by Carol Berg
“Stearc, it’s Valen come to help you,” I said, throttling my rage. Using a length of timber, I scraped away the filth underneath him and spread out the guard’s cloak.
“Valen?”
“I’m going to get you down.”
“No…no…no…no,” he rasped. “Must not falter. Will not.” Blood bubbled from his lips.
“You’ve held long enough, Thane. They’ve not touched him.” With my brutish lock spell, I burst his manacles and lowered him to the floor.
He cried out, little more than an animal’s bleat. The bloody claw that was his left hand gripped my arm with desperate strength. “He is safe?”
“He will be with Voushanti and Saverian within the hour.” Avoiding his dreadful wounds as best I could, I took Stearc’s face in my hands, making sure his eyes met mine. “I’m going to take you to him, Stearc. You will not die in this vile place, but in the shelter of your lord.”
Die he would. The instinct that had ever spoken to me of death and life told me clearly. But anyone with eyes must understand that will alone drove Stearc’s heart and lungs.
“No!” His hand pawed at me, and he came near rising from the ground. “Don’t let him—I honor him above all men. My king. But I would not meet the Ferryman blind.” Terror radiated from him like fever. “I would not be Voushanti.”
How could I console such fear? I saw no means for Osriel to work his dreadful rites in Torvo’s inner courtyard. But that was poor assurance for a man who had spent his last reserves of courage fifty times over. The prince might have other means to capture souls.
“All right, then.” Which set me a dilemma. I could not leave Stearc living. “I would do you a last service, Thane. Tell me what you want.”
“A blade.” He opened his bloody palm, rock steady. In the command I heard a trace of his old accusations. He had ever believed me a coward.
I gave him Jakome’s dagger and wrapped his bloody fingers around the hilt. Then I spoke clearly so he could not mistake. “I will tell your king and your daughter only of courage, lord, not of horror. The lighthouse will stand. Teneamus.”
He jerked his head. “For House Erasku,” he whispered. “For Evanore, for Navronne…teneamus.”
I took off my glove and laid my hand on his forehead, determined Stearc would not die alone. His existence comprised naught but shadings of mortal agony…a map in which every road led but to another shock or scouring, and every border marked but new violation. My part in his pain, shared through my bent and the gards on my hand, ended mercifully fast.
Gripping the dagger with the remaining fingers of his left hand, he used the palm of his mutilated right hand to plunge the blade into his throat. Blood spurted from the wound. His hands dropped away.
I stayed with him, and when the face of the world had faded to naught but cold and gray, I whispered in his ear, “Know this, too, warrior of Evanore; the blood of noble Caedmon mingles even now with the blood of House Erasku. Your beloved daughter carries Caedmon’s heir. And I vow upon the soul of our holy abbot that I will see them both safe until the end of days.”
The revelation did not violate my vow to Elene, for I told her secret only to a dead man. But I believed Stearc heard me, for his eyes grew fierce and bright just before the life went out of them.
I hung him from his chains again and removed all evidence of my coming. Let the butchers believe Iero’s angels had released him from his pain.
Chapter 26
“Seventh watch! All honor to the Gehoum!”
As the call caromed through the fortress, I crouched on the prison stair at the verge of the main level. This was taking much too long. At any moment a replacement would be coming down to relieve the guard who lay vomiting in Osriel’s cell. But a pair of cursed orange-heads stood just in front of me, one blocking the doorway to the great hall, one blocking the doorway of the alley to the inner court. Neither clattering knucklebones nor a shower of armament pebbles had distracted them. I had been hoping they would just go away. To get up to the gallery and Sila’s chamber, I would have to run between them.
Forced to stillness, I had grown even more determined to take the map. I tottered on the verge of understanding. My glimpse of the Sentinel Oak had told me the map held two layers of information—perhaps that was what Gildas could not see. Sila was using the map in her campaign to squeeze the long-lived from their hiding places so that she could mingle Danae blood with Aurellian and Navron bloodlines. Something in the map would tell me her next move or which boundaries she thought to break. Though I regretted every moment’s delay in getting Osriel free, I had to take the chance. The map could be the key to everything, and I had no intention of ever returning to this fortress of horrors.
