Blaise groaned softly. “The Rowans. I was forgetting those notorious relations of yours. What were your parents thinking when they named you after them? But tell me this: Is there no end to the number of people who might be thirsting for your blood?”
A shadow passed over Wilrowan’s face, and Blaise suddenly realized that his annoying air of careless insouciance was largely affected.
“I really don’t know,” he replied with a wistful smile. “But I should imagine the list is a damnably long one.”
The room was oppressive, so small and dark it might have been a cell, with its one high square window barred in iron, its stone-flagged floor, and scarred hickory furniture. But it was not a cell; it was the room where prisoners, their papers already processed, awaited release from Whitcomb Gaol.
At the present time, there was a single occupant, pacing the floor through a long, cold night, while a trencher of oysters and a tankard of ale sat untouched upon the table. Though the hour of Will’s re lease remained uncertain, Trefallon’s gold had bought him this one indulgence, removing him from the common wards and the prison yard to this place of comparative safety, procuring him this meal which he had not tasted.
As the first pale light of dawn crept through the window, there came a fluttering of wings in the air outside. Wilrowan glanced up, just in time to see a large black bird land on the window ledge between the iron bars.
. Will extended an arm and the raven hopped from the ledge to his wrist. The silver intaglio ring on Wilrowan’s hand had come to life, glowing in that dreary little chamber with an uncanny blue light. To Will’s heightened vision, a spark of similar light appeared deep within the raven’s brain.
The raven folded its wings.
The ring was ancient, as Blaise had suspected, though not so harmless an article as he supposed. It allowed Will to communicate with the great black birds that came and went almost unnoticed throughout the city. How it had first come into the possession of his relations, the mysterious Rowan family, Will did not know, but it had passed to him from his grandmother, Lady Krogan, on the day he was appointed Captain of the Queen’s Guard. “It may prove useful,” the former Odilia Rowan had said as she bestowed the gift, and useful it had certainly proved to be. The Hawkesbridge ravens made an effective and utterly unsuspected network of spies.
Will asked.
The bird stepped daintily up his arm.
Will ground his teeth.
Wilrowan considered. A twig or a blade of grass was the usual signal when the ravens had any information to give him, but this was important and the sign should be a clear one. He reached into one pocket and drew out a small brass coin.
The raven lowered its glossy head, took the coin in its beak.
Will created a vivid mental picture of each man’s face, so there could be no mistake.
Crwcrwyl gave the images back as confirmation.
Will hesitated. Not that he doubted Blaise for a moment, but perhaps he should ask the ravens to watch as a measure of protection?
Before he had time to decide, a clatter of footsteps in the corridor outside his door, the grate of an iron key in the lock, shattered his delicate communion with the bird. Startled, the raven fluttered up from his wrist, then flew out the window.
Once upon a time, in the bad old times, when Men were weak and timorous and an evil race of Goblins ruled the earth, a certain small village grew into a great city of brick and marble, slate, and cobblestone.
Men lived there, of course, as they lived elsewhere: ragged and humble, dirty and ignorant, which was just as the Maglore wished to keep them, and therefore fit only for the most grinding, laborious tasks, like working and maintaining the pumps and other underground machinery—for Tarnburgh was located in a volcanic region far to the north, and the machines brought heated air and boiling subterranean waters up through a series of pipes and radiators to heat the metropolis during the long arctic winter.
She was just such a city as the Goblins loved: vast and intricate, startling, beautiful, and perilous. In the great maze of her winding streets and small hidden courts were many neat little shops where the tireless Goblin craftsmen (Ouphs and Padfoots, mostly) worked long hours making singing roses, clockwork dragonflies, glass slippers, and other novelties for their Maglore masters. In Tarnburgh’s great libraries and universities, the scholarly Grants and Wrynecks, bowed and ink-stained after centuries of study, drew elaborate star charts and leafed through ponderous old books on history, genealogy, and etiquette—for it was a characteristic of the long-lived races in those days that they delighted to look upward and inward, sideways and backward, but rarely more than a week or two forward in time.
But the beautiful Maglore in their mansions and palaces had little to do but amuse themselves, for tens of centuries had passed since they first created the intricate jeweled devices on which their power and their Empire rested. So they dreamed up endless tiny variations on spells they already knew by heart, became fanatic patrons of all the arts, and devoted themselves to those most elegant civilized pastimes: court intrigue, lovemaking, and delicate cruelty.
But when Mankind became restless, when they began to see the possibility of something more than poor rations, hard labor, and ignorance—when Men throughout the Empire first sought that knowledge of lives and fates, time and the universe, which the Maglore had denied them—when at last they took arms against the Goblin races, overthrew the universities and slaughtered the ancient scholars, herded the inoffensive Padfoots and Ouphs? into the poorest parts of the cities and forced them to live ever afterward in damp cellars, drafty attics, and dingy small tenements—when, armed with fire and salt, Mankind carried the battle against the Maglore into every city, village, and town, and vowed not to be satisfied with anything less than total extermination—when Men remade the world according to a new and better pattern, when some cities faded and others appeared out of nowhere—Tarnburgh, like Hawkesbridge, endured.
