The Warlord's Domain (19 page)

Hatred had brooded in Giorl’s mind for those three years, but nothing had come of it until the day when Lorei came in and told how she had met Uncle Terel in the street, and how he had spoken to her for the longest time and had been so nice…

For two days Giorl had been quiet and withdrawn. On the morning of the third, she reached a decision. With Ryn off to deliver some finished work, Lorei at her lessons and Mai left with a trusted neighbor, she had gone down to Ryn’s toolbox and stolen the leather-working knife he used to cut soft skins into coverings for his buffing-pads. And then she had gone looking for Terel.

He hadn’t been hard to find, for all that he no longer visited their house—because of a friendship-breaking quarrel over their shared business which Giorl was certain had been staged just for that purpose. But he had kept his own place on the other side of the city, and opened his own goldsmith’s shop as if to prove he no longer needed any partnership. Giorl had thought of dressing up, of wearing cosmetics and letting him believe that she had been taken with his prowess. The thought had been rejected; he was not so much of a fool as to be taken in. And using that sort of deception would leave her no better than the man who had pretended to be her husband’s friend.

For all that he
had
been taken in, deceived by nothing more than his own arrogance and pride. Terel had invited her indoors with all the old overblown courtesies, bowing low and kissing the back of her hand like a courtier. He had even started to seduce her, smiling, purring, showing her his house and especially its fine bedroom, plying her with wine the whole time as he had not troubled to do before when brute force had been so much cheaper. That was when she had mashed the wine-jug against the side of his head. He had recovered consciousness tied spread-eagled to the posts of his own ostentatious bed, gagged by the whole apple she had rammed past his teeth and secured with her silk scarf.

Then Giorl had taken out the knife.

She and Terel had learned many things that stinking afternoon: that men plainly knew no natural pain like the pain of bringing a new life into the world; that rape was much more than just an over-rough display of affection—and that it was possible to peel a human being like a ripe fruit…

For those few hours Giorl had been insane, and only when the madness and the hatred drained away and let her see what she had done did all the good memories replace the bad. How she and her husband and Terel had laughed at jokes, and gone to the theater, and worried over lack of work then seen it all come right at last. How Terel had made Lorei a little jeweled bracelet for her naming-day, the one Giorl had thrown away and claimed was “lost” and replaced with another gift that had never quite been the same…

She was still crusted with drying, flaking blood, still holding the knife and still crying bitterly when some instinct brought two off-duty constables and their drinking companion into the house. The officers had seen only the knife and the mess on the bed, and had arrested her at once, but their companion—much more than another policeman—had been more interested to note that the mess was still alive.

And that was how it had begun.
Either you can do it to them at our instruction, and comfort yourself with the knowledge that they’re all criminals anyway
—
or we’ll have someone do it to you and your entire family, because we know you’re a criminal, too
.

Ryn had heard it all from the constables’ non-police comrade, an
eldheisart Kagh’ Ernvakh
named Voord, and though it had taken her lovely husband a long time to come to terms with what his friend and then his wife had done, he had recovered something like equanimity at long last, accepted that she was now in the service of the State and left it all at that. Giorl had just one long-cherished and most unladylike ambition: to be a physician. Now that she was employed in activities far less ladylike than healing the sick, some unnamed person in Drakkesborg citadel spoke words—and likely some threats—on her behalf. It was an annoyance that her success in examination stemmed less from her long, hard studies than from that anonymous patron; and from her extraordinary knowledge of anatomy gained in the bloody chamber.

It was still more annoying to learn that she earned more by carving an interrogation Subject like a dinner joint than she ever would by restoring an operation patient to full health and strength. There was also the small matter of her own expendability. Voord had said it himself: she wouldn’t be allowed to leave the citadel alive if
Kagh’ Ernvakh
lost their hold on her. Giorl, however, had taken some steps in that direction herself. The insurance, if it could be termed such, took the form of hundreds of sensitive facts filtered from the screams in the questioning room, written down, multiply copied, and held by various people instructed either to open or to forward them elsewhere if Giorl Derawn should either vanish or die of anything other than undisputed old age. It might work, and it might not; there would be no way to tell until the time came to try. And that time was not quite yet…

There was less blood than Aldric usually saw when he brought a blade and a body together; but then, there was nothing usual at all about this situation. For all that Kyrin had talked about the clinical detachment of physicians, Aldric knew perfectly well that he was deeply involved in what he was doing. It was as much a matter of his personal honor as any of the ancient
kailin-
oaths.

