Shadowplay Page 16

  Despite a superstitious chill at the back of his neck, Chert was about to investigate, but something else caught his attention. He made his way as silently as he could down the corridor and past the hanging to the base of the stairs. He muffled his lantern, dropping the passageway into near-darkness as he stood, listening.

  Voices, coming from somewhere upstairs—were Chaven’s servants keeping the up house in his absence? Somehow Chaven did not think so.

  A disembodied moan, quiet but still piercing, made Chert jump. He looked around wildly but the corridor was still empty. He hurried back to the hanging and pulled it aside to discover a hidden door, ajar. The noise came again, louder, the muffled wail of a lost soul, and Chert summoned up his courage and pushed the door open.

  Chaven lay in the middle of the floor, writhing as though he had been stabbed, surrounded by rumpled lengths of cloth. Chert ran to him, turned him over, but could find no wound.

  “Ruined . . . !” the physician groaned. Though his voice was quiet, it seemed loud as a shout to Chert. “Ruined! They have taken it . .. !”

  “Quiet,” the Funderling hissed at him. “There is someone upstairs!”

  “They have it!” Chaven sat up, wild-eyed, and began to struggle in Chert’s grasp like a man who had seen his only child stolen from his arms. “We must stop them!”

  “Shut your mouth or you will get us killed,” Chert whispered harshly clinging on to the much larger man as tightly as he could. “It might be the entire royal guard, looking for you.”

  “But they have stolen it ... I am destroyed . . . !” Chaven was actually weeping. Chert could not believe what he saw, the change that had turned this man he had long known and respected into a mad child.

  “Stole what? What are you saying?”

  “We must listen.... We must hear them.” Chaven managed to throw the funderling off, but his look had changed from sheer madness to something more sly. He crawled across the room before Chert could get his legs under himself; a moment later he had snaked out under the faded hanging and into the corridor. Chert hurried after him.

  The physician had stopped at the stairwell. He touched his lips to enjoin the Funderling to silence—an unnecessary gesture to someone as fright ened as Chert was, both by the danger itself and Chaven’s seeming madness. The physician was shaking, but it seemed a tremble of rage, not anything more sensible like a fear of being caught, imprisoned, and almost inevitably executed.

  And me? Chert could not help thinking. If they kill Chaven, the royal physician, what will they do with a mere Funderling who is his accomplice? The only question will be whether anyone ever learns of my death. Ah, my dear old Opal, you were right after all—/ should have learned to stay at home and tend my own fungus.

  He took a deep breath to try to slow his beating heart. Perhaps it was only Chaven’s own servants after all. Perhaps .. .

  “I promise you, Lord Tolly, there is nothing else here of value at all.” The reedy voice wafted down the stairwell, close enough to keep Chert stock-still, holding the last breath he took as if it must last him forever. To his horror, he saw Chaven’s eyes go wide with that mindless, inexplicable rage he had shown earlier, even saw the physician make a twitching move toward the staircase itself. Chert shot out his hand and clung as if his fingers were curled on scaffolding while he dangled over a deadly drop.

  The other’s voice was lazy, but with a suggestion somehow that it could turn cruel as quick as an adder’s strike. “Is that true, brother, or are there things here that you think might not be of value to me, but which you might quite like for yourself?”

  Confused, Chert guessed that Hendon Tolly and his brother, the new Duke of Summerfield, stood in the hallway above them. He could not understand the expression of heedless fury on Chaven’s face. Earth Elders, didn’t he realize that the Tollys owned not just the castle now but had become the unquestioned rulers of all Southmarch? That with a word these men could have Chaven and Chert skinned in Market Square in front of a whooping, applauding crowd?

  “I tell you, Lord, you already have the one piece of true value. I promise that eventually I will winkle out its secrets, but at the moment there is something missing, some element I have not discovered, and it is not in this house ...” The man’s thin voice suddenly grew sharp, high-pitched. “Ah, keep that away from me!”

  “It is only a cat,” said the one he had called Lord Tolly.

  “/ hate the things. They are toots of Zmeos. There, it rum away. Good. “ When he spoke again his voice had regained its earlier calm. “As I said, there is nothing in this house that will solve the puzzle—I swear that to you, my lord.”

  “But you will solve it,” the other said. “You will.”

  Pear was in the first one’s voice again, not well hidden. “Of course, Lord. Have I not served you well and faithfully for years?”

  “I suppose you have. Come, let us lock this place up and you can go hack to your necromancy.”

  “I think it would be more accurate to call it captromancy, my lord.” The speaker had recovered his nerve a bit. Chert was beginning to think he had guessed wrong—that one of these was a Tolly, but not both. “Necromancers raise the dead. It is captromancers who use mirrors in their art.”

  “Perhaps a little of both, then, eh?” said his master jauntily as their voices dwindled. “Ah, what a fascinating world we are making . . . !”

  When the two were gone and the house was silent Chert could finally breathe freely, and found he was trembling all over, as if he had narrowly avoided a fatal tumble. “Who were those two men?”

