HM02 House of Moons (23 page)

“Tell the little bastard that I’m occupied.” Senn waved one hand lazily at the waiting chierra servant. “Have him make an appointment.”

The servant nodded, his tan face tense, then turned back to the ornate carved wooden doors just as they swung open.

“I’m afraid my business can’t wait.” Clad in black trimmed with silver, Chee smiled at the servant, who paled and dropped his dark eyes.

“My Lord?” The servant caught Seffram’s eye, with the unspoken question ringing in his mind:
Should he call Security?

“No, Franel.” Seffram fingered his jaw, trying to judge how best to handle this. Chee did have a vote on the Council. It would be foolish to turn him away at this point. “Wait outside. Lord Chee will not be staying.”

Chee braced his arms behind his back and strolled across the dark maroon carpet to the huge windows that stretched from ceiling to floor, looking out on the snow-covered expanse of Senn’ayn’s fabled grounds. “You must lend me your head gardener this summer, Senn. I have a number of renovations planned at Chee’ayn.”

“Renovations?” Seffram felt a laugh bubbling up. “The only way to renovate that nit-eaten wreck would be to level it and start over. There’s nothing left there worth saving, even if you had the gold, which you do not.”

“You haven’t heard, then.” Chee turned away from the windows and slid a hand inside his tunic. “I’m getting married.”

“Oh, really?” The laugh moved upward, tickling his ribs. “Did some Lowlands House come calling?”

Chee drew his hand out, then thrust it casually behind his back. “Haemas Sennay Tal, actually. Really, I’m surprised you haven’t heard.”

“Haemas Tal?” The suppressed mirth escaped and ricocheted through him until he was helpless with laughter. “You can’t be serious! Not only has her father just died, but that snip has sworn never to marry. By the Light, she once turned down the
Killians!
She would never settle for a Chee.” Warm tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks.

“Obviously, my charms escape you.” Chee’s voice was strained. “Still, who knows what lies within the heart of a woman?”

“Not that one, anyway.” Seffram wiped his eyes. “Even if it’s true, why are you here? You certainly don’t expect me to mix the anizt at your matrimonial?”

“Well, I hadn’t considered that.” Chee smiled thinly. “Perhaps we can discuss it later.”

Something hard jammed against Seffram’s temple. He stiffened in shock as a hideous grinding buzz tore through his brain. The air whooshed out of his lungs and a black fog shivered behind his eyes.

Oh, no, you don’t,
Chee said into his mind.
You don’t get off as easily as old Tal.

Seffram’s diaphragm contracted. He took a long, shuddering breath, then another.

“That’s better.” Chee secreted the object inside his tunic again. “Now we’re going to set up a response pattern in that moribund old brain of yours.” His eyes seemed to grow larger until the dark flecks riding within them were all that Seffram could see. “From now on, anything I suggest is going to be more dear to you than your own skin. You will support me in all things, without asking any questions. Do you understand?”

The two eyes merged and formed one huge orb slivered with Darkness itself. “I—understand,” Seffram heard his voice say.

“Now, you will forget this conversation and remember only that your young friend Diren spent the afternoon, exchanging pleasantries.” A hand touched his temple, then suddenly he was blinking at Diren’s concerned face. “You look tired, Seffram.” Diren clapped him on the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Seffram stared at the hand on his shoulder. What had they been talking about? He tugged at his ear, feeling foolish. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Even the bright sunlight streaming in through his favorite windows looked oddly colored and strange. “I—I—”

“It’s all right.” Diren opened the sideboard and extracted a bottle of Nivan wine with easy familiarity. He poured a generous measure and handed it to Seffram. “Here. You’ve been working too hard, what with Tal’s sudden death and all.”

Seffram watched his shaking fingers curl around the fluted glass as if they belonged to someone else. “Tal, yes, that was a—shock.”

Diren poured another portion of the amber-colored liquid for himself and settled into the chair on the opposite side of the hearth. “Well, I have a plan.” He smiled, and his eyes shone across the space between them like two newly risen bright gold moons. “I should share some of the burden you’re carrying. After all ...” He tossed off the expensive wine as lightly as if it were water. “What are friends for?”

* * *

As always, the nexus was cold, glimmering with blue light too bright to focus on, yet as Haemas stepped into it with Kisa, she could feel the same brooding rhythm that had prevailed earlier. She glanced down at the latteh in her hand and realized it was still set in the controlling mode.

She wasted a moment trying to rearrange the flickering energy pulses within the dull-green crystal, but they eluded her, maintaining the mind-binding pattern Axia had set. She glanced around at the glittering array of lines and splintered scenes; it was difficult to concentrate amid all this. Perhaps it would be better to wait until she returned to her own When to free the latteh.

