Lady Knight. Tamora Pierce

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СКАЧАТЬ There were ostlers, whose job it was to mind the hundreds of horses kept at the palace, but Kel preferred to see to her riding mount, Hoshi, and her warhorse, Peachblossom, herself. The work was soothing and gave her time to think.

      Jump watched as she tended the horses. The scruffy dog had put in an appearance at Kel’s side about mid-morning, clearly recovered from having his morning’s sleep interrupted by Kel and a Stormwing.

      Jump was not a typical palace dog, being neither a silky, combed, small type favoured by ladies nor a wolf- or boar-hound breed prized by lords. Jump was a stocky, short-haired dog of medium size, a combat veteran. His left ear was a tatter. His dense fur was mostly white, raised or dented in places where it grew over old scars. Black splotches covered most of the pink skin of his nose, his only whole ear, and his rump. His tail was a jaunty war banner, broken in two places and healed crooked. Jump’s axe-shaped head was made for clamping on to an enemy with jaws that would not let go. He had small, black, triangular eyes that, like those of any creature who’d spent a lot of time with Daine the Wildmage, were far more intelligent than those of animals who hadn’t.

      ‘I need more information,’ Kel murmured to Jump as she mucked out Hoshi’s stall. ‘And soon, before the king orders us out with the army. I certainly can’t tell the king I won’t go. He’ll want to know why, and I can’t talk about what happened during my Ordeal.’

      Jump whuffed softly in understanding.

      Her horses tended, Kel reported to a palace library. There, she and the other knights who were her year-mates (young men who had begun their page studies when she had) practised the Scanran tongue. Many Scanrans spoke Common, the language used in all the Eastern Lands between the Inland Sea and the Roof of the World, but the study of Scanran would help those who fought them to read their messages and interpret private conversations.

      After lessons Kel spent her time as best she could. She cared for her weapons and armour, worked on her sword and staff skills in one of the practice courtyards, ate supper with her friends, and finally read in her room. When the watch cried the time at the hour after midnight, she closed her book and left her room, with Jump at her heels.

      The palace halls were deserted. Wall torches in iron cressets burned low. Kel did not see another soul. In normal times the nobility would be at parties; not this year. The coming war dictated their hours now. They retired before midnight after evenings spent figuring what goods and labour they could spare for the coming bloody summer. Even the servants, always the last to sleep, were abed. It was like walking in a dream through an empty palace. Kel shivered and grabbed a torch from the wall as she passed the Hall of Crowns.

      It was a good idea. No lights burned in the corridor that led to her destination. The Chapel of the Ordeal was used only at Midwinter, when squires took their final step to a shield. Now it was shut and ignored. Still, the chapel’s door was never locked. Kel shut it once she and Jump were inside. There was no need to post a guard: over the centuries, thieves and anyone else whose motives were questionable had been found outside the chapel door, reduced to dried flesh and bone by the Chamber’s immeasurable power.

      Once a year during her term as a squire, Kel had visited the Chamber to try her will against it. On those visits she had confined her encounter with it to touching the door. To converse with the thing, she suspected that she had to go all the way inside once again.

      Kel set her torch in a cresset near the altar. Its flickering light danced over the room: benches, the plain stone floor, the altar with its gold candlesticks and cloth, and the large gold sun disc, the symbol of the god Mithros. To the right of the disc was the iron door to the Chamber of the Ordeal.

      At first Kel could not make her legs go forward. She had never had a painless experience from the Chamber. In the grip of its power she had lived through the death of loved ones, been crippled and useless, and been forced to stand by as horrors unfolded.

      ‘This is crazy,’ she told Jump. The dog wagged his tail, making a soft thwapping noise that seemed loud in the quiet chapel.

      ‘You wait here,’ Kel told him. She ordered her body to move. It obeyed: she had spent years shaping it to her will. She stepped up to the iron door. It swung back noiselessly into a small, dark room with no windows or furnishings of any kind.

      Kel trembled, cold to the bone with fear. At last she walked into the Chamber. The door closed, leaving her in complete darkness.

       She stood on a flat, bare plain without a tree, stream, or animal to be seen. It was all bare earth, with no grass or stones to interrupt the boring view.

       ‘What is this place?’ she asked aloud. Squires were forbidden to speak during the Ordeal, but surely this was different. In an odd way, this was more like a social visit than an Ordeal. ‘Do you live here?’

      It is as close as your human mind can perceive it. The Chamber’s ghostlike voice always spoke in Kel’s head without sounding in her ears.

       Kel thrust her hands into her pockets. ‘I don’t see why you haven’t done something with it,’ she informed the Chamber. ‘No furnishings, no trees, or birds … If you’re going to bring people here, you ought to make things look a bit nicer.’

      A feeling like a sigh whiffled through Kel’s skull. Mortal, what do you want? demanded the Chamber. Its face – the face cut into the keystone over the inside of the iron door – formed in the dirt in front of her. It was lined and sexless, with lips so thin as to be nearly invisible. The deep-set eyes glinted yellow at Kel. The task you have been set is perfectly clear. You will know it when you find it.

       Kel shook her head. ‘That’s no good. I must know when and where. And I’d like another look at the little Nothing Man, if you please.’

       Instantly the dirt beneath her was gone, the air of the plain turned to shadow, as if she dreamed again. She fell like a feather, lightly, slipping to and fro in the wind. When she landed, she was set on her feet as gently and tidily as she could have hoped.

       During her Ordeal she had seen the Chamber’s idea of her task as an image on the wall in a corner of the grey stone room. Now she was living the image, standing in a room like a cross between a smithy and a mage’s studio. Unlike her vision and the dreams that had followed it, this place was absolutely and completely real. Behind her, a forge held a bed of fiery coal. An anvil and several other metalworking tools lay nearby. Along one wall stood open cupboards filled with dried herbs, crystals, books, tools, glass bottles, and porcelain jars. Between her and the cupboards was a large stone worktable with gutters on the sides. It was covered with black stains. To her left was another, smaller, kitchen-style hearth set into the wall. Its fire had burned out.

       Kel inhaled. Scents flooded her nose: lavender, jasmine, and vervain; damp stone; mould; and under it all, the coppery hint of old blood.

       There he was, scrawny and fidgeting as he stood beside the worktable chewing a fingernail. Kel shrank back.

      It is safe, the Chamber said. He cannot see you.

       The Nothing Man was just as she remembered, just as he’d been in all those dreams she’d had since Midwinter. There was nothing new to be learned from this appearance.

       In the shadows to Kel’s right, metal glinted. She gulped and backed up as a killing device walked out of the shadows, dragging a child’s body. The devices also looked just as she remembered, both from her Ordeal and from a bloody day the previous summer when she СКАЧАТЬ