The Second God (3 page)

I sipped the wine, then set the glass down on a side-table. There was no purpose in prevaricating. Yannassia always liked to get straight to the point. “Ly wants to attend the Challenge this summer. He feels the need to demonstrate his power, to remind his people who he is. But it would mean allowing his magic to grow for a while.”

“Ah, interesting,” Yannassia said. “I heard that the Blood Ceremony will be a bigger affair this year. The decision is yours, of course…”

“I’d like your approval, though,” I put in quickly.

“Hmm, so you are minded to agree?”

“His people treat him with disrespect. It would do no harm to show them what he can do.”

“You mean to put on a bit of a show, then? Arrive on the eagles, that sort of thing?”

“Yes, although many of his people have connections to beasts, so that is not at all unusual, but Ly is the only one who can connect to all of them.”

“Ah, I see. Well, I have no objection. He has been very well-behaved while he has been in Kingswell. You have managed him beautifully, Drina.
Both
your men, in fact. I was sure they would kill each other when you first set them up in the same apartment, but they get along rather well, I think.”

She saw my rueful grimace, but there was no hiding Arran’s disaster. “Unfortunately, it seems I cannot manage my drusse as well as I would like. He has been drawn in by the Gurshmontas, and was induced to reveal something of the Kallanash situation.”

Yannassia was too well-trained to betray the extent of her dismay, but she huffed a breath, and her words were sharper than usual. “I am disappointed, Drina. He should know better than to be seduced into indiscretion. But he has always had a weakness, we know that. I suppose they set one of the pretty young daughters to trap him.”

“No, quite the opposite. It was Shallack himself, and the old lady – many of the leading family figures. He thought he was safe with them.” Poor Arran! It was the lack of pretty young women which had drawn him in. He knew his own vulnerability, but amongst the older generation he’d not seen the danger. And they’d flattered him and fussed over him, and offered him the finest dishes and wine – and he’d grown too relaxed. Over time, he’d let slip a whole host of small but significant dribbles of information, only realising his error too late.

“This I do not like, Drina,” Yannassia said. “Our people are very vulnerable. I do not want Shallack Gurshmonta rushing in and starting a panic out there.”

“I have taken measures,” I said. “I talked to Shallack privately after the Trade Council.”

“Did you threaten him, or offer inducements?” Yannassia said sweetly.

“Both, of course! I believe – I hope – he will be circumspect, but we should let the specialists know of this.”

“Certainly. But I cannot let this pass without censure. You realise I could have him executed for this?”

Fear roared through me. “No harm has come of it! Shallack will be discreet. He understands the stakes.”

“Perhaps, but it is a betrayal, nevertheless. A lashing, maybe.”

“And how will you explain it? There would have to be a trial, and reasons given, and you cannot do that without revealing everything. If it must remain a secret, then you cannot punish Arran publicly.”

She clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Very true. Besides, for your sake I am minded to be merciful. I have had a couple of complaints about Arran overspending his allowance, so I shall censure him for that. In public, so that the Gurshmontas will know what we are about. You will bring Arran to me in – oh, three suns should be enough to make him sweat a little, then I will give him a thorough scolding. And tell Ly that he will need to request permission officially to attend the Challenge, so he will have to petition me at an assembly.”

I nodded, but my heart sank. I wasn’t sure which of my two men would have the greater dread of the prospect before them.

In the end, it was Ly who was most terrified of his encounter with the Drashona. Arran was noble-born, and well used to the ways of court. He’d regularly shared a relaxed morning board with Yannassia, and seen her ill and afraid and dragged from her bed at midnight; it made her image as an imposing ruler less than terrifying. So he donned his best formal clothes, and waited patiently to be summoned, and then held his head respectfully lowered while she lectured him. And afterwards, he was just as ebullient as ever. He was more afraid of
me
, as it happened, for I had the power to terminate his drusse contract. Not that I ever planned to, but I wondered sometimes just what it would take for me to take that step.

Ly was a different matter. He’d never adapted well to Bennamore court formality, and unless he was absolutely forced to attend some function in his official capacity as my husband, he was happier keeping to the apartment, or working on his small farm on the edge of the town. The farm had been a wedding gift from one of the noble families, probably because it was too small to be worked economically. Maybe they expected us to turn it into a summer estate. But Ly loved it and kept a whole range of animals there, wild ones as well as domesticated types, and it had become a place people went to on rest-suns to look at all the strange creatures.

Yannassia held assemblies quite regularly, to greet visiting dignitaries, hear petitions, initiate legal matters and, occasionally, dole out punishments. The nobles flocked to them like bees to flowers. They listened and watched and whispered together in corners, but mostly it reassured them that they were still important to the realm. It was my natural domain, too, where I kept track of the shifting alliances amongst the noble houses and watched for any budding threat to Yannassia’s position.

It was all too formal for Ly, though. “Do I have to speak?” he asked, for the thousandth time. “You can speak for me, you know all the proper things to say.”

“I will be with you, and I can prompt you if you forget what to say. But it will be better if you can say the words yourself.”

