The common room was a large airy room. Three long and sturdy wooden tables with antique-looking tall-backed chairs filled most of the space. Along one of the walls was a bar. From behind the counter, his favorite place, Jirve loved to serve good home-brewed beer and ale, and to the better customers, quality aged wine. (A tavernskeeper at heart, Jirve had once worked in a City tavern, before he had prospered and acquired his own place.)
It was a clean, well-kept place, the White Roads. The counter and the tabletops were always scrubbed clean, and the floors mopped often. There were sentimental pictures of pale silver flowers and smiling poised family dinners covering the walls—pictures which would glow with uniform orange as soon as the monochrome was turned on, and at which Maertella the cook used to laugh privately, and so did most of the customers. Those pictures, the cook used to say, “look exactly what they were worth.”
At the moment, there was only one man in the common room, besides Nilmet and the innkeeper. Present in body but not in spirit, he was a well-dressed aged merchant, asleep in a comfortable chair in the corner of the room.
Glancing at him, Nilmet was continually reminded of the paradox of being, yet not being in one place, during the condition of sleep.
“There’s a fine aroma coming from the back,” said Nilmet, forgetting philosophy, his mouth watering with anticipation.
“Not fine, heavenly. Yes sir, Maertella knows how to please the palate. Excellent woman!”
For the hundredth time since his stay here, Nilmet refrained from saying that one same thing, giving that one simple nuptial hint. Really, it was none of his business.
Jirve began on another yawn.
From outside came the sound of voices. Abruptly one of the stablehands dashed in. “Master Jirve, come quick! There’s fine lords and ladies arrived, their carriage’s at the gates, they were attacked at the crossroads, they say, the driver is dead—”
Jirve Lan hated when his yawn was interrupted. It left something vaguely unsatisfying behind it, an altogether unpleasant feeling.
But the mention of lords and ladies brought him instantly awake, as excited greed entered his bloodstream together with the adrenaline.
“Excuse me, friend, business calls again,” he said to Nilmet, who nodded somewhat sleepily. Jirve then quickly rose to follow the stablehand.
Nilmet sighed, glancing at the seven tiny orange-lit figures of the Tilirr on the abandoned game board, and watched the innkeeper exit, carrying orange shadows with him into the black of the outside. He then got up also and went over to the bar, selected a clean mug from the wooden rack and discreetly poured himself something cold and fizzy from the tap. He leaned more easily against the counter, and took a blissful swallow.
The delicious smell from the kitchen drifted stronger.
* * *
Postulate Three: Rainbow is Balance.
* * *
In all of Tronaelend-Lis there was not a man being torn in more different directions than the one who now stood before a tall oval mirror in a tiny alcove of the Regents’ Palace.
He was Chancellor Rollen Lirr, heading the Ministry of State for the last thirty-four years, first advisor to the current Regent, and the Regent before him. More accurately, he was first advisor to the Regent and Regentrix, for the older sister of Hestiam Grelias was as much embroiled in the heart of politics as her somewhat less enthusiastic brother.
Chancellor Lirr was a man of sixty-odd years, with an intellectual, soft-voiced manner and a receding hairline. He possessed the gloss of diplomatic finesse that the Regent himself lacked, and which the Regentrix disdained even though she could be flawless if she set her mind to it.
Lirr stood and looked at the gray image of himself in the mirror, looked into his own monochrome eyes. He waited thus for a span of several seconds, motionless, hoping to catch a flicker of insecurity, of ill composure, so that he could eradicate it with several deep calming breaths. He always prepared himself thus before going out of this secret chamber adjacent to the large State Room, to face the endless petitioners and the rest of the political machine.
Balance was a vital thing. One must always appear calm, pleasant, polite, and yet, always confident and never deferential. One must always appear the Chancellor, even if inside, his heart raced, and sweat congealed lightly in his pores, ready to break free. One must be able to ingest any news without blinking or twitching any of the facial muscles. That would be allowed later, when alone, in the privacy of this little cubicle. And above all, one must never fail the Regents.
