Valdemar 05 - [Vows & Honor 02] - Oathbreakers (33 page)

“When cows fly, prob‘ly. Makes me fit in here, though.” She straddled the bench beside him, a mug and bowl of her own in hand. “Eat here ev'ry chance I get. Ma Kemak, she sure can cook. Pa Kemak don' water the beer, neither. Finish that up, boy. We gotta get you off th' street soon's we can.” She set him a good example by nearly inhaling her soup.

From the inn Kyra led Beaker on a rambling stroll designed to shake off or bore any pursuit, bringing him at last to the stableyard entrance of a wealthy merchant. A murmured word with the chief stableman got them inside; from there they slipped in the servant's door and climbed a winding staircase to the attic of the house. Normally a room like this was crowded with the accumulated junk of several generations, now it was barren except for a line of pallets. There were only two windows—both shuttered—but there was enough light that Beaker could recognize most of those sprawled about the room.

“Beat you, Birdbrain,” Garth mocked from a corner; looking around, Beaker could see that a good half of the pallets were occupied—and that evidently, he was the last of Tarma's scout troop to arrive.

“Well, hell, if they'd given me somethin' besides a half-dead dwarf donkey t'
get
here on—”

“No excuse,” Jodi admonished. “Tresti and I were Shayana mendicants; we came here on our own two feet.”

“Beaker, what have you got in the way of arms?” asked someone off on the opposite side of the room; peering through the attic gloom, Beaker could make out that the speaker was a skirmisher he knew vaguely, a Hawk called Vasely.

“One short knife, and my sword,” he replied. “And I've got my brigandine under this shirt.”

“Get over here and pick out what you want, then. Take whatever you think you can use, we aren't short of anything but swords and body-armor.”

Beaker crossed the attic, picking his way among the pallets, and sorted through the piles of arms. Shortly thereafter he was being caught up on the developments by his fellow scouts.

He learned that they hid their faces by day, slipping out only at night to meet in the ballrooms and stableyards of the great lords who had also joined the conspiracy. There they would hear whatever news there was to hear, and practice their skills.

 

Each night, as the Hawks gathered to spar, Kethry would siphon off the incredibly dangerous energy of their anger and hate. Dangerous, because the energy generated by negative emotions was hard to control—and attracted some very undesirable other-planar creatures. But it was a potent force, and one Kethry was not going to let go unused. She channeled what she accumulated each night into the dozen trap-spells she was building, one for each of Char's mages. She was beginning to think that she might well be able to carry this off—for despite her brave words to Justin, she had no idea if what she planned was going to work, nor how well. She was just too new at being Adept to be certain exactly what her capabilities were.

“I wish you'd tell me what you're going to do,” Jadrek said plaintively. He'd been watching her as she traced through the last of the parchment diagrams, laying in the power she had acquired that night. There were times his patience astounded her still....

“I didn't realize you'd want to know,” she replied, sealing the new layer of power in place, and looking up at him with surprise as she finished. “Come around here behind me and have a look, then.”

He rose, moved to her right shoulder, and bent over the table with his expression sharp with curiosity. “Well, you
know
I'm not a mage, but I do know some of the mage-books—and Keth, what you've been doing doesn't even look remotely familiar.”

“You know what a trap-spell is. That's this part.” She leaned over the parchment and pointed out the six tiny diagrams encircling the last mage's Name, as he looked over her shoulder with acute interest she could feel without even seeing his face.

“That's just the part that's like a trigger on a physical trap, right?”

“Exactly, except that what will activate the trigger won't be something the mage does, but something I do—a kind of a mental twist to release the rest of it.”

He examined the elaborately inscribed sheet with care, leaning on the back of Kethry's chair, and not touching the page. “That looks familiar enough from my reading—but what's all the rest of this?”

“That's something new, something I put together. There's a mind-magic technique called a ‘mirror-egg' that Roald told me about,” she said, sitting back. He responded to her movement by beginning to massage her neck as she talked. “It involves surrounding someone with an egg-shaped shield that is absolutely reflective on the inside. It's something you do, he told me, when you've got a projective that refuses to lock his mind-Gift down, or is using it harmfully. Everything he projects after that gets flung straight back into his face—Roald says it's a pretty effective way of teaching someone when ad monishment fails.”

“I would think so,” Jadrek agreed.

“Ah—” his gentle hands hit a particularly tense spot, and Kethry fell silent until he'd gotten the muscles looser. “I thought about it, and it occurred to me that there was no reason why the same kind of thing couldn't be applied to magical energy. So I found a spell to make a mirrored shield, and another to shape a shield into an egg shape, and combined them. That's this bit.” She traced the twisted patterns with her finger above the diagram. “When Jiles got here, he agreed to let me throw one on him as a test.”

“It worked?”

“Better than either of us had guessed. Scared him white. You see, with most other trap-spells if you have the patience to work your way through it, you can find the keypoint and get yourself loose by cutting it. Not this one—because everything you do reflects back at you. There're only two ways to break this one—from the outside, or to build up such pressure
inside
that the spell can't contain it.”

Jadrek pondered that in silence for a moment, while Kethry let her head sag and reveled in the relaxation his hands were leaving in their wake.

“What's to keep the mages from building up that kind of pressure?” he asked at last.

