Taltos Page 17

  Aliera continued, “I couldn’t leave either, for that matter. And didn’t the Empress Zerika manage? And for that matter, what about you? I know what being a Lord of Judgment means, and there’s nothing that makes you so special that you should be immune to these effects. You’re lying.”

  Verra’s face lost its smile, and her multijointed hands twitched—an odd, inhuman gesture that scared me more than her presence. I expected Aliera to be destroyed on the spot, but Verra only said, “I owe you no explanation, little Dragon.”

  Aliera said, “Yes, you do,” and Verra flushed. I wondered what it was that had passed between them.

  Then Verra smiled, just a little, and said, “Yes, perhaps I do owe you an explanation. First of all, you are simply wrong. You don’t know as much about being a god as you think you do. Easterners hold gods in awe, denying us any humanity. Dragaerans have the attitude that godhood is a skill, like sorcery, and there’s nothing more to it than that. Neither is correct. It is a combination of many skills, and many natural forces, and involves changes in every aspect of the personality. I was never human, but if I had been, I wouldn’t be now. I am a god. My blood is the blood of a god. It is for this reason that the Halls of Judgment cannot hold me.

  “In the case of Zerika, she was able to leave because the Imperial Orb has power even here. Still, we could have stopped her, and we nearly did. It is no small thing to allow the living the leave this place, even those few who are capable.

  “Your Easterner friend could never have come here without a living body to carry him. No, the soul doesn’t matter, but it’s more complicated than that. It is the blood. As a living man he could bring himself here, and as a living man he can leave.” She suddenly looked at me. “Once. Don’t come back, Fenarian.” I tried not to look as if I were shaking.

  Verra went on, “And as for you, Aliera ...” Her voice trailed off and she smiled.

  Aliera flushed and looked down. “I see.”

  “Yes. In your case, as perhaps your friends told you, I had some difficulty in persuading certain parties to allow you to leave. If you weren’t the heir to the throne, we would have required you to stay, and your companion with you. Are you answered?”

  Aliera nodded without looking up.

  “What about me, boss?”

  Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. I screwed up my courage and said, “Goddess, I need to know—”

  “Your familiar shares your fate, of course.”

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you.”

  “Thanks, boss. I feel better.”

  “You do?”

  Verra said, “Are you ready to leave, then? You should depart soon, because if you sleep, none of you will live again, and there are imperial rules against the undead holding official imperial positions.”

  Aliera said, “I will not leave without my cousin.”

  “So be it,” snapped Verra. “Then you will stay. Should you change your mind, however, the path out of here is through the arch your friends know, and to the left, past the Cycle, and onward. You may take it if you can. The Lord Morrolan will find his life seeping away from him as he walks, but he can try. Perhaps you will succeed in bringing a corpse out of this land, and denying him the repose of the Paths as well as the life which is already forfeit. Now leave me.”

  We looked at each other. I was feeling very tired indeed.

  For lack of anywhere else to go, we went past the throne until we found the archway beneath which we’d first met Kieron the Conqueror. To the right was the path to the well, which was still tempting, but I still knew better. To the left was the way out, for Aliera and me.

  I discovered, to my disgust, that I really didn’t want to leave Morrolan there. If it had been Aliera who had to stay, I might have felt differently, but that wasn’t one of my options. We stood beneath the arch, no one moving.

  * * * *

  I opened the box. The sensation I’d felt upon touching it became stronger. It contained a sheathed dagger. Touching the sheath was very difficult for me. Touching the hilt was even more difficult.

  “I don’t like this thing, boss.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Do you have to draw it before—”

  “Yes. I need to know I can use it. Now shut up, Loiosh. You aren’t making this any easier.”

  I drew the dagger and it assaulted my mind. I found my hand was trembling, and forced my grip to relax. I tried to study the thing as if it were just any weapon. The blade was thirteen inches, sharp on one side. It had enough of a point to be useful, but the edge was better. It had a good handguard and it balanced well. The hilt was nonreflective black, and—

  Morganti.

