Perhaps the stone had been removed long ago by someone else. If so, the answer lay with Tarvik. Who had first told him about the passage? I could imagine he had accidently found the doorway to his own room, but had he also discovered the latchstones at the end of the corridor? That was harder to believe. Over the years he had spent a lot of alone time in the castle. But not really alone, not without a guard. And he said Artur didn't know about the passage.
"Is she still in his chamber?"
The voice was so near to me it startled me out of my thoughts.
"We will be told when she leaves,” I heard Ober say, and knew the other voice must belong to her daughter, Alakar.
What did I hope to gain, standing in the space between the walls? With so many missing planets in their horoscopes, I hoped I could fill in information from elsewhere. If ever a place was elsewhere, this was it, a dark passageway with a concealed opening into their room.
"Why did he send for her?” Alakar asked.
"I will learn that when I have her in my power,” Ober said.
Alakar said, “Does she matter to us? She is nothing, merely a templekeeper, and so dark and tall and her bones stick out. Can we not have her killed now?"
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Chapter 11
I bit my tongue and continued to listen. Never had liked the looks of that girl, way too smarmy.
"She may seem nothing to you,” Ober said, “but I have watched your Tarvik. He looks at her with great longing which is more than he has ever done with you."
"You're mad! Want her when he is promised to me? Why should he?"
"Why indeed? She requested this audience with him. He did not send for her. What does she plot?” Ober said, and sounded more as though she was thinking aloud than talking to her daughter.
Was there nothing that escaped those colorless eyes?
"Does Kovat long for her, too?” Alakar asked.
Ober's low laugh was not pleasant. “Not that way, you stupid girl. Something else. I remember his obsession with the Daughter because of her magic. I wonder. Could this one also possess magic?"
"She cannot be powerful or Kovat would have taken her with him to defeat the warlords of Thunder."
To hear their words was suspense enough, but it was as nothing compared to standing in my dark hiding place after their voices died away. What were they doing? Had they turned to stare at the hanging rug that separated us? Did some movement of the air in the cold passageway stir the hanging? Or had they gone to their warm beds while I stood freezing in this damn place?
Or was Ober quietly opening the door to her room and instructing her guards to go outside the castle to grab me when I stepped out of the secret door?
I waited for what seemed to me half the night, shivering in the folds of my cloak. When I could bear the silence no longer, I touched the backing of the rug. As it moved slightly, a dim edge of light framed it.
An oil lamp burned in their room. Leaning my head through the wall opening so my ear pressed against the rug, I listened. Somebody was moving around. There. A footstep. A scrape. Was that a bowl or mug scraping on a tabletop?
How bright was the room?
Should I push the rug aside or would they see it move?
If I hadn't been so positive the lives of Tarvik, myself, and maybe Nance, too, depended on my knowledge of Ober's plans, I would have felt my way out of the passage and run all the way back to the temple.
Instead, I moved the carpet aside the width of a pinch at a time, the wool backing catching on my fingertips, pausing after each move to listen for the sound of an indrawn breath. While I waited, I almost wished someone would scream. Then I could let go and take off out of there and forget the whole dumb idea of playing spy.
Nobody screamed. My last move brought the edge of the rug a finger width past the edge of the opening and I blinked at the light. Set for flight, I peered through. In the lamp glow at the table the two women bent over an assortment of crockery, their attention fixed on what they did. The wall that separated us was in deep shadow.
Ober dropped a pinch of powder into a bowl. After carefully opening a small container, she let some liquid drip on the powder. It flared. The room filled with yellow smoke that looked like the smoke created by the magician of Thunder. That trick hadn't impressed Kovat or Tarvik. How did she intend to use it?
With a fingertip she drew a triangle on the tabletop. If she touched it with anything other than her finger, I couldn't see what she used. A red glowing line followed her touch. In the center of the triangle she placed a bowl filled with some sort of dark powder. Making odd hand motions above it, she mumbled a chant. Then she took a part of the powder and measured it into a shiny object she held in her palm.
