Again, Kristiano danced during Strings' recitative, giving a strangely separated life to his words.
"I'm old," said Strings. "The boyok here, he is my child-self. What dance can I do now, except to stand and give the others their movements around me? Not until you came, not for years have I done anything but stand in the middle of my dance."
"Then you are powerful," said Patience. "Enough to control the others, anyway."
"I have no will, great lady, but I have desires, as strong as yours are, hot as fires, cold as the bedchamber waiting for you, and perfect, yes, I know the perfect shapes. I desire the shape of perfection from them, and they answer me, they follow me. Let me follow you, lady." His eyes pled with her.
She tried to understand the pleading look he gave her.
All that he had told her was true. But something more.
She had to know even what he kept back from her. She let the desire grow within her, pushed into the background her desire for Will, her fear of this place; she even subdued, for a moment, her need to rise to where Unwyrm waited.
His face twisted. His breath came in labored heaves.
And then, suddenly, out of a mask of agony he spoke again. "Don't go up the mountain, lady, he'll have you then, all alone, there'll be no help for you."
"I'm not alone," she said.
"You will be, you will be, except for the liar, except for his puppet, except for the wise man who went and came back, the traitor who-"
As he spoke, Patience thought of the one man who claimed to be Wise and who admitted he had been to Cranning and returned. She looked at him, and so the others did, too. Will, ready to betray her for Unwyrm's sake.
And she would have gone on believing that, if she hadn't glanced back at Strings just before his speech petered out, and he went limp and collapsed on the chair, his breath a thin whisper of exhaustion. Kristiano gasped, and immediately felt him for a pulse; relieved that Strings was not dead, the boyok held the old gaunt against him.
But even in the dim light. Patience had seen. Strings had not collapsed from exhaustion. Angel's hand had reached out, had touched the gaunt in the places that Angel had taught her could make a man lose consciousness.
Just when Strings had said enough to incriminate Will, but before Strings had said all he meant to say, Angel had silenced him. Had silenced him at the moment when all were looking at Will. She was the only one who could have noticed. Had silenced him before Strings had actually named a name or pointed a finger or looked at anyone.
"You," said Angel. He was looking at Will. "You're the one he meant. You've been here before. And I heard you tell Patience the other morning on the boat, I heard you tell her that you had felt the Cranning call. That you are one of the Wise. Do you deny it?"
If she had not seen Angel's fingers at their work, she would have believed his words. But she knew that the traitor was Angel. Even as he accused Will, he confirmed the truth to her. He had been a young man when he heard the Cranning call. He came to Cranning as all the Wise had come, no better able to resist the call than any other. But Unwyrm needed one task performed. The daughtering of Peace. So Angel had come back down from the mountain, armed with the knowledge of how to repair what had been done to Peace. Soon Unwyrm's bride was conceived and born, and Angel then devoted his life to bringing her up, preparing her. And finally bringing her here. All the time, he had been in Unwyrm's service. All the time. And my father trusted him. She wanted to tear at him with her hands, reach in through the soft places of his face and rip him to pieces. Never had she felt such rage and shame as now, knowing that all her childish love had been given to a man whose show of affection was all a mockery. He is a pigherd, and I am his only swine. Now he leads me to the slaughter, and I, blind to what he truly is, love him.
Not blind now, though. And because she could hide anything when she needed to, she let nothing of her rage show.
Ruin was laughing at the thought of Will being one of the Wise, but Reck was alert. Patience caught her eye and gazed steadily at her for a moment, while Angel continued his accusation against Will. Did she understand?
I will act, and you must watch me if you mean to stay with me up the mountain.
Still her thoughts raced, putting everything together now, revising all her past memories to fit the present reality. Angel was the enemy. He had tried his best to keep her from meeting Ruin and Reck, and now he meant to get rid of them before she reached Unwyrm. He was too good an assassin for her to believe the gebling king would reach the top of the mountain alive, if Angel were with them, and Will not there to protect them. So Angel would not be with them.
