have been able to break an oath sworn on a champion's sword, which, in the moment of swearing, actually was the very Sword of Tomanak. It was simply a fresh warning to her never to underestimate Trisu's intelligence simply because she detested his opinions and attitudes.
"It's not always easy, no," she agreed. "But it is a trick any of Tomanak's champions has to master. I imagine the lord of any domain has to be able to do much the same thing if he's going to administer justice fairly. "
She smiled affably, hiding her amusement—mostly—as his eyes flashed when her shot went home.
"On the other hand, Milord," she continued more briskly, "I feel I'm definitely making progress where the documents and their interpretations are concerned. At the moment, I have at least as many questions as I have answers, but at least I believe I've figured out what the questions themselves are. And I feel confident Tomanak will lead me to their answers in the end.
"But there is one other matter which doesn't relate to the documents or, actually, officially to Kalatha itself in any way."
"Indeed?" he said coolly when she paused.
"Yes, Milord. When I spoke with Mayor Yalith, it was clear to me that more was involved than the simple legalities of your disagreement explained. There was, quite frankly, a great deal of anger on the war maids' part. And, to be equally frank, it became quite apparent in speaking with you that the same is true from your perspective."
Trisu's gray eyes were hard, and she raised one hand in a slight throwing away gesture.
"Milord, that's almost always the case when a dispute reaches the point this one has. It's not necessarily because either side is inherently evil, either. It's because the people on both sides are just that—people. And people, Milord, get angry with other people they feel are wrong or, even worse, out to cheat them in some way. It's a fact of life which any judge—or champion of Tomanak—simply has to take into consideration. Just as you have to take it into consideration, I'm sure, when you're forced to adjudicate between the conflicting claims of two of your tenants."
It would have been too much to say that Trisu's anger dissipated, but at least he nodded grudgingly in an admission that she'd made her point.
"Quite often," she continued, "there are additional causes for anger and resentment. When people are already unhappy with one another, they're seldom as interested as they might otherwise be in extending the benefit of the doubt to the people they're unhappy with."
"I understand that you're attempting to prepare me for some point you intend to raise and think I'll find objectionable, Lady Champion," Trisu said with a thin smile which actually held a trace of genuine amusement. "Shall we simply agree that you've done that now and get on with it?"
"Well, yes, I suppose we could." Kaeritha gave him an answering smile and nodded her head in acknowledgment.
"Where I was going, Milord, is that the mayor's share of the . . . intransigence in this dispute seems to be fueled in no small part by her belief that you've shown insufficient respect for the Voice of Lillinara at Quaysar."
"What you truly mean, Milady," Trisu responded in a flat, hard voice, "is that she believes I have shown no respect for the Voice. And, while we're on the subject, that she bitterly resents my failure to solve the disappearance—or murder—of the Voice's handmaidens."
Once again, Kaeritha was surprised by his blunt, head-on attitude. Not that she should have been, perhaps, she reflected. Trisu was in many ways the quintessential Sothoii. He might be capable of tactical subtlety on the battlefield, but he disdained anything that smacked of the indirect approach in his own life.
She felt a fresh flicker of anger at the confrontational light in his eyes, but she reminded herself once more never to underestimate this intolerable young man's native intelligence. Nor was she about to forget that the evidence she herself had turned up that afternoon strongly suggested that there was more than a little merit to his interpretation of the actual legal disputes.
"I suppose that is what I mean," she conceded after a moment, "although that's considerably more . . . pointed than the manner in which I would have chosen to express it."
He looked at her long and steadily, then dipped his head in a small bob of acknowledgment. He even had to the grace to blush ever so slightly, she thought. But one thing he didn't do was retreat from the point he'd just made.
"No doubt it was more confrontational than one as courteous as you've already proven yourself to be would have phrased it to her host, Milady. For that, I apologize. But that was essentially what she said, was it not?"
"Essentially," she acknowledged.
"I thought it would be," he said and gazed at her speculatively for a few more seconds. "Given your willingness to consider and examine the evidence Salthan and I offered you, I would assume you've raised this point in order to hear my side of it directly."
His tone made the statement a question, and she nodded.
"Dame Kaeritha," he began after a moment, "I won't attempt to pretend that I'm not more uncomfortable dealing with Lillinara and Her followers than I am with other gods and their worshipers. I don't understand Lillinara. And I don't much care for many of the things Her followers justify on the basis of things She's supposed to have told them. To be perfectly honest, there are times I wonder just how much of what She's supposed to have said was actually invented by people who would have found it convenient for Her to tell them what they wanted to hear in the first place."
Kaeritha arched her eyebrows.
"That's a . . . surprisingly frank admission, Milord," she observed.
"No sane man doubts the existence of the gods, Milady," he replied. "But no intelligent man doubts that charlatans and tricksters are fully capable of using the gods and the religious faith of others for their own manipulative ends. Surely you wouldn't expect someone charged with the governance of any domain to close his eyes to that possibility?"
"No, Milord, I wouldn't," she said, and felt a brief flicker of something very like affection for this hard-edged, opinionated youngster. "In fact, that sort of manipulation is one of the things champions spend a lot of their time undoing and repairing."
"I thought it probably would be." Trisu sipped brandy, then set down his glass, and his nostrils flared.
"I brought up my . . . discomfort with Lillinara intentionally, Milady. I wanted you to be aware that I was aware of it. And because I am aware of it, I reminded myself when I met Lillinara's newest Voice that the fact that I don't like what someone tells me She wants me to do doesn't necessarily make that someone a liar. But in this instance, I've come to the conclusion that the so-called 'Voice' at Quaysar is one of those manipulators."
"That's an extremely serious charge, Lord Trisu." Kaeritha's voice was low, her expression grim, yet she wasn't remotely as surprised to hear it as she should have been.
"I'm aware of that," he replied with unwonted somberness. "It's also one which I haven't previously made to anyone in so many words. I would suspect, however, that Mayor Yalith, who—despite our many and lively differences—is an intelligent woman, knows that it's what I think."
"And why do you think it, Milord?"
"First and foremost, I'm sure, is the fact that I don't much care for this particular Voice. In fact, the day I first met her, when she arrived to take up her post at Quaysar, she and I took one another in immediate and intense dislike."
"Took one another in immediate dislike?" Kaeritha repeated, and Trisu chuckled sourly.
"Milady, I couldn't possibly dislike her as much as I do without her disliking me right back! I don't care how saintly a Voice of Lillinara is supposed to be."
Despite herself, Kaeritha laughed, and he shrugged and continued.
"It's not unusual, I imagine, for the lord of any domain to have differences of opinion with the priests and priestesses whose spheres of authority and responsibility overlap with his. Each of us would like to be master in his own house, and when we have conflicting views or objectives, that natural resentment can only grow stronger.
"But in this case, it went further than that."
He paused, and Kaeritha watched his face. It was as hard, as uncompromising, as ever, yet there was something else behind his expression now. She didn't know quite what the emotion was, but she knew it was there.
"How so, Milord?" she asked after the silence had stretched out for several breaths.
"I don't—" he began, then stopped. "No, Dame Kaeritha," he said, "that's not true. I started to say that I don't really know how to answer your question, but I do. I suppose I hesitated because I was afraid honesty might alienate you."
"Honesty may anger me, Milord," she said with the seriousness his tone and manner deserved. "It shouldn't, but I'm only the champion of a god, not a god myself. But this much I will promise you, on my sword and His. So long as you give me honesty, I will give you an open ear and an open mind." She smiled without humor. "As you've been honest with me, I'll be honest with you. You hold certain beliefs and opinions with which I am as uncomfortable as I'm sure you are with the war maids. No doubt you'd already realized that. But whether or not I agree with you in those matters has nothing to do with whether or not I trust your honesty."
"That was well said, Milady," Trisu said with the first completely ungrudging warmth he'd displayed. Then he drew a deep breath.
"As I'm sure Mayor Yalith told you, the original town of Quaysar has effectively been absorbed by the temple there. In the process, the office of the Voice of the temple has merged with the office of the mayor of Quaysar, as well. By tradition, the same person has held both of them for the past seventy-odd years. Which means that the Voice isn't simply the priestess of the temple, but also the secular head of the community. In that role, she is one of my vassals, which has occasionally created uncomfortable strains between the various Voices of the temple and my own father and grandfather. Inevitably, I suppose, given the unavoidable difficulties the Voices must have faced in juggling their secular obligations to the Lord of Lorham with their spiritual obligations to his subjects. And, of course, to the war maids over whom my house has no actual jurisdiction.
"My father had seen to it that I would be aware that such difficulties were only to be expected from time to time. I think he was afraid that without such an awareness I would be unwilling to consider the sorts of compromises which situations like that might require. Even as a child, I'm afraid, I wasn't exactly noted for cheerful compromises." He snorted a sudden laugh of his own and shook his head when Kaeritha looked a question at him. "Your pardon, Milady. I was just thinking about how fervently my tutors and arms instructors would have endorsed that last statement of mine."
Kaeritha nodded. At least he was able to laugh at himself sometimes, she thought.
"At any rate," he continued, "I was prepared for the possibility that the new Voice and I might not exactly take to one another on sight. What I wasn't prepared for was the . . . well, the wave of wrongness that poured off of her."
" 'Wrongness'?" Kaeritha repeated very carefully.
"I don't know a better word for it," Trisu said. "It was as if every word she said rang false. Every word, Milady. I've met other people I simply didn't like, and I'm sure other people have had that reaction to me. But this was like a dog and a cat closed into the same cage—or perhaps a snake and a ferret. It was there between us from the instant she opened her mouth, and although it shames me to admit it, something about her frightened me."
He looked squarely at Kaeritha, and his gray eyes were dark.
"If you want the full truth of it, Milady," he said very quietly, "I wasn't at all sure which of us was the ferret . . . and which the serpent."
Kaeritha stared up at the glowing heavens, remembering Trisu's expression and the sound of his voice, and a chill ran down her spine like the tip of an icicle. Trisu of Lorham might be a pain in the arse. He might be opinionated, and he was certainly stubborn. But one thing she did not believe he was was a coward. For that matter, no true coward would have been prepared to admit to a champion of Tomanak that he'd been frightened by anyone. Especially not if he was also a thorough conservative of Trisu's stripe admitting he'd been frightened by a woman.
But Yalith had shown no sign of any similar feelings towards the Voice of Quaysar. It was tempting, dreadfully so, for Kaeritha to put the difference down to all of the other differences between Kalatha and the Lord of Lorham. Yet tempting or not, she knew that simple answer was insufficient.
Which was why she knew she had to travel to Quaysar herself. And why she felt an icy edge of fear of her own at the thought.
"Welcome back to Kalatha, Dame Kaeritha." Mayor Yalith's voice was much warmer than it had been the first time Kaeritha entered her office, and her smile was broad. "How may we serve you this time?"
"Actually, I'm more or less just passing through on my way to Quaysar," Kaeritha replied, watching the mayor's expression with carefully hidden attentiveness. "I've spoken to you, and to Lord Trisu. Now I think it would be just as well for me to speak to the Voice and get her perspective on the disputes between your town and Trisu, not to mention her temple's own . . . difficulties with him." It seemed to her watchful eyes that Yalith's quick nod of approval was automatic, almost unconscious. "I hadn't realized from our previous discussion that she was also the secular head of the Quaysar community. The fact that she is means she's probably had much more direct contact with him than I'd previously assumed."
"I'm sure she has," Yalith said a bit sourly. "I doubt that she's enjoyed it any more than I have, though." The mayor shook her head. "I realize that the Voice is Lillinara's personal servant, but it would take a saint, not merely a priestess, to endure that man as her liege."
"He can certainly be one of the most irritating people I've ever met," Kaeritha acknowledged even as she mentally filed away Yalith's tone and body language. Clearly, the mayor, at least, had no reservations about the Voice. Kaeritha wished the same were true for her.
"If he's irritating to a visiting champion of Tomanak, you can probably begin to imagine how 'irritating' he can be as a permanent, inescapable neighbor!" The mayor shook her head again, with a grimace.
"I doubt that proximity makes him any easier to deal with, anyway," Kaeritha agreed. The mayor snorted a laugh and waved for Kaeritha to take one of the chairs facing her desk.
The knight seated herself in the indicated chair and leaned back, crossing her legs.
"Before I move on to Quaysar," she said in a tone which was as everyday sounding as she could keep it, "I wonder if you could tell me a little more about the Voice." Yalith's eyebrows rose, and Kaeritha shrugged. "I understand that she's almost as new to her office as Trisu is to his lordship," she explained, "and I'd like to have a little bit better feel for her position and personality before I walk into her temple and start asking questions which some priestesses might consider impertinent or even insulting. Especially coming from a champion of someone else's god."
"I see." Yalith rested her elbows on the arms of her chair, steepling her fingers under her chin. She pursed her lips for several seconds, clearly marshaling her thoughts, but Kaeritha saw no evidence of any uneasiness or misgivings.
"The present Voice is younger than the last one," the mayor said finally. "To be honest, when I first met her, I thought she might be too young for the post, but I was wrong. Actually, I think she may seem to be younger than she truly is."
"You do? Why?" Kaeritha asked.
"She's an extraordinarily attractive woman, Dame Kaeritha, but she has one of those faces that will look young until she's at least eighty." The mayor smiled. "When I was younger myself, I would have cheerfully traded two or three fingers from my left hand for her bone structure and coloring. Now I just envy them."
"Oh." Kaeritha smiled back. "One of those."
"Definitely one of those," Yalith agreed. Then she shook her head. "But she doesn't really seem aware of it herself," the mayor continued more seriously. "I sometimes wonder if her appearance was an obstacle for her in her pursuit of her calling, but her vocation is obvious once you've spent even a very few minutes with her. There's a . . . a presence to her that I've never experienced with any other Voice. Once you've met her, I think you'll understand why the Church assigned her to Quaysar."
"I'm sure I will," Kaeritha replied. "At the same time, Mayor, a spiritual vocation doesn't always translate into effectiveness when it comes to managing the more mundane affairs of a temple. I'd imagine that would be even more the case for a priestess who's also a mayor. How would you evaluate her in that regard?"
"I've only been to Quaysar myself once since she became Voice there," Yalith said. "She's visited us here four times since then, but most of the contact between us has been through her handmaidens. So my impressions of her abilities as an administrator are all secondhand, as it were."
