The Given Sacrifice (10 page)

The two great dogs had been at his feet, heads on paws. They sprang in a blur of speed,
and Cole froze again as the gruesome jaws closed on his wrists; they were tall enough
at the shoulder that they didn’t have to bend their heads upward to do it. They didn’t
clamp down, which he suspected would have cut right through bone and sinew with a
single bite, but they weren’t letting him move either. Those growls like millstones
grinding came from each deep chest again, and their eyes cocked up at him in warning.
Or possibly hopeful anticipation. The feel of the fangs was like the teeth of a waiting
saw, and between them they weighed as much as he and half over again.

Alyssa was grinning at him. Which was understandable; turnabout was fair play, and
being a helpless prisoner was no fun.

“
Urghabháil dó!
means ‘grab him,’ pretty much, soldier,” she said. “You don’t really have to worry
until he says
mharú air
! Which means ‘kill.’ Though he’d most likely just shoot you instead.”

“Loose him, Artan, Flan!” the Mackenzie said to the dogs, and they obeyed, backing
away but looking at Cole with suspicion anyway. “Now, off we go!”

“You guys are weird,” Cole said resignedly.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Alyssa said cheerfully. “What you’ve seen so far is nothing.
Try Dun Juniper sometime. Or even better, Castle Todenangst, I’ve visited there a
couple of times with Mom and Dad.
That
place is weird.”

Castle Todenangst, Crown dem
esne

Portland Protective Association

Willamette Valley near Newburg

High Kingdom of Montival

(formerly western Oregon)

June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

“M
om!”
the High Queen of Montival said.

Sandra Arminger looked up from where she had been kneeling at her prie-dieu. The padded
prayer-stool—rather like a reversed legless chair—stood before a triptych of the Madonna
and Child flanked by Saints Edgar and Olaf, the patrons of rulers. The gold leaf of
the halos in the icons glowed in the beam of light from an ocular window set high
up under the carved plaster of the coffered roof.

She smiled at her daughter, the dark-brown eyes dancing. “Honestly, Matti, you needn’t
goggle as if you’d caught me doing something nasty with a pageboy. I was
praying
.”

Mathilda opened her mouth and closed it as Sandra crossed herself, returned her rosary
to the embroidered purse at her belt and stood. That still left her six inches shorter
than her tall daughter, a smoothly pretty and slightly plump woman in her fifties,
in a cotte-hardie of dove-gray silk elaborately jacquarded with ribbons and swallows
and a white silk wimple bound with silver and opals. A Persian cat yawned and padded
out from beneath the prie-dieu, its gaze as blandly self-satisfied as that of its
mistress.

People who don’t know better underestimate Mother.

Though nowadays you had to go a long way to find someone so utterly uninformed. She’d
seen very hard men start to sweat when Sandra Arminger smiled at them in her let’s-share-a-joke
way. The joke might be very pointed, or give you indigestion.

Mathilda shook her head. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen her mother pray, of course;
it was just the first time she’d seen her doing it strictly in private, where there
wasn’t any political benefit to be gained by conventional piety. Previously she’d
used this little room off the Regent’s suite for confidential interviews, though it
was
the sort of place a noblewoman would set up a private shrine. Now, besides the prie-dieu
and images it had a big carved rood on one wall and a small shelf of devotional books.

“What . . . were you asking?” she said at last.

“I was praying for your father,” her mother said.

“Oh, good!” Mathilda said with a rush. “I mean, for both of you.”

They looked at each other silently for a moment in the incense-scented gloom. She’d
told her mother much of what she’d seen in the . . .

Visions,
Mathilda thought.
That’s as close as you can get to a word for things there aren’t words for. What did
Father Ignatius say when I made my confession? That some realities make language itself
buckle and break when we try to describe them instead of just living them.

. . . the
visions
she’d seen at Lost Lake, when she and Rudi had joined their blood on the blade of
the Sword of the Lady and thrust it into the living rock of Montival.

Or perhaps where
Artos
and I did.

Rudi carried the Sword again now, but in another sense it was still there beside the
infinitely blue waters with their hands clasped on the hilt . . . and always had been
and always would be. She could still feel a little of the curious
linking
that had started then, the sensation that the whole of Montival was like her own
body. Since then her dreams had been odd; not so much fantastic as . . .
real
.

