The Paths of the Dead Page 10

  "Trout! I nearly think so! I was a young man when it happened, and a thousand miles away, and yet I remember feeling the ground shake beneath my feet, and I was nearly brained by a large pitcher falling from a shelf."

  "Well, then, my father was a friend of Adron."

  "How, Adron himself?"

  "Exactly."

  "Ah! I had not known of this circumstance."

  "There is more."

  "How, more?"

  "He was a servant to His Majesty, the Emperor."

  "A servant?"

  "And more than servant."

  "More than a servant?"

  "He was—"

  "Yes?"

  "Captain of the Phoenix Guards."

  "He!"

  "Exactly."

  "And yet, His Majesty was assassinated."

  "Precisely."

  "Well, much is explained then. And yet—"

  "Well?"

  "Has he been brooding on this subject for two and a half hundred years?"

  Piro made a gesture with his hands. "It has grown worse, so I am told, these last hundred years or so. But nevertheless…"

  "Well, that clarifies matter, my lord. Only—"

  "Yes?"

  "The position, as I have been informed, is not that of servant for the Count."

  "How, it is not?"

  "Not the least in the world."

  "Well, but then, what is it, my good Lar?"

  "It is lackey to his son."

  "His son?"

  "Exactly."

  "But I am his son."

  "So it would seem, my lord."

  Piro looked at him again. "You are, then, to be my lackey?"

  "That, at any rate, is the post for which I have the honor to apply."

  "And yet, good Lar, I give you my word that I had no idea any such position was requested."-

  "It is only very recent, my lord. That is, within the last few days. And then again—"

  "Yes? Then again?"

  "It is also possible that I have been misinformed."

  "What use have I for a lackey?"

  "Oh, as to that, my lord—"

  "Well?"

  "I assure you, I have not the least idea in the world, although I am convinced, my lord, that the Count your father must have a reason."

  "Oh, I am certain that he does, and, moreover, I am equally certain that, in time, I will learn what it is. But, in the meanwhile, as it concerns me—"

  "Yes?"

  "I will look again at your letters of recommendation."

  Lar bowed and passed them over. Piro this time studied them more carefully than he had at first. "You have traveled extensively," he remarked after some few minutes.

  "Well, that is true."

  "What has taken you on these journeys?"

  "Is Your Lordship aware of the expression 'to follow one's nose,' meaning to travel according to mood, and to instinct, thither and yon, with no plan, hoping to find one's fortune?"

  "I have heard this, yes. And?"

  "My lord, I have followed my stomach."

  "Ah. I understand. Well, at any rate, you have no fear of travel."

  "None. You expect to be traveling?"

  "I have no expectations. But the fact that my father the Count wishes for me to have a lackey may indicate something of his plans for my future. Then, again, it may not. I see you cooked for a band of mercenaries."

  "Highwaymen might be a more accurate term, my lord, or road agents as they are sometimes called."

  "I see. Well, then you have no fear of a skirmish or two."

  "Oh, as to that, there have been times when the very air was thick with the sounds of battle, and steel flashed, and bodies fell, and blood flowed freely, and yet I stayed at my post cooking venison with wayberries as if it were nothing at all; I assure Your Lordship that, with regard to my duties, I am utterly without fear."

  "Well, that is good," said Piro.

  "Then there is to be an expedition of some sort, my lord?"

  Piro shrugged. "I have no such plans, but, whatever the Count's plans for me may be, I have no intention of staying here for-ever."

  "Ah! My lord is ambitious?"

  "Nearly."

  "So much the better."

  "Oh?"

  "A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be."

  "Ah. I perceive you are a philosopher."

  "My lord? Not the least in the world."

  "You say you are not?"

  "My lord, I must nearly insist on it."

  "Very well, if you will have it so. But tell me, how did you come to the line of work you occupied—that is, cooking for a band of highwaymen?"

  "I will tell you, my lord, if you wish it."

  "Wish it? I nearly think I have asked."

  "This is the answer, then: In my youth, I was granted use of a small parcel of land from the estate of Baron Halfwing, which estate, my lord, was situated in the lowlands some eighty leagues west of the city and along the coast."

  "Well?"

  "That is, my lord, it was quite along the coast, so that I could dip my feet in the ocean without leaving the land I had been allocated."

  "Ah! Yes, it is clear to me now. With the fall of the Empire…"

  "Exactly. It soon came to pass that I had no land, but, rather, a small parcel of ocean. And being thus tied to no place—the Baron, you perceive, having no inclination to insist that I remain in the water, nor being in a position to insist on anything—I found myself free. I have neither the patience nor the inclination to fish, my lord, and so I took the opportunity to set out onto the road to make my fortune."

  "Well, and have you made your fortune?"

  "I have my life, which, as Your Lordship may agree, is a fortune to a man such as I."

  "And have you family to support, as well?"

  "A younger brother, but he is getting along well enough on his own."

  "Ah. And what is he doing?"

  "He? Oh, he is doing as I did—that is, cooking for a band of highwaymen."

  "I see. It is as well you know some of these, for it may prove helpful should some of them set on us if we travel."

  "Indeed, it may save Your Lordship's life."

