P. Hodgell: Honor's Paradox

Pyres and the Pit

Jame half woke, tangled in sleeping furs.

Where am I? she thought.

The white-washed wall beside her danced with murals given life by the low fire sulking beneath the great bronze basin while rain tapped on the copper smoke hood above. Rue snored softly in her own mound of blankets by the door. Of course. She was back in her quarters at Tentir, almost too tired from the long ride south from the Merikit village to sleep.

But she had slept, and dreamed of dark things. Fire and ash, furious blue eyes in a charred face, a seared finger encircled by a ring, jutting out of a pile of corpses . . .

Some images she recognized, but to whom had the other ones belonged? Over the past year she had sometimes shared the dreamscape with both Timmon, set on seduction, and her twin brother Torisen, pulled in against his will. Neither showed her anything she wanted to see. To sleep again was to risk falling back into nightmare, but oh, she ached for rest.

A branch snapped and the flames leaped. Her eyelids flickered, then fell again. Through them she still saw fire. . . .

Such pulsing heat, such an incandescent glow! Beads of sweat burst on her brow and trickled down, stinging, into her eyes. It hurt to breathe. Tentir’s fire timbers loomed around her like a forest perpetually eaten by sullen, internal flame.

The vents far above sucked in a breath of hot air: “Aaaah . . .”

Embers glowed, above, below, while black flakes of combustion fluttered against ironwood trunks like infernal butterflies.

At her feet, the floor fell away into a wide-mouthed pit where once a fire timber had stood. “Haahh . . .” breathed the searing air again, and coals glowed in the pit’s deep bed.

“Afraid, little man?”

The creature who spoke looked like Caldane’s son Nusair, but its hair was white under its ruddy fire-tint. It was a Shanir—worse, a darkling changer, once one of the Master’s most loyal servants, now turned against him in a desperate bid for freedom.

“Afraid? Oh you? Moderately.”

That wasn’t her voice, nor her hand creeping to the collar of her dress coat where (since when?) she carried a set of throwing knives.

“Now, what would really frighten you? Shall we find out? Beauty, now!”

Something gray near her foot, something that sank fangs into her leg even as her hand whipped down to bury a blade in its head, and her senses reeled.

But the darkling wyrm is cocooned in a trunk in Greshan’s chambers, she thought, bewildered. It had bitten her brother two years ago when he had visited Tentir on the way south to battle at the Cataracts, and now she was protecting it while it metamorphosed into . . . what?

Then wyrm and changer were gone and again she circled the pit. This time Vant moved opposite her, his handsome face underlit by glowing coals, twisted with hate.

“Does honor mean nothing to you?” he snarled at her. “Do 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.”

It was the Winter War, and Timmon had seized her scarf before the contest had even begun, officially removing her from competition.

“You think I’m Jame,” said the voice that she now recognized as her brother’s.

Vant spoke to him, not to me. I wasn’t there. Rue told me.

Vant 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? It was an honest mistake!”

“What was?” asked both siblings in one voice, and that his.

“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?”

“You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”

The steel in Torisen’s voice pierced her. Beneath it she felt his barely suppressed rage that one of the precious young Kendar entrusted to him had been lost. The other lords mistook his mild ways for weakness, but for thirty millennia his ancestors had been Highlord of the Kencyrath, just as he was now, and their power ran in his veins. As such, he was responsible for the well-being of all his people, in life, in death.

Anise with a Noyat arrow jutting out of her stomach, so scared, then so cold. And I nearly flayed you alive for it, Vant, Ancestors forgive me. Now here you are, with fire at your feet.

“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be.” Before his lord, the cadet’s outrage thinned to a self-justifying whine. “Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”

“That depends on you.” Trinity, but Tori sounded cold, no less than an Arrin-ken passing judgment. Despite the heat, the words half froze on his lips, issuing forth in a plume of frost. “In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”

“You misbegotten bitch!”

Suddenly Vant was upon him, grappling, trying to throw him onto the coals. They wrestled back and forth on the pit’s rim. Then Vant lurched free, shaking his head. He looked startled and dazed, as if dealt an unexpected blow.

“You . . .” His eyes wildly searched the shadows. “Don’t!”

And he reeled again, over the edge, onto the coals, rolling to his feet. For the first time he clearly saw and recognized his adversary as the Highlord.

“Oh.”

“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.” In life, in death . . .

Do it, you fool! Jame thought behind the mask of her brother’s face. Don’t haggle!

But even now Vant didn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to him.

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

Get out, get out, get out . . .

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

The cadet beat at his smoldering clothes with a kind of exasperated irritation.

“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,” came the pitiless answer. “To lead is also to serve . . . something that you never seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”

Fire flared under Vant’s hands.

“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.”

Torisen/I/we reach for him, but Brier stops us.

“He would have pulled you in, lord.”

Tori didn’t deserve that. Did I? Did Vant?

Pyre succeeded pyre, as if all the flames in the world roiled through her dreams:

At the Haunted Lands keep, where her father Ganth presumably had burned.

But I wasn’t there either. Kindrie told me.

In Wilden’s forecourt.

Ah, Rawneth. How much will your people endure when you put their children to the torch?

At the Cataracts.

Oh, Tirandys, Senethari, I will never forget.

At the Cataracts again.