Like vivid memories but of things she had never seen. Perhaps of ragged men stalking
deer in a clearing fringed by redwoods, or wild horses running in a desert with dust
smoking around their hooves and manes flying, or gulls on a cloudy beach beneath the
enormous rusted hulk of a wrecked freighter, or the empty tinkling clatter of glass
falling from the leaning tower of a skyscraper as windblown rain hooted through the
wreck of a dead city . . .

Either it had faded a little or she’d grown accustomed to it; Rudi thought it was
the latter, though he felt it much more as bearer of the Sword.

But for a while at Lost Lake she and he had walked outside the light of common day,
their footsteps carrying them on separate paths across all boundaries of space and
time. One thing
she
had seen was her own father, Norman Arminger, in a place where he did penance. And
there she had met . . .

Her eyes went to the supernal peace on the Virgin’s face as she looked down upon the
Christ Child.

“
She
said . . . She said that because he loved us, he could receive love now,” Mathilda
said softly. “And choose to . . . to make amends. I think that works both ways.”

Her mother sighed. “Here I receive positive proof of an afterlife, and instead of
being reassuring it’s
frightening
.”

“Well, of course,” Mathilda said. “That’s
much
worse than death. Potentially. Worse than oblivion, I mean. It raises the stakes
of
everything
.”

They looked at each other with perfect mutual bafflement for a moment.

Sandra broke it with a laugh. “You know, darling, I have exactly the opposite problem
with this than many people
used
to have with religion. When I was your age.”

Mathilda raised an eyebrow, and Sandra made a graceful gesture with one small well-manicured
hand, tapping her own temple with a finger that just touched the white silk of her
wimple.

“Now I know up
here
that it’s all true. Including the parts that are flat-out mutually contradictory,
but leave that aside. Oh, well, a great many very intelligent people always
did
believe it, and I’m not going to reject the evidence of my own senses.”

She put the hand over her heart. “But the difficult part is making
this
part of me believe it . . . integrate it into my worldview, as we’d have said in
the old days . . . my heart rebels against my mind. And here I thought I was a complete
rationalist!”

“You are
impossible
, Mother!” Mathilda laughed.

“Not impossible. Improbable, yes. Anyone who’s lived my life and done what I’ve done
would have to be
highly
improbable at the very least, my darling. Now let’s go. It wouldn’t do to keep people
waiting, even now that you’re Lady Protector.”

“
Particularly
now that I’m High Queen too,” Mathilda said, with a slight quirk in her smile. “I
always knew that the higher your rank the more firmly you were bound by custom. I
hadn’t quite realized . . .”

“Just how
high
a High Queen is,” Sandra finished for her. “But there are compensations, dear.”

They walked out through the semipublic part of the Regent’s suite arm in arm. Technically
Mathilda was Lady Protector now; the peace after the Protector’s War had provided
that she’d come of legal age at twenty-six. In practice . . .

In practice, being High Queen of Montival in the middle of a great big war doesn’t
leave me the time to be Lady Protector of the PPA!
And
being a new mother, which
cannot
be completely delegated and I
won’t
anyway . . . having Mother handling the administrative routine and a lot of the politics
in the north-realm territories not only lets me do other things, it buffers me from
Associates who’d presume too much. I don’t want to alienate the Protectorate’s nobility.
But I’m High Queen of all Montival, not just the PPA, and I have to be
seen
to be so people will know I mean it. Ruling is as much about seeming as being. If
there’s a difference at all.

So she’d firmly turned down her mother’s pro forma offer to relinquish the suites
that occupied the upper stories of the Silver Tower and shuffle off to some manor.
Sandra Arminger had been the
Spider of the Silver Tower
for far too long. Even her virtues were a political problem; everyone knew how effectively
she’d rebuilt the PPA after the shock of Norman Arminger’s death in the Protector’s
War and the Jacquerie rebellion and the reforms and purges that followed it. If the
Prophet hadn’t come along that might have caused real trouble with fearful neighbors.

Mathilda would have felt uneasy calling these her own chambers anyway, though of course
her bedroom had been here before she turned twelve and got her Associate’s dagger
and her own household and retinue. Like much of the great fortress-palace they’d been
designed by Sandra, or at least she’d directed the terrified architects and interior
decorators and artists she and Norman had swept up after their coup.

