Valor of the Healer (32 page)

“Well, know this, my friend.” Celoren plucked Kestar’s amulet from his fingers and slid it back into its pouch, then pressed that back into his partner’s grasp. “Whatever you decide, I have your back.”

* * *

No matter how he railed, no matter how much he threatened to call the Anreulag back down upon their heads, Arlitham Abbey’s priests refused to set Shaymis Enverly free. They hauled him instead, with unflinching hands, out of the chapel’s ruins and off to one of the abbey’s guest chambers. They bound him hand and foot to a chair, and with a blade sanctified with holy water, prayer and fire, they sliced off his tongue as their abbot had commanded.

He couldn’t pretend that he lamented the guard he’d chosen to sacrifice on the spot. In truth, he barely remembered which man he’d killed. None of it signified, for with his own voice, he
had
called the Anreulag. She’d taken shape and flesh before them all because of the words he’d thundered. And because he hadn’t been able to contain Her, the deepest fear he’d ever known clawed through his heart even as white-hot pain burned away the edges of his world. After that, he had no choice but to submit to whatever tending his jailers permitted. Another of their number arrived to dose him with laudanum, and once that was done, he tumbled down into unconsciousness.

Nightmares of unearthly radiance and the debris falling down from the chapel ceiling intruded upon his slumber, too fierce and bright to grant him any peace. How had the summoning ritual gone awry? Why hadn’t he been able to keep the Anreulag in the abbey, so that Her wrath could strike down the girl—as by all rights it should have done? How had Faanshi driven Her away?

When his confinement was interrupted, it should have been a mercy. But with no voice or knock to give him warning, the door flew open to admit Abbot Grenham and the abbey physician. Behind them came two more priests bearing a slack, stumbling figure between them. When he recognized the bowed, bandaged head of the wounded man, Enverly’s doubt swelled with new and alarming strength.

He couldn’t rise from the chair in which he was tied; he couldn’t even call out for his patron, not now. He could do nothing but watch and listen as the priests assisted Holvirr Kilmerredes to bed. “Get him lying down at once,” the physician commanded. “He shouldn’t be on his feet an instant longer than necessary.”

Only Abbot Grenham paused to pay him any heed, and then only to look down at him with unrelenting eyes. “See what more you’ve wrought tonight.”

With far too much concentration for so small a motion, the duke turned his head in Enverly’s direction, and the sepulchral tone of his normally resonant voice pierced through his pain-hazed awareness. “She blazes. A slip of a thing, and she shines, and not even the Voice can speak against her...” His eyes held a febrile gleam that jarred against his lopsided smile. “She should be mine, Shaymis. I’m the only one who can master her—she shines because of me. She heals on my command. She heals on my command!”

On his last few words his voice rose, and he tried to rise with it. But the physician gestured for his assistants to pin the duke to the bed, while he, with brisk and ungentle motions, pinched his nose and poured more laudanum straight down his throat.

“We’ll send His Grace home as soon as Brother Orlin affirms he’s fit to travel,” Grenham told Enverly, nodding toward the physician. “Take in this sight of him well, sir, for it’s the least of your sins—and you’ll be remanded into the custody of Captain Follingsen to answer for them. Five of my people and one other of His Grace’s guards, besides the one you slew, are dead because of you.”

Enverly could say nothing to that, not anymore, and he couldn’t even laugh at the bitter suspicion that Grenham hadn’t confiscated the amulets of Kestar Vaarsen and Celoren Valleford along with his own. He could do nothing but endure his pain and rest his sight on the raving form of his patron. As the drug seized hold of him, Kilmerredes’s cries grew weaker, but not before he threw him one last look, his eyes crazed, wild. Only then did the full, final import of what had occurred in the chapel sink in at last, chilling Shaymis Enverly with the beginnings of despair.

* * *

It took nine days for the duke to return to Lomhannor Hall, and Ulima had counted every hour as a weight of stone upon her life and breath. When one of His Grace’s guardsmen arrived, on a horse as exhausted as he, murmurs filled the house at the news he brought. The duke had found his runaway slave—but had lost her to the Hawks and to the abbot of Arlitham Abbey. Two among the company were dead, slain by Father Enverly, and Kilmerredes himself was gravely wounded. Even now he rode toward Lomhannor in his coach rather than upon his own horse.

