The Ruins of Ambrai

by Melanie Rawn

  Stairs; more stairs. She had never wished so much for a Folding spell. At last they reached the top, where an oak door hung on one hinge. Uniforms and bones sprawled everywhere; she had no choice but to climb over them.

  Sarra stopped cold an arm’s length from the doorway, tottering with one foot on a tiny patch of floor and the other on a mound of uniforms. “Alin! Stay back! This must be a Ward—I feel that if I take one more step, I’ll die!”

  “All right, Sarra, take it easy.”

  There was nothing in the open doorway. All she saw was the space beyond: an expanse of plain gray flagstones, stairs rising about fifty feet from where she stood, a glimpse to the left of a wide foyer and a tall window empty of glass. Hissing in her head was the grim promise of death at a thousand eager hands. She trembled, unable to go through and yet refusing to turn back. I’m Mageborn, even if I don’t have my magic—I know this isn’t real!

  “Alin!” She was ashamed of the thin whine that came from her throat.

  “Nothing’s going to hurt you, Sarra. Stay where you are. Val, talk to her.”

  “Sarra?” Val’s tone was easy and calm. “Alin’s coming around to your left. You can hear him, can’t you? Don’t worry. During the battle, the Wards were countered. They’d never have been able to get in otherwise. So what you feel—careful, Alin!—it’s leftovers of a dead Ward, Sarra. It can’t hurt you.”

  “I know that, damn it!” she gasped. “But if this is a dead Ward, how did these people keep sane when it really w-worked?”

  “Tell me what it’s like. Come on, Sarra, you talk to me for a while.”

  She knew what he was doing: making her use the sound of her own voice against irrational fear. She took a deep, steadying breath that hurt her constricted lungs. “There’s nothing here—no people, I mean, but—but the Ward’s telling me they’re waiting for me, to k—kill me—”

  “How? Swords, knives, spells, what?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how?’” she shouted. “It’s death, Val, people who want me to die!”

  “Sloppy,” Val announced scornfully. “If it’d been a really strong Ward you’d still feel the specifics, as detailed as the menu in the Compass Rose Inn. Ever been there? It’s run by the Olvosian Web in Neele, and a finer venison steak and cheese pie I’ve never had in my—”

  “Oh, shut up! I’m standing here like a damned statue and you’re babbling about restaurants!” But anger was a good weapon against fear, and she knew Val knew it. “Alin, where the hell are you?”

  “Right here, Sarra.”

  “He has to keep back from the Ward, Sarra, don’t worry. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Easy for you to say!” Alin’s voice came from her right, and then he was holding her hand. He was still a pace behind her, balanced on piled bones. She heard him suck in a breath and knew the Ward had touched him. “Saints and Wraiths! Val, stay back. You’re not Mageborn, you don’t have any resistance.”

  Sarra clung to Alin’s cold fingers. “What can we do?”

  “I’m going to put my arm around you. On three, we jump through.”

  “No! I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can.” Not leaving her any more time to think or fear, he said swiftly, “One—two—three!”

  And he hauled her with him through the Ward. They stumbled and went down hard on the paving stones, bruising their knees. Sarra could breathe again, and her head and heart cleared of the terrible certainty that the door meant death. Still shivering, she wrapped both arms around Alin in wordless gratitude.

  “Now, Sarra,” he chided. “You’ll make Val jealous.”

  “You wish!” called Val.

  Sarra laughed at that, a bit hysterically. She bit her tongue and let Alin go, turning to look at Val. “Your turn to jump. Come get me, Val—pretend you are jealous and want to slit my throat.”

  “Nothing so messy, adorable Domna,” he replied, taking a cautious step closer to the door, bones crunching underfoot. His bantering tone was belied by the apprehension in his dark eyes. Another step. “And nothing so quick. No, I’d make it something lingering, and—and—” His face went rigid and he dropped his sword. “Geridon’s Golden Balls! Alin!”

  “Jump!” Alin shouted. “Now, Val!”

  He did, more on instinctive obedience to his cousin’s command than from any real thought. He sprawled near them, panting and shaking. Alin propped him up and held him close. After a moment Val drew away.