The echoed call of the watch was slowing. Replacements had arrived for the two guards. I had to move. I seated the guard’s flop-brimmed hat on my head. Then I pelted up the stair as if newly come from the depths, sweeping Jakome’s brown cloak about my shoulders and calling to the two guards, “Tell Nikred I couldn’t wait for his lazy ass to show. I’m to relieve Jakome at the tower for the night.”
The two grunted assent and turned back to their replacements, while I raced up the stair to the gallery. One torch burned outside Sila Diaglou’s chamber, but no guard was posted. Soft light leaked around the door curtain. I held my breath and listened. One person inside, breathing softly.
I drew the knife, pulled back the edge of the curtain, and peered inside. Torches blazed on either side of the map. Ronila sat in front of it, her chin propped on her walking stick. Nothing for it but to slip inside, keeping my back against the wall.
“You might as well come in, abomination,” she said, not even shifting her gaze from the map.
Of course, Ronila would have skills like mine. Once I had confirmed that no one else was in the room, I strolled over to the map, keeping the knife under my cloak. “Did you know my father, Ronila?”
“I suppose you deem yourself wise.” Never had I heard amusement that tasted so much of gall and rancid life. She cocked her head at the map. “The answer is no. Cartamandua first came to Aeginea long after I had left. He is talented, I hear—talented at finding places he should not. As you are.”
“He was,” I said, staring at the map, trying to gauge its secret. Knotted cords looped from bolts in the wall through three bound eyelets sewn into the map’s upper edge. Three strokes of the knife would take it down. “The Danae took his mind for a failed promise.”
“Pah!” She blew a note of disgust. “The long-lived cannot admit they are as crippled as I am. Mixed blood will be your doom as it has been mine, abomination.”
“You know not even the half of it, Lady Scourge.” Though, in truth, I’d always thought the blood of my erstwhile mother’s prophecy meant I’d die in battle or at least in a fight. I’d never considered it might signify heritage…bloodlines…family. Even queasier than usual at recalling the divination, I shoved the annoying hat backward and scratched my head. “Do our kind see the future? I’ve not been taught that skill.”
“I see the future,” she said. “In the hour he broke me, I told Stian what I planned. He didn’t believe a crippled halfbreed girl could bring them down. But when he feels the world die, he will confess it at last. When he sees Tuari Archon himself lapping from my hand, he will admit my power, and I will see Stian Human-friend stand alone in the ruin of his making. Was it the proud son—the most arrogant of an arrogant race—who marked you or the old cat himself?”
“You made Sila a perfect tool for your vengeance,” I said, unwilling to yield even so small an answer. “You hate the Danae because they did not allow you to be one of them; you especially hate the archon because Tuari killed your mother. You hate Stian because, out of fear for the Canon, he crippled you, and because he allowed Eodward and Picus to live in Aeginea, so that a human man became your temptation. You loathe humankind because it was humans who sullied your blood, and you hate both Eodward and the Karish god, because they stole Picus’s
affections that you believed should be yours alone. But I don’t understand your particular antipathy for purebloods. That mystifies me.”
She snickered at that. “My daughter, Sila’s mother, was more Dané than human. Such grace…such beauty…When she danced in my kitchen, she made Stian’s daughter, Clyste, look as a stick. The Aurellians ruled this benighted land…and one of their knights rode through my village when Tresila was but thirteen. He dragged her to their pleasure house, forced her to service his common soldiers and Navron slaveys. Not the purebloods, though. She was not perfect enough to break their bloodlines. Thirty years they kept her a slave.”
