Return to Eddarta (16 page)

The refreshments I sought were there, and I helped myself.

There was also an ornamented wooden box—the same one in which I had seen Indomel place the Ra’ira on my last occasion in this room.

Nah
, I thought.
It can’t be that easy.

I had my hand on the box when someone knocked at the door, scaring me into spilling barut on the woven carpet.

“Yes?” I called.

The door opened and a guard stepped in, holding a droopy-looking Indomel by one elbow.

“As the High Lord commanded,” the guard said stiffly, “Indomel has been brought to the house of Harthim. Are there further instructions?”

You’re asking me?
I thought.

Indomel looked like a man with a broken spirit, but I had good reason to respect the boy’s capacity for deceit.

“Take him to one of the—uh—spare rooms, and set a guard on his door. The High Lord will provide further instructions later.”

The guard nodded and started back out the door, pulling Indomel with him. I felt relieved that he had accepted my authority to give that kind of direction, and a little chagrined at having been put in the place of Assistant High Lord.

Indomel resisted the guard’s movement, dragging himself backward and holding on to the door sill. He looked me full in the face, and I thought:
He lost, and it hurts—but he’s not down. I must remember to warn Tarani, if she doesn’t already know not to trust the kid.

Indomel’s gaze flickered from me to the box and back again.

“Enjoy it,” he whispered, “for all the good it may do you. It is barren and useless.”

The guard dragged him away.

I opened the box, and took out a palm-sized blue stone: the Ra’ira.

It was dark by the time I saw Tarani again that day. I was still in the sitting room, and doing a good imitation of Dharak. Tarani opened the door and looked in, then came through the closed door. She touched me, leaned down to kiss me lightly, then settled onto a divan and sighed heavily. We were both still wearing the clothes in which we had arrived—desert tunic and trousers.

One lamp was burning in the room, the candle flame brightened by the facets in the glass chimney surrounding it. Tarani lay her head back and closed her eyes. After a moment or two, she roused again.

“Did you eat something?” she asked me.

“Yes, one of the—uh—”

“Servants,”
she said, emphasizing the word. “I have made it clear to the head of household maintenance that no slaves will be permitted in this house.” She shrugged. “A small beginning which will not threaten the other Lords, but speaks for the changes I desire to make.”

“One day as High Lord,” I said, “and you are already thinking like a statesman. Yes, one of the servants found me in here, took pity, and brought me some dinner. What about you? Have you had time to eat?”

She looked at me sharply.

“This room is near the front entry, remember. I’ve heard the traffic; I know you’ve been busy. I kept expecting to be moved out of here, so you could use this room for meetings, or whatever.”

“Things never quite reached that degree of formality,” Tarani said, rubbing a hand across her eyes. “I stayed with Zefra until she woke, and we had a moment of the fury you predicted. Then she became remorseful, and we were finally able merely to greet one another as mother and daughter.

“I saw Indomel briefly—thank you for the arrangements you made, by the way; they exactly matched my intent—and assured him he would remain here, in a degree of confinement that corresponds to his proven trustworthiness.

“Hollin called on me to discuss the public transfer of power—a Celebration Dance will be held in two-days’ time.

“I have had a brief meeting with each of the other Lords. It is odd, Rikardon; I find them to be largely well-intentioned men who support the Eddartan system because it is what they know. They represent the interests of their families with care and honor. One or two—Sarel, in particular—seem to be more willing to be greedy for themselves than for their families. They are intelligent people, and open to new ideas. I see much that can be done here, Rikardon.”

There was a fervor in her voice I had never heard before. I sipped my third small glass of barut, and let her talk until she wound down and noticed my silence.

She laughed self-consciously.

“Forgive me for prattling, my love. This has been an exciting day, a new beginning for me.” She got up and went to pour her own glass of barut.

She saw the ornate box. She set down the flask and opened the box, and gasped a little as she took out the stone and held it toward the lamp. The candlelight shimmered along the stone’s intricate structure lines, casting a refracted blue glow back over Tarani’s face.

She closed her hand around the gem, and turned to me.

