The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8) Read online

  “Heads up!”

  A branch crashed down through brittle leaves, almost hitting Damson. The stocky cadet glowered up at Dar, who yelped and lost his grip on a high limb.

  “Damson . . .” said Jame, in a warning tone.

  The Shanir cadet made a face and turned away. Jame already knew that Damson could cause considerable damage by tweaking others’ minds, especially their sense of balance. Worse, she seemed to enjoy doing so and had, as far as Jame could determine, no conscience whatsoever except where her command-mates were concerned. Instead of now hanging upside down by his knees like some improbable fruit, Dar could have fallen like a stone on his head.

  Rue prodded the branch with a toe. “Look. The wood is rotten and . . . ugh.” She drew back as black beetles swarmed out of it. The bark collapsed with a papery rustle on its hollow core.

  Jame remembered Tori’s dinner teeming with mold and maggots. Perhaps the firelight had fooled her eyes, but reports had been coming in for days about disease and insects covering damaged crops.

  “Trinity,” Rowan had muttered when Jame had told her, in part, what had happened in the tower that first night. “That’s worse than I’ve seen. I only meant to warn you that Blackie has been unusually short-tempered and preoccupied of late. You had better stay out of his way until he sorts himself out. Trust me: he always does.”

  This had struck Jame as very good advice. She had since seen her brother at a distance, but in general the latter days of spring had passed without the twins crossing paths even though they dwelt, more or less, under the same roof.

  In the meantime, Jame thought a good deal about what had happened in the tower, without understanding it at all. She might be a potential nemesis, and she had been very angry that night, but she was usually aware when destruction flared in her. There was a cold, ruthless joy to it, a surrender to forces that seemed beyond her control. At such a moment, one could do anything, no matter how terrible, before conscience pulled one back. If nothing else, her retractile claws emerged. In that context, slapping Tori hardly seemed to count.

  How, though, could he be responsible? He had manifested some Shanir traits in the past, true, whether he admitted them or not, but how could That-Which-Creates cause such destruction?

  Jame shivered. The closer the three surviving Knorth came to fulfilling their destiny—if they ever did—the more terrifying the prospect became. Would she, Tori, and Kindrie still be themselves, or only puppets of their hated god, possessed by his power? Honor guided them now. Would it protect them then?

  “So, how do you reckon the ratings will go?” asked Killy as he tossed an armload of shattered branches into a waiting wagon.

  The horse in the shafts shifted from one shot hip to the other, sighed, and went back to sleep. In the wagon bed, the hunting ounce Jorin protested at being woken from his nap. The other cadets groaned.

  Of course, they were deeply concerned about how they ranked after their year in Kothifir and how that would effect their third and final year of training. However, they had already picked this topic to pieces and most felt that it was bad luck to bring it up again so close to learning their fates—tomorrow, in fact, on Summer’s Day. Killy could be maladroit at times, though. Now he was so again.

  “If we pass,” he said, cheerfully plowing on, “we’ll all become ten-commanders, in charge of regular Kendar or of other cadets. Just think of that!”

  “Or five-commanders,” said Quill, “which, either way, is barely a step up from where we are now. You mark my words: everything we’ve done to mess up over the past two years will come back to haunt us. You shouldn’t have put a spear through that instructor’s leg at Tentir, Killy.”

  “Ah, who’s going to remember that?”

  “The instructor, I should think.”

  “Anyway,” said stolid Erim, “the Randon Council will decide according to what skills they think we still need to prove. What good does it do to second-guess them?”

  Nonetheless, they were off again despite themselves, wondering out loud where they would be bound on the morrow.

  “Tentir for Dar and me as third-year mentors, we hope,” said Mint.

  The others hooted. During the ride north, she and Dar had at first tried to conceal that they had become lovers, then responded to teasing by flaunting it. The Randon college frowned on such attachments, although they were far from uncommon there.

  “Special duty for me,” said Quill. “I’d like to accompany a diplomatic mission to the Central Lands now that the Seven Kings are riling up against each other again.”

