A Flame in Hali, Page 2

  Distributions from the royal granaries to the poor continued for a time. On those days, people gathered in the darkness before dawn, shivering in their layers of woolen cloaks and shawls, jackets and much-patched blankets, clutching their jars and baskets. Their breath rose like plumes of mist. On some mornings, each was given a portion of grain, dried beans, and a measure of cooking oil or sometimes honey. Lately, there had not been enough for everyone.

  Thick dark clouds hung low above the city, as if the sky itself were frowning. The King’s guards, warmly clad in Hastur blue and silver, cleared the area in front of the doors and funneled the people forward, one by one. They gave preference to the weakest, the women and the elderly. More than one man was turned away, especially those wearing thick, fur-lined wool over their ample bellies.

  “Why throw away good food on the likes of them?” shouted a man who had been pushed to the side. He pointed to a woman clutching a pottery jar now filled with grain. Her skirts and shawls were so threadbare that several layers showed through in patches. She looked like an overdressed doll, except for the pinched thinness of her cheeks; clearly, she wore every tattered garment she owned.

  “She’ll only waste it—”

  “And you’ll only sell it to some wretch who’s even poorer or more desperate,” the guard at his elbow replied. “The King means this food to go to those who truly need it. You don’t look to me like you’ve ever gone hungry.”

  “Zandru’s scorpions upon you!” Cursing, the man jerked his arm free from the guard’s grasp.

  “Not so long ago,” one of them grumbled, meaning the reign of King Carolin’s cousin, Rakhal, “things were different. There were avenues open to a sufficiently resourceful man, bargains to be made, favors exchanged. More than one of us had a friend in the castle. But those times are gone. There’s no doing business with Carolin’s bunch.” He shrugged philosophically. “As soon as the roads open in the spring, I’m off for Temora. There’s nothing here for the likes of us.”

  “You mean we’ll have to turn honest to earn our bread!” a third man joked. Waving to the others, he disappeared down one of the side streets.

  “They don’t go hungry. Or cold, or in want of any comfort.” A stranger who had been standing a little apart from the others moved forward. He glanced toward Hastur Castle and then the rich residences of the Comyn lords. The sun was not yet full up and shadows lay in frigid pools along the streets. Tower and Castle blazed with light, powered by laran-charged batteries.

  “They throw us a bit of bread and expect us to be grateful. All the while they sit up there with their satin cushions and their heated rooms and their matrix screens. Poison and plague and spells of torment, they care nothing—nothing—”

  “Come, friend,” the man bound for Temora said, holding out his arm. “Come. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “A drink will not cure what ails this city.” The hooded man pulled away, lips drawn back in a snarl. The hood of his shabby cloak partly masked his face, revealing only the line of an angular, cold-roughened chin.

  The other man paused, eyes narrowing in appraisal. The stranger’s clothes, though stained and torn, had once been of good quality, and he did not hold himself like a man accustomed to the gutters.

  “Then let me see you home, away from—”

  “Home?” The hooded man’s voice rasped, dark and bitter. “It is their doing that I have none. But the time is coming when it is they who will beg for bread and sleep on cold stones—”

  “Hold your tongue, man!” the man hissed. “Or if you cannot, then go your way alone, for I’ll not be a party to your seditious talk. It’s one thing to take the King’s largesse or strike a bargain with his men, and quite another to stand here in the open, courting treason with such words. Any one of those guards could hear us, and they’re Carolin’s to a man.” He strode away without a backward glance, as if eager to distance himself from any troublemakers.

  The first man, the one who had been so angry, gave the hooded man a coin. “Best get out of the cold.” Then he, too, departed without waiting for thanks.

  The hooded man stared at the coin in his palm, while the people who’d been given food hurried away and those who had come too late turned back with sagging shoulders. His hood concealed his expression, but something in his carriage kept even the grumblers at a distance.