She arched an eyebrow, and Kaeritha nodded her understanding of the qualifier.
"Well, having said that," the mayor continued, "I would have to say she seems to be at least as efficient and effective as her predecessor was, which is pretty high praise all by itself. I certainly haven't heard about any internal problems, at any rate. And given my own experiences, I can't say that the difficulties she's apparently had with Trisu of Lorham give me any cause to question her ability to work comfortably with an unprejudiced secular superior."
"I see." Kaeritha considered that for a moment, then cocked her head to one side. "Given what you've said about how relatively little direct contact you've had with her, I suppose that's probably as definitive an opinion as anyone could expect you to have formed. Did you know the previous Voice better than that?"
"Oh, yes!" Yalith smiled. It was a broad smile, warm, yet touched with sadness. "The old Voice came from Kalatha herself, actually. I knew her long before she heard Lillinara's calling. In fact, we grew up together."
"You did? Somehow, I had the impression she was older than that."
"Old? Shandra?" Yalith snorted, then grimaced. "I suppose I shouldn't call her that. I know any Voice gives up her old name and takes a new one in religion. But she was actually a year or two younger than I was, and I'll always think of her as the blond-haired kid who insisted on tagging along when I went fishing in the river."
"So she was actually younger than you," Kaeritha mused. "And from your manner and tone, she sounds as if she were an extraordinary person."
"Indeed she was," Yalith said softly.
"How did she come to die?" Kaeritha asked. "Because I thought she was older than she was, I'd simply assumed it was old age, or perhaps some illness she was unable to fight off because of her age. But if she was as young as you are . . ."
"No one is really sure," Yalith sighed. "Oh, it was an illness, but it came on extraordinarily suddenly, and I think it took her and her physicians by surprise because she'd always been so healthy. The constitution of a courser, she always used to joke with me when we were girls." She shook her head sadly. "But that wasn't enough this time. She became ill one day, and she was gone less than three days later. I didn't even realize she was seriously ill in time to get to Quaysar to tell her goodbye."
"I'm sorry for your loss," Kaeritha said softly. Even sorrier than you can guess, given what I'm beginning to suspect, she added silently to herself. "But you'd say you're pleased with the job the new Voice is doing as her successor?"
"As pleased as anyone could be after losing someone like Shandra," Yalith agreed firmly. "We were extremely lucky to have two such strong Voices in succession. In fact, I think possibly our present Voice may even be better suited to the . . . less pleasant aspects of our disputes with Trisu than Shandra would have been. Her faith is obviously just as deep, but Shandra always shied away from confrontation. She wasn't weak, or anything like that, but she preferred finding a consensus or arriving at compromises. Which is fine, as long as the person on the other side of the dispute is equally willing to be reasonable. Our present Voice is a bit more willing to remember that she speaks as the Mother's Voice when it comes to rebuking Her children's misbehavior."
"So she's been supportive of Kalatha's position against Trisu, not simply concerned by his failure to adequately investigate the deaths of her handmaidens?"
"Oh, yes." Yalith nodded emphatically. "She hasn't made any secret of her feelings in that regard, and she's a strong supporter of our decision to stand fast, at least until we get some sort of reasonable offsetting concessions from Trisu in any compromise settlement. Although she did insist on reviewing the original documents herself before she took any official position."
"She did examine them? Here?"
"No, not here. She was unable to leave Quaysar at the moment, so she sent two of her handmaidens to fetch them back to the temple."
"Just two handmaidens to transport them?" Kaeritha sounded surprised, and Yalith chuckled in harsh understanding.
"We're just as aware as you are of how . . . convenient some people might find it for those documents to disappear, Dame Kaeritha. I sent along an escort of ten war maids, and Lanitha went along to care for the records themselves." She shrugged. "But there weren't any problems. That time, at least."
"I see." Kaeritha frowned thoughtfully. "I'm glad you did send an escort, though," she said. "Just from a purely historical perspective, those documents are priceless. I imagine the war maids have always seen to it that they were properly looked after whenever they left Kalatha."
"That was the only time they ever did leave Kalatha," Yalith replied. "But I'm sure any of my predecessors would have been just as careful about protecting them."
"Oh, I'm sure they would," Kaeritha agreed. "I'm sure they would."
"Hello, Dame Kaeritha."
Leeana Bowmaster had changed a great deal during Kaeritha's absence. Or, no, Kaeritha decided. That conclusion might still be a bit premature. Her appearance had certainly changed a great deal; it remained to be seen how much the young woman under that appearance had changed.
"Hello, Leeana," the knight replied. "You're looking good."
"Different, you mean," Leeana corrected with a smile, almost as if she'd read Kaeritha's mind.
"Well, yes. But in your case, I think, 'different' and 'good' may mean the same thing. And, no, I'm not talking just about outward appearances, young lady. The last time I saw you, you weren't exactly the happiest young woman I'd ever seen."
"Oh." Leeana looked down at her bare toes and actually wiggled. "I guess maybe you have a point," she admitted after a moment.
The two of them stood on one of the main training salle's covered porches. The porch's plank flooring was rough and unfinished under Kaeritha's boots, and must have felt even more so to Leeana's bare feet. But the girl didn't seem to notice that. Nor did she appear aware of how the fine garments, rich embroidery, and semi-precious stones of a great baron's daughter had vanished forever.
Kaeritha was. She'd anticipated changes, and she hadn't expected to find Leeana lounging about in the sorts of gowns her mother would have approved. But the leather breeches and smocks Leeana had favored as casual, get-your-hands-dirty clothing back home at Hill Guard Castle when her mother wasn't looking had also disappeared. Instead, she wore the garments the war maids called the chari and yathu, which together, Kaeritha had discovered, were the standard costume of the actual war maids.
Kaeritha wondered what Leeana's parents would have had to say if they'd seen her at the moment. The chari was bad enough—a short, green kilt which fell barely halfway to her knees and would have been unutterably shocking to any properly reared Sothoii noblewoman. But the tightly laced yathu above it would have reduced that same properly reared Sothoii noblewoman to near hysteria.
"There do seem to have been some changes in your appearance, though," she acknowledged with a smile. She cocked her head. "Are you comfortable with them?"
" 'Comfortable' is such a . . . flexible word," Leeana said with a grimace. She reached up and slid an index finger under the shoulder strap of her yathu. "I've seen heavy draft harnesses that were probably more 'comfortable' for the horses wearing them! Besides," she grimaced again and withdrew her finger to indicate her bosom with a wave of her hand, "it's not as if I really need it."
"Ha! You may think that now, girl, but I think your opinion will change in a year or two." She eyed the girl consideringly for a moment, then chuckled. "As a matter of fact, and bearing your height in mind, I expect you'll end up appreciating it even more than I would. And it probably won't take any 'year or two,' either, now that I think about it!"
"Really?" Leeana looked at her quickly, then blushed and looked back down at her toes. But she also grinned, and Kaeritha shook her head.
"I'd say the odds are in favor of it," she said judiciously. "I was never particularly . . . well endowed myself. I doubt I ever would have been, even if Mistress Sherath hadn't started working my backside off in the Morfintan mage academy's exercise salle when I was a year younger than you are now. But you're already taller than I am, and you're not done growing. I'd say you've still got a bit of filling out to do, and it looks to me like you're probably going to be built a lot like your mother. So wait a few years before you start complaining about the yathu."
"If you say so, Dame Kaeritha," Leeana murmured obediently, and Kaeritha suppressed another chuckle.
She didn't doubt that, at the moment, Leeana did find the yathu confining. For her own part, however, and speaking from personal experience, Kaeritha thoroughly appreciated and approved of that firm support for any reasonably endowed female human being expected to engage in brisk physical exercise. At the same time, she rather suspected that the war maids had chosen that particular form of support at least partly for its shock effect. A way to thumb their collective nose at the standards of feminine "propriety" which they had rejected.
Under different circumstances, the yathu might almost have been described as a short, abbreviated—very abbreviated—bodice, but it wasn't boned and happened to be made out of fabric-lined, glove-supple leather. Whereas the main support of a regular bodice came from below, with little or no weight actually bearing on the shoulders, the yathu was equipped with shoulder straps which crossed on the wearer's shoulder blades. It was shorter, snugger, and stronger than any conventional "bodice" Kaeritha had ever seen, and it was short enough to allow its wearer to do things like crawling lithely and unobtrusively through the bushes without encumbrance. Which also made it ideal as standard wear when it was time for calisthenics or any other form of strenuous physical exercise.
Whether the war maids' intentions had been solely to provide proper support or to combine that with a poke in respectable Sothoii society's eye, however, Kaeritha rather doubted that Baron Tellian—or Baroness Hanatha—would have approved of the yathu's undeniable brevity and snug fit . . . or of the way that their daughter's shapely form (and navel) were exposed for all the world to see.
"Don't go fishing for compliments, young lady," she said now, her tone severe, and Leeana produced a sound suspiciously like a giggle.
That giggle, and the girl's entire body language, did a great deal to reassure Kaeritha. Leeana had been called away from her morning calisthenics to speak with Kaeritha, and the war maids' physical training regimen was as demanding as any Kaeritha herself had ever experienced. It was certainly more rigorous than anything Leeana had ever experienced before leaving Balthar. Not that the girl had ever been indolent or lazy. But the war maids believed in pushing their new recruits—especially the probationary ones—hard. Partly, Kaeritha supposed, that was part of the training intended to make the difference between their old lives and their new ones clear on an emotional as well as an intellectual level. But it was also a testing process designed to identify the young women with the potential and mindset to become war maids.
The great majority of those who went on to become the war maid community's warriors would serve as the light infantry, scouts, and guerrillas most Sothoii thought of whenever they thought about war maids at all. That combat style required speed and stamina more than sheer size or brute strength, and the physical training required to provide those qualities was demanding and unremitting. It had been Kaeritha's observation that most people—including most men, she thought sardonically—didn't much care to invest the focus and sweat required to maintain that high pitch of physical conditioning.
From what she could see so far, it looked as if Leeana was actually enjoying it.
"Are you happy, Leeana?" she asked quietly after a moment, and Leeana looked up quickly. Her smile disappeared, but she met Kaeritha's eyes steadily.
"I don't know," she said frankly. "I've cried myself to sleep a night or two, if that's what you're asking." Her shoulders moved in what could have been called a shrug if it had been a little stronger. "I can't say I didn't expect that, though. And it's not because life here in Kalatha is so hard or because I'm not a baron's daughter anymore. It's because I'm not legally Father and Mother's daughter anymore. Does that make sense?"
"Oh, yes, girl," Kaeritha said softly, and Leeana drew a deep breath.
"But aside from missing Mother and Father—and being miserably homesick from time to time—I'm actually enjoying myself. So far, at least." Her smile returned. "Erlis—she's the Hundred in charge of physical training here in Kalatha—has been running me hard ever since I got here. Sometimes I just want to stop running long enough to drop dead from exhaustion, but I'm learning things about myself that I never knew before. And at least until she gets me brought up to a physical standard she finds acceptable, I'm excused from attending more 'traditional' classes."
"Traditional classes?" Kaeritha repeated.
"Oh, yes." Leeana's smile turned into a wry grin. "I have to admit that I'd hoped running away to the war maids would at least rescue me from the clutches of my tutors. Unfortunately, it turns out that the war maids require all of their members to be literate, and they 'strongly encourage' us to continue with additional education."
"I see," Kaeritha said, hiding a smile of her own as she recalled the team of strong horses it had required to drag her into a classroom when she'd been Leeana's age.
"What matters most, though," Leeana continued quietly, "is that by coming here I've done the most important thing. Father's enemies can't use me against him anymore, and I have the chance to be something besides an obedient little broodmare making babies for some fine stallion who completely controls my life."
"Then I'm glad you have the opportunity," Kaeritha said.
"So am I. Really." Leeana nodded firmly as if to emphasize the mere words.
"Good." Kaeritha rested one hand lightly on the girl's shoulder for a moment. "That was what I wanted to know before I leave for Quaysar."
"Quaysar? You're going to visit the Voice?"
There was something about the way Leeana asked the question that narrowed Kaeritha's eyes.
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"No reason," Leeana said, just a bit too quickly. "It's just—" She broke off, hesitated, then shook her head. "It's just that I have this . . . uncomfortable feeling."
"About what?" Kaeritha was careful to keep any suggestiveness out of her own tone.
"About the Voice," Leeana said in a small voice, as if she were admitting to some heinous fault.
"What sort of feeling? For that matter, why do you have any 'feelings' about her at all? I didn't think you'd even met her."
"I haven't met her," Leeana admitted. "I guess you could say that what I've got is a 'secondhand feeling.' But I've talked to some of the other war maids about her. A lot."
"You have?" Kaeritha's eyes narrowed. Her discussion with Yalith hadn't suggested that the Kalatha community was as heavily focused on the Voice as Leeana seemed to be implying.
"Yes," the girl said. "And to be honest, Dame Kaeritha, it's the way they've been talking to me about her that worries me most."
"Suppose you explain that," Kaeritha suggested. She stepped back and settled her posterior onto the porch's railing, leaning back against one of the upright roof supports and folding her arms across her chest. The morning sunlight was warm across her shoulders as she cocked her head.
"You know I'm the most 'nobly born' person in Kalatha right now, right?" Leeana asked after a moment, and Kaeritha raised one eyebrow. The girl saw it and grimaced. "That's not an 'oh what a wonderful person I am' comment, Dame Kaeritha. What I meant to say is that even though I was only Father's daughter, not his real heir, I've seen a lot more sorts of political and aristocratic backbiting and maneuvering than most of the people here have."
"All right," Kaeritha said slowly, nodding as Leeana paused. "I'll grant you that—on an aristocratic level, at least. Don't make the mistake of assuming that peasants can't be just as contentious. Or just as subtle about the way they go about biting each other's backs."
"I won't. Or, at least, I don't think I will," Leeana replied. "But the thing is, Dame Kaeritha, that the way people here are talking about the Voice strikes me as, well, peculiar."
"Why?"
"First," Leeana said very seriously, her expression intent, "there's exactly which of the war maids seem to be doing most of the talking. It isn't the older ones, or the ones in the most senior positions—not people like Mayor Yalith, or Erlis, for example. And it isn't the very youngest ones, except in a sort of echoing kind of way."
"What do you mean, 'echoing'?"
