The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (53 page)

I have been left unbound, and food and drink is brought to me regularly. My back-sling, after being examined, was returned to me. Gone was the blade I'd hidden in the back-sling's secret pocket, but my letter and blank paper and writing materials were still there. That is why I am able to write these entries. I know, of course, that what I write will be read by the thieves, but as long as I do not write anything that would betray Emor, it doesn't matter what I say here. The thieves already know most of my story anyway.
They know that I am a spy and that I was in the border mountain patrol before that; I suppose that one of the Koretians we sent back to this land spread word that a Koretian-born soldier of my name was in the patrol. They also know about Mountside's blood feud and my broken vow; Griffith would have told them that. But they also know of things no one else knows, secrets I only told Fenton. These, they cheerfully inform me, they learned from the Jackal.
I suppose they tell me this in order to frighten me. They needn't have bothered; I am scared enough as it is. I have known, of course, that I would one day face the Jackal and be forced to pay the penalty for breaking my vow. I have even rehearsed in my mind on several occasions the speech of defense I would give; I patterned it after the law defenses Carle taught me. But I thought that I would be giving this speech when I reached the Land Beyond. Now I will have to give it in just a short time.
In the meantime, I am being treated well. Every few hours, a thief visits my cell – to keep me from getting bored, each of them says, though I suppose the real reason is to try to trap me into revealing something about my work. So far they have asked me no direct questions about my life in Emor. Instead, they have questioned me about the people I knew in Mountside and Cold Run: Fenton and Hamar and Emlyn and Griffith and Siward and my father and many others. I have answered all their questions; I am not sure what they would do to me if I remained silent, and I would prefer to save my defiance for the issues that really matter.
They have also talked freely about themselves – not about their work for the Jackal, naturally, but about their ordinary jobs that they use to disguise their thieves' work. Since they seem willing to answer any questions I ask, I have been trying to discern some pattern to what sort of men the Jackal recruits. Not that I will be able to take this information back to Emor, but I would like to satisfy my own curiosity.
I've had no luck in discovering such a pattern. The Jackal's thieves come from all the ranks except, of course, that of the slaves – they say that they have been trying to find recruits among the Reborn, but those men, above all others, are unwilling to become involved in unlawful activities and risk being punished. The thieves come from the borderland and from central and southern Koretia, and they hold the usual mixture of trades and professions. The only feature they hold in common, if their words are to be believed, is that they all hate the civil war and the blood feud that started it. In fact, they have gone to great lengths to tell me how much they hate blood feuds, as well as demon-stonings and Living Deaths and all the other religious atrocities of this land.
I suppose they are trying to lure me into showing how great my hatred is of the gods. I have not lied to them here either; speaking of this to them saves me the trouble of saying these words to the Jackal. Now that I am forced to meet with the god, I am eager to tell him how much I despise the horrors that he and the other gods have instituted in this land.
The eighteenth day of May in the 943rd year a.g.l.
When Morgan delivered my food this evening, I finally had the opportunity to ask him a question that has been bothering me. He laughed at length before saying, "Knox? May the gods bless his spirit – why would he tell us where to find you? Not that he had a chance to do any talking, once you'd delivered him back to the King's men." He raised his eyebrows, and I felt myself flush. Morgan took pity on me then, saying, "No, it wasn't Knox or any other breacher who told us where to find you. It was Piers."
"Piers?" I said slowly. "He's one of you?"
"He wasn't at the time you met him. You remember him, then?" Morgan placed his leg on the bench I was sitting on and slung his arm over his knee. He was taking care, I noticed, to stay out of arm's reach of me, but I was not such a fool as to think that I could fight my way past both him and the thieves in the room outside.
I nodded slowly. "He gave me directions to the underground market here. And he talked about how he enjoyed playing pranks when he was young. . . ." My voice faded away.