“This is the reason you have stayed in here all day, is it not? You were guarding the stone.”

I shook my head.

“I was thinking,” I corrected her. “About many things, some of them very personal. But I was thinking a lot about
that
.” I nodded toward the hand that held the Ra’ira.

I stood up, took her arm, and guided her to stand by the window and look out into the huge garden. By the light of an oil lamp, a gardener was pouring water from a ceramic jug into an irrigation channel.

“Try to tell me what that man is thinking,” I said.

She stared at me.

“Go on,” I urged. “I’d offer myself as a test, but we’ve already seen that my mind is different, and less accessible.”

“I—all right. I will try.”

She certainly seemed to try. Her body went tense, her eyes closed, and lines of effort appeared in her forehead. After a moment, she relaxed and inhaled deeply.

“I feel nothing,” she said.

“I’ve been putting things together,” I said. “Indomel has a lot of power, yet he was never able to use the stone.” She looked at me in surprise and I explained: “He told me so himself, when he arrived this afternoon. He would have no reason to lie about it.

“You said, in Iribos, that you believed the Ra’ira would have some
special
feeling to it when it was used—and you’ve just now proved that your greater power can’t activate it.”

Tarani pushed me away from the window and paced across the room. She opened her hand and stared at the blue jewel.

“It could be a trick of learning,” she said. But her voice sounded doubtful, and I knew that her mind had admitted the same terrifying suspicion that had plagued me all afternoon.

“Tarani, I have
used
the Ra’ira,” I said, startling her. “Not as myself, but while I shared the lifememory of Zanek. I was there at the moment he discovered the power. There was no trick, no combination of factors to be perfectly arranged. He held the stone, and could hear the thoughts of the people around him as clearly as he could hear their voices.

“Think back to the lifememory of Serkajon that you and I shared in Kä. When Zanek appeared in Serkajon’s memory as a Visitor, he used the Ra’ira’s power to watch the movement of the guards while he stole the gem from Harthim’s bedroom. Do you recall that? How little effort it took to make the thing work? As soon as he was near the stone, he could use it.”

She was nodding. “Yes, I do remember,” she said, frowning. “But Zanek’s power was born of an earlier age,” she protested. “Perhaps the modern mindgift is not strong enough—” She paused. She held up her hand to caution me against interrupting her thoughts. “Obviously, the Supervisors in Raithskar have been able to use the Ra’ira’s power on the vineh. But I see a qualitative difference between seeing an animal’s intent to violence and understanding the rational thought of a man. Perhaps the Kings had a different sort of power, and it has been lost in the years since the Kingdom fell.”

“Here in Eddarta,” I reminded her, “the Lords have been doing what amounts to keeping the breed lines pure, to encourage the presence of mindgifts among the Lord families. Logic would support the existence of a stronger, not a weaker, mindgift.

“Uh—and speaking of breed lines, isn’t there a rule that says the High Lord has to marry a member of one of the Lord families?”

Tarani walked over to the refreshment area and poured the barut she had wanted earlier. “Is that the ‘personal’ thing you have been thinking about?” she asked.

“One of them,” I hedged. “Is there a rule, or not?”

“You know very well that such a rule exists,” she said. She turned around, leaned on the stone wall into which the refreshment shelf was cut, and sipped her drink. “It will be changed—if it becomes necessary.”

“If?”
I sputtered. “
If
it becomes necessary?”

“Rikardon, my love,” she said, in a deadly calm voice. “Think carefully. Have you ever spoken to me of marriage?”

I gaped at her, my heart racing with confusion and apprehension.

“Have I ever led you to believe,” I finally said, “that I wanted
anything
more than for us to continue to be together?”

“Once, and recently,” she said. “At Relenor, we discussed the need for separation—you to take
this”
—she tossed the blue stone lightly—“back to Raithskar, I to fill the role I have chosen here in Eddarta.”

“We discussed the
possibility
!” I whirled away from her and paced around the room, trying to calm myself. When I felt more in control, I faced Tarani again. “The possibilities are vastly changed,” I said, “if this stone is
not
the true Ra’ira.”