  "Or the lives of the highwaymen."

  "Trout! That is true! But then, a life is a life, and if some are of more importance to us than others, it does not make these others worthless."

  "It is, no doubt, living near the sea that has made you a philosopher."

  Lar spread his hands, as if to say that if Piro wished to insist that the prospective servant was a philosopher, said servant would not dispute the issue, but instead, although disagreeing, would remain, if we may, philosophical about the difference of opinion.

  The reader may, perhaps, be confused about the apparent liberty in conversation between Teckla and nobleman; if so, we can only give our assurance that, by all accounts, this was one result of the fall of the Empire—the courtesy and respect due one's social superior seemed to fall apart even as did the ties of land, fortune, and honor that they supported, so that, in some places, one might listen to an hour's conversation between two persons unaware that one was a nobleman and the other a servant. To be sure, this did not happen at all times and in all places, and one can also find occasions, especially in the duchies far from any large city, where such distinctions increased, as if the desire for tokens and symbols of respect could replace the actuality. We will not waste the reader's valuable time by attempting to account for this peculiar alteration in social custom, but will instead leave it up to the reader to decide how much consideration the phenomenon merits; having both represented and pointed it out, we consider our duty fulfilled and our goal achieved.

  Piro's goal was, at least for the moment, also achieved: He had learned enough about the Teckla to convince himself that by letting the fellow into his house he was not, as they said at the time, "letting the brigand onto the coach," and he had, moreover, given himself a certain amount of information to think o
ver during the night; this much done, he showed the Teckla to a spot where he might rest and be warm until the morning, after which the Viscount took himself off to his bedchamber to consider the events of a day rather more full of significance than he had expected it to be. To a Tiassa who had not yet passed the mark of his first century, events full of significance cannot fail to bring cheerful ruminations, wherefore it was a contented young man who fell asleep that evening in Whitecrest Manor.

  Chapter the Tenth

  How the Arrival of an Envoy

  Caused Turmoil in Whitecrest Manor

  By contrast with the sentiment with which we closed the previous chapter of our history, it was a discontented and ill-humored older man who, in the form of our friend Khaavren, woke up early the next morning and, after dressing himself, made his way down the stairs. We trust that we have dropped sufficient hints to prevent the astute reader from being unduly startled by the changes that have taken place in our old friend since we last saw him two and a half hundred years before; and we do not, moreover, wish to give needless pain to those readers who have done us the honor to concern themselves with the brave Tiassa whose activities have formed the center of these histories; all of which is to say that we propose merely to glance briefly at the Count of Whitecrest, and give only the barest outline of what he has become, thus saving ourselves from the vicarious unhappiness the poor soldier has suffered in the time that has elapsed since the assassination of the Emperor and the fall of the Empire.

  As the reader will, no doubt, have deduced, Khaavren's failure—or, rather, what Khaavren perceived as his failure—to protect the Emperor had preyed upon his mind and spirit, leaving him, to some degree, a sad and bitter man, inclined to keeping his own counsel, and to torment himself mercilessly for every failure in his long and active life. To be sure, this bitterness had occurred only gradually during the last two hundred and fifty years, yet the alteration of his character, like the rot in a fruit, had come with ever-increasing speed once first begun, so that the last thirty or forty years had seen more change than the previous two hundred.

  These changes were reflected in the set of his jaw, which gave the appearance of hiding teeth perpetually clenched; and in his hair, which had become quite grey; and in the unnatural rigidity of his posture, which gave the impression, when he walked, of an utterly inflexible spine, as if he had suffered some disabling injury, and above all in his eye, which lacked the gleam of joy and ambition that had marked his countenance even when he had been, for all anyone could see, content to be merely a soldier, carrying out the humble yet exacting duties of his office. Moreover, though he retained, perhaps, some skill in swordplay, for such skill is based in part on knowledge of the art and science of defense that is not subject to the whims of the body, he had lost nearly all of the strength, quickness, and stamina which had made him, at one time, such a formidable opponent and one of the most feared and respected swordsmen in the Empire. His condition could be observed from the sagging of his muscles and the shortness of breath that accompanied even such a mundane task as climbing the stairs up to his bedchamber. To all of this, for the sake of completeness, we should add that his left hand, wounded on that long-ago day in the last, desperate battle to stop Adron, had never entirely healed, so that it remained somewhat stiff, and unable to close, and caused him a certain amount of discomfort, especially on cold, wet nights.

  And yet no one, least of all a Tiassa, is made up only of one characteristic; no one, that is to say, can be entirely lacking in complexity and contradiction. In the case of our old friend, the reader ought to remember that, at nearly the same time as the events which had marked what he saw as the great failure of his life, he had met a woman—to be precise, Daro, the Countess of Whitecrest—who had brought him a kind of happiness and contentment he had long despaired of achieving. His life with her, which resulted in a son in whom he had no small degree of pride, had worked, in some measure, to offset the sense of defeat that beset his spirit, so that at times, most often in the evening, as he sat in the drawing room before the grand hearth and played at sparrows with his son, or drew rounds with the Countess, or dealt dog-in-the-wood with both of them at once, a certain aspect of peace and happiness would settle over him; too often, however, it would be dispelled by some stray thought which would bring to mind those last days and hours of the Empire, and he would fall silent, and Daro (and, later, Piro) would know that he was asking himself once more what he could have done differently to have saved the life of that well-intentioned but ineffectual man whom the gods and the Cycle had made the last Emperor. At such times, wife and son would fall silent, as if in respect for his thoughts, and provide what little comfort they could by their presence.