Balance was more and more a difficult thing to maintain, especially now, with things being the way they were. Out of the east, the sudden unexpected appearance of a mysterious element—whether a people, a nation, a land—that was hard to evaluate, for little was known yet. So far, the only known variable was this Lord Araht Vorn, one who claimed he was an Ambassador sent from this mysterious eastern source.
Lord Araht Vorn.
What is one to think of a great dark man—a giant—who had come accompanied by a mere dozen men, riding into the City through the toll-free Southern Gates? True, his honor guard, though meager, was comprised of powerful-looking, feral men, the like of which were hardly ever seen in Tronaelend-Lis. It was also true that the trappings of their monster warhorses shone with the pale gray fire of diamonds, and their sheathed blades were longer than any war sword known. But what was most unusual was that the riders managed to pass unchallenged, unquestioned, and unnoticed despite their imposing size, through the heart of the City, and came to Dirvan.
They had ridden all the way to the Inner Gates of the Regents’ Palace. And there they stopped, dark, relentless, silent, by their very presence effectively blocking the entrance to the Palace. Faces remained concealed by the lowered helmet visors, making it impossible to guess what manner of men they were, impossible to see their eyes.
When hailed by the Palace Guards, they remained mute, merely sat their mounts, with one man before them (later to be identified as Lord Vorn) greater and haughtier than the rest. Neither did they respond to the Captain of the Guard, nor his superior, who was summoned by an emergency dispatch from the Military Quarter.
When an attempt was made to forcibly remove them from before the Gates, a terrible wonder occurred. None of the dozen had moved, but the Palace Guards attacking them were suddenly perceived by all onlookers to stiffen and fall dead, like leaves all around.
Eyewitnesses later swore that there had been no warning, that they were stricken by an invisible psychic attack, an impossible gale of something, some numbing force. . . .
This bizarre encounter concluded in awe-stricken silence.
The silence continued until the Minister General himself came to address them from a tall parapet of the Palace Walls, and identified himself as representative of authority. It was then that the dark giant answered him.
“I would speak to your King!” he uttered, like thunder. The voice was low, hollow, accented, and peculiarly amplified. It lifted echoes among the Palace Walls of monochrome stone.
And the sentries that had come out in force to surround the Palace were imbued with an even greater fear upon hearing that voice than they were upon seeing their comrades fall mysteriously stricken.
The Minister General, Lord Raelin Barsadt, allowed a second of silence, while he thought furiously of all possible repercussions of his next words.
As he stood considering, one ordinary soldier, moved by who knows what insane god, yelled out brazenly to the dark emissaries of the unknown:
“We have no King, strangers! Don’t you know that, or have you come from so far that news of the greater world mean nothing to you? If you would speak to our King, then you will speak to a dead man! He sleeps forever in a Tomb, while a Regent rules Tronaelend-Lis, our City. It is the Regent you must seek now, and no other!”
Whatever had prompted the man to speak did not matter, for he was silenced by his Captain. Later, the man was to plead at his Court Martial that he had no idea wh
at had come over him at that instant, as though another had come to possess him, his lips, his mind. However, this strange outburst had bought Lord Barsadt the time he needed to formulate his reply.
“It is true, O visitors to our City,” spoke the Minister General. “If you seek audience with our Highest, you must seek the Regent Hestiam Grelias and the Regentrix Deileala Grelias. But you must first identify yourselves, and explain your hostile manner. For, I swear if you do not, despite the fact that you may appear invincible and wield unknown powers, no one here will receive you. And I promise, you will still be sitting here until the New Rainbow comes!”
A pause.
Maybe it was the casual reference to the Rainbow that evoked some microscopic response from the dark ones below. Lord Barsadt saw a barely noticeable stiffening of one of the man-figures. A twitch of a finger upon the pommel of a great longsword.
The dark giant spoke.
“I am Araht Vorn, Lord Prime, serving the Twilight One, whose name will not be pronounced until I face your Regent. My lord has sent me, his ambassador from the twilight place that is Qurth, to prepare you. I will say nothing more until I stand within these walls and face the one you call Regent. Therefore, open your gates, and let us enter!”