  “You there!” one of the guards called as he locked the granary doors. “We’re done for today.” He added, in a more kindly tone, “Come back tomorrow, earlier next time, and we’ll try to give you something.”

  “I don’t need anything from the likes of you,” the man snarled. “You and your accursed sorcerer masters—”

  The guard’s face hardened and he took a step forward. The hooded man whirled with surprising quickness, spat out a curse, and scurried away. The guard turned to his partner, who still wore the sash of a cadet.

  “Keep an eye out for that one. I’ve seen his kind before. They make trouble wherever they go.”

  “We have enough of that this winter without some madman drumming up more,” the boy replied, shaking his head. “Should we tell the captain?”

  “What should we say, there’s yet another malcontent on the streets? We’d as well inform him the sun came up, or there is an excess of mice in the granary!” The first guard barked out a laugh. “Come on, let’s get back to the barracks. A drop of hot spiced wine sounds good to me.”

  “Friend.”

  Sound shaped into word, repeated now, along with a gentle shake of the shoulders. Eduin’s head felt as if it had swollen to several times its normal size, and with each pounding of his pulse, an answering jolt erupted behind his eyes. Hands slipped beneath his arms, lifting him. He opened his mouth to protest, for the slightest movement only intensified his headache. He realized his eyes were still closed, and a bright light shone directly on his face.

  Day.

  He mumbled a curse. It had been day when he found oblivion beneath the tavern bench, but now it was day again. Probably not the same one, but he neither knew nor cared.

  “Come on, sit up, that’s the way,” came the voice again.

  Go away. Leave me be.

  Thought came slowly, as if the cheap ale still flooded his veins. Somehow, he found himself on his feet, eyes slitting against the brightness. He made out the blurred shape of a man—one head, two arms, two legs—enough to convince him this was probably real and not another drunken hallucination.

  “Aldones, you stink,” the stranger said. “But you’re soaking wet and I can’t let you stay out here. Night’s coming on. It’ll be a cold one, enough to freeze Zandru’s bones.”

  To freeze. It was a painless death, he’d heard. To sleep and never wake, not with some interfering stranger yammering at him. It sounded wonderful.

  No more forcing down ale so raw a dog wouldn’t touch it, guzzling the stuff until the knot in his belly finally eased and the voice in his head fell silent. No more petty, demeaning jobs or stealing small coins, begging for the next round. He’d long since ceased to care about a bed or food or the taunts of the gutter urchins. The only thing that mattered was the next drink, and the next. And stillness, blessed stillness.

  His body was moving now, partly by its own reflexes, partly propelled by the gentle, uncompromising hands. About him, an alley came into focus. He didn’t recognize it; he could have been anywhere in the poorer areas of Thendara. Or Dalereuth or Arilinn, for that matter.

  No, not Arilinn. For in that place, he could not hide. They would know him, no matter how dirty or drunk he was. They would know his mind, the leronyn of the Tower. Even with the psychic shields that long ago had become as automatic as breath, they would know him because he had once been one of them.

  Here in the anonymous squalor of Darkover’s largest city, no one would think to look for him. Here he could drown himself in a river of ale. No one would know if he lived or died. No one would care. Only in the bitter winter would some passerby or alehouse keeper pull a n
ameless drunkard out of the snow, for no one could survive such nights.

  “We’re almost there,” said the voice.

  “Wh—where?” His voice came out in a croak.

  He felt rather than saw the stranger’s smile. “Someplace safe.”

  They passed between two buildings, deep in shadow. A wind, ice-tipped, gusted down the narrow space. It would snow again tonight. His body shivered, and he thought how he might crawl into a drift and pull it over himself like a blanket of costly wool, gather it to him until it turned warm and dreamy. He would have to be thoroughly drunk to do it, almost in a stupor, or the pressure in his head would stop him. He had tried several times to seek permanent oblivion, but each time, his second conscience, like an old and evil companion, kept him alive, chained to its own purposes.

