The Shadow Within (10 page)

He fully expected Gillard to lobby the Table for an extension of his own regency so Abramm could be prepared to rule. Somehow Abramm had to convince them all he was not so unprepared as they believed. Unfortunately, his experience as advisor to the Dorsaddi king would count for nothing here, at best, and at worst, could bring him ridicule and disdain. Gillard would be first to stand in that line, he guessed, with Uncle Simon right behind him. And if he feared the lords might disbelieve the tale of his exploits among the Dorsaddi, how much more that they would scoff at the notion he’d been the White Pretender? Especially since the Pretender’s exploits had been so embellished and exaggerated even in Qarkeshan, they were unbelievable all on their own. Just a mention of it last night had provoked rolled eyes and sardonic comments among his armsmen.

So if he was unable to cite any of his real accomplishments, that left him with appearances and first impressions, which his time in Esurh had shown him were powerful tools, at least for the short run. He wanted something that would jolt the lords free of their preconceptions and inspire in them at least a moderate confidence that he could do the job—given the appropriate counselors, of course. Something as far from what he had been as Brother Eldrin—and “little Abramm”—as he could get. Something to hearken back to the days when kings were men of action more than words.

He was about to step into the bath when a knock sounded on the outer bedchamber door, causing the shieldmark, glittering in plain view on his chest, to suddenly burn in his awareness. He snatched up the thick cotton robe hanging on the wall beside the tub and was overlapping its front edges around him when an adolescent boy peeked into the tiled chamber.

“I gave you no leave of entrance!” Abramm snapped, fear of discovery lending harshness to his voice.

The boy blanched and withdrew from sight. “Forgive me, Highness. I . . . I . . .”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve brought extra towels, sir. And a top-off of hot water for the bath.” The youth, dressed in the white shirt and dark britches of his status, his brown hair queued at his nape, moved back into the doorway, revealing the stacked towels and steaming pitcher he carried.

Annoyed mostly by his own overreaction, Abramm made a conscious effort to ease his black expression. “Very well,” he said.

After the boy had laid the towels on a sideboard by the tub and added the pitcher’s contents to the bathwater, Abramm instructed him to take the clothes and hair by the door and see them burned.

“And tell Master Haldon I should like to eat when I’ve finished with my preparations.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name, lad?”

“Jared, sir.”

“Very well, Jared. Once you’ve seen to the clothes, you’re to station yourself outside this bathchamber door and let no one open it without my say.”

The page drew himself up proudly. “Yes, Your Highness!”

Abramm sighed as the door closed. Obviously, keeping his mark secret from all would be impractical. He was neither slave nor Guardian any longer, and a king must have servants. To deny them would only awaken the very suspicions he wished to allay.

I’ll have to find a few I can trust. Men who won’t go running to Gillard—or
the Mataio—the first chance they get
.

Laying the robe close at hand, he eased into the tub and exhaled in delight. The hot springs at Jarnek had given him a taste for baths, and in these last seven weeks he had missed them sorely. This water was nearly hot enough to burn and felt wonderful. Submerging himself to his chin, he sighed again.

Part of him could hardly believe he was here, still free, still in contention for the Crown. It seemed a miracle he had come this far, and yet, he felt as if he trod a knife-edge of disaster. It took but a slight shift of perspective for all his plans of convincing the lords to accept him over Gillard on image alone to look ridiculously naïve. These were men seasoned in the ways of politics and rule, many of them antagonistic and suspicious, most of them having more years of experience than Abramm had even lived. It would take such a little thing to ruin it all. A loss of poise, a breech of protocol, some heedless remark, and it could all come tearing apart. Even assuming the plan would do anything more than make them laugh in the first place. That was the worst part—imagining their laughter.

Little Abramm? King of Kiriath?

For a moment it was as if a great hand squeezed round him, pressing out his breath, replacing it with a snake pit of writhing doubts. How could he possibly think this would work? He had nothing to bring to them. He was nothing. Yes, he had gained experience with the Dorsaddi in Esurh, but Esurh was not Kiriath, and he was a fool to think it had prepared him. A fool to have come here at all, knowing how things were. As Blackwell said earlier, Gillard would fight him, smashing his shield of imagery and projected confidence into rubble.

