by Melanie Rawn
5
They didn’t, of course. Identification of the Ladders hidden in the big/little verse was the extent of their detections. But though Sarra was frustrated, Alin was as pleased as the piglet on the toy-shop sign.
Alin knew only those Ladders neither lost nor forgotten. Of the possibly hundreds once extant, a mere twenty-six Ladders—thirteen pairs—were still in use. Many were destroyed when Ambrai burned—that was why they’d burned it—and many more when Malerris Castle met the same fate. For, as the final line of any version of the song attested, “Ladders set afire die.” Alin theorized that Ambrai and Malerris Castle were two of three major hubs—the former because centers for Mages, Bards, and Healers had been there, the latter because it was the home of the Lords of Malerris. He was sure the other hub was Ryka. Though he knew of only two Ladders there, to Ambrai and to Shellinkroth, for governmental convenience Ryka must have had Ladders to all the Shirs.
It made sense to Sarra. She was eager to get back to Roseguard and her purloined library and look for the oldest and most authoritative versions of the song. Then Alin wouldn’t have to guess about lyric shift, added verses, or dropped lines. Her Ladder Rat would solve all the riddles, the Rising would have a network of swift transportation, and this journey would turn out even more profitable than she hoped.
Roke Castle Lighthouse (North or south, south or north/Ladder shines the lightning forth) was easily approached and impossible to enter. Unless, of course, one happened to have along a Mage whose Invisibility spell had been the envy of three Captals. At Half-Eighth, while the keepers were in their common room eating lunch, two Mage Guardians, two power-blocked Mageborns, and a Wastrel climbed the winding stairs to the top floor.
Sarra went through the Blanking Ward much more easily this time, knowing what to expect. This made it easier on Alin. She opened her eyes thousands of miles, two seasons, and eight hours away in Cantratown.
As promised, it was the middle of the night. Kanto Solingirt immediately respelled for Invisibility, however, for the Ladder was located in a cellar of the Affe family compound. Fourth Tier, nearly as numerous as the Ostins, and staunch supporters of First Councillor Anniyas, an Affe discovery of fugitive Mages would be unmitigated disaster.
Once out the back door, however, the elderly Scholar let the spell drop—and nearly dropped to the cobbles with weariness. His daughter and Val supported him to the main street of this rough part of town, where all five then mimed the results of a late drunken night. Sarra, leaning against Alin’s shoulder, nearly leaped out of her skin when he began howling the unspeakably obscene chorus of “Bower Lad’s Lament.” Windows opened above to let down a rain of curses and a brick that narrowly missed Imilial. But no Constable of the Watch appeared to chastise, warn, arrest, or otherwise silence the group.
The boundary between Lesser and Greater Cantratown, though unmarked, was as clear as the winter moons in the cloudless night sky. The five staggered down a block lined with cheap stores and broken cobbles, crossed an intersection, turned left, and found themselves in a neighborhood in good repair. Trees lined the street in front of tidy shops, the paint was almost new, and a Watch post was visible two streets ahead. Alin shut up and everyone else straightened up. Six fast blocks later they were being warmly welcomed to Garvedian House.
“Sorry about the time, Luse,” Imilial apologized to the young woman who let them inside. “It was noon where we came from.” She settled her exhausted father on a soft chair in the parlor.
“Well, rest what’s left of the night. Hungry? No, don’t answer that, Alin Ostin!” Lusira Garvedian playfully poked him in the ribs. He pretended to collapse, mortally wounded, onto a couch—giving the lie to Val’s remark that pretty girls made him nervous.
Although to describe Lusira as “pretty” was an injustice. She was, quite simply, staggeringly beautiful. No older than twenty-five, clad in a snowy nightrobe that did nothing to conceal a spectacular figure and everything to emphasize a dusky brown complexion, she had the kind of long-limbed, doe-eyed, full-lipped beauty that Sarra—round-cheeked, tiltnosed, and uncompromisingly short—had always envied.
“Advar and Elomar arrived yesterday,” Lusira went on. “They’re asleep upstairs. As you ought to be!” she scolded Kanto Solingirt. “Val, make yourself useful and take him up to the corner bedroom.”