  I held it until I stopped shaking. I had never touched one of these before. I almost made a vow never to touch one again, but careless vows are stupid, so I didn’t.

  But it was a horrible thing to hold, and I never did get used to it. I knew there were those who regularly carried them, and I wondered if they were sick, or merely made of better stuff than I.

  I forced myself to take a few cuts and thrusts with it. I set up a pine board so I could practice thrusting it into something. I held it the whole time, using my left hand to put the board against a wall on top of a dresser. I held my right hand, with the knife, rigidly out to the side away from my left hand. I must have looked absurd, but Loiosh didn’t laugh. I could tell he was exercising great courage in not flying from the room.

  Well, so was I, for that matter.

  I thrust it into the board about two dozen times, forcing myself to keep striking until I relaxed a bit, until I could treat it as just a weapon. I never fully succeeded, but I got closer. When I finally resheathed the thing, I was drenched with sweat and my arm was stiff and sore.

  I put it back in its box.

  “Thanks, boss. I feel better.”

  “Me, too. Okay. Everything is set for tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.”

  * * * *

  As we stood, I said to Aliera, “So tell me, what’s so special about you that you can leave here and Morrolan can’t?”

  “It’s in the blood,” she said.

  “Do you mean that, or is it a figure of speech?”

  She looked at me scornfully. “Take it however you will.”

  “Ummm, would you like to be more specific?”

  “No,” said Aliera.

  I shrugged. At least she hadn’t told me she owed me no explanation. I was getting tired of that particular phrase. Before us was a wall, and paths stretched out to the right and to the left. I looked to the right.

  I said, “Morrolan, do you know anything about that water Verra drank and fed to Aliera?”

  “Very little,” he said.

  “Do you think it might allow us to—”

  “No,” said Aliera and Morrolan in one voice. I guess they knew more about it than I did, which wasn’t difficult. They didn’t offer any explanations and I didn’t press the issue. We just stood for a long moment, then Morrolan said, “I think there is no choice. You must go. Leave me here.”

  “No,” said Aliera.

  I chewed on my lower lip. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then Morrolan said, “Come. Whatever we decide, I wish to look upon the Cycle.”

  Aliera nodded. I had no objection.

  We took the path to the left.

  Chapter 16

  The horizon jumped and misted, the candle exploded, the knife vibrated apart, and the humming became, in an instant, a roar that deafened me.

  On the ground before me, the rune glowed like to blind me, and I realized that I was feeling very sleepy. I knew what that meant, too. I had no energy left to even keep me awake. I was going to lose consciousness, and I might or might not ever regain it, and I might or not be mad if I did.

  My vision wavered, and the roar in my ears became a single monotone that was, strangely, the same as silence. In the last blur before I slipped away, I saw on the ground, in the center of the rune, the object of my desire—that which I’d done all
of this to summon—sitting placidly, as if it had been there all along.

  I wondered, for an instant, why I was taking no joy in my success; then I decided that it probably had something to do with not knowing if I’d live to use it. But there was still somewhere the sense of triumph for having done something no witch had ever done before, and a certain serene pleasure in having succeeded. I decided I’d feel pretty good if it didn’t kill me.

  Dying, I’ve found, always puts a crimp in my enjoyment of an event.

  I’d love to see a map of the Paths of the Dead.

  Ha.

  We followed the wall to the left, and it kept circling around until we ought to have been near the thrones, but we were still in a hallway with no ceiling. The stars vanished sometime in thee, leaving a grey overcast, yet there was no lessening in the amount of light I thought had been provided by the stars. I dunno.

  The wall ended and we seemed to be on a cliff overlooking a sea. There was no sea closer than a thousand miles to Deathgate Falls, but I suppose I ought to have stopped expecting geographical consistency some time before.

