“And it will be very unpleasant for you.”
“I can handle it,” said Csorwe.
They took the cutter farther out, and made a long loop around the island. Csorwe stripped out of her outer clothes, and buckled her belt back on over her undershirt. She wished now that she hadn’t left her good sword behind. If Sethennai even noticed, he would be disgusted by the pointlessness of the gesture. She had two good hunting knives, though, and if things went according to plan she wouldn’t even need them.
“You will want to hold on to the rail,” said Oranna, setting her hand on Csorwe’s sternum. “This is going to hurt.”
At first it just felt cold. Csorwe was more uneasy about the contact than the pain. Then the chill seemed to penetrate her bones, driving spikes of ice through her heart and lungs. She should never have trusted Oranna. This had been a mistake from the first. Oranna was killing her—draining the warmth from her body—she tried to breathe, sucking in great gasps of air, but it did her no good. The cold tore at her insides as if she had swallowed great claws. She tried to pull away, reaching for her knives, but her hands were clumsy, as if they had swollen into clubs, and she couldn’t fasten them on anything. Panic swirled and tightened around her.
At last Oranna let her go. The damp heat of a summer’s night in Qarsazh wrapped around her. She clutched the rail with both hands, retching.
“You—you weren’t joking,” she said, when she could speak again. “That hurt like hell.”
“Well, it wasn’t much fun for me, either,” said Oranna. “Living flesh is a nightmare to practice upon. Anyway, it worked. You won’t have any difficulty with the perimeter.”
Csorwe swallowed and nodded. She didn’t feel any different. She would have to take Oranna’s word for it. She remembered, uneasily, how successfully she and Shuthmili had tricked Morga.
“Guess this is the last I’ll see of you,” said Csorwe. “Nothing to stop you taking the cutter, once I’m gone.”
Oranna smiled. “As I said, I gave you my word. And you gave me yours.”
“Uh-huh,” said Csorwe. It had occurred to her that the blood-pledge wouldn’t mean much if Oranna couldn’t find her.
“Why would I devalue my own currency? Why would you?” said Oranna. “Besides, there aren’t many runaways from the House of Silence. We ought to stick together.” Csorwe was certain this was intended purely to throw her off balance, and it worked. “We are … in a sense … sisters, don’t you think?” Oranna went on, and her smile became practically phosphorescent.
“You sent your sister to die,” said Csorwe.
“Ejarwa did what she wanted to do,” said Oranna. “I will remain here with the cutter, circling the island. And you had better hope I’m not lying, because I don’t see how else you mean to get away. When you get hold of Shuthmili, bring her to a window and give the signal.”
* * *
The water was surprisingly cold, but the air was balmy and the waves quiet. Csorwe crossed the first trail of lights with a brief tingle of alarm, but she felt nothing. The light didn’t change. That might not mean anything either way, but it was encouraging. She glanced back over her shoulder, and saw the shadow of the cutter moving off, deep black against the blue night sky.
She crossed another two perimeters—still no response—and reached the shallows. She lay on her belly in the water for some time, looking up at the fortress. The beach here was a short fingernail of gravel at the bottom of a steep cliff. There was a jetty, where one or two boats were moored, and a staircase cut into the cliff, only just visible in the moonlight. Two Wardens were wandering up and down the jetty, coming in and out of view. Csorwe couldn’t always see them, but their boots slapped on the boards, louder than the hissing of the waves.
She stalked up out of the water. One of the Wardens seemed to notice something, and stopped in mid-stride. She froze, not daring even to look round. A moment passed—two, three—and then the Wardens returned to their patrol.
At last she reached the bottom of the cliffside stair. This was more dangerous. Once she was high enough, she was absolutely exposed.
The stairs were narrow and slippery with spray under her bare feet. The wind cut through her wet clothes as though she were naked. At least she could see the Wardens on the jetty easily from here. As she climbed she watched them trundling back and forth.
She couldn’t see what was at the top of the cliff. If someone was there Csorwe would need to deal with them before they could raise the alarm. And what if there were two of them?