  “Back to Kothifir,” said Erim, “on Harn Grip-hard’s staff.”

  When pressed, quiet Niall spoke wistfully about a ranger assignment. Given his experiences in the slaughter at the Cataracts, no one wondered that he would yearn for the quiet of the wilderness.

  Rue had already made it clear that she intended to continue as Jame’s servant, no matter what anybody said.

  Damson remained silent, although Jame felt the dart of her small eyes. Well aware of her oddity, this disconcerting cadet had announced that she would henceforth look to her Highborn ten-commander as a model—a prospect that filled Jame with profound misgivings.

  No one asked the Southron Brier Iron-thorn. She, like Rue, would presumably go wherever Jame did, whatever she felt about it.

  Jame hoped that her ten wouldn’t suffer for her faults. After all, they had proved themselves over and over in one unlikely situation after another, ending with the defeat of the Karnid horde before Kothifir that had resulted in her own broken collarbone.

  She herself had hardly been idle, but not in ways that might count among the randon, assuming they ever learned of them. Harn Grip-hard had his suspicions. So did Sheth Sharp-tongue. Still, they were only two members of the Randon Council, made up as it was of one war-leader from each of the nine major houses.

  Jame wondered if Tori already knew what the Council had decided. Surely so, since the randon would have consulted with him as they did with all lords, each of whom had his own special needs for this new crop of cadets. Her brother must already be thinking about possibilities. She hated being at his mercy, especially when their father might at any moment glare at her out of his eyes.

  Oh, Tori, what has happened to you, and what does it mean for all of us?

  Dar had righted himself on a tree limb. “You should see this, Ten,” he called down to her.

  Jame considered the apple tree’s trunk. Boughs flung wide their arms from it, offering a ready ladder—that is, assuming more of it wasn’t afflicted with rot. Her shoulder twinged.

  “Here.”

  Brier stepped between her and the tree, offering cupped hands. For a moment, Jame looked into the Southron’s eyes, as green and unreadable as malachite. Even bound as they were, would they ever understand each other?

  She put her foot into the offered stirrup of laced fingers without giving herself time to think and was flung upward. Leaves and twigs whipped her in the face. A flailing hand struck a major limb and clung by its claw-tips. Then her feet found purchase. Dar reached down and pulled her up to his perch.

  “Look,” he said.

  Blinking away black spots—crumbled leaves, surely—Jame stared out over the orchard. From ground level, the damage had seemed random. From here, it appeared that the wind and hail had raked through the trees like fingers, leaving parallel tracks of destruction. Those trees on the southwestern edge were blighted and broken. Others leaned together behind them in rows as if seeking shelter, no doubt aided by a vernal touch of arboreal drift. Those that had fallen must have leaned too far. Jame’s eyes followed the sweep of destruction, which curled around the foot of Gothregor. She couldn’t see over the fortress’s high walls, but memory showed her the bands of hail that had fallen across the inner ward, melting in the next day’s morning sun. No doubt about it: the Highlord’s tower had been the epicenter of the storm.

  Movement caught her eye down on the River Road—a troop of travelers
approaching the Knorth fortress from the north. From their bright clothes, she judged that they weren’t Kencyr.

  “Those must be the emissaries from Karkinaroth,” said Dar. “I hear that they passed through here around the Feast of Fools, headed for Restormir.”

  “Why?”

  “Folk say that their new prince wants a contract with a Caineron Highborn.”

  Jame snorted, then reconsidered.

  As rare as such an occurrence was, it had happened once before, when Caldane had sent his young daughter Lyra Lack-wit south to the ill-fated Prince Odalian. Then, what the Karkinorans had really wanted was a military alliance with the Kencyrath, and they had gotten something of the sort when the Waster Horde had marched on the Cataracts. Never mind that poor Odalian had been replaced with the darkling changer Tirandys, Jame’s former teacher or Senethari, for whom she still mourned.