  We stared out at the dark, gloomy sea for a while and listened to its roar. It stretched out forever, in distance and in time. I can’t look at a sea, even the one at home, without wondering about who lives beyond it. What sorts of lives do they have? Better than ours? Worse? So similar I couldn’t tell the difference? So different I couldn’t survive there? What would it be like? How did they live? What sorts of beds did they have? Were they soft and warm, like mine, safe and—

  “Vlad!”

  “Uh, what?”

  “We want to get moving,” said Morrolan.

  “Oh. Sorry. I’m getting tired.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, let’s—Wait a minute.”

  I reached around and opened my pack, dug around amid the useless witchcraft supplies I’d carried all this way, and found some kelsch leaves. I passed them around. “Chew on these,” I said.

  We all did so, and, while nothing remarkable or exciting happened, I realized that I was more awake. Morrolan smiled. “Thanks, Vlad.”

  “I should have thought of it sooner.”

  “I should have thought of it, boss. That’s my job. Sorry.”

  “You’re tired, too. Want a leaf? I’ve got another.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll get by.”

  We looked around, and far off to our right was what seemed to be a large rectangle. We headed toward it. As we got closer, it resolved itself into a single wall about forty feet high and sixty feet across. As we came still closer, we could see there was a large circular object mounted on its face. My pulse quickened.

  Moments later the three of us stood contemplating the Cycle of the Dragaeran Empire.

  * * * *

  Raiet picked up a carriage at the Imperial Palace the next day and went straight to the home of his mistress. A Dragonlord rode with him, another rode next to the driver, and a third, on horseback, rode next to the carriage, or in front of it, or behind it. Loiosh flew above it, but that wasn’t part of their arrangements.

  Watching them through my familiar’s eyes, I had to admire their precision, futile though it was. The one on top of the coach got down first, checked out the area, and went straight into the building and up to the flat, which was on the second floor of the three-story brick building.

  If you’d been there watching, you would have seen the rider dismount smartly as the driver got down and held the door for the two inside while looking up and down the street, and up at the rooftops as well. Raiet and the two Dragons walked into the building together. The first one was already inside the flat and had checked it over. Raiet’s mistress, who name was Treffa, nodded to the Dragon and continued setting out chilled wine. She seemed a bit nervous as she went about this, but she’d been growing more and more nervous as this testimony business continued.

  As he finished checking the apartment, the other two Dragons delivered Raiet. Treffa smiled briefly and brought the wine into the bedchamber. He turned to one of the Dragons and shook his head. “I think she’s getting tired of this.”

  The Dragon probably shrugged; he’d been assigned to protect a Jhereg, but he didn’t have to like it, or him, and I assume he didn’t. Raiet walked into the bedchamber and closed the door. Treffa walked over to the door and did something to it.

  “What’s that, babe?”

  “A soundproofing spell. I just bought it.”

  He chuckled. “They making you nervous?”

  She nodded.

  “I suppose it’s starting to wear on you.”

  She nodded again and poured them each a glass of wine.

  When he hadn’t appeared after his usual few hours, the Dragons knocked on the door. When no one answered, they broke the door down. They found his lifeless and soulless body on the bed, a Morganti knife buried in his chest. They wondered why they hadn’t heard him scream, or the window opening. Treffa lay next to him, drugged and unconscious. They couldn’t figure out how the drugs had gotten into the wine, and Treffa was no help with any of it.

  They were suspicious of her, naturally, but were never able to prove that Treffa had actually taken money to set him up. She disappeared a few months later and is doing quite well to this day, and Treffa isn’t her name anymore, and I won’t tell you where she’s living.

  * * * *

  It is commonly believed that if anyone had the strength to take hold of the great wheel that is the Cycle and physically move it, the time of the current House would pass, and the next would arrive. It is also commonly held that it would require enough strength to overcome all the weight contained by the forces of history, tradition, and will that keep the Cycle turning as it does. This being the case, it seems a moot point, especially when, as I stared at it, it was hard to imagine anyone with the strength to just move the bloody great wheel.

