Widowmaker Read online

  “Not… Not magic. Dyrek would never…” The man’s voice trailed away at some image, some memory, that had begun to give the lie to his defence.

  “Vanek-arluth,” said Marc ar’Dru, speaking openly for the first time, “when fear of a forbidden thing has gone, it can exert a strange attraction.”

  “The Art Magic has a charm all its own,” said Eskra. Ar’Kelayr gave her a sharp look, but she wasn’t making a joke. “Because you cannot – or will not – see that it exists, you hope that it might go away. A curious contradiction, that. You must think again, my lord ar’Kelayr. The Art Magic will not go away just because it unsettles you, any more than the sun might fall from the sky because it dazzles you. Now listen to me. And listen well…”

  Bayrd had never seen Eskra in such a passion about anything. Some of them already knew some of what she was talking about, but none of them knew all of it – or, he corrected himself, would admit that knowledge openly. They knew the calendar information well enough, but as for the rest…

  Alban holydays fell on the last full moon night of each season, as near to the appropriate solstice or equinox as possible, and continued into the day immediately following. Though by comparison with some the Albans were not an especially religious people – someone had long ago decided that there was little point in making supplication to gods who so obviously didn’t pay any attention, though courtesy to the Father of Fires and the Light of Heaven was advisable just in case – the seasonal festivals had been observed and celebrated for hundreds of years.

  The feast-night was for thanks concerning ventures completed in the preceding three months, and for those members of one’s Clan or House or family who had remained in good health and prosperity. Sunrise of the next day was a time for, well, for aching heads from the previous night, mostly, but also for making plans and resolutions for the next season.

  Since the full moon didn’t usually oblige by falling precisely on the equinox or solstice, it was no more than a convenient mark on which to hang the holyday and the festival that accompanied it. But on those occasions when the two did coincide, both sorcerers and the wizards who practiced the Art Magic were of the common opinion – a unanimity unusual enough in itself – that the conjunction could be used as a focus of great power.

  An dé Nadelik, the day of year-turning, was an extra day-name on which the year number was formally changed in calendars and chronicles. It fell at the end of winter, taking priority over the Feast of Darkness, and like the others would occasionally match the night of the full moon; more rarely with the solstice. But if it should chance to coincide with all three, then it was considered most unlucky, and no work, task, promise or sorcery was ever begun or concluded on that day.

  But if the conjunction of the full moon fell on the Feast of Fire, then that was a day for beginnings and for hopes. Or for conquests. The word slithered like a serpent through Bayrd Talvalin’s mind. A Red Serpent.

  “Last autumn’s festival was on the night of the equinox,” said Eskra. “And—”

  “And this year’s Fire falls on the summer solstice?” Bayrd asked, though it wasn’t really a question. He knew the answer already. She nodded. “Then whatever Dyrek was—”

  “Now listen to me, ar’Talvlyn—” Vanek burst in, but Bayrd silenced him – successfully and rather to his own surprise – with a single upraised finger.

  “Vanek-arluth ar’Kelayr,” he said, “this discussion started badly, but has improved beyond all measure. We’ll continue it tomorrow. Things might continue to improve after a night’s rest – although I’ll certainly hear you better if you start to use my proper name…”

  Then his teeth closed with a click on whatever else he might have been about to say, because a realization that had eluded him all afternoon suddenly came home to roost. From the quickly-hidden shift of expression on Eskra’s face, she had seen it too.

  Ar’Talvlyn was the old style, the pure Alban version of his clan and family name. Talvalin was the local pronunciation; he’d adopted it, setting him at one remove from the old ways and making him – perhaps – a little more acceptable to the Elthaneks of Dunrath’s domain. There had been no complaints, except from his own people.

  If one were to perform the same exercise on Vanek’s name, then the Elthan inflection would change ar’Kelayr, that old Alban name, in just the same way. But it would become…

  Kalarr.

