Of Absence, Darkness, page 29
Even if he had asked, he knew he would have believed whatever smooth assurance Keitah provided. He had never met a man who lied so effectively and so comprehensively.
“Take it,” Keitah said softly.
Daniel held out his hand and let the other man tip the little ornament into his palm.
“So long as you wear this pendant, Nola Daniel, I will hear every word you speak and every word said to you or in your hearing. That is what you gave me, when you gave me your blood and accepted the words I set within the pages of my gift to you. Do not think to write what you would say; I will hear words you write as though you spoke them. Show it to no one; I will know if any gaze but yours falls upon it. Put it on.”
Daniel obeyed. His fingers felt stiff and clumsy; it was hard to fasten the catch. Keitah waited patiently. Daniel felt no different after the pendant was on. Though the chain felt cold against the back of his neck, the slight coolness of the stone warmed against his skin and became unnoticeable. He asked, “What is it you want of me?”
The lord of Kinabana smiled. “Danyel. Can you not guess? I want you to kill the king. If you do so secretly, that will do. If you strike him down in the sight of all men, that will also do well.”
The hot air seemed very still; the morning breeze had died. Somewhere a bird called. The splash of the fountain was just audible in the distance. Jenna was not, thank God, crying any longer—at least not loudly enough for Daniel to hear her. None of Keitah’s men were within earshot. Keitah himself was standing with his hands tucked into his belt and an attitude of perfect composure, watching Daniel.
Daniel knew he himself did not look half so self-possessed. He said at last, “Even if I would—stop, please, don’t hurt my daughter!” Keitah, looking at him narrowly, lowered his hand, and Daniel said as earnestly as he could, “Nolas-ai, I’ll try. Of course I will. I’ll try to do anything you want. But I’m not a ... a soldier, not any kind of ... of assassin.” The idea was so utterly ludicrous that Daniel could hardly make himself say the words.
Keitah smiled. “Anyone can kill a man who trusts him. This is not a difficult task for a man of reasonable wit. I am quite confident you will contrive. Consider, Nola Danyel: all Mitereh’s magical and sorcerous protections are for you less than cobwebs strung across your path. He favors you—he is curious about you for his own part, and he favors you both for your sake and to please Tenai Chaisa-e. He has permitted you to enter his presence freely; that will assuredly continue. I am certain you can contrive.”
Daniel was certain he could, too, if he had to. He felt ill—literally sick, as though he might throw up. Pride he had not even known he possessed made him clench his teeth. He found himself putting on his blandest, most professional face, and was surprised he could.
“You will return to Nerinesir. Tell Mitereh that the little queen is ill—nothing dangerous, but a cough and a touch of heat in the wrists and forehead. Your daughter stayed with her, and both lingered in Kinabana to wait for the queen’s vigor to return. Your daughter will come to Nerinesir in a handful of days. The king will be patient.”
Daniel nodded. He understood that Keitah meant that he’d better deliver the news in a way that ensured Mitereh would indeed be patient.
“You will do your task; and why not? What is Mitereh Encormio-na or Talasayan to a foreign man who owns no king? Chaisa-e is your friend, you aver; well, she will not mourn a son of Encormio, and why should you care one way or the other? Do this for me and I will pardon you, should you yet live, and at midwinter I will escort both you and your daughter back to your proper domain. I will fill your hands with gold from Kandun and your daughter’s hands with pearls from Patananir. Or fail me, and I will put your daughter’s voice into that stone you wear so that you may listen to her scream her way into Lord Death’s kingdom. That was the spell she allowed me to set upon her.”
“I understand.” Daniel’s own voice sounded distant to his own ears.
“Of course.” Keitah nodded down the path to the gate, where, Daniel saw, men waited with horses. “Go, then. The weather is fair; the roads will be good. You will have a pleasant seven-days journey on which to decide what you will do.”