Naturally, she underwent changes. For all their outward similarities, Men differ greatly from Maglore: numbers and measurements fascinate them, and they love what is useful as well as beautiful. So the city of portrait-painters, dancing masters, courtiers, astrologers, and toymakers became instead a city of clerks and notaries, lens-grinders, cartographers, inn-keepers, tailors, and bookbinders.
The Maglore, meanwhile, gone but not precisely forgotten, had entered into legend, the heroes and (more often) the villains of a thousand fantastic tales: as false black knights and scheming queens, wicked stepmothers, magical godmothers, and the like. And some indefinable hint of their presence still lingered in Tarnburgh, lending that city of fine old buildings and curious small shops an indefinable air, suggesting the kind of place where any sort of marvelous unexpected thing might happen.
4
Tarnburgh, Winterscar—Thirteen Months Earlier
29 Frimair (Midwinter’s Eve) 6536
The palace was ablaze with light. From the latticed window of an attic room two miles distant, Ys could not actually see Lindenhoff, but she had passed the palace five days earlier on her way into Tarnburgh, and given the golden glow she could see on the north side of town, over the dark irregular roofline of the intervening shops and houses, it was easy to picture how enchanting King Jarred’s elegant white-and-gold jewel-box of a castle must look with the torches all lit.
The girl
shivered and folded her arms across her chest. A square-necked grey taffeta gown, cut low across the bosom, with full skirts held stiffly out from her body by a set of baleen hoops, offered scant protection against the damps and drafts of this garret in the Goblin Quarter. But it was anticipation quite as much as the bitter cold of winter that nearly froze her already chilly blood.
She thought of the months just past, the long weeks of planning and scheming; she thought of the difficult years before that, the times when she had even lost faith in Madame Solange, her threats as well as her promises. But at last the great day had finally arrived, the hour was almost at hand, to go to the ball and enchant a king.
A large white rat skittered across the uneven floorboards; Ys drew in her breath sharply, felt her fingers curl instinctively. For just a moment, a memory struggled to surface. The memory of something small and savage, a swift, sly, wary little creature that cringed in dark corners, that fought for every mouthful of food it ever ate, for the very pile of rags on which it huddled at night—Then the memory faded, and Ys could breathe again.
The old nightmare, that was all it was. The old terror that came when she was lying in bed half-sleeping, half-waking, and made her feel as if she was being stifled to death with dust.
With an effort, Ys forced her thoughts into more pleasant channels. They said that King Jarred was young, elegant, and darkly handsome; educated, witty, and charming. With all this, she could only hope that he would not prove to be overly clever, or he might wear her to death with questions she dared not answer.
Her hands wandered to the glowing necklace at her throat, to the strange stones which always appeared at first glance to be pearls, but were something brighter, colder, and harder, to the crystal pendant burning like a lump of ice against her bare skin. She remembered, then, that Jarred was going to find her absolutely irresistible, and that would make everything so much easier.
The door behind her creaked open; there was a rustle of stiff petticoats. Ys whirled around just in time to see the slim, active figure of her governess sweep into the room. As always, Madame Solange appeared to be animated by a dark, malicious energy. “How much longer do you mean to keep us waiting? Do you imagine we have nothing better to do than to linger here at your pleasure?”
Ys flinched, though she knew the harsh words were not intended for her. They were meant for the tiny crooked Gobline who huddled on a low stool in one corner of the attic, sewing up a seam with quick, even stitches.
“I am just finished now.” The little Padfoot seamstress made a final knot and snipped off the thread with her teeth. She was a queer little person, all skin, bone, and gristle, except for a rat’s nest of unruly hair and a pair of large fleshy feet. “I have mended the spell as best I could, given so little time.”
Madame Solange snatched up her handiwork, examining it minutely. It was a long sealskin cloak, very old, very tattered and fragile looking. Once, it had been a lady’s garment and exceedingly fine. Around the edges, where the short dark hairs had been stripped away, there was an intricate border of crystal beadwork, and the fragile leather had been so deeply permeated with a rich, musky perfume that the scent still lingered. But it was not with an eye to its antiquated grandeur that Madame regarded it. When she reversed the cloak and spread it out across her skirts, the gossamer-light inner lining shimmered—and then disappeared, enabling Ys and the little seamstress to see right through Madame Solange to the dusty plank floor behind her.
“The young lady must wear the skin-side out until she reaches the palace,” the Padfoot cautioned. “I can’t vouch for such shoddy work on such short notice, but the spell should hold while she moves from the kitchen to the ballroom.”
“If it does not hold, we will all regret it,” Madame replied in a voice of suppressed passion. “You most of all.”
She might have said more, but just then a dainty figure, vaguely masculine, appeared in the doorway, instantly claiming the attention of all three females.
Lord Vif was a sight to behold. Exquisitely attired in a coat of palest lilac satin with silver embroidery, he was rouged, patched, laced, powdered, tricked out to a remarkable degree. After a pause, which allowed the others to admire him sufficiently, he minced into the room, extended a slender silk-clad leg, and made a deep flourishing bow, toward a point strategically located somewhere between Ys and her daunting governess. “It is time. Your carriage and escort await you.”