  4

  Mirrors

  There were many more questions that Bayrd had wanted to ask Vanek ar’Kelayr. About Gerin ar’Diskan for one thing, and about whom Clan ar’Kelayr and its allies supported in the rivalry for Overlord for another. He had hoped for many more answers, and perhaps even a leavening of undiluted truth. But the man was a guest of equal rank, not a prisoner, and this – now that the earlier unpleasantness had been set aside – had become a lengthy conversation rather than an interrogation. Courtesy had to be observed.

  In this instance, the courtesy involved seeing ar’Kelayr safely to one of the all-too-recently completed guesting-chambers in the north tower, ensuring that his retinue were also provided with somewhere to sleep, and that all of them were fed. That was the most difficult part.

  For all Bayrd’s apparent wealth, few people outside his family and immediate circle of friends knew that most of that wealth was being poured, like the mortar holding them together, into the walls of Dunrath-hold. Plenty of time to accumulate riches when where you intend to keep them is strong enough to make sure you keep them.

  So it was oven-pudding with gravy again, and a roasted chicken. Elaborately cooked, elegantly presented, expensively powdered with spices, but quite definitely chicken. The poor man’s meat.

  If Vanek-arluth looked slightly askance at the pudding because he knew it was an Elthanek dish, at least he was far too noble to realize the significance of why it was served up and eaten before the meat appeared. That was a trick Dunrath’s cooks had borrowed from the local people, a means to blunt a diner’s appetite before the expensive part of the meal without being obvious about it. Hence the generous size of the pudding, and the tastiness of its gravy.

  But he might have noticed the number of poultry scuffling and scratching around the fortress, and then added that observation to what he and his men – and even the Clan-Lord Talvalin himself – were eating. It might have helped him to draw unfortunately accurate conclusions about that clan-lord’s parlous financial state.

  Except that Bayrd wasn’t eating.

  Eskra and Marc each worked at their respective plates with spoon and eating-knife and two-tined fork, and after every few mouthfuls one or the other glanced at Bayrd, or at each other, or muttered some observation about how good dinner was tonight and why didn’t he try some.

  Bayrd never failed to nod acknowledgement of their attempts, but his appetite, sharp-set less than half an hour ago, had been severely blunted by his half-accidental venture into the world of language.

  “Ar’Kelayr, an-Kehlahr, Kalarr,” he said aloud, pronouncing the word in Old Alban, in Prytenek, and finally in the burr of the Elthanek borders. He seemed to gain more nourishment and flavour from those syllables than from the several dishes sitting untouched in front of him. They smelt savoury enough – so whichever cook had prepared them was hardly at fault – but if the Talvalins, and the ar’Talvlyns before them, had one failing above all the others, it was the ability to brood about problems to the exclusion of everything else.

  Except perhaps, went the self-mocking joke, for an unlimited quantity of good-quality wine and a harper to play mournful music when their gloom needed inspiration. Even though there were no musicians in the council-room, Bayrd was already halfway down his third bottle of strong white Hauverne, and there was still no sign that the alcohol was affecting him at all.

  “Him again?” said Marc ar’Dru, as if he had ever expected it to be anything else. “It’s a coincidence, nothing more. Eat your supper or pass it down here – ukh!”

  The grunt was a result of Eskra
’s elbow hitting him a solid jab just under the ribs. Bayrd caught his wife glowering at his best friend, and felt a glum smile tug at the corners of his mouth. They would gather in a solid wall of support behind him or each other when the need arose, but for the rest of the time they teased, they sniped, they insulted each other – and Mevn too, when she and her family came calling.

  Married for only six years, but she had presented her husband with three sons and two daughters, the ar’Menez succession secured without a doubt, and she not an inch or a pound or a smile different for all of it…

  “If it’s a coincidence, then it’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.” He felt vaguely surprised, and more than a little pleased, to have spoken the convoluted sentence without his tongue tripping on the words or the sense. Assuming there was sense in it in the first place.