After introductions all around, a servant came in with food. They’d eaten the remains of last night’s dinner at dawn back in Kenrokeshir, so the array of duck-egg omelets, fried venison strips, potato jumble, and tangy lemonade was more than appreciated. Still, eating breakfast by lamplight when her senses told Sarra it was afternoon warned her that she was falling victim to what Alin termed Ladder Lag. Much more of this leaping around the world and Sarra was convinced she’d want lunch at midnight.
After the meal, Lusira Garvedian escorted her to a small, pleasant room at the back of the house. Sarra lay down for a nap. And couldn’t sleep.
All these people seemed to know each other so well. Why had she never heard of them? Why had Agatine and Orlin insulated her from the Rising? Or was it a more inclusive conspiracy—with Gorynel Desse giving the orders? In any case, what had they been protecting her from?
Or saving her for?
What, damn it?
It was no surprise to be in this house. Sarra remembered Mage Captal Leninor Garvedian quite well. How many other houses held relatives of Guardians killed at Ambrai? Did they all shelter agents of the Rising? Or did the majority shudder when their dead were mentioned, and shut their doors?
Suddenly she jerked upright in bed, wide awake without realizing she’d been asleep. Frail winter dawn outlined the curtained windows, but the house was silent. No—some sound had awakened her, alerted her. She rose quietly and looked outside. Nothing but a little walled garden, bare but for a few bushes and two beds of straggly winter herbs. Along its dirt path hurried a tall, cloaked man. Valirion? Yes—the long strides were familiar now, the jut of an elbow as he kept one hand on the knife concealed in his right trouser pocket.
That he could betray them never crossed her mind; that he could risk their safety on some private business was unthinkable; so it must be something to do with the Rising. Something else she hadn’t a clue about.
Well, that was going to change. Now.
Hauling on her boots, Sarra slipped along a hallway to the garden door. Lusira Garvedian stood there, exquisite beauty framed in the open door against a winter as stark as her black gown. She stared at nothing as she sipped tea from a porcelain cup—Rine make, to Sarra’s eye, and worth a small fortune.
“Where did he go?” Sarra asked—rudely, she knew, but she’d had enough of not knowing what she had a right to know.
“He’ll return in good time,” Lusira replied, still watching something only she could see.
“Where from?” She paused, then added, “Please tell me, Domna.”
Lusira closed the door and turned. The sadness in those huge dark eyes caught at Sarra’s throat. With a graceful gesture she invited Sarra to follow her into the dining room, where the table was laid for another breakfast. The service was more of the same Rine porcelain: cups, saucers, plates, platters, and bowls in subtle tones of autumn green.
Sarra spared the service not a hundredth of the admiration it deserved, drawn instead to the sideboard where a silver clock, gears visible behind a glass door, ticked the last few minutes of Fourth. Such clocks that told the week as well as the hour were rare, but its uniqueness was not what caught Sarra’s eye. To her, this clock was anything but unique. It was twin to one she’d seen a thousand times in Allynis Ambrai’s bedchamber. On a round mother-of-pearl face each hour was marked by a tiny octagon of Ambraian blue onyx. The thirty-six weeks and the Wraithenday were shown on a cylinder that revolved around the bottom, each with the sigil of its saint or, for the weeks of solstices and equinoxes, many-flared golden suns. She knew it was not her grandmother’s clock by the
small lion’s head week-marker; the one belonging to Lady Allynis had an acorn there instead, for her husband Gerrin Ostin.
“You recognize it, of course,” Lusira Garvedian murmured. “A gift from your grandmother to her good friend the Captal. Friends spared it from what happened at Ambrai. Do you prefer your tea strong?”
Sarra turned to find Lusira at the serving cart. “Yes, please.”
In total silence but for the soft tick of the clock she was privileged to witness Lusira turn a small ritual into a work of art. Delicate hands selected fresh leaves, ground them with a fine marble mortar-and-pestle set, tied them in an unbleached muslin bag, and settled the bag in a silver pot. Boiling water was poured, and as the tea steeped Lusira considered the array of porcelain cups on the cart. All were different, and the selection depended on a host’s intentions toward a guest. The one chosen for Sarra had a pattern of wheatsheaves: sigil of St. Velireon the Provider.
