The Seer - eARC (56 page)

“Are you saying this is all for show?”

“There is no such thing. Presentation is not distinct from substance.” More items from the pack. A chisel. Large needles. He looked at her. “Do you trust me?”

“No.”

He held large shears now, opening and closing them, putting a touch of oil on them from a small jar. He set them at the end of the set of tools.

Somehow she could not seem to look away from his hands arranging the tools.

“That is a lie,” he said mildly. “Try again.”

It was hard to force the words out. “I don’t want to trust you.”

“Now
that
I believe. Good. Where are your sister and nephew?”

“What?” For a moment anger overcame the terror that had frozen her where she stood. “My contract protects them. I don’t have to tell you that.”

“I know what your contract says. You will tell me.”

“I won’t.”

Or would she?

No; she would not look to find out. If he were right, she couldn’t bear to know.

Air. She needed air.

She had been holding her breath. She gulped an inhale.

In his hand was a flat stone. He picked up one of the knives, began to draw it across the stone. Sharpening the knife.

Again her breath caught.

“Lie to me,” he urged.

She swallowed hard. “They are in Munasee.”

“Good.” For a moment the only sound was metal against stone. “Now tell me the truth.”

“He’ll find them. He’ll kill them. No. I can’t. I would rather die.”

He made a thoughtful sound as he placed the sharpened knife on the linen. “I believe you, but I won’t let you. I will, however, break parts of you. Let me show you how.” He picked up one of the metal mallets with one hand and with the other hand patted the edge of the empty table. “I will tie you here, with your hands over this edge—see these metal rings? Very snug. Finger across here, then a sharp hit and they break. Where are your sister and nephew?”

“You’ll do it anyway,” she managed, suddenly sure, nauseated at the pain that accompanied the flash of vision.

“Yes. But how many fingers? Which hand? Can you tell?”

She shook her head wordlessly.

“Because I haven’t decided yet. What is the most important thing the Lord Commander needs to know?”

“That the future he asks for—
no
path will lead there. The empire
must
become smaller. Or . . .” She looked around furtively. After all these days with the Lord Commander, it felt like treason to say aloud. “Or end. Entirely.”

He nodded, walked to the map, studied it a moment. “He thinks you have answers you are keeping hidden. I think he is right.”

“What? No! I’ve told him everything. Everything he’s asked. I’ve—”

“What do you want, Amarta?” He gestured at the map. “Show me.”

She looked at the map table. “Peace in the empire.”

He laughed a little. “There has never been peace in the empire. I don’t believe you. Answer again. Dirina and Pas, perhaps?”

“Yes, I want them to—” She looked south on the map, toward Perripur, with a shock realizing that he was watching her. She looked back at him, hoping she had not already given too much away. “I want them safe. From you. From him.” From the man who had come in the night so many years ago, asking questions.

He nodded. “What else?”

“I want to stop the Lord Commander from causing so much suffering.”

“What do you care if strangers suffer?”

“I care,” she said, suddenly angry.

He shook his head. “I don’t believe you. Try again.”

“I pray you to the deepest hell.” She pushed away from the table, walking away from him and the map, as far as the room would allow, coming to the table with the tools.

She picked up the mallet. “This? You threaten me with this?” Without thought she hurled it at him. It sailed end over end. For a moment her aim seemed impossibly good; it flew toward his face.

Then he raised his hand and somehow caught it by the handle, held it a moment for her to see, then tossed it on the empty table, where it landed with a heavy thud. “I’m going to let you choose which hand, Amarta. Since your right hand is your strong hand, I recommend the left.”

“You’re a monster.” She grabbed the linen of the table in her hands and yanked it as hard as she could. The tools scattered across the floor. She was trembling all over. Gasping.

He walked toward her, stepping over the tools on the ground, seeming unconcerned.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“I hate you.”

“Yes, but do you trust me?”

“You told me not to.”

“So I did. And?”

