Chapter 1
From the rocky outcropping high on the mountain slope, Minna saw the town below as an ugly brown splotch amid an otherwise beautiful forested mountain valley. She attributed Cadlius’s exclamation, “Ah, civilization!” to the typical male inability to see the true value of things; the thought made her uneasy. Fint, the tracker, only grunted as he walked his horse along the edge of the rocks that provided them with their view.
Noticing movement, Minna’s turned to a pair of pegasi far off to her right gliding up the valley. She had long ago given up on pointing out such beauty to Cadlius. Fint probably knew the pegasi were there but judged that since they were not dangerous, they were not important. In the past three weeks he had shown himself to be at least as blind to aesthetic beauty as Cadlius.
Then she thought to glance over at Jeffers. His stare was fixed on the pegasi; his expression carried a hint of sadness.
Fint’s voice bounced among the rocks. “As I thought, our prey went to town. He doesn’t think we could have followed him this far. Look, he has made no attempt to hide his tracks.”
Even from where she was sitting, Minna could see the set of hoofprints that paralleled those of Fint’s horse. She followed them with her eye through a gap in the rocks and twenty paces down the slope.
“Hopefully, he’s still down there,” said Cadlius as he squirmed on his horse. He was trying to push a stick far enough through a gap in the armor around his shoulder to scratch his back.
“Hopefully, he stayed only long enough to resupply,” Minna said. “Most of these wilderness towns are formed by bands who think they can create a shining example of civilization for the rest of the world to follow. Maybe some of them are right, that’s why the Emperor has allowed fringe settlements so much autonomy. But most are intolerant, and none would tolerate the likes of Zin.”
“True enough, m’lady,” said Fint. “And true indeed of K’non. Earl Noreon granted this land to Sir Terrion because of his service during the Troll Wars. Sir Terrion believes in using a heavy hand against those who do not act properly.” With a snap of his reins, Fint started down the slope.
Cadlius followed promptly, the clattering of his armor scaring a flock of birds out of the brush that lined the base of the rocks.
“I guess it’s time for me to put away my toys,” Jeffers said softly. From his saddlebags he pulled out gloves that left his fingers free and ended halfway up his forearms. The thick leather around the wrist hid the watch he wore.
There was no sense in him wearing that timepiece that Minna could see. Her people divided the day into fifteen bells; they had no understanding of the ‘hours’ that Jeffers used. Furthermore, the `day’ in Jeffers’s homeland was shorter than her planet’s day by over half a bell. This pushed Jeffers’s ‘noon’ closer to the start of each day until a day had two ‘noons.’ The calendar functions on the watch were even more useless; the twenty months that made up her world’s thousand-day year had nothing in common with the twenty-eight to thirty-one day months in Jeffers’s much shorter year.
The only reason Jeffers had for keeping the watch was that, other than his memories, it was the only thing he had left from his home world. With it, he knew the day and time for the people he had left behind, and that made it easier to imagine what his friends and family might be doing at that moment. That was important to him.
Minna thought that sentimentality in a male was a rare treasure. However, in Jeffers’s case it was foolish. The most common way for people on her world to get technology like that was to receive it as a gift from a minion of evil. Wearing it invited suspicion; Jeffers admitted already being forced to flee one town, barely escaping the Temple Guardsmen sent to bring him in for spiritual cleansing.
Even worse was Jeffers’s ability to manipulate both magic and technology. Nobody else in her world was known to have that ability. For any other magician, artifacts like Jeffers’s flashlight blinked out on tough. Those for whom the flashlight remained lit could gain no advantage from a magical sword or ring, and they could never learn even the most basic spells. She had watched Jeffers levitate his flashlight by spell, using it to illuminate the writing in the books while he recited the incantations contained within.
Most people would explain this as the work of two people; Jeffers manipulating the magic, while some other creature — probably a minion of evil — manipulated the technology.
Minna did not discard that explanation easily. Jeffers’ own explanation, that being from a different planet gave him this unusual ability, sounded like hollow fantasy. But three weeks of traveling through the wilderness together had given her a chance to know him, and she had known few men pained as deeply as Jeffers by the suffering of others. If he had made a bargain with a devil, the devil was getting nothing in return.
After covering the watch, Jeffers slipped out of his light coat and unfastened the harness which held his pistol and ammunition around his chest. Rolling them up in his cloak, he buried them deep in the saddlebags that also held the flashlight and a hand-sized computer/recorder.
With the technology hidden, Jeffers followed the path Fint and Cadlius had broken. The tracker and warrior had vanished into the pines below. She stayed another moment to enjoy the beauty of near solitude in the wilderness. That moment passed much too quickly; both prudence and courtesy insisted that she join the others.
The steep slope of the mountain yielded gradually to the level floor of the valley. Trusting Fint’s expertise, Minna allowed her mind to wander and her senses to soak in the sights and smells. The suddenness with which the forest opened up into a plowed, and freshly planted field surprised her.
A wall of wooden logs on the far side, planted deep in a mound of earth yet three times an average man’s height, marked the outside edge of K’non. Planted in the slope in front of the wall were thousands of sharpened wooden spikes. Above and behind the wall was a wooden tower, its two guards standing next to a cocked and loaded ballistae. The weapon was pointed a little closer to Fint than a healthy concern for safety would suggest.
“They heard us coming,” Fint said.
“And didn’t like what they thought they heard,” Cadlius added.
Fint turned to the left, keeping to the trail which traffic had worn into the boundary between plowed field and forest. When they came around to where the guards from the next tower could see them, those guards turned their ballistae at the visitors, though theirs was not cocked.
“Friendly people,” Fint grunted.