Morgan nodded. "When Griffith recruited him to our cause not long afterwards – they're distant kin to each other – he told us that, ever since that conversation, he had been thinking about how much more exciting his life was when he was young, and how he wished he could be as afire with ideals as he had been before the duties of manhood weighed him down. Well, Piers has the right blend of fire and restraint we look for in thieves. And he did us a favor by telling us about his conversation with you."
"I didn't give him my lineage, though," I protested.
"You hinted you were kin to the old nobility; he mentioned that to Griffith. And when Griffith asked for your description, your appearance matched. Piers told us you'd been with another man – 'with skin so white you'd think he was Emorian,' was the way he put it. So Griffith checked with our border guards— Oh, yes, we have men there too," he said, seeing my expression change. "This was only a fortnight after you had spoken with Piers, and the guards still remembered a certain dark-skinned mountain patrol guard who had breached the border as a prank with a light-skinned mountain patrol guard. . . ." Morgan's smile broadened. "The rest was easy. Or at least, it was easy for the Jackal, once he had the clue he needed as to where you had gone after you fled from Cold Run. Ever since he learned that you became a spy after you were released from the patrol, he has been waiting for you to return. He thought you would be back, in the end. He's very patient in such matters." He glanced down at my untouched plate. "Aren't you going to eat that?"
I shook my head, and with a shrug he removed the plate. I sat for a long while, cold with sickness, thinking of the Jackal patiently waiting for his prey to return, so that he could pounce on me. . . .
I don't feel I can write any more tonight.
The nineteenth day of May in the 943rd year a.g.l.
Morgan came by again this morning and read what I had written so far in this portion of my journal. Keeping up the pretense that I am an honored guest rather than a prisoner, he asked my permission first. He laughed as he was reading but would not say why. I am trying not to be too bitter about this. I can remember many times when I and the other patrol guards laughed and joked while bringing a prisoner to the hut. I suppose that, in every blade-wielding profession, one becomes callous to other people's misfortunes.
I haven't seen Griffith again since my capture. When I asked about this, Morgan told me that he had gone to fetch the Jackal from one of the villages. This implies that the Jackal's powers are limited, as I and another Emorian I know had guessed; otherwise, the Jackal would have known about my capture without being told.
Since I have little else to do between the thieves' visits, I have found myself wondering what the Jackal is like in his human form. What is it like to live as a god-man, having the power to destroy or preserve all men around you? I cannot imagine that the god-man has any more understanding of human suffering than the god did before he came to the Land of the Living, since he himself can't have undergone any suffering. Perhaps he doesn't even fully understand that he puts his people through agonies when he demands their blood sacrifice – but there my sympathy extends too far, for he is a god, all-knowing, though not all-compassionate.
All this has led me to wonder why the Jackal bothered to take on a human body. Why live among men when he himself cannot truly be a man? Is it his way of pretending that he is one of us? If so, he is like a king who puts on the clothes of a slave and parades through the city, then returns at day's end to his fine sheets and velvet cushions.
So curious have I become about this question that I couldn't even wait for the Jackal's arrival, but instead asked Morgan. He said that I would understand when I met the Jackal – that some things cannot be explained but only experienced. This is the first thing any of the thieves have told me that I am sure is true. I can only hope that my curiosity will overcome my fear when the moment comes. I do not want to meet my death in a manner that would be shameful for one of the Chara's soldiers.
The twentieth day of May in the 943rd year a.g.l.
He arrived this morning. He is not what I expected.
The sound of Griffith's voice was what first alerted me to his coming. I pressed my ear against the door and did my best to make good use of my patrol-guard training. I could hear a tumble of voices and much laughter; from the snatches of phrases I could identify, it appeared that the thieves were giving their reports on what I had said during my imprisonment. Then the voices died down, and I could hear someone new speaking. He had a light, lilting voice, not what I would have imagined in a god, but whatever he said kept his thieves quiet. There was no more laughter, and from this I concluded that he must be telling them what he planned to do with me, and that the thieves were not as callous as I'd thought. Or perhaps the fate he planned for me was so dreadful that even they could not laugh.