You should never have come back . . . you’ll only make trouble . . . men will
die because of you
.

He gripped the tub sides and stopped the tumbling thoughts. He was here now and could only go forward. Doubts would not help him—and was not Eidon the one who’d brought him here? Would He not see him through this?

Resolutely refusing to contemplate further all the ways he might fail, all the very real weaknesses he had, he turned back toward the Light, and in that moment it seemed that something left him. Some subtle finger of presence.

He sat upright in a rush of trickling water, his nape hairs rising, his heart pounding hard against his ribcage. A wave of hot prickles rushed over his skin as he wondered—was that a rhu’ema’s touch? He couldn’t be sure. It had been so subtle, so delicate, hardly even there. Yet Trap had warned him such attacks would come, just last night aboard the crippled
Wanderer
.

“Your biggest enemies will be the ones you cannot see,”
his liegeman had said.
“Not flesh and bone, but powers of air and shadow. Once you start to walk into
your destiny, the opposition becomes intense. Spore, spawn, and rhu’ema themselves—
they’ll come after you from every quarter. And while High Father Saeral
may be dead, you know the rhu’ema that controlled him is not. He’ll seek to
control you again, and as well as he knows you, don’t think he’ll have a hard
time of it.”

If Saeral was not in Bonafil, he was probably in some influential palace courtier. One of the three noblemen he’d met earlier, for instance. Of them, Blackwell, as Speaker of the Table, was the only one who should have been there, Abramm having instructed Channon to inform him discreetly. The other two, the fop and the prig, had not been invited. And though he could think of numerous benign reasons for their presence, including the ones they’d given, he purposed to watch them carefully.

There would be spawn to look out for, as well—staffid, feyna, nightsprols. Staffid especially. He’d watched them come after the Dorsaddi king, Shemm, relentlessly. And Channon had already told him of the staffid infestation the palace had endured this summer. Indeed, he had noted for himself the bowls of onions sitting on hall tables as Haldon had led him to these apartments. There was even one in the bedchamber outside this bath closet.

Every successful attack would deliver new spore, activate the old, and provide a window in which the rhu’ema could work, tainting and twisting his thoughts. Shemm, under constant attack, had grown proficient at zapping them from afar, a Lightskill Abramm had not yet mastered and must. Soon. Meantime he’d better keep his guard up.

When the water had cooled he took up soap and brush from the tub-side table, scrubbing and rinsing himself repeatedly in his efforts to expunge the kraggin’s odor. He had just come up from a dunking when something long and gray and fringed slithered over the edge of the tub and into the water with him.

With an oath he flew out of the bath, slipped on the wet tile, windmilled to catch his balance, then leaped aside as another of the multilegged things slithered toward him from under the tub. It was a huge species of staffid, a fact he realized even as his bare foot smashed down upon the segmented carapace. Light flowed out of him on contact, frying it. He stomped another, smacked a third with the scrub brush as it came up the side of the tub. After that he lost count, for they seemed to be everywhere. He dodged and danced around the tub, slipping and sliding on the wet tile as he stomped and smacked them to death.
Where the plague are they coming from?

It was inevitable one would get him, and ironically it was the first he had seen, the one that had joined him in his bath. It came up out of the water and wriggled over the tub’s edge, dropping straight to the floor and landing atop his foot, where it wrapped itself instantly around his instep. With a shout of annoyance, he yanked it off before it could bite, only to have it twist in his palm and clamp around his fist. A bright pain stung the back of one knuckle, followed instantly by a flow of white fire down his arm and into the staffid, loosening its grip. The thing writhed in brief agony, multilegs fluttering. Then it flared blue and went limp.

He flung it to the floor with the others, glanced around warily to be sure it was the last, and froze as his eyes fell upon Jared and Haldon standing in the doorway, staring at him in slack-jawed astonishment.

