Gareth himself had ruled that the bodies of the dead must be burned, not laid in the tombs of their families.
Even Trey, she thought. Even Trey.
As she watched, the terrace doors opened. A tall figure emerged, wrapped in a hooded cloak—Gareth, by his height, though the uneven panes made it impossible to be certain. He neither spoke to the guards nor paused, only drew the hood more closely over his head and hurried down the terrace and across the garden, the cloak nearly tripping him as he went.
When he had passed from sight, Jenny opened the window and slept with the charnel smell of the city drifting above the rain smell and the earth smell from the garden. She rose with the tolling of the evening bells, dressed, and returned to Trey’s rooms, knowing that if he’d returned Gareth should not be alone. Passing along the terrace she heard no outcry of mourning. Gardeners and guards alike still wore the red and gold of the House of Uwanë, not mourning black. When she reached the door into the vestibule of the royal rooms, Jenny found the guardsmen still at their posts.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” Captain Torneval was saying to the tall red-haired man who stood before him in a scholar’s black robe as Jenny entered. “My lord Gareth said none were to be admitted until his return. My lady Trey needs her sleep.”
Jenny opened her mouth and closed it again. It was not for her to announce—to guardsmen, to the servants lighting the lamps, and to whomever else cared to carry the gossip abroad—the death of the Regent’s wife before the Regent himself was ready to bear the public display of sorrow.
“Did he say where he’s gone?” the man asked. Jenny recognized the scholar as Polycarp of Halnath, Gareth’s cousin and the master of the Citadel University. “Or when he’ll return?” At summer’s end Polycarp had sided with Ector of Sindestray in voting to imprison John for bargaining with the Demon Queen. Jenny had hated him then for it. Knowing what she now knew of demons, she understood. She knew, too, how difficult that decision had been.
“My lord,” she said now, stepping up to him, and he turned his head, startled.
“Thank you,” he said to the captain of the guards. “I’m glad to hear she’s feeling better. I shall speak to my cousin on his return.” Taking Jenny’s arm, he led her out of the lamplit vestibule down a flight of black marble and malachite steps into the garden.
The rain had lightened, though by the smell it would return. A pillared belvedere stood on the edge of a sedge-fringed pond, and in its shadows they sat.
“Trey is dead,” Jenny said quietly. She drew her cloak tighter about her, for the winter evening was cold. “Gareth posted guards around the room and left about an hour after that. This was about noon. If it’s true that all the bodies of the plague’s victims must be burned at once, I can understand that he’d want a little time. The guards—and the priests of healing—seem adamant about it.”
“And well they should be.” The master glanced across the garden at the crimson-cloaked warriors on the terrace. He was a fox-faced man and, like Gareth, tall and thin and nervy. Now he looked worn down. He was a scholar, like John, and as John would do, she thought, he must have sought long in the libraries of the university for some answer to this new scourge.
“He said something about an herbalist in the town—” She broke off as the master’s white hand bunched in a sudden, angry fist.
“This was all he said?”
Looking into his face, she nodded. By his voice there was something more.
The master was silent a long time, like a man debating how much he could reveal. He seemed to be seeking some omen among the scars of her face, the thin small wrinkles of age, the blue knowledge-haunted eyes.
Then he sighed. “There is a man in the city who is said to raise the dead.”
Pellanor in the firelight. Dogface in the snow. She felt a thousand years old.
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know.” Rain made gold rings in the beryl water where the light from the terrace windows crossed it. It damped the charnel smoke from beyond the city’s walls, but still a whiff of decay smudged the air. Somewhere close a woman was crying, jagged and weary and beyond hope.
“The priests don’t like it,” Polycarp said at last. “I don’t like it.”
“No.” She thought of a dead sailor on the sea-hammered rocks, pulling a long red worm from his guts; a man’s hand dipping into a basin of blood and coming out with a glass shell.