  To be sure, in case it is insufficiently clear to the reader, it was the influence of his wife and son that had, as it were, held off for so long what might be called the disease of his spirit. These spells of bitterness or despair seemed to grow worse and more frequent as Piro grew older; almost as if the son in which the Count took such pride were a reminder to him of his own ambition, and the devastating blow it had suffered. Yet both mother and child knew him to be of a kindhearted disposition, and loved him all the more for the pain—physical and spiritual—that he carried with him.

  This was Khaavren, then, as, dressed in dark, baggy pants tucked into his tall boots and a thin blue blouse, he made his way down the wide central stairway of Whitecrest Manor, and so into the kitchen, where he found the cook deep in conversation with a Teckla he did not recognize, although the reader, jumping ahead to the correct conclusion that it is none other than Lar, will have knowledge ahead of the good Tiassa.

  Khaavren, whose ears had remained as sharp as they had been on that long-ago day when the Emperor had done them the honor to make an observation respecting their obedience to their owner's desires, was able to ascertain that the conversation between the unknown and the cook concerned the identity of the unknown, wherefore from the force of old habits he took a moment to wait and listen. A moment was all it took for the Tiassa to learn something concerning the identity of the unknown, at which time he stepped forward and said, "I bid you good day. I am the Count of Whitecrest."

  Lar bowed very low and stated his own name, adding, "I was informed—"

  "Exactly," said Khaavren. "You have letters of recommendation?"

  Lar, remembering Piro's advice of the night before, contented himself with nodding, bowing, and respectfully offering the documents in question. Khaavren accepted them and led the way back into the drawing room, where, after sitting and inviting Lar to do the same, he asked many of the same questions Piro had asked earlier, albeit in briefer form and receiving more laconic answers. At one point in the interview, the side-door clapper made its sonorous report, and Khaavren suggested Lar find out who was there; upon returning the latter announced coolly and without expression that a certain Teckla was at the door inquiring about a position as doorman and lackey.

  "You may tell him," said Khaavren evenly, "that the position is filled."

  Lar bowed without comment and turned to carry out his duty. Upon his return, Khaavren suggested that he see if he could find something with which to break his fast, after which he might introduce himself to the cook, the maid, and the stable-boy (who was also the night-groom), these being the only three other servants currently employed at Whitecrest Manor. "You will," remarked Khaavren, "be informed of your duties at a later time, save that, as you know, you are to answer the door and—" He was interrupted again by the door clapper. He smiled and said, "To-day you will, no doubt, be spending a certain amount of your time informing those who arrive of your new position."

  "Yes, lord," said Lar, and once more went off to answer the door, this time returning to say, "My lord, a messenger."

  "How, a messenger?" said Khaavren, frowning. "And from whom?"

  "He would not say, my lord. But he is dressed in the livery of the House of the Phoenix."

  These words had such a profound affec
t on Khaavren that even Lar, who scarcely knew him, could see that he was experiencing strong emotion. The Tiassa nevertheless mastered himself sufficiently to say, "Pray find the Countess and inform her, after which you may show the messenger into—well—into whatever room the Countess may wish."

  "Your pardon, my lord, but—"

  "Well?"

  "Where might I find the Countess?"

  "Ah. At the top of the stairs, turn there to the right. At the far end of that corridor, on the right, will be a small anteroom where you will find her maid. Speak to the maid."

  Lar bowed and went off to fulfill his orders, which he did with careful precision. Khaavren sat where he was, thinking and remembering, but not speculating. That is, it is not so much the case that he knew, or thought he knew, what the message was; or even that he didn't care; it was that he had long ago simply stopped wondering about things. He knew that he would either find out or not, and it would have an effect on him or it would not, and it would be good or it would be bad, and he saw no reason to permit his thoughts to run ahead of the facts, especially when his thoughts were so entirely occupied with all of those recollections engendered by the phrase "House of the Phoenix," which recollections we will, in respecting Khaavren's privacy, refrain from making explicit to the reader, although the reader can, no doubt, form whatever conclusions he wishes, especially recalling that the Viscount had already spoken of a certain turmoil engendered by a letter. Should the reader conclude that the earlier letter and the present messenger are related, we will at once endorse this opinion; but should the reader choose, instead of speculating, to merely await the unfolding of events, a choice by which we are flattered in that it indicates trust in the narrator, we will give our word that the source and purpose of the messenger will be revealed before too many pages have passed.

  After some few minutes, Lar returned and stood before Khaavren.

  "Well?" said the Tiassa.

  "Madam's compliments, and would the Count be kind enough to attend her on the terrace?"

  "Very well. Do you, then, bring us coffee."

  "I will do so at once," said Lar. "Unless—"