Teidez, disgruntled, wriggled back down under his covers. “Can I go back to sleep now? If you don’t mind. And draw the curtain, the light hurts my eyes.”
“Yes, stay abed,” Cazaril told him, and withdrew.
Iselle followed him into the antechamber, lowering her voice. “It’s not right, is it?”
“No. It’s not. Good observation, Royesse. Your judgment was correct.”
She gave him a satisfied nod, and he bowed himself out and made for the end stairs. By Nan dy Vrit’s shadowed face, she at least understood just how not-right it was. All Cazaril could think of, as he hastened down the stairs and back across the stones of the courtyard toward Ias’s Tower, was how very seldom he’d seen any man, no matter how young or strong, survive an amputation that high upon the thigh. His stride lengthened.
By good luck, Cazaril found dy Jironal at once, in the Chancellery. He was just sealing a saddlebag and dispatching a courier with it.
“How are the roads?” dy Jironal asked the fellow, who was typically lean and wiry and wore the Chancellery’s tabard over an odd assortment of winter woolens.
“Muddy, m’lord. It will be dangerous to ride after dark.”
“Well, do your best,” dy Jironal sighed, and clapped him on the shoulder. The man saluted and made his way out past Cazaril.
Dy Jironal scowled at his new visitor. “Cazaril.”
“My lord.” Cazaril offered a fractional bow and entered.
Dy Jironal seated himself on the edge of his desk, and folded his arms. “Your attempt to hide behind the Daughter’s Order in its plot to unseat me is doomed to fail, you know,” he said conversationally. “I intend to see that its failure will be miserable.”
Impatiently, Cazaril waved this aside. He’d have been more surprised had dy Jironal not had an ear in the order’s councils. “You have much worse troubles this morning than anything I can offer you, my lord.”
Dy Jironal’s eyes widened in surprise; his head tilted in an attitude of sudden attention. “Oh?”
“What did Teidez’s wound look like when you saw it?”
“What wound? He showed me no wound.”
“On his right leg—he was scratched by Orico’s leopard, apparently, while he was killing the poor beast. In truth, the marks didn’t look deep, but they’ve taken an infection. His skin burns. And you know how a poisoned wound sometimes throws out feverish marks upon the skin?”
“Aye,” said dy Jironal uneasily.
“Teidez’s run from ankle to groin. They look like a bloody conflagration.”
Dy Jironal swore.
“I advise you pull that troop of useless physicians off of Orico for a moment and send them across to Teidez’s chambers. Or you could lose two royal puppets in one week.”
Dy Jironal’s glare met Cazaril’s like flint on steel, but after one fierce inhalation he nodded and shifted to his feet. Cazaril followed him out. Corrupted with greed and familial pride dy Jironal might be, but he wasn’t incompetent. Cazaril could see why Orico might have chosen to endure much, in exchange for that.
After assuring himself that dy Jironal was climbing the stairs to Orico’s chambers with due haste, Cazaril turned back down them. He’d had no word from the temple hospital since last night; he wanted to check again on Umegat. He made his way out the Zangre gates past the ill-fated stable block. A little to his surprise, he spotted Umegat’s tongueless undergroom climbing the hill toward him. The man waved his thumbless hand when he saw Cazaril, and hurried his step.
He arrived breathless and smiling. His face was marked with livid bruises, red-purple around one eye, from the futile fight in the menagerie, and his broken nose was still swollen, its lacerated edge dark and scabbed. But his eyes were shining in their wrecked matrix; he almost danced up to Cazaril.
Cazaril’s brows rose. “You look happy—what, man, is Umegat awake?”
He nodded vigorously.
Cazaril grinned back at him, faint with relief.
He spoke a mumbled sort of gargle, of which Cazaril made out perhaps one word in four, but enough to gather he was on some urgent errand. He motioned Cazaril to wait outside the silent, dark menagerie, and returned in a few minutes with a sack tied to his belt and clutching a book, which he brandished happily. By which Cazaril understood Umegat was not only awake, but well enough to want his favorite book—Ordol, Cazaril noted with bemusement. Glad of the stout little man’s company, Cazaril walked beside him down into town.