"It's almost like there's an organized pattern," Leeana said, obviously choosing her words with care. "I think that's what drew my attention to it in the first place, really. There've been enough whispering campaigns organized against Father over the years for me to be automatically suspicious when I seem to be seeing the same thing somewhere else."
"And you think that's what you're seeing here?"
"I think it may be," Leeana said, nodding slowly. "It took a day or two for my suspicions to kick in, and the thing that made me start wondering in the first place was that I seemed to be hearing exactly the same sorts of things, in almost exactly the same sorts of words, from half a dozen or more people."
Kaeritha's blue eyes narrowed even further, and Leeana nodded again.
"It wasn't just a matter of people expressing the same general opinions, Dame Kaeritha. They were making the same arguments. And the way they were doing it—the way they were choosing their words, and who they were talking to—makes me think that it's an organized effort, not something that's happening spontaneously."
It was an enormous loss to the Kingdom of the Sothoii in general that its invincible cultural bias against the possibility of female rulers had deprived the Barony of Balthar of Leeana Bowmaster as its liege, Kaeritha thought. She'd known from the outset that Leeana was keenly intelligent, but the brain behind those jade-green eyes was even better than she'd suspected. How many young women Leeana's age, the knight wondered, thrown into a world and facing a future so radically different from anything they had ever experienced before, would have had enough energy to spare to think analytically about what people around them were saying about anything, far less about someone as distant from her own immediate—and exhausting—experiences as the Voice of Quaysar?
"Tell me more," she invited, still keeping her own voice as neutral as she could.
"The thing that struck me most about what the war maids talking about the Voice were saying," Leeana continued obediently, "was that they all agreed that the new Voice had changed the policies of the old Voice. Changed them for the better, in the opinion of whoever was doing the talking, that was. I know you never actually discussed with me what took you to Kalatha in the first place, Dame Kaeritha, but I knew the sorts of research you'd asked Lord Brandark to do before you left. And—" she glanced away for a moment "—I heard Prince Bahzell and Father discussing it a little. So I know you're really concerned about the disputes between Lord Trisu and the war maids."
Kaeritha frowned, and Leeana shook her head quickly.
"I haven't discussed it with anyone here, Dame Kaeritha! I know you and Mayor Yalith talked about it—or talked about something, anyway—and if Tomanak sent you here, then it's certainly not my place to be blabbering away about it. But that's part of why what I was hearing bothered me, I think, because the same people who were talking about how much they approved of the Voice were talking about Trisu. And what they were saying was that the new Voice, unlike the old Voice, understood that the war maids couldn't put up with the way lords like Trisu were trying to turn the clock back. She understood that it was time the war maids stood up to people like him. That when someone pushed the war maids, the war maids had to push back—hard. Maybe even harder than they'd been pushed in the first place, since they had so little ground they could afford to surrender.
"That was enough to get me started listening to the way they were saying things, not just what they were saying. And when I did, I realized they were suggesting, or even saying outright, in some cases, that it was the Voice, not Mayor Yalith or her Council, who'd really pulled Trisu up short."
"They may believe that," Kaeritha said, forbearing any attempt to pretend Leeana hadn't accurately deduced her purpose in traveling to Kalatha, "but I've spoken to both the mayor and Lord Trisu. From the way both of them speak about the disputes—and about each other—the Voice has definitely played a secondary role, at most."
She watched the girl carefully. There were some thoughts—and suspicions—which she wasn't prepared to share with anyone just yet. Besides, she was curious as to how closely this acute young woman's analysis would parallel her own.
"That's just it," Leeana said. "From what they were saying, the Voice didn't charge right in and begin speaking in Lillinara's voice or anything like that. Instead, they were saying—bragging, almost—that she was too subtle and wise to be that openly 'confrontational' herself. They said it was because she had to maintain the 'neutrality' of her office as Voice. But I've seen and heard about too many 'subtle and wise' noblemen who adopted the same sort of tactics. As far as I can tell, most of them were only avoiding open confrontations so they could hide in the shadows better when it came time to plant a dagger in someone else's back. Either that, or they were setting someone else up to do what they wanted done for them. Preferably someone gullible enough that they could convince him the idea had been his own in the first place."
"Are you suggesting that a Voice of Lillinara is doing that in this case?"
"I'm suggesting that it's possible," Leeana said, undeterred by the slight chill frosting Kaeritha's tone. "And that's not the only thing I think is possible. The way the war maids who seem to approve of the Voice are talking is also undercutting the authority of Mayor Yalith and the Town Council. Not directly, and not openly, maybe, but that's the effect it's having, and I don't think that's an accident. Every time they talk approvingly about how insightful the Voice is, and how clearly she sees what needs to be done, the implication is that without the Voice, Mayor Yalith and the Council wouldn't have seen how important it was to stand up to Trisu. I've seen that before, too. Not personally, but I did pay attention to my history lessons, Dame Kaeritha. I think this is an attempt to undermine the authority of the people who are supposed to be governing Kalatha. And I think the Voice is either actively involved in it herself, for some reason, or else that some third party is using her, as well."
"I see." Kaeritha contemplated Leeana for several more moments, then shrugged. "Is there anything else?" she asked.
"Well," Leeana said, and looked away again. She seemed uncomfortable for some reason, almost a bit flustered. "There's the fact that the ones I'm worried about seem to be actively recruiting from among the younger war maids. I think that's one reason I've heard so much about it in the relatively short time I've been here. The fact that I used to be Father's daughter—still am, really, until my probationary period is over—might make me more valuable in their eyes, and they might figure I'd be young and new enough to be easily impressed and convinced.
"And," she turned to look back at Kaeritha, "some of the other things they've been saying about the Voice make me . . . uncomfortable."
"Like what?" Kaeritha asked.
"It's just . . . well, I suppose—" A faint flush of color brushed Leeana's cheeks. "I never expected to hear someone suggesting that a Voice of Lillinara would be so . . . promiscuous."
"Promiscuous?" Kaeritha fought successfully not to grin, but Leeana's blush darkened anyway.
"I'm not all that innocent, Dame Kaeritha," she said just a touch huffily. "For that matter, I grew up on one of the Kingdom's biggest stud farms, for goodness' sake! So I'm quite familiar with what goes on between men and women, thank you. Well," she added hastily as Kaeritha chuckled despite herself, "as familiar as I can be without actually— That is, as— Oh, you know what I mean!"
"Yes, Leeana," Kaeritha said, her tone just a bit contrite. "I do know what you mean."
"Well," Leeana went on in a slightly mollified voice, "what bothers me I guess is that the people who seem so fond of the Voice's political views are also talking about how 'liberated' her views are on . . . other things."
"Leeana," Kaeritha said carefully, "Lillinara doesn't require celibacy of any of Her Voices. Some of them take individual vows of celibacy when they decide they have a vocation to serve Her, but that's different. A personal decision to free them from other needs and desires in order to concentrate solely on Her, and there's actually some disagreement as to whether or not She really approves of it even then. In fact, her High Voices can't be virgins. She is the Goddess of Women, you know—all women, not just the patron of maidens—and She feels that Her church, and Her priestesses, need to have experienced the things they're going to be counseling Her worshipers about."
"Really?" Leeana considered that for several seconds, her expression intent, then nodded. "That makes sense," she pronounced with the definitiveness of the young.
"I'm glad you approve," Kaeritha murmured, and the girl blushed again. Then she grinned.
"On the other hand," Kaeritha continued, "it sounded to me like you were talking about something you feel goes a bit far even bearing that in mind."
"Well, yes," Leeana agreed, but her expression remained thoughtful, and she cocked her head at Kaeritha. "Can I ask you a question, Dame Kaeritha?"
"Of course you may," Kaeritha assured her, but the girl hesitated a moment, despite the reassurance.
"I was wondering," she said finally, slowly, "about how the other gods feel about that." She looked away, gazing out over the training salle's grounds. "For example, you're a Champion of Tomanak. How does He feel about it?"
"About celibacy?" Kaeritha chuckled. "Let's just say that as the God of Justice, He wouldn't exactly think it was 'just' to require His followers to forswear something that fundamental to the mortal condition. Like Lillinara, He expects us not to be casual about it, and He expects us to recognize and meet any responsibilities which might arise out of it. But all of the Gods of Light celebrate life, Leeana, and I can't think of anything much more 'life-affirming' than the embracing of a loving, shared physical relationship."
"Really?" There was something about that single word which made Kaeritha wonder exactly what the girl was thinking. But then Leeana shook herself, and turned back towards her.
"That makes sense, too," she said. "But it doesn't sound like what the people who worry me are saying, either."
"What do you mean?" Kaeritha asked intently.
"The loving and sharing part seems to get left out a lot," Leeana said simply. "And so does the part about responsibility." Kaeritha frowned, but she didn't interrupt, and the young woman continued. "There were a couple of other parts that surprised me a little, just at first. They shouldn't have, but I guess that despite everything, I've got a lot more 'conventional' leftovers in my attitudes then I realized I did. I mean, the war maids are a community of women who've chosen not to live in a society run by men. Under the circumstances, I should have been surprised if many of them hadn't chosen other women as their partners, not the other way around.
"But even if that surprised me, at first, it didn't take me long to understand it. And what bothered me, Dame Kaeritha, wasn't who someone chose to fall in love with. It was the way these particular war maids were talking about the what the Voice thought about the proper 'freedom' when it comes to choosing lovers, whether they're men or women."
She didn't seem a bit flustered by her subject matter now, Kaeritha noted. It was as if her concentration on explaining what she meant had banished such mundane concerns.
"Why?"
"Because the sort of commitment and responsibility you're talking about doesn't seem very important to them. They talk about it as if it were, well, only physical. As if it's all about selfish pleasure, or just a momentary fling. Like . . . like the other person doesn't really matter, or isn't really real. Just a convenience. I'm not naive enough to think there aren't a lot of people in the world who feel that way anyway, Dame Kaeritha. But these women were laughing—almost snickering—about it, like they knew what they were suggesting was wrong and that only made it better, somehow. And every time I heard one of them saying something like that, I thought about all of the people who already believe that all war maids think that way."
Kaeritha frowned, and her thoughts were grim. It was possible Leeana was overreacting to a few chance words. As she herself had said, she was the product of a Sothoii upbringing herself. Perhaps not quite as conventional as most, but even an 'unconventional' Sothoii rearing was bound to leave a few footprints.
Yet Kaeritha didn't think that was the case. Not only was Leeana keenly intelligent and observant, but the situation she described fitted only too well into the pattern Kaeritha had begun to discern. Or that she was afraid she had, at any rate.
"Do you think I'm imagining things?" Leeana asked, once again almost as if she could read Kaeritha's mind, and the knight shook her head.
"No. I'm certain you're not imagining things, Leeana. It's possible you're reading more into what you've heard than was actually intended, but I don't believe you've imagined anything."
"Oh," Leeana said in a voice which was suddenly so tiny that Kaeritha looked at her in surprise.
"I'd hoped I was," the young woman said softly.
Kaeritha left Kalatha seven days later.
She hadn't intended to stay that long, but her conversation with Leeana had suggested to her that there might be more that needed looking into at Kalatha than she'd thought. Conducting her own discreet investigations took more time than she'd allowed for. But that was all right . . . it also took her longer than she'd expected to secure another opportunity to examine the original charter and land grant.
Mayor Yalith's assistant, Sharral, was as helpful and efficient as ever, but it turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to arrange the visit to the town's archives this time around. Lanitha, Kalatha's librarian and archivist, was relatively new to her position, and more than a bit young for responsibilities of such magnitude. She was, however, attentive and determined to discharge those responsibilities to the very best of her ability. Which, Kaeritha knew from her previous visits to the town archives, was quite high.
This time, though, Lanitha, although she made it obvious she was trying her very best, found it difficult to schedule an opportunity for Kaeritha to consult the required documents. Given their importance to the town of Kalatha itself, and to all war maids in general, Kaeritha wasn't surprised that the young woman responsible for their security and proper care wanted to be present whenever they were consulted. If their positions had been reversed, Kaeritha would have felt exactly the same way. Not only that, but Lanitha had been a great help to her and Yalith when she first examined them. Still, she could have wished for it to take less than three days for Lanitha to clear her schedule sufficiently to allow her to offer Kaeritha the degree of personal assistance the champion of any god, and especially of the God of War and Justice, deserved. And then, on the fourth day, when Kaeritha arrived at the archives, she was surprised (although probably less so than she should have been) to discover that Lanitha had been called away by an unanticipated personal emergency. She'd left her profound apologies and promised she would be available the next day—or the day after that, at the very latest—but it had been simply impossible for her to keep her scheduled appointment.
Despite the undeniable frustration she felt at the delays, Kaeritha had put the time she found on her hands to efficient use. Most casual observers might have been excused for not noticing that, but Kaeritha had been a champion of Tomanak for quite a few years. And one thing champions of Tomanak learned—well, most of His champions, at any rate, Kaeritha had corrected herself with a smile—was how to conduct an unobtrusive investigation. It helped that most people expected a champion's methods to be flashy and dramatic. As, indeed, some of the tools in Kaeritha's arsenal were, she cheerfully admitted. But there were times when it was far better to be discreet, and this seemed to be one of them. Which was why none of the war maids of Kalatha noticed that the visiting champion of Tomanak sharing their meals, working out with them in the exercise salle, or training in weapons craft with them, managed to pick up an amazing amount of information.
Some of it was entirely open and aboveboard, and no less valuable because it was. Kaeritha's own two-sword technique was one she had evolved almost entirely on her own. The fact that she'd been born ambidextrous helped explain why it had occurred to her, but there'd been few weapons masters (or mistresses) in the Empire of the Axe who taught a combat technique which used a primary weapon in each hand. Many of them taught sword and dagger, or sword and dirk, and even more of them taught techniques for fighting with one's off hand, since it was always possible for one's normal weapon hand or arm to be wounded. But all of that was quite different from fighting with matched short swords in both hands simultaneously.
Quite a few of the war maids, however, used a technique which, despite many differences in detail, was very similar overall. Erlis, the Commander of One Hundred in charge of Leeana's physical training class, was one of them, and Kaeritha looked forward to her opportunities to match her own skills against the Hundred's. Erlis appeared to enjoy their training matches just as much as Kaeritha did, although it quickly became apparent to both of them that for all her own experience and skills, the war maid was thoroughly outclassed. But that, as Erlis pointed out herself, was as it ought to be when the person she was measuring her own abilities against was a chosen champion of the God of War.
