No! cried Des as he crossed the room, wadded up the shawl, and pitched it out, to Ikos’s evident bafflement. He reconsidered his sack. If he was staging a convincing suicide, the personal effects would need to be left in place, right. He grabbed it up and circled the room again, putting things back. Shoved the sack and dress under the mattress. “Right, ready—”
The lock rattled. Pen whipped his head around and rusted it stuck before Des could even voice an objection. “We just ran out of time,” he whispered. “Go.” He held a finger to his lips as thumps sounded on the door.
Ikos oozed sideways through the window. Penric glanced back. On the other side of the door, the sturdier attendant was trying her hand turning the big iron key. Pen ran a hair-thin line of rust through its barrel and grinned as it snapped off in the lock. He was fairly sure the sharp words that resulted, muffled by the door, weren’t ones a lady was supposed to say in the Daughter’s Order. Or anywhere else.
He added an extra burst of corrosion to guarantee the half-key would stay jammed in the face of anything short of a hammer and chisel, drill, and crowbar. Or an ax.
Ikos’s feet kicked and disappeared. Pen eased his torso through, and watched the man, one arm wrapped around a rope or vice versa, bend up and thread his legs through the loop of a girth. He wriggled it under his hips, straightened his spine and shoulders, and braced the other arm over the suspending eye and swivel, and across his chest. He rotated dizzyingly, snaked his hand around the second suspension rope, and swung the girth toward Pen. “Just like that,” he whispered. “Then hold still and leave the rest to me. You can’t help, and I don’t need interference.”
Des wailed as Pen copied the procedure. The girth closed up tight around his narrow hips as it took his weight. He clamped both arms around the suspending lines, gripping each other.
It wasn’t often that he spoke sharply to his demon, but he did now. Des, we’re committed. Settle down and keep your chaos strictly to yourself until I say otherwise!
A sense of a whimper, and a tight, unhappy ball within him. She would be surly for days, unless he made it up to her somehow. A process she would probably seek to stretch out to the maximum benefit to herself, once she regained her tone of mind. Minds. Apology-gifts to a nonmaterial person took some ingenuity.
Assuming they survived. Well… assuming he survived.
I do not wish to end up in an ugly engineer, she whined. Or a dolphin.
I don’t think he’s ugly. Sawed-off and tough-looking, sure. Pen chose not to look down to try to spot dolphins frolicking in the distant waters.
Ikos set about hauling on one pulley-rope after another, in some balanced pattern known only to himself. The swaying jerks of the girth at each yank did unpleasant things to Pen’s stomach. But, slowly and methodically, they began inching upward.
As they passed the window above Madame Gardiki’s room, Pen held his breath, but no awakening dedicats or acolytes tripped over to look through and take in the sunrise. And the man-rise. He could do things to disable their alarm cries like the Xarre mastiffs, but if it seemed an offense to him, it was possible the goddess would think so as well.
At least, Pen consoled himself, he had spared Madame Gardiki this ordeal. Unless she would have enjoyed it. From their few minutes of acquaintance, it was hard to know. She might have liked the part about seeing her elder son hard at work, and cleverly. Pen was pretty sure she wouldn’t have liked his risks.
Pen rotated toward the sea view, watching the thin red line of light start to glow behind the Cedonian mainland, eating up the steel gray. On any other occasion, the return of the sun would be a delight. Pen longed for an eclipse. The new moon was in the wrong place for it, alas.
The vertical progression lurched to a halt just under the balconies, and Ikos commenced a complicated dance with his pulleys of tightening three lines so as to loosen and ease the one in the rear from its joist, unhook and extend it forward, rehook it, and repeat. They moved north in the thinning shadows at an excruciating pace. Ikos, above him, was breathing heavily and sweating. Pen tried to estimate the distance and time left to make the end of the row, racing the advent of the sun like very anxious, very careful slugs.
