The Apogian War

Chapter 42

I glanced in, then wished I hadn't. Danilo was sitting on his cot,

hunched over in misery, and the arms-master and Hialmar were helping him gather his possessions. Danilo! What in all of Zandru's nine hells I could have happened? No wonder Father had been willing to plead with Dyant Could any sane man make a point of honor against such a child? Well, if he was old enough to be a cadet, he was old enough to bear the consequences of a rash act. I hardened my conscience and went on without speaking, I too had had such provocation-for some time, while my arm was still in a sling, I'd put myself to sleep nights thinking up ways to kill him-but I had kept my hands off my sword. If Danilo was not capable of self-restraint, the cadet corps was no place for him. By the time I came back to the Guard hall the men were gathering. Disciplinary assemblies were not common since minor offenses and punishments were handled by the officers or the cadet-master in private, so there was a good deal of whispered curiosity and muttered questions. I had never seen a cadet formally expelled. Sometimes a cadet dropped out because of illness or family trouble, or was quietly persuaded to re sign because he was unable physically or emotionally to handle the duties or the discipline. Octavien Vallonde's case had been hushed up that way. Damn him, that was Cyan's doing too! Cyan was already in place, looking stern and self-righteous. My fa ther came in, limping worse than I had ever seen him. Di Asturien brought in Danilo. He was as white as the plastered wall, his face taut and controlled, but his hands were shaking. There was an audible mur mur of surprise and dismay. I tried to barrier myself against it. Any way you looked at it, this was tragedy, and worse. My father came forward. He looked as bad as Danilo. He took out a long and formal document-I wondered if Cyan had brought it already drawn up-and unfolded it. "Danilo-Felix Kennard Lindir-Syrtis, stand forth," he said wearily. Danilo looked so pale I thought he would faint and I was glad di As turien was standing close to him. So he was my father's namesake, as well? Father began to read the document. It was written in casta. Like most hillsmen, I had been brought up speaking cahuenga and I fol lowed the legal language only with difficulty, concentrating on every word. The gist of it I knew already. Danilo Syrtis, cadet, in defiance of all order and discipline and against any and all regulations of the cadet corps, had willfully drawn bared steel against a superior officer, his cadet-master, Dyan-Gabriel, Regent of Ardais. He was therefore dismissed, disgraced, stripped of all honor and privilege and so forth and so on, two or three times over in different phraseology, until I sus pected that reading the indictment had taken longer than the offense. I was trembling myself with the accumulated leakage of emotion I could not entirely barricade in this crowd. Danilo's misery was almost physical pain. Darkovan looked ready to collapse. Get it over, I thought in anguish, listening to the interminable legal phrases, hearing the words now only through their agonized reverberations in Danilo's mind. Get it over before the poor lad breaks down and has hysterics, or do you want to see that humiliation, too? "...and shall therefore be stripped of honorable rank and returned to his home in disgrace...in token of which... his sword to be bro ken before his eyes and in the sight of all the Guardsmen together as sembled... This was my part of the dirty work. Hating it, I went and unfastened his sword. It was a plain Guardsman's sword, and I blessed the kind old man for that much mercy. And besides, I thought sourly, those heir loom swords are of such fine temper you'd need the forge-folk and Sharra's fires to make any impression on onel I had to touch Danilo's arm. I tried to give him a kindly thought of reassurance, that this wasn't the end of the world, but I knew it wasn't getting through to him. He flinched from my gauntleted hand as if it had been a red-hot branding iron. This would have been a frightful or deal for any boy who was not a complete clod; for one with chosen, possi bly a catalyst mind gap, I knew it was t*****e. Could he come through it at all without a complete breakdown? He stood motionless, staring straight forward, eyes half closed, but he kept blinking as if to avoid breaking into anguished tears. His hands were clenched into tight fists at his side. I took Danilo's sword and walked back to the dais. I gripped it be tween my heavily gauntleted hands and bent it across my knee. It was heavy and harder to bend than I'd realized, and I had time to wonder what I'd do if the damned thing didn't break or if I lost my grip and it went flying across the room. There was a little nervous coughing deep in the room. I strained at the blade, thinking, Break, damn you, break, let's get this filthy business over before we all start screaming! It broke, shattered with a sound shockingly like breaking glass. If any thing, I'd expected a noisy metallic resonance. One half slithered away the floor; I let it lie. Straightening my back I saw Regis' eyes full of tears. I looked across at Cyan.