Cazaril reflected on the fellow’s stigmata of martyrdom, displayed with such seeming indifference. It was silent testimony of horrendous torment, endured in the name of his god. Had his terror lasted an hour, a day, months? It was not quite possible to be sure whether the softened roundness of his appearance was the result of castration or just old age. Cazaril couldn’t very well ask him his story. Just attempting to listen to his badly mouthed ordinary exchanges was a painful strain upon the ears and attention. He didn’t even know if the fellow was Chalionese or Ibran, Brajaran or Roknari, or how he had come to Cardegoss, or how long he had served with Umegat. Doing his daily duties as they came to him. He stumped along now with the book under his arm, eyes bright. So, this was what a faithful servant of the gods, heroic and beloved, ended up looking like.
They arrived at Umegat’s chamber to find him sitting up in bed against some pillows. He was pale and washed-out, his prickly scalp puckered along its stitches, remaining hair a tumbled rat’s nest, lips crusted, his face unshaved. The tongueless groom rummaged in his sack, pulled out some shaving gear, and waved it triumphantly in the air; Umegat smiled wanly. He stared at Cazaril, not lifting his head from the pillow. He rubbed his eyes, and squinted uncertainly.
Cazaril swallowed. “How do you feel?”
“Headache,” Umegat managed. He snorted softly. Finally, he said, “Are all my beautiful creatures dead?” His tongue was thick, his voice low and a little slurred, but he seemed coherent enough.
“Nearly all. There was one little blue-and-yellow bird got away. It’s back safely in its cage now. I let no one make trophies of them. I saw them cremated like fallen soldiers yesterday. Archdivine Mendenal has undertaken to find their ashes a place of honor.”
Umegat nodded, then winced. His crusted lips tightened.
Cazaril glanced at the undergroom—yes, this man had to be one of those who knew the truth—and back to Umegat, and said hesitantly, “Do you know you’ve stopped glowing?”
Umegat blinked rapidly at him. “I…suspected it. At least you are much less disturbing to look upon, this way.”
“Your second sight is taken from you?”
“Mm. Second sight is redundant to reason anyway. You live, therefore I know perfectly well the Lady’s hand still grips you.” He added after a moment, “I always knew it was only lent to me for a time. Well, it was quite a ride while it lasted.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Quite a ride.” He turned his face away. “I could have borne it being taken back. To have it knocked from my hands…I should have seen it coming.”
The gods should have warned you…
The little elderly undergroom, whose face had drooped at the pain in Umegat’s voice, picked up the book and held it out consolingly.
Umegat smiled weakly and took it tenderly from him. “At least I have my old profession to fall back on, eh?” His hands smoothed the pages open to some familiar spot, and he glanced down. His smile faded. His voice sharpened. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke, Umegat? It is your book, I saw him bring it from the menagerie.”
Umegat struggled awkwardly to sit upright. “What language is this?”
Cazaril advanced and glanced over his shoulder. “Ibran, of course.”
Umegat paged through the book, fingers shaking, his eyes twitching over the pages, his breath coming faster through lips open in something like terror. “It is…it is gibberish. It’s just, just…little blotches of ink. Cazaril!”
“It is Ibran, Umegat. It’s just Ibran.”
br /> “It is my eyes. It is something in me…” He clutched his face, rubbed his eyes, and cried suddenly, “Oh, gods!” and burst into tears. The tears became wracking sobs on the third breath. “I am punished!”
“Get the physician, fetch the physician,” Cazaril cried to the frightened-looking undergroom, and the man nodded and sped away. Umegat’s clutching fingers were tearing the pages in his blind grip. Awkwardly, Cazaril tried to help him, patting his shoulder, straightening the book and then taking it away altogether. The coolly resisted breakdown, having breached Umegat’s walls in this unguarded spot, poured through, and the man wept—not like a child. No child’s sobs were ever this terrifying.