And it would have been a lot easier if he could read, but he’d never wanted to learn. Sometimes I read aloud to him, if I found a passage in a book that might interest him, but as often as not it confused him. He couldn’t understand the idea that a book was written by someone else, not me, and the words I read were not mine. Words written hundreds or even thousands of years ago by people long dead were beyond his comprehension.

“Don’t you have storytellers in the Clanlands?” I’d asked him once. “People who tell you the histories – where you came from, great events, that sort of thing?”

But he didn’t seem to understand the question.

He hated the clothes, too. “I feel like a goose trussed up for the spit,” he grumbled, even though it was a modified version of his own people’s costume.

“You look rather splendid,” Arran said. “That hat suits you. Do you want to borrow a sword?”

But Ly shuddered. By the time we got him to the assembly, he was shaking from head to toe. The assembly chamber was designed to impress, and the endless marble pillars and larger-than-life statuary did nothing for Ly’s nerves. Nor did the collected majesty of the nobles and petitioners, all dressed in their stiffest, most formal clothes, whispering behind their hands as we passed by. I stood one side of Ly, and Arran, who more correctly should have been behind us, was on the other side, practically propping him up. I’d timed everything so that we wouldn’t have long to wait, but even so, I thought Ly was going to faint away from sheer terror.

The moment came when we stood before the Drashona’s dais, with Yannassia and her husband in their oversized thrones, and her multitude of advisors and mages and scribes and waiting women and guards around her, all gazing down in silence at Ly.

The senior steward banged his ceremonial spear on the floor. “Pray silence for the Most Powerful Lord Ly-haam, Dush-Drashonor of all Bennamore and its dominions, Banshar of the Dehavoran, who requests permission to petition the Most Powerful Lady Yannassia, the wise and enlightened Drashona of all Bennamore and its dominions.”

“
Byan shar e de’haa vyoran
,” Ly growled. The corruption of his name irritated him more than summer flies. When we had first married, and the scribes had tried to construct the proper title for him, somehow the words had been mistranscribed, and there was no correcting the mistake, since it was written in indelible ink on all the official documents.

“You may speak, Most Powerful,” Yannassia said, with an encouraging nod.

Ly bowed and launched into the little speech we’d rehearsed. Perhaps his annoyance gave him fluency, for to my surprise he was word perfect and didn’t stumble once, although it came out rather fast, with the intonation flattened.

“I hear your petition,” Yannassia said when he had finished. “I will consider it carefully, and give you my answer in the third assembly from this sun.”

Ly bowed again, shaking with relief, and we withdrew.

“Do you want to stay for a while to watch the fun?” I said, reaching for a glass of wine as a tray went past.

“Fun?” The look of horror on his face made me laugh.

“It’s not a bad idea to be seen at these affairs occasionally,” I said. “You’re so seldom around court, the nobles tend to forget you exist.”

But he shook his head, making his soft curls bounce violently. “You stay if you want. I should like to leave now. If you permit.”

“We will all go. There is nothing else of interest this sun.”