“It’s as if … as if my dog died suddenly and in his prime, and a man appeared next day offering to sell me another, saying, ‘I hear your dog has died.’”
“Yes.” She felt bleak inside, and furious. For Gareth, and for Trey; for the weeping lord in the gate of his big house, begging men not to take his son’s body away.
Where was John, she wondered, and how might she get word to him that she and Gareth and the Realm all needed help?
“I’ve read, and studied, and searched far into the nights.” Polycarp rubbed wearily at the inner corners of his eyes. “First it was just for some mention of this sickness. But there is none, no ailment that sounds like this. Afterward it was for word of any, even in the remotest antiquity, that could raise the dead.”
They were silent, and in the silence the patter of droplets on the water sounded loud. Looking across the pool and into the gray mist, Jenny saw the hard wrinkled face and jeweled hands of the gnome mage in her dream. She visioned herself trying to piece together a mosaic of bits of stone and tile, knowing all the while that the picture she would produce would be terrible to behold.
John asleep in a dry well, sheltering from howling wind. John staring into a glass box, with the strange bluish radiance of it playing across his beaky face and turning his spectacle lenses to rounds of blank light.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Will you go to Ylferdun Deep?” Their eyes met for a time, and she saw that he recalled her hatred. But he, too, had felt the grip of the demon, had heard it whisper in his dreams, and this made an understanding between them. “The only mage whose learning I can trust,” he went on, “the only mage untainted by the demons last summer— is Miss Mab, the witchwife of the gnomes. I’ve tried to see her, but King Balgub of the Deep put her under house arrest, which still has half a year to run.”
“You know that my powers are gone,” Jenny said softly.
“I know,” he said. “But I know, too, that you’re a lady of the Winterlands. And you know the Deep. If any can reach her undetected, it is you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t until she reached the First Hall of Ylferdun Deep that Jenny knew for certain she was being followed.
From the gates of Bel to the village of Deeping, which lay outside the gnomes’ great doors, was the walk of most of a day. Leaving before the market women even began to cry their milk and nuts in the streets, Jenny avoided the paved road and made her way along the hedgerows that marked the fallow fields, her plaids blending with the winter landscape. Rain fell, obliterating her tracks. Wind bit through her damp garments, and she longed for the days when she could have wrapped herself in a scrim of magic and walked unseen down the high road.
Still, her lifetime in the Winterlands served her well.
She skirted Deeping. The town was smaller now than it had been, and the tanneries, where so many of the original populace had taken refuge and been killed, had never been rebuilt. In five years the woods behind them had encroached to smother the broken walls, and brown ferns stood around the well that the leather workers had used. But the clock tower above the market square had been repaired, globes and vanes and numerals glinting gold in the evening light. The clothing of the men and women coming down from the Deep’s iron doors glowed like poppies against the mud and old snow. Above everything the vast rusty darkness of Nast Wall gouged the clouds.
Morkeleb. Jenny reached toward him with her mind in the mists and glaciers where he laired but didn’t know if he heard.
Morkeleb. It had been winter, like this, when she
and John and Gareth had ridden to Deeping to seek him. The smell of the woods and the wet chill in her bones had been the same. The fear had been cold behind her breastbone. In her heart she saw John then, standing in the stirrups of his warhorse Osprey—a big dapple slain by the dragon the next day. She saw his eyes narrow behind the cold glint of his spectacles as he listened to the silence of the Vale; saw the flex of his mouth, the bent shape of his nose.
In the days of her magic, she thought, she would have known were he dead. But now she did not know, and her vulnerability terrified her. Had she been unable to sense him in her dragon dreams because it was not a thing of dragons to love? She had sensed her sons.
She put the thoughts aside, climbing over them as a dragon rises over obstacles in flight. What will come is what will come. She had other things to occupy her than gnawing fantasies about John eloping like a schoolboy with the Demon Queen. Pellanor had been raised from the dead for a purpose. The gnome wizards were buying slaves who could not work for a purpose. Folcalor, for a purpose, was invading the dreams of every mage his mind could touch.