Daniel took a step backward, and paused. “You don’t ... you don’t have doubts about what I’ll do?”
“No,” said Keitah, smiling. It was hard to decide whether the smile actually looked harder and more ruthless than it had previously, or whether that impression was due simply to a better understanding of the ambition that lay behind it.
Daniel turned toward the gate, and then hesitated. He glanced at the fountain where Jenna still sat—her head was no longer propped in her hands, though, and she had uncoiled from her hunched posture—and then at Keitah.
“No,” said the lord. “You need not delay. Your visit has honored my house. I have delighted in your company. But I must insist that you allow neither the bonds of hospitality nor the beauty of Kinabana to delay your anticipated return to Nerinesir, where I know both Mitereh and Chaisa-e wait impatiently to receive you. You will see your daughter again the sooner if you are prompt about your task. Indeed, I shall expect no less.”
Daniel wanted to protest, argue, at least delay. He did not dare. He bent his head to hide his face because he could feel the professional bland expression he wore wanting to crack and fail. He said helplessly, “Don’t hurt her. Nolas-ai. Please.”
“Give me no reason to doubt you, Nola Danyel,” said Keitah Terusai-e. “Be discreet, and then be swift.”
Daniel cast one last look at his daughter—he could see that she had turned her face his way; he saw her start to get to her feet—if he hesitated at all he knew he would try, despite Keitah’s plain order, to go to her—he turned sharply back toward the gate instead and walked away. Leaving his daughter behind, in the hands of an enemy. The chain weighed against the back of his neck as heavily as though he bore a great weight at his throat and not merely a little stone pendant.
*
The road south along the coast and then inland to the Khadur river and up into the mountains to Nerinesir was exactly the same: plenty of spectacular scenery and comfortable inns. Keitah’s men were perfectly polite, but they were his guards now. Daniel wondered whether they knew what Keitah Terusai-e meant to do. Was doing. Most of these men were old enough to remember the great wars that had stretched on and on until the old king’s death; they had enjoyed sixteen years of peace since. They had names and families and lives; did they know their lord was angling to start yet another war to try to take power in this land? Would they approve, if they knew?
Some of these men probably had daughters and sisters. Would they approve of torturing young women and keeping them hostage to force men to do as their lord demanded? Daniel remembered, bleakly, the stories Tenai had told about this land and all its wars, and thought they might. Men in those years had been so accustomed to brutality. Had sixteen years of peace taught them to let go of those memories? To be kinder in their dealings with the world?
Not that he could ask them in any case for help against Keitah. Or ask anyone. Daniel rested his hand on his shirt above the pendant Keitah had given him and tried not to shudder. He could not forget for a moment that Keitah might be listening to anything he said. It was incredibly inhibiting. Was he going to be able to act normal in Nerinesir, wearing this chain? Well, he would have to. No choice, no way to bear failure, with Jenna still trapped in Keitah’s house. He closed his eyes for a moment, consumed by a wave of longing for home, for a safe civilized life in a safe civilized nation that had never heard of magic, never endured a centuries-long war between an immortal king and his remorseless enemy. He almost imagined he could open his eyes and find himself in his own house, waiting for Jenna to slam cheerfully through the front door and shout a greeting. But no. Unlikely as it seemed, they were both really here in Talasayan, caught between their friends and their finally-recognized enemies, with no hope of getting out any time soon.
What would Jenna be doing now, prisoner as she was? At least Emelan was with her—was Emelan with her? The man had been shocked and horrified at what Keitah had done to Jen; Daniel didn’t think he was wrong about that. Emelan couldn’t be deep in his brother’s plans or confidence or whatever, could he?—because he’d been completely estranged from Keitah for the last decade. So Emelan at least had to be sincere in everything he’d said and done right from the beginning.
Daniel had believed Keitah intended to try to build a new relationship with his brother. Daniel had thought well of him for it. He tasted bile, and thought he might throw up. He wanted to spit on the road and didn’t dare, because it might raise the wrong kind of questions in the minds of his escorts.