Lusira offered the filled cup. Sarra inhaled the fragrance, sipped three times, and nodded approval. Grandmother had performed this ritual rather absently, usually too busy talking to pay proper attention to the nuances. But in some of Lusira’s gestures, in the careful and elegant preparation of the leaves in total silence, Sarra was reminded painfully of her mother.
Manners now dictated that she sit at the oval table to indicate acceptance of Lusira’s hospitality. She was barely seated when the lady spoke.
“He went to visit his son.”
“His—?”
“His son,” she repeated, “who is four years old and has no official father. Val must see him in more secrecy than any work he does for the Rising.”
“Divorced?” Like my parents. . . .
“Never married. She’s a Blood. He’s Third Tier. Legally meaningless these days, but socially. . . .” Lusira ended with a small, eloquent shrug.
“A father has rights.” Even Auvry Feiran? Does he have a right to see me or Cailet?
“Not unless his Name appears on the Census birth registry.”
“But that’s not fair! Unless a man is a criminal, or dangerous to his children, he ought to be allowed to see his child.”
Until now she’d never thought about it. The issue hadn’t even been one of those abstracts she loved to thrash out with Agatine and Orlin. But because Val had become a friend, the matter had become personal. And suddenly she wondered how many more social and political issues she’d find standing in front of her, made flesh and blood.
Worse, how many she’d never recognize until they stood in front of her.
Sheltered? Insulated? Protected? She’d been wrapped in a damned cocoon.
But—would I have been ready before now? Agatine and Orlin taught me the thinking part of it, how to reason through an issue without getting emotionally involved. Thinking is clean, logical. But people’s lives are full of feeling, all convoluted and confusing, and—
“Valirion is a criminal as far as the Council is concerned. That’s all the recommendation the Firennos Blood needs.”
“But it’s not fair,” Sarra repeated.
“Much in life is not.”
She felt her jaw muscles quiver—an outward sign of tension others could read, a habit she was trying to break—and consciously relaxed. “I promise, Domna Lusira, that things will become infinitely more fair very soon.”
“How vehement you are!” She laughed, a sound Sarra would have found exquisite if she had not thought it directed at her. She flushed angrily. But Lusira’s next words corrected her misunderstanding. “I thank the Saints for you, Sarra Liwellan! If anyone will make better this sorry world, it is you.”
“You bet I will. I—” She started as five high, piercing notes rang from somewhere in the house. “What was that?”
Lusira winced. “Breakfast.”
“Again?” Sarra asked, smiling. “It sounds like a shrine bell, summoning the starving!”
“If only it was limited to mealtimes!” She cupped her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, and sighed. “The silly thing rings every hour from Fifth to Thirteenth. It’s an exact copy of the bell—not to scale, praise all Saints—at St. Miramili’s near Wyte Lynn Castle. Our Name built the shrine ages ago, and with this house I inherited—to my hourly regret—that damned bell!”
Half an hour later they were all seated. No one remarked Val’s absence. It was as if he’d never been there to be gone. Joining them were two men in Guardian black, both wearing the green sash and silver herb-sprig collar pins of the Healer Mage. Sarra bit back a warning to change clothes; Imilial would take care of it, and Sarra would not be compelled to tromp on them with her authority first thing.
For she was Authority on this journey. Not because she was a Blood or a First Daughter or Agatine’s heir, but because she alone of them all was unhunted by the Council Guard.
And because she had been protected; because she had lived in a cocoon. Her thinking was clear and unimpassioned, not muddled by emotional conflicts and personal troubles.
Except for their regimentals, the two Healers were as opposite as pairs in the Ladder Song. Advar Senison, youngest son of the First Daughter of the Prime branch of that Third Tier family, was short, pleasantly plump, pink-faced, and a true gallant. He bowed and flourished greetings to the women, with many compliments on the obviously superb state of their health as evidenced by Lusira’s glowingly flawless complexion, Imilial’s delightfully sparkling eyes, and Sarra’s gloriously glossy hair.