  “Your pardon, Domna,” he managed. “I don’t usually use such language around ladies.”

  After all the rude, ill-bred, mannerless impertinences he’d committed in her presence, now he was apologizing for swearing? It struck her as exceedingly funny. Hilarity proved contagious; the three of them rocked with loud and witless giggles. Reaction, Sarra told herself in a fleeting moment of sanity. Laughter—better than tears for tension, or so Agatine always says. . . .

  Eventually they sobered. Val looked around and sighed. “Well, if all that noise didn’t bring them down on us, I suppose they’re not coming.”

  “Not here, or not interested,” Alin agreed.

  “Or waiting to see what we do next,” Sarra added.

  They helped each other up. Val slapped his thigh angrily. “Damn! My sword!”

  “I didn’t like to mention it,” Alin said blandly, “but what use you thought it would be against a castleful of Mageborns is something I don’t quite grasp.”

  Val gave him a look to boil a glacier.

  Malerris Castle undulated over the southern cliffs of its island, a series of towers, turrets, outbuildings, and baileys surrounded by stone walls fifty feet high and fifteen feet thick. They could not hope to explore more than a small portion of it. Frankly, Sarra was ready to say she had been here and go back to Shellinkroth. The place made her thumbs prickle.

  The window she had seen from the Warded door proved to be one of a score looking out on a cobbled courtyard. Deserted, of course, and scarred black by a conflagration that had blown the glass to shards. But within the castle signs of fire were few. The destruction was nowhere near as total as reported. Fire had come through, certainly. Still, as Alin said, it was odd to expect evidence of a blast furnace and find nothing wayward torches couldn’t account for.

  There were no more bodies. Perhaps the Council Guard had cleaned up. Perhaps this part of the castle was in use, and the Lords of Malerris had taken away the corpses. Or perhaps the door was the limit of the invasion. Recalling how it had felt to encounter the “dead” Ward, Sarra could easily believe it.

  She indicated the stairs with a tiny shrug; Alin’s shoulders lifted in the same fashion. Val made a multiple flourish of one hand toward the first step. Broad at the base, narrowing toward the landing, each riser was worn in the middle like a streambed. The stairs hugged the wall, no banister on the side open to the stones below; Sarra felt queasy at the idea of running sword fights.

  “Investigate each floor as we go?” Val asked. “Or climb to the top and peek in as we come back down?”

  “The top. I want to see the view,” Sarra replied stoutly.

  “Wonderful,” Alin muttered.

  “He’s afraid of heights.” Val nudged him with an elbow as they started to climb again.

  “You bet I am! After that leap you made me take off the wall at Isodir—”

  “That little hop?”

  “Fifty feet if it was an inch! I might’ve broken both legs!”

  “Thirty at the most, into a pile of straw.”

  Sarra nearly snapped at them to be quiet. Then she understood the good-natured acrimony: it kept fear at bay.

  The tower was short compared to others spreading across the cliffs, a bit less than a hundred feet high. But the view was indeed spectacular, even at night. Sarra didn’t intend lingering to see it by day. Light from the stars and the Ladymoon and her faithful companion illumined the sea far below and the rest of the c
astle mounting taller cliffs. An open balcony circled the tower. Sarra paced around it slowly, silently. The feeling of being watched was back.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s freezing out here.”

  “Fine with me,” Val said, eyeing the next spire over—a soaring stone needle sharpened to a wicked point snagging the starry sky.

  The pair followed her back into the uppermost chamber, a single broad room charred to a crisp. Alin said they’d probably fired it to create the impression that the whole tower burned. All this deception—the bodies in the tunnel, the damage by fire—made Sarra even more certain that the Malerrisi still existed, and in great numbers, and almost certainly somewhere within this vast complex.

  Damn it, she knew she was being watched.

  On the way down they opened dozens of doors. Bedchambers, garderobes, tiled rooms with sinks and bathtubs, closets, storage space: nothing more sinister. Yet everywhere—carved into stone and wood, glazed on tiles, woven into tapestries and rugs—were the sigils of the Weaver and his servants. The Great Loom predominated. But spools and spindles and shuttles, spinning wheels and needles and scissors appeared over and over. Sarra shivered, wondering if Lords of Malerris would react with the same instinctive shudder to the repeated sigils of Mage Guardians and their patron Saints.