  “Hendon Tolly, to give one of the dogs a name,” the physician snarled. “The other is the vilest traitor who ever lived—an even filthier cur than Hendon—a man who I thought was my friend, but who has been the Tollys’ lapdog all along, it seems. If I had his throat in my hands .. .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Talking about? He has stolen my dearest possession!” Chaven’s eyes were still wide, and it occurred to Chert it was not too late for the royal physician to go dashing out into Southmarch Keep and get them both killed. He grabbed Chaven’s robe again.

  “What? What did he steal? Who was that?”

  Chaven shook his head, tears welling in his eyes again. “No. I cannot tell you. I am shamed by my weakness.” He turned to stare at Chert, desperate, imploring. “Tolly called him brother because the man who helped him pillage my secrets is one of the brothers of the Eastmarch Academy. Okros, Brother Okros—a man who I have trusted as if he were my own family.”

  Chert had never seen the physician so helpless, so defeated, so ... empty.

  Chaven put his head on his arms, sagged as if he would never rise again. “Oh, by all the gods, I should have known! Growing to manhood in a family like mine, I should have known that trust is for fools and weaklings.”

  “Are you mad?” Teloni could not have been more astonished if her younger sister had suggested jumping off the harbor wall into the ocean. “He is a prisoner! And he is a man!”

  “But look at him—he is always here and he seems so sad.” Pelaya Akua-nis had seen the prisoner a half-dozen times, and always the older man sat on the stone bench as quietly as if he listened to music, but of course there was no music, only the noises of birds and the distant boom and shush of the sea. “I am going to talk to him.”

  “The guards won’t let you,” one of the other girls warned, but Pelaya ignored her. She got up and smoothed her dress before walking across the garden toward the bench. Two of the guards stood, but after looking at her carefully one guard leaned back against the wall again; the other moved exactly one step closer to the bearded man they were guarding, which was apparently the solution to some odd little inner mechanics of responsibility. Then the two guards resumed their whispered conversation. Pelaya wished she looked more like the dangerous type who might free a prisoner, but the guards had judged her correctly—talking to him with her friends and the man’s guards around her on all
sides was quite enough of an adventure, however she might like to act otherwise.

  As she reached him the man looked up at her, his face so empty of emotion that she was positive she could have been a beetle or a leaf for all he cared. She suddenly realized she had nothing to say. Pelaya would have turned and walked away again except that she could not bear to see Teloni give her one of those amused, superior looks.

  She swayed a little, trying to think of how to begin, and he only watched her. For a moment the garden seemed very silent. He was at least her father’s age, perhaps older, with long reddish-brown hair and beard, both shot with gray and a few curling wisps of pure white. Even as she examined him he was surveying her in turn, and his calm gaze unnerved her. “Who are you?” she said, blurting it out so that it sounded like a challenge. She could feel the blood rising in her cheeks and had to fight hard once more against the urge to flee.

  “Ah, my good young mistress, but it is you who approached me,” he said sternly. He sounded serious, and his face looked serious too, but something in the way he spoke made her think he might be mocking her. “You must name yourself. I lave you never been told any stories, have you read no books on polite discourse? Names are important, you see. However, once given, they can never be taken back.” He spoke the Hierosoline tongue with a strange accent, harsh but somehow musical.

  “But 1 think I know yours,” she said. “You are King Olin of South-march.”

  “Ah, you are only half right.” He frowned, as though thinking hard about his words, then nodded slowly. “It seems that, in fairness, you must tell me half of your name.”

  “Pelaya!” her sister called, a strangled moan of embarrassment.

  “Ah,” said the prisoner. “And now I have received my due, will you, nill you.”

  “That wasn’t fair. She told you.”

  “I was not aware we were involved in a contest. Hmmm—interesting.” Something moved across his lips, fleeting as a shadow—a smile? “As I said, names are very important things. Very well, I will do my best to guess the other name without help from any of the bystanders. Pelaya, are you? A fair name. It means ‘ocean.’”

  “I know.” She took a step back. “You are playing for time. You cannot guess.”

  “Ah, but I can. Let me consider what I know already.” He stroked his beard, the very picture of a philosopher from the Sacred Trigon Academy. “You are here, that is the first thing to be pondered. Not everyone is allowed into this inner garden—I myself have only recently been granted the privilege. You are well dressed, in silk and a fine lace collar, so I feel rather certain you are not one of the pastry-makers gathering mint or a chambermaid on your way to air the linens. If you are either of those you are shirking your chores most unconscionably, but to me you do not have the face of a true idler.”

  She laughed despite herself. He was talking nonsense, she knew, amusing himself and her, but also there was more to it. He was showing her how he would think about things if he truly meant to solve a problem. “So, we must assume you are one of the ladies of the castle, and in fact I see that you have brought with you a formidable retinue.” He gestured to Teloni and the others, who watched her with wide eyes, as though Pelaya had clambered down into a wolf’s den. “One of them addressed you by first name, which suggests a familiarity a lady might show to one of her maids or other friends, but since there is a sameness to your features—yours are a bit finer, more delicate, but I hope you will keep that as our secret—I would guess that the two of you are related. Sisters?”