The gaolers with breakfast would be a good long stretch getting through the door. First would come time wasted trying to extract the broken key, initially seeming an annoyance rather than an emergency, then more in futile attempts to unstick the lock. Some running back and forth to find the tools for the job, and wake the women in charge of them. The hinges had been on the inside, inaccessible, or he’d have rusted them as well. The planks were thick oak, which were going to need that ax. Or a battering ram. Only once they’d broken through could they know their prisoner was missing—or suicided—and set up a cry. The echoes of woodchopping would be Pen’s sign that he and Ikos had very little time left.
A red-gold sliver crested the distant hills, then became a crescent, a ball, and then too bright to look upon. The boundary of blue shadow on the slope below dropped like night’s floodwaters receding. From behind the thick walls of the Order, occasional light voices echoed, too muted to make out words. In some courtyard beyond the blue roofs, a choir of several voices began a hymn, echoing and eerie with the distance. No ax-blows yet.
Ikos, just above Pen, kept grimly working. Penric, reminded of his duties as a divine and otherwise feeling to be inert cargo, began praying. There was nothing in the least rote about his morning’s tally of the gods here, no.
Within Penric, Desdemona moaned. He could feel the chaos roiling within her, a growing pressure like a bad stomach about to heave up. My demon is seasick. The last thing in the world he needed was for her to begin vomiting unshaped disorder into the rigging that suspended them above a plummeting death. Or anywhere else nearby. He stared around like a frantic nurse looking for a bucket.
The most likely thing in sight was a trio of seagulls, rising with the morning breeze and cruising the balconies for scraps. He wondered if the ladies of the Order ever amused themselves throwing tidbits to them to be caught in midair. The pale scavenger birds were shore pests, considered sacred to the Bastard as the only god who would have them. Bastard’s vermin were always allowable sacrifices.
All right, Des, Pen thought in some exasperation. You may have one seagull. Just one.
A burst of gratitude and chaos caught a bird on the wing as it swooped above the balcony under which they were making their transit. With a loud pop, it exploded in a shower of feathers, blood and bones turning to dust as they fell in the white flutter. Pen winced.
That was a lot of chaos. Des must have really been in distress. Feel better now?
The response, had it been aloud, would have approximated the hostile noise one would expect from a friend bent over a ship’s rail who’d just delivered an offering to the sea.
Ikos stared up through the gaps in the boards with disconcerted expression, but any exclamation was caught by strong teeth biting his lip.
From inside the open door to the balcony, a startled female voice said, “What?”
Another more distant voice called, “Hekat, are you coming?”
“I’ll catch up in a moment. You go on ahead.”
The sound of a door closing. Pen and Ikos both froze as footsteps rapped out onto the balcony boards.
Pen caught sight of the blue tunic and skirt of an acolyte as the woman bent over to pick up a few blown feathers and roll them in her fingers. She looked up. She looked down.
Both men peered back through the board-gaps. Ikos tried a friendly smile. It just made him look like a bandit delighted with the prospect of cutting a throat.
Middle-aged acolyte. How many women named Hekat could there be in this order? Dozens, for all Pen know. She wasn’t an albino. But there might, unless he was fooling himself, be a faint echo of her brother in the fine frame of her face, much the way Ikos’s more robust bones echoed Nikys’s. Pen feared to attempt the delicate seizure of her vocal cords with Des in such disarray. As she
opened her mouth to cry out, he was driven to take a different chance.
He tapped his lips twice, looked up into the brown eye he could see, and said clearly, “Surakos.”
Slowly, the mouth closed, though the stare intensified.
Ikos swiveled his head and glared at Pen in complete mystification. Pen held up a hand begging silence.
“What,” she breathed, “has Sura to do with this?” A wave of her hand encompassed the lunatic configuration of tackle and men hanging from her balcony joists.
“It would take about an hour to explain in full.” Which they surely did not have. “But I promise you, when he comes out for your birthday in the autumn, he’ll tell you everything. It should be safe for him to speak by then.”
There. The birthday visit was personal information that no one who did not know Bosha could be privy to. Would it be coin enough to buy her trust?
“Why is it unsafe now?”
At least he had her attention focused on her brother, and not on the intruders’ blasphemy. “Thasalon court politics.”