  “I, uh… Yes, of course,” Marc said, staring, then shook his head and returned his attention to the chicken and a replenished cup of Seurandec red. It was a clan-lord’s privilege to drink himself incapable on the most expensive vintage in his cellars – and it was his head in the morning, too – but a Companion and Bannerman knew his place, and often enough that was to keep watch over his lord and friend during a drinking-bout. Marc’s chosen place in this instance was close to the Seurandec.

  “Takes its time, that wine,” he muttered through a mouthful of chicken, “but it works eventually.”

  Eskra glowered briefly at him, but didn’t dismiss her husband’s words so easily as mere drunken rambling. She had seen him drunk before, for one reason or another, and this, though it lacked form a little, was not like drunkenness. The perception of truth often took strange shapes, and never more so than in those possessed of the Talent.

  “What people dismiss as coincidence,” she said, not talking to any one person in particular but addressing the table in general, “happens more frequently in life than in the storymakers’ tales. They at least have a chance to re-shape events. To make more sense. Or so they say.”

  Marc swallowed the meat half-chewed and laughed dutifully, not entirely sure where this was all leading. “But we have to put up with things as they happen?” he wondered, smiling. “The way they write it in the Archive?”

  Eskra echoed the smile, but her version of it rang a little false. “Look at Ylver Vlethanek an-Dunrath for five years ago,” she said. “Find something you know. Some event you were involved in. Read it carefully. Then tell me how truthful the Book of Years can be…”

  “Ah.” Marc rolled his eyes theatrically, trying to lighten the heavy mood in the room a little. “That bad?”

  “Worse,” said Bayrd gloomily. “They’re rewriting history.”

  “Historians do that all the time,” Marc pointed out, waving a chicken-leg for emphasis. Perhaps because of the influence of the Seurandec he waved rather too vigorously, and part of the drumstick meat fell off, bounced once on his plate, bounced twice on the floor –then disappeared doorwards between the teeth of one of the fortress cats. He watched the small black animal accelerate until it reached a comfortable distance out of range, then abruptly sit down, devour its trophy and start to wash. “Odd, that.”

  “What?” Bayrd looked up from his contemplation of the straw-gold depth of his own wine.

  “Cats. No matter how many you think there are, it always seems like more.” He looked at the empty bone still gripped between finger and thumb. “And it never bounces more than twice. It’s as if they know. The cats, I mean.”

  “The cats?”

  “About the food. Bouncing.”

  “I thought you said the cats were… Never mind. You’re drunk.”

  “I’m sober.”

  “Drunk or sober, you two are sometimes worse than children,” said Eskra, eyeing them severely and knowing she was probably wasting her time. “Even,” and she made the little sign to avert ill-wishing, “our two. And Harel isn’t four years old yet.”

  “I think,” said Bayrd blearily, “that we’ve just been insulted.”

  “And I think that I may have just insulted both my daughters.”

  “Not that pair,” said Bayrd with a sudden grin that seemed to clear the wine-fumes from his head. “Not for a few years yet. But the Archivists, now…”

  “I wondered when you’ get back to that. What are they doing?”

  “Rewriting. No.” Bayrd shook his head, and since he had the wine in one hand Eskra wasn’t sure whether the sloshing sound she heard came from the bottle or inside her husband’s skull. She took the charitable view.

  “Put that down before you spill it. Better. Now: what’s history doing to annoy you?”

  “Changing. The Keepers of Years are destroying all the oldest Archives and writing new ones.”

  Marc ar’Dru whistled thinly through his teeth. “That bad indeed,” he said, but Eskra merely arched one curious eyebrow.

  “And why would they do this?”

  “Lies,” said Bayrd. “Giving us a new past.” He stared thoughtfully at Eskra. “Your past. Gelert’s past. Even Kalarr’s past. When the work’s done, we’ll always have been here. For a thousand, two thousand years. Your years. And our own past…” He flickered his fingers in the air. “Just dust on the wind. It might not be a good past, not all of it. Cowardice and treachery and murder. We were a fierce people then. But we had courage and honour too, more than many can claim. We had family. Ancestors. For a thousand, two thousand years. And now… Ashes and dust.”