She pictured her study in the House of Moons, but none of the scenes that appeared at the end of the lines were familiar. No doubt, the rattling, teeth-on-edge vibrations of the latteh were interfering, but she didn’t want to waste energy exiting the nexus, then reentering, and she couldn’t go back without it. Frostvine had demanded the return of this First One above all other priorities. She held the equivalent of an ilseri child in her hand, and the ilseri had every right to issue ultimatums.

Kisa’s fingers tightened on hers.
I can’t breathe very good here
.

Haemas concentrated harder, trying to focus the timeways as the ilseri did. She glimpsed something vaguely familiar at the end of a line to her right, just an impression of a shadowed room, but she felt that she had been there before. Clasping Kisa’s hand tightly, she drew her over to the writhing blue line.
Watch,
she told her.
When the line crosses in front of you, step down on it.
Then she took the first step herself and felt the power of the nexus humming up through the sole of her foot.

Behind her, Kisa watched soberly, then did the same.

Good,
she told the child.
Now we must take two more on the same line and then we will be there.
After waiting for her chance, she took a second step and then a third, feeling Kisa correctly follow her each time.

The glimmering blue faded away, leaving them in a darkened room with a vaulted ceiling, far too big to be in the House of Moons. Spicy-sweet incense filled the air and she saw fluted vases of mind-conjured chispa-fire placed around the outside of the walls. Long rows of highly polished dark wood benches had been pulled back to make room for a single shrouded bier containing the richly dressed figure of an older white-haired man.

“Oh, my Lady, I knowed you would come!” The quavering voice spoke behind her, and her heart sank as she recognized the speaker. She turned to see her old chierra nurse, Jayna, huddled by the doors in a woolen shawl. “He were took that fast.” Her brown eyes were reddened and tears streamed down her lined face. “There were nothing that anyone could do, not even the healers.”

Kisa tugged at Haemas’s hand and whispered, “Where are we?”

“This is the chapel at Tal’ayn.” Haemas’s hands were cold and clammy, her heart racing like a runaway horse. Had she blundered into an Otherwhen, or was this what her When had become? She released Kisa’s hand to approach the bier carved of oak.

There had been a period in her life when she had seen this scene every time she’d closed her eyes, when it had formed the substance of her every nightmare, but that had been a fabrication of her cousin Jarid, crafted to make her run away and abandon her inheritance. Her father’s death had been only a sick fantasy spun by Jarid’s twisted mind.

But this time ... She stopped at the edge of the bier and gazed down at the still face, white as marble beneath the silken shroud.
This time, apparently, it was real.

LEAFCURL SLITHERED
out along the branch over Kevisson’s head, then peered anxiously down at the small campfire burning beneath the tree.
If Moonspeaker does not return soon, the mothers say it will be too late.

Kevisson reached for another stick of wood from his dwindling pile and tossed it into the hungry flames. He rested his chin on his knotted hands and stared moodily into the weaving flames. When he squinted, he could see Haemas’s face in them, somber and yearning, anxious. Where in the name of Darkness was she? “Too late for what?” he asked dourly.

Leafcurl leaped down from the tree, a drop of at least fifteen feet, and landed lightly on his feet with dancer-like grace. He hunched his head between his shoulders and held his four-fingered hands protectively before his face as he warily circled the fire.
We may not say.

Kevisson glanced into the trees, sensing how the other ilserin lingered out of sight amid the dark massive trunks, unnerved by the flames. Apparently, the adult ilseri had made them understand that he had to have warmth and sleep and appropriate food in order to survive. Still—he grimaced—he was stranded there, just as he was finally figuring out what was going on, with no way to return to the Highlands unless he hiked to the nearest Kashi portal, and because of the confusing manner in which he’d arrived, he had no idea as to where that might be, just so the ilseri could repeatedly ask him a question to which he had no answer—where was Haemas?

Braving the fire, Leafcurl settled an arm’s length away, curling his four green limbs as neatly as a silsha. Kevisson leaned his head back against the tree’s rough gray bark, thinking. Evidently, from the way the ilserin had hounded him before, a human had taken something from the pool, but that in itself was baffling. Why would a human want anything from an ilseri pool?

Because it was valuable, the back of his mind whispered, because it would bring him money or power or prestige.
Him
... he stared up at the tree-slivered green sky. Why had he assumed that a man had taken the object?

Because the ilserin had mistaken
him
for the thief, and although the youthful, inexperienced ilserin obviously understood very little else about humans, they did seem to know the difference between males and females.

