Perrin stepped over a sword lying loose on the floor and stood in the center of the room, hands on hips. “And there are no racks nor stands to hold it all. It is as if someone simply dumped it all here to get it out of the way.”
His words chilled Sienne, though she didn’t know why. “Someone… who?” she said. “And why didn’t they take all this with them when they left? It’s junk now, but it would have been valuable when it was new.”
Kalanath, crouching over a pile of chain links orange with rust, suddenly stood and shifted the pile with the end of his staff. “This is new,” he said. He bent and picked up something thin and flat that flexed like leather. He handed it to Sienne. “A spellbook, but not like yours.”
Sienne took it and turned it over. Its pale birch cover had flowers burned into it in a thick pattern that had traces of red paint still in the curves. It was much thinner than Sienne’s, with only eight pages, but—Her fingers went briefly numb with horror. “There are two spells to a page, front and back,” she said. “People used to do it that way, for a little while, until it turned out it was less efficient. But… that was fifty years ago.”
She waited. They all looked at her, waiting for her to continue. “Fifty years ago, don’t you see?” she exclaimed. “This place was abandoned eighty years ago. So—”
“Somebody else was here,” Dianthe said. “Somebody who lost her spellbook. That’s not something you do voluntarily.”
Sienne closed the book. “What happened to her?” She looked down at the pile of rotting leather near her feet. “What happened to all of them?”
“We need to get out of here,” Dianthe said.
“But this place is clearly abandoned. We have seen no sign nor sound of anyone but ourselves,” Perrin said.
Alaric had not been poking around the piles. Instead, he’d roamed from one window to the next, sticking his head out and looking around. “We’re not going without the stone,” he said. “I can see the whole roof from these windows, and it’s not up here. And it wasn’t on the outside when we walked around the keep. We need to keep looking.”
“This is not a good place,” Kalanath said.
“It does look like someone used to live here who preyed on scrappers,” Alaric said. “Probably bandits. But they’re long gone. Let’s get what we came for and leave this place behind.”
Sienne tucked the spellbook into her harness, behind her own book. “We have to tell Tonia what it’s like here. I don’t like her, but if she’s planning to retake this territory, she needs to know what she’ll be facing.”
“Something to worry about later, but I agree,” Alaric said. “Let’s go back to the entry and see what’s on the ground floor.”
Sienne’s disquiet faded as they made their way back down the tower stairs and through the connected rooms. She wished she’d thought to pay more attention to the lost spellbook’s contents. Suppose it had spells she didn’t? Granted, more spells had been discovered in the years since this spellbook had been assembled, but there were so many she didn’t know, the odds were in her favor. Her impatience to find the falcon stone and be done with this miserable job increased.
Back in the entry hall, Dianthe tested the second door and found it unlocked. It, too, opened as easily as if the hinges were oiled. Sienne examined them just in case that was true, and found no trace of rust. “This is strange,” she said, running her finger along the hinge plate. It came away damp and a little dirty, but not greasy or tinted red with rust.
She turned away from the door and found her friends clustered together in the doorway, examining the room. It was the keep’s great hall, an enormous space that took up most of the ground floor. Three steps led down to the sunken floor, made of flagstones that had probably required fit to transport them, they were that big. Blackened remnants of rushes strewed the flagstones, but no tables or chairs remained. More shreds of time-ravaged tapestries clung to the walls, lit by the row of windows they’d seen outside.
Sienne took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The room was cold, much colder than the weather outside. She had left her cloak behind in camp, wanting freedom of movement more than warmth, but now she wished she could snuggle into it. The tapestries still showed some of their original colors and patterns, but in irregular patches, and the effect was as if dozens of misshapen eyes were looking down at her. She shuddered. Everywhere she turned, she felt she was being watched.
Dianthe exclaimed, “Look!” She pointed at the far wall, toward a dais where the duke and his family would have sat. Above it, set into the stone of the wall, was a round stone about four feet across with a ridge around the rim. Carved into the stone as if emerging from it was a falcon, its wings spread and its beak open, caught by the sculptor mid-cry.