But in addition to adding some new wrinkles to her own combat repertoire, Kaeritha found the opportunity to spend time with Kalatha's war maids in informal surroundings invaluable. It wasn't so much what they said to her, as what they said to one another . . . or didn't say to her when she asked carefully casual questions. Kaeritha's natural hearing was more acute than that of most humans, although it fell far short of the sensitivity of a hradani like Bahzell. But one of her abilities as Tomanak's champion was to "listen" to conversations she couldn't possibly have overheard otherwise. It wasn't like the telepathy many magi possessed, and she could only "listen" to conversations she knew about and could see with her own eyes. But it meant that even across a crowded ballroom—or a noisy training yard—she could sit in unobtrusively while other people spoke.
It was an ability she used sparingly, because it would have been so easy to misuse. But it was also one which was extraordinarily helpful to any investigator, and she employed it to good effect during her extended stay in Kalatha.
And what she heard confirmed her unhappy suspicion that Leeana had not been an alarmist young woman seeing shadows where none existed. In fact, if anything, the girl had underestimated what was happening.
There was nothing overt enough that Kaeritha could have taken it to a magistrate, but the pattern was clear. There were at least three factions in Kalatha.
One was Mayor Yalith's, which—for the moment, at least—was the most numerous and the most important and influential one. As Yalith herself, its members were angry with Trisu and determined to force him to admit his transgressions. They were gratified by the Quaysar Voice's strong support, but they were still essentially prepared to allow the system to work. Partly because they were convinced of the rectitude of their own positions and believed that, ultimately, the courts must decide in their favor. But also partly because they accepted that it was incumbent upon them to prove that they and their demands had been reasonable from the outset. It wasn't because they were any less angry than anyone else, but they were only too well aware that the subjects of the Kingdom of the Sothoii were predisposed to view all war maids with disapproval. They were determined not to provide that prejudice with any fresh ammunition to use against them.
The second faction Kaeritha had identified consisted of most of the townsfolk who weren't firmly behind their mayor. Their view of the disputes was that the mayor and her council were pushing too hard. It wasn't that they doubted Yalith's arguments or her judgment of the technical legalities of the situation; they simply didn't feel the confrontation with Trisu was ultimately worth what it was likely to cost. Whatever else they might think of him, he was the most powerful noble in the vicinity, and they were going to have to deal with him—and his sons—for years to come, regardless of what any judge in a court might decide. Very few people in that faction, however, were upset enough to actively oppose Yalith. They simply didn't support her, except with a certain disgruntled sense of civic responsibility, and there appeared to be significantly fewer of them than there were of the mayor's strong partisans.
But it was the third faction which worried Kaeritha. The smallest of the three, it was also the angriest. It consisted primarily, although not exclusively, of younger war maids and those too junior in Kalatha's hierarchy to force their own opinions upon the Town Council. The most senior of them whom Kaeritha had identified so far was a mere Commander of Fifty—the equivalent of an infantry captain in the Royal and Imperial Army—but that didn't necessarily mean they weren't influential. They were the ones who were most furious with Trisu, most militant in their insistence that their rights, and those of all war maids, must be defended. They were impatient with any argument which suggested they must be cautious, or appear reasonable. It was time for someone else to be reasonable, as far as they were concerned, and in all honesty, Kaeritha found it easy to sympathize with them in that view.
But many of the conversations she overheard went beyond that. There were no more than ten or fifteen women whom Kaeritha would have considered "ringleaders." The vast majority were no more or less than understandably outraged and angry women reacting to endless years of prejudice and bigotry. But those ten or fifteen Kaeritha had picked out clearly had an organized agenda. They weren't simply angry; they were manipulating the anger of others and using it to subtly undermine the traditional figures of authority in the Kalathan war maid community. That was bad enough, but Leeana had also been correct about the rest of what they were saying. Whether they were actually taking their cue directly from the Voice at Quaysar or not—and at this point, whatever her suspicions, Kaeritha had no way of knowing whether they were—they were using the Voice's supposed statements and views to assert that Lillinara Herself supported self-centered, narcissistic life choices which appalled Kaeritha. And which she was grimly certain would be equally appalling to Lillinara. It wasn't just the denial of responsibility, or the notion that it was morally acceptable to use someone else for one's own advantage or pleasure. It was the fact that they justified that denial and notion at least in part on the basis that it was time the war maids "got even" for all the indignities and oppression they had ever suffered.
Kaeritha knew, from bitter personal experience, the difference between vengeance and justice, and she knew what bitter tang she tasted in the low-voiced, bitter conversations she listened to about her.
Unfortunately, all she had were suspicions. It was nothing she could really take to Yalith, and even if it had been, Yalith was angry enough herself that she might not have listened. Besides, there was something about the mayor's own position that bothered Kaeritha. Yalith's tenure as mayor of Kalatha predated the beginnings of the current confrontation with Trisu. If, as Kaeritha had come to suspect, the original documents at Kalatha had been tampered with somehow, Yalith ought to have been aware of it. Which suggested, logically, that if something nefarious was going on in Kalatha, Yalith was a part of it. Kaeritha didn't think she was, and she'd done a little subtle probing of the mayor's honesty—enough to be as certain as she could without the same sort of examination she'd given Salthan that Yalith honestly and sincerely believed she was in the right.
Which suggested to Kaeritha that something more than mere documents might have been tampered with in Kalatha.
"I am so sorry about the delay, Dame Kaeritha," Lanitha of Kalatha said as she ushered Kaeritha into the main Records Room. "I know your time is valuable, to Tomanak as well as to yourself, and I hate it that you sat around cooling your heels waiting for me for almost an entire week."
She shook her head, her expression simultaneously harassed, irritated, and apologetic.
"It's like there was some sort of curse on my week," she continued, bustling around the Records Room to open the heavy curtains which normally protected its contents and let the daylight in. "Every time I thought I was going to get over here and pull the documents for you, some fresh disaster came rolling out of nowhere."
"That's perfectly all right, Lanitha," Kaeritha reassured her. "I imagine everyone's had weeks like that, you know. I certainly have!"
"Thank you." Lanitha paused to smile gratefully at her. "I'm relieved that you're so understanding. Not that your sympathy makes me look any more efficient and organized!"
Kaeritha only returned her smile and waited, her expression pleasant, while the archivist finished drawing back the curtains and unlocked the large cabinet which contained the most important of Kalatha's official documents.
"Mayor Yalith—or, rather, Sharral—didn't tell me exactly which sections you're particularly interested in this time," she said over her shoulder as she opened the heavy, iron-reinforced door.
"I need to reexamine the section of Kellos' grant where the boundary by the grist mill is established," Kaeritha said casually.
"I see," Lanitha said. She found the proper document case, withdrew it from the cabinet, and set it carefully on the desk before the Records Room's largest eastern window. Her tone was no more than absently courteous. But Kaeritha was watching her as carefully and unobtrusively as she'd ever watched anyone in her life, and something about the set of the archivist's shoulders suggested Lanitha was less calm than she wanted to appear. It wasn't that Kaeritha detected any indication that Lanitha was anything but the honest, hard-working young woman she seemed to be. Yet there was still that something . . . almost as if Lanitha had some inner sense that her own loyalties were at odds with one another.
The archivist opened the document case and laid the original copy of Lord Kellos' grant to the war maids of Kalatha on the desktop. Kaeritha had done enough research among fragile documents to stand patiently, hands clasped behind her, while Lanitha carefully opened the old-fashioned scroll and sought the section Kaeritha had described.
"Here it is," the archivist said finally, and stepped back out of the way so that Kaeritha could examine the document for herself.
"Thank you," Kaeritha said courteously. She moved closer to the desk and bent over the faded, crabbed handwriting. The document's age was only too apparent, and its authenticity was obvious. But the authenticity of Trisu's copy had been equally obvious, she reminded herself, and rested the heel of her hand lightly on the pommel of her left-hand sword.
It was a natural enough pose, if rather more overly dramatic than Kaeritha preferred. The last time she'd been in this room, she'd taken both swords off and laid them to one side, and she hoped Lanitha wasn't wondering why she hadn't done the same thing this time. If the librarian asked, Kaeritha was prepared to point out that last time, she'd been sitting here for hours while she studied the documents and took notes. This time, she only wanted to make a quick recheck of a single section. And, as Lanitha's own profuse apologies had underscored, she was behind schedule and running late.
There it was. She leaned forward, studying the stilted phrases more intently, and ran the index finger of her right hand lightly along the relevant lines. Only a far more casual archivist than Lanitha could have avoided cringing when anyone, even someone who'd already demonstrated her respect for the fragility of the documents in her care, touched one of them that way. The other woman moved a half-step closer, watching Kaeritha's right hand with anxious attentiveness . . . exactly as the knight had intended.
Because she was so focused on Kaeritha's right hand, she failed to notice the faint flicker of blue fire which danced around the left hand resting on the champion's sword hilt. It wasn't very bright, anyway—Tomanak knew how to be unobtrusive when it was necessary, too—but it was enough for Kaeritha's purposes.
"Thank you, Lanitha," she said again, and stepped back. She took her hand from her sword as she did so, and the blue flicker disappeared entirely. "That was all I needed to see."
"Are you certain, Milady?" Lanitha's tone and expression were earnest, and Kaeritha nodded.
"I just wanted to check my memory of the words," she assured the archivist.
"Might I ask why, Milady?" Lanitha asked.
"I'm still in the middle of an investigation, Lanitha," Kaeritha reminded her, and the other woman bent her head in acknowledgment of the gentle rebuke. Kaeritha gazed at her for a moment, then shrugged. "On the other hand," the knight continued, "it's not as if it's not going to come out in the end, anyway, I suppose."
"Not as if what isn't going to come out?" Lanitha asked, emboldened by Kaeritha's last sentence.
"There's a definite discrepancy between the original documents here and Trisu's so-called copies," Kaeritha told her. "I have to say that when I first saw his copy, I was astonished. It didn't seem possible that anyone could have produced such a perfect-looking forgery. But, obviously, the only way his copies could be that different from the originals has to involve a deliberate substitution or forgery."
"Lillinara!" Lanitha said softly, signing the Mother's full moon. "I knew Trisu hated all war maids, but I never imagined he'd try something like that, Milady! How could he possibly expect it to pass muster? He must know that sooner or later someone would do what you've just done and compare the forgery to the original!"
"One thing I learned years ago, Lanitha," Kaeritha said wearily as she watched the archivist carefully returning the land grant to its case, "is that criminals always think they can 'get away with it.' If their minds didn't work that way, they wouldn't be criminals in the first place!"
"I suppose not." Lanitha sighed and shook her head. "It just seems so silly—and sad—when you come down to it."
"You're wrong, you know," Kaeritha said quietly, her voice so flat that Lanitha looked quickly back over her shoulder at her.
"Wrong, Milady?"
"It isn't silly, or sad," Kaeritha told her. "Whatever the original motivation may have been, this sort of conflict between the documents here and those at Thalar is going to play right into the hands of everyone else like Trisu. It isn't the sort of minor discrepancy that can be explained away as clerical error. It's a deliberate forgery, and there are altogether too many people out there who are already prepared to think the worst about you war maids. It won't matter to them that you have the originals, while he has only copies. What will matter is that they'll assume you must have made the alterations."
"Then I suppose it's a good thing a Champion of Tomanak is on the spot, isn't it, Milady? Even the most prejudiced person would have to take your word for it that Trisu or someone working for him is the forger."
"Yes, Lanitha," Kaeritha said grimly. "They certainly would."
The road to Quaysar ran almost due east from Kalatha, and the morning sun shone brightly into Kaeritha's face two days later as Cloudy trotted briskly along. Birds soared and dipped overhead, calling to one another against the impossibly blue sky as they rode the brawny wind gusting out of the northwest, and the endless sea of young grass rippled and hissed musically as the stiff gusts pushed waves across it. The morning was still cool, but there was a sense of life and energy wrapped up in the wind and the high, beautiful cries of the birds, and Kaeritha drew that energy deep into her lungs.
It was tempting to abandon herself to the sensual enjoyment of the new day, but the dark suspicion which had first whispered to her in Trisu's library had hardened into something even darker which cast its own ominous shadow across the morning.
She still had altogether too many questions and far too few answers, she reminded herself. Yet even as she conscientiously bore that in mind, she knew which way the facts she had been able to test all pointed. What she didn't begin to know was how all this could have happened, or why Lillinara and Tomanak seemed to have agreed that it was her job to deal with it.
Not that she was tempted even for a moment to pretend that it wasn't her job. This was exactly the sort of task which had attracted her to Tomanak's service in the first place. The fact that she wished with all her heart that someone like the war maids had been available to her mother—or to her—when she was a child only stiffened her resolve still further. She had no clear idea exactly what she was going to encounter at Quaysar, yet there was a stink of Darkness about this entire business. It was only too probable that she was riding directly into that Dark, but it was one of a Champion of Tomanak's functions to carry Light into even the deepest Darkness.
Of course, sometimes the Light failed.
Dame Kaeritha Seldansdaughter knew that, just as she knew how few of Tomanak's champions ever died in bed. But if that was the price to hold off the Dark which had claimed fallen Kontovar, it was one she would pay. And if worse came to worst, the letter she had dispatched to Bahzell under Sword Seal contained all of her suspicions, discoveries, and deductions. If it should happen that this time she was fated to fail, she knew with absolute certainty that her brother would avenge her and complete her task as surely as she would have done that for him.
She smiled warmly at the thought, then shook off her dark musings and raised her head, turning her face more fully to the sun and luxuriating in its warmth.
Quaysar was impressive.
The temple's original architects had found one of the few genuine hilltops the Wind Plain offered. It was obvious as Kaeritha approached that the upthrust knob upon which the temple and the town which supported it stood was basically a solid plug or dome of granite. It was nowhere near as towering as it had seemed at first glance, she realized as she drew closer. But it didn't have to be, either. The low, slightly rolling flatlands of the Wind Plain stretched away in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and even Quaysar's relatively low perch allowed it to command its surroundings effortlessly.
The old town of Quaysar, which had been folded into the temple community, was surrounded by a low but defensible wall. Newer buildings and outlying farms spread out from the old town along the arms of the crossroads which met beside the sizable pond or small lake at the base of the granite pedestal which supported the temple, and Kaeritha saw workers laboring in the fields as Cloudy trotted past them.
