P. Hodgell - Honor's Paradox

He filed into his first class, where those of pronounced Shanir power met in a claustrophobic room lit only by garish lichen murals of unpleasant designs.

“Who is our lord?” demanded their instructor, a minor priest disparagingly behind his back called a priestling.

“No one!” chorused back the assembled acolytes from the circle that they made around him.

“Who is our patron?”

“Lady Rawneth.”

“Whom do we serve?”

“The high priests.”

“Who is our family?”

“Each other.”

“On whom do we spit?”

“On our cruel god”—each except Kindrie turned to mime spitting over his shoulder—“who has forsaken us.”

The catechism over, the instructor turned to his class. “Remind me. What can each of you do?”

“I can make dogs howl, master.”

“I can start fires with a touch,” said a boy with a hideously scarred face.

“I can shake the earth,” said another who himself couldn’t stop trembling.

“I can madden birds.”

“I can make snakes dance.”

“I can carve stone images that move—all right,” the acolyte added, to the jeers of the others, “very slowly.”

“And you?” the instructor said to Kindrie.

“I heal.”

“No. You can manipulate soul-images and walk the soulscape, as our Lady Rawneth does. Are you greater or lesser than she?”

“That isn’t for me to say.”

“Then I will. You are lesser because you can only heal, not destroy or create. Now, show us your power. Hinde, stand forth.”

The twitching cadet nervously crossed the circle to face the Knorth.

“Well? Touch him.”

Reluctantly, Kindrie did.

In his soulscape and in the room itself, not the acolyte but his entire surroundings began to quake, to the startled protests of the other students. Dust rattled down from the ceiling. Stones groaned. Standing still in the midst of growing chaos, Kindrie focused. In his soul-image, someone huge was shaking the boy, now a mere infant.

“Oh, you little Shanir bastard . . .”

Kindrie gripped those enormous, tormenting hands.

“You’re killing him,” he said. “One more seizure and he will die. You are nothing but a memory, to torment him so. Go away.”

Then they were back in the classroom, the boy quiet and bewildered in his grasp, the stones settling around them. Angry shouts came from neighboring rooms.

“What did you do?” demanded the instructor.

“I sent away a baleful influence.”

“You destroyed it!”

“No. Only he can do that. See. It has him in its grip again.”

The boy broke Kindrie’s hold and backed off, shaking, sneering. His thoughts echoed in the Knorth’s mind:

“I deserve it, I deserve it, I deserve it . . .”

“Try me,” said the fire-boy, suddenly before him, gripping Kindrie’s sleeves.

Kindrie felt heat. The dank wool smoked and stank. His hands in turn gripped the other’s wrists. He was falling toward fire. No. The one falling was a child on a hearth, ignored by his parents as they argued about his fate. That had been decided long ago but still he fell, only to be thrust away by Kindrie’s will.

The acolyte looked at his hands, aghast. His ruined face crumpled on the side not fixed with scar tissue. “I can’t,” he said, almost in tears. “What have you done to me, you bastard?”

Nothing that would last, thought Kindrie sadly as the other, blundering, withdrew. Not without his consent. That was one of the bitter lessons he had learned over the past three weeks: those here below in the Priests’ College had been made to embrace their wretchedness. Earth shaker and fire-touch both might have turned their talents to more constructive ends, but not under the college’s direction.

For the rest of the lesson, the instructor ignored him while the burnt boy wept scalding tears and the trembling boy complacently jittered in place, occasionally gulping back foam.

The next class was wind-blowing Senetha as practiced for the Great Dance. Ah, the freedom to move, almost to fly, but here one also felt a touch of the power that the dance was meant to channel. It streamed in at the top of the college from the Kencyrath’s wide-flung temples and spiraled down through it, bound for the catch pool below, the cloaca of divinity. From whence did it come? Different currents had different scents—the musk of Tai-tastigon, the jungle sweat of Tai-than, the spice of Kothifir, the dust and ashes of Karkinaroth—and there were other flavors there too, including one very strong like simmering brimstone. Kindrie was gingerly trying to backtrack this last when the class ended.

Next(without any intervening lunch) was elementary runes, taught by a former randon whose eyes kept straying to Kindrie.

“Not like that. Here. Look.” He bent over Kindrie’s wax tablet and drew on it. Kindrie noticed that the back of the priest’s neck was scarred, but not heavily enough to disguise the swooping lines of the rathorn sigil. On Kindrie’s pad he had written, “Wake up! She has her nails in you.”

She . . . who?

The cords, climbing higher and higher, obscenely burrowing in and out of flesh . . .

For a moment he knew what was happening to him, and then it was gone. The priest had scraped clean the slate.

Last came potions and powders.

“Today we will compound a dust to stop an enemy’s breath,” announced the instructor, “something so simple that even our esteemed Knorth Bastard should be able to master it.”

The other students tittered and shot him sidelong glances, but Kindrie had his doubts. Nothing that he tried in this class ever came out as planned, perhaps because most of it was meant to harm.

Throttle-weed, ash-berry, powdered bilge-beetle . . .

The instructor was right: what could be simpler—assuming that he really did want someone to choke.

The priestling gingerly sniffed at Kindrie’s concoction, the antidote clutched ready in one fist. His breath caught and his eyes bulged.

Trinity, thought Kindrie, dismayed, did I really do it right?

Then the man drew a whooping gasp and began convulsively to sneeze. His explosive breath scattered the powder throughout the room. Some bent double helplessly as if about to blow their brains out. Others keeled over chairs and table, sending their own ingredients flying to add to the confusion. Kindrie stood back in alarm, holding his breath.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face a senior priest holding a cloth to his face. “Of course, it would be you,” he said in a tone of muffled exasperation. “Come along. Someone wants to see you.”

Kindrie went with him, but not before surreptitiously sweeping what little was left of his experiment into a pocket.

His guide led him up the spiral ramp to the foot of a stair, then up into the stone building, hardly more than a shed, that masked the college’s entrance. Outside was Wilden’s high, windy terrace looking down over the fortress’ many barred family compounds full of steep, narrow buildings like so many pinched, inward-turning faces. The shadow of the Witch’s Tower fell across the flagstones, turning puddles to ice where it touched.

Kindrie hesitated on the tower’s threshold, loath to enter, and looked out over the clean world denied to him. Beyond the sweep of buildings, down on the river flats, he saw a large tent flying a black flag with white tracery on it, too distant to make out.

“Who is that?” he asked his escort.

The priest laughed. “The Highlord, come to settle our little border dispute, or so he thinks.”

Torisen, so close . . .

Clean air seemed to blow through him for the first time in weeks, but the priest’s hand closed on his arm as he took an involuntary step toward the terrace’s edge.