A strong feeling grew in Kevisson’s mind that a single hand lay behind everything that had happened, no matter how disconnected the events seemed—the attack on Lenhe’ayn, Riklin Senn’s appointment over him to the Lord High Mastership of Shael’donn, Myriel’s death, the attack on Enissa, the theft of something apparently crucial from the ilseri pool, Haemas’s subsequent erratic comings and goings, the closing of the House of Moons ...

Haemas had said Diren Chee was responsible for her disappearance, that he wanted access to the timeways. The altering of Dorria’s memory and the mindblow that had led to Enissa’s death all spoke of someone with a strong Talent—and Chee did hold a seat on the Council. Kevisson got to his feet and scavenged more deadfall wood from the brush, still thinking. It must have been Chee who had broken his Search link and almost killed him. He piled an armful of sticks beside the fire, then closed his eyes and settled back against a hollow log, slowing his breathing, letting his mind drift, Searching his memory much as he had Searched the Highlands for Haemas.

When he had found her the night after she’d disappeared, he’d had an impression, just for an instant, of a tall rambling house built of crumbling gray stone and weather-blasted wood. That must have been Chee’ayn. He remembered something Myriel Lenhe had said before she’d died, about the leader of the chierra attack—something that had made no sense at the time. “There was something wrong with his eyes,” she had insisted. “They were the wrong color.”

At the time, he’d thought perhaps they had been blue or gray, like those of Outlanders. Had she meant instead that his eyes were Kashi-gold, not chierra-brown? Had
Chee
led the attack on Lenhe’ayn, then killed Myriel to guard his secret? Opening his eyes again, he watched his exhaled breath misting white in the frigid air. He had to return to the Highlands and find Chee—before there were more deaths.

He glanced into the thickly set trees, feeling the childlike ilserin’s eyes studying his every move. He couldn’t afford the days that hiking back would cost, even if the ilserin would let him go this time, and they very likely would not. He had to persuade the older ones, the ilseri, to send him back, but how? He couldn’t even see them, let alone communicate with them.

“Leafcurl?” He motioned to the slim green creature that was closest, although to his eyes all ilserin looked enough alike to be seeds in the same callyt pit. “I have to go back.”

Why?
Leafcurl advanced over the frozen ground, his naked four-toed feet making no noise at all in the crackly dead brush.

“To find Moonspeaker.” Kevisson concentrated, producing in his mind Haemas’s oval face surrounded by a cloud of shining pale-gold hair.

But she is on the business of the mothers.
Leafcurl looked anxiously over his shoulder as the other ilserin crept through the trees like dim green shadows to stand behind him.
Such things are forbidden to male-brothers.

“Among ilseri and ilserin, I’m sure that is true, but not among the Kashi.” Kevisson unclenched his fists, trying to curb his mounting impatience. “I must find her. She may be in terrible danger.”

The ilserin’s head whipped around. The others froze in place, like a herd of startled ebari, then leaped almost as a single creature into the trees and clambered high over Kevisson’s head.
Windsign says Moonspeaker has returned!

“To the Highlands?” A surge of excitement ran through him. If so, he could Search for her, as he had done before. Then doubt surfaced; what if Chee sensed him and broke his link again? The last time had nearly killed him, and there were no healers waiting to save his life down here in the forest.

To the high places, yes.
Leafcurl’s eyes, bottomless as two holes, gazed down at him through the leafless branches.
But ilseri cannot travel there. Windsign and Summerstone ask: Do you wish to go to her?

“Yes!” Kevisson rotated, peering through the densely packed trees, but he could see no sign of the elusive ilseri who had to be there—somewhere. “Tell them I will help in any way I can. I will give my life for her!”

Leafcurl reached down and bracketed Kevisson’s face with cool green fingers.
Open your mind, male-brother, and the mothers will send you. They say there is little time left.

For a second, Kevisson hesitated, reluctant to drop his shields before creatures he could neither sense nor communicate with. He squinted up into the layer upon layer of tree limbs surrounding him, pinning him in this cheerless place so far from everything he knew. He didn’t want to stay shut up here with the children while Haemas was in danger back somewhere in the Highlands.

Haemas ... She trusted the ilseri implicitly, and he had no choice but to do the same. He could either believe them and join the fight, or wait things out down here with the rest of the males in this blasted nursery.

He flung open his mind, laying himself bare before the unseen and unseeable natives, concentrating on his desire to find Haemas and fight at her side in any way possible. A moment of fierce blueness overwhelmed him; an alien presence swept through his mind, blinding him to everything else, stealing the breath from his lungs. He swayed, unable to command his limbs or receive any input from his senses. Then a great roaring surfaced in his head, and he crumpled to his knees, instinctively throwing his hands out to break his fall. His outspread fingers slid through new, wet snow, which soaked coldly through the legs of his pants. He took a spasmodic lungful of achingly chill fresh air as he waited for his vision to clear.