After agonizing minutes, the white-haired physician arrived and soothed the distraught divine; he seized upon her in hope, and would scarcely let her hands go free to carry out her business. Her explanation that many men and women taken with a palsy-stroke improved in a few days, people carried in by anxious relatives even walking out on their own a few days later, did the most to help him regain his shattered self-control. It took all his strength of mind, for her further tests, conducted after sending a passing dedicat running to the order’s library, revealed he could not read Roknari nor Darthacan either, and furthermore, his hands had lost the ability to wield a pen to make any kind of letters.
The quill fell from his awkward grip, trailing ink across the linens, and he buried his face in his hands, groaning again, “I am punished. My joy and my refuge, taken from me…”
“Sometimes, people can relearn things they have forgotten,” the physician said tentatively. “And your understanding of the words in your ears has not been taken, nor your recognition of the people you know. I have seen that happen, with some afflicted people. Someone could still read books aloud to you…”
Umegat’s eyes met those of the tongueless groom, who was standing to one side still holding the Ordol. The old man scrubbed his fist across his mouth and made an odd noise down in his throat, a whimper of pure despair. Tears were running from the corners of his eyes down his seamed face.
Umegat’s breath puffed from his lips, and he shook his head; drawn from his trouble by its reflection in that aged face, he reached across to grip the undergroom’s hand. “Sh. Sh. Aren’t we a pair, now.” He sighed, and sank back on his pillows. “Never say the Bastard has no sense of humor.” After a moment his eyes closed. Exhausted, or shutting it all out, Cazaril was not sure which.
He choked down his own terrified demand of, Umegat, what should we do now? Umegat was in no condition to do anything, even give direction. Even pray? Cazaril hardly dared ask him to pray for Teidez, under the circumstances.
Umegat’s breath thickened, and he dropped into an uneasy doze. Softly, careful to make no sound, the undergroom laid out his shaving gear on a side table and sat patiently to await his wakening again. The physician made notes and left quietly. Cazaril followed her out to the gallery overlooking the courtyard. Its central fountain was not playing in this chill, and the water in it was dark and scummy in the gray winter light.
“Is he punished?” he asked her.
She rubbed the back of her neck in a weary gesture. “How do I know? Head injuries are the strangest of all. I once saw a woman whose eyes appeared wholly undamaged go blind from a blow to the back of her head. I’ve seen people lose speech, lose control of half their body but not the other half. Are they punished? If so, the gods are evil, and that I do not believe. I think it is chance.”
I think the gods load the dice. He wanted to urge her to take good care of Umegat, but clearly she already was doing so, and he didn’t want to sound frantic, or as though he doubted her skill or dedication. He bade her a polite good morning instead, and took himself off to track down the archdivine and apprise him of the ugly turn of Teidez’s wound.
He found Archdivine Mendenal in the temple at the Mother’s altar, celebrating a ceremony of blessing upon a rich leather merchant’s wife and newborn daughter. Cazaril perforce waited until the family had laid their thanksgiving offerings and filed out again before approaching him and murmuring his news. Mendenal turned pale, and hurried off to the Zangre at once.
Cazaril had developed unsettling new views of the efficacy and safety of prayer, but laid himself down on the cold pavement before the Mother’s altar anyway, thinking of Ista. If there was little hope of mercy for Teidez’s own sake, lured into violent sacrilege and left there by Dondo, surely the Mother might spare some pity for his mother Ista? The goddess’s message to him via Her acolyte’s dream the other day had sounded merciful. In a way. Though it might prove to be merely brutally practical. Prone on the polished patterned slates, he could feel the lethal lump in his belly, an uncomfortable mass seeming the size of his doubled fists.
He rose at length and sought out Palli at Provincar dy Yarrin’s narrow old stone palace. Cazaril was conducted by a servant to a guest chamber at the back of the house. Palli was seated at a small table, writing in a ledger, but laid his quill aside when Cazaril entered and motioned his visitor to a chair across from him.
As soon as the servant had shut the door behind him Cazaril leaned forward and said, “Palli, could you, at need, ride courier to Ibra in secret for the Royesse Iselle?”
Palli’s brows climbed. “When?”
“Soon.”
He shook his head. “If by soon you mean now, I think not. I am much taken up with my duties as a lord dedicat—I have promised dy Yarrin my voice and my vote in the Council.”
