He heard the groan of iron and timbers and the stone-enforced walls of the little chamber quivered slightly as the drawbridge thunked down onto the path above him. He did not use the entrance through which he had come. Instead, he used the one on the opposite side of the path. It opened under the bridge, just above water level in the moat, which was lower than that of the canal. The guards customarily faced out, his allies assured him, and with the ponderous bridge in position, his exit would be unobserved.
Footsteps were overlain by the low murmur of voices soberly conversing in tones suitable to the religious occasion drawing them forth. When the clamor overhead reached what Timoteo judged a prudently crowded level, he swung himself up onto the bridge, landing acrobatically upright. Most of the traffic was concentrated near the center of the bridge, but enough people strayed near the edges to conceal him. No one gave him a second glance, each person intent upon his own business which, judging from the expressions on their faces, was not cheerful.
Timoteo scowled and marched briskly against the tide of people, his expression arranged to say to all who saw him that he was a busy, important man who had been accidentally drenched and who urgently needed to return to his chambers in the palace for a change of clothing before rejoining the crowd bustling off to the ceremony. He kept within the throng until he was inside the palace. His allies had drawn him a floor plan, which he had memorized, and now he had no trouble locating the privy tower, where he secreted himself in darkness almost as overpoweringly smelly as the skunk-woman. To pass the time until the castle would be clear enough of inhabitants, he recalled his recent travels in four different countries and went back over the instructions he had received from the relatives of the allies he had met in one of them. He hoped his contacts had stayed on friendly terms with their kin, and that the prearranged signal would have indeed been prearranged on this end as well. If not…
With that foray into futile worry, he decided that the atmosphere of his hiding place was depressing him. Slipping out into the torch-lit hall, he turned left at one of the bedchambers, dried his feet and legs, and regretted that he could not borrow an item or two of dry clothing without providing clues to his identity. He used the front staircase to reach the second floor, and the main hallways rather than the back ways, reasoning that for the ceremony of which he had been told, a lesser servant or two was more likely than his or her betters to be running loose, un-consoled by religion. He fully expected, on reaching the nursery, that the nurse and her charge would both be absent, tending to their spiritual needs.
He opened the door to the nursery as if he had come bearing a message for the nurse. As he expected, however, she was not there. The room was dark and gently redolent of baby oil, powder, and the faintest lingering scent of soiled diaper.
The nurse’s cot was flat and tidy, the blanket pulled up over the pillow. Outside the narrow window thunder crashed and lightning crackled across the pane. From the cradle beside the window a thin and plaintive cry arose. Smiling, Timoteo knelt and scooped up his quarry, quieting her with the extravagant promises he made to all females of any age.
Now came the difficult part, the part with which he needed help. Suddenly he felt sure that it would not be there, that his allies in the city would not be alert for his signal. Though the plans had been set for the night of the ceremony from the beginning, he had not had time to contact anyone after his arrival and make them aware of his presence. The barge’s proximity to the little room had been a fortunate happenstance that was supposed to take place in a more deliberate fashion, and would have, had he not been under guard with the witch and Prince. Still, his allies were exceptionally well-informed of activities in and around both temple and palace. He had to trust that his predicament had been noted. If so, they should be watching.
He lifted a torch from its sconce outside the doorway and carried it back into the darkened room. With the baby snuggled in the crook of one arm, he carried the torch to the window, raising and lowering it in a deliberate pattern, slowly and precisely, so that it would not be confused with lightning.
The baby slept against his chest and he folded his wet robe over her blanket as he carried her through the hallways and down the steps to the delivery entrance. No sooner had he reached the door than another lightning flash revealed a rope writhing down across the wall, atop which a man stood with outstretched arms.
Timoteo handed him the child and scaled the rope without further encouragement. Vast relief expanded within him as the man handed the child to a woman standing in a small craft on the other side of the wall. The woman cradled the baby against her breast. The men joined her, and silently they rowed across to the opposite shore.
Timoteo had to hand it to these Gorequartz kinfolk of his friends. They knew how to steal a child. There was still much more to be done, of course, but the hard part was over. They could work the rest of it out later, when it was safe to talk.
Chapter X
Rupert would have liked to lead the way, but was daunted despite all of his best intentions. The passage, just large enough for any average-to-smallish size person, took considerable contortions and acrobatics on his part to accommodate his great stature. These were made no easier by the inflexibility of the rowan shield still strapped to his back. It insisted on catching on the walls at every twist and turn, but he dare not leave it behind. The explanations and instructions he had planned to issue had to wait until he and Carole entered a wide spot, a central downward staircase with the narrower corridors branching off of it in two directions at each level.
He told her the bare bones of Jushia’s message, ending with the caution that they would be making their way to the godhead in the midst of what had been referred to as the Ceremony of the Midnight Rainbow.
“Hmph,” Carole said. “Sounds like a lodge meeting for old trappers’ wives or something to me. Still, I suppose it will keep everyone too preoccupied to follow us for a while.”