For an instant his barriers were down. He was not looking at me, or at the sword. He was staring at Danilo with a hateful, intense, mocking, satiated look. A look of horrid, satisfied l**t. There was simply no other word for it. And all at once I knew-I should have known all along-exactly how and why Danilo had been persecuted, until in a moment of helpless desperation he had been goaded into drawing a knife against his perse cutor or possibly against himself. Either way, the moment the knife was loose from the sheath, Cyan had him exactly where he wanted him. Or the next best thing. I don't think I'll ever know how I got through the rest of the cere mony. My mind retains only shaken vignettes: Danilo's face as white as his shirt after the full-dress uniform tabard had been cut away. How shabby he looked. And how young! Dylan taking the sword from my hand, smirking. By the time my brain fully cleared again, I was out of the Guard hall and on the stairs to the Alton rooms. My father was wearily taking off his dress-uniform. He looked drawn and exhausted. He was really ill, I thought, and no wonder. This would make anyone sick. He looked up, saying tiredly, "I have all your safe conducts arranged. There is an escort ready for you, with pack animals. You can get away before midday, unless you think the snow's likely to be too heavy before nightfall." He handed me a packet of folded papers. It looked very official, hung with seals and things. For a minute I could hardly remember what he was talking about. The trip to Aldaran had receded very far. I put the papers into my pocket without looking at them. "Father," I said, "you cannot do this. You cannot ruin a boy's life through Cyan's spite, not again." "I tried to talk him out of it, Lew. He could have condoned it or handled it privately. But since he made it official, I couldn't pass it over. Even if it had been you, or the Hastur boy." "And what of Cyan? Is it soldierly to provoke a child?" "Leave Cyan out of it, son. A cadet must learn to control himself under any and all conditions. He will have the life and death of dozens, of hundreds, of men in his hands some day. If he cannot control his personal feelings. My father reached out, laying his hand on my " wrist in a rare caress. "My son, do you think I never knew how hard he tried to provoke you to the same thing? But I trusted you, and I was right. I'm disappointed in Dani." But there was a difference. Though he was perhaps harsher than most people thought an officer should be, Cyan had done nothing to me that was not permitted by the regulations of the cadet corps. I said so, adding, "Do the regulations require that the cadets must endure that from an officer too? Cruelty, even s******c discipline, is bad enough. But persecution of this kind, the threat of s****l attack" "What proof have you of that?" It was like a deluge of ice water. Proof. I had none. Only the satisfied, triumphant look on Dyan's face, the sickness of shame in Danilo, a telepathic awareness I had had no right to read. Moral cer tainty, yes, but no proof. I just knew. "Lew, you're too sensitive. I'm sorry for Dani, too. But if he had reason to complain of Dyan's treatment of him, there is a formal pro cess of appeal "Against the Comyn? He would have heard what happened to the last cadet to try that," I said bitterly. Again, against all reason, Father was standing with the Dover, with Cyan. I looked at him almost in disbelief. Even now I could not believe he would not right this wrong. Always. Always I had trusted him utterly, implicitly, certain that he would somehow see justice done. Harsh, yes, demanding, but he was al ways fair. Now Dyan had done-again!-what I had always known Cyan would do, and my father was prepared to gloss it over, let this monstrous injustice remain, let Cyan's corrupt and vicious revenge or whatever prevail against all honor and reason. And I had trusted him! Trusted him literally witph my life. I had known that if he failed in testing me for the Faltron gift, I would die a very quick, very painful death. I felt I would burst into a flood of tears that would unman me. Once again time slid out of focus and again, eleven years old, terrified but wholly trusting, I stood trembling before him, awaiting the touch that would bring me into full Dover birth right... or kill me! I felt the solemnity of that moment, horribly afraid, yet eager to justify his faith in me, his faith that I was his true born son who had inherited his gift and his power. . . . Power! Something inside me exploded into anguish, an anguish I must have been feeling through all the years since that day, which I had never dared let myself feel. He had been willing to kill me! Why had I never seen this before? Cold-blooded, he had been willing to risk my death, against the hope that he would have a tool to power. Power! Like Cyan, he didn't care what t*****e he inflicted to get it! I could still remember the exploding agony of that first contact. I had been so deathly ill for a long time afterward that, in his attentive love and concern, I had forgotten-more accurately, had buried-the knowledge that he had been willing to risk my death. Why? Because if I had proved not to have the gift, why, then... why, then, my life was of small concern to him, my death no worse He was looking up at me, appalled. He whispered, "No. No, my son, no. Oh, my boy, my boy, it wasn't like that!" But I slammed my mind shut, for the first time deaf to the loving words. Loving words merely to force his will on me again! And his pain now was for seeing his plans all go awry, when his puppet, his blind tool, his creature, turned in his hand! He was no better than Dyan then. Honor, justice, reason-all these could be swept aside in the ruthless hunger for power! Did he even know that Danilo was a catalyst telepath, that most sensitive and pow erful of talents, that talent thought to be almost extinct? For a moment it seemed that would be the last argument to move him. Danilo was no ordinary cadet, expendable to salve Cyan's bruised pride. He must be saved for the Comyn at all costs! With the very words on my lips, I stopped. No. If I told Father that, he would find some way to use Danilo too, as a tool in his driving quest for more power! Danilo was well freed of the Dover and lucky to be beyond our reach! My father drew back his extended hands. He said coldly, "Well, it's a long road to Alsha; maybe you'll calm down and see sense before you get there." I felt like saying Aldaran, hell! Go do your own dirty work this time, I'm still sick from the last job! I don't give a fart in a high wind for all your power politics! Go to Aldaran yourself and be damned to you! But I didn't. I recalled that I, too, was Aldaran, and Terran. I'd had it flung in my face often enough. They all took it for granted that I would feel enough shame at the disgrace of my origins to do anything, anything, to be accepted as Comyn and my father's heir. He'd kept me subservient, unquestioning, all my life, that way. But Terran blood, so Linnea had said, was no disgrace in the moun tains. It had amazed her that I thought it so. And the Aldarans, too, were kinsmen. My father had allowed me to think the Terrans and the Aldarans were evil. It had suited his purposes to let me think so. And maybe that was another lie, a step on his road to power.

