P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“Something is wrong with him. I don’t like the way he looks, and he kept muttering ‘All gone.’ ”

“ ‘All gone’?” The brows fell in a frown. “Then we had better find him. Quickly. I’ll warn the other monitors. You check his quarters in Old Tentir. Recently, he’s complained of feeling ill and has taken to dining alone in his room.”

While much of Old Tentir was a mystery to Torisen, he knew his way to Harn’s tower apartment. He found it a mess, with clothes strewn all over as if Harn had been searching for something, with increasing urgency and lack of success. Under a pair of torn pants, he found the remains of Harn’s last meal. The Kendar must truly have been feeling ill to have subsisted on such watery gruel. Torisen removed his monitor’s mask, dipped a finger in to taste it and frowned. Something about the taste, no, the smell, was familiar.

He had a sudden, vivid memory of Lord Ardeth handing him a glass of wine and watching as he sipped it. It had had just such an out-of-place floral fragrance. Then he had been back in the Haunted Lands keep doing . . . something . . . with Ardeth’s voice in the back of his mind murmuring questions which he hoped he hadn’t answered.

Black forget-me-not. That was the smell. Adric used it when he wanted to remember something or when he wished to see his beloved Pereden again, as that wretched boy had been in life and lived on still in his father’s memory.

If Harn had been dosed with this for days . . . but by whom, and why?

Trinity, the stuff was potent. It tugged at his mind. He remembered the last time he had been in this tower apartment, before the Host had marched south to confront the Waster Horde at the Cataracts. They had been talking when a cadet had burst in nearly in hysterics.

“D-dead,” he had stammered. “Dead, dead, dead . . . ”

They had run down to the great hall to find two cadets crushed together face to face on the hearth . . .

Where were they now?

. . . and a darkling changer wearing a stolen face waiting for him.

“We have unfinished business,” it had said.

Cadets were rushing to the stricken pair on the hearth. One moment he saw them, the next he didn’t as then and now bled into each other. That filthy drug . . .

But someone was waiting for him at the stair’s foot—a tall cadet whom, surely, he should know.

Not another forgotten name.

Torisen paused, his face in shadow, his mind in turmoil. “What do you want?”

“To talk to you. In private. Now.”

Still adrift between past and present, Torisen followed the cadet down the stairs, through the stable, into the fire timber hall, between the towering, incandescent timbers.

They faced each other across a smoldering, stone-lined fire pit. Was this where he had confronted the changer? No. That pit was off to one side, although surely drying laundry hadn’t then hung over it. The heat was the same, though, warping the air between them, stinging the eyes, hindering sight.

“Doesn’t honor mean anything to you?” demanded the cadet furiously. “Don’t the rules? Then again, why should they when the Commandant lets you break them over and over? Quite his little pet, aren’t you? You think you’re so clever that you can get away with anything. Well, not this time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your scarf. Someone has already scalped you, but here you are, still in play.”

“You think I’m Jame.”

The other spat on the stones. His saliva skipped among them, sizzling, going, gone. “The spoiled brat. The Highborn little lady. What did your brother think, that Tentir needed a mascot?”

He began to pace. Torisen moved also, to keep the pit between them. He wanted to hear, to understand.

“We’re just toys to you, aren’t we, and Tentir is all one big game. Well, some of us fought to get here. Three generations it’s taken my family to claw our way up from the dirt where your precious uncle flung my grandmother after he’d had his fun with her. She died giving birth to my mother, who died at the Cataracts on the Mendelin Steps, fighting for your precious brother. Her blood bought me my place here. Dishonor that, would you, by dishonoring me? I don’t think so.”

At last Torisen remembered this cadet’s name: Vant. As for the rest, he was still confused. “How have you been dishonored?”

“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be. It was an honest mistake!”

“What was?”

“Stop playing with me, dammit! How could anyone seriously believe that hillmen were attacking on Tentir’s doorstep? What logic was there in that? What sense is there in anything that you do or that happens around you?”

Torisen was catching up now, and his voice hardened. “You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”

“And I tell you, it was an understandable mistake! Who are you, to be taken seriously, then or now? I’d as soon take orders from Gorbel’s pook! Your presence here is a joke, an insult. Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”

“That depends on you. In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”

“You misbegotten bitch!”

He circled the fire pit in a rush, meeting Torisen on the far side in earth-moving Senethar. The Kendar far overmatched the Highborn in both size and strength, but Torisen had fought bigger men than himself all his life. While Vant tried to fling him onto the searing stones, he tried to wrestle them both away.

Vant suddenly lurched free. He looked dazed and incredulous, as if someone had just struck him in the head. His eyes, slightly crossed, swept the hall.

“You . . . don’t!”

With that, he flinched again, stumbled on the rim of the pit, and fell in. There he rolled hastily to his feet, his hands already red and blistered.

“You bitch, all of you, bitches . . . ”

Then for the first time he clearly saw his adversary. “Oh.”

“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.”

Vant shuffled from foot to foot. Clearly he felt the heat, but he didn’t take his peril seriously.

“Not until you make me master-ten of my barracks and withdraw that bitch sister of yours. You must see that her presence here isn’t right!”

“I suppose you know that your boots are smoking. I can’t be blackmailed, Vant. It would be a betrayal of my position.”

Stomping unsettled sparks from the coals beneath the stones. Now the cadet’s pant cuffs were smoldering. He beat at them with his hands in a kind of exasperated irritation. Wherever Vant had expected life to take him, it wasn’t to this, nor did he yet believe it.

“You’re Highlord, dammit!” The furnace breath of the pit made him increasingly hoarse as his throat closed. “You can do . . . what you please!”

“Not so. To lead is also to serve . . . something that neither you nor Greshan ever seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”

He could have ordered in a voice that the cadet would have had to obey, but he didn’t. The will that allows a man to argue while he risks immolation deserves that much respect at least.

Fire flared under Vant’s hands. No doubt he could smell as well as feel his own burning flesh.

“I don’t believe this. I don’t accept it. It isn’t fair!”

“Is the truth? Come out. Here, take my hand.”

The flames rose, licking from pants to jacket, with a sudden rush to the hair. At last Vant believed the unthinkable.

“I will . . . have justice,” he panted as the smoke gnawed at his throat, “or I will . . . have revenge.”

He groped toward Torisen with a hand whose fingers were already blackening. Torisen would have met his failing grasp, but strong hands pulled him back.