I have tried hard while writing these entries to avoid recording my various fears about what form my death would take, for I knew that the thieves would read this journal, and I didn't want to give the Jackal any ideas. But those fears were very much in my mind as I heard the voice stop and footsteps come toward my door.
At moments like this, when waiting for a door to open and dark doom to enter, I found that one becomes occupied with trivialities. In this case, I could not figure out what to do with my hands and arms. Should I fold my arms over my chest as a sign of defiance? Should I place my hands behind my back, as though I were a prisoner brought before his judge? Should I lean casually against the wall, as though I was fearless?
I was still worrying about all this when the door opened and the Jackal entered.
His eyes were gold. That was the first thing I noticed. His eyes were bright gold and slanted; his whiskers were thin and sleek; his teeth were razor-sharp and curled into a grin. All this was just a mask, of course; I had known that it would be. But it is surprising how effective a painted god-mask can be when it is worn. I felt as though I were truly looking at the god's face.
Something more entered the room with him, and this I cannot describe. I suppose that all this time, the skeptical, Emorian side of me was waiting to disprove that the man called the Jackal was a god. It was my only way to escape, after all; I could not escape death, but I would escape judgment if this was only an imposter. But what I felt when the man entered the room was what I had felt on the day of my coming of age. That could not be counterfeited; I had known the presence of the god's power then, and I knew it now.
This alone kept me speechless to await the god's words. When they came, they matched the smile on his mask. "Well, Adrian," he said, "how do you like being the prey once more?"
This mockery stung me. I heard myself reply, "I would rather be the Jackal."
"Oh, I doubt that," he said. He was standing with his body swayed to one side, like a wild dog relaxed in its posture after a hard day's hunting. "You wouldn't want to be the Jackal all of the time. Even as a patrol guard, you have not had to take on the duty of sitting in judgment over men."
I swallowed, then launched into the first stage of my defense. "You have no right to judge me. I'm an Emorian now."
"Then you ought to have stayed in Emor. I could have reached you in Emor, but I left you alone as long as you stayed there. Now you are in my land; now you are under my care once more. And so you must answer for the promise you made to me."
The slanted eyes on his mask were punctured by eye-holes, but oddly enough, the human eyes behind the god's eyes appeared gold as well. I stared at them, trying to grasp at some thought that would not come. Then I realized that the Jackal was still waiting for my reply, so I said, "I made my vow to you when I thought that you and the other gods were good and just, but you're not – you're evil, and you have brought evil to this land. You command men to kill each other, just to satisfy your own blood-thirst, and when one man refuses to murder, you, the God of Mercy, condemn him for it. You said a moment ago that I am under your care; why should I believe that you care about me or any other human?"
There was a pause, and then there was a soft, rippling sound, like that of a wind stroking the leaves of a tree. The god was laughing.
Feeling my face grow warm, I shouted, "Stop that! It's not funny!"
"Only because you do not see the joke," the Jackal replied. "When the gods look down upon human suffering and laugh, it is not because they are heartless to what men feel, but because they see widely enough to know the irony of all that happens. Laughter is only the other side of crying; I have done enough of both to know this."
I willed away my own impulse to tears and countered, "I don't believe you. I don't believe that you've ever cried."
"What were Fenton's first words to you when he returned from the priests' house?" the Jackal asked softly.
I was silent, remembering the day during my twelfth year when Fenton had appeared at my home after his years spent living in the south. He had taken me up the mountain and told me the story of how the Jackal had fought to protect the Koretians against their enemies and had suffered grievous wounds, and then had wept for thirty days, not from his pain, but for the pain of his people. His tears, Fenton said, had turned into the black border mountains.
"In any case, it is not for your broken blood vow that you must answer to me," said the Jackal. "It is for this."
His left hand, which had been curved until this moment like a mighty claw, thrust forward suddenly with a rapidity that startled me as he tossed something at me that was round and black. I caught it automatically, then stared down at the twisted, blackened object in my hand.