CHAPTER

7

The tub itself, standing hip-high between them, afforded Abramm a measure of modesty, but did nothing to hide the golden shield on his chest. Jared stared at it, transfixed, while Haldon took one look and immediately turned away, stopping the servants now coming up behind him and herding them back out the bedchamber door.

Abramm heard him assure them it was only staffid, heard the door shut and the latch click. Only then did his mind, stunned by the sudden discovery, churn back into action. His robe lay on the other side of the tub, soaking in a puddle of water. Not that it mattered now. Feigning calm, he turned, took one of the towels from the sideboard and wrapped it around his waist.

About that time Haldon returned, stopping in the doorway behind Jared, who still had not closed his mouth. As before, the chamberlain’s gaze riveted upon the shieldmark. After a moment, it flicked to the red dragon rampant branded into Abramm’s left arm, then to the scars that laced his torso.
“True
trophies of a warrior’s successes,”
his former master had called those scars. Haldon’s eyes catalogued every one before moving on to the dead staffid littering the floor. When his gaze finally returned to Abramm’s, he looked pale and shaken.

“Look at all the staffid,” Jared murmured. “They’re
huge
! And there’s so
many
of them. . . .”He lifted his wide eyes to Abramm. “And you killed them all yourself, my lord!”

And not one without my having to touch it first,
Abramm thought morosely. He counted eleven of them and wondered again where they had come from. Staffid were self-propagated, either free roamers or cultivated and delivered to a specific target by an agent. In daylight the free roamers might roll into any number of disguises designed to be picked up and brought into the house, unrolling in the night to seek out warm flesh. Others took on the form of jewelry—bracelets, rings, and armbands—and exerted a subtle compulsion over the finder to put them on, sometimes without even knowing it. They fed on blood, injecting their victim with a tiny amount of sense-dulling spore so they would not be felt. Staffid spore was among the most benign. Injected in minute amounts, it produced no negative symptons for weeks.

These particular staffid were not, however, free roamers. They had come after him aggressively, their spore atypically strong. Someone had cultivated them especially for him, hoping no doubt to break down his resistance to deception.

“Who’s had access to this chamber?” Abramm asked, scanning the tiled floor for the remains of the membrane pouch that had held them. Quiescent as long as their target was not nearby, they could have been left here for hours, awakening to chew through only when he’d come close enough.

Haldon frowned. “Since you sent us all out, no one save Smyth, me, and the boy here.”

“And before I arrived?” He stepped back to look under the tub, then bent closer. Sure enough, shreds of a translucent blue-gray membrane floated in the puddled water near the claw foot farthest from the door.

“Before that,” Haldon said, “we were getting ready. . . . There were probably close to fifty people, and no one really watching for anything suspicious. At least nothing like this.” Coming around the tub to see what Abramm had found, he bent down to pick up the membrane. It dangled, dripping, from his large, bony fingers, shimmering in the light. “Do you know what this is, sir?”

“It’s part of the pouch the staffid came in.”

Something in Haldon’s expression made Abramm think the man already knew that. He draped it over the tubside with a grimace and wiped his fingers on one of the towels. “Sir,” he said finally, “I do not believe this is something your brother orchestrated. You have other enemies here.” His eyes darted to the shieldmark on Abramm’s chest and away, as if it made him uncomfortable to look at it.

“Yes,” said Abramm.

Jared was staring at the mark again, as well, his expression jolting Abramm’s thoughts from questions about the staffid to a greater concern. Feeling his attention, the boy’s eyes flicked up to his own, then down to the floor, his face growing white as the tile.

Abramm sighed. “You understand, Jared, that what you have seen here is not information you are free to spread around. That if it does spread, I will know the source.”

“Yes, my lord. But—” He stifled his words, looked pleadingly at Haldon, then at the floor again.

Abramm raised a questioning brow to the chamberlain.

“Sire, the rumor that you wear a shield is all over Springerlan. Everyone knows what Master Rhiad accused.”

“Nevertheless, this gives neither of you leave to confirm it. If you do, I will know.”

Jared drew breath to speak and again stopped himself before the words came out.