The Well of Darkness Read online

  That was a once-only, I told myself, the product of all our frustration on many levels, expressing itself in the most basic way possible. I think we both would have preferred something more gentle, but at least, now, the edge is off. Gentleness can come later, provided Tarani can cope with what happened. If we get out of this mess alive, Tarani, I promised her silently as I watched her silhouette put on a final boot, I‘ll give you all the time you need. Whatever you need. Anything is worth getting there again, both of us willing, both of us reaching for it with our hearts as well as our bodies.

  “Ready for dinner?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I am hungry,” she said, her voice subdued.

  I almost reached for her, then, nearly overcome with tenderness.

  You just promised to give her time, I reminded myself sharply, and threw myself toward the opening in the floor overhead. She has to find her own answers.

  I brought down the lamp and the plate of fruit, meat, and bread, and went back for the pitcher of cool water. We are in silence, awkwardly and separately availed ourselves of the chamberpot, then crept up the ramp and poked our heads out of the floor opening.

  “Carn,” I called out in a whisper.

  “I be here,” he answered, and stepped in front of the opening in the carpet. He was tall and lanky, with rounded shoulders and long, muscular arms. One eye and one side of his mouth drooped slightly, giving him a permanent, wry expression. “Best be ye hurry a bit,” he said.

  We crawled out into the storeroom; he stepped back to let us out, then turned away abruptly and walked toward the back of the room. “Leave the city by the second street,” he said, referring to the system by which the oldest, main street had been supplemented on alternate sides by parallel avenues. “Ye’ll be met at the joining by two who’ll trade clothes wi’ ye, and give ye instructions for where to join up with Tellor’s caravan. Ye’ll need to move quickly, mind.”

  We had made our way through the rear door of the room into a smaller room that seemed to serve as an office. Carn stopped by a woven-reed door on the opposite side of the room and turned back to us.

  “‘Tis a hurried job I’ve done for ye, but it be the best I could do in shorttime. It be clear ye cannot stay in Eddarta …” His voice trailed off, then he closed his mouth and turned toward the door.

  “And?” I prompted him. “You were going to say something else?”

  “‘Tis naught,” he said, but I caught his arm.

  “I know you understand the risks you’ve taken to help us, Cam,” I said. “And there is little we can do to repay you. Whatever is important to you is also important to us.”

  He looked up and shifted from foot to foot. At last he dropped his eyes and said: “Indelicate it be, but hap it needs saying.” He rubbed his hand quickly over his face as if scrubbing it. “The noises ye made,” he said, all in a rush. Tarani caught her breath, and I’m sure my neck began to redden. “And not but me heard them, neither. Folk passing in the street stopped in to ask of it.”

  “What—” I had to clear my throat. “What did you tell them?”

  Cam had caught the reason for my hesitation. “‘Tis not a jest!” he protested. “Seekers, watchers, might have heard!” Then he flexed his shoulders back, and looked at me with the start of a smile. “I spake that my wife was entertaining a Lord upstairs, and a trick of the building made it seem the sounds were below.”

  “Would your wife support that, if the Lords come questioning?” I asked.

  Cam shrugged. “They were strangers who asked—why should they care of my wife’s honor? Nor am I wed, in any case.”

  I laughed, reached out my right hand, and took his. He responded with a warm grip, even though the gesture was strange to him.

  “Vasklar is expecting ye at Stomestad in two seven-days,” he told us. “To hear the desert folk speak of ye, there is little ye cannot do.” He nodded at us, including both of us.

  The Fa‘aldu would make great publicity agents in Ricardo‘s world, I thought. They‘ve managed to make me a legend while frequently keeping me from becoming a dead one.

  “Keep ye well,” Cam said. “Hap I shall hear news of ye now and again.”

  We were out the door and down the street before I realized that I had never asked him where he came from, how he had acquired that odd accent.