She crouched at the top of the steps and listened for talk, footsteps, breathing—anything. Nothing but the sound of the sea below, and the wind blowing in the dry grass.
There were no guards. There was only the fortress, so big that it blotted out the sky, and its great outer wall, and the forgotten sally port that she had to hope still existed.
The stairs in the hillside, said a treacherous voice in her back-brain. The door in the stone. You’re going to your death, Csorwe. There are only two certain things, you know that? Hunger and death. Those are the only things you can rely on.
She sidled along the edge of the cliff, staying low. There were guards at the main entrance to the fortress, and others on the wall, but at least there was a little cover here in the grass. The sally port was at the far edge, where the cliff had eroded until it was almost flush with the wall. Csorwe had a few nasty moments scrambling out to reach it. It would be pretty funny to come all this way and die by falling over your own feet into the sea.
The sally port was barricaded with planks, but they were soft and swollen with water; it was easy to batter her way through. Not so easy to do it silently, but she didn’t seem to have drawn any attention.
The opening gave onto a narrow passage, slanting upward and half-full of loose gravel, which slid and crumbled under her feet. Once or twice she had to cling on for balance and hope the floor wouldn’t give way altogether. Gravel rolled away beneath her, bouncing out of the sally port and cascading into the sea below.
She scrambled out into a slightly wider passage, and then reached a door, latched on the other side. Csorwe finagled a blade past the jamb and, little by little, hitched up the latch. The hinges gave a sad, crunchy little squeak as the door opened, and she came out into the back of a storeroom, full of barrels and boxes. The sea breeze was gone. This place smelled of dust and stale coffee. She crouched behind a gigantic jar of olive oil to catch her breath. If the vision she had been granted in the Shrine was accurate, she should have come out on the ground floor, where they kept the guards’ quarters, record offices, that sort of thing.
She scrambled over the barrels and out to the door of the pantry. It wasn’t locked, and she didn’t hear anyone nearby.
The ground floor was virtually empty. Csorwe agonised over the safest way to pass the open door of a kitchen, but it turned out there was nobody inside but a young man listlessly mopping the floor. He didn’t look up once.
She made her way undetected up several stories—administrative offices, a library, a wing of private Inquisitorial studies, and Quincuriate quarters. There were many more guards here, but they patrolled in regular patterns and it was easy to avoid them. There were magical wards too: worked into the doorframes and carved upon the panels, disguised as harmless decoration. Sethennai had taught her enough to recognise and avoid them.
Csorwe waited for the last patrol to pass, then slunk out into the corridor again. From here she could see the stairs up to the next floor. There was nothing left but the top floor. According to the thief, that was the prison level.
Shuthmili was here, upstairs, only just out of reach. Csorwe’s nerves, already drawn taut, began to screech in discord. What if she was too late? Shuthmili had already resisted for so long. What if she had given in?
She drew back into an alcove and tried to calm herself. It was such an amateur move to start thinking about things when you were working. She let another patrol pass by, then darted for the staircase.
Stairs were always difficult, and these were particularly bad. Whatever you tried, you were exposed from one side or the other. There was only a tiny blind spot at the top, where an arrow-slit window let in a grey shaft of moonlight.
At the top of the stairs was another corridor. There was no attempt to hide the wards and seals cut into the walls, into every block and every panel. Csorwe could almost feel the press of them: a low buzz at the edge of hearing, a flattened quality of light, a curdled thickness in the air.
The wards didn’t seem to respond to Csorwe’s presence. She had to hope Oranna’s spell was still working.
Csorwe had been in prisons before. She knew roughly what to expect: muttering, shouting, even singing. There was no sound here at all, just the buzzing of the seals, like dust made audible, and a faint draught coming from somewhere.
She didn’t see any guards. Maybe it wasn’t wise to leave the prisoners any sort of potential sacrifice to work with.
There was no cover here, either, just dozens of doors, all closed and barred. Shuthmili could be behind any one of them, but she needed to be quick. She couldn’t risk calling out. For a moment she considered some flashy Talasseres move, like unbolting every door and escaping with Shuthmili in the chaos, but she could see too many ways for that to end badly.