"Will," she said. "With what has happened, you can see that I can't trust you anymore." She hoped that he, too, could read in her steady gaze a plea for him to understand, to play along with her. "But I don't want Angel to kill you."
"Not kill him!" whispered Angel.
"So I'll bind you here, and leave Sken to watch you, and we'll bribe the boxmaster to leave you undisturbed for the night. Don't try to follow us, or I'll kill you myself."
Will said nothing. Did he understand?
"This is insane," said Angel. "He's a dangerous man, and you mean to leave him alive?"
"There's no harm in him," said Reck. But she looked confused, as if she was not sure whether to believe that Will was a traitor or to cling to her long belief in the man.
"We can argue later," said Patience. "Outside this box." She glanced toward the curtain that was the only barrier between them and the audience. "Or do we want to be part of the show?"
Patience had Sken tie him with the cord she had worn around her waist. It was long and strong enough to hold.
Patience carefully maneuvered herself between Angel and Will, for fear Angel would slip a knife into him or poison him and then apologize for having done what he thought best. Patience wasn't sure yet how to get through this crisis without bloodshed. But she knew that she could trust Will, and wanted him alive. Will never took his gaze from Patience's face; he never denied anything, either. She hoped this meant he trusted her, too.
Every word that Angel said now, every move he made filled her with anger and dread. Hadn't she looked up to him as the master assassin? Everything she knew of attack and defense she had learned from him; she had come to rely on these skills, had believed she could defeat anyone, but now she wondered what Angel had kept from her. She could try this, or that, but he had taught it to her-a thrust with a needle, a dart in the throat, a pass with the loop, he knew every move she could make, while she could not guess what he might have hidden from her.
Did he notice that she kept herself between him and Will? Did he notice that she maneuvered so that he would leave the box first, giving him no chance to separate her from the geblings? Did he know that she no longer trusted him? She hoped he was too worried, too distracted by how close Strings had come to unmasking him, to realize from her actions that she knew the truth about him. The fact that she had even seen him silence the gaunt was proof that he was not at his best right now.
This alone gave her a chance to defeat him, to escape.
Angel led them out into the hallway. Sken stood in the doorway after the others passed through, watching them.
"We should take the gaunt," Angel said softly. "Even if Unwyrm controls him, he does know the way."
"Angel," she said. "I'm so frightened. I trusted Will, and he was Unwyrm's creature all along." She put her arms around him, clung to him as she had when she was little. But before her fingers could reach the places she had to touch to render him unconscious, his fingers had found hers. She knew, then, that he was not deceived.
That he was perfectly aware that she no longer trusted him. She had a fleeting vision of herself, collapsing unconscious in his arms. He would tell them she had fainted; they would believe him. And without her there to protect them. Reck and Ruin would not last long. It was over.
But his fingers did not press. "I loved you," she whispered, letting the agony of betra
yal sound in her voice.
And still he hesitated. Now her fingers found the places; she did not hesitate. He fell at once to the floor.
"Let's go," she said to the geblings.
"What's happening?" asked Ruin.
"Angel is the traitor."
The others looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending.
"I saw him silence the old gaunt before he could name names. It's Angel who is Unwyrm's man."
"Then we must set Will free," said Reck.
Sken turned around to go back into the box and untie him. But just then the boxmaster appeared at one end of the corridor. "What are you doing!" he shouted. He could see Angel's body lying on the ground. "What have you done! Murder! Murder!" He ran back the way he had come.
"This is stupid," Ruin said. "He isn't even dead."
"Stupid or not, if he brings the police, and they arrest us for questioning, they imprison humans and geblings in separate jails, where Unwyrm can push you away while he pulls me on," said Patience.