What was the Minister General to do? The logical thing was to scornfully drive off these intruders with some reinforcement from the Military Quarter. But obviously, these were not to be removed by normal means. Should he then command the Inner Gates to be opened, and allow them access to the heart of the City? What if that resulted in deadly harm to the Grelias whom he was sworn to protect? Something had to be done now, in order not to lose face before them. But—did it even matter if he were to lose face? Who were they anyway? What—
Lord Barsadt felt his mind become unusually dilute, his thinking more than normally muddled for some reason, while a small sickening sense of wrong began to stir in his guts. (Again, was it their effect upon his mind? Could they do that much?)
In his time, Tronaelend-Lis has never been faced with any such direct hostility. The fact that there was no real standing Army, only many very small and specialized Warrior Guilds, suddenly sank in as a flippant oversight on everyone’s part. There had been no hostile invasions for hundreds of years, not even hints of such, and the City had grown corpulent and placid, cloaking itself with a false sense of security.
Now the Minister General considered this grimly. Fortunately, messages had been urgently relayed to the Palace itself, and as a result, the Lord Chancellor Lirr was on his way here, to take over in his official State capacity.
Lirr the diplomat arrived and immediately assessed the situation before him, both on the Palace parapets and at the Inner Gates below. He saw the sheen of sweat on Lord Barsadt’s brow. He saw the stone-like dark ones below, and their giant commander. He saw the dead.
And Lirr felt the impact of responsibility for this City, the weight of the centuries, come to settle upon him at last. All the former concerns of State, all the minor unpleasant details, all the skirmishes of the Palace and Grelias household, were now reduced into insignificance—like the last beams of the sun before this encroach of twilight.
Rollen Lirr knew that in this moment and none other, his function as Chancellor took on meaning. He knew all of this in a split second of realization, during which a universe was born and collapsed inside his mind.
Outwardly, Chancellor Lirr did not even blink.
The gray sun danced with pale silver fire upon the surface of the large splendid medallion of State that hung from a great pleated chain on his chest. “Now, what is the matter here?” he said in a loud, powerful, absolutely bored voice, the sound of which carried to the dark twelve below.
“As you can see, my lord, we have somewhat of a problem on our hands,” said the Minister General, sounding like an idiot.
Chancellor Rollen Lirr smiled then, charming, strong, suave. “My dear Lord Barsadt,” he said. “What nonsense. I see only a misunderstanding. Our guests have been mistreated and naturally they found it necessary to defend themselves.”
Lord Barsadt stared at him in shock, while Chancellor Lirr continued, this time directing his words to those below.
“I am Lord Rollen Lirr, Chancellor of State. And you are—Lord Vorn, I believe? On behalf of the Regents Grelias, I apologize for the delay, and welcome you and yours, Lord Vorn, to the City.”
“What are you doing, Lirr?” whispered Lord Barsadt. “They are dangerous, we have no idea what they want—”
“Thank you, my lord, I realize. All is under control . . .” responded Chancellor Lirr in a similar whisper, while his calm, balanced face showed nothing.
And gesturing dramatically to the sentries, he intoned loudly, so that no one would again doubt his intent:
“Open the Inner Gates!”
CHAPTER 3
Lord Elasand Vaeste drove the carriage in silence. Night forest hurtled past them in shards of broken shadows and snaking branches, and the road ahead was a patch of invisible guesswork.
He said nothing. His aunt Dame Molhveth Beis, and cousin Lixa Beis, cocooned within the false safety of the equipage, would only be upset further by words.
There must be none. Otherwise, there would be reproaches.
“Elas,” Dame Beis would start. “That poor man who drove our carriage. If only you’d agreed to an escort, he would be living.”
“This attack was absolutely unforeseen,” he might retort, or, “Escort or no, he could have been killed anyway, and all of us even, if the assassins had been twice in number.”