She went on down the corridor of doors, wondering where it ended.
The sound of the draught got louder as she walked. Maybe someone had left an open window, and the wind from the sea was getting in.
It didn’t sound like the sea. There was a hiss of blowing sand in it, as though she were back in the Speechless Sea, as though the corridor were a canyon and a storm was building in the desert beyond.
She looked back the way she had come. She couldn’t see the stairs any longer, only doors, stretching off into the distance.
The noise waxed, building like a thunderhead into a great rumbling swell of sound, though the feeling of the wind was still soft, only brushing Csorwe’s bare skin and stirring her hair. Ahead of her: nothing but doors, and the corridor stretching on and on.
She had time to think For fuck’s sake, of course it was too easy, of course, that’s why it was so empty everywhere. Oh, shit.
Doors, and more identical doors. They could have locked up a whole city of people in this place. She broke into a run.
As if in answer, the wind whipped about her ears, more forceful now, and getting louder. Fear can be useful. That was what Sethennai said. This fear, she felt as a fog: thick, sickly, paralysing.
At last the corridor reached its end, in a blank wall of bare stone. Csorwe stopped ten feet away. She could no more drag her eyes from the wall than she could have looked away from a predator about to spring. In that blank expanse was a threat she could not articulate. She was trapped here in this dead hallway, only her and the uncanny roar of the desert wind. The fog grew thicker, numbing her responses, slowing her reactions.
The wall changed without changing. Not a barrier but a tunnel, a hollow way, opening before her. The wind was howling in the tunnel and someone was walking toward her, like something coming up out of a nightmare. Someone dressed in white, head bowed, walking against the wind but purposeful, unswerving, relentless.
It was a Vigil Adept. The world dissolved around her, and she felt herself falling.
24
Neither a Blessing Nor a Curse
“THE PRISONER IS CONTAINED, Inquisitor,” said Vigil. “I’m afraid I made no progress with the interrogation.”
Qanwa Zhiyouri made a dismissive gesture. “I’m not particularly interested in anything she’d have to say for herself. Had quite enough of that in Tlaanthothe. It’s too bad we couldn’t take her immediately, but I do not desire Belthandros Sethennai as an enemy. And you would have missed out on the fun of closing the trap.”
Vigil nodded. Zhiyouri didn’t know whether a Quincury could actually have fun, but she had certainly enjoyed planning the operation: making sure the old sally port was clear, reducing security without tipping off the intruder that something was wrong, and ensuring that she found her way safely to the old prison level where Vigil had set up its lobster pot.
“Let me know if she does say anything,” said Zhiyouri. “I don’t think she’s got what you’d call a very developed psyche, but she might be more forthcoming now she’s outside Sethennai’s protection.”
She dismissed Vigil, called for a fresh pot of coffee and some biscuits, and summoned Shuthmili to her office. Best to give her one last chance to see sense.
“Please,” said Zhiyouri to her niece. “Take a seat. Help yourself to a biscuit. They’re made with honey from the Qanwa estate, you know. You must be hungry.”
Zhiyouri knew this, since she had been the one who had ordered the Wardens to reduce Shuthmili’s rations. If Shuthmili was determined to be difficult, she was not going to be comfortable.
“I am fine, thank you,” said Shuthmili, though Zhiyouri noted her eyes were fixed on the plate of biscuits.
“Just between the two of us,” said Zhiyouri, “don’t you think it’s time we sorted out this silly mess?”
Shuthmili blinked, folding her hands demurely in her lap, well out of the way of the biscuits. “I’m afraid I’ve lost track of time a bit. Is there a rush?”
Most mages out of the School of Aptitude were shrinking things, quiet and eager to please. Zhiyouri found Shuthmili’s assurance distasteful, but she forced a laugh.
“Well, no real rush, I suppose,” she said, “but we’ve already wasted a certain amount of time retrieving you from various scrapes, haven’t we?”
No response.
