The Bronze of Eddarta Read online

  Without bodies blocking sight of our actions from the Council Chamber I took the Ra’ira from Tarani’s unresisting hand, and put it in my pouch. We sheathed our swords and joined hands.

  “Ready?” Tarani asked.

  Thymas and I nodded, and the three of us stepped out into the Celebration Dance.

  20

  The door moved behind us, and we heard the muffled sounds of a struggle. We jumped back into the concealment of the hallway and whirled around.

  Indomel was pressing back against the stone wall, fury and amazement plain in his face. His mouth opened and closed, but made no sound.

  Zefra stood near him, not touching him. She was glowing with triumph. “He planned to betray you to the Guard,” she said, then smiled grimly. “But I have power that not even my dear son suspects. I can control him—for a time. With your help, Tarani, we could control him—always. Perhaps he is right, and you could not be acclaimed High Lord. But we could use Indomel himself, Tarani, to bring about the changes we know are right. I ask you again: stay.”

  Tarani hesitated.

  I thought, again, how much the two women resembled one another. Height, facial structure, bearing—it was uncanny. Could I blame Tarani for feeling the call of a common heritage that was so plainly visible to all of us?

  What will I do if she wants to stay? I wondered. It’s her choice. Please, Tarani …

  She said, softly and sadly: “No.”

  Zefra sighed, and I started to breathe again.

  “Then go quickly, daughter,” Zefra said, and opened her hands to show us what she held. “I will keep the Ra’ira.” She watched us warily, prepared for some argument.

  “Keep it, then,” Tarani said. “But don’t rely upon it, Mother—remember that the Kingdom fell, without it.

  “Thymas. Rikardon.”

  The commanding tone of her voice hid the grief I knew Tarani must be feeling. Deceiving Zefra was necessary. Using her power to help us get away was necessary. Leaving her was necessary.

  But the only thing that made it possible for Tarani was the glimpse she had been granted of her mother’s desire for actual power. There was no stronger argument for securing the true Ra’ira than the way Zefra, who knew the corruptive influence of power better than most, coveted that harmless piece of blue glass.

  So we turned away and started once more across the dance floor. I felt Tarani’s hand trembling, and I knew she was close to collapse. Possibly for that reason, she had assumed the familiar semblance of Rassa, and given me the look of Yoman. Thymas she had not changed physically, but she had given him, as well as us, clothing appropriate to the occasion.

  We moved around the tables slowly, only pretending to be surveying the selection of refreshments. Ahead of us was the door which led to the main avenue of the city—and to the entry gate. To our left and right, the ballroom flowed around the Council Chamber that was the core of Lord Hall. People milled and danced, laughed and talked. And one particularly large group had planted itself directly in front of the door we were heading for.

  Is it possible to die of impatience? I wondered, as Tarani shifted our path into an arc which would swing around the knot of people. I’m going to jump right out of my skin, any minute now.

  The group of people was in a constant state of change, with individuals leaving, joining, or working their way through. Just as our arc began to swing back toward the doorway—it was barely twenty paces away, now—someone broke away and stepped right in front of us.

  It was Pylomel.

  “Doubtless you have forgotten our appointment for later this evening,” he said softly. “Lovely Rassa. I look forward to it now, more than ever.” He reached up to stroke the golden hair he thought he saw—and Tarani wasn’t up to coping with a tactile illusion. As his hand touched her hair, the entire illusion vanished.

  I reached for my sword, but Pylomel didn’t raise the alarm. His mouth sagged open, his eyes grew large, and he sank to his knees, holding onto Tarani for support. She pushed him away, shuddering.

  People looked around, just as Pylomel fell over. When they saw the hilt of Thymas’s dagger protruding from the High Lord’s chest, just under his rib cage, somebody screamed.

  We drew our swords and headed for the door, three deadly points on our triangle. Nobody near us was going to be a problem—there was a lot of yelling, and a general and uniform scramble to get out of the way. I was surprised at the contempt I felt as I thought: They’re so used to having everything done for them—including their fighting.