“Gently,” Kyrin said, “as if you were cutting silk on a table you didn’t want to scratch.” Aldric nodded silently, astonished by both the sharpness of the knife’s edge and the steadiness of his own unaccustomed hands.

A bare touch of the blade was enough. The offending organ burst from the incision as if it had a life of its own. Kyrin brushed past him and began to do rapid things with a length of suture and another of the ceramic dishes. She stitched and tied, then stitched some more and drew the stitching tight. “The other knife,” she said, and pointed. “Cut there. Now.”

The second knife came to his hand as Isileth Widowmaker came from her scabbard, and he sliced off the foulness with something of the same grim satisfaction as delivering a perfect
taiken
cut… except that this time nobody would die.

Kyrin continued to pull the stitches tight. They were, quite literally, a drawstring to keep the infected and the healthy separate.

“Now the water.” She was talking to Ryn, who had done the best and wisest thing he could and stayed out of their way. “Make sure it’s not too hot, then use it to flush out the wound.” Ryn came forward with the pot of water, cooled by now to little more than blood heat, and sluiced it carefully into the incision.

“Save the rest,” said Kyrin. “Wash it out some more as I suture up to the skin.”

She was working with the curved needle and length of gut just now lifted from their bath of alcohol, sewing membrane and flesh with tiny neat stitches that were very far from the hasty, clumsy wound-closures Aldric had seen employed by some military surgeons.

He watched for a brief moment before glancing at his hands. There was blood on them—but good blood, this time. Living blood, not dying blood, if the smile Kyrin had given him was a true judgment. They wouldn’t know for a while yet, but at least he—
he
—had done something with a blade that wasn’t part of slaughter.

Kyrin tied off the last suture and wiped all clean with a spirit-soaked pad. AH that remained of the incision was an assymmetrical criss-cross of stitches, and those were being covered by a swathing of bandages just as the child stirred. The pad over Mai’s face had been dry for some minutes now, and since then she had been breathing the heavy fumes of the sleep-drug out of her lungs without its being replenished. It would be a while yet before its effects had worked out of her bloodstream, and in that time the intrusion of steel and stitches into flesh would be a poppy-muted ache.

“Ryn,” said Aldric gently at Kyrin’s prompting nod, “wrap up your daughter in these clean blankets and take her somewhere warm.”

The man said nothing more than his “Thank you,” in a voice so faint that the words were barely there at all. But it was more than enough for Kyrin. She watched through bright-blurred eyes as Ryn lifted and wrapped his limp little burden and hurried her quickly to another bed in another room.

“Will she be all right?” asked Aldric after Ryn had gone.

“Wha… ?” Kyrin straightened from her slump against the wall and tried to listen to him. “I hope… yes, I think she will. Strong child; healthy. Her mother will check, of course, but I doubt even the best surgeon in Drakkesborg would find fault with how you did in these circumstances. Or any others, damn it! You were wonderful…”

She threw her arms around him and hugged him tight, then backed away slightly and looked at his face. “Anything wrong with that?”

“Not with what I did, especially if it works out—”

“Which it will!”

“But I don’t like the idea of us being quite this noticeable.”

“Ah. I see what you mean.”

“This
is
Drakkesborg, don’t forget.”

“Love, you remind me every few minutes. How
could

I forget? So you think we should just…” Kyrin waggled her ringers in a walking kind of gesture.

“Yes. Very quietly. There’s nothing further we can do for Mai now, is there?”

“Not really. She’ll heal in her own good time; we can’t speed up the process.” She glanced at the crystal set in Widowmaker’s pommel as Aldric returned the longsword to his belt. “At least, not without attracting even more attention to ourselves, huh?”