“I know you have your doubts about the Quincuriate, but I assure you it is no bad thing to have a vocation,” said Zhiyouri. “It’s a gift to know that you are where you’re meant to be, doing what you’re meant to do.”
“Is that how you feel about the Inquisitorate, Aunt Zhiyouri?” said Shuthmili sweetly.
“Of course,” she said. “The work, that’s the thing. You would be much happier if you had proper work to do. I certainly always am.”
“You don’t really believe that, though,” said Shuthmili. “You don’t think you’re like me.”
Shuthmili evidently did not recognise that Zhiyouri was paying her a supreme courtesy by implying that they were, in any sense, equals. Zhiyouri felt a growing urge to slap her. Instead she smiled, as if entertaining a child’s joke. “Well, not in all respects,” she said.
“It would be simpler if I were to enter Archer Quincury, wouldn’t it?” said Shuthmili. “Not a single mage in four hundred years of spotless genealogy, and now me. It makes life difficult. I can see that. If I become Archer Five then you can erase my name from the Qanwa record.”
“I think that’s rather unfair of you,” said Zhiyouri. Not to mention rather self-centred. “In the Quincuriate you would be contented and successful. It is a position of honour. At the moment your position can do nothing but damage to the house, and you are plainly miserable.”
“Yes. You only want what’s best for me,” she said. “So I’ve heard.”
“I want to help you,” said Zhiyouri. “I understand that you are young and it is never pleasant to make decisions that will alter the rest of your life. But you would make an exceptional Quincury Adept, according to every possible assessment. It is an insult to the Nine to waste that kind of talent.”
“Careful,” said Shuthmili. “It isn’t a talent. Neither a blessing nor a curse, but a duty.”
“Semantics,” said Zhiyouri, snapping off the word. It was a bit late for Shuthmili to turn pious now, but two could play at that game. “In any case, shirking a duty is also an affront to the Nine.”
“If the Nine cared what we did, people would behave better,” said Shuthmili, with a smile as thin as the sheen on a beetle’s shell. “It wouldn’t bother you, would it, if I had turned fully heretic? You’re so desperate to get me safely into the Quincuriate, it doesn’t matter what kind of corruption I might
take with me.”
“And what kind of life do you think you’re going to have outside the Quincuriate?” said Zhiyouri. The fact that Shuthmili was right made her angrier—Zhiyouri’s private view of religion was that it was useful for some purposes, and otherwise tiresome, but that wasn’t something one could admit to in polite company, and it was uncomfortable to be seen through. “You can’t think they’ll ever let you out again. No more jaunts with the Survey Office. What does that leave? Tutoring in the School of Aptitude? You’d be a glorified governess and you’d die of the mage-blight. Is that really what you want?”
“I suppose so,” said Shuthmili. “Or there’s always ship service, not that it really solves the mage-blight issue.”
Zhiyouri had to assume this was a joke. Ship service would be an obscene waste of Shuthmili’s talents. “Do you really think you’d enjoy life as part of a warship?”
Shuthmili shrugged. “Well, I’m sure my superiors will determine the best placement.”
Zhiyouri bit down on a snarl and willed herself to be calm. She held all the cards here. Let Shuthmili have her fun now, and learn later that it did not pay to antagonise Qanwa Zhiyouri. “Don’t you see that they already have?” she said, mildly.
“Oh, yes,” said Shuthmili. “I’d be an excellent Quincury Adept. I do know that. But it’s the only placement I have the capacity to refuse, and I find I’m quite enjoying the experience.”
“Yes,” said Zhiyouri. “You know, I did think you might be.”
You could let your quarry believe that she had managed to conceal her pitiful secrets, that she had won, that she was safe. But the Traitor’s Grave had many cells, and Zhiyouri had many strategies, and Shuthmili had no notion what was locked away in any of them.
* * *
Csorwe lurched into wakefulness, feeling as though someone had driven nails into her skull. She wasn’t tied up, but a heavy fog of weakness pressed down on her. She couldn’t move, nor could she see anything more than a diffuse day-brightness. Her ears felt tight, as if she had sunk to the bottom of a deep pond.
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