They were well over a hundred feet high here, and on the side looking out southward
over the central keep, so the windows could be large—sets of triple pointed-arch portals
at intervals, their upper fifth filled with stained glass and stone tracery in the
Protectorate’s version of Venetian Gothic style. The sashes below were thrown open
on the fresh early summer afternoon amid a scent of roses and Sambac jasmine from
the planters. A torrent of light shimmered on walls and floors of pale stone, on tables
of inlaid rare woods and mother-of-pearl, the carved surrounds of arched open doorways
or tile above hearths, on spindly chairs and sofas upholstered in cream silk and on
tapestries of war and the hunt and high ceremony.

The vivid colors of the hangings and those of the rugs on the floor were a deliberate
contrast. Walls and niches held art commissioned new or scavenged from museums and
galleries all across the west of the continent. Some were as familiar as her own face:
Leighton’s
Pavonia
for instance, which had been there in the background so constantly she’d assumed
for years it was a modern portrait of Delia de Stafford until she embarrassed herself
by saying so at a reception here. But there was always something that surprised even
her: this time it was a bronze statue of a youth, a slimly perfect athlete standing
hipshot and about to crown himself with a wreath of laurel vanished twenty-four hundred
years ago.

Classical but not Roman,
Mathilda thought.
Greek, and of the great years. And undamaged except for the feet. Oh, my . . .

“That’s new,” she said. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“Not so very,” Sandra said, stopping for a moment and seeming to caress the figure
with her eyes. “This one is . . . probably . . . by Lysippos, Alexander the Great’s
court sculptor. But it was in storage for a long time, since that last expedition
I sent to southern California just before the war . . . my goodness, three years ago
now! I’ve had some experts working it over and mounting it on that pedestal. It’s
amazingly fragile, for something that’s lasted so very long.”

Mathilda looked at it and sighed, then sighed again rather differently as they walked
on. She’d gone through a phase of guilt about her mother’s art-collecting activities
when she’d been a teenager and in the first incandescent sureness of her faith. Some
of the men in the teams sent to retrieve these treasures had died horribly in the
desolate Eater-haunted ruins of the lost cities, in Seattle and Vancouver, San Francisco
and Los Angeles and places like San Simeon and the Getty Villa. And the revenues to
finance it all came out of the incomes of peasants and craft-folk and traders, eventually.

When you were in a position to spend the fruits of other people’s sweat, not to mention
their blood, prudent thrift became a cardinal virtue.

But should we be concerned
only
with food and shelter and the weapons to protect it?
she thought.
Mom saved so much that was beautiful. And she made it fashionable for the other nobles
and the wealthy guildsmen to do the same thing;
and
to give patronage to our own makers. That kept knowledge and skills alive through
the terrible years when everything might have been lost. How many generations will
thank her for both? And if she did it so
she
could have this . . . stuff . . . does that matter? The realm gets it just the same,
and all the people in times to come. That’s good lordship too.

Two separate holy men had pointed that out to her—Father Ignatius had used Sandra’s
art collecting as an example of how God’s plan turned all things to good in the end.
The Rinpoche Tsewang Dorje had phrased it a little differently, but it amounted to
the same thing. Though her private confessor at the time had simply and sternly admonished
her that her own sins were a heavy enough burden to carry up to Heaven’s gate without
adding the spiritual pride of assuming someone else’s.

I’ve never quite understood why my confessors and tutors were all so
sincere
. Not since I realized . . . or let myself realize . . . that Mother
wasn’t
, that she was playing at it. Which I only
really
accepted when she stopped playing and started trying it for real. And now I’m High
Queen—

She asked the question bluntly, and was a little astonished when her mother wiped
at one eye until she caught a glint through the tear that was neither entirely false
nor altogether genuine.

Absolutely Mother, in other words.

“My little girl is all grown up, and just as smart as I am!” she said.

Then, in utter seriousness: “Because I wanted you to
fit
in this world, darling. I can fake it . . . sometimes for days or weeks at a time,
I don’t notice . . . but then everything, all this—”

She waved a hand.

“—is suddenly like a dream, and I expect to wake up and pop another tape in the VCR.”

Mathilda looked around and shook her head. Todenangst was about the most solidly real
place she knew. Her mother went on:

“I
survived
by playing a game in deadly earnest I’d always liked to pretend to do for fun—I was
in the Society but not the type who pulled their persona around them like a security
blanket after the Change and never let go. Possibly I could play it so well
because
something deep down in me never entirely believed it, which meant I could be more
objective. But it’s your
life
and you deserve to live it with a whole heart.”