Whatever was happening, Miss Mab, whose spells had sustained John in his quest behind the mirror, would have at least some idea of what to do.
If she could reach her.
Jenny stole as far as she could along Tanner’s Rise, then descended to the square before the market hall and crossed it through the gathering evening to the gates of the Deep. She waited patiently until a large group of merchants emerged with baskets on their backs, drawing the notice of the gnome wardens. The day was ending, and torches were being kindled in fantastic iron holders beside the gate. Soon the market’s doors would shut. She passed through without being seen.
As at the opposite limit of the delvings of the gnomes, where an eastern gate looked out into the town of Halnath, this western boundary of the underground domain consisted of a market hall where the gnomes brought metalwork, jewels, and their renowned weapons to trade for the produce of humankind’s farms. John had been wounded about here, she thought, as the straw mats that covered the vast floor crunched a little under her feet. Did his blood still mark the stone beneath? Did Morkeleb’s? Where the glittering bulk of the dragon had stretched, a brightly draped stall sold painted pottery; a barrow heaped with apples occupied the place where his head had lain. Jenny smiled, thinking of what the dragon would have to say, not on those facts but on her bemusement at them. Time is time, she heard his soft voice echo in the dark of her mind. And all things pass and are renewed.
The plague did not appear to have reached Deeping Town, but the market was thinly populated, even for this time of evening. Jenny idled over a selection of silk kerchiefs until one of the gnome guards at the inner doorway went to speak to a market woman. Even so she thought the other guard saw her, and she had to walk quickly through the hall beyond. “Madam, wait,” he called out to her, and she pretended not to hear.
She was in the Deep.
For quite some time she thought that it was one of the gate guards who pursued her, intent on asking her business or telling her to leave. The way the gnomes looked at her as she passed through the public spaces of the upper levels fed this impression; she heard one of the gnomewives in the arched Hall of Sarmendes say to another, “Spreading the plague…” and guessed that the Lord of the Deep had told the guards to keep humankind out. So she quickened her step and sought the downward-leading passageways as soon as possible, ways that led to the warrens of this or that powerful clan: storerooms, well chambers, private chapels to the Ancestors where a thousand candles burned. In her wake she caught the echo of boots with a gnome’s quick, soft tread and hurried still faster, ducking into shortcuts and passing through rooms filled with wheat sacks or oil or wool.
When first she’d entered the Deep, to heal the dragon Morkeleb and to find the medicines that would save John’s life, the thought of getting lost had terrified her. The Deep had been empty then, the gnomes all fled before the dragon. Morkeleb’s mind had guided her through the narrow passageways, the endless stairs in darkness. Had she lost her way she would have starved.
Since that time, however, she had entered the Realm of the gnomes on several occasions, twice under the dragon’s guidance. Survival in the Winterlands depended on knowing where you were and what was around you, and in the days when she had had to make do with slight powers, she had made it a point to know always where she stood in relationship to the things of the earth, from which even tiny amounts of power could be sourced. At summer’s end she and Morkeleb had sought out Miss Mab after the Council of the Gnomes had placed her under arrest for helping John; so she had a good idea of how to find her way to the ninth level, where lay the caverns of the clan of Hawteth-Arawan.
Now she patiently dug through her trained memory for the stairs and alleyways through which slaves tugged burdens, the walkways along the pipes that pumped water from wells deep below. The lamps here were dim, and they smoked with cheap oils and fats that stained the rock of the walls with their soot. The walls were clean, though, for the gnomes were a fastidious folk. Twice on her circuitous way Jenny saw slaves—human slaves—scrubbing the limestone around such cressets or washing the reflectors behind them.
More than one pair of soft boots pattered behind her now, and there was a muttered whisper too distorted by echoes to understand. She realized that she risked not simply the failure of her errand, but enslavement herself.
