P. Hodgell - Honor's Paradox

“Oh, I say,” protested the scrollsman, snatching up his own cup.

In the moment that Holly was down, Kindrie threw the remains of experimental powder in his face. His features convulsed.

“Ah- choo! ”

Dust flew everywhere, wrecking havoc. Bodies lurched about in paroxysms of sneezing, falling over furniture and each other. The canvas walls bulged and jittered as if the tent were also suffering a fit. Guards outside cried out in alarm. Those who reached the door first, however, also doubled over, coughing and half-blinded with tears.

Inside, only Torisen and Kindrie had had the wits to hold their breaths.

The figure that Torisen pinned writhed under his hands, distorting fantastically. It gasped, sneezed again, and seemed nearly to blow off its own face. An elbow weirdly bent caught Torisen in the chin, knocking him back. Before he could recover, his opponent had lurched out of the tent through the incapacitated guards with the two wolvers in close pursuit.

Torisen also started after him, but stopped when Kindrie fell to his knees, choking.

“. . . cords . . .” wheezed the Shanir, clutching at his throat. “In my . . . soul-image.”

Torisen only saw the rope tether still around Kindrie’s neck, but it had tightened and was digging into the healer’s flesh. When he worked his fingers under it, he found himself grappling with an entire network of tough threads that bound the Shanir from head to foot. A woven mockery of a head like an inflated sack rose behind Kindrie and hissed at Torisen. Then Kindrie found a loose thread and jerked at it. The cords unraveled with a sigh, leaving Torisen with the original rope in his hands. He dropped it as if it were a dead snake.

“Are you all right?”

Kindrie nodded weakly, still clutching his bruised throat.

“I-I didn’t know . . . I didn’t realize . . . all this time, sh-she had me . . .”

Before Torisen could ask what he meant, Holly burst back into the tent with a wolver gripping either arm of his leather hunting jacket.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” he began, then took in the chaos only beginning to sort itself out inside the tent as various shaken Highborn extricated themselves from the furniture and each other.

Rowan pushed past him and moved quickly to her lord’s side.

“Blackie, you’re bleeding.”

“I know.”

Burr opened Torisen’s coat and shirt to examine the slash across his ribs.

“As usual, m’lord, you’re luckier than you should be,” he said, and handed Torisen a table linen to hold against the seeping wound.

Holly lifted the arm to which Yce was attached and regarded her dangling from it, growling around her mouthful of leather.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Release him, Yce, Grimly. D’you think it likely that my own cousin would try to skewer me, much less that he could change from a dress coat to hunting clothes in seconds?”

Grimly rose, assuming a less hairy, somewhat chagrined aspect. “We did lose sight of him in the confusion,” he admitted, “and neither of us could track worth scat with a snout full of that wretched powder. So when we saw M’lord Holly here coming up the plank walk, bold as you please, we just grabbed him.”

“Oh, that’s as clear as mud soup,” said Holly. “I take it that you thought I was an assassin. I also take it by the carving on your precious hide that there was a would-be assassin who looked like me. So, who and how?”

“I think I can explain,” said Kindrie hoarsely, still sitting hunched on the floor, his face as white as his hair.

Torisen gave him a hard look. “One thing among many that I don’t understand,” he said, abruptly changing the topic, “is why you’re here at all.”

“He . . . the other one . . . brought me as a witness to Lord Danior’s presumed perfidy. Beyond that, I’ve been a prisoner in the Priests’ College these past twenty-six days.”

“Did you know about this?” Torisen demanded of the Randir envoy.

Wither shrugged. “I may have heard some rumor, but really, the priests go their own way under my lady’s protection. Besides, the man is a bastard.”

“If anyone says that one more time, I shall wax violent and ruin more perfectly good napkins.”

“Is there anyone here,” asked the scrollsman piteously, “who wants to hear the results of my research?”

“I do at least,” said Wither, with a courteous inclination of his head.

“Well, all complications aside, it comes down to this: the river establishes the boundary between keeps.”

“Thank you.”

Torisen sighed. “That’s it, then. I’m sorry, Holly.”

The earth trembled again, shaking them where they stood, making the planks chatter like teeth under them.

“That was a strong one,” Holly remarked.

The wolver had darted out the door. Now he returned. “Tori, everyone, come look!”

Torisen, on his way out, hesitated at the abstracted, pained look on Kindrie’s face.

“I said the next seizure would kill him,” whispered the healer. “These are that wretched boy’s death throes.”

Outside, a cloud of dust rose over the shoulder of the northern bluff. The far side seemed to have suffered a considerable landslide, and the eastern end had crumbled altogether. Water and debris boiled through the new cut as the Silver raced to regain its old bed, slicing off a chunk of former Randir land for good measure. They watched as the river, fanged with debris and gilded with the sunset, surged around them. Then Torisen turned to Wither.

“Well,” he said, “that’s it.”

Wither made a face. “As you say. This time. Fare you well, my lord.”

On his departure, Adric emerged from the shadows where he had retreated to avoid being trampled in the uproar and to mop off his wine-soaked clothes. “About Pereden’s ring . . .” he said.

Holly shot Torisen a look, then drew himself up with a gulp. “I gave it to the Highlord,” he said. “It was on the finger of a corpse being burned on the common pyre at the Cataracts along with the renegade changers.”

Adric breathed a sigh of relief. “My boy, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Obviously it was worn by the changer who impersonated my dear son. Tori, you should have given it directly to me.”

Torisen meekly agreed.

“If you will come with me, m’lord,” said Holly, scrambling to recover himself, “I would be honored to host you for the night. Tori?”

“I’ll join you later.

Left alone with Kindrie, Torisen searched for and found a bottle with enough wine left in it for two small cups. His side wrenched at him as he bent to pick it up and the stain on the linen grew.

Kindrie moved as if to help him, but Torisen waved him off.

“It’s only a cut. Let’s not push our luck. The question remains: what in Perimal’s name just happened?”

Kindrie drew a deep breath. He was still shaken by how deeply Rawneth had tricked him into despair. She had almost stolen everything that he valued most: friends, family, self-respect . . . all the things that the Priests’ College also sought to destroy.

She could have broken me, he thought. She almost did. But not quite.

He accepted the cup of wine, waited until his hands stopped shaking, and then drank from it. Warmth spread outward from his empty stomach. Breakfast had been a long time ago.

“To begin with,” he said, “you were attacked by a changer.”

Torisen snorted. “That much I guessed. I have come up against such creatures before, you know.”

“Yes, of course. I should have started further back. My lord . . . m-my cousin, our great-grandmother Kinzi stitched a letter on the night that she died. A copy came into the hands of the Jaran Matriarch and she translated it for us.”