“You could leave a proxy with dy Yarrin, or some other trusted comrade.”
Palli rubbed his shaven chin, and vented a dubious, “Hm.”
Cazaril considered claiming to be a saint of the Daughter, and pulling rank on Palli, dy Yarrin, and their entire military order. It would require complicated explanations. It would require divulging the secret of Fonsa’s curse. It would entail not merely admitting, but asserting, his…peculiar disorder. God-touched. God-ravished. And sounding as mad or madder than Ista ever had. He compromised. “I think this may be the Daughter’s business.”
Palli’s lips screwed up. “How can you tell?”
“I just can.”
“Well, I can’t.”
“Wait, I know. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray for guidance.”
“Me? Why don’t you?”
“My nights are…full.”
“And since when did you believe in prophetic dreams? I thought you always claimed it was nonsense, people fooling themselves, or pretending to an importance they could otherwise never claim.”
“It’s a…recent conversion. Look, Palli. Just do it for, for the experiment. To please me, if you will.”
Palli made a surrendering gesture. “For you, yes. For the rest of it…” His black brows lowered. “Ibra…? Just who would I be riding in secret from?”
“Dy Jironal. Mostly.”
“Oh? Dy Yarrin might be interested in that. Something in it for him?”
“Not in any direct way, I don’t think.” Cazaril added reluctantly, “And likewise secret from Orico.”
Palli sat back, his head tilting. His voice lowered. “Coy, Caz. Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?”
“Worse,” Cazaril sighed. “Theology.”
“Eh?”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Cazaril pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to decide if his headache was getting worse. “Tell dy Yarrin his councils are being reported by some spy to dy Jironal. Though he may be canny enough to realize it already, I don’t know.”
“Worse and worse. Are you getting enough sleep, Caz?”
A bark of bitter laughter broke from Cazaril’s lips. “No.”
“You always did go strangely fey when you were overtired, y’know. Well, I’m not riding anywhere on the basis of a bunch of dark hints.”
“In the event, you’d be given full knowledge.”
“When I am given full knowledge, then I’ll decide.”
??
?Fair enough,” Cazaril sighed. “I will discuss it with the royesse. But I didn’t want to propose to her a man who would fail her.”
“Hey!” said Palli indignantly. “When have I failed?”
“Never, Palli. That’s why I thought of you.” Cazaril grinned and, with a little grunt of pain, pushed to his feet. “I must return to the Zangre.” Briefly, he described the unpleasant progression of Teidez’s claw mark.
Palli’s face grew very sober indeed. “Just how bad is it?”
“I don’t…” Caution tempered Cazaril’s frankness. “Teidez is young, strong, well fed. I see no reason why he cannot throw off this infection.”
“Five gods, Caz, he’s the hope of his House. What will Chalion do if he doesn’t? And Orico laid low as well!”
Cazaril hesitated. “Orico…hasn’t been well for some time, but I’m sure dy Jironal never imagined them both becoming so sick at once. You might note to dy Yarrin that our dear chancellor is going to be fairly distracted for the next few days. If the lord dedicats want to get past him to Orico’s bed and get anything signed, now might be their best chance.”
He extracted himself from Palli’s cascade of second thoughts, although not from Palli’s insistence that he take the dy Gura brothers for escort. Climbing the hill once more, his circling calculations of how to effect Iselle’s escape from the wreck of her cursed House spiraled inward on a much simpler grim determination not to fall down in front of these earnest young men, to be hauled home stumbling with his arms across their shoulders.
CAZARIL FOUND THE THIRD-FLOOR CORRIDOR OF THE main block promisingly crowded upon his return. Green-robed physicians and their acolyte assistants scurried in and out. Servants hurried with water, linens, blankets, strange drinks in silver ewers. As Cazaril lingered, wondering what assistance he might offer, the archdivine emerged from the antechamber and started down the corridor, his face set and introspective.
“Your Reverence?” Cazaril touched his five-colored sleeve in passing. “How goes the boy?”
“Ah, Lord Cazaril.” Mendenal turned aside briefly. “The chancellor and the royesse have given me purses for prayers on his behalf. I go to set them in motion.”