She shouldn’t. She knew better. “Yes,” she admitted.

He stepped close enough that she could smell him, tangling her feelings. He took her shoulders, looked into her eyes. “Then tell me everything, without hesitation, and I’ll take you through this as well and as quickly as I can.”

“You’ll hurt me.”

“Less than anyone else who would be standing in front of you right now.”

“No.”

He released her and went back to the table with the map. “You say the empire becomes smaller. Tomorrow? Two days hence?”

“Not so soon. He asks for outcomes in years. Decades. There are no answers that satisfy him.”

“It is the nature of people to ask poor questions. Ignore his words. Consider his needs. What gets him a step closer to his intention? Not years hence, but tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” She shook her head. “What he does tomorrow will not give him what he wants in ten years.”

“Perhaps not.” He put both hands on the map table. “But every step he takes changes him, and that, I think, will change what’s possible. What understanding can you give him, Seer, however small, to achieve his hopes, however distant and unlikely?”

She walked to the other side of the table and put a finger on the western edge of Arunkel, where it met the sea, and considered the question.

Not what would happen, and not what someone might do to achieve some end. Rather, how a person might need to change, so that they could go in a particular direction.

The sun rose. Where sky met earth a dark, uninterrupted band of near-black stretched wide across the land.

She looked at the map, following the great road with her eyes, so familiar from days of standing in the map room. “He so often looks north and south,” she said. “I think he should look east.”

“How far east?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you see?”

“A thick, dark line on the horizon.”

“Ah. The Dalgo Rift.” He touched one side of the map where there was a heavy, straight line, north and south. “The edge of the Empire. Back to you, Seer: tell me what you want most of all.”

Not to be facing this man, who had somehow had gotten inside her mind, gaining her trust. “To be somewhere else.”

“And if you were there, this somewhere else, what then?”

The dark room flickered in the light of wall-mounted lamps. Why was he asking this? She did not understand.

But he was right, she trusted him.

What did she want, if she could have anything? It was not something she had considered before.

“I say a thing and people die,” she found herself saying. “I stay silent and people die. I want to be free.”

“And what do you need to know? What is your next step toward this freedom?”

For some reason she had stopped trembling.

“Go on,” he urged. “Look. Just as you would for another.”

It was harder to foresee for herself. Painful. Her eyes went to the table where the linen and tools had been, then to the floor where they now lay.

She held up a hand. He nodded slowly.

“No,” she breathed.

Watching her face he said, “I think yes. A good beginning, in any case. What else? Look again.”

She didn’t want to, but there was something in his expression now—a warm smile—that somehow compelled her. Almost as if this, what they did here together, would not be so bad.

How did he do such things with a few words and a look?

“Freedom,” she mouthed, looking around the room. At the map, the tools on the floor, the empty table, back at him. What was a step forward in that impossible direction?

Dead bodies lay strewn in every direction, as if someone had scattered loads of firewood across the field. She stood in the middle, turning and turning, looking at the sky and the thick column of smoke over the rise. Someone, somewhere, called her name. She had been the cause of their deaths, as surely as if she had cut each one down herself, yet all she felt was a fierce joy.

“No,” she breathed in horror.

“Again, the ring of truth,” he said. “Now the same question, but for the Lord Commander. Not in a year or five or even twenty, Amarta, but in a matter of days. What does he most need, to come closest to his intention?”

The sound of a gold coin being set decisively on a wood table. Someone spoke, an urgent tone. A warning.

“A souver, on his desk. Someone says something. I think it’s an accusation. He will wonder if it is true.”

“And is it?”

“Yes. Though the speaker is . . .” She shook her head. “Not telling him everything. Still it is true. That’s all I see.”

“Well done, Amarta.” The gentle clink of metal brought her gaze back to him. He picked up a tool and the linen from the floor, arranged them on the table. Dread trickled back into her.

“Your sister and nephew,” he said. “Where are they?”