  That’s all it was, too. A big wheel stuck onto a wall in the middle of nowhere. On the wheel were engraved symbolic representations of all seventeen Houses. The Phoenix was at the top, the Dragon next in line, the Athyra having just passed. What a thrill it must be to be here when it actually changed, signaling the passing of another phase of Dragaeran history. At that point, either the Empress would step down, or she would have recently done so, or would soon do so, or perhaps she would refuse and blood would run in the Empire until the political and the mystical were once more in agreement. When would it happen? Tomorrow? In a thousand years?

  Everyone I’ve asked insists that this thing is the Cycle in every meaningful way, not merely its physical manifestation. I can’t make sense of that, but if you can, more power to you, so to speak.

  I glanced at Morrolan and Aliera, who also stared at the Cycle, awe on their faces.

  “Boss, the kelsch won’t last forever.”

  “Right, Loiosh. Thanks.”

  I said, “All right, folks. Whatever we’re going to do, we’d best be about it.”

  They looked at me, at each other, at the ground, then back at the Cycle. None of us knew what to do. I turned my back on them and walked back to look out over the sea again.

  * * * *

  I won’t say that I’m haunted by the look in Raiet’s eyes in that last moment—when the Morganti dagger struck him—or his scream as his soul was destroyed. He deserved what happened to him, and that’s that.

  But I never got used to touching that weapon. It’s the ultimate predator, hating everything, and it would have been as happy to destroy me as Raiet. Morganti weapons scare me right down to my toes, and I’m never going to be happy dealing with them. But I guess it’s all part of the job.

  The whole thing gave me a couple of days of uneasy conscience in any case, though. Not, as I say, for Raiet; but somehow this brought home to me a thought that I’d been ignoring for over a year: I was being paid money to kill people.

  No, I was being paid money to kill Dragaerans; Dragaerans who had made my life miserable for more than seventeen years. Why shouldn’t I l
et them make my life pleasant instead? Loiosh, I have to say, was no help at all in this. He had the instincts of an eater of carrion and sometime hunter.

  I really didn’t know if I was creating justifications that would eventually break down or not. But a couple of days of wondering was all I could take. I managed to put it out of my mind, and, to be frank, it hasn’t bothered me since.

  I don’t know, maybe someday it will, and if so I’ll deal with it then.

  * * * *

  I don’t know how long I stood there, perhaps an hour, before Morrolan and Aliera came up behind me. Then the three of us watched the waves break for a few minutes. Behind us, the way we’d come, were the Paths of the Dead and the Halls of Judgment. To our right, beyond the Cycle, was a dark forest, through which lay the way out, for some of us.

  After a time Aliera said, “I won’t leave without Morrolan.”

  Morrolan said, “You are a fool.”

  “And you’re another for coming here when you knew you couldn’t get out alive.”

  “I can think of another fool, Loiosh.”

  “Another two, boss.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Morrolan. “But there is no need to make the venture useless.”

  “Yes there is. I choose to do so.”

  “It is absurd to kill yourself merely because—”

  “It is what I will do. No one, no one will sacrifice his life for me. I won’t have it. We both leave, or we both remain.”

  There was a cool breeze on the right side of my face. That way was home. I shook my head. Morrolan should have known better than to expect rationality from a Dragaeran, much less a Dragonlord. But then, he was one himself.

  Aliera said, “Go back, Vlad. I thank you for your help, but your task is finished.”

  Yes, Morrolan was a Dragonlord and a Dragaeran. He was also pompous and abrasive as hell. So why did I feel such a resistance to just leaving him? But what else could I do? There was no way to leave with him, and I, at least, saw no value in pointless gestures.

  Morrolan and Aliera were looking at me. I looked away.

  “Leave, Vlad,” said Morrolan. I didn’t move.