  A door swung open and warmer air surrounded him. He put out one hand to catch his balance and touched the cracked, weather-splintered planks. Inside, light flared. He staggered free of the stranger’s grasp and slumped into a crudely wrought chair.

  He was in some sort of servants’ quarters, an old scullery perhaps, though he could not make out anything beyond a rickety table along one wall. A pitcher, its rim cracked and jagged, sat beside an equally decrepit bowl. He couldn’t make out the rest of the room’s contents without turning his head, and that meant risking another wave of nauseating pain.

  “Drink,” he pleaded, gesturing with one hand.

  The stranger bent over him, and it seemed a mantle of blue light rested across his shoulders. The hood of his cloak hid his face. He placed one hand on Eduin’s forehead.

  Rest. Rest now, and forget. We will speak tomorrow.

  Eduin woke again to a dim, watery light. He had been drifting in and out of strange, restless dreams in which faceless men pursued him, and each time he tried to hide, he was discovered. Now he lay on a crude pallet on the floor of a room that should have been strange, but felt familiar.

  Aside from his physical discomforts, the urgency of his bladder and the thick cottony film in his mouth, he could not remember a time when he felt more at ease. More inwardly still. It was as if a voice that had been raging at him, night and day, had suddenly fallen quiet.

  He sat up, his spine crackling, muscles stiff. The light came through a window, layers of oiled cloth instead of glass. A candle, thick and irregular, shone from the other side of the room. On the floor beside his pallet, he spied a mug. It contained water rather than wine or even rotgut ale, but he drank it down. There was a faint lemony taste that cleared his head and eased the dryness of his throat. It gave him the strength to haul himself to his feet, to the door and outside. The drifted snow burned his bare feet. The alley was deserted, and he discovered with some surprise that this mattered to him. He relieved himself against the side of the building.

  As quickly as he could, he scurried back inside. There was no fireplace, only a small stone brazier filled with ashes. Still, the walls kept out the worst of the wind.

  Heartened, he explored his surroundings. The pitcher contained more of the lemony water, and beside it was bread, only slightly moldy on one side, and hard cheese. He could not remember when he had last eaten. Chewing slowly, he finished it all, except for the moldy part. Once he would have eaten that, too, but now the smell disgusted him.

  Several circuits of the room revealed no trace of its owner’s personal effects. The floor was bare wood, stained and gritty with dried mud. The sleeping pallet was of the poorest sort, layers of straw and blankets too tattered for any other use, laid over a frame of wooden slats to keep it off the floor. The back of the door bore a row of wooden pegs, some broken off like rotten teeth, and here his own jacket hung. The worst of the surface filth had been brushed off and the padding stuck out in threadbare patches. He found his boots shoved into a corner. As he pulled them on, he reflected that for all appearances, the room was his, and yet he had no memory of ever being here before. Certainly, if he had come upon the few reis for rent, he would long since have spent them at the ale shops.

  Again, he remarked on the clearness of his head and the unwonted silence in his mind. He felt no craving for drink, although there was every reason why he should. His memory presented him with numberless mornings in which his first and only thought was how he was going to get drunk again. In his time in Thendara and before that on the road, he had known many men who lived as he had, stumbling from one stupor to the next. They swore the only cure for the nausea, the headaches, and the nightmarish visions was more of the same.

  Eduin had never drunk to escape the aftermath of drinking. This was what he had sought, this blessed stillness. Was it some property of this room, although it seemed ordinary and shabby? He saw no trace of a telepathic damper. From experience, he knew how useless a damper was against his inner tormentor. Properly attuned, it would keep psychic energy from entering or emanating from the room. It could not protect him from what already lay within his own mind. He had used one when he lived in a Tower, first at Arilinn, where he was trained, and later at Hali for a brief time, and then Hestral until its destruction.