When she stepped back from the table and reached toward Alakar, I saw what the object was. Ober had put the powder into a small ornamental locket that hung on a chain. Slipping the chain over her daughter's head, she arranged it carefully around her neck. The little locket hung like a jewel, shining against the dark fabric of Alakar's robe.
"It is done,” Ober said.
"Are you sure it will work?” Alakar asked.
"I know my part well enough if you remember yours."
"I wish we were rid of them both now,” Alakar said.
"What use would that be? Until we receive word of Kovat's death, we cannot proceed. Time enough then to wed and rule, my girl."
I strained so hard to catch their words it was a miracle they didn't feel my presence and hear my heart banging away, my breath catch in my throat. They also didn't continue their discussion. Instead, the conversation turned to the usual, empty chatter about jewels and robes. I waited, shivering and silent, until they blew out the lamp, before I let the rug slide back into place.
Receive word of Kovat's death? Oh, damn.
After the dim light of the room, the passageway was thick blackness. I felt my way along the wall until I reached its end.
A pressure on the spot above the door where Tarvik had touched the rock accomplished nothing.
I touched it again, to the side, then above, then below. Had he tricked me? Had he raised his hand to mislead me, then touched some other stone, the stage magician thing of watch my right hand so you won't see what my left hand is doing? I had barely been able to see what he did. But why would he try to mislead me? Had he guessed I would return this night? Was I an idiot to believe anything he told me? Was he waiting now in his room to hand me over to Ober's guards?
Frantic, I felt around the rock's edge, searching for the latchstone. I could stay here until daytime when Ober and Alakar left their room and then, if I hadn't frozen to death, I could climb through their wall opening. But what would that gain me? Guards must constantly patrol the corridor beyond their door.
Or I could return to Tarvik and tell him what I had overheard. And how would I explain why I'd decided to spy on his aunt and cousin? He said he trusted me, which could be useful, and, wow, would my turning up now put paid to that idea.
My fingers touched a smaller stone, set slightly deeper in the wall, and almost at the point I had thought Tarvik touched. I pressed it. The door opened.
So he had not tricked me and my suspicions were unfair. Not much consolation there. It meant Tarvik really did trust me more than I trusted him, which put me in the unpleasant position of knowing I did have an obligation to protect him. Hate being obligated, because in my experience, being in some guy's debt is never a good thing.
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Chapter 12
Have I mentioned that a thousand years ago, when I was sixteen, I dated Rock Decko?
No, I did not know that he had an older brother out in the big bad world, over in Spokane, actually, working for some law firm, and I wouldn't have cared. Rock in black leather and chains was, uh, hot. And I was sixteen. Which I hope explains why I thought he was hot.
He wasn't much older than me, two or three years, I think, and by then I was well into my training
as an astrologer, which had begun about two years before. I had been handpicked by the resident astrology teacher, but that's another long story.
To cut to the chase, Rock was into motorcyles, worked in a cycle repair shop, and really, really, really wanted to be a bad boy but had no special skills. I am talking fighting skills. He couldn't possibly have held his own in a Hell's Angels-type of dust up. So he hung around the edges when bikers came into the shop, soaking up their wild stories and believing them, then putting himself into the lead role.
I can still hear him telling me, “Babe, this dude came at me, had a knife this long, thought I'd back off, blah, blah, blah.” He had me fooled for about a month. I was really impressed in that teenage nuts kind of way.
"Weren't you scared?"
"Nah, babe, nothing scares me."
Did I mention he was a really good kisser? Sixteen is easy to impress.
Fortunately, he didn't own a car and neither of us had a room to go to or money to rent one and hadn't figured a path around that little obstacle. Also, fortunately, Rock hadn't yet been tapped to be a wizard. Most smash wizards don't know they are wizards. It isn't genetic, at least not where I come from. It's more accidental, like discovering you're a natural on the oboe. And that happens when a music teacher hands you one and says, “I think you might be good on this."