Might Niah be able to protect Jenna? The two young women had seemed to become friends. How much of that had been sincere? Daniel tried to remember every nuance and shading of meaning and inflection in Niah’s manner, in her conversation. Had there been any special secrecy, any hidden tension there? He could not tell. All his memories were colored by his current knowledge; he doubted all his previous assessment of the little queen. Was it possible that Niah was not even Keitah’s hostage and prisoner, but his willing partner, and Tenai’s first guess about her at least half-right? Keitah had implied otherwise. But Keitah might have meant to deceive Daniel on that point. If Keitah had lied about that as about so much else, Daniel probably wouldn’t have been able to tell. Whether Niah was imprisoned or duplicitous, Jenna probably could look for little help from the young queen.
Daniel shuddered again. He remembered Tenai describing how she had heard the voices of her husband and son screaming for days out of a letter the old king had sent her. And he had thought her description of that horror symbolic. Symbolic, hell.
Immune to magic. Except magic specifically accepted. Daniel had been glad he and his daughter had that protection. Protection, hell. Keitah had certainly had no trouble getting Daniel to accept the literacy spell, and everything else that came with it. How easy everything had been for him.
They traveled fast enough this time that Daniel ought to have fallen into exhausted sleep every night. Instead, he lay awake for hours in unfamiliar beds when they stopped for the night at an inn, or wrapped in blankets under the stars when there was no inn. He would stare into the shadows under a roof or into the depths of the sky, equally blind in each case. The bone-deep weariness of too many days’ travel in a row was first endurable and then actually welcome: his exhaustion prevented him from thinking about killing the king. About walking with an actor’s smile past all of Mitereh’s guards, through all of the king’s magical wards and protections. With what? A knife?
The king was probably a trained warrior. And Daniel himself was no longer young and never athletic. He had never in his life even been in a fist-fight. He rubbed his hands hard across his eyes, and then his forehead and smooth scalp, wanting to swear. He didn’t dare do it, even in a whisper.
If Mitereh were truly taken by surprise, if an assassin were quick enough, then neither his youth nor his training might matter. Daniel imagined the feel of flesh parting under the point of a knife, of bone grating against metal. He imagined the astonishment in the young man’s eyes as the knife went home. Could he do it?
He knew, with a surety as complete as his love for his daughter, that he could not.
That surety came to him like a gift. Like a kind of inward freedom. Daniel did not have to plan an assassination. He did not have to imagine how a knife would feel in his hand. It was not necessary to imagine the shock Mitereh would feel as he died, because Daniel was not going to kill him.
How many days until he arrived back in Nerinesir? Daniel had lost track. It seemed this road had been rolling out under the hooves of his horse forever, with all his companions men he did not know and could not trust. Four more days, five? Four or five days to plan—not an assassination, but how to avoid doing one. With a constant spy he did not dare remove hung about his own neck like an albatross, and everything to lose.
But he knew with absolute certainty that he was not going to murder Mitereh. He wasn’t going to let that smiling bastard Keitah Terusai-e torture and murder Jenna either. There was a third choice. And he was going to find it.
Endnotes
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about Daniel, and Jenna, and their introduction to Tenai’s world.
This story concludes in Death’s Lady #3: As Shadow, A Light.
Turn the page to read a sample of –
As Shadow, A Light
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The pain was so strong, so intense, and so unexpected that when it hit, Jenna lost all thought and awareness. She did not know she was screaming; if she had known, she would not have tried to stop because the pain drove her past caring what impression she made or whom she frightened. She was not conscious of pain as a thing outside herself; she was not really conscious of herself as a person at all, with a past that went back before pain began and a future that might extend somewhere outside of pain. All that existed was pain and terror.