Fear needled through her, and she slipped down the first stair she saw with the dim intention of backtracking and losing her pursuit in the storerooms around some ancestral sanctuary. Through a narrow doorway she passed into a kind of servants’ hall where two women— humans—labored over a smoking stove; she fled silent as a bird through a thickly curtained door, which let into a chamber where a fountain poured water endlessly into a basin of stone.
A small archway let her into a narrow stair, stretching into darkness beside a stepped waterfall illuminated only by the fewest and feeblest of lamps. She descended the stair at a run, the shallow steps favored by the gnomes making her knees ache, though she was little taller than a tall gnome herself. Far above her in the dark she heard a soft alto voice say, “There she goes.”
Jenny caught up her plaids and fled. She thought there would be a door soon through which she could evade her pursuers but there wasn’t, not for many hundreds of steps. Her thighs and calves throbbed and she panted in the cold, but the footfalls drew closer. She heard the clatter of weaponry on metal buckles, the dry hollow rattle of arrows. When at last she found a door, it was on the other side of the watercourse and led into a long tunnel she did not know, the stone of its walls and floors undressed and unfinished. A great draft blew hot and steady all around her. A ventilation corridor, she thought, leading into the mines. That meant traps and pitfalls, but nevertheless she ran, her hand on the wall to guide her as they left the realm of the lights, the boots behind her running also.
One turning, two—darkness ever deeper and the clatter of feet coming closer. They could see her, she thought— gnomes’ sight in darkness being clearer than that of humankind. They haven’t called out to me to stop, she thought. That must be because they know—
The floor vanished from beneath her feet. She cried out and just had time to roll herself together, protecting her head, as a jagged floor smote her and pain lanced up through her left hip and thigh, taking her breath away. She tried to rise and couldn’t; above her, the clack of boots came slower. They’d heard her fall.
They’d known the trap was there.
Dim light reflected on the tunnel ceiling. It was a hothwais—a stone or crystal charged to hold light— steady and cold. It showed her the lip of the drop over which she’d fallen, a dozen feet above her head. Not a pit as such, she saw now in the wan glow, but a small rough cavern, perhaps seventy feet at its widest. There were other tunnels, higher up the other walls; some had bones beneath them. A ladder dangled from one, but when she tried to stand and limp toward it the pain in her le
g made her nearly faint.
“There she is.”
She got a glimpse of them—three squat armored shapes—just as one loosed an arrow that took her in the shoulder with such force as to throw her down.
The other two were nocking arrows to their bows. Pain like a burning knife went through her shoulder as she rolled, then crawled into the shelter of the drop-off itself, where they would have to shoot straight down at her; the cavern even curved a little in, below the lip of the tunnel floor above. One gnome cursed, and another said, “One should do it.” He sounded like a tradesman talking about logs on a fire.
The light dimmed as they walked away. She heard the tap of arrows replaced in quivers, a voice commenting, “We’ll need to make a report to Rogmadoscibar…”
One should do it.
Sickness washed her in a terrifying wave, and she felt her breath start to slow.
They had not been trying to turn her back, she thought. Had not wanted to enslave her.
Their orders had been to kill her.
The arrow was poisoned.
“You understand,” Shamble TenSevenTwentysix said, squinting behind smoked magnifiers at the white-hot tip of his soldering iron, “that nobody really knows what magic is, or why it worked. Or why it stopped working.”
“Come to that,” John replied cheerfully, “I don’t know what plasmic ether is either, or why it stops workin’ three or four nights a week in my apartment just when I’m on me way to the bathroom, bad cess to it.”
“Oh, that’s just the crystals going out,” Bort explained. “They don’t maintain the relays into the wet zone.” He came through the apartment door and maneuvered carefully between the plex table that took up two-thirds of the room between Shamble’s kitchen niche and the narrow bed, and looked around the cluttered surface of the table for somewhere to put down his burden: the giant bundle of pale green flimsiplast he and Garrypoot had spent most of the evening running out on Garrypoot’s printer.
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