Whatever had brought him here was like nothing he had ever encountered before.

Blinking furiously, he wiped away tears and glanced up at the twin crags with their bridging tower—the famous, never-to-be-forgotten sight of Tal’ayn.

* * *

“The mourners will be arriving that quick, coming through those very doors.” Jayna wrung her work-roughened hands in her apron. “The family, what little there is of it, should be down here in the chapel to greet them, but Lady Alyssa—” Her mouth compressed and she dabbed angrily at the tears leaking from her reddened eyes. “
She
won’t come!”

Haemas stared down at the empty face of her father, feeling as if she made the slightest movement she would break into slivers and scatter across the floor. This wasn’t real; it couldn’t be. Down through the years, she had seen him dead in her mind a thousand times, and yet known all the while that he lived. Guilt bubbled up through tiny cracks in her reason, unexpected and fever-hot.

A distant part of her understood that the damage Jarid had done her all those years ago was resonating now with this scene; she’d never been able to completely eradicate the false memory he’d spliced into her drugged mind. She and Master Ellirt had only been able to subordinate it to the truth of what had actually happened on that terrible night—that it had been Jarid who had attacked her father and the chierra servant Pascar who had died, not her father.

But the image still lurked below the surface, painfully sharp.
He sprawled across the rug, one limp hand grazing the toe of her boot. She wanted to run, to scream, to do anything but just stand there, frozen, gazing down at her father’s white and empty face.

Sweat beaded her forehead, chilling her in the cool air of the chapel. She felt Jayna’s warm fingers on her clammy arm. “How—” She couldn’t make her head turn, couldn’t look at the beloved chierra servant who had raised her. “—how—did this happen?”

“It were, as they say, natural causes.” Jayna’s voice was only a whisper in the still, incense-permeated air. “One minute, he were visiting with Lord Chee in his study, and the next he were lying there in his chair, eyes staring, cold and dead. It were that fast.”

An icicle formed around Haemas’s heart. She forced herself to look at Jayna’s tear-swollen face, touched her wet, wrinkled cheek. “Lord—Chee?”

“Yes.” Jayna reached past her to pick up a basket, then folded back the silk veil over the bier and began spreading the traditional tiny white anith flowers around her father’s body. “He came to speak with his Lordship last night. Lady Alyssa took him into the study herself. His Lordship were that angry at first. Ivva and I could hear him yelling all the way down the hall, even through the door.”

Sick flutters exploded in Haemas’s stomach, as if she were full of lightwings trying to batter their way out. Diren Chee had come here, to her father’s house, and now her father lay dead. What was it that Chee had said to her?
“The poor fellow wasn’t up to it, but it wasn’t a total loss. Just before he died, he admitted that he had never changed his will.”

He had told her, had all but pushed her nose in what he had done, and she had dismissed his words as a weak bluff. Her throat closed; she might as well have killed him herself. She should have stopped Chee somehow, should have told the Council about the latteh when she’d first returned from the Otherwhen, should have made them believe her and demanded their help!

The blood pounded in her temples, and she knew that no matter what she had said, the Council would not have taken her word against Chee’s. The Lords disdained her because she made no pretense of being a traditional Kashi wife and daughter. And then there was the promise she had made to the ilseri to keep the secret of the latteh crystals. If she had enlisted the help of any other Kashi, she could not have made that promise, and a whole new era of cruel power plays among the Kashi, not to mention extinction for the ilseri, would have begun. Unwittingly, Chee had pitted Kashi against ilseri once again, and Haemas was caught squarely in the middle. It had to be her fight and no one else’s.

She watched Jayna’s hand tremble as she scattered the fragile white flowers along the length of the bier. Tears coursed down the old woman’s faded cheeks in an unending stream, but Haemas’s own eyes were hot and dry. She wondered where her tears had fled.

The doors to the chapel creaked inward, admitting a frigid draft. Haemas caught a glimpse of gold-encrusted robes as Father Orcado’s staid presence swept into the room.

“Peace be with you, my child,” he said, his voice loud in the chapel’s stony silence.

Kisa darted out of the shadows to press against Haemas’s side. She glanced down at the child’s drawn face, catching the memory of this man presiding at another funeral only days before
, Kisa s mother and brother consigned to a huge pyre while the orange-yellow flames leaped up and up ...

She put her arm around the trembling girl and turned to Jayna. “Please take Kisa down to the kitchen and get her some warm food. Then have Ivva bathe her and put her to bed in my old room. Perhaps some of my old clothes will fit her.”

Jayna nodded and looked down, seeming to notice the exhausted child for the first time. “Of course.” She reached for the small hand. “Poor little barret, she looks half starved, as well as all done in.”