  There are some things I may never know about this world, I told myself, and was a little surprised that the thought wasn‘t frustrating. The only thing better than having curiosity satisfied is having more to be curious about, I thought, not at all sure I believed it.

  It was early evening, and the center of the city would be crowded, now, with people relaxing after the day’s work. There wasn’t a district in this city for places such as I had seen in Raithskar and Chizan—a gaming house, or what Ricardo might have called a casino. But there were plenty of “come have a drink” places that provided tables and game pieces, should the customers want to play a friendly round of mondea on their own. Those places, and the restaurants, would be doing a booming business about now.

  But Carn’s storeroom was west and south of the main part of the city. As nearly as I could judge it (considering the stacks and stacks of various products I’d seen), Cam must have been a caravan agent, someone who collected the goods for a caravan master to pack and carry to other markets. It was an ideal position for someone who was also an agent for an escape route.

  Eddarta wasn’t guarded in the sense that everybody had to step through a tollgate and display some identification. You might say that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, guarded everyone else.

  The Lords were not liked, but neither was Eddarta a rebel city held under armed guard. The people were bound solidly to their lives by tradition and familiarity, and viewed anyone who turned his back on the system with a mixture of envy and resentment—and sometimes greed. When Tarani and I had entered Eddarta as the tailor, Yoman, and his daughter, Rassa, one of Yoman’s “friends” had already moved into his house/shop.

  There had to be a few Eddartans who, spotting a native on his or her way out, would go straight to the appropriate landpatron and report or sell the information. Most folks, though, simply noticed it and talked about it, and it wouldn’t be long before someone in Lord City heard the news.

  Tarani and I weren’t natives, but neither were we totally strangers. Enough people had seen us on the way into Eddarta, surrounded by dralda and High Guard, that there was a fair chance we could be recognized.

  Caution demanded that we walk through the outskirts of the city boldly, make no attempt to disguise ourselves, and simply take our chances of being stopped before we met our contacts outside the city. The “joining”, where the city avenues merged into a single wide road leading eastward, also marked a turning point of safety; past it, no extra light was provided. Until we reached it, however, we walked between waist-high brick pillars that held oil and slow-burning wicks. We couldn’t be as clearly seen as in daylight, but neither did we feel as safe as we might have felt, had we been walking through a moon-grayed world under the pale night sky.

  Tarani’s power, while it seemed much stronger than before, still demanded a great deal of her energy—her fatigue when we had finally reached Carn testified to that. She didn’t offer to disguise us, and I didn’t ask it of her, because by any measure we had a rough trip ahead of us. She would need all her energy.

  There‘s another factor, too, I thought. We can‘t become dependent on her power.

  Physical disguise was out of the question. Too bad the hooded cloak isn‘t fashionable in Gandalara, I moaned. I‘ve only seen two kinds of hoods—the jeweled ones the ladies were wearing at the Celebration Dance and, if you could call them hoods, the desert scarfs.

  We carried such scarfs threaded through our belts, and there would have been little danger in wearing them in the normal style—that is, tied around our heads with the long point of the triangle dangling down our backs. Desert dress wasn’t an uncommon sight on the outskirts of
the city. But the scarf’s protective arrangement, with the free end pulled around to cover most of the face, would attract too much attention here.

  Skulking about, trying not to be seen, would also be an attention-getter for the inevitable few who would see us. So Tarani and I just walked at a comfortable pace through Eddarta and tried to project a “belonging” image.

  There weren’t many people on the road, and most of them were going our way—farmers who had brought in their produce and spent their day in the city shopping or drinking. There were more vleks than people, actually, and everybody looked downhearted and tired. Few Eddartans actively opposed the landpatron system. I had heard a lot of gripes, while free in the city when we’d been here before, about general conditions, but they had been largely undirected complaints, as though the people couldn’t see that it was the Lords who sat at the center of their unhappiness.

  And maybe that‘s not really true, I thought. It‘s easy for an outsider to make quick judgments, and through both Ricardo and Markasset, I‘m pre-conditioned to dislike this system.