  Eskra stood up and walked quietly around to Bayrd’s chair, then put her arms around his neck. “Is that what’s troubling you? Mine are a conquered people, loved. The conquerors can do as they please. But in a hundred years we and they will all be dust, and the people who live after us won’t care one way or the other.”

  “That’s foolish optimism. Both your people and mine have long memories for history, and for the wrongs done centuries past. Trying to change it or forget it or destroy it will only make it worse.”

  “Right now it doesn’t concern me. I thought you were talking about Kalarr.”

  “I was. Am. If they can change what happened in my lifetime, so that what I remember isn’t what my children read, then what’s certain any more? What will they say about Kalarr cu Ruruc twenty years from now? Fifty years? Five hundred…?” Bayrd swivelled in his seat to look up at her. “What will they say about me…?”

  “That you built a fortress and married a wizard,” she said. “And were a credit to your name and your fame.” Eskra’s arms tightened suggestively around Bayrd’s throat and she smiled down at him with most of her teeth on show. “I’d strongly advise you not to question any of that right now. Just give me some of the Hauverne you’ve been hoarding. And have something to eat. We’re not done with my lord ar’Kelayr just yet.”

  * * * *

  Eskra was right, but not in the sense she had intended.

  She and Bayrd were roused first by shouts of dismay from the courtyard below their chamber window, and then by a tentative tapping at the bedroom door. That paused almost at once, but only for the duration of a few seconds’ muttered conversation, before resuming as a full-blooded hammering of fists. Even though Bayrd merely stirred muzzily and muttered something obscene into his pillow, Eskra went from sleep to consciousness like the striking of a spark and pulled the nearest quilt up to her chin.

  It was just as well, for the door opened immediately afterwards and Marc ar’Dru’s head came round the edge, his hair still sleep-tousled but his eyes shocked wide awake. There were no apologies for the intrusion at so early an hour, after what had been so late a night, just a blunt announcement of trouble.

  “Ar’Kelayr is dead!”

  For a moment Bayrd didn’t move. Then he rolled over and opened his eyes to the brightness of the day, flinched and squeezed them shut again, and realized that the queasiness he could feel starting to churn in his stomach had nothing to do with his hangover. Despite the way it was pounding, the headache like two steel bolts in his temples was g
oing to be the least of his problems this morning.

  “Five minutes,” he heard Eskra snap, and then the click of the latch dropping back into place, as Marc beat a retreat in the face of the tone of voice Lady Talvalin used only when questions and delay had ceased to be an option.

  “Wake up.”

  “I am awake,” said Bayrd, with all the haste of a man determined to avoid the vigorous shoulder-shaking which normally followed that command. The way he felt right now, any such shaking might dislodge the top of his skull.

  “Then get up. You heard what happened?”

  “I heard it. I just don’t want to believe it.” The range of possible repercussions was appalling. For a guest to have died under his roof was one thing – such tragedies did take place, after all – but that it should be the man who had ridden to Dunrath with accusations of the death of his son was quite another. Except for his Bannerman, a glowering figure who had contributed nothing, there had been no witnesses to their reconciliation, either…

  And how had it happened? Sickness? That was hardly possible – ar’Kelayr had been in perfect health when he left the council-room. Accidental poisoning? Unlikely, since he had eaten exactly the same as everyone else, and Heaven bear witness that the meat was fresh enough – those same chickens had been a part of the flock running out from under their horses’ hoofs when Vanek and his people rode up to Dunrath’s gates.

  Deliberate poisoning…?

  “Not in my fortress, not without my permission, and not for the sake of my honour,” growled Bayrd. He flung back the covers of the bed with only a small groan at what the exertion did to his head, and reached for his clothes.

  * * * *

  Vanek, Clan-Lord ar’Kelayr, lay on his back on the floor of the guest-quarters in Dunrath’s north tower, his body as composed as though he had merely lain down to sleep on the floor rather than the bed. His eyes were closed and his face was calm. But for all that peaceful appearance his mouth hung slackly open, his skin was cold and pallid, and his muscles were already stiff with rigor.