It would be her final failure to tell him this, the last thing that gave her life its worth. But as she looked at him, she knew he would take it from her. She could not allow herself to tell him, but she sensed she would anyway. What to do? What to say?

Suddenly she knew.

She breathed out, not quite a laugh, then walked to the map, put her finger on Munasee, met his look evenly. “They are with Marisel dua Mage, under her protection. If I tell you where that is, I think you will be answerable to her for any outcome. Shall I move my finger from Munasee to where I left them, or no?”

For a moment he stood unmoving. Then, with a slow smile, he said, “That is sufficient answer, Seer.”

She exhaled her relief.

He picked up the remaining tools from the floor and laid them out again on the white linen. Then she remembered what this was. Why they were here.

“Fear is like a wolf,” he said as he aligned the knives. “It howls at the door. It distracts and unnerves. But fear is a shadow, not the wolf at all.”

A shadow. As he had been her shadow for so long.

“Are you saying that I should not be afraid now, that the wolf has no substance?”

He glanced at her, then back at his tools. “No. The wolf is quite real. But they are two different things, the wolf and the fear. Only the wolf can bite. Fear makes you bite yourself. Do you understand?”

She hugged herself, considering. “I think so.”

“Good.”

So many shadows. She took a step in his direction, paused, then took another and stopped.

He looked at her. For a moment the only sound she heard was her own breath.

“This one,” she whispered, holding up her left hand.

Amarta woke slowly, reluctantly, at first not understanding why she would be holding herself so still. At a slight movement memory rushed back, helped along by a series of sharp pains and aches across her body. Her throat was sore. Her ribs ached. Her feet burned.

Again she went still.

The room around her was quiet and bright with daylight. In vision, there were no dark clouds of pain. In the past, finally.

Her left hand was heavily bandaged. Despite the shooting pain, curiosity drove her to move each finger. The middle three, it seemed. He had broken three.

There had been more questions, many of them the same. She had started with the truth and ended with it as well, having no more reason to lie, but in between, when the pain did not cease, she had said things that she had not expected to, little of it to do with the course of the Empire. She confessed to him how she had let her parents die on the side of a mountain one day because she was afraid to believe what she had foreseen the night before. She cried her terror of Dirina and Pas dying, caught in the horror of war and death that would sweep south.

In a strange state brought on by pain and exhaustion, not awake and not asleep, she became lost in images and memories and visions, unsure what was in the past or the future. Horses and fire. The Lord Commander angry again. Someone laughing. Someone screaming.

Or perhaps she was the one screaming and laughing. She was no longer sure.

She could not quite remember when it ended, though it seemed to her there were more people in the room, the Lord Commander among them, that she was inspected, spoken of, and wrapped in blankets, carried to her room, laid down in the soft bed.

She hugged the bed and wept. Nothing, it seemed, in the brief moments before she lost awareness, had ever felt so good.

How long she had slept, she did not know. But now, in the light of day, her body a mass of aches and bruises, ointments and bandages, she recalled the various things she had foreseen under Tayre’s questioning and wondered what, if anything, had changed.

When she next started awake it was from a dream. His hands were in front of her face, holding sharp metal tools with glinting points and edges that flickered in the lamplight. Then they were his empty hands, which somehow could also make so much of her hurt so astonishingly.

The red and white room settled around her, quiet, bright. She was still so very tired. A heat burned across her body and through her head, each heartbeat bringing a dull ache, joined by many other points of pain. For a time she simply lay there, dozing.

She woke again when the lock clicked and the door opened. In walked the Lord Commander with a tray of food and a cylinder of tea. He put it on the table by her bed, brought a chair close and sat at her side.

She struggled to sit up. Silently he helped her, then offered a bite of bread. She shook her head.

“This, then,” he said, offering a cup of tea. She took it, but her hand shook enough that he took it back, holding it to her lips while she drank. He set the cup down and took her chin in his hand, turning her head each way, examining her face.