by Carol Berg
CHAPTER NINETEEN
32 QAT 29 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY
The wet cloth tied across my eyes might have been dampened in Journia’s snowmelt. Water droplets dribbled down my nose like pearls of ice. As far as I could remember, I had been shivering, puking, and head-splintered forever. If I only knew why . . .
Cobweb memories floated in the dark. Held captive. Beaten. Bled. There’d been a fire. Flame yet raged in proximity to my lungs, within and without. Now I sat on stony ground in the open air, back propped against a rock wall, and my head felt as if the Pantokrator’s own mace was bashing it. But I had no idea where I was or who had brought me here. I needed to be careful. I needed to know. I needed to see.
“Who’s there?” Even such a raw whisper started me coughing, but at least my hands were free to clamp the bones of my skull together. While there, my fingers tested the knot of my blindfold. I tugged one tail and felt it loosen.
Firm footsteps crossed a bit of rough ground, halted, and a body knelt down beside me. “None you know. Stay still until we discover who’s about.”
A hand cupped the back of my head.
I jerked away, which launched fiery spears from skull through spine, setting me gasping through fire-seared lungs and barking like a maddened hound. . . .
Arms wrapped my shoulders and buried my face in a man’s chest, holding me tight and still until the paroxysm quieted. My head did not quite shatter.
“Let us try this again,” he said, soft and urgent. “I am not going to hurt you. I’m going to give you a tisane to soothe your throat and clear your lungs. Might make you a bit drowsy, too.”
Gently he held my head and poured a litre or more of lukewarm liquid down my gullet. It tasted of anise and the scrapings from a stable floor. I choked and burbled a feeble protest, while pressing the heel of my hand to my throbbing forehead.
Lacking a voice or nerve enough to move again, I could not rebel when he snugged the wet blindfold tighter. “Your eyes are smoke-scalded, and you’ve clearly broken your head, so you’d best leave this in place for a time. If you please.” The recommendation sounded very like a command. “You really ought to be dead.”
My companion rose, then moved away. His walk bespoke a trained swordsman, sure of himself, light on his feet, but rooted firmly to the ground, one might say. He paused, took a few steps, paused, took a few more, circling from my right to my left before returning to settle beside me. I smelled smoke and death blood on him, at least until he raised another stinking cup under my nose.
I waved it off. But liquid slopped and spattered on the ground beside me. The next thing I knew, he was gently blotting the raw wounding on my chest with a scalding cloth that stank of his tisane. My body near seized with the hurt of it and my stomach with the smell.
“Sorry,” he said. “I thought it had cooled.”
Cloth ripped. He dabbed at the scorched cuts and tied strips around my torso. I worked at keeping still. At listening. At remembering. At staying awake.
“How many in their party? Use your hand to tell me.”
Surely, if he asked, he was not one of them: not the wolfish one who’d kicked me half to death, nor the brute who’d strapped me in the chair, nor the masked one . . .
The incoming tide of memory and urgency charged my aching body with fury. Ophelie’s murderer, I was sure of it . . . and Gruchin’s . . . and Ilario’s. For certain the Aspirant had caused a man to emit a cry of torment that might have come from the Souleater’s caverns.
“The man in the mask,” I croaked, struggling to sit up. Philippe de Savin-Journia’s worst nightmare. A knight. A sorcerer. I ought to know him.
“Hush.” The hand with the warm cloth rested heavy on my rapidly pumping chest, while the other touched my mouth. “Use fingers. I can account for only two men. A scrawny one at the bridge. The big hairy fellow down below. How many more?”
I raised one finger. “He wore—”
“Yes, yes, the third wore a mask. Are you sure there were no more? That makes no sense if they were guarding secrets.”
“Maybe an adept. And a prisoner,” I whispered. “Desperate, dying. Go!” I shoved at him and waved him away.
He remained solidly in place. “Sante Marko himself could not send me back into that inferno. Smoke’s still pouring out the hole. But I looked about before I hauled you up. None remained in the cells, and none’s come out since. Either they’re dead, or there’s another way out, or . . . you were confused. There’s not a sign of anyone hereabouts.”