  By the time they reached the ground floor again, Val remarked that the time was just after Half-Eighth, and considering the hour or so back to the Ladder, they’d return to Shellinkroth around Fourth—time enough for a nap before they set off to catch up with the others.

  Sarra did not relish another jump through that doorway or another walk through that tunnel of bones. But she had another reason for wanting to stay a little longer: she had found exactly nothing.

  What she had expected (hoped? dreaded?) to find, she could not have said. Perhaps the discovery of the Ladder pair and the confirmation of her suspicions were enough. Yet somehow she felt disappointed.

  Ridiculous.

  “Come on, then,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this place.”

  “Y’know,” Val replied, “I like you, Sarra. I mean, I really like you.”

  She shrugged this off as yet another masculine incomprehensibility—for it would never even occur to her that he wouldn’t.

  She approached the doorway with heart pounding—and sensed exactly nothing. Idiot! she chastised internally. Of course it doesn’t work from this side!

  Even so, she went through as quickly as she could, boots sliding on the piled uniforms and bones. The Ward clutched her for an instant, then let go. Alin and Val hurried, too. The latter stooped briefly to retrieve his sword, cursing under his breath. Down the long stairs they went, down into the damp and dark.

  And emerged from a cave on the wrong side of the waterfall.

  “What happened?” Val yelled over the liquid thunder, sword half drawn.

  “So much for infallible memory,” Sarra accused Alin—unfairly, she knew, because there had been no wrong turns to take in the tunnel. There had been no turns at all. “How’d we get over here? We’re supposed to be over there!”

  Alin’s blue eyes narrowed against the waterfall’s spray. He paced the rocky shelf, scowling ferociously, muttering and gesturing with both hands as if retracing their route below ground. Sarra was about to tell him to stop fidgeting and do something useful when he gave a sudden explosive “Ha!” and strode to the lip of the cliff.

  Marching off a circle enclosed by black stones—shiny obsidian like that littering Caitiri’s Hearth on Brogdenguard; Sarra had a souvenir from Neele—he pointed straight across to the cavern barely visible on the other side.

  “See that?”

  “See what?” Sarra demanded.

  “It’s identical!”

  “It is?” Val joined him, squinting into the darkness. “To what?”

  “Here! Except it’s on the west side of the waterfall instead of the east!”

  Sarra approached them, arms wrapped around herself, soaked by chill spray. “And you think this is significant.”

  “Of course it’s significant!” Alin shouted. “‘West or east, east or west/Ladder at Viranka’s Breast’! Here’s the Ladder—” He nodded at the circle of stones, then at the cascade. “—and there’s St. Viranka!”

  Sarra, tired of trying to make herself heard, drew the men back into the relative shelter of the cave. “Alin, are you sure?”

  He mopped his wet face and slicked hair from his brow with both hands. “I just know, that’s all.”

  “Great,” Valirion muttered.

  “Shut up, Val,” Sarra said. “Alin, do you have any idea where this one goes? Because if you don’t, we’ll have to go back to the tunnel and get over to the other side somehow. We’ll have to do that anyway, to get back to Shellinkroth.”

  “Not necessarily.” He gave a secret smile and began to explore the cavern, a tiny bluish Mage Globe kindling over his left shoulder. Sarra gave a start. Val only shrugged.

  “He can, when he’s not thinking about it,” he murmured. “When there’s need enough, and he’s not—reminded.”

  “Oh,” she said inadequately.

  They watched his systematic search in silence. He was dogged by his Globe as faithfully as was the Ladymoon by her little companion across the sky. The odd light played over his features, reflected off each droplet clinging to cheeks and brow. Sarra glanced at Val, and nearly smiled to see bemused affection in his dark eyes—not unmixed with cheerful lust. It might be nice, she conceded, to have a man look at her like that, with tenderness and humor to govern passion. If she could find a man who could feel and laugh as well as desire, she might even think about thinking about marriage.