“Nothing—
if
they can. But if they try—and they don't figure out that they're going to have to shield themselves within the shield—they'll fry themselves before they free themselves.”

Jadrek spoke slowly, and very quietly. “That—is
not
a nice spell....”

“These aren't nice people,” Kethry replied, recalling all the soul-searching she'd done before deciding that this was the thing to do. “Frankly, if I could call lightnings down on all of them, I would, and take the guilt on my soul. I agree, it isn't a thing one should use lightly, and just before I trigger the traps, I intend to burn the papers. I won't need them any more at that point, and I'd rather that the knowledge didn't get into too many hands just yet.”

“And later? How do you keep someone else from finding out how you did it? What if—”

“Gods—Jadrek, love, once a thing's been thought of—it gets out, no matter what. So once this is all over with, I'm going to arrange for the information to be sent to every mage school I know of, and spread it as far and wide as I can.”

“What?” Jadrek asked, so aghast that he stopped massaging.

“You can't stop knowledge; you shouldn't try. If you do, half the time it's the wrong people that get it first. So I'm doing the best thing you can do with something like this—making sure everybody knows about it. That way, if it's used, it will be recognized. Mages trapped inside one of these eggs will realize what's happened and get outside help before they hurt themselves, ones outside will know the counter.”

“Oh,” he said, resuming what he'd broken off. There was silence for a while as he plainly pondered what she'd said.

One more thing to love about him. He doesn't always agree with me
,
but he hears me out, and he thinks about what I've said before making up his own mind.

“Huh,” he said, when she'd begun to drowse a little under his gentle ministrations. “I guess you're right; if you can't guarantee that something harmful stays out of the wrong hands—”

“And I can't; there's no way.”

“Then see that all the right hands get it.”

“And that they get the antidote. I don't know that this is all that moral, Jadrek, I only know that the alternative—taking the chance that someone like Zaras figures out what I did
first
—is less moral.” She sighed. “I never thought that becoming an Adept would bring all these moral predicaments with it.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Keth, power brings with it the need to make moral judgments; history proves that. You have no choice but to make those decisions.”

She sighed again, and reached up to lay one of her hands across his where it rested on her shoulder. “I just hope that I always have someone around to keep reminding me when something I'm thinking about doing ‘isn't nice.' I may still do it—but I'd better have good reasons for doing so.”

He squeezed her shoulder, gently. “Don't worry. As long as I'm around, you will.”

That's what I hoped you'd say,
she thought to herself closing her eyes and leaning back.
That is exactly what I hoped you'd say.

“
T
arma—”

arma looked up from the maps spread before her to see Jadrek nudging his way into the knot of fighters she was tutoring. She'd had ample time to learn every twist and turn of the maze within the Palace, and she was endeavoring to make sure every person of the secret army knew every corridor and storeroom before the planned coup. She felt a twinge of excitement when she saw that Jadrek's expression was at once tense and anticipatory.

She excused herself and turned her pupils over to Jodi. “What is it?” she asked him quietly, not wanting to raise hopes that might be dashed in the next moment. “You look like you've swallowed a live fish, and you're not certain if you're enjoying the experience.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You aren't far wrong; that's about how my stomach is feeling. Stefan's in Petras.”

“Warrior's Oath!” She bared her teeth in a feral grin as those nearby glanced at her in startlement. Although they had been planning for this very moment, suddenly
she
felt rather as though the fish was wriggling about in
her
stomach.

“When? How long ago did you make contact? Where is he now?”

“About three candlemarks ago, and he's with Keth at the inn; it seemed the safest place for him.”

“All right—this is it. He's here, we're ready. Let me get Sewen and Ikan, and I'll meet you at Kethry's.” She turned on her heel and began making her way across the crowded, dimly lit ballroom. She kept sight of Jadrek as he slipped back out the door, and she noticed that he was slump-shouldered and limping slightly.

: Chase
one
another around the bedroom when you aren't spellcasting
—: Warrl broke into her thoughts.

Still at it, are they?
Tarma thought at him.
Well, if the liaison has survived this much stress for this
long,
Keth's right about him being The One. Good. I'd welcome Jadrek as Clanbrother with no reservations.
He's
the closest thing I've seen since Keth to a Shin‘a'in.

: And he has more sense than both of you put together. You know, he still thinks you don't know about the love affair,:
Warrl chuckled. :
Keth hasn't enlightened him. I can't read her as easily as I can him, what with all her mage-shields, so I don't know why she hasn't told him that you knew about it from the first. She might assume he knows you know—or she might be waiting to see how he handles the situation.:

She had reached Sewen and Ikan by the end of that mental conversation, which had all taken place in the space of a few heartbeats. They looked up at her approach, and knowing her as well as they did, she reckoned they would have no trouble reading the news in her eyes.

“Time, is it?” Sewen straightened, and rolled up the map they'd been working with.

She nodded. “He's here.” No need to say
who
“he” was—not when all they lacked for the past several days to put the plan into motion had been Stefansen's physical presence. “Keth's room. Ready?”

Both nodded; Ikan signaled Justin, who came to take his place, Sewen did the same with the scout Mala. Within moments the three of them, darkly cloaked and moving like shadows through the ill-lit streets, were on their way to Kethry's room.

Warrl, as always, told the others of their approach; Kethry was at the door before they set foot on the staircase, and held it open just enough that they could slip inside.