As they approached the town’s only gate, Fint slowed, allowing Cadlius and Minna to move into the lead. Cadlius rode a step ahead and to the right of Minna where his sword arm and horse could best defend her. He took the position more out of habit than genuine fear for her safety. Jeffers stayed back with Fint and attempted to conceal himself by an aura of ordinariness; an illusion he never fully mastered.
The Gatekeeper planted his feet directly in front of Cadlius’s horse, forcing the guardian to stop. To Minna, the Gatekeeper said, “I do not know you. What brings you to K’non?”
“I am Varlet Minna, and I travel in the name of the Earl Chie Noreon of Malikii.”
“What type of mission would have you coming to our town by wilderness trail rather than road?” the guardsman sneered.
Anticipating the guardsman, Minna was already holding out the scroll containing her introduction. The Gatekeeper took the scroll and passed it to an older man standing behind him.
“Greetings from the Earl Chie Noreon of Malikii,” the older man read. “Please provide welcome to Varlet Minna, who serves me as Wardmaster in the Dungeons of Malikii, and to those who travel with her. They travel at my request and are due the hospitality fitting for one on courtly business. Should there be expenses associated with assisting her, beyond that due a guest of the Court, this Court will make any reasonable reimbursement.”
Handing the paper back to the Gatekeeper, the Guard added, “It appears authentic.’
The scroll also contained a drawing of Varlet Minna, enhanced by magic to be accurate in great detail. “My pardons, Varlet,” the Gatekeeper said, taking a pace back to give a deep, courtly bow. “Pardon my suspicions, but . . . if I may ask, my lady . . . why did you not come by road?”
“We are tracking an escapee from the Earl’s Dungeons. We did not travel here by road because the person we are tracking did not.”
“He came here?”
“Yesterday.”
The Gatekeeper’s eyes flashed a quick glance at his aide. “May I ask the name of this person you seek?”
“His name is Zin Kussad, though I doubt that is the name he used when . . . “
With a smile of relief the Gatekeeper said, “He is locked within the temple, my lady.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” said Fint. “We can be out of here by morning.”
Minna’s glance reminded the tracker that the casual speech she allowed in the wilderness was not fitting here. Meanwhile, her heart flew into a nervous pounding at the Guard’s news. When her attention returned to the Gatekeeper, he said, “I’m afraid, my lady, that your man got in a bit of trouble while he was here. You will need to talk to Deonta, the Matron of the Temple.”
“Would you be kind enough to tell me what kind of trouble?”
“I’m afraid he assaulted a Lady of the Temple.”
“He’s accused?”
“Well, that too, my lady. But nobody is doubting what he did. Half the town was witness. During the Procession of Receiving he was on the temple steps shouting heresies; denying all evidence that women are made with a calmness of mind that fits to be better planners of the affairs of home and country than men.”
Minna resisted the temptation to look at Jeffers. He has expressed the same idea during the trip, and argued with words like ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ against Sif’s Noble Order. Yet, he wore the pendant of a prophet of Sif and could call forth Her divine powers. It was one of a great many contradictions surrounding this foreigner. Reminding herself that Jeffers was male, she dismissed his arguments and returned her thoughts to the Gatekeeper.
The Gatekeeper did not recognize Minna’s distraction and continued, “A Lady of the Temple came down to answer his charges, and right in the middle of everything he suddenly reached out and pushed her. He knocked her down!”
“How badly was she hurt?” Minna asked, holding her breath against an answer she did not want to hear.
“Harm is not the issue, my lady. To attack a Lady of the Temple is to attack Sif herself. You can hardly expect us to let such a thing go unanswered. And to do such a thing on the temple steps . . . . The area will need resanctification.”
Minna let her breath out slowly so as not to reveal the relief she felt. “You not need worry about Zin any more. We will be taking him back to Malikii with us.”
“You will be taking his corpse, perhaps,” the Gatekeeper said, his anger forcing a brief lapse of formality for which his downcast eyes showed instant regret.
The anxiousness riding through Minna’s veins flashed into fear. She launched a futile prayer against the certainly that she had heard him correctly. “What do you mean, ‘take his corpse?’”
The elder man who had read the scroll stepped forward to answer her; the Gatekeeper bowed and backed away in recognition of the aide’s greater authority. “Varlet, unlike those in Malikii, we take seriously the fact that the Sif is the mother of all things. We owe her for everything that we have; for the food we eat, for the blessings bestowed upon us by those who serve Her at the temple and who channel Her powers for our benefit, for our very existence. She gives value to all things and has made those of us most like Her, our women, able to see the true value of all things. To strike one of Her servants is to strike Her. Can there be any greater crime? Even a murderer denies the value of only one life, and the life of a mere mortal at that. A defiler attacks all that gives life meaning, purpose, and value.”
“So you plan to execute him?” Minna asked.
“The greatest crime deserves the greatest punishment.”
“I must speak with Sir Terrion.”
“I’m afraid, my lady, that he is not here. He lead a patrol into the woods to drive off troll and hobgoblin raiders and is not due back for two weeks. The person you should speak to in his absence is Matron Deonta.”
“All the better,” Minna answered. She sighed gratitude at being allowed by bypass the formality of meeting first with Sir Terrion. The Noble Order ranked a Knight above a Matron, and tradition still gave the right of first visit to the highest ranking citizen independent of gender, but nothing of value could be accomplished in a meeting with a figure head.
Minna only needed to look up to see the Temple. It stood at the end of the street she faced; a large stone building above a massive pyramid. Yet the Gatekeeper found it necessary to point it out to her as he stepped aside. Minna maneuvered her horse around the Gatekeeper.