Elomar Adennos, as grim and dry and uncompromising as his Fourth Tier family’s main holding in The Waste, was in his mid-forties, perhaps six or eight years older than Advar Senison. He said exactly nothing when introduced. He bent his head over no woman’s hand. Tall, thin-shanked, plain and brown as an earthenware plate, he was an unlikely object for affection. When Lusira rose from her chair to kiss him an extremely affectionate good morning, Sarra forgot her manners and frankly stared.
After the meal they repaired to the bookroom. Lusira and Imilial wrote letters; the three Mages talked with each other—or, rather, Solingirt and Senison talked while Adennos sat silent; Sarra looked over the books and temporarily considered trying to interest Alin in a collection of song-sheets. But he ignored everything in favor of sitting at the window, staring through lace curtains at the street.
When an informal lunch was served in the library at Half-Eighth, Sarra was pleasantly surprised to find that this was the meal her stomach was expecting. But Val, also expected, did not show up. Sarra’s head filled with all sorts of disasters and she ached with curiosity about this unsuspected son. Four years old—what was his name? Which Firennos was his mother? Did some sympathetic family member or nurse sneak the child to a secret meeting with his father now and then? She wasn’t sure she ought to ask Val. She didn’t dare ask Alin.
It was getting on for a dusky Eleventh, and Sarra was getting frantic, when Val finally returned. He was loud with false cheer and there were scars in his dark eyes. Alin took him out into the back garden for a time while the others got ready for the trip to Shellinkroth.
At length the pair returned. Lusira led them all upstairs to a door guarded by a pair of carved lions crouching above the lintel.
Sarra whispered to Alin, “‘Ladder in a lion’s lair’?”
He nodded. “Garvedian family sigil, and a bad joke.”
The circular “lion’s lair”—featuring a fashionable Tillinshir Savannah decor that included a fresco of gamboling galazhi fawns, woven grass mats, and a brass lion head for a tub spigot—was a bathroom.
6
The Ladder on Shellinkroth was round, too, of course. Alin supplied the identification from a verse Sarra didn’t know.
“‘Clear and fine, or rainy weather/Ladder of the silver feather.’”
Then he sneezed.
“Tell me, Kanto,” Val asked, rubbing his own nose, “was the placement of a Ladder wholly dependent on its maker’s sense of hu
mor?”
“Not always.” The old man brushed feathers off his cloak and mustache. “They worked with what they had—and because a dovecote is round. . . .”
The doves fluttered at their appearance, then fled in a flurry. Exiting by the keyhole-shaped door—through which pudgy Advar Senison barely fit—they stepped out into a sweet summery night. The sea was a star-sparked darkness far away. Once they descended a mile or two down the trail, it would vanish in folds of the Tarre Mountains.
“I imagine isolated Ladders are best,” Imilial Gorrst said, picking feathers from her hair. “I’d hate to think what would happen, for instance, if someone arrived in Luse’s bathroom while she was in it.”
“You may hate the idea,” Val retorted, “but it does wonders for me.”
By the blue-white light of his softly kindled Mage Globe, Elomar Adennos favored him with a long, level look that quelled him instantly. Alin cleared his throat, mouth twitching in amusement.
“The cote-holder comes by a couple of times a week,” he said to Sarra. “But this isn’t one of his nights to sleep over. We’ll wait in his shelter until daylight, then start for Havenport.”
Sarra had forgotten all about the ship that supposedly was taking her to Ryka. What day was it, anyhow?
Val’s happily malicious grin told her that asking was a mistake. “Count the night we left Roseguard as the first, or the ninth of Snow Sparrow. We spent the first, second, and third nights, which is to say the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, and the fourth night, which was first—of Candleweek—in Kenrokeshir. We lost the fifth and second between Kenroke and Cantrashir. We just came from Half-Eleventh on the sixth—or third—in Cantratown back to Half-First of the same day, which means that we’ve caught the night we lost.”
“Everybody got that?” Alin inquired innocently.
“Very funny,” Imilial growled.
When Advar Senison asked plaintively, “But what day is it?”, Alin clapped a hand over his partner’s mouth.