  I considered that idea for a moment, and tried to put myself into the perspective of the classes of people I had encountered in Eddarta: a Lord, a landservant, and a slave.

  Ah, it‘s no use, I thought. My biases are too strong. I can‘t detect a shred of “human” dignity in any of those roles, especially in the Lords. They‘re parasites, skimming the wealth of this part of the world …

  Wait a minute. What makes them different from the major capitalists of Ricardo‘s world? I wondered. The Rockefellers, the Duponts, the oil cartels—they “ruled” after a fashion. They dictated world economic conditions, the survival of rival businesses, the very lives of the people who depended on their products. Why don‘t I despise their memory as violently as I do the Lords?

  The All-Mind, I realized. It‘s not just Markasset‘s memories I‘m dealing with here, but the influence of generations of memory. Whether it‘s just memory, or really the surviving personalities of all Gandalarans, though, aren‘t Eddartans just as much a part of it as Raithskarians? So there ought to be considerable support within the All-Mind for the Eddartan system. Right?

  I let the problem filter into the corners of my mind and occupy all the places where worry had been hiding. A part of my mind, just before I descended into total preoccupation, recognized that I hadn’t had the pleasure of this sort of intellectual exercise since Keeshah had left my mind in shock. The puzzles I had dealt with while trying to stay sane as Obilin’s captive—those had been familiar. This was a new one, and I welcomed it.

  Those in favor of the Lord system would probably be a minority, I figured, but the Lords were born of the Kings, and the Kings had the support and confidence of the entire Gandalaran population for many, many generations.

  The time involved in Gandalaran history was huge and indistinct; I couldn’t estimate how long it had been after the meteor before Zanek had become the first King. Neither could I identify when the Kingdom had gone sour or exactly when Harthim, the Last King, had bailed out from Kä and built what was now Lord City in Eddarta.

  If I were analyzing this statistically, I reasoned, I‘d need accurate time information and, if not actual demographics, at least some idea of the total population. Undoubtedly, the population of “Gandalarans”—that is, the favorably mutated species that would develop into this present culture—expanded exponentially at the beginning.

  I reached into my Gandalaran memory, actively searching for a connection to the All-Mind’s memory, but the only result was the recollection of remarks in a conversation between Ricardo—before he and Markasset had been consolidated into Rikardon—and Markasset’s father, Thanasset. The older man had mentioned the Great Pleth, something Ricardo had understood as a large body of water, a lake or sea. It had been present in Gandalara when the All-Mind had achieved consciousness—that is, when the radiation-loaded meteor had struck the Great Wall above Raithskar and initiated the mutation which provided the subconscious memory link. Some geologic change—possibly an earthquake triggered by the impact of the meteor—had caused the Great Pleth to diminish and, as far as Thanasset or Markasset knew, disappear entirely. Centers of population had begun to shift toward the walls and the only remaining sources of water.

  These impassable walls made Gandalara a closed world, I thought, and let the vision form of the humanoid race, little more than animals, growing in numbers, developing social structure, establishing territories. Foraging for edible plants shifted into planting and cultivating them; a circle of shelters became a town; surplus food appeared, allowing leisure time for the development of tools which would help insure a greater surplus, and more time to spend inventing and creating.

  They would have been living between the edge of the sea and the edge of their world, the walls, I thought. There would have been a long period in which the population growth filled in the new land left by the diminishing sea. But it would have been only a matter of time before the retreating shoreline exposed only untenable land. The pressure of continued population growth would have initiated a period of intense competition for tenable land area.

  War.

  I sighed.

  Unpalatable as the idea is, war is an effective deterrent to population growth. Trouble is, it becomes a habit.

  Zanek must have had the vision to see what was happening. With the Great Pleth shrinking and already huge desert areas growing, the environment was threatening everybody, and cooperation was the only road to survival.