  The visitors disappeared around the foot of the mountain spur upon which Gothregor was built. Horns echoed off the opposite mountain slope, announcing their arrival.

  By now it was late afternoon. The sun had set behind the western Snowthorns, and shadows were beginning to pool in the river valley. The cadets threw their last armloads of branches into the wagon, scrambled in after them (again displacing Jorin), and woke the drowsy horse. As soon as the latter realized it was stable-bound, it roused and took them through the northern gate at a bone-jarring trot.

  As they passed under the shadow of the gatehouse, a bucket full of hammers fell from above, clipping the horse’s flank and smashing on the pavement at its heels. It bolted through into the wasteland that had been the inner ward’s garden, sending several cadets tumbling off the back of the wagon into the churned-up mud.

  “Sorry!” a voice called after them from above.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” Rue muttered to Dar as they scrambled to catch up.

  The mess hall was already full and boisterous by the time they reached it. Surrounded by towering Kendar, Jame didn’t see that someone was already sitting at their table until she was almost upon him, and then he was hard to miss, being large even for one of his kind. She noted, amused, that the table bobbed slightly as it balanced on his raised knees. Marc had aged some over the past year, his red hair thin and receding at the temples, but he was still hale and fit with the muscles of a warrior turned artisan in his late middle age. How old was he now? In his mid-to-late nineties, probably. Jame dropped a kiss on the top of his balding head and sat down on the bench beside him. Since they had first met in Tai-tastigon nearly four years ago, he had been her dearest companion and the moral compass of her turbulent life, sorely missed during her sojourns at Tentir and Kothifir.

  Brier sat down on the big Kendar’s other side with a nod to him, which he returned with a warm smile. Jame felt an unfamiliar twinge of jealousy. Brier might be his great-granddaughter, but that didn’t count for much since they were only related by the paternal line and had barely seen each other since Brier’s childhood.

  “How was your day?” Jame asked to regain his attention. “Still shutting down the kilns?”

  He popped a chunk of bread dripping with gravy into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Yes. Mind you, I’m nowhere near done, but I’ve run out of raw materials for the moment.”

  On her last night in the Women’s Halls two years ago, pursued by shadow assassins, Jame had accidentally shattered the huge stained-glass map that made up the eastern wall of the High Council Chamber. Ever since, Marc had been trying to repair it, and doing a remarkable job, considering his only knowledge of glassmaking was hearsay gained from the secretive artists of Tai-tastigon. He had discovered that sand, ash, and lime taken from various parts of Rathillien, not to mention traces of such native elements as cobalt, copper, and gold to add color, created glass unique to that area.

  Contiguous pieces in turn fused together spontaneously, allowing him to fit them into the upright window frame. The result was spectacular, but it didn’t look at all like a map unless one knew how to read the mineral traces. Bits of it glowed where Torisen had mixed drops of his blood into the molten glass, to what purpose, no one was yet sure. Also, there were holes in it: despite over three thousand years on Rathillien, the Kencyr had not yet explored all parts of their new world.

  “That reminds me,” said Jame. “It’s odd that this never occurred to me before, but the original map only showed the Central and Eastern Lands.”

  Marc frowned, wiping his beard. “I didn’t think of that either. There’s no room for the Western Lands on the new map either, and that’s not just because I have no raw materials for them. It’s as if they no longer existed.”

  Jame shivered. One could go a long while, even a lifetime, without thinking about Rathillien’s endangered status as the threshold world closest to Perimal Darkling, ancient of enemies. The Kencyrath had retreated down the Chain of Creation for some thirty millennia, ever since The Three-Faced God had created it to fight the shadows that crawled. How many worlds they had lost, not even the scrollsmen of Mount Alban knew for sure, nor how close they were to losing this last refuge. Most agreed that Rathillien was round, and that the other side of it had already been swallowed. The Barrier lay within sight of the Haunted Lands keep where Jame and Tori had been born, also just north of the Merikits’ land and south of the Southern Wastes. There were also “thin” spots such as the White Hills where it dwelt just under Rathillien’s surface. How close had it crept to the west? The Tishooo, otherwise known as the Falling Man, one of Rathillien’s four elementals, had gone to see. Jame wondered if he would ever return to tell her.