  But why, she wondered with a forlorn inner sigh, were all the good ones either taken, like Orlin, or taken another way, like Alin and Val?

  Alin swung around, gleaming eyes lit by more than the Mage Globe.

  “He’s got it,” Val said.

  The damp blond head nodded. “You’ll never guess.”

  “But you’d like us to,” his cousin replied, adding to Sarra, “He’s always like this when he thinks he’s been clever.”

  “I am clever,” Alin retorted.

  “Can we get out of here?” Sarra asked with exaggerated patience.

  “As you command, Domna.” The Mage Globe vanished as Alin led the way back out to the cliff. Keeping them outside the black stone circle, he said, “I’ll go first, just to be sure.”

  And before Val could lash out an arm to stop him, he was inside the circle and gone.

  “Where does he think he’s going?” Sarra cried. “If he doesn’t come back, we’ll be stranded!”

  “If he doesn’t know where he’s going,” Val told her grimly, “he’ll never come back.”

  But he did come back, scarcely a minute later. And he was laughing quietly, his eyes all alight with glee.

  “It’s safe—the absolute dead of night. Come along, step inside. That’s it. By St. Rilla, we’re in luck! There’s even a nearby Ladder to Shellinkroth!”

  “From where?” Val roared.

  “Ambrai.”

  And two blinks later, Sarra returned to the city of her birth for the first time in more than seventeen years.

  10

  She emerged from the round Ladder—this time a chimney—into a room she had never seen before but knew from her books. This was Caitirin Bekke’s private hideaway, located in the highest tower of the Commandery. The fires that had destroyed the Mage Academy and its precincts had not climbed the thin round spire to this room, built two hundred years ago by the Third-Tier Mage Captal from Brogdenguard, a shrine to the home she had loved.

  “The obsidian circle,” Alin said as he stepped out of the chimney, Val close behind him. “I should’ve guessed just from that. But at first I thought it meant Brogdenguard.” Carefully he touched the hearth hood, made of great sharp lumps of gl
assy black rocks mortared with black cement.

  Sarra was drawn to a narrow window with a pointed arch. The shutters hung askew; years of storms had battered the frames and shattered the glass. Night wind swirled around her as she stared down at her city. In her memory, it had still risen proud and lovely across rolling hills on either side of the Ambrai River. Now that illusion was gone forever. She made herself see the ruin, barely hearing her cousins talking behind her.

  “How did you know this one led to Ambrai?” Val asked.

  “I read the sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “The one carved into the cave wall.” Alin sounded unbearably smug. Triumph evidently made him voluble. “Captal Bekke’s initials entwined with Third Lord Escovor’s. Their family colors even linger: red and crimson, black and orange.”

  Sarra knuckled her eyes and turned from the window. It would not do for them to see her crying over her moonlit glimpse of the Octagon Court. “A Mage Captal and a Lord of Malerris?”

  “Lovers,” Alin affirmed. “They were the scandal of all Lenfell at the time—except for Grand Duchess Veller Ganfallin, of course. In fact, they were hatching a plot against her when the First Lord, Warden of the Loom, found out about them and executed Shen Escovor. Rather messily, legend has it.”

  In all the books Sarra had stolen—rescued—she had never read about this. A Mage Captal and a Lord of Malerris? Lovers? Impossible! She sank into a dusty chair, one of an upholstered pair set near the hearth. Everything in this room came in pairs, in fact—tables topped with carved slabs of obsidian, brass lamps gone dull with lack of polishing, wrought iron braziers beside the chairs to warm chilled toes.

  “Alin,” she began, but he was still telling the tale.

  “Caitirin Bekke built this tower the first year she was Captal, originally because she was homesick for Brogdenguard. Then she put in the Ladder so she and Escovor could meet in secret.” He walked softly across the polished ceramic tiles, black filmed with a layer of dust and ash. “Everything is from villages near Caitiri’s Hearth—the stone, the tiles, the furnishings—” He pointed to smoke-stained frescoes on the walls. “There are the mountains themselves.”