“But she birthed a child…”
“You’ve yet much to learn of your Danae kin. Even halfbreed females can choose to conceive or not. One of Eodward’s soldiers rescued Tresila from the Aurellian pleasure house. In gratitude…in gratitude…she gave him a child.” Her tongue near curled with her bile. “The slut died bearing Sila. That’s as well, as I would have killed her for it, as I did the cur who plowed her. You cannot measure my hatred for this world. Sila merely wishes no blot of green to remain on this map, but my vengeance will be sated only in the hour humankind reaps eternal desolation and no Danae gard lights the world’s darkness.”
No blot of green…I caught my breath and spun to look at the map again. This map was no ordinary fiché, where the significance lay in written symbols and proportionate distances, nor was it a grousherre, where disproportionately sized features demonstrated the mapmaker’s judgment of relative importance. In this map the shifting colors told the story. My eyes raced across the expanse. The lands about Gillarine gleamed ocher. The meadow near Elanus yet green. The bogs—Moth’s sianou—green. Kol’s western sea and its bordering shores green. The tangled waste of Mellune Forest ocher. Sianous—living or dead.
When a sianou was lost, the Danae could no longer remember it. Sila wanted to force them out of their hiding places, out of their sianous and into human lands. She wanted them to forget Aeginea completely and merge with humankind. What if Janus had made this map to show the Danae the lands they had forgotten, so that Kol and the others could dance and reclaim those lands…repair the broken Canon…repair the broken world? Gods, I was looking at the answer!
Excitement surged through flesh and bone as I reached up and sliced through the first cord holding the map. “I’m sorry for all that happened to you, Ronila. Sorrier for what you did to your granddaughter, a child who did not deserve to be warped for your vengeance. But Sila’s rapine cannot be allowed to succeed—nor can yours.”
The second supporting rope at the opposite corner split like dry wood at the touch of the knife. Rolling up the bottom edge of the map with my left hand, I reached for the third cord.
Ronila lunged from her chair, grabbed one of the torches, and flung it at me. As the old woman toppled to the floor, bellowing with spiteful laughter, the ancient parchment exploded into fire like nitre powder.
“No!” I bellowed. I dropped the rolled map, and it crashed to the floor. Using hands…feet…cloak…I tried to smother the spreading fire. But sparks set my cloak ablaze, and searing heat drove me backward. The flames chased charring blackness across the lustrous colors with the speed of shooting stars.
The woven curtain behind me roared into flame. Shouts and footsteps rang from the gallery. Ronila lay in a rumpled heap. “You’d best go quickly, abomination,” she said, waving me off with a hand streaked with azure. “My granddaughter will flay you.”
Blazing ash floated in the air. Acrid smoke billowed from blackened, smoldering curls of vellum, my hope vaporizing with it. With every breath I wanted to crush the cackling crone, but I dared not compromise those awaiting me. I had no such strength as Stearc. I ran.
Whether it was only the smoke from the gallery or someone had discovered the missing prisoners or the fused lock on my tower cell, the stair was swarming with Harrowers. “The gallery chamber’s afire!” I shouted when someone barred my way. And when a rough hand detained me and its owner snarled, “Who are you? I saw you go up…” I shoved him against the wall and said, “I’m Jakome’s brother. Where is he?” Then I grabbed a woman warrior and another man and dispatched them to the “east tower,” hoping such a thing existed, and the hunt for strangers quickly became the hunt for Jakome.
My hands were scorched and blistered, my gards peeking through the charred tatters of my gloves. I tucked my hands beneath my half-burnt cloak.
“Grandam!” Sila Diaglou raced past me, Gildas close on her heels. I pressed my back to the wall and ducked my head so that the flop-brimmed hat shadowed my face. Only the tether of Osriel’s illness kept me from plunging my knife into one or the other of them; he might need me to get free. I galloped downward just as Sila screamed, “That was Magnus! The one in the hat! Take him!”