  No one had yet served the cadets their dinner.

  “D’you suppose they’ve forgotten us again?” Quill asked, craning to look around.

  It had happened at almost every meal. The odd thing was that the neglect didn’t seem to be deliberate. People simply forgot that they were there.

  Under the table, Jorin impatiently butted her knee with his nut-hard head. He was hungry too.

  Belatedly, a cook rushed out of the kitchen carrying a streaming cauldron of soup, its bottom still ruddy from the fire. Clutching its handles through his bunched-up apron, he dodged around the diners, trying not to splash anyone. As he neared Jame’s table, however, he tripped. His grip on the pot held, but its contents went flying. Marc knocked her backward off the bench, out of the way. Soup flew over her head in a scalding brown sheet that seemed to boil in midair. It hit the back and exposed neck of a Knorth Kendar seated at the next table, who jumped up with a startled yelp of pain. The cook dropped the kettle and bustled over to administer to his enraged victim. The pot, meanwhile, rolled under another bench and over assorted feet. As chaos spread, Jame regained her seat.

  “Has this sort of thing happened often, since you returned?” Marc asked.

  “Huh. More so than it should.”

  The big man regarded the remains of his meal, then pushed them aside.

  “Kendar are often vulnerable to their lords’ health and moods,” he said. “It comes with the bond between them.”

  “I know that.”

  Hadn’t she seen Lord Caineron inflict his vicious hangover on his helpless bondsmen at Restormir? Worse, wasn’t her father Ganth said to have imposed his madness on his followers in the White Hills when he had sought to avenge the slaughter of the Knorth ladies on the Seven Kings, never mind that they were the wrong target?

  The very thought made her feel sick. The so-called Highborn shouldn’t have such power over the perforce servile Kendar. Damn their god anyway, for having made the Kencyrath so.

  Some things need to be broken.

  “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” Kirien had said, never mind that it had been in the grip of what amounted to an academic berserker fit.

  But what was the truth?

  If the link between the Three People suddenly disappeared, what would become of them? The catlike Arrin-ken would probably go their own way, as they had for the past two millennia. The c
ompetent Kendar could no doubt manage by themselves. Only the proud Highborn would be left helpless. Fair enough. However, if the Kencyrath did break, who would be left to oppose Perimal Darkling? She thought again of shadows hungry for life crawling out of the Master’s House, out of the Haunted Lands, out of the Southern Wastes, and she shivered.

  The mess-hall fracas had grown around them, spilling from table to table. Some Kendar leaped up with curses, upsetting benches, as their neighbors barged into them. Others shouted for order, and raised fists to enforce it. When someone bumped into him, Killy half rose, but Brier’s hand on his shoulder pressed him back down. The ten-command sat wide-eyed in the midst of chaos, once again forgotten.

  All in all, it was one of the strangest fights that Jame had ever seen.

  Kendar sometimes reflected their lords’ moods.

  Tori was doing his best to ignore her, but behind that Jame sensed that he was angry, confused and, yes, perhaps even frightened, Ancestors only knew why. He didn’t want to hurt her. Neither did his people. However, accidents kept happening. Of course, except for Brier, her ten-command were also bound to the Highlord, but they knew her better than they did him, and as twins she and Tori had much in common. So far she seemed to be providing them with an adequate substitute.

  “We should leave,” Jame said to Brier, under the uproar, both of them ducking a flung bowl. “Without us here, they may calm down.”

  She had been resting her forearms on the tabletop, sleeves rolled up to her elbows after the day’s heat. When she rose, she saw that the wood which she had touched was bumpy with knotted whorls as surely it hadn’t been before. What, now she was giving the very furniture hives? Time to go, indeed.

  Chapter II

  Departure