  Trouble is, I thought in the next second, they’ve got people to do it.

  There were four guards in the doorway, waiting for us to get clear of the crowd.

  Thymas and I attacked, leaving Tarani to keep the mob at bay. Apparently Gharlas had appropriated the best fighters for his own plans, because these four were rookies. In seconds, they were all dead or badly damaged, and the three of us ran out into the avenue.

  Lamps had been placed on platforms along the main avenue. We had a clear view to the city entrance. The river, with a line of rafts tied up by its bank, was barely visible, though we could hear its rushing murmur clearly above the clamor coming from Lord Hall.

  We ran like hell along that lighted pathway, then skidded to a halt, not a hundred yards from the gate. Where I had expected two guards, maybe four, there were twenty. And they had heard the ruckus. They were ready for us.

  Tarani groaned, and Thymas swore: “By the Nine! Is there no escape from this fleabitten place? Not even the sha’um could fight these odds!”

  Damn Eddarta and its blasted Celebration Dance, I thought. And its blasted hired muscle. These guys know it’ll be their skins if we get away. Thymas is right, we’re trapped. Unless—

  This was a Gandalaran situation, and suddenly I was thinking like Ricardo, who saw two gateways into—and out of—the city. “Come on,” I said, and dragged Tarani toward the line of tied rafts. Thymas followed. The guards set up a yell and started running down the avenue.

  I let go of Tarani’s hand and jumped from the bank onto one of the rafts. It wobbled in the water; I dropped to my knees to steady it for Tarani’s arrival.

  But Tarani and Thymas were standing on the bank, staring at me in confusion.

  “What are you doing?” Thymas demanded. “There aren’t any vleks, and anyway they would be too slow—what are you doing?”

  “Shut up and get out here!” I ordered.

  Tarani dropped to all fours and crawled out to me with teeth-gritting slowness. I put my arms around her and could almost feel her terror through her skin.

  She knows what’s going on, I thought. But she came anyway.

  Thymas was still on the bank, and he had figured it out, too. “That’s crazy!” he said. “You’ll kill us all!”

  Two lines held the raft against the shore. I slashed one, and the raft swung out toward the current, Tarani and I balancing precariously on our knees. “You want them to kill you?” I asked. He looked over his shoulder at the oncoming guards, fifteen yards and closing. Then he turned back and took a deep breath.

  “No, don’t jump!” I warned, too late. He landed on the tied corner of the raft. “Grab him!” I told Tarani, and sliced through the last line.

  By some miracle, Thymas didn’t send us all into the river. “On your stomachs,” I yelled. “Spread your weight on the surface of the raft.” Daggers and swords flew overhead as the raft drifted away from shore. A couple of the guards, either braver or more desperate, ventured out into the water after us, but retreated when it got too deep to walk.

  I didn’t have any trouble getting Thymas and Tarani to hang on to the ropes that lashed the reeds into logs, and tied the logs together. They were terrified, and probably seasick, as the rudderless raft spun slowly toward the arch that marked the edge of Lord City.

  The guards were running along the bank, arguing about what to do. Some of them were laughing at us; others were just plainly amazed. There seemed to be no question at all i
n their minds that we were totally, thoroughly crazy.

  Things floated in Gandalara. Pontoon bridges. Rafts steadied by vlek power. People drank water, bathed in it, used it to irrigate crops. They did not float on it. It simply wasn’t part of the Gandalaran lifestyle.

  No wonder Tarani and Thymas were scared to death. I felt some of their fear, myself—but Ricardo’s logic put a hammerlock on Markasset’s traditionalism.

  “Listen,” I warned the others, “when we hit the rapids, we’re going to get wet. Don’t let go! Even if the raft breaks up, pieces of it will float.”

  The raft was through the archway, moving more or less straight and faster, now, toward the brink of the cataract. Tarani looked up, whimpered, and pressed her face back into the reeds. Thymas looked up, too, and watched grimly as the blackness of the empty Gandalaran sky seemed to rush toward us. A roar of falling water drifted up from the hidden slope of the hill.