Alaric walked toward the dais and stood with his hands on his hips, looking up. “I don’t know whether to be glad we found it, or irritated that it’s embedded in the wall.”
Sienne came to stand beside him. “How thick do you think the block is? As thick as the wall? I mean, it’s not structurally part of the wall, right?” There was something strange about it, but she couldn’t identify the source of her disquiet.
“How should we know?” Perrin stood on Alaric’s other side and tilted his head like an inquisitive sparrow. “My extensive education did not cover matters such as fortress engineering, which at the moment seems a shameful oversight.”
“It looks like they put it in after the keep was built,” Dianthe said.
“If that’s true, I can use sculpt to shape the stone surrounding it and free it from the wall.”
“I think that will work,” Dianthe said, moving to one side. “You can—ah!” She stumbled and fell to her knees.
“What happened?” Alaric said.
“I tripped. There’s something here. Something…” She groped along the floor. “It’s round and hard, and invisible—” She jerked her hand away. “It feels like bone.”
Her words sent a jolt of fear through Sienne, and she edged toward Alaric, staying clear of his sword arm. “How could—”
The air shimmered, and there it was—ivory-white, with a rounded top, rocking from where Dianthe had kicked it. A human skull.
Dianthe backed away hurriedly. “What is going on?”
Someone laughed. The chilling sound made gooseflesh rise up on Sienne’s arms. She spun around and saw only Kalanath, who was also looking wildly about for the source of the laughter. The tapestry eyes mocked her terror.
Alaric drew his sword, which made a reassuring rasp of steel against leather. “Show yourself!” he shouted.
More laughter, from three different places. Then shapes emerged from the shadows surrounding the sunken floor. They had not been invisible; invisible creatures who became visible did so in an instant, not fading in as these… people… were. It was as if they’d been visible all along, but blended in with the stones until they chose to make themselves seen.
There were dozens of them, dressed haphazardly in fur and leather far too skimpy for this weather. Their skin was ice-pale, paler than Alaric’s northern complexion, touched with blue where the shadows lay across their bodies. They were tall and slender and moved with a cat’s grace, like hunters sneaking up on their prey. Sienne focused on the one nearest her, a man wearing fox tails like a cape across his shoulders. He was impossibly beautiful, his eyes large and dark, his face an elegant sculpture of planes and angles, his lips full and sensuous. He had his eyes fixed on her, and Sienne swallowed, her mouth and throat suddenly dry with fear.
The creatures came to stand around the pit and went so motionless they might have been statues carved out of someone’s nightmares. Sienne’s fingers groped for her spellbook, though her mind was numb. She couldn’t think of anything to do against these otherworldly creatures.
Movement caught her eye, and she spun to face the one who came down from the dais and crossed the room toward them. She was as beautiful as the others, her eyes as blue as the icy shadows that defined her arms and shoulders,
her fair hair cascading down her back to fall nearly to her knees. Unlike the others, who looked at the five with hunger, she looked curious, her head tilted to one side, her perfect brow furrowed into the slightest of lines. She approached Alaric, who stood with his sword ready to attack, but stopped some ten feet from him. Alaric was breathing heavily, his shoulders moving as if he’d exerted himself almost to his limit, but he didn’t attack.
The woman raised one delicate hand, and Alaric moved, bringing his sword up to swing at her. Sienne lifted her spellbook, willing it to open to force. Nothing happened. A wave of lassitude swept over her, exhaustion so profound her fingers ached with it. She let the spellbook fall to swing in its harness by her side. Her eyelids drooped, and she tried to force them open, but it was like trying to hold back the tide. Beside her, Dianthe slumped to the floor, not falling so much as folding at the knees and lying gently on the flagstones. It seemed like such a good idea, sleep, that Sienne sagged to the floor herself. She wouldn’t have imagined flagstones could be so soft.