They had, or so went the whispers, seen the Anreulag. And Father Enverly himself had Called Her, only to earn the swift retribution of the abbey for defiling their chapel with blood.

Ulima believed it, for the guardsman’s haunted eyes were those of a man who’d beheld a truth he could not bear. Rather than brag to his fellows or to the people in the town at the foot of the mountain, he sequestered himself in his cot in the guard barracks and prayed for a night and a day.

Before he was done, the duke’s slower-riding entourage reached Lomhannor Hall at last. A bandage wreathing his brow, his motions dulled from their usual vigor and grace, Holvirr Kilmerredes stepped across the threshold of his ancient home and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. His wife’s embrace and the faces of his children sparked recognition in his eyes, but he spoke no more than a few disjointed words to the servants. The duchess instead took command, issuing orders that sent maids and footmen scurrying in all directions and which left the route to her husband’s private chambers clear.

Ulima witnessed the homecoming but held back from the furor that swirled around their lord and master, and wished in her heart of hearts that the Anreulag had struck him down. As Khamsin guided him toward the stairs, his glance roved over her, and the old priestess went cold. His eyes were flat, empty as though scoured clean by a desert wind. They were the eyes of a ghost, and of her doom.

Shaken to her bones, Ulima retreated to her room to whisper what prayers she could for Djashtet’s all-hearing ears. This time she had no orisons for the Dawnmaiden or Noonmother; this time she prayed to the Crone of Night alone. She could almost feel Her, a gray presence on the edge of her perceptions, waiting for a final price to be paid before she could reach Her side and rest at last.

If
I
must
shed
my
blood
for
hers
,
Ancient
One
,
let
it
be
so
.
Let
me
lay
down
my
life
to
keep
Faanshi
free
.

Khamsin didn’t call her to the duke’s chambers, for which Ulima was dourly grateful. She wouldn’t have to tell her kinswoman that no tisane or potion would return the light to her husband’s eyes. It would do no good, not now, not when she knew that her niece wouldn’t welcome such wisdom, and not when her final hours would end before the coming of dawn. She heard no upraised voices, no tramping feet to alert her that the household was in turmoil. Yet as night fell she drew tension in with every breath, as though her chamber’s very walls exuded it, and only the focus of her meditation let her transmute that apprehension to a solemn kind of peace.

In the night’s deepest hours the door opened at last. Unshod feet made far less noise than a booted tread, but Ulima still caught the creak of the floorboards as he stole into the room. Her heart constricted, but she didn’t rise from where she knelt before her altar. She wouldn’t show her fear before a prowling wolf.

“You succored her. You fed her light even when I hid her away in darkness.”

He sounded almost lucid, save for the strain in his voice, the first signs of rot at the heart of a tree, the first cracks in a wall about to fall. Ulima watched his reflection shimmer across the altar’s golden trim as he loomed closer, into the candlelight that was her haven in the otherwise darkened room. Blocked from his line of sight, she held her knife low and ready before her. Her gaze focused upon its edge—her ears, upon the duke’s harsh and ragged breaths.

“I did,” she said, pride ringing through her voice like a sword whipping free of its scabbard. Eighteen years she had kept silent, hiding her contempt for this northern barbarian lord for the sake of the alliance he’d forged with her clan, but no longer. “In Almighty Djashtet’s name, by the will of the Dawnmaiden and Noonmother and the great Crone of Night, I defy you, jackal. Through the child of my clan’s blood, the Lady of Time will bathe this land in fire!”

He giggled in splinters of laughter that held no mirth. “Gods,” he breathed, and then laughed harder, fell and dark. “The Blessed One couldn’t destroy her. Couldn’t quench the light. The gods have no power!” His big hands locked on to her throat, squeezing, and his laughter didn’t stop. “Neither does yours, old witch!”

Ulima shot to her feet, ignoring the shrieking of her aged joints and muscles. It wasn’t enough to break the duke’s hold, but it didn’t need to. She’d already marked the place she needed to strike, and she needed only to raise her knife and thrust it home.