“I suggest we keep moving unless you wish to return to languish in your dungeon again. I can handle this alone, you know.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Once we have the child, I see nothing to stop us from just continuing on until we’re back in Argonia. And I’m afraid if we’re caught again I’ll have to languish somewhere other than the very nice room I have so cleverly escaped this time. One gets awfully good service associating with a god.”
“I’m not a god,” he said testily.
“Yes, well, I think we should both try to bear that in mind, eh?”
They were descending the staircase as they talked and suddenly found it ended in a blank wall. Although they felt along it and Rupert went so far as to put his shoulder to it, it offered no egress. Carole softly hummed several religious-sounding hymns before recalling that the chief function of the passage seemed to be to expedite trysts. Thereafter she hummed one of her father’s favorite ballads about illicit love, cuckolded husbands, and indiscreet horse grooms who came to especially gruesome ends. The wall swung inward with barely a whisper, nearly knocking them both flat before they could scramble around it and out into the mist.
The mist had changed. Instead of the dense, obscuring silver-white of earlier in the evening, it now surrounded them in a glowing kaleidoscope of pearlized color, lit from without and dancing with shadows. They walked cautiously through it, listening for the pacing of the sentry, the swish of canal water against the banks. They heard nothing but a vague disturbance, then, as they stepped forward, a subdued chanting rising on the swirls of color, falling in a hushed murmur to the docks where it hissed like the inhalation of some great monster, muffled by mist and distance.
Carole sidled forward and Rupert lost sight of the tail of her skirt in the mist until her hand reached back for him, fingers wiggling at him to follow. He did. He didn’t need the warning gesture of those same fingers at her lips. He stayed perfectly quiet of his own volition, his breath deserting him as he surveyed the scene before him.
The lights of moon, stars, torche
s and candles shone through the crystal panes of the shrines lining the banks. Bubbles of iridescence skimmed the breeze across the canal, illuminating the water, collecting the reflections from the brightly lit shrines and casting them into the canal as dark, moist replicas of their daylight manifestations. Elongated shadows swayed somewhere in the midst of the light behind the dazzling panes, intoning a song as regular and monotonous as a drumbeat. The river nearest the temple dock, shadowed by the great edifice, was dark. With a meaningful glance back at Rupert, Carole lowered herself carefully into the river. Rupert paused long enough to adjust the strap of the shield so it wouldn’t unduly hinder his movements then pulled off his boots and let them fill with water and sink before joining Carole. The water was warm and fragrant with the freshness of a storm-bearing wind.
“Are you a strong enough swimmer to reach the harbor?” she asked.
“I was strong enough to save you,” he reminded her.
“I know, but that was a short ways. This is quite long.”
“Yes, in fact, you know, I believe that perhaps while I wear the comb it may give me a certain advantage in the water. I seemed to have no problem breathing that other time—”
“Fine. We can swim above water most of the time so that we’ll spot the nurse, should we pass her, but we may need to stay submerged for some time to hide.”
He nodded and they set out, Carole leading, side-stroking with their faces to the shrines illuminating one bank.
During their previous twilit ride, they had failed to notice the rectangular pools connecting the shrines along each bank to each other. But now the beaming colors danced off the pools and the water cast bright snakes of light and shadow across the countenances of those who chanted beside the pools, staring upward with eyes full of prayer and terror. Very far away, thunder boomed. The moon and stars simmered in a cloudy stew.
Carole and Rupert stroked past three more of the shrines. The same scene was repeated over and over, as if they kept swimming past the same place. Far away, lightning first blanketed the sky with light, then pierced it through with blazing forks.
As the lightning sizzled closer, the chanting increased in volume, the swaying of the worshippers echoed in the clawing limbs and whipping trunks of the trees framing the shrines and pools. Carole stopped stroking and rested, floating with her hands grasping the bank, her chin on her knuckles, watching. Rupert had been watching her rather than the shrine, so when the first bolt actually struck the spires, he missed all but the flash. Beside him, Carole’s breath stopped sharply and her eyelids flew wide.
“Wha—” he began. She lay a finger on his hand and pointed.
In Gorequartz, lightning was not only striking twice in the same place, it was striking repeatedly through the spires and into the shrine pools, the forks aiming themselves with the accuracy of cats’ paws. In the pool they faced, the High Priest stood ankle deep, clad now in a black-cowled robe with a multicolored hem that stretched above him in a semicircle as he lifted his arms to pray. Upon his chest was a long prismatic stone that sang with a light of its own. When the lightning struck the spires, it channeled through the pool and into the stone, which gathered the light in a great shining star and dispersed it through the High Priest, who jerked spasmodically. Then, his rigid form bowed backward, and all of him disappeared—cowl, robe, flesh, muscle, tissue, and organs snuffed out by pulsing jolts. Only the bones were left, spine arched, jawbone rising and falling with the chant, empty eye sockets beseeching the sky.