The boxmaster was still shouting, and soon he would be back. They could hear the audience, too, becoming alarmed. Patience wanted to wait for Will and Sken, but there was no time. Ruin tugged at her arm. Reck and Ruin led her quickly toward the far end of the corridor.
"What makes you think this is a way out?" asked Patience as they ran. "It's right against the mountain face."
There was a spiral stairway leading upstairs to the actors' rooms, where the pleasures of the performance were often continued through the night, with improvisation and audience participation. Since there was nowhere else to go, they climbed. Patience, between the geblings, stumbled and fell against the stairs.
"Unwyrm knows what I've just done," she said. "I can feel it-he's trying to punish me for leaving Angel."
She tried to climb, but could hardly take a step. Unwyrm was pounding at her; she was a storm of conflicting passions; she could not think.
Ruin ahead of her and Reck behind, they dragged and pushed her up the stairs. There were rows of dressing rooms here, with naked gaunts and humans busy cleaning themselves up from the last show or preparing for the next. The geblings held her by the arms and led her down the corridor. Step. Step. The movement gave her something to concentrate on. Unwyrm's surge began to weaken-he couldn't maintain such a powerful call for long. Gradually her self-control returned to her, and she began to walk faster, without the geblings' help.
"Are there windows in the dressing rooms on the outside wall?" she asked.
"This one," said Ruin.
A naked young gaunt was glittering his crotch when they came in and tried the window.
"It's cold out there," he said mildly.
"Lock the door, please," said Patience.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It doesn't lock."
"Pretty far down," said Ruin, looking out the window.
"And the walkway isn't very wide there. A lot farther down if we miss."
Patience looked out the window. "Child's play," she said. She swung out the window, hung from her hands, and dropped. The geblings had no choice but to follow her. Reck ended up sprawled on the walkway. "We geblings are not wholly descended from apes," she said.
"We don't have your instincts for jumping out of windows."
Patience didn't bother to apologize. The night was dark, with clouds only a few meters above them, and it was hard to see where they were going, but they broke into a run. Suddenly Patience felt very tired. It was a long way up the mountain. She hadn't slept since last night on the boat; why couldn't she just go back to her room and rest? She wanted to rest. But she shook off the feeling; she knew where it came from. Unwyrm was not going to make anything easy for them. As long as Angel had been with them, Unwyrm hadn't had to put obstacles in their way. But now, if Unwyrm was to keep the geblings from arriving with Patience in his lair, he would have to use other people to try to pry them from Patience.
Or kill them. Patience had no desire to face Unwyrm alone. She knew his strength, and needed help; if the geblings were all the help she could get, then she certainly didn't want to lose them. She could trust no one else. Everyone was her enemy.
They stopped at their rooms in the inn long enough for Reck to get her bow and Ruin his knife, and to take cloaks for the climb upward into winter. There was no human conspiracy working against them, only Unwyrm sensing the nearest people and arousing them against the Heptarch's party. So there was no particular danger in going to their rooms-only in staying for more than a few minutes. They did not separate: the geblings stayed with her in the room she had shared with Angel and Sken, and she in turn went with them to theirs. Someone knocked on their door as they were preparing to leave.
"It's probably just the innkeeper," said Reck.
"It's death," said Patience. "Unwyrm will see to it that we meet nothing but death on our way up the mountain."
Ruin thrust open the window. Patience climbed out.
The window hung over a thirty-meter drop. It was too much even for her. But she had always been a good climber, and she saw it would be easy enough to get to the roof. "Trust your human half," she said. "You'll need all your ape ancestry for this." She stood on the sill, reached up to the rain gutter, and pulled herself up.
Reck followed right behind her. Ruin had barely joined them on the roof when they heard a roaring sound.
Flames leaped out of the window of the room they had just left.
"We'll have to be quick about this, won't we?" said Ruin.
"Up," said Patience. They ran along the rooftop to where a ladder connected it to the walkway of the next level. How many kilometers to the glacier at the top of Skyfoot? Patience didn't want to remember. She just set her hands and feet to the ladder and climbed.