Her “carriage,” as Ys well knew, was nothing more than a rickety peddler’s cart, her escort a rag-tag company of wandering entertainers led by a disreputable old Ouph woman who posed as a fortuneteller. It was ludicrous and degrading that she, who should have been empress of the entire world, was forced to arrive on the king’s doorstep in a cart, but it could not be helped.
So Ys held her tongue and allowed Lord Vif to help her put on the cloak, draping the ancient sealskin to conceal her gown of taffeta and lace, then pulling up the deep hood to cover her profusion of powdered curls.
She was moving toward the door, when a small gnarled hand reached out and timidly touched a corner of her cloak. “My Lady, your shoes. They catch the light.”
Ys stopped and looked down. So far as she could see, the tattered hem of her mantle reached all the way to the floor. Still, she imagined the creature had detected something, some flash of reflected light as she moved across the room. With a shrug, Ys bent down, raised her hoops and ruffled petticoats with one hand, removed her diamond-heeled brocade shoes with the other. Her stockings of finest pearl-grey silk would suffer, but that was a small price to pay, considering what she hoped to gain this night.
“The necklace,” said Madame Solange. “It might be well to keep it hidden until the moment arrives.”
Wordlessly, Ys unfastened the clasp and dropped the double string of cold stones down the front of her gown.
“Don’t speak to me of the Maglore, I beg you.” Lucius Sackville-Guilian gave a bitter laugh as he spoke. “Spin me no tales of those beautiful, terrifying Goblin sorcerers, for I am half-convinced they never existed. Or if they did, if they were anything more than an elaborate hoax on the part of our ancestors, then we are their lineal descendants.”
Far from taking offense as Lucius might have intended, King Jarred only responded by laughing, too. “Is this another page from the Great Revisionist History? Just how many revisions does that make?”
His cousin shrugged. “I believe at last count there were eighty-three.” It was a conservative estimate; Lucius had been rewriting history since the age of eight, and the book’s history—if not the history in the book—was a long and colorful one.
“You realize,” said Jarred, “that you are being perfectly outrageous. And yet, your powers of persuasion are always so great, I wouldn’t be surprised if Francis and I end up ‘half-convinced’ before you are through with us.”
The third man present, Doctor Francis Purcell, said nothing, though the old man’s eyes were troubled. At Purcell’s invitation, the king and Lucius had met in the philosopher’s workshop-laboratory for a light supper before the ball. That conversation around the mahogany dining table would eventually turn argumentative the older man might have foreseen, for he had been tutor in his time to both the young ones. That the discussion, over the final course of pigeons, chestnut soup, and game pie, would take on such a disturbing tone, he had clearly not anticipated.
“We are told,” said Lucius, sitting back in his chair, crossing one muscular white-stockinged leg over the other, “that ever since Men brought down the Empire and harried the Maglore into extinction the world has existed in a state of near perfection. And why? Because Our Revered Ancestors, when they created their new civilization, made certain laws, handed down certain maxims, and incorporated certain habits and fears into the very fabric of Society, intended to maintain that state of near perfection practically forever. But have we really inherited the best of all possible worlds?”
The room was quiet for several moments, while the king an
d the scholar thought that over. Quiet, except for the movement of heavy machinery in the room above. For reasons that were obscure to Jarred—but perhaps only because Purcell found the sound of moving gears and wheels, the constant whirring and ticking, somehow soothing—the philosopher had chosen to locate his workshop in the Lindenhoff clock tower.
“You think we have not?” said Purcell, adjusting his gold-rimmed spectacles.
“I think we could hardly have inherited anything worse. We are a hundred tiny nations ruled by a hundred ruling houses, as vain, idle, weak, and sapless a collection of painted figureheads—excepting present company, of course—as one could hope to meet. Why are they inbred to the point of weakness? Because our ancestors placed a ban on marriage between the various royal houses. Why are they idle, vain, and frivolous? Because that is what people expect, that is what they will have. Because when the rare exception comes along, a visionary thinker, a great humanitarian, the world grows uneasy—just as our ancestors planned that it should—and everyone starts muttering about Imperial Ambitions.”
Jarred put down his empty wine glass. With that movement, the candles on the table flickered and then grew bright again. “You’re thinking of the King of Rijxland.”
“The King of Rijxland as he once was, yes. But as he is now, he illustrates my point even better. The poor old fellow goes absolutely mad—I suppose that he is mad, and it’s not just a convenient excuse for locking him up?”
“Oh, yes. I sent two of my own doctors to confirm the diagnosis, and so did the King of Kjellmark and the Prince of Catwitsen.”
“Well then, Izaiah of Rijxland is undoubtedly insane. But do they depose him?” said Lucius. “Do they set up his daughter as regent to rule in his place? No. There is no precedent for either of those things in Rijxland, so they keep the lunatic on as their head of state and actually allow the business of government to be conducted from a madhouse. And what is even worse, nobody anywhere else seems to think the situation at all unnatural.”
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