She heard Alaric drop to his knees and opened her eyes just enough to see him bent over, clutching his head as if it hurt. He should sleep, too, she thought. She blinked once more and saw the woman bending over her. By her side, dangling from a loop of leather, was a long, curved knife stained dark with old blood. Then Sienne’s eyes closed, and she knew nothing more.
8
Sienne’s mouth tasted terrible, dry and bitter as if she’d eaten coffee grounds. Her whole body ached the way it usually only did when she was ill and had slept restlessly. She blinked, and her eyelids resisted the motion, feeling dry and crusty. Something warm and soft pressed against her cheek. She shifted, and discovered her hands were bound behind her. That brought her to full consciousness, alert and terrified. What had they done to her?
She struggled to sit up. The soft thing she was lying on was Kalanath’s thigh. He was just coming awake, his hands bound as hers were. They were all crammed together in a small room with wooden slats for walls—no, it was a cage, there was a door to one side, and if her hands had been free she could have reached through the slats to whatever lay beyond. The cage was no more than five feet high and about twice that in length, and it stank of urine and vomit.
Alaric sat up abruptly and smacked his head on the roof of the cage. He grunted and swore explosively. “Is everyone all right?”
“I take it you mean aside from the minor matter of being bound and caged,” Perrin said.
“If you can be sarcastic, I assume you’re fine,” Dianthe said. “They took my sword.”
“And mine,” Alaric said.
“And my staff,” Kalanath said.
Sienne groped at her side. “My spellbook’s gone.”
“But we’re all still alive.” Alaric shifted, trying vainly to find a comfortable position. “Caged, so they probably want something else out of us.”
“Sienne, give me your hands,” Dianthe said. “I’ll untie you and you can untie me. It’s a start, anyway.”
Sienne turned her back and held out her hands for Dianthe to pick at her bonds. “Can anyone see them?” Dianthe continued.
Kalanath pressed his face to one of the gaps. “They are eating,” he said. “There are many tables now, all surrounding the sunken place. They were not there before.”
“Or they were under an illusion,” Perrin said. “I see too late what the scrying intended us to know. Whoever or whatever they are—”
“Carvers,” Sienne said, memory striking like an icicle into her chest. “They’re carvers.”
“Carvers are imaginary,” Dianthe said.
“All legend has basis in fact,” Sienne said. “They have strange magic, they appear and disappear when they want, and the knives… I bet they’ve all got knives.”
“It’s impossible,” Dianthe said. “These are just… just humans who can…”
“They all have knives,” Kalanath said.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re carvers or not,” Alaric said. “That doesn’t help us know how to escape, given that no one’s ever escaped a carver attack to tell about it.”
“As I was saying,” Perrin said, “whatever they are, they have magic that confuses the scrying. They are intelligent, but their illusions, if illusions they are, are more powerful than Averran’s magic. That fills me with horror.”
The ropes around Sienne’s wrists fell away, and she flexed her hands briefly before beginning on Dianthe’s bonds. “Are they paying any attention to us?” she asked.
Perrin joined Kalanath in peering through the slats. There was no room for more than that. “They are eating in eerie silence,” he said, “no talking, no singing, no laughter. If it turns out they are, in fact, not human, I would not be at all surprised.”
The ropes binding Dianthe’s wrists were thin—in fact, they were from their own supplies, which made Sienne angry as nothing else had. She clung to that feeling like armor against the terrified despair the thought of carvers made her feel. She picked at the tight knots with her fingernails, loosening them slowly. Every second was one more second in which the carvers might decide to investigate what their captives were doing. Gradually, the knots became loops, and finally she pulled the last strands apart and tore the ropes free. Dianthe’s hand immediately went for her boot. She sighed. “Thank Kitane they didn’t take my lock picks. Now we just have to wait for them to go to sleep, and I’ll unlock this cage and let us out.”
Sienne sneaked a hand through the slats of the door. “There’s a padlock. It doesn’t—” She pulled her hand back and sniffed it. “It’s not rusted. I think it’s just an ordinary lock.”