The temple itself had its own wall, which was actually higher than that of the old town and rose sheer from the very lip of the temple's stony perch. That sort of security feature was no part of the temples of Lillinara in the Empire of the Axe, but the Empire was the oldest, most settled realm of Norfressa. Things had been far less orderly on the Wind Plain when Quaysar was first constructed. For that matter, they still were, she supposed. At any rate, she didn't blame the original builders for seeing to it that their temple was not simply located in the most defensible position available but well fortified, to boot.
She couldn't see much of the temple buildings with the wall in the way, but the three traditional towers of any temple of Lillinara rose above them. The Tower of the Mother, with its round, alabaster full moon, was flanked by the slightly lower crescent moon-crowned Tower of the Maiden and the Tower of the Crone, with its matching globe of obsidian. The added height of the prominence upon which the entire temple stood lifted them even higher against the blue sky and high-piled, snow-white clouds to the south, and Kaeritha felt her imagination stir as she realized how they must look against the night heavens when the silver-white glow of Lillinara touched their stonework. Quaysar was far from the largest temple of Lillinara Kaeritha had ever seen, but its location and special significance gave it a majesty and a sense of presence she had seldom seen equaled.
Yet as she drew closer still, the imagined image of towers, burning with cool, radiant light against the star-strewn heavens faded, and an icy chill touched her heart. No silver Lady's Light clung to those towers or those walls under the warm sunlight of early afternoon. But Kaeritha's eyes weren't like those of other mortals. They Saw what others didn't, and her mouth tightened as an ominous, poison-green light flickered at the corner of her vision.
She knew that stomach-churning green. She'd Seen it before, and her mind went back to a rainy day in Baron Tellian's library when she'd told him how unhappily familiar with the presence of the Dark champions of Tomanak were.
She inhaled deeply and gazed up at the temple, trying to isolate those elusive flickers of green. She couldn't, and her jaw clenched as she failed. Each of Tomanak's champions perceived evil and the handiwork of the Dark Gods in his or her own, unique fashion. Bahzell, she knew, received what he called "feelings"—an impression of things not yet fully perceived, yet somehow known. Another champion she had known heard music which guided him. But Kaeritha, like some magi to whom she had spoken, Saw. For her, it was the interplay of light and shadow—or of Light and Dark. That inner perception had never yet failed or deceived her, and yet today, the meaning of what she Saw was . . . unclear. She couldn't pin it down, couldn't even be positive that the green light-devils dancing at the edges of her vision were coming from the temple, and not the town clustered below it.
That shouldn't have happened. Especially not when she'd come already primed by her suspicions and earlier investigations. The revealing glare of evil should have been obvious to her . . . unless someone—or something—with enormous power was deliberately concealing it.
She made herself exhale and shook herself. The concealment wasn't necessarily directed specifically against her, she told herself. Whatever was happening in Quaysar was clearly part of a years-long effort, and the very thing which would make Quaysar such a prize in the eyes of the Dark was its importance to Lillinara and, specifically, to the Sothoii war maids. But that also meant Quaysar was more prominent, and more likely to draw pilgrims and visitors, than most other temples of its relatively modest size. And with pilgrims came those besides Kaeritha whose eyes might See what the Dark preferred to keep hidden.
Yet logical as that conclusion was, the fact remained that it required tremendous power to so thoroughly obscure the inner sight of a champion of Tomanak. Indeed, such power must have completely blinded the perceptions—whether of sight, or hearing, or sensing—of anyone less intimately bound to the service of her god.
Which meant that somewhere atop that timeworn tooth of granite waited a servant of the Greater Dark.
Yes, she told herself grimly. And it's probably the "Voice" herself. In fact, it would almost have to be. There's no way anything this Dark and powerful could hide itself from an uncorrupted Voice. But whatever it is, it doesn't have complete control. Not even a Dark God himself could keep me from Seeing if that were the case. Great! She snorted in harsh laughter. It's not everyone in Quaysar. Marvelous. All I have to do is assume that anyone I meet serves the Dark until she proves differently!
She closed her eyes and drew another deep breath.
All right, Tomanak, she thought. You never promised it would be easy. And I suppose I'd be riding off in search of reinforcements instead of riding in all by my fool self, if my skull wasn't just as thick as Bahzell's. But it is. So, if You don't have anything else to do this afternoon, why don't You and I go call on the Voice?
"Of course, Dame Kaeritha! Come in, come in! We've been expecting you."
The officer in command of the temple's largely ceremonial gate guard bowed deeply and swept his arm at the open gate in a welcoming gesture. He straightened to find Kaeritha gazing down at him from Cloudy's saddle with a quizzical expression and frowned ever so slightly, as if surprised that she hadn't ridden straight past at his invitation.
"Expecting me?" she said, and he cleared his throat.
"Uh, yes, Milady." He shook himself. "The Voice warned us several days ago that you would be coming to visit us," he said in a less flustered tone.
"I see." Kaeritha filed that information away along with the officer's strong Sothoii accent and the warmth which had infused his own voice as he mentioned the Voice. It was uncommon for a temple of Lillinara in the Empire of the Axe to have its gate guard commanded by a man. It was scarcely unheard of, even there, however, given the small percentage of Axewomen who followed the profession of arms, and she supposed it made even more sense here in the Kingdom of the Sothoii, where even fewer women were warriors. Yet she also saw two war maids in chari and yathu standing behind him, with swords at their hips, crossed bandoliers of throwing stars, and the traditional war maid garrottes wound around their heads like leather headbands. Given the special significance Quaysar held for all war maids, she found it . . . interesting that the temple's entire guard force didn't consist solely of them.
The way the guard commander had spoken of the Voice was almost equally interesting, especially from a native Sothoii. He seemed completely comfortable in the service of a temple not simply dedicated to the goddess of women but intimately associated with the creation of all those "unnatural" war maids. Undoubtedly, anyone who would have accepted the position in the first place must be more enlightened than most of his fellow Sothoii males, but there was more than simple acceptance or even approval in his tone. It came far closer to something which might almost have been called . . . obeisance. For that matter, Kaeritha didn't much care for the look in his eyes, although she would have been hard put to pin down what it was about it that bothered her.
"Yes, Milady," the officer continued. "She knew you'd visited Kalatha and Lord Trisu, and she told us almost a week ago that you would be visiting us, as well." He smiled. "And, of course, she made it abundantly clear that we were to greet you with all of the courtesy due to a champion of the War God."
Kaeritha glanced at the rest of his guard force: the two war maids she'd already noticed and three more men in the traditional Sothoii breastplate and leather. They were too well trained to abandon their stance of professional watchfulness, but their body language and expressions matched the warmth in their commander's voice.
"That was very considerate of the Voice," she said after a moment. "I appreciate it. And she was quite correct; I have come to Quaysar to meet with her. Since she was courteous enough to warn you I was coming, did she also indicate whether or not she would be able to grant me an audience?"
"My instructions were to pass you straight in, and I believe you'll find Major Paratha, the commander of the Voice's personal guards, waiting to escort you directly to her."
"I see the Voice is as foresightful as she is courteous," Kaeritha said with a smile. "As are those who serve her and the Goddess here in Quaysar."
"Thank you for those kind words, Milady." The officer bowed again, less deeply, and waved at the open gateway once more. "But we all know only serious matters could have brought you this far from the Empire, and the Voice is eager for Major Paratha to bring you to her."
"Of course," Kaeritha agreed, inclining her head in a small, answering bow. "I hope we meet again before I leave Quaysar," she added, and touched Cloudy gently with her heel.
The mare trotted through the open gate. The tunnel beyond it was longer than Kaeritha had expected. The temple's defensive wall was clearly thicker than it had appeared from a distance, and the disk of sunlight waiting to welcome her at its farther end seemed tiny and far away. Her shoulders were tight, tension sang in her belly, and she was acutely conscious of the silent menace of the murder holes in the tunnel ceiling as she passed under them. This wasn't the first time she'd ridden knowingly into what she suspected was an ambush, and she knew she appeared outwardly calm and unconcerned. It just didn't feel that way from her side.
Major Paratha was waiting for her, and Kaeritha raised a mental eyebrow as she realized the major was accompanied only by a groom who was obviously there to take care of Cloudy for her. Apparently, whatever the Voice had in mind included nothing so crude as swords in the temple courtyard.
"Milady Champion," Paratha murmured, bending her head in greeting. The major had a pronounced Sothoii accent, and stood an inch or so taller than Kaeritha herself, but she wore combination plate and chain armor much like Kaeritha's own and carried a cavalry saber. If she was a war maid, she was obviously one of the minority who'd trained with more "standard" weapons.
That much was apparent the instant Kaeritha glanced at her, just as it would have been to anyone else. But that was all "anyone else" might have seen. The additional armor Paratha wore was visible only to Kaeritha, and she tensed inside like a cat suddenly faced by a cobra as she Saw the corona of sickly, yellow-green light which outlined the major's body. The sensation of "wrongness" radiating from her was like a punch in the belly to Kaeritha, a taste so vile she almost gagged physically and wondered for a moment how anyone could possibly fail to perceive it as clearly as she did.
"Quaysar is honored by your visit," the tall woman continued, smiling, her voice so bizarrely normal sounding after what Kaeritha had Seen that it required all of Kaeritha's hard-trained self-control not to stare at her in disbelief.
"Major Paratha, I presume," she replied pleasantly, instead, after she'd dismounted, and smiled as if she'd noticed nothing at all.
"I am," Paratha confirmed. "And our Voice has bidden me welcome you in her name and assure you that she and the entire temple stand ready to assist you in any way we may."
"Her graciousness and generosity are no less than I would expect from a Voice of the Mother," Kaeritha said. "And they are most welcome."
"Welcome, perhaps," Paratha responded, "yet they're also the very least the Mother's servants can offer a Servant of Tomanak who rides in search of justice. And since you come to us upon that errand, may I guide you directly to the Voice? Or would you prefer to wash and refresh yourself after your ride, first?"
"As you say, Major, I come in search of justice. If the Voice is prepared to see me so quickly, I would prefer to go directly to her."
"Of course, Milady," Paratha said, with another pleasant smile. "If you'll follow me."
Well, Kaeritha thought as she followed Paratha into the temple complex, at least I can be sure where to find one of my enemies.
It took a physical act of will to keep her hands away from the hilts of her weapons while she trailed along behind the major. Paratha seemed to glow in the temple's hushed, reverent dimness, and tendrils of the sickly radiance which clung to her reached out to embrace others as they passed. There was something nauseating about the slow, lascivious way those dully glowing light serpents caressed and stroked those they touched. Most of them gave no indication that they realized anything had touched them, but as Kaeritha walked past them behind Paratha, she Saw tiny, ugly spots, like a leprosy of evil, upon them. They were so small, those spots—hardly visible, only a tiny bit more intense than any normal, fallible mortal might be expected to bear. Yet there were scores of them on most of the acolytes and handmaidens she and Paratha passed, and they blazed briefly stronger and uglier as the major's corona reached out to them. Then they faded, sinking inward, until not even Kaeritha could See them.
That was bad enough, but those who did feel something when Paratha's vile web brushed over them were worse. However hard they tried to conceal it, they felt the caress of the Darkness draped about Paratha, and a flicker of pleasure—almost a twisted ecstasy—danced ever so briefly across their faces.
Kaeritha's pulse thudded harder and faster as they moved deeper and deeper into the temple. They'd entered through the Chapel of the Crone, which was not the avenue of approach Kaeritha would have chosen in Paratha's place. Whatever crawling evil had infested Quaysar, this was still a temple of Lillinara. To defile its buildings and, even more, its inhabitants and servitors might be an enormous triumph for the Dark, but the stones themselves must remember to whose honor and reverence they had been raised. However great the triumph, it could not pass undetected forever, and of all of Lillinara's aspects, it was the Crone, the Avenger, whose fury Kaeritha would have least liked to face.
And yet, there was also a sort of fitness, almost a logic, to Paratha's chosen course, for the Crone was the Avenger. She was the aspect of the goddess most steeped in blood and vengeance. Her Third Face, most apt to merciless destruction. There were those, including one Kaeritha Seldansdaughter, who felt that the Crone all too often verged upon the Dark Herself, and so perhaps there was a certain resonance between this chapel and the shadowy web which rode Paratha's shoulders and soul.
"Tell me, Major," she asked casually, "have you been in Lillinara's service long?"
"Almost twelve years, Milady," Paratha replied.
"And how long have you commanded the Voice's guards?"
"Only since she arrived here," Paratha said, glancing back over her shoulder at Kaeritha with another smile. "I was assigned to the Quaysar Guard almost eight years ago, and I commanded the previous Voice's guards for almost a year and a half before her death."
"I see," Kaeritha murmured, and the major returned her attention to leading the way through the temple.
They passed through the chapel, and Kaeritha felt the accumulation of Darkness pressing against her shoulders, like a physical presence at her back, as she moved deeper and deeper into the miasma of corruption which had invaded the temple. She was afraid, more afraid than she'd believed she could be even after she'd deduced that Quaysar must be the center of it all. Whatever evil was at work here, it was subtle and terrifyingly powerful, and it must have worked its weavings even longer than she had believed possible. The outer precincts of the temple, and those members of the temple community furthest from the centers of power, like the gate guards who'd greeted her upon her arrival, were least affected. She wondered if that was deliberate. Had they been left alone, aside from just enough tampering to keep them from noticing what was happening at Quaysar's core, as a part of the corruption's mask? Or had whatever power of the Dark was at work here simply left them for later, after it had fully secured its grasp on the inner temple?
Not that it mattered much either way at the moment. What mattered were the barriers she sensed going up behind her. The waiting strands of power, snapping up, no longer threads but cables. The fly had entered the web of its own volition, arrogant in its own self-confidence, and now it was too late for escape.
She glanced casually over her shoulder and saw more than a dozen other women, the ones who had reacted most strongly to the touch of Paratha's Darkness, following behind. They looked as if they were merely continuing whatever errands had been theirs before Kaeritha's arrival, but she knew better. She could See the latticework of diseased radiance which bound them together, and the shroud about Paratha was growing stronger, as if it were less and less concerned about even attempting to conceal its presence.