  She looked at him sternly. She was not going to be so easily tricked into helping him.

  “Well, then I will declare it so for the sake of my argument. Sisters. Now, I know well that my captor, the lord protector, has no declared offspring. Some might say he was the better for that—they can be difficult creatures, children—but I am not one of them. However much I pity his childlessness, though, I cannot make him your father, no matter how I puzzle the facts, so I must look elsewhere. Of his chief ministers, some are too dark or too pale of skin, some too old, and some too much inclined otherwise to be the fathers of handsome young women like your sister and yourself, so I must narrow my guesses to those whom I know to have children. I have been here more than half a year, so I have learned a little.” He smiled. “In fact, I see now that your companions are waving for you in earnest, and I must cut to the bone of the matter before they drag you away. My best guess is that your father is this castle’s steward, Count Perivos Akuanis, and that you are his younger daughter, while the dark-haired girl there is his older daughter, Teloni.”

  She glared at him. “You knew it all along.”

  “No, I must sincerely protest that I did not, although it has become clear to me as we talked. I think I may have seen you once with your father, but I have only now remembered.”

  “I’m not certain I believe you.”

  “I would not lie to a young woman named after the sea. The sea god is my family’s patron, and the sea itself has become very precious to me these days. From one corner of my room in the tower, if I bend down just so, I can see it at the edge of a window. Of such things are hearts made strong enough to last.” He tipped his head, almost a bow. “And, the truth is, you remind me of my own daughter, who also has a weakness for old dogs and useless strays, although I think you are a few years younger.” Now his face became a little strange, as though a sudden pain had bitten at him but he was determined not to show it. “But children change so quickly—here and then gone. Everything changes.” For a moment whatever pained him seemed to take his breath away. It was a long time before he spoke again. “And how many years have you, Lady Pelaya?”

  “I am twelve. I will be married next year or the year after, they say, after my sister Teloni is married.”

  I wish you much happiness, now and later. Your friends look as though they are about to call for the lord protector to come rescue you. Perhaps you should go.”

  She began to turn, then stopped. “When I said you were King Olin of Southmarch, why did you say I was only half right? Isn’t that who you are? Everyone knows about you.”

  “1 am Olin of Southniarch, but no man is king when he is another man’s prisoner.” Even the sad, tired smile did not make an appearance this time. “Go on, young Pelaya of the Ocean. The others are waiting. The grace of Zoria on you—it has been a pleasure to speak with you.”

  Leaving the courtyard garden, the other girls surrounded Pelaya as though she were a deserter being dragged back to justice. She stole one look back but the man was staring at nothing again—watching clouds, perhaps, or the endless procession of waves in the strait: there was little else he could see from the high-walled garden.

  “You should not have spoken to him,” Teloni said. “He is a prisoner—a foreigner! Father will be furious.”

  “Yes.” Pelaya felt sad, but also different—strange, as though she had learned something talking to the prisoner, something that had changed her, although she could not imagine what that might be. “Yes, I expect he will.”

  10. Crooked and his Great-Grandmother

  The great family of Twilight was already mighty when the ancestors of our people first came to the land, and the newcomers were drawn to one or the other of the twin tribes, the children of Breeze or the children of Moisture, who were always contesting.

  One day Lord Silvergleam of the Breeze clan was out riding, and caught sight of Pale Daughter, the child of Thunder, son of Moisture, as lovely as a white stone. She also saw him, so tall and hopeful, and their hearts found a shared melody that will never be lost until the world ends.

  Thus began the Long Defeat.

  —from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar’s Book of Regret

  BARRICK EDDON WOKE UP in the grip of utter terror, feeling i as though his heart might crack like an egg. He could smell something burning, but the world was cold and astonishingly dark. For long moments he had no idea of where he was. Out of doors, yes—the rustle and creak of trees i
n the wind was unmistakable . .. He was behind the Shadowline, of course.

  Barrick felt as though he had just awakened from a long, bizarre dream—a feeling he knew all too well—but the waking was not much more reassuring than the dream. The endless twilight of these lands had actually ended, but only because the sky had turned black and not |usl night dark, but empty of stars, too, as though some angry god had thrown a cloak over all of creation. Had it not been for the last of the coals still glowing in the stone fire circle, the darkness would have been complete. And that terrible, acrid smell . . .

  Smoke. Gyir said it was the smoke from some huge fire, filling the sky, killing the light. Barrick’s eyes had stung for most of a day, he remembered now, and they had been forced to stop riding because he and Vansen the guard captain had trouble breathing.

  Barrick crawled to the fire and poked the embers. Vansen was asleep with his mouth open, wearing his arming-cap against the chill. Why was the man still here? Why hadn’t he turned and ridden back to Southmarch as any sane person would have done? Instead, here he lay beside his new friend, that ugly, splotch-feathered raven (which was sleeping too, appar-endy, its head under its wing). Barrick disliked the raven intensely, although he could not say why.