Roberson, Jennifer - Cheysuli 08 (34 page)

           
"But it must hurt you!"

           
Her eyes dimmed behind a glaze of
tears. "As it hurts you. As it hurts Brennan. We are all of us scarred by
the absence of Aidan."

           
Cold fury filled Kellin. "And
you wonder why I want nothing to do with a lir, or with the gods! You have only
to look at him, and what obsession has made of him. I will not be so
bound."

           
"You will be Mujhar one day.
That will bind you even as it does your grandsire."

           
Kellin shook his head. "That is
different. What kind of a Mujhar risks himself by bonding with an animal who
might be the death of him? Does he not therefore risk his realm as well—and the
prophecy?"

           
Aileen's voice was steady.
"What is worth having if you are naught but a beast, and your people
desire to kill you?"

           
One hundred and two steps. Kellin
counted them as he climbed down from the Great Hall into the undercroft of
Homana-Mujhar, where the Womb of the Earth lay within lir-warded walls. As a
boy he had gone once with Ian, and once with the Mujhar. He had never gone
alone.

           
Not entirely alone. The cat is with
me.

           
He did not want her there. But she
was the reason he went down to the Womb at all.

           
One hundred and two steps. He stood
in a small closet made of stone and depressed the keystone.

           
A wall turned on edge, and the Womb
lay before him.

           
Air was stale, but did not stink of
an ending.

           
The passageway walls were
damp-slicked and shiny. He carried a torch; it smoked and streamed, shedding
fragile light as he put it forward to illuminate the Womb.

           
Kellin tensed, though he knew what
to expect; three visits were not enough to diminish the impact. Lir leapt out
of walls and ceiling, tearing free of stone. They were incredibly lifelike, as
if a sculptor had captured living animals and encased them in marble rather
than carving them. They stared back at him from hard, challenging eyes: creamy
ivory veined with gold.

           
The Womb gaped. Its rim was
nonexistent in distorting light, so that he could not see the rune-worked edge.
Only the deeper blackness that marked its mouth.

           
Kellin wet drying lips and moved
past the lir-carved door slowly, holding the torch outthrust so he did not
mistake the footing and tumble to his death.

           
But would I die? I am meant to be
Mujhar ... those to be Mujhar can survive the rebirth.

           
He did not have the courage to
accept the challenge.

           
Kellin stepped inside. The Womb's
maw expanded as the torch, held in an unsteady hand, illuminated the truth: a
perfectly rounded hole that had accepted men before and refused to give them a
second birth.

           
"Carillon," he murmured.
"The last Prince of Homana to enter into the Womb and be born in the shape
of a king."

           
He had learned the histories. He
knew his birthline. Carillon of Homana, the last Homanan Mujhar.

           
"After him, Donal. Then Niall.
Then—Brennan."

           
Kellin's jaws tightened. The next
should have been my jehan, had he the courage to understand.

           
But Aidan had renounced it. Aidan
had been a coward.

           
Should I leap into the Womb to prove
my worthiness? Can I atone for my jehan's weakness with my own strength? He
stared hard at the marble lir. "Is that what they want?"

           
No answer. The lir stared back in
silence.

           
Kellin turned and set the torch into
a bracket.

           
Carefully he took three steps to the
edge of the Womb, then squatted down beside it. Buttocks brushed booted heels.
Sore thighs protested, as did newly knit ribs.

           
Silence.

           
Kellin's mouth went dry. In the
presence of the Lion, he had felt many things. But the Womb was not the Lion.
It spoke to him of a heritage far older than the Lion's, who was, in the
unbiased nature of measurement, naught but a newmade thing. A cub to the Womb's
adulthood. The walls were man-made, and the lir carved within stone, but before
men had meddled to glorify what they perceived as the tangible proof of power,
there had been the Womb.

           
"A gate," Kellin murmured.
"How many have gone through it?"

           
Movement caught his attention. A
black shadow paced into the vault, then rounded the Womb. It sat down across
from him so that the Womb lay between, black and impenetrable. Gold eyes threw
back smoky torchlight, opaque and eerily slanted.

           
Now, she said. Your choice.

           
He did not speak as a lir. "Is
it?"

           
It has always been your choice.

           
"According to the prophecy,
there can be no choice. If a warrior repudiates his tahlmorra, his service to
the prophecy, he is denied the afterlife."

           
Her tail twitched once, then folded
over arched toes. He had seen housecats sit so; incongruity.

           
She was not and could never be tame.
A man may turn his back on life after death. It is his right to do so. It is
the price of living.

           
"To choose how he will live
after he is dead?" Kellin grinned derisively. "I sense obscurity. I
smell the kind of argument that must content my jehan, who trafficks with the gods.
How else could a man be made to repudiate his son?"

           
He did not. He answered his
tahlmorra. Her tail twitched again. He created your tahlmorra in the following
of his own.

           
Kellin frowned. "I mislike
oblique speech. Say what there is to say."

           
That it is a warrior's choice to be
other than the gods might prefer him to be.

           
"And therefore alter the
prophecy?"

           
Your jehan might say that altering
of the prophecy also follows its path.