They passed rooms and chambers whose functions Kaeritha could only guess at, and then they entered what was obviously a more residential area of the temple. She had a vague impression of beautiful works of art, religious artifacts, mosaics and magnificent fabrics. Fountains sang sweetly, water splashed and trickled through ornate channels where huge golden fish swam lazily, and a cool, hushed splendor lay welcomingly all about her.
She noticed all of it . . . and none of it. It was unimportant, peripheral, brushed aside by the tempest of Darkness she felt gathering all about her, sweeping towards her from all directions. It was a subtler and less barbaric Darkness than she and Bahzell and Vaijon had confronted in the Navahkan temple of Sharna, and yet it was just as strong. Possibly even stronger, and edged with a malice and a sense of endless, cunning patience far beyond that of Sharna and his tools.
And she faced it alone.
Paratha opened a final pair of double doors of polished ebony inlaid with alabaster moons, and bowed deeply to Kaeritha. The major's smile was as deep and apparently sincere as the one with which she'd first greeted Kaeritha, but the mask had grown increasingly threadbare. Kaeritha Saw the same green-yellow glow at the backs of Paratha's eyes, and she wondered what the other woman Saw when she looked at her.
"The Voice awaits you, Milady Champion," Paratha said graciously, and Kaeritha nodded and stepped past her through the ebony doors.
The outsized chamber beyond was obviously intended for formal audiences, yet it was equally obviously part of someone's personal living quarters. Pieces of art, statues, and furniture—much of it comfortably worn, for all its splendor—formed an inviting focus for the vaguely throne-like chair at the chamber's center.
A woman in the glowing white robes of a Voice of Lillinara sat in that chair. She was young, and quite beautiful, with long hair almost as black as Kaeritha's own and huge brown eyes in an oval face. Or Kaeritha thought so, anyway. It was hard to be certain when the poison-green glare radiating from the Voice blinded her so.
"Greetings, Champion of Tomanak," a silvery soprano, sweeter and more melodious than Kaeritha's, said. "I have longed for longer than you may believe to greet a champion of one of Lillinara's brothers in this temple."
"Have you, indeed, Milady?" Kaeritha replied, and no one else needed to know how much effort it took to keep her own voice conversational and no more than pleasant. "I'm pleased to hear that, because I've found myself equally eager to make your acquaintance."
"Then it would seem to be a fortunate thing that both of our desires have been satisfied this same day," the Voice said.
Kaeritha nodded and bent her head in the slightest of bows. She straightened, rested the heel of her right hand lightly on the hilt of one of her swords, and opened her mouth to speak again.
But before she could say a word, she felt a vast, powerful presence strike out at her. It slammed over her like a tidal wave, crushing as an earthquake, liquid and yet thicker and stronger than mortar or cement. It wrapped a crushing cocoon about her, reaching out to seize her and hold her motionless, and her eyes snapped wide.
"I don't know what you intended to say, Champion," that soprano voice said, and now it was colder than Vonderland ice and sibilant menace seemed to hiss in its depths. "It doesn't matter, though." The Voice laughed, the sound like fragments of glass shattering on a stone floor, and shook her head. "The arrogance of you 'champions'! Each of you so confident he or she will be protected and guided and warded from harm! Until, of course, the time comes for someone like your master to discard you."
Kaeritha felt the power behind the Voice pressing upon her own vocal cords to silence her, and said nothing. She only gazed at the Voice, standing motionless in the clinging web of Dark power, and the Voice laughed again and stood.
"I suppose it's possible that you truly have found a way to interfere with my plans here, little champion. If so, that will be more than a mere inconvenience. You see? I admit it. Yet it isn't something I haven't planned against and allowed for all along. The time had to come when someone would begin to suspect my Mistress was playing Her little games here in Quaysar. But, oh, Dame Kaeritha, the damage I've done to your precious war maids and their kingdom first! But perhaps you'd care to dispute that with me?"
She made a small gesture, and Kaeritha felt pressure on her vocal cords vanish.
"You had something you'd care to say?" the Voice mocked her.
"They aren't my 'precious war maids,'" Kaeritha said after a moment, and even she was vaguely surprised by how calm and steady her voice sounded. "And you're scarcely the first to try to do them ill. Some of the damage you've inflicted will stick, no doubt. I admit that. But damage can be healed, and Tomanak—" it seemed to her that the Voice flinched ever so slightly at that name "—is the God of Truth, as well as Justice and War. And the truth is always the bane of the Dark, is it not, O 'Voice'?"
"So you truly think these stone-skulled Sothoii will actually believe a word of it? Or that the war maids themselves will believe it?" The Voice laughed yet again. "I think not, little champion. My plans go too deep and my web is too broad for that. I've touched and . . . convinced too many people—like that pathetic little puppet Lanitha, who believes Lillinara Herself commanded her to help safeguard my minor alterations so the war maids get what should have been theirs to begin with. Or your darling Yalith and her council, who don't even remember that they used to say anything else. As you yourself told their fool of an archivist, those who already hate and despise the war maids—those like Trisu—will never believe that they didn't forge the 'original documents' at Kalatha. And the war maids won't believe they're forgeries either. Not after all my careful spadework. And not without a champion of Tomanak to attest to the legitimacy of Trisu's copies . . . and to explain how Kalatha's come to have been altered without the connivance of Yalith and her Council. And I'm very much afraid that you won't be around to tell them."
"Perhaps not," Kaeritha said calmly. "There are, however, other champions of Tomanak, and one of them will shortly know all I know and everything I've deduced. I think I could safely rely upon him to accomplish my task for me if it were necessary."
The Voice's brown eyes narrowed and she frowned. But then she forced her expression to smooth once again, and shrugged.
"Perhaps you're correct, little champion," she said lightly. "Personally, I think the damage will linger. I've found such fertile ground on both sides—the lords who hate and loath everything the war maids stand for, and the war maids whose resentment of all the insults and injustices they and their sisters have endured over the years burns equally hot and bitter. Oh, yes, those will listen to me, not your precious fellow champion. They will believe what suits their prejudices and hatreds, and I will send my handmaidens forth to spread the word among them. My handmaidens, little champion, not those of that stupid, gutless bitch this place was built for!"
She glared at Kaeritha, and the knight felt the exultant hatred pouring off of her like smoke and acid.
"And to fan the flames properly," the false Voice continued, her soprano suddenly soft and vicious . . . and hungry, "Trisu is about to take matters into his own hands."
Kaeritha said nothing, but the other woman saw the question in her eyes and laughed coldly.
"There are already those who believe he connived at—or possibly even personally ordered—the murder of two handmaidens of Lillinara. He didn't, of course. For all his bigotry, he's proven irritatingly resistant to suggestions which might have led him to that sort of direct action. But that isn't what the war maids think. And it won't be what they think when men in his colors attack Quaysar itself. When they ride in through the gates of the town and the temple under his banner, coming as envoys to the Voice, and then butcher every citizen of Quaysar and every servant of the temple they can catch."
Despite herself, Kaeritha couldn't keep the horror of the images the false Voice's words evoked out of her eyes, and the other woman's smile belonged on something from the depths of Krahana's darkest hell.
"There will be survivors, of course. There always are, aren't there? And I'll see to it that none of the survivors anyone knows about were ever part of my own little web. The most attentive examination by one of your own infallible champions of Tomanak will only demonstrate that they're telling the truth about what they saw and who they saw doing it. And one of the things they will see, little champion, will be myself and my personal guards and the most senior priestesses, barricading ourselves into the Chapel of the Crone to make our final stand. Trisu's men will attempt to break into it after us, of course. And I will call down the Lady's Wrath to utterly destroy the chapel's attackers . . . and everyone inside it. Which will neatly explain why there are no bodies. Or, at least, none of our bodies."
She shook her head in mock sorrow.
"No doubt some of Trisu's fellows will be horrified. Others will be charitable enough to believe he simply ran mad, but some of them will feel he was justified in burning out this nest of perversions, especially when the question of forged documents comes to the fore. And whatever Tellian and the Crown may do, little champion, the damage will be done. If Trisu is punished while protesting his innocence and flourishing his proof of forgery, then his fellow lords will blame his liege and the King for a miscarriage of justice. And if he isn't punished—if, for example, some interfering busybody champion of Tomanak should examine him and find he's telling the truth and had nothing to do with the attack—then the war maids will be convinced it's all part of a cover-up and that he's escaped justice. And so will be many within the Church of Lillinara."
"Was that your plan all along?" Kaeritha asked. "To sow dissension and hatred and distrust?"
"Well, that and to enjoy the pretty fires and all the lovely killing, of course," the false Voice agreed, pouting as she studied her polished fingernails.
"I see." Kaeritha considered that for a moment, then cocked an eyebrow at the other woman. "I imagine it wasn't too difficult to assassinate the old Voice once Paratha became the commander of her bodyguards. I don't know whether you used poison or a spell, and I don't suppose it matters much, either way. But I would like to know what you did with the Voice who was supposed to replace her."
The false Voice froze, staring at her for just a moment. It was only an instant, almost too brief to be noticed, and then she smiled.
"What makes you think anyone did anything 'with' me? There was no need. It's not as if I were the first oh-so-perfect, straight and narrow priest or priestess to realize the truth, you know. Or would you pretend that no others have ever joined me in transferring my allegiance to a goddess more worthy of my worship?"
"No," Kaeritha acknowledged. "But it's not as if it happens very often, either. And it's never happened at all in the case of a true Voice. Nor has it in your case. You were never a priestess of the Mother—or did you truly think you could fool a Champion of Tomanak about that?" She grimaced. "I knew the moment I Saw you that you were no priestess of Lillinara. In fact, I'm not entirely certain you were ever even human in the first place. But the one thing I'm positive of is that whoever—or whatever—you may be or look like, you are not the Voice the Church assigned here."
"Very clever," the false Voice hissed. She glared at Kaeritha for several seconds, then shook herself. "I'm afraid that sweet little girl suffered a mischief before she could take up her duties here," she said with pious sorrow. "I know how dreadfully it disappointed her—in fact, she told me so herself, just before I cut her heart out and Paratha and I ate it in front of her." She smiled viciously. "And since it bothered her so, and since I was in some small way responsible for her failure, I thought it incumbent upon me to come and discharge those responsibilities for her. A duty which I am now about to complete."
"Ah." Kaeritha nodded. "And just where do I fit into these plans of yours?"she inquired.
"Why, you die, of course," the false Voice told her. "Oh, not immediately—not physically, that is. I'm afraid we'll have to settle for just destroying your soul, for the moment. Then I'll replace it with a little demon whose essence I happen to have handy. He'll keep the flesh alive until 'Trisu' gets around to attacking. Who knows?" She smiled terribly. "Perhaps he'll enjoy experimenting with some of my guards. I'm afraid you won't be around anymore to observe the way he broadens your sexual horizons, but no doubt he'll be amused. And then, when Trisu attacks, you'll die gallantly, fighting to defend the temple against its desecrators. I think that will add a certain artistic finish to the entire affair, don't you? And whether it does or not, the opportunity to treat one of Tomanak's little pets to the experience she so amply deserves would make this entire investment of effort worth while in its own right."
"I see," Kaeritha repeated. "And you believe that you can do all of this to me because—?"
"I don't believe anything," the false Voice told her flatly. "You've been mine to do with as I chose from the instant you stepped into this chamber, you stupid bitch. Why do you think you haven't been able to so much as move your head, or shift your feet?"
"A good question," Kaeritha conceded. "But there's a better one."
"What 'better one'?" the false Voice sneered disdainfully.
"Why do you think I haven't been able to?" Kaeritha asked calmly, and both swords hissed from their sheaths as she catapulted towards the other woman.
The sudden eruption of movement took the false Voice completely by surprise. She'd never even suspected that Kaeritha had simply chosen not to move or speak when she became aware of the power crushing down upon her. Whoever—or whatever—the "Voice" might be, she had never before tried to control a champion of Tomanak. If she had, she would have realized that no coercion, no spell of control or compulsion, even backed by the power of another god's avatar, could hold the will or mind of one who had sworn herself to the War God's service and touched His soul as He had touched hers. And because the false Voice hadn't realized that, she was still staring at Kaeritha—gawking in disbelief—as two matched short swords wrapped in coronas of brilliant blue fire drove through her heart and lungs.
A scream of agony cored with fury ripped through the audience chamber as the creature masquerading as a Voice of Lillinara fell back in a scalding gush of blood. Kaeritha twisted her wrists before the swords slid free, and even as she did, she went forward on the ball of her left foot while her right foot flashed up behind her. The heel of her heavy riding boot smashed into the person she'd sensed charging up behind her. It wasn't the clean, central strike she'd hoped for, but it was enough to deflect the attack and send the attacker crashing to the floor with a whooping cry of anguish.
Kaeritha let the force of her kick pivot her on her left foot so that she faced Major Paratha and the Voice's other servitors. The crackling blue aura of a champion of a God of Light roared up like a volcano of light, blasting through the audience chamber like a silent hurricane. It clung to her, flickering between her and the rest of the world like a thin canopy of lightning. But she could see through it clearly, and her eyes found Paratha with unerring speed. The major's saber was still coming out of its scabbard, and at least half of the others seemed stunned into momentary paralysis. But that paralysis wouldn't hold them for long, and Kaeritha knew it.
Every champion of Tomanak had his or her own preferred combat style. Kaeritha's was totally unlike Bahzell's, except for one thing; neither of them was ever prepared to stand on the defensive if they had any choice. And since there was no one to watch her back or coordinate with, Kaeritha Seldansdaughter decided to make a virtue of the fact that there was only one of her.
She charged.
There was no doubt in her mind that Paratha was the most dangerous of her remaining opponents. Unfortunately, Paratha seemed disinclined to face her in personal combat. The major dodged swiftly, darting behind one of the corrupted priestesses, who shook herself and then charged to meet Kaeritha with no weapon besides a dagger and the naked fury blazing in her eyes.
Kaeritha's right blade came down with lightning speed and all the elegance of a cleaver. It lopped off her opponent's right hand like a pruning hook removing a limb. The woman shrieked as blood spouted from the stump of her wrist, and then Kaeritha's left blade went through the front of her throat from right to left in a backhanded fan of blood. Some of the blood splashed across Kaeritha's face, painting it like a barbarian Wakuo raider's.
"Tomanak! Tomanak!"