That eye-scrunch might be a wince. “Oh, gods,” she said, in a voice of loathing. “Not again.”
“He’ll be all right if you say nothing of what you’ve just seen. Except to the Lady of Spring. You can pray to your goddess. She might even speak for us.”
Now the eye grew indignant. “Do you expect me to believe you have some sort of, of holy dispensation for this?”
Pen knew they did, or at least Nikys had, but it seemed unwise to test the gods. Or the acolyte. “I make no claims. Sura can tell all.”
She sat with a thump, fingering her handful of feathers. “He’d better,” she muttered, and Pen knew they were safe. He motioned for Ikos to continue.
Ikos shot him a hot look that suggested Surakos wasn’t the only one who would be interrogated later. But he started working his pulleys and hooks again, and they recommenced their onward lurch.
Acolyte Hekat went to the gap between her balcony and the next—and last, thankfully—and hung her head over to watch their progress. “That’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. What in the world is it in aid of?”
“Right now, removing two men from a place they should not be as expeditiously as possible. With our heartfelt apologies, I assure you.”
“Were you looking at that seagull?”
“What seagull?” Pen produced an innocent blink.
She sucked breath through her teeth and gave him a gimlet glower reminding him of how the Jurald Court cook used to successfully squeeze confessions out of him about the missing pastries. Followed by a cuff to his ear and, usually, another pastry to eat on his exit. “Is Sura going to explain that, too?”
“If I get another opportunity to see him, I’ll make sure he can,” Pen promised.
When they swayed out of her view, she was still sitting cross-legged rolling the feathers in her hand.
Pen discovered Ikos’s plan for descending from the balcony end to the stairs when they arrived, and it was even more horrifying than he would have guessed. It consisted of Ikos lengthening Pen’s suspension rope and setting him in motion like a pendulum, swinging some twenty or more feet over to where the rising steps curved out of sight to their pilgrim-gate. “It’s perfectly safe,” the bridgebuilder asserted in a whisper. “Just don’t get out of your girth till you’ve found your feet. If you slip before then, we just try again.”
Pen managed his landing on the third attempt. Desdemona, crying, insisted she wanted another seagull, but he held her off.
There followed a heart-stopping interlude watching Ikos twist himself around under the balcony, fiddle with ropes, and loosen all four hooks of his evil contraption. Pen had to detach his girth and clip its doubled line to a mysterious eye-bolt in the rock face, which held it taut for Ikos as he slid down with his machine in tow. An unclipping and undoing, a rapid winding-up of rope around the engineer’s arm, and the loosed end cleared its joist and fell, leaving nothing at all in its wake. Ikos somehow drew the eyebolt anchor out of its socket in three pieces, leaving only an anonymous square hole. Pen couldn’t quite see if there were any other such holes pocking the rockface.
Then another maddening delay while Ikos sat down and carefully wound and folded it all into a tight, heavy bundle, no trailing ends. Pen supposed it was how he’d packed the thing up here. In the dark, all last night. Pen really wanted to take it away from him and just heave it into the sea, but Ruchia, managing to get her one-twelfth voice heard through the general cacophony that was the upset Des, agreed it would be better to leave no evidences at all. As Ikos had already concluded, apparently.
Ikos made a final survey of the balconies, and frowned aside at Penric. “Wordy bastard, aren’t you?”
In so many ways. “It’s my stock-in-trade.”
“I’ll be wanting to hear more about that, later.”
“I hope you’ll get a chance.”
Pen reflected on all that the weary Ikos had done, starting last night at dusk. And for weeks beforehand, it seemed. All that patient labor, and no pleased mother to show for it at the end after all. He regarded the start of the two thousand steps, and murmured, “Would you like me to carry that pack?”
Ikos huffed, thick eyebrows rising in surprise at him. “Aye.”
Two pilgrims on the steps. It would be no unusual thing to see (and mock, probably) and their details would be indistinguishable from a distance. Pen felt very penitential indeed as he hoisted the contraption, which turned out to weigh about thirty pounds mostly in coiled rope, on his back. As he started down in front of Ikos, he could finally hear the faint crunch of ax-blows leaking from one far window.
