At the second-floor she kept going, and Sterren followed without question.
At the third floor he paused, hoping she would change her mind, but she kept on climbing. He suppressed a moan. At the fourth floor he considered asking how much further they had to go, but couldn’t think of the right words in Semmat.
At the fifth floor he was panting heavily.
At the sixth floor the staircase ended, and he breathed a sigh of relief as Lady Kalira led him down a passageway, and then she reached another staircase and started up again. He balked.
Alder and Dogal came up behind him and did not stop; he yielded and hurried on, up into the tower.
After just one more flight, on the seventh floor, they left the staircase and headed down one more short passage, to an iron-bound door. Lady Kalira turned a large black key in the lock, then swung the door open to reveal the room beyond.
“This is your room, as the warlord,” she announced. She stood back to let him enter. “It was your great- uncle’s for almost twenty years, and his father’s, your great-grandfather’s, for half a century before that.”
Sterren stepped in cautiously.
He was in a large, airy chamber, one side mostly taken up by three broad, curtainless, many-paned windows. Thick tapestries, slightly faded but still handsome, hid the stone walls. A high canopied bed stood centered against one wall, with a table on either side, a wardrobe beyond the left-hand table, and a chest of drawers to the right. Opposite the bed was a desk, or worktable, flanked by tall bookcases jammed with books and papers. A chair was tucked away in each corner of the room; counting the one at the desk, there were five in all.
Sterren turned and discovered that the wall around the doorway was covered with displays of weapons, swords, knives, spears, pole-arms, and a good many he could not put a name to, even in Ethsharitic. He wondered if he, as warlord, was expected to learn to use them.
The weapons were all dusty. In fact, everything was covered by a layer of dust, the desk, the books, the papers, everything. The air was full of the dry, dusty smell of disuse. It was plain that nobody had been living in the room recently.
Hesitantly, he crossed to the windows and looked out. He judged the angle of the sun and decided he was looking almost due north.
The view was spectacular; he could see the castle roofs below him, hiding his view of the outer wall and most of the surrounding village. Beyond that he could see a few houses, and then the plain, rolling on into the distance, spotted with farmhouses, orchards, and various outbuildings, marked off into individual holdings by hedges and fences. He saw no roads, however; what traveling was done here was apparently done straight across country.
To the right he thought he could see, out near the horizon, the farms and grasslands fading into desert sand; somewhat to the left of center he thought he might be seeing the peaks of distant mountains somewhere beyond the horizon.
He turned back to the doorway and saw that Lady Kalira and the two soldiers were still standing in the corridor. He had a sudden vision of the door slamming, trapping him inside.
“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked.
Lady Kalira nodded and stepped in.
“What did you wait for?” he asked.
“I would not enter your private chamber without an invitation, Lord Sterren,” she replied.
Baffled by this pronouncement, which clearly implied that he had some authority and was not merely a prisoner, it took Sterren a moment to realize that Alder and Dogal were still waiting in the hall. He looked at Lady Kalira.
She looked back, paying no attention to the soldiers. “May I sit down?” she asked.
“Yes,” Sterren said in Ethsharitic, again caught off guard by her sudden deference. He corrected himself, repeating it in Semmat, as he remembered his escort waiting for him, back out on the plain. Maybe they were serious about calling him a lord.
She pulled a chair from a corner and sat. Sterren considered for a long moment before lowering himself cautiously into the chair by the desk.
The healing salve on his saddlesores was working; he could sit with only mild discomfort.
“You must have questions,” Lady Kalira said. “Now that we’re safely home, maybe I can answer them.”
Sterren stared at her for a moment, still puzzled, and then smiled crookedly. “I hope so,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
“Everything in this room is yours,” Lady Kalira said. “This, and the position of warlord, are your inheritance from your great-uncle Sterren. Nothing else; everything he owned when he died is right here, or was given, at his request, to others.”
Sterren struggled with that for a moment and carefully phrased a question.
“How did he give anything to me? How did he know I... I was alive, when he hadn’t seen my grandmother for so long?”
“Oh, he didn’t know you existed, but he had no choice in the matter,” Lady Kalira said, waving the question away. “Semma has very clear and definite laws on the lines of succession. This room and its contents were his as the warlord, not his, personally, so he had no say about who would receive them, nor who would receive the title. If people were allowed to influence successions it would result in all sorts of intrigues, and frankly, we have too much of that even as it is.”
“Succession? Intrigues?”
Lady Kalira explained the words as best she could, and eventually Sterren thought he understood.
“But why me?” he asked. “Isn’t there anyone here who could be warlord?”
The noblewoman snorted in derision. “Your ancestors,” she said, “were about the worst line in the whole family at providing enough heirs. It doesn’t help that warlords tend to die young, in battle.”
That statement, when the unfamiliar terms had been defined, did little to help Sterren’s peace of mind, but he made no comment.
“After you,” Lady Kalira continued, “the next heir is the old warlord’s third cousin, your third cousin twice removed. That’s only the seventh degree of consanguinity. You’re an heir in the third degree of consanguinity. That’s a pretty big difference. And besides, you’re young and strong...”
Sterren took this as flattery, since he knew he was relatively scrawny.
“She’s past fifty. If she had a son, well, that would be the eighth degree, but it might do. Unfortunately, her only child is a daughter. Unmarried, even if we allowed inheritance by marriage instead of blood.”
An attempt to explain the new words this time was unsuccessful until, exasperated. Lady Kalira rose and crossed to the desk, where she found a sheet of paper, a pen, and ink, then leaned over and began drawing a family tree.
Sterren, still seated, watched with interest as she ran down the history of Semma’s nine warlords.
The first, Tendel, was the younger brother of King Rayel II, born almost two hundred years ago. His son, also named Tendel, followed him, and a grandson after that, but this third Tendel managed to get himself killed in battle early in the disastrous Third Ksinallionese War, before he could get around to marrying and siring heirs. His brother Sterren inherited the title as Fourth Warlord, only to get himself killed three years later in the same war.
This first Sterren had been kind enough to produce five children, though three of them were daughters, and the younger son died without issue. The elder son succeeded as Fifth Warlord. His only child became Sixth Warlord, and in turn produced only one son, the eventual Seventh Warlord, before meeting a nasty end after losing a war.
Sterren, Seventh Warlord, was only twenty-one when he inherited the title and lived to be seventy-three. He was something of a legend. He broke with tradition and, instead of marrying a distant cousin, married an