With wizard mentality, the line is, “Do you sometimes wish for something and are surprised when it happens?"
Rock and I were a twoesome before his big moment. While necking in the back booth of the pizza parlor, because necking on a bike is really hazardous and I have a few scars to prove it, I'd come up for air and tell him about my astrology training.
"You can tell fortunes? Hey, can you pick winners, you know, like for a Seahawks game?"
Verboten, every astrologer knows that, not because it is illegal but because one teeny error can earn you a lifelong enemy, so I told him of course not.
That isn't why we broke up. Another guy tried to hit on me, nothing obnoxious, the sort of thing I could have turned off with a polite, “That's my boyfriend over there."
Rock didn't give me a chance. The guy touched my arm, just touched, didn't grab, and asked my name and could he buy me a beer. I was on my way back to the booth from a rest room run. I didn't even get a chance to tell him I stuck to diet coke because even in Mudflat they card.
The bad boy wannabe saw us and flew out of the booth swinging a chain and then there was this damn messy bloody mix-up, with the owner tossing us all out into the parking lot. I left and caught a bus home. Buses stayed clear of Mudflat at night, so from the nearest bus stop I still had to walk a couple of miles. Lots of time to think. So I wasn't a brain. At least I knew a violent boyfriend could be a girl's worst nightmare.
I told him so the next time he phoned.
Funny thing, that. He didn't argue, didn't say he was sorry. I heard later that some other girl helped scrape him up off the parking lot pavement where Mr. Pick-Up turned out to be the tougher of the two. And so I put Rock Decko out of my mind.
Sure, when my cousin Jimmy introduced me to Darryl Decko, six years later, I asked if he was related to somebody named Rock and he said, “My half-ass brother? Sorry you've met him, honey. I don't have anything to do with him and he's not crazy about me, either."
And I was dumb enough to believe him.
So after the Decko boys, and a list of guys in between, is it such a surprise that I avoid letting myself be indebted to good looking young men?
The troll is a different story. And speaking of the troll, old Lor was about as attractive and therefore, yes, I trusted Lor.
Peeking out around the edge of the doorway, I saw it was still night-black outside and no one guarded the long wall on this side of the castle. I closed the stone door and moved in the building shadow toward the trees.
A shadow separated from the others. My breath stopped.
Old Lor whispered, “This way."
I hurried to him and whispered back, “We heard Ober send you away."
"Aye, but I waited."
We circled around the back of the temple, past the stables and up the other side, watching from the far wall until we saw that no one stood near the gate except two temple guards. Yeah, tonight there were two of them. Had the guards decided that themselves? I didn't know what their rotation was so maybe this was routine, something they did when there were others around. Maybe they didn't like Ober and company any more than I did.
When they opened the gate for me, their torches lighting my way, I glanced back and saw the silhouette of Ober's manservant across the hill, a tall form of hood and narrow cloak. I hadn't had time to do his horoscope and I didn't much want to because I had seen the evil washing through Ober's heart and that was enough.
Lor was right to lead me to the gate. Now no one would suspect secret entrances. They might wonder how I had left Tarvik's room and slipped past them, but this was not their castle. I doubted they knew every doorway. They would figure there must be a door from his room to an adjoining room, with that room opening to a different corridor. Or they would believe I was magic.
That's the most useful thing about superstitious people. They are easy to fool. Oh right, a policeman once said something like that to me about fortune telling.
Nance waited for me, wringing the hem of her tunic in her hands and blinking back tears. She sputtered complaints about the lateness of my return, sounding worse than my Gran when I came home from a date, then touched me and sobbed that I was chilled through and would probably come down with fever. After wrapping a blanket over my cloak and pushing me down among a pile of sheepskins, she pressed a cup of hot tea into my hands and insisted it would warm me. I sipped at it, wishing it was coffee, brandy, even their bitter mead, almost anything other than tea. When she settled down, I told her what had happened.