           
Kellin swore and sat down upon his
rump, letting his heels slide forward. With blatant disregard for proprieties,
he dangled both legs into the void. "You are saying that a man who turns
his back on the prophecy also follows it by that very repudiation. But how? It
makes no sense. If I made myself celibate and sired no more children, there
would be no Firstborn. How would that serve a prophecy that exists solely to
make another Firstborn?"

           
You have already sired children.

           
He thought about it. So he had.
They, too, each of them, claimed the proper blood. Save for the final House,
the final link in the chain. Kellin drew in a deep breath. "If I went to
Solinde and found myself an Ihlini woman with whom I could bear to lie and got
a child upon her, the task is finished. The prophecy complete."

           
Sima's tail twitched. She offered no
answer.

           
"I could do it tomorrow, if I
decided to. Leave. Go to Solinde. Find myself a woman, and end this
travesty."

           
Sima displayed her teeth. No one
ever said it would be difficult.

           
Kellin exploded. "Then if it is
so easy to do—"

           
But he let it trail off. "The
blood. It comes to that. Ian lay with Lillith and sired Rhiannon. Rhiannon lay
with my grandsire and bore—who? A daughter? The one who in turn lay with
Lochiel and bore him the daughter with whom I shared a cradle?" Kellin
hitched his shoulders. "And who, no doubt, would be the unlikeliest woman
with whom I should be matched—and therefore is, in the perversity of the gods,
the very woman they intend for me to lie with. To sire the proper son. Cynric,
the Firstborn.'"

           
Sima held her silence.

           
The image was vivid before him.
"Lochiel will geld me. He will show the woman to me—or, rather, me to
her—and then he will geld me! So that I know, and she knows, how very close we
came—and how superior the Ihlini are despite our Cheysuli gifts."

           
Sima bent her head and licked
delicately at a paw.

           
"No answer?" Kellin asked.
"No commentary? But I believed the lir were put here to aid their
warriors, not obfuscate the truth."

           
The cat lowered her paw. She stared
directly at him across the black expanse of the Womb. Feral gold eyes dominated
the darkness. I am not your lir. Have you not declared it? Have you not
renounced me as your jehan renounced you?

           
Had he? Had he?

           
A lirless warrior was destined to go
mad. A lirless Cheysuli was not a warrior at all. A lirless Cheysuli could
never be Mujhar. Could never hold the Lion.

           
Could never sire the Firstborn
because the Cheysuli would look to another.

           
A solution presented itself. An
answer to the questions.

           
Kellin shuddered once. Sweat ran down
his temples and stung the scratches on his face. Breathing was shallow, though
the ribs now were healed. A flutter filled his belly, then spilled to genitals.

           
He swallowed painfully because his
throat was dry and tight. He pressed both hands against cold stone on either
side of his thighs. Fingertips left damp marks. Within the link, he said, Let
the gods decide.

           
Kellin, prince of Homana, thrust
himself into the Womb.

           
No top. No bottom. No sides.

           
No beginning, nor an ending.

           
Merely a being.

           
Kellin bit his lips bloody so he
would not scream. It would diminish him to scream. Such noise would dishonor
the gods.

           
Gods? What did he know of gods? They
were, he had said, little more than constructs invented by men who desired to
rule others, to keep lesser men contained so that they maintained the power.

           
Gods. His father worshiped them.
Jehan, father, sire . .. there were so many words. None of them made sense.
Nothing at all made sense to a man who leapt into the Womb.

           
The only sense in such folly was the
search for sense, so he might understand what manner of man he was and what he
was meant to be in the context of the gods.

           
Gods. Yet again.

           
If he renounced them, if he
repudiated them, would they permit him to die?

           
If there were no gods, then surely
he was dead.

           
Kellin fell. There was no bottom. He
did not scream at all.

           
What were the Cheysuli but children
of the gods? It was what the word meant.

           
Upon such unflagging faith was a
race made strong, so others could not destroy it.

           
Men who had nothing in which to
believe soon believed in Nothing. Nothing destroyed a man.

           
Nothing destroyed a race.

           
Was Nothing, then, a demon?

           
Belief replaced Nothing. Belief
destroyed the demon.

           
The Cheysuli were, if nothing else,
a dedicated race. Once a thing made sense within the context of their culture,
belief was overriding. Belief was their champion; it overwhelmed Nothing so the
demon died of disuse, of DisBelief.

           
In the Womb, Kellin laughed. What
had Sima said as Kellin looked upon flesh-bound wrists?

           
"You believe too easily in what
the Ihlini tells you to. His art is illusion. Banish this one as you banished
the Lion."

           
Illusion was another's successful
attempt to make a man believe in something that did not truly exist. The key to
banishing illusion was to disbelieve.

           
Corwyth, and other Ihlini, had tried
very hard to make the Cheysuli disbelieve in the prophecy.

           
The Ihlini disbelieved. Teirnan and
the a'saii had—and did—disbelieve. And if disbelief could defeat illusion, and
yet the prophecy survived, was it therefore a true thing, a thing with
substance?

           
Or was it simply that the Cheysuli
who believed in it believed so strongly that the weight of their faith, the
contents of their spirits, destroyed the disbelief?

           
The champion of the gods, called
Belief, destroyed the demon whose true-name was DisBelief.

           
Kellin cried out in the confines of
the Womb: "I do not understand.'"