Chapter 16. ANGEL
SKEN STRUGGLED TO UNTIE WILL, UNTIL HE SAID TO HER, "Wouldn't it be faster to cut it?"
"Oh, now he can talk. Why didn't you say anything before?" She sawed with her dull eating knife. "When I was tying you, why not a word about how you were innocent?"
"Because somebody wasn't innocent, and I didn't know who."
A cord finally separated. "It was Angel."
"I gathered that." His hands and feet came free, once the central knot was cut. He got to his feet quickly-he hadn't been tied long enough to become stiff.
Just as he reached the door, the boxmaster ran by, waving a cudgel and leading a group of highly irregular soldiers. Certainly not the official guard, just a spur-of-the-moment mob gathered to serve Unwyrm's purpose.
Real soldiers would be summoned soon enough. Will decided to make no effort to follow them. He knew Patience and the geblings well enough not to fear for their safety yet. And he had another matter to attend to.
"Is there enough of that cord left. Lady Sken, to bind this fellow before he wakes up?"
Sken stepped into the corridor and joined him beside Angel's unconscious body. "They left him?"
"Unwyrm was urging them on. He doesn't let his people have many distractions."
She prodded Angel with her toe. "Are you sure nobody's home? He's a crafty one."
"Poke him long enough and he's bound to wake up. I don't want his hands free when he does."
Sken tied him-Will knew from experience what an admirable job she could do-and together they carried the old man back into the box. Only then did Will pay any attention to Kristiano and Strings. The old gaunt was awake again.
"What happened to me?" asked Strings.
"Angel thought your story was getting too personal."
"Story? Oh, yes. Yes, my story. I tried to lie. I could feel how much Angel wanted me to lie."
"But you told the truth anyway?"
"The girl. She wanted the truth more than he wanted the lie. It was very distressing. I think I fainted."
"You were helped along."
"I knew him," said Strings. "I knew them all. But Angel-he was a good one, a bright one. When I took him up the mountain, there wasn't a trace of evil desire in him."
&n
bsp; "I couldn't even guess what a gaunt thinks is evil," said Sken.
"We think the same as everyone else thinks," said the gaunt. "And like everyone else, our actions have no relation to our opinions of good and evil. I wasn't chosen accidentally as the guide for the Wise. I'm very clever."
"Your dance was beautiful."
"Clever. Merely clever. It's the best a gaunt can hope to achieve. Yes, Krisfiano?" He tousled the hair of the beautiful gauntling beside him. "I am the peak of gauntish ambition. But don't grieve; we are the ultimate innocents.
We are never the cause of our own actions. It allows us to reach a ripe old age untroubled by guilt."
Will thought he heard irony in the old gaunt's tone.
"You knew what you were leading them to?"
He shrugged eloquently. "They all wanted to go."
"I also want to go," said Will. "Will you take me?"
"He doesn't want me to take you," said Strings.
"And he makes the most urgent requests of me. I have never denied him."
"He isn't paying attention to us right now."
Strings looked thoughtful for a moment. "You're right.
It doesn't mean anything, though. He left me alone for ten years. And then three days ago he came to me again.
I've never hurried so fast. I was on the other side of Cranning, playing in a decent place, a palace filled with people of breeding and discernment. Then he made me leave everything and come here, to take a booking like this-I don't like working in this kind of place. The crowd has deplorable tastes. Why do you want me to keep talking?"
"I like the sound of your voice."
"No, you want more than that from me. You want to know-ah. Yes. Well, how can anyone know who a gaunt really is? Am I good or evil? Can you trust me or not? Can you tell him, Kristiano?"
Kristiano smiled. His face had the peaceful sweetness of a saint. Or an idiot.
"How strong are your passions, man? You have the size and strength of a horse, but that's nothing to me. It's the dimension of your lust, your gluttony, your ambition.
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