I dodged down the prison-level stair, just far enough to discard the hat. Then I raced upward again, tossing two knucklebones over my shoulder, and commanded two men to check on the clattering noise. The moment the two were out of sight, I bolted for the alley. The hose covering my feet, soggy with the guard’s piss and Stearc’s blood, disintegrated as I sped through the voluminous undercrofts. When I reached the arch into the inner courtyard, I paused long enough to rip them off before they tripped me. I draped the scorched remnants of the cloak over my head, so that at least my pale face would not be visible to those above. I had to hope it would suffice to block any view of my blue-streaked feet as well. Then I moved.
The temptation to dash through the yard straight to Jullian and Osriel nearly overwhelmed me. But the arrow loops on the second level were bright with firelight, and the fortress exploding with shouts. I crept softly, silently through the rubble.
I was halfway across the yard, angling toward the corner, when footsteps and voices echoed in the undercroft behind me. “I’m sure I saw a fellow run this way. Same one as came up the stair.”
I dropped to the ground and held still under the ragged cloak, not even daring to look around to see if they followed me. Face buried in the dirt, I scrabbled for some spell that might give us time to get away, but I had naught in my bags of tricks that might deter a determined pursuit. Stupid…cocky…arrogant… Thinking I could get away with this. Allowing myself to be distracted and beaten by a bitter hag. Disappointment gnawed at my gut like rats.
“None would come in here. There’s no way out but this.” Though the sharp-voiced woman kept her excitement tight-reined, the close walls amplified her every word and footstep. I scarce breathed.
“Sila said to search everywhere.”
“She’ll tear every stone down before he gets away.”
At least three of them…curse the luck. Light danced on the broken paving that pressed my cheek. I could smell the hot resin of the torches. One step in my direction and I would have to run.
“Over there, Braut! Summat’s at the wall!” The three raced past me toward the north wall and the canal and my friends.
I leaped up, shouting, “Here, you damnable fools!”
They stopped, and turned my way, then looked back to the wall, where a shadow mimed a running man—though none of us were running.
“What is it?” They were pointing at me, and I realized the burnt cloak remained on the ground and the gards on my arms and feet glowed the hue of summer midnight. “Where’s the other?”
As their resolution wavered, a great explosive crack shot dust and rubble from the wall, and in a roaring avalanche the remainder of the privies crashed down, pulling much of the standing north wall down with it. Osriel…
The three Harrowers retreated screaming—more in fear than pain. Had they paused two steps closer to the wall, the masonry would lie atop their heads. And I was no more than ten paces farther away. I leaped and dodged the debris, grateful my half-Danae eyes could penetrate the clouds of dust that fogged the yard.
“Glad I didn’t choose to hug the wall,” I said, as I skidded into the corner where Jullian and Osriel waited. “Now we move.
Even that display won’t hold Sila for long.”
Jullian quaked like a spring leaf, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as he gaped at the man he knew as quiet, studious Gram.
Osriel huddled in the blanket Jullian had given him, his head resting heavy against the grate, as if he had expended every remaining portion of his strength. But his dark eyes blinked open when I knelt beside him. “Stearc?” he said.
My elation at the moment’s reprieve sank quickly under the burden of rage and disappointment. “I’m sorry, lord. He gave everything.”
Jullian choked back a cry.
We had no time for grief. The two of them had wisely cleared the rocks and weeds away from the grate. I touched its opposing corners, as Max had instructed, and fed magic to the spell that vibrated in the iron bars. A pop and hiss and the grate flopped forward into a very dark hole.
“Jullian first, then me, so I can help you through,” I said to Osriel, who had rolled forward onto all fours. He nodded without speaking, his head drooping between his quivering shoulders.
I reached out to the boy, but he scrambled backward. “Aegis Ieri,” he whispered, his head shifting frantically between Osriel and my glowing hand.
“You’ve no need of Iero’s shield, Jullian,” I said, as calmly as I could, considering my own heart clattered like hailstones on a slate roof. “This was but magic—considerable magic, to be sure. Gram has hidden skills—inherited from his mother, as my talents and my strange appearance are inherited from my parents. Whatever else he may be, he is still the good man you know as Gram.” It was the argument I used with myself every hour.