Kaeritha's war cry echoed in the chamber as another dagger grated on her breastplate, and a short, vicious thrust put one of her swords through her attacker's belly. The mortally wounded priestess fell back, writhing and screaming, and Kaeritha's champion's healing sense cringed as she realized all of the daggers coming at her were coated in deadly poison.
She slashed a third priestess to the floor with her right hand even as her left sword darted out to engage and parry yet another dagger. She twisted between two opponents, killing one and wounding the other as she passed, and then she was behind them all and spun on her toes like a dancer to charge once more.
"Tomanak!"
Her foes seemed less eager to engage her this time, and she smiled like a direcat, teeth white through the blood on her face, as she slammed into them once more. Two more priestesses went down, then another, and finally Kaeritha heard alarm bells ringing throughout the temple complex.
Her jaw tightened. She had no doubt at all that the Voice and Paratha had drawn upon their patron's power to make certain Quaysar's guard force was loyal to them, whether or not those guards knew what they truly served. And even if there'd been no tampering at all, any guardsman who entered this audience chamber and saw the Voice and half a dozen or more of her priestesses dead on the floor was unlikely to assume that the person who'd killed them was the intended victim of an ambush by the Dark. She had no more than seconds before a veritable flood of guardsmen and war maids came pouring in upon her, and her swords flashed like lethal scythes as she slashed her way through the dagger-armed priestesses towards Major Paratha.
The bodies between them flew aside, screaming or already dead, and Paratha was no longer falling back. The major still declined to rush forward, watching with no more apparent emotion than a serpent as her allies fell like so much dead meat before Kaeritha's blades. But she made no effort to flee, either, and as Kaeritha looked at her, she Saw something she had never Seen before.
A cable of vile yellow-green energy linked Paratha to the corpse of the false Voice, and even as Kaeritha watched, something flowed along that cable. Something coming from the dead Voice to the living Paratha. And there were other cables, reaching out to the fallen priestesses, as well. The web of sickening luminescence centered on Paratha, sucking greedily at whatever flowed along it. Kaeritha didn't know what it was, but the corona which had clung to Paratha from the outset suddenly blazed up, fierce and bright as a forest fire to Kaeritha's Vision. And as it did, Kaeritha knew at last which of the Dark Gods she faced, for a huge, hideous spider wrapped in flame arose behind Paratha.
The spider of Shigu, the Queen of Hell and Mother of Madness. Wife of Phrobus and mother of all his dark children. Far more powerful than her son Sharna, with a foul and twisted malice none of her offspring could equal, and Lillinara's most bitter enemy for the way in which her parody of womanhood perverted and fouled all that Lillinara stood for.
The flame-wrapped creature towered up, compound eyes ablaze with hatred and madness. Its mandibles clashed, dripping with venom that flamed and hissed, bubbling on the polished stone floor as it burned its way into it. Claws scraped and grated, and the vilest stench Kaeritha had ever imagined filled the audience chamber. The hideous apparition loomed over her, reaching for her with more than mere claws and pincers, and a black tide of terror lapped out before it.
Even as Kaeritha recognized the spider, Paratha seemed to grow taller. The false Voice hadn't been Shigu's true tool, Kaeritha realized; Paratha had. The Voice might even have believed that she was Shigu's chosen, but in truth, it had always been Paratha, and now the major no longer hid behind the camouflage of the Voice. She was drinking in the life energy—probably even the very souls—of her fallen followers, and something more was coming with it. Potent as all that energy might be, it was only a focus, a burning glass which reached out for something even stronger and more vile and focused it all upon the major.
Paratha's face was transfigured, and her entire body seemed to quiver and vibrate as Shigu poured energy into her chosen. Kaeritha remembered Bahzell's description of the night he had faced an avatar of Sharna, and she knew this was worse. Harnak of Navahk had carried a cursed blade which had served as Sharna's key to the universe of mortals. Paratha carried no key; she was the key, and Kaeritha's mind cringed away from the insane risk Shigu had chosen to run.
No wonder she'd been able to penetrate Lillinara's church, kill Lillinara's priestesses and Voices and replace them with her own tools! For all the endless ages since Phrobus' fall into evil, no god of Dark or Light had dared to contend openly with one of his or her divine enemies on the mortal plane. They were simply too powerful. If they clashed directly, they might all too easily destroy the very universe for whose dominion they contended. And so there were limits, checks set upon their power and how they might intervene in the world of mortals. It was why there were champions of Light and their Dark equivalents.
Yet Shigu had intervened directly. She had moved beyond the agreed upon limits and stepped fully into the world of mortals. Paratha was no champion. She was Shigu's focus, her anchor in this universe. She wasn't touched by the power of Shigu—in that moment, she was the power of Shigu, and Kaeritha felt a terrifying surge of answering power pouring into her from Tomanak.
"So, little champion," Paratha hissed. "You would contend with Me, would you?"
She laughed, and the web of her power reached out to her living minions, as well as the dead. Kaeritha heard their shrieks of agony—agony mingled with a horrible, defiled ecstasy—as Shigu's avatar seized them. They didn't die, not right away, but that was no mercy. Instead, they became secondary nodes of the web centered upon Paratha. They blazed like human torches to Kaeritha's Sight as the same power crashed through them, and the will which animated Paratha—a will Kaeritha realized was no longer mortal, if it ever had been—fastened upon them like pincers. All nine of the remaining priestesses moved as one, closing in to form a deadly circle about Kaeritha with Paratha.
"So tasty your soul will be," Paratha crooned. "I'll treasure it like fine brandy."
"I think not," Kaeritha told her, and Paratha's eyes flickered as she heard another timbre in Kaeritha's soprano. A deeper timbre, like the basso rumble of cavalry gathering speed for a charge. The blue corona flickering around Kaeritha blazed higher and hotter, towering over her as the luminously translucent form of Tomanak Orfro, God of War and Justice, Captain General of the Gods of Light, took form to confront the spider of Shigu. The priestesses caught up in Shigu's web froze as if stilled by some wizard's spell, but although Paratha drew back ever so slightly, her hesitation was only brief and her mouth twisted like the snarl of some rabid beast.
"Not this time, Scale Balancer," she—or someone else, using her voice—hissed venomously. "This one is mine!"
Her body seemed to tense, and, on the last word, a deadly blast of power ripped from her. It screamed across the audience chamber like a battering ram of yellow-green hunger, and the entire temple seemed to quiver on its foundations as it slammed into Kaeritha. Or, rather, into the blue nimbus blazing about her. The nimbus which deflected its deadly strength in a score of shattered streamers of vicious lightning that cracked and flared like whips of flame. Small explosions laced the chamber's walls, shattered fountains, and incinerated two of the living priestesses where they stood, and Kaeritha felt the staggering violence of the impact in her very bones. But that was all she felt, and she smiled thinly at her foe.
"Yours, am I?" she asked, and a strange sense of duality swept through her on the tide of Tomanak's presence. "I think not," she repeated, and Paratha's face twisted in mingled fury and disbelief as Tomanak's power shed the fury of her attack.
Kaeritha's smile was hard and cold, and she felt the call to battle throbbing in her veins. She was herself, as she had always been, and the will and courage which kept her on her feet in the face of Shigu's hideous manifestation were her own. But behind her will, supporting it and bolstering her courage like a tried and trusted battlefield commander, was Tomanak Himself. His presence filled her as Shigu's filled Paratha, but without submerging her. Without requiring her subservience, or making her no more than his tool. She was who she had always been—Kaeritha Seldansdaughter, Champion of Tomanak—and she laughed through the choking stench of Shigu's perversion.
Paratha's entire face knotted with livid rage at the sound of that bright, almost joyous laugh, and the spider snarled behind her. But Kaeritha only laughed again.
"Your reach exceeds your grasp, Paratha. Or should I say Shigu?" She shook her head. "If you think you want me, come and take me!"
"You may threaten and murder my tools," that voice hissed again, "but you'll find Me a different matter, little champion. No mortal can stand against My power!"
"But she does not stand alone," a voice deeper than a mountain rumbled from the air all about Kaeritha, and Paratha's face lost all expression as she and the power using her flesh heard it.
"If we two contend openly, power-to-power, this world will be destroyed, and you with it!" Paratha's mouth snarled the words, but the entire audience chamber shook with the grim, rumbling laugh which answered.
"This world might perish," Tomanak agreed after a moment, "but you know as well as I which of us would be destroyed with it, Shigu." Paratha's lips drew back, baring her teeth like a wolf's, but Tomanak spoke again before she could. "Yet it will not come to that. I will not permit it to."
"And how will you stop it, fool?!" Paratha's voice demanded with a sneer. "This is My place now, and My power fills it!"
"But you will bring no more power to it," Tomanak said flatly. "What you have already poured into your tools you may use; all else is blocked against you. If you doubt me, see for yourself."
Paratha's eyes glared madly, but Kaeritha's heart leapt as she realized it was true. She had never faced such a terrifying concentration of evil, yet that concentration was no longer growing.
"If I am blocked, then so also are you," Paratha grated. "You can lend no more power to your tool, either!"
"My Swords are not my tools," Tomanak replied softly. "They are my champions—my battle companions. And my champion is equal to anything such as you might bring against her."
"Is she indeed?" Paratha laughed wildly. "I think not."
Her saber seemed to writhe and twist. The blade grew longer, broader, and burned with the same sick, green radiance as the giant spider and its web.
"Come to me, Champion," she crooned. "Come and die!"
She leapt forward with the words, and even as she did, the remaining priestesses charged with her. They came at Kaeritha from all sides, a wave of deadly blades, all animated and wielded by the same malign presence.
Unlike the priestesses, Kaeritha was armored. But there was only one of her, and she dared not let them swarm over her with those envenomed daggers. Nor did she care to face whatever unnatural power had been poured into Paratha's blade while the priestesses came at her back. And so she spun to her left, away from Paratha, and her twin blades struck like serpents trailing tails of blue fire as she ripped open the belly and throat of the nearest priestess. She vaulted the body, lashing out with her right-hand sword, and another priestess staggered away as the backhand stroke slashed the tendons behind her knee.
Paratha—or Shigu, if there was any difference—shrieked in wordless, enraged fury. Her remaining tools pursued Kaeritha, charging after her madly, and Kaeritha laughed coldly, deliberately goading Paratha with the sound.
She supposed some idiots who'd paid too much attention to bad bard's tales might have thought it cowardly, or unchivalrous, to concentrate on her unarmored, dagger-armed foes rather than go directly for the opponent who was also armored and armed. But although Kaeritha might be a knight, she'd been born a peasant, with all a peasant's pragmatism, and Tomanak's Order believed in honor and justice, not stupidity. She turned again, once she was clear of the closing perimeter, and two more of Paratha's priestesses caught up with her . . . and died.
Paratha's shriek was even wilder than before, but the two surviving priestesses fell back. The sole unwounded one bent over and seized the crippled one's arm and dragged her to one side, and Kaeritha turned once again—slowly, calmly, with a direcat's predatory grace—to face Paratha and the flaming spider form of Shigu.
The glaring light web still connected Paratha's body to those of the false Voice and all of the others except Kaeritha herself, living or dead, in the audience chamber. But there was a difference now. The strands connected to the dead women glared with a brighter, fiercer radiance that flared high, then faded and died. And as they died, the nimbus about Paratha blazed more brilliantly still. The bodies themselves changed, as well. They went in an instant from freshly slain corpses to dried and withered husks. Like flies in a true spider's web, Kaeritha thought, sucked dry of all life and vitality.
Tomanak had blocked Shigu from pouring still more strength into her avatar, and so she had ripped everything from her dead servants, devouring even their immortal souls and concentrating that power in Paratha.
"Come on, 'Major Paratha,' " Kaeritha invited softly. "Let's dance."
Paratha screamed wordlessly and charged.
Whatever else Paratha might have been, she was an experienced warrior. She had the advantage of reach, and her armor was every bit as good as Kaeritha's. But she also realized she had only one weapon to Kaeritha's two, and for all her shrieking fury, she was anything but berserk.
Kaeritha discovered that almost too late, when Paratha's headlong charge suddenly transmuted into a spinning whirl to her left. The demented shriek had very nearly deceived Kaeritha into thinking her foe truly was maddened by rage, attacking in a mindless fury. But Paratha was far from mindless, and she pivoted just beyond Kaeritha's own reach, while her longer, glowing saber came twisting in in a corkscrew thrust at Kaeritha's face.
Kaeritha's right hand parried the thrust wide, and their blades met in a fountaining eruption of fire. Blue and green lightning crackled and hissed, exploding against the chamber's walls and ceiling, blasting divots out of the marble floors like handfuls of thrown gravel. She gasped, staggered by the sheer ferocity of what should have been an oblique, sliding kiss of steel on steel. No doubt Paratha had felt the same terrible shock, but if she had, it didn't interrupt her movement. She was gone again, fading back before Kaeritha could even begin a riposte.
Kaeritha's entire right arm ached and throbbed, and sweat streaked her face as she turned, facing Paratha, swords at the ready, while alarm bells continued to clangor throughout the temple complex.
"And what will you do when the other guards come, little champion?" Paratha's voice mocked. "All they will see is you and me, surrounded by the butchered bodies of their precious priestesses. Will you slay them, as well, when I order them to take you for the murderer you are?"
Kaeritha didn't reply. She only moved forward, lightly, poised on the balls of her feet. Paratha backed away from her, eyes lit with the glitter of hell light watching cautiously, alertly, seeking any opening as intently as Kaeritha's own.
Kaeritha's gaze never wavered from Paratha, yet a corner of her attention stood guard. She'd always had what her first arms instructor had called good "situational awareness," and she had honed that awareness for years. And so, although she never looked away from her opponent, she was aware of the remaining unwounded priestess creeping ever so cautiously around behind her.
Paratha gave no sign that she was aware of anything except Kaeritha, but Kaeritha had almost allowed herself to be fooled once. Now she knew better. And she also knew she had only one opportunity to end this fight before the guards Paratha had spoken of arrived.
Paratha slowed, letting Kaeritha close gradually with her. Her saber danced and wove before her, its deadly, glowing tip leaving a twisting crawl of ugly yellow-green light in its wake, and Kaeritha's nerves tightened. The priestess with her poisoned dagger was close behind her, now, and Paratha's glittering eyes narrowed ever so slightly. If it was going to happen, Kaeritha thought, then it would happen—
Now!