Coughing racked me again, threatening to turn my raw lungs inside out, and he muzzled me again and held me still, which was a mercy on my head. When I next opened my mouth, he poured another litre of anise-and-barnstraw tea down me, now rimed with ice. It tasted even nastier when cold.
“I’ve no yearning to stay here, but I’d rather drag you across that devilish bridge with this cough better settled.” He laid something over me—a blanket or cloak that reeked of smoke. “And I’d like some notion of how many others might be waiting for us over there. Sleep easy. I’ll watch.”
The man’s voice bled weariness. He rose and walked away again, making the same pattern: a few steps . . . a pause . . . a few steps. A patrol, only this time he halted halfway round.
“Damn and blast.” The quiet oath sounded more in the line of annoyance—a banged shin or snagged hair—than emergency. Even so, it raised another brush of cold sweat.
The wind blustered, tainted with smoke and dust. The harsh screech of a hunting bird echoed from the nearby cliffs. Still shivering, I snugged the blanket round chin and neck. As my breathing eased, the head pounding settled to a duller rhythm, and my cobwebby thoughts collected themselves. I slipped my hands behind my head and untied the damp knots. Slowly, I tugged the cloth down and peered through slitted eyelids.
The wall supporting my back was the well enclosure in the center of the ruined village. Just inside one of the beehive houses burned a small, smokeless fire. Leaning gracefully against the doorpost, frowning at the little spyglass in his two uninjured hands, stood Ilario.
He must have glimpsed the movement of the cloth, or heard as much as I could make of a gasp or a laugh. I myself could not have said which. Or perhaps he’d been slammed by the sheer force of my astonishment, pleasure, and relief, for he glanced over at me, his lips pursed in rue, then looked back at his lady’s gift. “Should have known you weren’t so addled as you seemed. You’ll not mention this to anyone, I trust.”
“That you’re not dead?” I croaked, choking back a cough with all my will. “That you saved my life? That you leapt through an illusion into a holocaust, freed me from that chair, and fought—”
“Just the one down there. The twitchy fellow’s at the bottom of the chasm. Hoped nobody would notice he’d been stuck before he fell. Till the fire bloomed out of that cursed hole like sunrise, I’d come to think you must have fallen, too. Now stop talking. I don’t like it here.”
The fire. Resting the back of my head on the wall, I grinned at the thought of the “Pantokrator’s Aurora” that had saved my life. Ilario’s knightly sword dangled from his belt. I’d thought it naught but show.
“They showed me your riding glove with a severed hand in it,” I whispered.
“The little ferret snagged my rucksack as he fell,” he said, with a choked laugh. “My best gloves!”
The man peering through his exquisite little instrument, twisting and shaking it, looked like Ilario de Sylvae: the earring, the fair hair cut fashionably ragged since that other fire, the long nose, unblemished skin, and lithe physique. And yet he was someone else entirely. “Untruth seated so deep, it is scarce detectable,” so Dante had said, as if such untruth must ever be dangerous and wicked. Which it could be, I supposed.
Sobered, I waggled my hand to catch his attention. “Tell me who you are, lord chevalier.”
His complexion took on the tint of firelight. “One who learned very young that elders pay no mind to idiot children. T
hey don’t lock them away. They don’t murder them in their beds and call it childhood flux. They allow them to stay close to those they care about.”
Close to Eugenie. “Does even your sister know you?”
He scrubbed tiredly at his forehead. “She sees as she wills. Beyond that, she does not care.”
I interpreted this as no. “But Philippe . . .”
He stuffed the spyglass inside his jerkin and moved away from the fire and the house, until he was but a darker silhouette against the starry night. “Truly, Portier, I beg you put this out of your mind. You must have the constitution of an ox. The tisane should have put you to sleep three times over. If I’d thought you’d see . . .”
He would have donned his fool’s mask. No, far more than a mask. He would have reverted to that other person, a man as vividly real as anyone I’d ever met. Philippe surely knew. It explained why my cousin had such faith in Ilario. Their friendship expressed itself in private games of stratagems, played out over many years.