  “HANG ON!” I screamed, as the raft tipped sickeningly forward.

  The raft plunged down the hillside, crashing against rocks, dipping and bucking like a thing alive and trying its best to get rid of us. It didn’t matter that it was too dark to see; all our senses were concentrated on breathing, when we had the opportunity, and clinging to that bundle of reeds.

  The raft took one deep dive, and when it bobbed to the surface, it took us a few seconds to realize that we were level again. I looked up to see lights and the straight lines of the edges of buildings ahead of us.

  I lifted myself cautiously to my hands and knees, to make sure. We were at the inner edge of Eddarta. “Tarani, Thymas,” I urged, “take a look. We made it.”

  Just then, the raft hit a hidden crosscurrent and spun wildly. My knees slipped, and I wound up half in, half out of the water, my weight canting the surface of the raft at a crazy angle.

  “Rikardon!” Tarani cried, and started to come after me.

  “Stay there!” I ordered.

  We had drifted into the city itself, now, and there was a crowd of people, carrying torches, on the riverbank. I wasn’t sure how they knew we were here, or what they thought of us, but the immediate problem didn’t relate to them at all. As far as I could see, we were spinning slowly, and not making much speed downstream.

  All right, smart guy, I thought to myself. How the hell are you going to get this thing back to ground? Didn’t think about that, did you?

  My hands were stiff and chafed, and I was beginning to swear at the weight of the gold around my waist—but when I thought of it, the solution occurred to me.

  “Thymas!” I called. “When I move, you move along the opposite edge, to keep us balanced. Tarani, you stay put. Understand?”

  They both nodded, and Thymas released each hand in turn, working out the stiffness in preparation of moving around.

  I was hanging off the raft from its side, so that water was striking abreast of the reed log. I started pulling myself along the log by its lashings; Thymas crept along the far edge in the other direction. It was tricky, turning the corner, but worth it—with my body weighing down the log ends, the current channeled itself along the ridges, and the spinning motion stopped. When I had worked my way into the center of that edge, we started moving downriver with some speed.

  Only now there was a new problem. I couldn’t get back up on the raft. The lashings which held the logs together were too close to the end of the raft to give me any leverage, and the next set which could provide a handhold was too far away to reach. All I could do was hang on.

  *Rikardon?* The thought struck my mind, and I realized that it had been repeated before—I had been too busy surviving to recognize it. The small mystery of how the crowd of people had spotted us in the dark was solved, too—they were following the sha’um.

  *Keeshah!* I called. *Follow the raft down the river.*

  “Tarani, untie the middle lashing of the raft. Don’t cut it unless you have to.”

  She started working at it with one hand and got nowhere. Thymas readjusted his position, and their two hands, together, loosened one knot. It was slow going, and I was beginning to wonder if my arms would hold out—but at last they had a good length of the sturdy, woven rope free.

  Thymas—who, of course, was aware of the sha’um—had already seen what I had in mind. He pulled Tarani down to his end of the raft, tipping me out of the water for a moment, then moved nearly to the middle and stood up cautiously. He tied one end of the rope to another lashing, then threw the other end toward the bank. It fell far short, and he dragged the rope back, talking to himself.

  “I’ll try to guide us closer to shore,” I shouted at him. “Tell me when you think we’re close enough for the rope to reach.” I strained my aching arms and pretended I really was a rudder, holding my body rigid with the legs pulled up at an angle. I could feel the difference in the water pressure against my body.

  I’ll be damned! It’s working! I thought, and suddenly I had new energy.

  Even that second wind was gone, by the time Thymas called to say it was time. I took a deep breath, let go with one hand, and dragged along underwater, fumbling with the fastening on my homemade belt. Finally it was free, and I spent my last bit of energy swinging the long, heavy thing up to the deck of the raft.

  Thymas grabbed it, tied it to the rope, and threw it at the shore, nearly all in one motion. None too soon, either, because without that belt I made a rotten rudder. We were already moving toward the center of current again.