A last look up before the rising stone eclipsed her found Acolyte Hekat still leaning on her railing, looking down studying them. He made the tally of the gods broadly over his chest at her, tapping his lips twice by way of farewell.
She touched her fingers to her forehead in return salute, and Pen thought her brother might not be the only member of her family with a strong ironic streak.
XIV
Close to Akylaxio, Master Bosha found another sheltered spot to conceal the cart, where they lay up to wait out the dawn. The stop afforded more an uncomfortable doze than a sleep; still, better than nothing. His timing was good, Nikys thought, for they entered the city gates at the dewy hour when the guards were busy overseeing the influx of country folk bringing food and goods to the day-markets. Their tense wait to pass within was recompensed by being cloaked in the crowd.
The guards did not yet seem to be scrutinizing middle-aged women. If things had gone as Penric had planned, Idrene might only just now have been discovered missing on Limnos.
It didn’t seem wise to assume all had gone as planned.
Still, there had to be a minimum and a maximum. If the escape was discovered at breakfast, a certain amount of time would first be spent searching the Order’s precincts, and then the island. Any alarm would have the same watery barrier to pass that they had. Minister Methani’s women gaolers might have to send to their master in Thasalon for instructions, though Nikys expected they’d delay that in the hopes that their report could include the prisoner being found. The period for any pursuit reaching Akylaxio could stretch out for days.
The minimum was all Nikys must worry about. If Pen had been seized last night, a military courier could have docked at Guza bare hours behind them. Although such a message couldn’t have overtaken them yet, or their reception at the city gates would have been very different. If Pen had been captured… she really wasn’t sure if she should be worrying for Pen, or for Limnos. But even sorcerers couldn’t fly out a window, or across a strait.
The cries of gulls and the smell of the shore announced the harbor, and Nikys stretched her neck to take it in. Bigger and busier than little Guza, smaller than Patos, much less than the maze of docks and warehouses and forests of masts that crowded great Thasalon’s entrepot. Two piers in deep-enough water allowed direct loading and unloading of vessel
s, and men and cranes were already noisily doing so for the handful of ships tied up. The port was active enough to rate full-time bureaucratic customs officers, although they inspected mainly for contraband and tax evaders. But they would also keep both provincial and imperial lists of wanted fugitives and criminals.
Bosha, Nikys gathered, was only slightly more familiar with Akylaxio than she was, but he found a clean-looking inn close to the harbor, and, playing servant, escorted both women inside to secure a room in which to rest and hide. He carried up their luggage, not speaking until the door closed behind them.
“I’ll find a place to put up the horse and cart,” he said, “then reconnoiter the harbor. I brought papers that we can finish filling out when I’ve found a ship.” He took a sheaf from his tunic and laid it on the washstand. “Think of what names and personas you want to travel under. Don’t leave the room till I get back. I’ll send up a maid to see about food and drink.”
“Thank you, Master Bosha,” said Idrene formally, by way of accepting this program, and he nodded and departed.
Nikys went over and peeked out the window, which gave onto the other roofs of the town, mostly flat and filled with drying laundry, pots of herbs, and other useful implements. She picked up and examined the papers, which already bore seals and signatures… some of Lady Xarre’s wealth was in shipping, yes, so these probably weren’t even forged, wholly. Although she didn’t doubt such skills were also in Bosha’s repertoire, at need.
Nikys and Idrene took the chance to wash, eat, and, both familiar with the challenges of the army baggage train, reorganize their meager belongings for a quick removal when the order came. A cat-nap would be due after, to make up for the prior night.
Idrene examined Pen’s medical case with interest. “This seems well thought-out. I can believe he really is a physician.”
“In all but final oath. And you’re snooping, Mother.”
“Of course.” She held up Pen’s braids, which she’d unearthed in the depths, contemplating them with less irony than Bosha had. “And really a Temple sorcerer. Not hedge. Hedge would be too risky. Temple is probably all right. So, you say you’re courting?”
The Prisoner of Limnos Page 11