“You need to sleep,” he said again. “We’ve maybe two hours until first light. Once we’re well away from here and Fedrigo’s tisane has done its work, you can tell me what you’ve learned between getting bashed and burnt—or not, as you choose. But I’d prefer not to fight any more of these lunatics. They don’t tire.” He drifted to the next house. And the next.
Sleep was impossible. My head throbbed. My chest stung. Every portion of my cursed body hurt, and I had to flex my fingers repeatedly to keep them from going numb. The wind moaned about the beehive houses, swirling dust and grit into my face. My mind leapt from one puzzle to the next without resolution.
Eventually Ilario interrupted my grumbling with more tea. “Eugenie was only eight when Soren chose her to wed,” he said as I drank. “Three months she cried. He didn’t touch her—not even Soren was so vile as that—but she’d never been from home. She just missed us all, her papa and mama, and her dolls and dogs. And me. We’d always got on. She is so loving—”
He straightened, dropped three weights in my lap, and strolled off to take up his watch. The weights were my journal, my scratched and dented compass, and Gruchin’s double strike coin.
“Antonia suggested Papa send one of the dogs to soothe her. On the very day he received her letter, he called me into his study and told me he’d decided to send me instead. Amid all the lessons and warnings one would expect before sending a boy into fostering, he told me how he’d tried to discourage the marriage until Eugenie was older, and how he had petitioned the Temple to have it nullified on the grounds of Eugenie’s misery. But King Soren insisted on an alliance with the House of Sylvae, and that was that. Papa charged me to stay close to Geni no matter what. To protect her as he could no longer do.
“And so I went, happy in Papa’s trust, happy for the adventure, and happy to be with Eugenie. The moment I arrived at Castelle Escalon, she stopped crying. Ten days after, a fire destroyed our home. Papa, and Ge ni’s mother whom I adored as my own, and all their servants died in the fire, along with our dogs and cats and birds.”
“Angel’s comfort, did you ever learn who was responsible?”
“I was eleven, Portier,” he said, dry as the Arabascan landscape. “Soren’s court comprised a thousand people and thrice that many plots and schemes. Even yet I can’t swear whether it was murder or no. Antonia was kind and tried to mother Eugenie, though she has no more instinct for mothering than a berry bush. But I remembered how somber Papa had been, and how his hands had trembled as he spoke to me that last morning. And I thought how if he hadn’t sent me, I’d be dead, too, and how the people at the palace had wanted a stupid pet. So I became what was wanted. I’ve stayed close to Eugenie, and for better or worse, I’ve stayed alive.”
“And somehow Philippe learned the truth.”
“That is a private matter. We—hsst!”
Ilario whisked his sword from its scabbard. Without taking his eyes from the direction of the bridge, he extended his left hand and hauled up my creaking bones. He snatched a poniard from his left boot and pressed it into my hand, motioning me into the house where the little fire burned. He himself dissolved into the night.
I scooped dirt over the fire. Telltales of smoke would be less noticeable than live flame on a night when the air was smoke-laced, anyway. Then I wrapped myself in Ilario’s dark cloak and huddled, dizzy, by the low doorway.
Quiet, hurrying footsteps crunched the stony ground. A shapeless figure entered the village circle. “Sheathe your weapon, fool of a lord. The both of you come with me if you favor living an hour more.” Faint scarlet light flowed up Dante’s white staff like warmed honey, twining his maimed hand and illuminating naught else of him but a billowing black cowl.
“Where in Heaven’s demesne have you been, mage?” My voice was much too loud, unfortunate for several reasons. The subsequent lung spasm near shattered my head, and it would not stop.
Before my watering eyes could quite make him out, the mage was beside me, wrapping a string round my throat and his luminous stick. As I coughed and clutched my head, he dragged a finger along the string and snapped, “Kiné sentia.”
A leaden blanket enfolded my chest, silencing me in midspasm. I could breathe, albeit I had to think about it.
Dante’s hand caught my elbow just as my knees buckled. “Over here, lordling,” he snapped quietly. “Put your hand to Portier.”
“Saints Awaiting, mage, you’ve no idea the dreadful frights we’ve encountered!” Ilario—the more familiar Ilario—stumbled out of the inky shadows, fumbling sword and dagger as he tried to sheathe them. “That wretched bridge was near the death of me. If Portier hadn’t got himself free of that chair and found me, I’d be a quivering—”
“Keep him on his feet, peacock. We must move.”