  I craned to see the shore, and was surprised that we had left most of the city behind. The crowd of torches was still there, the huge shapes of the sha’um clearly silhouetted. There was a roar of noise from the nearly invisible people.

  I had told Keeshah what we were doing, and I assumed Thymas had told Ronar. I saw the belt arc through the torchlight, and heard it slap into the ground and slither toward the river as we moved away from the bank. Keeshah went after it, pawing at it like a kitten chasing a string—and then he had it in his teeth.

  He dug his claws into the muddy shore and yanked—and Thymas pitched head over heels into the water. He surfaced near the raft; I grabbed him and held him up until he was able to get a grip on the lashings.

  The sha’um hauled us in leapfrog fashion, one pulling until the other had a jaw grip on the rope closer to the bank, then circling around while the other pulled.

  When we scrambled to shore, we didn’t take time to say hello. Thymas caught up the weighted belt, cut it free of the rope, then leaped on Ronar’s back. I mounted Keeshah, and Tarani swung on behind me. The half-circle of torches opened where we aimed.

  *Wet,* Keeshah complained, then carried us out into the night beyond Eddarta.

  21

  For more than two hours we ran through the pale moonlight. We passed through grainfields that looked like thick black carpet. We pounded through pastures, scattering grayish shapes—terrified vlek and glith.

  I pressed my face into Keeshah’s fur and didn’t think of anything at all, for a while, except the exhilaration of riding again. There was an open, flowing contact between my mind and Keeshah’s that was like a mental hug. There was little deception possible in our relationship; we each knew how glad the other was that we were together again.

  Gradually my awareness expanded to include the others who were with us. Thymas and Ronar were a single, moving shadow off to my left, and Tarani was a warm pressure against my back. A hooting call from above told me that Lonna was nearby. For a breathless moment, I felt the bonds which tied me to each of them.

  They were different—less intense, less intimate—than the special touching Keeshah and I could share. But I felt them.

  It was an amorphous feeling, and very brief, like a glimpse into the heart of a brilliant diamond when, just for a second or two, you can almost perceive the structure of the faceting. You can almost understand—not the crisp angles and cool planes of the stone, but the art of the gemcutter who chose them and executed them.

  It went beyond simply a sen
se of shared destiny—the team spirit of which I had spoken in Dyskornis.

  It went beyond gratitude that each of them had saved my life.

  It went beyond pride that, together, we had accomplished what we had set out to do—that we were carrying the Ra’ira back to Raithskar.

  Team spirit, gratitude, pride. None of them quite identified what I felt, yet they were all part of it. I reached for the truth with all my intuition, but the moment passed too quickly. I felt my failure to understand as a piercing, cold ache, an inconsolable sense of loss.

  I sought comfort in the steady rhythm of Keeshah’s movement. After awhile, the stinging sadness eased, and I slept.

  I woke when Keeshah’s rhythm changed. *What?* I muttered sleepily to the sha’um.

  *Other one stops,* Keeshah told me.

  I came fully awake in a hurry. Tarani’s weight stirred slightly as I moved, and I thought: Could she be asleep, riding second? She must be utterly exhausted. And she hasn’t recently recovered from Thymas’s injuries …

  I suffered a twinge of pure panic as I opened my eyes. We seemed to be in a narrow corridor with walls so tall that I couldn’t see over them from my present eye-level, which was Keeshah’s shoulder height. I thought that we had gotten turned around, and were back in Eddarta.

  “Thymas!” I called, sitting up. Tarani, startled into wakefulness, put her arms around my chest to steady herself.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her cheek pressed my shoulder for a moment, then lifted. “Where are we?”

  I felt foolish as the disorientation faded. Sitting up had brought my line of vision above the obstructions beside us, and I could see that the “walls” of the corridor were lattice frames covered with leafy growth. We were on a farm, in a Gandalaran version of a berry patch. The frames were about ten feet long, and stood in rows about six feet apart.