“But no, Elas, my boy,” she would continue, “Nothing is ever unforeseen,” or, “Some escort is better than none! And don’t you argue with me, telling me that we might all be dead! We aren’t, and we have only the gods to thank for that. Why, you may as well say that if it weren’t for the moon causing tides, there’d be no waves on the southern sea, and hence no storms, and no broken ships or drowned men—”
And at that point his gentle cousin, whose eyes were cool like the moon, would step in to say, “Mother, I don’t quite follow you there,” or, “Mother, don’t you think Elas knows all that? I don’t think you should blame him. It was but fate.”
But Elasand knew equally well that soft words and gentle looks from Lixa meant only that she held her own displeasure well in check, only to pour it out later, in some insinuating dark manner. Lixa was gently serpentine, her moon-eyes hypnotic in their intensity, her smile a sweet shadow. And her reproach was, like that fate she liked to invoke so often, absolute. Such intensity was inherent in her bloodline.
Beis was an old name. Almost as old as Vaeste. The two lines ran, often side by side, for hundreds of years. At the Court of Tronaelend-Lis, they belonged to the elite group of highest-ranking aristocrat dynasties, on par with that of the Regents.
The Regents’ line, Grelias, it is said, came originally from such a line of nobility, one of the many offshoots of the greater vines, so that in truth its only distinction was honorific. It was the Kings’ line, sublime Monteyn, that had held in it a higher distinction than nobility, a seed of deity.
But the line of Monteyn was extinct.
Monteyn had died out almost four hundred years ago, with the last King bearing its name and being of its blood, lying—it is claimed—in the semi-death and non-life of Stasis, the body mysteriously preserved in a glass casket. To this day, visitors to Tronaelend-Lis approach the Mausoleum to view a wax-like face from a great distance, in the silver monochrome splendor of marble, mother-of-pearl, and grayness of gold. The face could as likely belong to a porcelain doll.
Thus lies Alliran Monteyn, dead at the age of twenty-seven, upon coming into his full power. And his body, hermetically sealed, has not decayed for three hundred and eighty years.
But that was ancient history. Beis and Vaeste, and others like them, ruled by the Regent Grelias, now headed a radiant decadent Court in Tronaelend-Lis, city of thousands, the capital of the West Lands.
And th
e West Lands themselves, great wooded expanses, lay for a thousand leagues in all four directions, with mountain ranges piercing heaven in the north, with the faraway southern sea down to which poured all the rivers, and on both sides, east and west, other lands, and forests all throughout. The world was one great forest in those days, it seemed. And the deserts of sun-drenched silver, fabled and unbelievable, were said to be far, far west, or maybe east, beyond human thought.
* * *
Postulate Four: Rainbow is Unexpected Wonder.
* * *
The Family Olvan had claimed as its color silver, or the “standard of the world.” Imogenn Olvan thought this choice was highly appropriate. Bland, stoic, ordinary, her Family was the standard indeed. For it had produced such insipid offspring as herself.
Imogenn was the first daughter of Reanne Olvan and Barand of the Artisans Guild, a man not of noble blood. Reanne, in her youth, had been one of those capricious social coquettes who—because of their beauty—reigned Dirvan for seasons on end. She flirted, played the game of glances, and in one such encounter conceived a child from a man half her rank. Such an outrage it was to her proper kinfolk that to atone for it, as all good manners dictated, Reanne must honorably bring up the child herself.
And that she did. From a wild thing, Reanne very suddenly converted into a proper matron. If possible, she was even better at it than at her previous role. From her motherly endeavors, the pale, small, quietly unattractive girl-child received fine schooling, and random expressions of half-love.
Since the first, Imogenn had been nearly voiceless. She had been immediately accepted into the solemn ranks of the Great Family, by all the stern aunts, uncles, cousins, and various other adults, who would gaze upon her small wispy figure with serious eyes. And she felt overwhelmed, drowning in that non-judgmental yet harsh sea of “family.” For, she knew, even back when she was four summers old, that somehow, despite their acceptance, she would never completely be one of them.