Then it was over. Jenna found herself limp on the paving stones, with a man’s broad shape bending over her and her head cushioned on his knee. She clung to him in mute desperation, shaking—she was crying like a baby and could not stop—the man was not her father. For a long moment, she didn’t know who he was. Then she knew, in a vague way. Emel, right, this was Emelan Terusai, whom Tenai had set to guard her. But she wanted her father. She tried to get up. Emel held her. He was saying something to her. She didn’t understand him, but there was an urgency to the way he held her that made her stop fighting him. She let him gather her up—he was very strong, big, his hands went almost all the way around her arms, she hadn’t realized before how strong he was. He set her on the edge of the fountain, and splashed her hands and face with the cold water.
“Emel,” she said. Tried to say. It came out in a cracked whisper. They had been in a garden. In Kinabana. At Keitah’s house in Kinabana, in Talasayan. She knew that. She remembered that. What had happened?
“Hush,” Emel was saying. He sounded upset. Well, she’d been hurt somehow. She didn’t remember how, but probably that had upset him. She was still shaking. The sun on the back of her neck felt strong enough to press her down to the stones again. The cold water helped. She rubbed her wet hands across her face. Was she still crying? She thought she wasn’t. She tried to speak. Where was her father? Her vision seemed uncertain. She peered around, looking for him.
“Hush,” Emel said again. “Hush. Nola Danyel is over there, with ... with Terusai-e. Try to breathe a little more deeply. You are well. It is past.”
There was her father. With, right, Keitah Terusai-e. Jenna tried again to get to her feet. Again, Emel wouldn’t let her. She stared at him, at last feeling her wits jar sharply back to order.
There was no pain now. She couldn’t even remember what it had felt like. Just that it had been awful. But it was over, leaving her wrung out and exhausted, but fine. She was stiff all over. But basically she felt okay. And her father was talking to Keitah, over near the gate and now that her vision had cleared, she could see he didn’t look happy. He looked awful. He kept looking over at her, quick little glances like he didn’t dare take his eyes off Keitah for more than a second.
“Emel,” she said, and was startled at the fragility of her voice, “what happened? What happened to me?”
The man answered, his rough voice sounding strained, “Terusai-e put pain on you. It is something he can do. He does it sometimes to punish. This time ... it is clearly Nola Danyel at whom Keitah strikes.”
Jenna stared at him. “Why?” That had been a stupid question. Pieces were falling into place, inescapably. “I guess we know now who the king’s enemy is. Not Niah. Obviously.” The young queen had struck Jenna as timid and sad from the first moment she’d met her. She’d immediately decided the suspicion that Niah might be working against her husband was ludicrous. But she sure hadn’t jumped from that to suspecting Keitah.
As far as she knew, no one had suspected Keitah Terusai-e. Not her father, not the king, definitely not Tenai, because there was no way Tenai would have send Jenna and her father to Kinabana if she’d guessed. No way. He must have covered his tracks really well.
Jenna looked at her father again, where he stood with Keitah. She swallowed hard.
“Nolas-ai Keitah will be angry if you foul his fountain,” Emel said, his tone flat.
Jenna took this as simple advice and nodded. She hadn’t thought herself still so badly thrown by ... the thing Keitah had done to her. The thing that ... if he had done once, he might do another time. She swallowed again. “I thought we were immune to magic,” she said in a small voice. “Daddy and me.”
“Yes,” Emel agreed, his tone flat. “Save enchantment you accept freely. I think my brother may have offered you some small enchantment, a kindness, something you took willingly from him, from his hand ...”
“The literacy spell.” It wasn’t a question. The second she thought of it, Jenna was sure. She’d thought that was just a kindness, offered because things had gotten so rushed and weird and Tenai hadn’t had the time or opportunity to do it. She hadn’t thought anything of it.
Keitah had worked that spell on both of them. On her father as well as Jenna herself. She stared across the garden. Her father looked all right ... upset, scared, but all right. But who knew what Keitah had done to him? Or might do, later?
