Her voice was flat. “The djinn army is preparing to strike camp. I seek your counsel. Should I trigger the trap or let them advance into our land?”
More shock from the archons told Rap that the previous Keeper had not asked for advice like this. But then she had managed to avoid making this decision and had surely never been required to make a worse one.
“Archon Raim?”
The youngster’s distress showed as a writhing glow in the ambience. After a moment he spoke aloud. “I think not, Holiness,” he said hesitantly. ”That would be a crime beyond remorse. We have already offended the Gods enough. To slaughter sixty thousand . . .” His voice faded off into the sound of the storm.
“Archon Quaith?” The Keeper was taking them in order of age.
Quaith wrung her hands and then whispered, “No.”
“Reason?”
“It will reveal our existence to the Covin!”
But the Covin already knew, Rap thought. Or if it didn’t know, it suspected, and Zinixo could never live with suspicion. As had been prophesied, a woman with child had brought evil to the Accursed Land.
Rap should probably have been next after Quaith, but Thaile passed him over. All seven pixies spoke, and all seven said no. They mostly gave the same reasons as the first two, but Toom said that war now seemed likely and to initiate brutality on such a scale would antagonize potential allies—a logic that Rap thought showed the best sense yet. It was wrong, though. Neem was the oldest and last. His reedy voice quavered.
“No, Holiness. Surely we can mask our land in power so that the horde passes through without conflict? This has been done before.”
Not when Zinixo was running things, Rap thought. Thaile had given no reaction yet. And finally “Archon Rap?”
Rap’s mouth was dry, and he felt sick. “Yes. If the duty were mine, I would spring the trap.”
Eight cowled heads remained bent over the ice-coated grave. Seven shocked faces stared horror at him in the ambience. “Reason?”
“Two reasons. First, you cannot now avoid war with the Covin. In war you must seek to win. Backed by magic, that djinn army alone will ravage your land utterly, so you must destroy it while you have the chance. Second, the Covin has won every skirmish so far—the wardens, the imperor, the goblins, the legions, dragons, Warlock Olybino . . . It has met with no resistance. Unless we can chalk up a victory soon, our cause dies stillborn. To smite the djinns will send a signal to all those we must enlist, the sorcerers still uncommitted. It will show that the Covin can be beaten.”
The dread words died away into the steady beat of the rain on the forest canopy.
“Will it not cause revulsion, though?” Thaile said. “As Raim suggested, will they not recoil from joining an ally who launches such mass slaughter?”
“The djinns are not innocent peasants,” Rap said grimly. He hated his own logic, but he was sure he was right. “They are professional soldiers bent on aggression. And Zinixo began the atrocities. You saw the field of Bandor. Have you forgotten the legions?”
Thaile sighed. “No. It shall be done.” She was gone.
One by one the archons rose to their feet until they were all standing.
“Well?” Rap said harshly. “I seem to have convinced the Keeper. Have I changed any of your minds?”
Neem vanished without a word. Then Toom. In a moment only Raim was left.
The youngster grinned. He strode around the grave and pumped Rap’s hand in a firm clasp. “You changed mine! In fact, I think I’d have voted the other way if I hadn’t been first. They all sounded so, well, timorous!”
His sincerity was appealing, yet very juvenile.
“I do not feel happy with my reasoning,” Rap confessed, “but the alternative would be worse.”
The pixie nodded. “The others will come around. They will support the Keeper.” He chuckled. “Being outvoted by a demon has upset them.”
“It takes a demon to fight demons,” Rap said sadly. He had given Thaile a horrible beginning to her reign. He should be feeling soiled by his own words, yet he had a strange hunch that the advice had been irrelevant, the whole scene staged for some other purpose altogether.
“Come!” Raim said. “Let us go and watch!” He was excited.
Rap hesitated. To refuse to witness the results of his own counsel seemed the worst sort of hypocrisy, but to do so would be ghoulish. He shook his head.
Raim scowled at him and disappeared. Rap stared for a while at Keef’s grave, and then turned and headed for the door.
He came back to the Rap Place in clear moonlight. Kadie still tossed in nightmares. He sent her a deeper slumber. Inos slept on in the other room just as he had left her.
He wanted to go in and join her, to lie there in her arms. He could waken her and tell her what he had done; she would hold him while he wept, and comfort him.
He could never do that to Inos. He sat down on the steps and cradled his head in his arms.
9
Who never sleeps?
In the silence of the night, Thaile stood for a long while by the river. The site of the Leeb Place was a pond now. Nothing moved in the deep dark of the flooded crater except a silvery gleam of fish, although once in a while a breath of warm wind moved ripples of moonlight over its surface. Ugly charred tree trunks in the background marked the edge of the forest and the limits of her destruction.
Here she had loved. Here she had been happy. Here she had brought forth a child, not half a year ago. Here she had fought the Keeper.
Now she was Keeper. Now she knew, with wisdom greater than human, that her predecessor had been blameless in that iniquity. Not the Keeper but the archons had slain her child and her love.
It had been foretold that Thaile of the Gaib Place would save the College and Thaile of the Leeb Place would destroy it. Lain had expunged the revelations from the records, but the words were still preserved in the archons’ memories, easily visible to a demigod. By their own misdeeds, the archons themselves had brought the prophecy to pass. It had been the bereaved Thaile of the Leeb Place who had rescued the woman with child.
She had goaded them a little this night. What fools they seemed now! They were not even worthy of vengeance. Sinning out of stupidity, in folly they had unchained the hounds of fate and been driven by them to calamity. The end of that chase had seen Thaile herself bring in the woman with child, as the auguries had warned. Her pity had been folly, also, of course—yesterday she had been as addle-witted as the rest of the archons—but had the archons left her to dwell in peace here with Leeb, then Thume might have eluded the Almighty’s notice for ever.
She would weep, were the pain not so great.
How little time the Gods had granted her for happiness! Yet even less time had passed since that final morning when Leeb had departed to fetch the old woman. If They sent him back to her now, he would not know her. She was no longer a peasant child content with a peasant’s love, a peasant’s life. Leeb had died and the Thaile he had loved so staunchly had died, also. She was not that same Thaile now. She was the Keeper.
With a Keeper’s responsibilities. With a Keeper’s pain. Lain had been Keeper for seven years. Many of their predecessors had endured longer, but in the end they all failed. In the end they all broke under the strain. They all died as Lain had died, consumed by unbearable power.
Thaile had never doubted that she must spring the trap on the djinn army, so why had she summoned the archons to give her counsel she had no intention of heeding? For spite? To demonstrate how far above them she was now? Petty, Thaile, petty! But if that had been her purpose, then why had she involved the faun?
Perhaps she had hoped for reassurance that her destruction of the djinns could be justified by necessity and was not motivated by resentment and pain. Only the faun had given her that comfort.
A good man, the faun. He would be a bastion of strength for her in the struggle to come. He was the only one she could call on for wisdom about the Outside. He knew the world as no pixie did, or ever could, not even her, and few saw reality as clearly as he did. He had said that the djinns must be destroyed although he had hated himself as he did so.