His golden eyes went wide beneath the bandage on his brow, and his bellow of pain and rage drove all else from Ulima’s hearing. Just beyond the candlelight figures with weapons drawn rushed into the room, but she didn’t struggle, for Khamsin and the household guards were too late. Her foe’s face was ashen, his grip faltering even as he crushed her throat between his palms. She was Ulima elif-Jaroun Sarazen, daughter of kings and warriors, priestess of the Lady of Time. Even with her years, though it cost her strength and breath and life, she could drive a dagger into a man’s heart. And she could watch, smiling in fierce triumph, as the knowledge of his own doom flooded Holvirr Kilmerredes’s eyes.

“Behold the power of my god,” she whispered as she let herself fall.

* * *

Many hours passed before Semai escaped Lomhannor Hall, hours in which word of the deaths of the duke and the
akresha
Ulima spread rampant through the ranks of the guards and servants. The Lady Khamsin became a tigress, snarling commands that her terrified children be kept from their father’s bloodied body, and taking charge of moving him to where he might be prepared to be laid to rest. Ulima she would have consigned to the rubbish heap, but for Semai. She was Djashtethi, he reminded her, and the
akresha
duchess’s own kin. To dishonor her body was to dishonor the Lady of Time Herself.

Khamsin flushed crimson with wrath at his resistance, but couldn’t gainsay him before the other Tantiu of the household. “Do what you will with her, then, but do it out of my sight.”

And so he led the last few of their people still faithful to Djashtet in taking the body of the old priestess away. While the women washed her and anointed her in sacred oils, he took the men and built a pyre in the loneliest corner of the estate. There they conveyed her, and there they spoke the words to consign her soul into Djashtet’s keeping. When nothing remained of her but cooling ash, he ordered it gathered into a jar of the finest clay. Holding it high, he proclaimed that he would bear it safely home to Tantiulo, so that the Nobi would return to the sands of the land that had given her life.

No one, not even the duchess, thought twice of his taking on this task. No one barred him from choosing a younger warrior to accompany him down to the town, or from buying passage on the first vessel that would carry them westward down the river to Shalridan, where they could find a ship to carry them home.

No one, then, was there to witness when Semai took his young companion aside, swore him to secrecy, and commanded him to bear the jar of ashes on to Tantiulo alone. And no one at all marked his passing as he stole back into the city in search of the things he would need to carry out the task with which the
akresha
Ulima herself had entrusted him.

Before the duchess could order her recaptured, before the infidel Church could put her to death, he would find the maiden Faanshi—and with her, the assassin and the knight who had given her freedom and life.

* * *

“They’re going to live, aren’t they? They’re going to be all right?”

She and Kirinil had not, in theory, been prisoners—yet Alarrah hadn’t dared to venture out of the storeroom where they’d taken their dubious shelter. From this hiding place they couldn’t see the sky, and so she’d had to rely upon the pattern of noises beyond its walls, distant yet still distinct in her hearing, to set the pattern of the hours. Beyond that, the flow of time had little meaning, for she couldn’t bear to leave her charges. She stayed at the side of their
valannè
and the Rook, while the glow pouring from Faanshi filled their haven with golden light. Her own power was but a fraction of its strength, yet she offered it unstintingly, and sang what airs of comfort and grace she knew besides—as much for herself and Kirinil as for Faanshi’s and Julian’s unhearing ears.

Now, at the sound of her heart-brother’s voice, she looked up. Kirinil wasn’t a healer, and couldn’t attune himself as well as she to the ebb and flow of Faanshi’s far greater magic. He’d been the one to risk leaving the storeroom, when it was safest in the dead of night, to attend to their horses and hold Kestar Vaarsen to the promise that none of them would be harmed.

Thus he’d missed what Alarrah had seen when she’d taken the assassin’s false hand from his arm. She hadn’t had to touch the human to sense the magic that engulfed him—but once she did, it felt like dipping her hand into a river of fire. And one touch was all she required to know that the girl who shared her father’s blood, untaught as she was, was guiding that river’s current with every last fiber of her being.