I bowed with ironic submissiveness. "I am entirely at your command, Lord Faltron," I said and turned my back, leaving him without a farewell embrace or a word. And sealed my own doom.

Since Danilo's departure the cadet barracks had been silent, hostile, astir with little eddies of gossip from which Darkovan was coldly excluded. He was not surprised. Danilo had been a favorite and they identified Darkovan with the Dover who had brought about his expulsion. His own suffering, his loneliness-all the worse because for a time it had been breached-was nothing, he knew, to what his friend must have been feeling. Dani had turned on him that night, he realized, be use he was no longer just Darkovan, he was another persecutor. Another Dover. But what could have made him so desperate? He went over it again and again in his mind, without reaching any conclusions at all. He wished he could talk it over with Lew, who had been just as shocked and horrified by it. Darkovan had felt it in him. But Les had gone to Alsha, and Darkovan had no idea when he would be back. The day before the cadets were dismissed to their homes, to return next summer in Council season, Darkovan was scheduled for his regular practice session with Cyan Hardais. He went with the usual blend of ex citement and apprehension. He enjoyed his reputation among the ca dets as a swordsman too expert for ordinary teaching and the sessions with Dyan challenged him to the utmost, but at the same time he knew these sessions alienated him further from the other cadets. Besides he emerged from them battered, bruised and completely exhausted. Cadets were readying for practice in the little dressing room off the armory, strapping on the padded surcoats which were worn to protect against the worst blows. The heavy wood and leather practice swords could not kill, but they could inflict substantial injury and pain and even break bones. Darkovans flung off his cloak and tunic, pulling the ded coat over his head and flinching as he twisted his body to fasten the straps. His ribs were always sore these days. As he fastened the last buckle, Cyan strode in, threw his jerkin on a bench and got quickly into his own practice outfit. Behind the thick fencing-mask he looked like some giant insect. Impatiently he gestured Regis toward the practice room. In his haste to obey Darkovan s forgot to pick up his gauntlets, and the older man said harshly, "After all these months? Look here" He that out his own clenched fist, pointed to the lump on the tendons on the back of the hand. "I got that when I was about your age, I ought to make you try it one day without gloves; forget again and I will do just that. I promise you'd never forget an other time!" Feeling like a slapped child, Darkovan went back hastily and snatched up the heavily padded gamtlets. He hurried back. At the far end, one of the arms master's aides was giving young Gareth Lindir a lesson, pa tiently positioning and repositioning his arms and legs, shoulders and bands, after every separate stroke. Darkovan could not see their faces behind the masks, but they both moved as if they were bored with the business. Bruises were better than that, Regis thought as he hurried to join Cyan. The bout was brief today. Cyan moved more slowly than usual, al most awkwardly. Darkovan found himself recalling, with a faint embar rassment, a dream he had had some time ago, about fencing with Cyan. He couldn't remember the details,