  Markasset, of course, had a built-in reverence for the legendary First King. But Ricardo, too, appreciated what I knew of the man. He had enforced peace, promoted trade, and used the telepathic power of the Ra’ira in some benevolent way to help him. The Bronze—the thin sheet of imprinted metal which concealed the vault door in the Council Chamber, and which Tarani had been able to decipher—had cautioned future Kings in their use of the Ra’ira.

  “Seek out the discontented”; it had commanded, “Give them answer, not penalty.”

  Zanek was a wise man, I thought. No wonder he and the Kings who followed his way were so loved.

  But the other Kings—only half of the present world believe that they had any good points.

  I almost laughed. Half the world, I repeated to myself. I think I‘ve found the answer. The All-Mind isn‘t geographically limited to one half of the world or the other, but people are. For instance, look at Thanasset. He‘s as strongly linked to the All-Mind as anyone who isn‘t a Recorder. But his knowledge and opinions are hardly universal.

  He told me that the Ra‘ira had been delivered into the hands of the Kings after Kä had begun to demand slaves.

  Wrong. Zanek had it at the beginning.

  He spoke of the Great Pleth as if there had been only one sea.

  Wrong. The Chizan crossings mark a division of Gandalara, and the composition of the desert on this side bears every earmark of once having been covered by a salt sea, just like the Kapiral on Raithshar‘s side.

  And he believes that Serkajon‘s sword was the only steel sword that had ever existed in Gandalara.

  Which Zefra swears is wrong.

  I stopped the whirling chain of logic and took a mental breather, and approached the conclusion calmly.

  In high school, Ricardo had a world history textbook that looked nearly new except for one short, dog-eared section on Greek and Roman mythology—a testament that students study most conscientiously the subjects which are most interesting to them. Perhaps the All-Mind knows everything about the history of this world, but people look only at that part of it which favors their ethical system. If enough individuals unconsciously draw selectively on their links to the All-Mind, part of past history becomes a current belief system. To Raithskarians, Serkajon is a hero. To Eddartans—the Lords, at least—he is a thief and a traitor.

  All of which adds up to—don‘t believe everything you hear.

  Has Raithskar mistakenly forgotten about a second sword, or has Eddart
a mistakenly remembered it?

  15

  I snapped into the present, anxiety closing my throat so that I could hardly breathe. We were leaving behind the Ra’ira and Serkajon’s sword—my sword—to go look for a centuries-lost treasure which might or might not exist. Suddenly all the doubts I had felt when Zefra and Tarani had talked about this project swept down on me—only now something was missing, a layer of dullness, a barrier of simply not caring. Now I was fully awake, fully alert …

  And I haven‘t been, I realized. Between the time Keeshah left us (one thing hadn‘t changed; pain still zinged through me when I thought of the big cat) and that—um, what happened in the cellar—I wasn‘t really here for the full count. But now my head is clear; my mind is functioning again. Well enough to realize we may be doing exactly the wrong thing.

  “How do you know there’s another sword?” I asked.

  Tarani jumped, and we stopped walking. We had left behind the last buildings of the city, and we had outdistanced most of the other travelers. At the moment, there was no one nearby.

  “How do I know?” Tarani repeated. “It seems logical to me. The Captain of the Sharith would not have so valuable an article if it were unique.”

  “A King who wanted to cement the loyalty of the Sharith might give a unique weapon to the Captain,” I argued.

  “Not even Zanek would have done that,” she said, shaking her head. “Rakor was even more rare and valuable then than now. The only reason to give up so rich a gift would be for the very purpose Eddarta’s legends report—the symbology of twin swords, shared between King and Captain.”

  “Do you know that, Tarani?” I asked.

  “I do not understand what you mean,” Tarani said, but shifted her weight restlessly.

  “Zefra said you have a strong link with the All-Mind,” I said. “Is that how you know? Have you seen it in the All-Mind?”

  Tarani shook her head, not in answer, but at me. “You have strange notions, Rikardon. One does not ‘see’ in that sense without establishing a direct link.”