Ilario stowed his weapons, including the knife he’d loaned me. As I struggled to draw breath, he thrust a long arm under my shoulders. “How the devil are we to get him across the bridge? It’s nowhere wide enough for two. And there may be more villains than the ones Portier bashed with the lantern.”
Ilario could not have imagined how unlikely I was to remember these fabrications. Dante’s spell pressed me inevitably earthward.
“By all you name holy, keep silent, fool,” said Dante. “And hurry. This rock is riddled with unstable enchantments. We do not want to be here.”
The mage led us out of the village, the gleam of his staff reduced to a puddle of scarlet on the path. His urgency seemed reflected in the night air. The stars had vanished. Wind gusts threatened to knock us from our feet. A wing-spread owl swooped over our heads, shrieking.
Instead of venturing onto the worrisome bridge, we clambered down a rock shelf . . . and then another . . . and another . . . each shallower and narrower than the one before, until we were descending a crude, even-more-worrisome stair, hacked from the plateau’s rocky flank. Each step took shape in the scarlet pool of light that slopped underneath Dante’s billowing hem to settle about our feet.
I dared not take my eyes from the light. Some shallower steps could support only our heels. Some were but broken stubs, so that Ilario had to go before and help me down to the next. Some crumbled ominously beneath us. Jagged edges and sharp gravel tormented my feet, yet I was almost grateful for the lack of boots. Bare feet gave me better purchase.
The chevalier alone kept me upright. Knees like porridge, I could scarce move air in and out.
It was a madman’s descent into the abyss. Only the grazed evidence of my fumbling knuckles proved a solid wall existed on our left. On our right, the air churned like boiling tar.
Ilario jerked and waved his hand, as a shadowy shape, far too big for leaves or birds, flew in front of us. Revulsion fluttered my spirit. An icy whirlwind whipped another dark shape past and sent it howling into a gaping darkness vaster than the chasm below. My senses—who could imagine they reported faithfully?—insisted they scented dry cedar on the wind and tasted mouldering leaves of trees that had never grown on de
sert rock. Whisperings that were not quite words raised the hair on neck and arms, speaking hatred . . . anger . . . a gleeful fury. . . . I blessed Ilario for taking our exposed flank, and I thanked all gods that he was not the ninny he professed.
A great rumbling shivered the stair. Rocks and pebbles skittered around our feet. “Hurry!” shouted Dante above the din. “The dawn comes! Dawn is the danger.”
Though I could not understand his concern—I yearned for dawn and light—I clung to Ilario and stumbled downward. The cliff wall bulged and split. A hail of rocks bounced across the path. But no longer was it only my lungs needed forcing. My heart’s lumbering pace hobbled my feet.
When we reached a step so broad that Dante’s light did not drip off its edge, extra arms grabbed me, and the two men together dragged me through a tangle of trees—fragrant myrtle and prickling juniper, cracking limbs sticky with resin. Leafy wands slapped face and torso, as my bare feet squelched in mud and slipped on moss-slicked stones shuddering with the world’s upheaval.
“Here,” said Dante, even his substantial voice gone breathless. “Stow him here. We’re at the boundary. That will have to do.”
My back grazed earth and stone. I slid downward, near dissolution from the crushing weight of the world’s end. Everywhere in or on me hurt. I could not so much as twitch a finger.
In air lightened to charcoal, my bleared vision picked out the soaring bastions of Eltevire two hundred metres in front of me. “Boundary?” I wheezed, laboring to push air out as well as to draw it in. “What—?”
“Aagh!” Face twisted, Dante clapped his hands to his head. . . .
Eltevire’s heights erupted in orange, red, yellow, and green flame, a thundering, unnatural dawn that cast cliffs and weedy thicket into high relief, sounding a din of Dimios’s battle against Heaven. The earth before, beneath, and behind me heaved and bucked. Sharp reports of cracking rock heralded cascades of earth and stone. My stomach lurched. The lurid light illumined the impossible steps we had descended in the night, just in time for an avalanche to sweep them away.