“This assumes they sleep,” Kalanath said.
“Or that they do not have plans for us before that,” Perrin said.
“Let’s not borrow trouble,” Alaric said. “They kept us all together, and that’s good. Can anyone see where they put our things?”
Perrin shifted awkwardly. “They are on a table on the dais, next to that woman. Are we agreed in thinking she cast that spell on us?”
A spell. Sienne had forgotten the unnatural sleep. “Charm,” she breathed. “She used a charm on us.”
“And without a spellbook,” Dianthe said. “Maybe you’re right about them being carvers. What human could do that?”
“No human,” Sienne said. “But it means… she might be able to do anything. Charm is so forbidden I barely know anything about it. Just a few names of spells.”
“Not something we can help,” Alaric said. He held up his hands for Sienne to work at his bonds. “Let’s concentrate on getting free, and getting our weapons back. Then we can find a way out of this trap.”
Kalanath sucked in a sharp breath. “Two of them are coming this way.”
Sienne frantically tore at the ropes around Alaric’s wrists. The sound of a key in a lock carried far in the still air. The door opened, and Kalanath lunged at it, coming up short when one of the men shoved a knife in his face. The other man reached past him and grabbed Sienne by the collar, dragging her out of the cage. The others shouted her name, but the man with the knife slammed the door shut and locked it again. Sienne fought, twisting and clawing in her captor’s grasp, until he laid the sharp curved edge of his knife along her throat.
She went still, trying to calm her breathing. The cage was off to one side, between the door and the dais. Her captor changed his grip on her collar so he could march her to the center of the sunken central pit of the great hall. Kalanath was right, the room was full of tables surrounding the sunken area, which remained clear of anything but dead rushes and… Sienne’s heart pounded harder. Dark stains streaked the flagstones, stains that had been invisible until now, and bones scattered across the floor, some small like animal bones, some unmistakably human. The smell of old blood rose from the floor, mingled with the smell of wet, ancient stone.
She looked up and met the gaze of the woman, who alone among the carvers ate nothing, but held a pewter goblet in one elegant hand and stare
d at Sienne as if sizing her up. Sienne glared at her, pretending she wasn’t close to screaming in terror. Alaric’s greatsword lay across the table beside the woman, with Dianthe’s smaller sword atop it and Kalanath’s staff propped against the table. Sienne’s spellbook, still in its harness, lay open on its face nearby, as if the woman had been reading it and was one of those people who thought nothing of cracking a book’s spine by laying it on its face. Doing that couldn’t damage a spellbook, but it irritated Sienne, and she clung to that irritation as she did her pretend defiance.
The woman leaned forward like a cat sniffing a mouse it hadn’t decided to eat yet. Her eyes narrowed. Sienne continued to glare. The woman set down her goblet and stood, walking around the table and descending the dais, then the three steep steps into the pit. She gestured the man with the knife away and took Sienne by the chin, turning her head one way and the other. Then she released Sienne and walked away. It was all done in complete silence, making Sienne wonder if they were even capable of speech, or if they were simply so disdainful of humans they wouldn’t bother speaking to them. Or maybe they communicated some other way. If they were going to kill her, it didn’t matter one way or the other.
The carver with the knife—the one who’d dragged her out of the cage; they all had knives—took hold of her shoulder and marched her toward the door. For a wild moment, she thought he was going to let her go—but she couldn’t abandon her companions! But no, he merely thrust her to sit on the stairs leading up from the pit and took up a watchful pose at her side. Cold and damp leached through her trousers from the stone steps, and Sienne wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
The woman raised her hand. Three carvers stood from their tables and walked around to the cage, then paused as if waiting for direction. Sienne watched them closely, watched the woman, and saw nothing that might be communication pass between them, but after a moment, one of the three, a woman, opened the cage, and the other two dragged Alaric out. Sienne held her breath. Big mistake on their part; Alaric overtopped each of the carvers, tall as they were, by several inches, and Sienne knew he didn’t need his sword to beat them into submission.
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