  Hali. Only a short half-day’s ride from Thendara, it might have been on another world. At the far end of the city, at the foot of the mysterious cloud-filled lake, a Tower lifted toward the heavens, a finger of graceful alabaster. In it, as in every other Tower, psychically-Gifted men and women joined their minds to work unimaginable feats, everything from the creation of weapons to the healing of hurts. Relays sent messages across the reaches of plain and mountain; laran-charged batteries powered aircars, lighted palaces, and guarded the secrets of kings.

  Hali. She had once been there. Might still be, for all he knew.

  Pain washed through him, but not from any physical cause.

  Eduin sank down on the pallet and buried his face in his hands. His breath came ragged as he struggled for the control he had learned in his years as a laranzu, a master of the psychic force called laran. Images flashed behind his closed eyes, bits of memory he had washed away with the bottle. The pale translucent stone walls that created the sense of light and endless space . . . the ever-restless mists of Lake Hali . . . Dyannis warm and supple in his arms.

  Sweet and bitter, feelings he had thought long dead stirred in him—longing and loss and things he could not put a name to. He lay back upon the pallet. Soundless weeping racked him. Some long time later, it seemed that someone held him, rocked him, stroked his matted hair.

  For this pain, too, there will be a healing.

  Again, he slept.

  He wandered through a dreamy landscape of gently rolling hills and a knoll overlooking a river. Although he could not remember ever having been here before, something about the place tugged at his heart. The air was almost luminous, the warmth hypnotic. Time itself seemed to be holding its breath. Tree branches stirred and dappled brilliance danced across his face. Around him drifted transparent shapes, like figures of the Overworld. They drifted in and out of his sight. He felt no sense of threat.

  He thought he heard singing in sweet bell-like tones, so faint it might have been only the breeze through the leaves. Shapes took on substance. Out of the corners of his eyes, he glimpsed slender bodies and cascades of silvery hair. Eyes and skin glowed with colorless radiance, as if sculpted from moonlight.

  No humans moved with such grace, for these people were chieri, of the race that was already ancient in the times lost to memory, when humans first came to Darkover. It was said that in the madness of the Ghost Wind, they left their forests to take human women as lovers, appearing as fair, proud elfin lords, and from that time, the blood of the chieri—and their laran—flowed through Comyn veins.

  Their voices came clearer now as they sang through the slow, stately movements of their dance. Four moons swung through the pellucid sky, drenching it in multihued pastel light.

  Part lament, part joy, the words resonated through Eduin. His body felt strangely light, as if the chieri’s song transmuted his mortal flesh into glass. He found himsel
f moving among them, these people whom no man had seen for hundreds of years, known only by legend. Their blood flowed in his veins, sang in his laran, his very soul. They turned to him with those knowing, luminous eyes, and held out their hands in welcome.

  The Yellow Forest and the White, the slow, slow turning of the stars . . . the pain of exile, the seasons in their cycle like the beating of an immense living heart. . . .

  And most of all, the endless dance of sky and tree, of hands and voices intertwined, so calm and sad and joyous as to break his heart, fading now. . . .

  Fading. . . .

  Eduin’s next waking came more quickly. His senses had grown even sharper, as had his hunger. He had slept deeply, wandering in dreams that slipped away with each passing heartbeat. A rank smell arose from his body, a miasma of stale sweat, gutter filth, and the sodden reek of ale. His gorge rose at it.

  There was no food, only the full pitcher. With an effort, he gulped down the water, which he now recognized as a dilute tincture of kirian, a psychoactive distillate used in the Towers for treating threshold sickness and other psychic maladies.

  Eduin frowned as he finished the last of it. Only someone with training would know how to make the stuff, let alone administer it properly. It was clearly beneficial in his case. He could not have fallen into the hands of anyone with Tower training. If he had, he would not be in such a hovel, nor would he still be at liberty.

  No, that transgression would not be soon forgotten.

  His unknown benefactor had done more than refill the pitcher. Charcoal glowed in the little brazier, giving off a comforting warmth. The pile at the end of the table turned out to be clothing, a heavy tunic and drawstring trousers, worn and crudely patched, but clean.