An odd thing happens when you talk out loud about something you fear. It becomes more real, more frightening, and yet it seems easier to deal with it, once it has been expressed.

Tarani straightened up and set her empty glass on the shelf. “If this is not the real stone, where is it?”

“Now
that
is mostly what I’ve been thinking about all day. I’ve gone over my memory of every second we were in contact with Gharlas, every time we have seen
any
version of the Ra’ira. Every way I look at it, I see the same thing: Gharlas
believed
he had the real thing. He would not have let it out of his sight. The jewel we took from his body was the same one he had brought all the way from Raithskar.”

“Can we be sure that
this
is that same stone?” she asked.

“I’d bet on it,” I said. “Gharlas said that Volitar made only two realistic copies of the Ra’ira.”

“Are you saying,” she demanded, “that this is the second copy? Gharlas also said that it was lost—”

“In Raithskar,” I interrupted. “Where someone who had the
real
Ra’ira could easily send a vineh to pick it up and deliver it somewhere. He switched the duplicate for the real stone during his duty shift, then held his own private duty shift to convince the next custodian that the jewel in the vault was the real thing.”

Tarani took a couple of steps away from me, came back, paced away again. “If we suppose that the situation you described is true, then the real thief is a Supervisor who used Gharlas to draw attention away from himself.” She threw up her hands. “For what possible reason? I have no doubt that Gharlas was cleverly guided, but he obviously believed in everything he said to us. He was entirely mad, of course, but he did seem to have a reason for wanting the Ra’ira. The thief you propose would have
had
the gem in his possession a good part of the time. Why steal it?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t a clue,” I said. “The way I’ve worked it out, it could have been any one of the Supervisors—though my preference is to rule out Thanasset as a possibility. One, I don’t believe he
would
do such a thing. Two, the thing was stolen during his duty shift, and he’s certainly smarter than that. I’ve listed the Supervisors a dozen times in my head, trying to figure out why. I know that two of them are having financial problems right now. Another just lost his wife in childbirth, and seemed to go a little crazy for a while. But there’s nothing certain, nothing I can pin down.”

“Let us leave it, then,” Tarani suggested, “and address a different question. If this
is
one of Volitar’s duplicates, and not the true Ra’ira, what then? What are the possibilities which you see as vastly changed?”

“I—uh—well—ah—”

She crossed her arms and waited, not giving me any help at all. I cleared my throat and started again. “Um—well, the way I see it, you’ll need to come back to Raithskar with me.”

“I see,” she said.

“Do you?” I asked her. I moved closer, and took her upper arms in my hands. The muscles were taut and strong. “We made a commitment to make the Ra’ira safe from abuse again. How often have we talked about that being our ‘destiny’?”

I drew my hand along her arm to her hand, and took the blue gem stone to hold it up between us.

“If this
is
real, then—yes, sending me back to Raithskar alone would satisfy the commitment, and you could get on with your life as the High Lord.” I was surprised by a surge of bitterness—jealousy?—that showed in my voice so clearly that Tarani flinched away and strode across the room.

“If this is
not
real, then—we’re not finished yet, Tarani, not until the Ra’ira has been taken back to the
Council
of Supervisors, first to protect Raithskar from the vineh, and then to be destroyed, or isolated, or handled in whatever way is necessary to keep it from ever being used again.”

When Tarani spoke, her words seemed unrelated to the topic. “You were not born among the Sharith,” she said. “Not even Markasset was born in Thagorn. Yet you lead them. You have told me how you resisted becoming Captain. You have also told me that you have few regrets for it now, and you have come to believe that the event has some significance to our task.”

She half-turned toward me. She was near the lamp, and shadows flickered across her face with the wavering, reflected candleglow. “Six months ago, the idea of serving as High Lord of Eddarta would have appalled me. Three moons ago, I had accepted the idea, but was very frightened. Today—” She turned to face me. Her hands were at her sides, balled into fists. “Today, Rikardon, I found a part of my destiny. I know it. I think if you will let yourself see, you know it too.”