"It sounds to me as though Tarvik suspects we also have a secret door, probably because he does,” Nance exclaimed. “Be careful, Stargazer. If he ever discovers our way through the stables, we will become prisoners in this temple."
"He trusted me with his secret. Isn't that worth something?” I asked.
"Who can be sure of Tarvik? He is safe enough now but someday he will rule and marry Alakar. That will change everything. Those who rule do not remember their friends. Think of Kovat. He prayed with the priests of Thunder until the Daughter of the Sun cured him. Then he was quick enough to turn against them. Those who did not escape fell beneath his sword or died in prison cells."
"Tell me about this Daughter and her consort,” I said. “Do you remember them?"
"I remember them, but it was long ago. I was a child when they died. They were both kind to me."
"Nance, do you know how she cured illness? How did she cure Kovat?"
"I only know what I have been told. Fifteen years ago the Daughter and her consort arrived here from the afterworld, from the home of the gods. I was an infant. Tarvik was four. His mother had already died, as had my mother and father. Kovat lay on his deathbed.
"When the Daughter saw him, she ... oh, it is so long since I have heard this tale, let me think. Yes, she lay her hands upon him and prepared a drink for him and the fever left him. He knew then that she possessed great magic."
About what I'd guessed. She gave him a swallow of tea or mead or whatever, probably used to wash down a dose of antibiotic.
Nance added, “No one can do that but a god. Now tell me what Ober said. And what she did."
I told her what Ober said. Neither of us was sure what she meant. As for what Ober did, I knew of only one person who could explain that.
"Nance, is there some way we can speak with the magician of Thunder?"
"Speak with him? Are you mad?"
"I must speak with him. I am guessing he is the only person who will know what sorts of tricks Ober uses. Knockout drops? Poison? I don't know much about drugs, but some are made from wild plants. We need to tell him what I saw Ober mixing and find out what it is. Can he
be brought here?"
Nance did her drama queen thing, flung herself back against her pile of sheepskins and tossed her head from side to side, exclaiming, “Life was so easy for me before you came, Stargazer. Tarvik did not suspect me. Ober's guards did not watch me. I went where I chose when I chose. And no one ever asked me to invite a magician to the temple. Stargazer! His eyes hold terrible magic!"
"Okay. Don't give it another thought,” I said, giving her my widest smile. “If it is you and me that Ober wants to be rid of, and those were her words, I will patiently await my fate."
Nance jumped to her feet. Her small fists beat the air. “You are terrible! Wicked! I cannot think why I listen to you! Oh, have your way. But if the magician's eyes turn my heart and mind forever against you, it will be what you deserve."
"Don't look at his eyes,” I said. “Let me talk to him alone."
"And who will keep him from killing you?"
"Why should he kill me? What would it gain him? No, we'll give him something he wants. Besides freedom, what would he want, Nance? Something I can hand him?"
"Food and, oh, I cannot believe I am planning this with you! It is madness! I cannot allow it!"
While Nance moaned and sobbed and shouted her opinions of me, I went outside and heated water over the courtyard fire, carried it inside, washed away the day's dust and paint, and then dried myself with a linen altar cloth. By the time I pulled on a clean tunic and rubbed most of the water from my hair, Nance was almost calm. Not screaming anyway.
She no longer shouted. She merely glared at me.
"You win,” she said. “I can think of only one way to do this and when Kovat returns he'll punish us all. I will send word to Tarvik to order the magician brought to us."
"Will Tarvik do that?"
"I will not ask him as his cousin. I shall command him as temple priest. I shall say the magician holds knowledge you must have to complete the task Kovat set for you."
"Clever you. But let me make one change."
Nance clapped her hands over her ears and cried, “I do not want to hear it!"
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