His distraction is interrupted when he suddenly hears a shriek, the human cry that he most dreads — a desperate, pained sound that might once have belonged to a woman, but surely cannot be made by any mortal throat now. It comes from one of the largest bedchambers in the northernmost corner of the Kastelgerd, opposite the northwestern face of the Merchant Lord’s octagonal tower. Listening to the sound with no more than a passive, even a downcast, reaction, Baster-kin comes to a conclusion: The heralds of death and rebirth ought to have a voice, he tells himself, and no one could deny that such a cry would more than suit their purpose … His own behavior certainly gives little evidence of such momentous change: as the voice shrieks on, only the fingers of his right hand move, slowly and forcefully grinding the fragile seed of grain held within them against his palm, until it has become but dusty bits.
There is little about this scene that can be called new, a fact that does not stop Baster-kin’s patience and temper from wearing away, as if the voice were in fact some sort of demon’s lash striping his very souclass="underline" for it is, in truth, the sound of his own wife’s voice, and it continues on and on, echoing through the halls of the Kastelgerd like a loosed fury. Assuming an accusatory tone, it screeches just one word over and over — and that one word is his name:
“Rendulic!”
But Baster-kin only moves to a basin in the tower room’s corner, remembering Sentek Arnem’s urgent warning that he wash his hands after handling the tainted grain.
{ii:}
Hoping that one of Lady Baster-kin’s ladies or her healer will soon control her screaming, his lordship paces about his high retreat, studying the only ornamentation in the room: four enormous tapestry panels that cover the walls between the eastern and western doorways, all depicting an earlier time in Rendulic’s life, the celebrated moment when he had completed his transformation from a slight, sickly youth into the strong, manly figure that he is today: the time when, though only eighteen years old, he had embarked upon a panther hunt. This had been the kind of hunt about which the scions of Broken’s merchant families dreamt, in the days before the city’s stadium became their haunt: before, that is, less hazardous sport replaced the dangers of battling wild beasts and pursuing Bane criminals and Outragers into Davon Wood.
During his hunt — which was led by that same tireless guardian, Radelfer, who had ever been the boy’s only true friend and counselor — Rendulic, riding ahead of his men, had encountered a group of four adolescent panthers, offspring of no less than the fabled white panther of Davon Wood. Although seemingly doomed to a most savage death, Rendulic had nonetheless demanded, when two of the animals were already dead and their mother disabled by a deep wound to one thigh, that he be allowed to engage the final brace of beasts.
The youth who braved death in what seemed so reckless a fashion that day had long been treated as a disappointment by his exacting father, then lord of the Kastelgerd. Rendulic had dared to believe, with a passion that made him so bold as to be utterly unconcerned with his own safety, that the outcome of the hunt would change his father’s low opinion of him; and, fueled by such thoughts, the brave young man and ever-faithful Radelfer succeeded in tricking and caging the young female panther, after which Rendulic flatly insisted that he be allowed to battle the last male alone. And alone, with arrows, pike, and finally a long, elegant dagger, Rendulic had indeed fought that animal, in the same clearing beyond the Cat’s Paw where the rest of the battle had taken place. Having mortally wounded the young panther with his pike, Rendulic gripped his dagger tight and used it to administer the dauthu-bleith to the still-defiant beast — all within clear sight of the animal’s living but helpless mother.
Doing thus, Rendulic had made this hunt, the last of its kind, a legend among the people of Broken. Even so, his father had not proved as readily persuaded of his son’s worthiness as Rendulic had hoped: a result, the youth chose to believe, of a bout of the pox that was returning to torment the aging lord with ever greater frequency. Then, too, the Stadium’s athletics were fast on their way to eclipsing woodland blood sports, and young men and women would, from that time on, turn almost exclusively to such activities for excitement, and as a way to prove themselves to the citizenry. True, their exhausting amusements still included contests against the great beasts of the Wood: but now those animals were captured and safely chained upon the sands of the Stadium, so that death was never a real danger for any young Broken athlete who entered the lists.
But it should not be thought that the tale of Rendulic Baster-kin’s panther hunt was forgotten: indeed, its memory would later form the basis of much of his unquestioned personal authority in the city. And most of all, he broods as he stares at the tapestries, it had virtually eliminated talk of an earlier incident in his life, an incident that was rumored to have involved a romantic quest after a young beauty from the Fifth District who was but two or three years older than he, the assistant to a renowned healer who had been summoned to help when, as the first signs of manhood matured in his young body, a terrible malady from which Rendulic had always suffered, that of the megrem,† had worsened cruelly. This crippling pain in the head and illness of the gut had proved beyond the skills of all Kafran doctors, just as it had, since ancient times, outwitted so many such feckless healers around the world, who knew it by different names. Any such men or women worth their fees, however, could recognize its symptoms instantly: the healer Gisa, for example, had been able not only to name it, but to ease it, with treatments that secretly took place at one of the Baster-kin family’s lodges on the lower slopes of Broken, whence one of the Merchant Lord’s younger brothers, an uncle who was near alone in having sympathy for the boy, tended to the herds of cattle upon the Plain that bore the family’s name. To such a place, Radelfer knew, the lord himself was unlikely to venture; and in this safe and shielded place, the ancient healer who was a legend to most of Broken, but a boon to many others in her native Fifth District, had set Rendulic Baster-kin on the road to a healthy manhood.† But while Gisa prepared the tinctures and infusions herself, keeping the ingredients kept jealously secret, the actual doses were administered by the soothing hands of the crone’s lovely apprentice, the orphaned girl called Isadora. Golden-haired and tall, Isadora possessed a comforting touch that had burrowed its way deep into young Rendulic’s heart and mind, and had been the source of his scandalously desperate efforts to find her in the weeks that followed her departure from his bedside. The boy’s father, meanwhile, either ignored or threatened to remove all such wagging tongues: and once his latest bout of the pox had passed, the sight of a son growing healthy had made the relentless Lord Baster-kin take horse, and begin the search for a politically advantageous wife for his heir …