'I don't know,' Vanyel replied soberly. 'I wasn't there. But I don't think I would have left a situation that volatile.'
'Well I left; it's not Valdemar and it wasn't my business. I went out to the stable and Jenna, was outside with her for a while.' He shook his head. 'They'd moved the fight up to Deveran's study, toward the back of the palace; I could hear 'em both shouting at each other through the window. Then it got real quiet for a bit - and then all hell broke loose.' He gestured at the wreckage in the Great Hall, and his expression became strained. 'You can figure what that sounded like; enough screaming for a war. Nobody wanted to break in on that, and anyway we found out that the doors were all like they were welded shut.'
His voice was casual, but he was trembling and sweating, and his skin was dead white.
'It didn't last long. Then it was quiet again, sudden, like everything had been cut off. Me, the outside servants, and Deveran's armsmen from the palace, and the town guard and a couple of the town council with some courage in them, we all broke the doors open.'
'And you found?'
“That's what we found. The boy knocked out under that bench, and when we went to look for bodies - gods. Everyone inside these walls... was dead. The boy's sibs, the servants, everybody. Torn to pieces, just like . . . that stuff. Nothing bigger than palm-sized pieces of everybody else.' He was shaking now, his teeth chattering, and his pupils dilated. “Nothing,“ he repeated.
'You're not saying Tashir did all that?' Vanyel said incredulously. 'That's impossible - it's insane!' The mage-light flared a little, setting shadows shrinking and growing again, flickering as he whirled to look at the boy, and his attention wavered.
Lores turned away from the wreckage, clutching his arms against his chest, and gradually stopped trembling. His eyes fell on Tashir again; just the sight of the boy seemed to reawaken his anger. 'What's insane about it?' he demanded. 'Fetching can wreck, or even kill. I should know that better than you, it's my Gift.'
'It's one of my Gifts, too, you damned fool!' Vanyel growled. 'And at one point I almost got out of control, but my Gift was blasted open and I was in pain enough to drive a strong man mad. Nothing like that happened here! This boy never showed a hint of anything on this scale! And he was untrained? Not bloody likely!'
'How do we know he was untrained?' Lores demanded, his eyes reflecting blue glints from the mage - light over Vanyel's head. 'He was the only one left alive! He had to have done it!''
Vanyel had a dozen retorts on the tip of his tongue, but none of them seemed wise.
So how did you come to be such an expert on Gifts and magic, you idiot? And did you search to find someone who might have hidden himself - or herself - until you 'd found and dealt with Tashir? Or did you identify everyone, or at least count all the bodies and come up with the same number as those known to be in the palace ?
He kept his teeth shut on all those questions. It was obvious that this had been bungled from the start, and dressing down this fool wasn't going to undo the bungling.
'We couldn't really believe it, not at first,' Lores admitted reluctantly. 'We thought it must have been - oh, something out of the Pelagir wilderlands, or even something cooked up by the Mavelans. We really didn't know what it could have been, especially not the Lineans, but there wasn't anyone or anything else, and when we tried to question Tashir, the boy wouldn't answer. At first he was - dazed-like. Then he just refused to speak except to say he didn't remember.' Lores shook his head. 'Not remember? How could he not remember something that did that? Unless he was lying, or he'd done it in anger and had blanked it out of his mind.' Lores clasped his folded arms still tighter against his chest, as if he was trying to protect himself. 'What could we do? The guards were spooked, nobody wanted something like that on their hands. In the end, we just threw him in the guardhouse at the front gate there, since the townsfolk didn't want him in their jail and nobody wanted to have to go down to the cells under the palace. We sent off a messenger for Vedric, since he was the one making all the fuss about the boy in the first place. He may be a Mavelan, but he's not going to be able to talk the boy out of this mess. He'll have to deal with him, and he is a mage. We reckoned it was better for one mage to deal with another. Especially a murderer.'
'That's not proved.'
Lores glared at him. Vanyel repeated his words stubbornly. 'That's not proved. Nothing is proved. And furthermore, I'd like to know how the hell a Herald could come to attack a Companion.'
Lores began pacing, four steps away from Vanyel, four steps back. 'We shoved him in there, picked up the bodies - what was left of them. Things quieted down. Then, less than a candlemark ago, that demon showed up.'
“Companion.''
