It was the rationality in Erij that made him seem most mad; at times Vanye almost thought him amenable to, reason, to forgiveness. A man could not speak so with an enemy. At such times they were more brothers than they had ever been. At such times he almost understood Erij, through the moods and the hates and the lines that began to be graven into his face, making him look several years older than was the truth.
“Your lady,” said Erij then, “has not quitted Morija as you said she would.”
Vanye looked up sharply. “Where is she?”
“You might know,” said Erij, “since I think you know full well what she is about.”
“That is her business.”
“Shall I recall her and ask her or shall I ask you again?”
Vanye stared at him, beginning suddenly to see purpose within the madness, the sickly, fragile humors. He liked it no less. “Her business is with Hjemur, and she is no friend of Thiye. Let that suffice.”
“Truly?”
“It is truth, Erij.”
“All the same,” said Erij, “she had not quitted Morija. And all my promises were conditional on that.”
“So were mine,” said Vanye, “conditional.”
Erij looked down at him. There was no mirth there at all. Of a sudden it was Nhi Rijan in that look, young and hard and full of malice. “You are dismissed.”
“Do nothing against her,” Vanye warned him.
“You are dismissed,” said Erij.
Vanye gathered himself up and took his leave with a scant bow, maintaining the slender thread of courtesy between them. There were the guards outside to take him—there always were: Myya; Erij trusted no Nhi to do this duty, walking him to and from his quarters.
But they had doubled since he had come into the room. There had been two. Now four waited.
Suddenly he tried to retreat back within the room, heard the whisper of steel and saw Erij drawing his longsword from its sheath. In that instant of hesitation they hauled him back and tried to hold him.
He had nothing to lose. He knew it, and flung himself at his brother, intent on cracking his skull at least: there should no Myya whelp lord it in Ra-morij, that benefit for the unfortunate Nhi if nothing else.
But they overhauled him, stumbling over each other and overturning furniture in their haste to seize him; and Erij’s fist, guarded by the pommel, came hard against the side of his head, dropping him to his knees.
He knew these nether portions of the fortress, those carved deep into the hill for the holding of supplies in the event of siege, a veritable warren of tunnels and rooms of dripping ceilings, frozen in winter. It was this which made the whole east wing unsafe, so that no one lived there: collapse had been reckoned imminent as long as anyone could remember, though the tunnels were shored up and the storerooms braced with pillars and some filled with dirt. As children they had been forbidden these places: as children they had used the upper storerooms on the safe west for their amusements in the bitter days of winter and the heat of summer.
And one time after he came to live in Ra-morij, his brothers had dared him to come with them down to the nethermost depths: they had taken a single lamp and ventured into this place of damp and cold and moldering beams and crumbling masonry.
Here they had left him, where his screams could in nowise be heard above.
And it was into this place that the Myya sealed him, without light and without water, with only his thin shirt against the numbing cold. He fought against them, dazed as he yet was, panicked by the fear that they would bind him here as Kandrys had; fled their grasp and meant to fight them.
They closed the door on him, plunged him into utter dark; the bolt outside crashed across and echoed.
He tried his strength against it until he was exhausted, his
shoulder bruised and his hands torn. Then he sank down against it, the only sure point in this absolute dark, the only place that was not cold earth and stone. He caught his breath and heard for a time only the slow and distant drip of water.