I took a sip of the wine and then regretfully abandoned it on a side table.

~~~~~

Yannassia held a private meeting with the specialists, to discuss Arran’s mistake. The specialists were a small part of the Elite Guards, trained in secrecy to undertake any task necessary for Bennamore’s safety considered too dark for the army to undertake. When kin of my Icthari father had tried to avenge some perceived slight by killing me and my two siblings, Zandara and Axandor, it was specialists who had crept in disguise into Icthari lands to assassinate the perpetrators.

The meeting was held in one of the inner rooms of Yannassia’s apartment, small and intimate. The location was deliberately chosen. It was unlikely that a specialist would withhold information from the Drashona, but in such a confined space nothing could be hidden. The smallest nuance of expression could be clearly read.

Yannassia’s drusse-born son, Hethryn, was also present, his first time at such a meeting. He was eighteen now, and likely to be appointed Yannassia’s heir in the autumn, relieving me of that burden, so his mother considered it time to introduce him to some of the secrets of the court.

Both the specialists in attendance were known to me. Rythmarri was only thirty-six, slim, dark and so unmemorable, you’d pass her in the street without noticing, but she was as astute as anyone I’d ever met. She’d done her share of creeping about in disguise and, perhaps, assassinations, but now she was resident at Kingswell, and in charge of what was known as the eastern project on the Plains of Kallanash.

The other specialist was almost as familiar to me as a brother, for we’d grown up together. Lathran was the son of the mage guards assigned to my birth mother, and he’d irritated me intensely when we were children. I’d never even tried to be polite to him. Once he grew up he’d fallen spectacularly in love with me, and I’d rewarded his devotion by seducing him, in one of my stupider plots to disgrace myself and persuade the Drashona I was unsuitable heir material. Fortunately, this worked out well for Lathran, who was sent to train with the Elite Guards, and they discovered that his unmemorable features and ability to blend in anywhere made him the perfect spy.

After Yannassia had explained the problem to them, Rythmarri said to me, “What exactly do the Gurshmontas know?”

Straight to the point. I liked that. “That we have people in place at one of the Karningers’ walled settlements on the southern plains, that they are hidden but would be in grave danger if discovered. That
we
would be in grave danger if they are discovered.”

“They do not know which settlement?”

“Not explicitly, but it’s not hard to guess, is it? There’s only one it could be.”

“Greenstone Ford,” Hethryn put in eagerly.

“Precisely.” I smiled at him. Hethryn said little, but he was observant and clever. Good-looking, too, in the same blond-haired way as Yannassia. He would make an admirable Drashon, in time.

Rythmarri turned her penetrating gaze on him. “Tell me all you know of it,” she said.

He didn’t hesitate. “First settled about twenty years ago in the aftermath of the political upheaval in the Karningplain, as a farming and craft community, trading with others upriver. About seven years ago, when a temple was built there, it expanded very quickly and there was an influx of newcomers, including large numbers of soldiers. But I do not know why,” he added, flashing the smile that had turned many a young lady to quivering incoherence.

He received no answering smile. “No one knows why,” Rythmarri said. “There are thousands of them, these soldiers. They wear golden armour, and they never speak – not in public, at any rate. They are a ferociously disciplined force, established originally to guard the Karningers’ temples, and at first, as they spread into the plains settlements, that was all they did – build a temple, and guard it. Nothing else. Move on to the next settlement, build, guard. But something about Greenstone Ford stopped them. They made half-hearted approaches to the south – Rinnfarr Gap, a long-settled town – but the council there wanted no Karningplain temple, and the soldiers abandoned the idea. They stayed at Greenstone Ford, and after they built their temple, they started building – well, army barracks, I suppose you would call them, but huge. And more and more of them poured in.”

“So they are setting up an army there?” Hethryn said in alarm. “An invasion force?”

“They certainly have the capability to invade, if they wish to,” Yannassia said. “If we give them reason to. And if they find out that there are Bennamore spies in their midst…”

“Our army is strong,” Hethryn said. “We have recovered well from the war against the Blood Clans, and we are at peace with all our neighbours. Defending ourselves would not be a problem, surely?”

“That is the question we are wrestling with at the moment,” Rythmarri said, with a grimace. “Lathran, you have just come from Greenstone Ford, what is your opinion?”

They talked back and forth for some time, without coming to any conclusions. These golden-armoured soldiers were so secretive that estimates of their numbers varied from five thousand to fifty, and no one had the least idea what they planned to do with so many.

“Well, this is not very satisfactory,” Yannassia said. “So many trained soldiers just round the tip of the Sky Mountains from us, yet we have no idea why. We do not even know if they have any hostile intent, or are simply following some plan of their own which has nothing to do with us.”

“Perhaps we should ask them,” I said.

They stared at me in bemusement, but then Hethryn laughed. “You mean, send a diplomatic mission?”

“Well, why not?” I said. “They are only a few suns’ march from our closest border, and they sit directly on our main trading route to the Karningplain. It is not unreasonable to extend the hand of friendship to our new neighbours.”

“What a splendid idea!” Hethryn said. “I should love to be part of that! But I suppose you will say I am too young again.”

“And so you are,” Yannassia said.

“I am older than Drina was when she went to see the Blood Clans.”

“And look how badly that turned out,” I murmured.

“Phooey. You fixed everything nicely.” He grinned at me mischievously.

“Idiot boy,” I said, ruffling his hair.

“You and Ly could fly over there to have a look,” he added.

“I don’t think—”

“An excellent idea,” Yannassia said crisply. “You would only be gone a few suns. It would give us a different view of the place.”

“A bird’s eye view,” Hethryn giggled.

Everyone else laughed, but I sighed. When you can fly aback a giant eagle, everyone thinks you have nothing better to do than to shoot about the countryside. It was surprising how often there was a message or package too urgent for the roads. It was not that I minded, but sometimes I wished there were more people able to fly. The mages could do it, if they chose, using their magic to connect to the birds but mages were too important to be spared for running airborne errands. I liked to think I was important, but as the Drashona’s heir, and soon to be supplanted by Hethryn, I was clearly not essential to the running of the realm.

Arran hated the idea, as usual. “I wish I could fly on an eagle,” he lamented. “You two have all the fun, and I always get left behind.”

He looked so woebegone that I stretched up to kiss him. “We will only be gone for – oh, four suns, maybe five.”

“We could do it in less time,” Ly said. “A sun-crossing there, a sun-crossing to look around and a sun-crossing back. Arran would not have time to miss you.”

“I always miss Drina when she is away from me,” Arran said, glowering at Ly. “Even for an hour.”

“And I miss you, too,” I said hastily. “But really, I think it would be best if we don’t try to rush this operation. I should like to check the roads as we go, to see if there is anything amiss along the way, and we should keep an eye out for Vahsi movements as well. So I think we will take two suns to get there. Then we can take our first look at this settlement at dawn, when the gates open. A sun looking around, and then, if the eagles are up to it, we can fly back in one sun.”