Aldric smiled crookedly and covered the spellstone with his hand. He made a small sound of affirmation, nothing more. Now that all the tensions and worries were past he was tired, dog-tired after a day that would have been busy enough without this little side excursion into the world of the cutting-surgeon.

“All right then,” he managed at last. “Let’s slip away before anyone comes back and wonders who we really are.”

“And get something warm inside us,” Kyrin suggested.

Aldric’s mouth twitched indecisively, halfway between a rueful smile and a quirk of disgust. “I’d as soon not think about warm insides right now, thanks very much,” he said; then looked down at his hands, clean now, as if seeing life-blood in the truest sense still on them. “But I deserve a drink, at least.”

“You deserve a hero’s toast, my dear,” said Kyrin, linking her arm through his as they walked softly toward the street. “And I’m buying…”

“Where is my son?”

There had been a time, an instant ago, when Aymar Dacurre and Hanar Santon had been alone in the Hall of Kings, working over new reports or collating old ones. There had been a time when, except for the crackle of fires in the nine hearths and the rustle of papers, the hall had been silent. That time was past, ended when Gemmel Errekren stepped from the core of a howling spiral of azure flame and dismissed the clamoring blue fire with a single strike of his staff against the echoing floor.

The sound of Gemmel’s thunderclap arrival had broken two windows, and the blast of icy air arriving with him had blown a week’s worth of paperwork from the desktops and sent it swirling in a blizzard of disorder almost to the ceiling. And it was obvious to both the Alban lords that Gemmel didn’t care.

“I ask again,” he said, for all that it was a demand instead, “where is my son?” The old enchanter took a step forward, then paused and sent a green-eyed glare up and down the Hall of Kings, a glare that started fierce and finished rather puzzled as he took in the reverberating emptiness, the lack of the usual guards and the white cloth covering the High Seat. “And where is Rynert the King?”

Dacurre looked at Santon; Santon returned the look and added a raised eyebrow to it. “You don’t know?” the younger man asked. “Nobody told you on your way here?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I did,” said Gemmel irritably.

He smiled an enigmatic little smile. “And I didn’t meet anyone on the road I traveled.”

“Quite so.” Aymar Dacurre was doing his best not to be over-awed by Gemmel’s presence, but the overflow of power that sleeted from the dragon-patterned black stave in the enchanter’s hands made that exercise in control something of a strain. “You seem… well, out of touch with current affairs. Rynert the King is dead. Twenty-three days now. Long enough even for a wizard to learn what goes on in the capital city of his country.”

Gemmel gave none of the looked-for signs of surprise at the news of Rynert’s death. Instead he repeated his enigmatic smile, the smile of a man who knows more interesting things than he’s ever likely to be told. “But Cerdor isn’t my capital, and Alba isn’t my country. I have been in my home, which I have never regarded as Alban sovereign territory… and about my own affairs. Yes, Lord Dacurre, I am indeed out of touch with the events of this world.” The way in which he put emphasis on
this
sent icy-footed spiders running up and down Dacurre’s back. “Now, my lord, I grow tired of repeating myself, but… where is my son Aldric?”

“Son?” echoed Hanar Santon, then quailed as Gemmel stared at him with a gaze that seemed for just an instant as hot and crazy as a goshawk’s, sighting down his blade of nose—and down the suddenly-leveled Dragonwand that looked to the young lord more deadly than any more familiar weapon.

“Now don’t
you
start,” Gemmel warned. “I’ve had this from better men than you, so…”—the old enchanter drew in a long calming breath—”just don’t.”

“
Ilauem-arluth
Talvalin is somewhere in the Drusalan Empire,” said Dacurre. “Doubtless, like yourself, about his own affairs.”

“Why… ?” said Gemmel; but the word was soft enough for both lords to know that it didn’t need an answer, at least no answer that they could supply. And then he struck the black staff against the floor so hard that it drove into ceramic tile as if into a loaf of stale bread. “No.” He spoke with the voice of a man denying that which cannot be denied; Dacurre had heard it often enough. “Not the Jewel. Not alone. I released him from that charge…”