Xylox headed for one of the small tents, and Grimm waited to see what the others would do. Crest declared that he had spent more than long enough pressed to the armpit of Tordun to wish to share a tent with him, and Foster agreed to be his tent-mate. That left Drex and a red-faced Tordun; the girl assumed the expression of a martyr.
"If I must, I must," she declaimed in tragic tones, glancing at Grimm, who feigned a complete disinterest, while his vitals churned within him.
Grimm went to the tent of Xylox, and wormed his way inside what looked like the sloughed skin of a giant green maggot; his resting-place for the night. Xylox was already asleep, and his snoring seemed almost loud enough to drill holes in the rock beneath them. It took Grimm a long time to reach his own repose; when, at last, he did, he dreamed of Drex. The girl was pushing him away and laughing at him.
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Chapter 16: Mind Games
Grimm's sleep did not last for long. His green, hooded bag was warm and comfortable enough, but three things still disturbed him: Drex taunted him in his fitful dreams; Xylox snored with a sound like a metal chair being dragged across a rough stone floor; and the matter of the ignominious banishment of Grimm's grandfather, Loras, the former Mage Questor of the Seventh Rank, called the Firelord, was, once more, foremost in the mage's mind.
Loras never seemed to have denied trying to murder Lord Prelate Geral; nonetheless, his behaviour after being caught in the act by his best friend, Thorn Virias, appeared curious. Doorkeeper had told Grimm that the mighty, iron-willed Loras had broken down and wept in front of the High Conclave standing in judgement over him, whilst admitting to the crime.
When asked if he had carried out the deed, Loras' response, as recorded in the Guild records of the trial, was "I must have done it; may the Names forgive me! It all seems like a ghastly nightmare to me now. What was I thinking?"
Grimm tossed and turned within the confines of the green sack, trying to assess the few facts he knew, trying to marshal them into a coherent argument.
Two motives for the assault were discussed at the triaclass="underline" either Loras was seeking to hasten his inevitable election as Lord Geral's successor, or he was carrying out an act of mercy to ease the passage of a sick, addled old man he loved and revered. Thorn proposed this second motive to the High Conclave as his argument for sparing Loras from the ultimate penalty.
This argument made little sense; the aged Prelate had been sick and in great pain for many months. From what Doorkeeper had told Grimm, Geral seemed to have drifted into a blissful reverie by the time of the assault, and he was no longer in pain. If pity had been Loras' sole motive, surely it would have been strongest when the old man's suffering was at its height. Doorkeeper had tended the Prelate throughout his long malady, and he had told Grimm how relieved he felt when Geral drifted into the deep anaesthesia of the terminal stage of his sickness.
The idea of an ambitious Loras seeking to speed his accession to the rank of Prelates did not hold water, either. The old man plainly had little time remaining to him, and he died within two weeks of Loras' banishment, leaving Thorn as the almost inevitable choice as his successor. In any case, Loras was a mighty and accomplished Questor, with several decades of experience as a weapon of the Guild; he must have known a hundred ways of terminating the Prelate's life without even entering his room. Grimm had killed the Haven Technician, Deeks, from afar by telekinetic compression of his heart. It had been a new spell-concept for the young Questor, but, then again, Grimm was still finding his feet as a mage; Loras had had many years to stock his lethal magical arsenal with covert and undetectable means of murder.
Was it reasonable that such a man, so gifted in the arcane arts, had chosen to snuff out the life of an old man in such a crude, physical manner? It was not; it made no sense at all, particularly since the old man was already well along the slippery path to his demise at the time of the act. If blind ambition was his grandfather's aim, Loras only needed to wait a little longer, and Questors were noted for their patience and willpower.
The disturbing thoughts clashed and coalesced in Grimm's mind in a frenetic dance, denying him the release of much-needed sleep.
Who else stood to gain from Loras' banishment?
The obvious candidate was Lord Thorn: he had been the only other realistic candidate for the demanding post of Prelate, but he had been reckoned a poor second to his dear friend, Loras. Grimm thought it improbable that Thorn had been behind the plot; the mage had, after all, fought with great vigour for Loras' life to be spared. In addition to this redeeming fact, the powerful Xylox, in the prime of his thaumaturgic career, had all but drained his energies in persuading the secular Haven pilot, Foster, to take the hazardous route down the mountains towards Glabra. A spell of Compulsion that could persuade a Guild Questor to attempt to murder a man he was reputed to revere would have required far greater reserves of thaumaturgic power. Grimm doubted that even Thorn possessed such might.
Could it have been a cabal of mages, acting in concert, who had favoured Thorn's accession rather than Granfer's? he wondered.
However, it would be very hard for even a small, renegade group of powerful magic-users to assemble and cast a Great Spell within the confines of the House without attracting the least attention. In addition to this, unless a vast, unfeasible conspiracy of lesser thaumaturges had been involved, such men would have been ineligible to vote on the issue of Geral's successor, and they could have disposed of Loras' suit without recourse to underhand means.
Grimm now knew there were spells that could compel a man to act in a certain way, whilst maintaining the illusion of unfettered volition. This, at least, seemed to fit with the facts as he understood them. Nonetheless, it also seemed that such an enchantment could not have been raised within the House. He knew also that Loras had been held in great esteem at the highest echelons of High Lodge, and it therefore seemed improbable that the spell had been sanctioned by the Lord Dominie; in any case, if High Lodge had disapproved of the idea of Loras as House Prelate, the Dominie possessed an absolute power of veto over any such appointment within any Guild House. It was used only on the rarest of occasions; but it existed, nonetheless.
Once again, Grimm had set up a structure designed to establish the innocence of his beloved grandfather, beyond a reasonable doubt; once again, it had proved no more substantial than a house of cards.
Grimm felt exhausted after the exertions of the day, and his brainstem engaged in mortal combat with his cerebrum for control of his senses. The end result was a semi-conscious state, in which concepts, facts, numbers and images whirled through his mind in an endless, circuitous cavalcade of meaningless conclusions that demanded his mental attention with ruthless authority. When full awareness returned to him, weak, pallid rays of early morning light were creeping into the tent.
****
"I trust you all slept well?" the ever-cheery Foster said. An access of unreasonable hatred flooded through Grimm at the man's indefatigable good humour, and he fought to dismiss it.
"Quite well, thank you, Foster," he lied, forcing his unwonted hatred back onto himself at this facile falsehood.
"I slept like a newborn babe," Crest declared. "Those green bags of yours are wonderful, Foster. I slept better than if I'd drunk myself into a stupor, and I don't have a hangover to contend with, either."
Tordun looked bleary-eyed and a little unsteady on his feet. The titanic albino's strong reservations at the prospect of sharing a tent with a nubile young girl had been plain to see. A man of such scruples, also possessing high levels of masculine hormones, must have doubted his ability to control his physical desires when asleep, and perhaps he had chosen to remain awake, rather than to risk succumbing to dark, primitive inner drives he feared might overwhelm his sleeping body.