The priestess sprang forward, teeth bared in a silent, snarling rictus, dagger thrusting viciously at Kaeritha's unguarded back. And in the same sliver of infinity, with the perfect coordination possible only when a single entity controlled both bodies, Paratha executed her own, deadly attack in a full-extension lunge.
It almost worked. It should have worked. But as Tomanak had told Shigu, his champion was the equal of anything the Spider might bring against her. Kaeritha had known what was coming, and she'd spent half her life honing the skills she called upon that day. Perfectly as Paratha—or Shigu—had orchestrated the attack, Kaeritha's response was equally perfect . . . and began a tiny fraction of a second before Paratha's.
She twisted lithely, turning her torso through ninety degrees, and lunged at Paratha in a consummately executed stop-thrust. Her left-hand blade met the longer saber, twisting it aside in another of those terrible explosions of light and fury, then slid down its glaring length in a deadly extension that punched the blue-caparisoned short sword through Paratha's breastplate as if its tempered steel had been so much cobweb. And even as she lunged towards Paratha, her right-hand sword snapped out behind her, and the priestess who had flung herself at Kaeritha's back shrieked as her own charge impaled her upon that lethal blade.
For one instant, Kaeritha stood between her opponents, both arms at full extension in opposite directions, her sapphire eyes locked with Paratha's hell-lit eyes of brown. The other woman's mouth opened in shocked disbelief, and her saber wavered, then fell to the floor with a crackling explosion. Her left hand groped towards the cross guard of the sword buried in her chest and blood poured from her mouth.
And then the instant passed. Kaeritha twisted both wrists in unison, then straightened, withdrawing both her blades in one, crisp movement, and the bodies of both her opponents crumpled to the floor.
The alarm bells continued to sound, and Kaeritha turned from her fallen enemies to face the audience chamber's double doors. Foul-smelling smoke drifted and eddied, and small fires burned where the reflected bursts of contending powers had set furniture and wall hangings alight. The walls, ceilings, and polished floors were pitted and scorched, and the windows along the eastern wall had been shattered and blown out of their frames. Bodies—several as seared as the chamber's furnishings—sprawled everywhere amid pools of blood and the sewer stench of ruptured organs.
The blue corona of Tomanak continued to envelop her, and she knew that any priestess who saw it—and who was prepared to think about it—would recognize it for what it was. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that most of the temple's regular guards would do the same. Worse, she knew that although Shigu's avatar had been vanquished, the Spider Goddess' residual evil remained. Shigu might have been considerate enough to concentrate most of her more powerful Servants here in the Voice's chambers for the attack on Kaeritha. But she hadn't concentrated all of them, and even if her remaining Servants hadn't hungered for revenge, they must know that their only chance of escaping retribution lay in killing or at least diverting Kaeritha.
Her jaw tightened. She knew what she'd do, if she'd been one of Shigu's tools faced by a champion of Tomanak. She would feed the uncorrupted members of Quaysar's guard force straight into the champion's blades, and the chaos and confusion and the fact that none of the innocents knew what was really happening would let them do exactly that. Any champion would do all she could to avoid slaying men and women who were only doing their sworn duty, with no trace of corruption upon their souls. And if, despite all she could do, that champion found herself forced to kill those men and women in self-defense, the Dark would count that a far from minor victory in its own right.
But Kaeritha had plans of her own, and her sapphire eyes were grim as she kicked the chamber's doors wide and stalked through them, swords blazing blue in her hands.
The bells were louder in the corridor outside the Voice's quarters, and Kaeritha heard sharp shouts of command and the clatter of booted feet. The first group of guards—a dozen war maids and half that many guardsmen in Lillinara's moon-badged livery—came around the bend at a run, and Kaeritha gathered her will. She reached out, in a way she could never have described to someone who was not also a champion, and seized a portion of the power Tomanak had poured into her. She shaped it to suit her needs, then threw it out before her in a fan-shaped battering ram.
Shouted orders turned into shouts of confusion as Kaeritha's god-reinforced will swept down the corridor like some immense, unseen broom. It gathered up those who were responding to what they thought was an unprovoked attack upon the temple and its Voice and simply pushed them out of the way. Under other circumstances, Kaeritha might have found the sight amusing as their feet slid across the temple's floor as if its stone were polished ice. Some of them beat at the invisible wall shoving them out of Kaeritha's path with their fists. A few actually hewed at it with their weapons. But however they sought to resist, it was useless. They were shunted aside, roughly enough to leave bruises and contusions in some cases, but remarkably gently under the circumstances.
Yet some of the responding guards were not pushed out of Kaeritha's way. It took them precious seconds to realize that they hadn't been, and even that fleeting a delay proved fatal. Kaeritha was upon them, her blue eyes blazing with another, brighter blue, before they could react, for there was a reason her bow wave hadn't shunted them aside. Unlike the other guards, these were no innocent dupes of the corruption which had poisoned and befouled their temple. They knew who—or what—they truly served, and their faces twisted with panic as they found themselves singled out from their innocent fellows . . . within blade's reach of a champion of Tomanak.
"Tomanak!" Kaeritha hurled her war cry into their teeth, and her swords were right behind it. There was no way to avoid her in the corridor's confines, nor was there room or time for finesse. Kaeritha crunched into them, blazing swords moving with the merciless precision of some dwarvish killing machine made of wires and wheels.
Those trapped in front of the others lashed out with the fury of despair as they saw death come for them in the pitiless glitter of her eyes. It did them no good. No more than three of them could face her simultaneously, and all of them together would have been no match for her.
Those in the rear realized it. They tried to turn and flee, only to discover that the same energy which had pushed aside their fellows caught them like a tide of glue. They couldn't run; which meant all they could do was face her and die.
Kaeritha cut them down and stepped across their bodies. She continued her steady progress through the temple's corridors, retracing her path towards the Chapel of the Crone, and sweat beaded her brow. Another group of guards came charging down an intersecting passageway from her left, and once more her battering ram broom reached out. Most of the newcomers gawked in disbelief and confusion as they were shunted firmly aside . . . and those who were not gawked in terror as Kaeritha stalked into their midst like death incarnate, brushing aside their efforts to defend themselves and visiting Tomanak's judgment upon them in the flash of glowing blades and the spatter of traitors' blood.
She resumed her progress towards the chapel, and felt a fatigue which was far more than merely physical gathering within her. Forming and shaping raw power the way that she was was only marginally less demanding than channeling Tomanak's presence to heal wounds or sickness. It required immense concentration, and the drain upon her own energy was enormous. She couldn't keep it up long, and every innocent she pushed out of her way only increased her growing exhaustion. But she couldn't stop, either. Not unless she wanted to slaughter—or to be slaughtered by—those same innocents.
Her advance slowed as her fatigue grew. Every ounce of willpower was focused on the next section of hall or waiting archway between her and her destination. She was vaguely aware of other bells—deeper, louder bells, even more urgent than the ones which had summoned the guards to the false Voice's defense—but she dared not spare the attention to wonder why they were sounding or what they signified. She could only continue, fighting her way through the seemingly endless members of Quaysar's Guard who had been corrupted.
And then, suddenly, she entered the Chapel of the Crone, and there were no more enemies. Even the innocent guards she had been pushing out of her way had disappeared, and the clangor of alarm bells had been cut short as though by a knife. There was only stillness, and the abrupt, shocking cessation of combat.
She stopped, suddenly aware that she was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath. She lowered her blades slowly, wondering what had happened, where her enemies had gone. The sounds of her own boots seemed deafening as she made her way slowly, cautiously, down the chapel's center aisle. And then, without warning, the chapel's huge doors swung wide just as she reached them.
The bright morning sunlight beyond was almost blinding after the interior dimness through which she had clawed and fought her way, and she blinked. Then her vision cleared, and her eyes widened as she saw a sight she was quite certain no one had ever seen before.
She watched the immense wind rider dismount from the blue roan courser. He wore the same green surcoat she wore, and the huge sword in his right hand blazed with the same blue light. She stared at him, her battle-numbed mind trying to come to grips with his sudden, totally unanticipated appearance, and his left hand swept off his helmet. Foxlike ears shifted gently, cocking themselves in her direction, and a deep voice rumbled like welcome thunder.
"So, Kerry, is this after being only for those with formal invitations, or can just anyone be dropping in?"
She shook her head, unable to make herself quite believe what she was seeing, and stepped out through the chapel doors two of the Quaysar war maids had swung wide. The temple courtyard seemed impossibly crowded by the score or so of coursers and wind riders behind Bahzell. Most of the wind riders were still mounted, interposing with their coursers between the remainder of the Quaysar Guards and the chapel. Two of them weren't. Baron Tellian of Balthar and his wind-brother Hathan had dismounted behind Bahzell, and Kaeritha shook her head in disbelief.
"Bahzell," she said in a voice which even she recognized was far too calm and remote from the carnage behind her, "what are you doing here? And what are you—or any hradani—doing with a courser, for Tomanak's sake?"
"Well," he replied, brown eyes gleaming with wicked amusement, "it's all after being the letter's fault."
"Letter?" She shook her head again. "That's ridiculous. My letter won't even arrive at Balthar for another day or two!"
"And who," he asked amiably, "said a thing at all, at all, about your letter?" It was his turn to shake his head, ears tilted impudently. "It wasn't from you, being as how it's clear as the nose on Brandark's face that you've not got the sense to be asking for help before you need it. No, this one was after coming from Leeana."
"Leeana?" Kaeritha parroted.
"Aye," Bahzell said a bit more somberly. "She'd suspicions enough all on her own before ever you came back to Kalatha from Thalar. She'd written a bit about them to her mother, but it was only after you and she spoke that she was sending the lot of her worries to Tellian and me. As soon as ever I read her letter, it was pike-staff clear as how I'd best be on my way to Quaysar. I'm hoping you won't be taking this wrongly, Kerry, but charging in here all alone, without so much as me or Brandark to watch your back, was a damned-fool hradani sort of thing to be doing."
"It was my job," she said, looking around for something to wipe her blades on. Tellian silently extended what looked like it had once been part of a temple guard's surcoat. She decided not to ask what had happened to its owner. Instead, she simply nodded her thanks and used it to clean her swords while she continued to gaze up at Bahzell.
"And I never once said as how it wasn't," he replied. "But I'm thinking you'd be carving bits and pieces off of my hide if I'd gone off to deal with such as this without asking if you'd care to be coming along. Now wouldn't you just?"
"That's different," she began, and broke off, recognizing the weakness of her own tone as Bahzell and Tellian both began to laugh.
"And just how is it different, Kerry?" another, even deeper voice inquired, and Kaeritha turned to face the speaker.
Tomanak Himself stood in the courtyard, and all around her people were going to their knees as His presence washed over them. Wind riders slid from their saddles to join them, and even the coursers bent their proud heads. Only Kaeritha and Bahzell remained standing, facing their God, and He smiled upon them.
"I'm still waiting to hear how it's different," He reminded her in gently teasing tones, and she drew a deep breath as His power withdrew from her. It left quickly, yet gently, flowing back through her like a caress or the shoulder slap of a war captain for a warrior who had done all that was expected of her and more. There was a moment of regret, a sense of loss, as that glorious tide flowed back to the One from Whom it had come, yet her contact with Him was not severed. It remained, glowing between them, and as He reclaimed the power He had lent her, she found herself refreshed, filled with energy and life, as if she had just arisen on a fresh day and not come from a deadly battle for her very life and soul.
"Well, maybe it's not," she said after a moment or two and with a fulminating sideways glower for Bahzell. "But it still wasn't Leeana's place to be telling you that I needed help!"
"No more did she," Bahzell said. "All she wrote was what she suspected—not that it was after taking any geniuses to know what such as you were likely to be doing about it if it should happen as how she was right." He shrugged.
"All right," Kaeritha said after another pregnant moment. "But that still leaves my other question."
"And which other question would that be?" Tomanak asked.
"The one about him and him," she snapped, jabbing an index finger first at Bahzell and then at the huge stallion who stood regarding her over her fellow champion's shoulder with what could only be described as an expression of mild interest. "What's a hradani—any hradani, but especially a Horse Stealer hradani—doing with a courser? I thought they, um, didn't like one another very much."
"Ah, now, I don't think it's my business to be telling that particular tale," Tomanak told her with a slow smile. He chuckled at the disgusted look she gave Him, then turned his head, gazing about the temple courtyard. There were dozens of bodies lying about, Kaeritha realized—all that was left of the corrupted members of the Quaysar Guard who had tried to prevent Bahzell and his wind brothers from fighting their way to her aid. Tomanak gazed at them for several seconds, then shook His head with a sad sigh.
"You've done well, Kaeritha. You and Bahzell alike, as I knew you would. I believe this temple will recover from Shigu's interference, although you'll still have your work cut out for you in Kalatha. My Sister will be sending two or three of her Servants to aid you in that work, but this is still a matter of Justice, and so falls under your responsibility."
"I understand," she said quietly, and he nodded.
"I know you do. And I know I can count upon you and Bahzell to complete all the tasks you've been called to assume. But for today, my Blades, enjoy your victory. Celebrate the triumph of the Light you've brought to pass. And while you do," He began to fade from their sight, His face wreathed in a huge smile, "perhaps you can get Bahzell to tell you how a Horse Stealer became a wind rider. It's well worth hearing!" He finished, and then He was gone.
"Well?" Kaeritha turned to her towering sword brother and folded her arms.
"Well what?" he asked innocently.
"Well you know perfectly well what!"
"Oh," Bahzell said. "That 'well.' " He grinned toothily at her. "Now that's after being a mite of a long story. For now, let's just leave it that while you've been off enjoying your little vacation in Kalatha and Thalar, there's some of us as have been doing some honest work a bit closer to home."
"Work?" Kaeritha repeated. "Work? Why, you hairy-eared, overgrown, under-brained, miserable excuse for a champion! I'll give you work, Milord Champion! And when I'm done with you, you'll wish you'd never—"
She advanced upon him with fell intent, and Bahzell Bahnakson demonstrated once again the sagacity and tactical wisdom which were the hallmarks of any champion of Tomanak.
He took to his heels instantly, and despite the carnage all about them, Baron Tellian and the other wind riders burst into laughter as Kaeritha paused beside a planter only long enough to snatch out a handful of ornamental river stones suitable for throwing at him before she went speeding off in pursuit.