The lightning died. Once more the High Priest stood whole, clothed in his robes, his arms still raised, prayers interrupted. Rupert shivered, neck hairs bristling. He watched fascinated while the chanting priest was flayed twice more by the lightning and re-clothed in flesh and vestments as the spires collected and transmitted the deadly light. Then Carole tugged at Rupert’s hand and they swam again, now carefully avoiding catching sight of the spires.
They had all but lingered too long. As the lightning receded, the chanting dribbled to a mournful thread. The worshippers filed away, one by one, from the river back to the secular reaches of the city. The swimmers reached the castle just as several richly clad folk arrived, dripping water from elaborate headgear that kept most of the precipitation from their fine garments. They hurried across the lowered drawbridge back into the palace. A fleeting, graceful shape, bareheaded, with hair dark and shining, caught Rupert’s eye and he nodded silently to his cousin.
Carole pitched her hum deep and made it slow enough that the girl did a gentle two-step toward them that looked rather as if she was undecided between returning to bed or singing in the rain.
Seeing Rupert, albeit a bedraggled and drenched Rupert, the girl’s face suffused with alarm. “Grand Prismatic! Forgive me but I was delayed. The Midnight Rainbow began before I reached the castle. I could not but stay.”
“Perfectly all right,” Rupert reassured her. “We just wanted to be sure everything was well with you and the baby—”
Jushia bit her lip and her feet kept wanting to two-step back toward the drawbridge. “I don’t know yet, Precious Polyhued. But I shall know more when I can row her to you at dawn, when the locks open.”
“Fair enough,” Rupert said, “We’ll be waiting.” And as she left he said to Carole, “Sorry, old girl, but it looks as if we’re in for a damp night.” But the mer-descended witch was already stroking ahead of him, into the concealing shadows and away from the torch glare of the lights left burning on the castle walls for returning worshippers.
Around the bend the locks loomed, outlined by shimmies of dimming sheet lightning. The great beasts stood at either end, heads lowered, extra tails swinging gently. The hut was alight with the flicker of a single candle. An occasional snort of laughter or a quarrelsome burst of conversation carried across the water.
“We must go over, for we can’t go through. Unless you can whistle the locks open, that is?” Rupert’s voice was half-mocking, half-hopeful.
Carole shook the water from her hair and blew her nose clear. “You may not have noticed but the locks are made of iron. My magic won’t budge them.”
“Then over it is. I’d like it better if those chaps up there were sleeping on the job, I must admit. Why is it only in repressive societies that one can get decent help?”
“Perhaps they’ll be too taken with their own pastimes to notice us. After all, they’re just supposed to accommodate nighttime barges and things. I don’t imagine they’re used to guarding against anyone. We’ll see soon enough, I suppose.”
The stones embedded in the earthen portion of the locks were slick with water and weed and deadly cold, but they were also irregular and provided good handholds and footholds. Carole’s feet were small enough that she was easily able to haul herself belly down onto the flat cottage-wide surface atop the lock. Rupert’s much larger foot slipped, skinning his bare toes and instep. He bellowed—not a very intelligible or human sounding bellow, but a definite noise. The chatter inside the hut silenced abruptly. The whites of Rupert’s eyes looked big as hen’s eggs. Carole swallowed. The great beast on the end of the lock nearest them rocked restlessly against the chain confining one of its heavy, wrinkled legs and turned its head almost fearfully in the direction of the newcomers.
Carole took a deep breath and hummed quietly to the beast, but in a compelling, forcefully driving rhythm that set it rocking harder, straining the clanking chain, then tearing the stake from the ground before trudging tunefully toward the hut.
The swimmers dashed for the other side of the lock while the occupants of the hut dashed away from it. The clamor they made stampeding to the opposite end of the lock while the beast trampled their hut and its counterpart across the river cheered it on, trumpeting from its front tail, was quite enough to conceal any slight sound Carole and Rupert made scrambling down the far wall and back into the river.
The torches on the ridge top flickered in the rain, many of them darkened and half-hidden by the smoke of the others. The swimmer
s steered away from the stripes of light cast by the torches, clinging instead to the darkness near the cliff walls. Swimming was rougher where the river dumped into a sea whipped into waves by the last of the storm winds. Rupert had to abandon the side stroke and swim as strongly as he could to keep from being swamped. The comb might be protecting him and it might not, but he would prefer to test it at some later time, when he could afford for it to fail.
The godhead was unguarded and unlighted, alone, frowning sternly in the middle of the harbor. Carole made a sudden porpoise-like leap and grabbed the lower lip with both hands, hoisting herself easily onto the shelf between lip and teeth. Rupert jumped up after her, his extra height helping him achieve what his lesser buoyancy would not.
The mouth was open to form a quizzical snarl, the tongue a wide, curving platform where the sacrifices were dashed to death. Rupert couldn’t see how at first, but holding on to the roof of the mouth he made his way carefully to the back of the tongue. A tentative hello fell endlessly down the throat and echoed back to him.
The Christening Quest Page 16