Then Anrel looked around at his surroundings, and frowned. He was in a library; wouldn’t Lord Allutar want his library convenient to his study? Uncle Dorias did not keep many books in his study because the dampness was bad for them, but he did keep them shelved near the stairs. Anrel crossed to one of the nearby shelves and pulled out a volume in a fine leather binding, and opened it.
“Ah,” he said, as he read the title—The Wantons of Quand. The next volume revealed itself to be Nocturnal Customs of the Old Empire. Mistress of the Harem was after that.
These were not the sort of books a sorcerer would need close at hand. Anrel closed Mistress of the Harem and returned it to its place, then moved on to another shelf.
This second collection was somewhat more mundane—Ten Years in the Cousins, Swordsmen of the Fallen Empire, and other alleged histories. Anrel was familiar with some of these from his studies at the court schools. Again, these were not anything a magician would refer to.
That made sense, though—this library was open to guests. Presumably Allutar had a more private one somewhere else. Probably, Anrel thought, in the cellars, near his study.
He put the books back where he had found them, gave the gently snoring white-haired guest a final glance, then slipped quietly out into the gallery and looked around.
There were no signs of life; the gallery was bright with sunlight from the windows at either end and a skylight above, but empty of people. Anrel hurried to the stairs and down, finding himself once again in the marble-floored hallway. The door to the salon was open, and that room was silent and still; the double door to the dining room was now closed.
Those did not lead anywhere he wanted to go; he turned and looked the other way. There were several closed doors; he chose one at random, and began exploring.
It took about three attempts before he found a passage leading to a stair going down, and each new exploration stretched his nerves tighter. He was, after all, in his enemy’s home, and even if Lord Allutar was asleep or elsewhere—which was by no means certain—there were servants up and about, and if any one of them stumbled upon him in any of these places, there would be questions. Guests would not ordinarily go wandering about like this uninvited.
With his nerves so tense, he did not immediately recognize the wards. It was only when he found himself turning away from the head of the staircase without having made any conscious decision to turn back that he caught himself and forced himself to think about what he was doing and what he was feeling.
He stopped. He knew perfectly well that he wanted to go down a flight of stairs, and here was a flight of stairs leading down, but the thought of walking down it somehow filled him with loathing. He could feel his gorge rise at the very idea.
He smiled bitterly. He had felt this sort of ward before; when he was very young his parents had used them to keep him from going anywhere he shouldn’t. Uncle Dorias had used them occasionally, as well. More than one of his professors had invoked them to keep the students from intruding where they were unwelcome. His own magical attempt to avoid notice the night before had been similar in concept, though far less effective.
None of those other wards had ever been quite so strong as this, but Lord Allutar was a very powerful sorcerer.
Students being what they were, ways of defeating such protections had been discussed frequently in the taverns and residential courts, and various theories advanced. Certain of Anrel’s classmates had even claimed to have succeeded in defying such wards, though they were not universally believed. Anrel tried to remember exactly what methods they had advocated. He closed his eyes in an attempt to recall Dariel vo-Basig’s boasts; Dariel had been the most convincing of those who said they had gotten through serious warding spells unharmed.
Closing his eyes had been the right thing to do, Anrel immediately realized; once he could not see the stairs the incipient nausea vanished.
“It’s all in your mind,” Dariel had said. “Oh, there are spells that set physical wards, but the ones that make you not want to go there, they work entirely on your mind—and not the surface, where you think about what you’re doing, but down deep in your soul, where you know what you want, without thinking about it. So you have to fool that part of yourself. You have to know that you’re doing something else entirely, not doing the thing the wards are preventing.”
That had a logic to it that had seemed very reasonable at the time, but at the time he heard Dariel’s explanation Anrel had been slightly drunk and not personally involved. Now, as he stood in a corridor in Lord Allutar’s town house, Anrel was not fully convinced. Dariel had not been a sorcerer, after all, merely a clever young man from a wealthy family of merchants. Anrel had grown up among sorcerers, as Dariel had not, and had heard his parents and his uncle discuss the nature of magic, and he could not quite see how Dariel’s theory fit. Sorcery drew power from earth, or from sky, or from living things, or things that had once lived, and used that energy to manipulate the natural forces that kept the world in order. Bindings, the most common and useful spells, forced mind and matter into a particular shape, or tied a spirit to a specific course of action. Unbinding spells broke down the natural forces that maintained forms, as Lord Allutar’s unbinding had destroyed the integrity of Valin’s flesh. Wards put forces in a particular place so that they would react when mind or matter of the right sort impinged upon them. How could you fool the forces of nature?
But then Anrel stopped, and smiled bitterly. He opened his eyes.
He had unconsciously been moving away from the stairs. The warding was still working on him, even if he did not feel ill. It was working on him in several ways. It was even, Anrel was sure, making him reject Dariel’s ideas. Fooling natural forces happened all the time in sorcery. After all, how did a sorcerer draw power from the earth or the sky, other than by convincing it to flow through him?
And it wasn’t the ward he had to fool, in any case; it was himself.
Anrel reached out and pressed his left hand against the wall. That’s my right, he told himself. If I keep that hand on the wall as I walk, I’ll be moving away from the stairs.
Then he closed his eyes and forced himself to start walking.
My right hand is on the wall, he reminded himself. My right hand.
He repeated it, and kept forcing his feet forward, one step at a time, until he brought one foot down and found no floor; he tumbled forward, and rather than try to catch himself he curled into a ball and allowed himself to fall down the stairs. As he thumped and banged his way down, he hoped that none of Lord Allutar’s servants heard the regrettable clatter he was making.
But then, a sorcerer’s servants were likely to be accustomed to strange noises.
He landed at the foot of the stairs with a bump to the back of his head, and lay dazed for a moment, staring up at the shadowy ceiling. It had rather fine plasterwork—elaborate moldings at the edges, and an ornate medallion in the center.
But he shouldn’t be down here; he knew that; he felt it in his bones. He felt a strong urge to jump up and scramble back up the stairs . . .
No. He forced himself to lie still while he gathered his wits. He must not be hasty, he told himself. He could not go back up those stairs—he would be seen.
Not those stairs, he told himself. The ward wanted to send him back up, and he would go back upstairs soon, but not up those stairs. They weren’t safe. He would be hurt, perhaps killed, if he went back up those stairs.
With just a very little practice, he discovered, it was really startlingly easy to lie to himself.
He rolled over and rose to hands and knees, then looked around.
He was in a small, windowless, unlit hall at the foot of the stair, illuminated only by the daylight that spilled down the stairwell from above. Four doors opened off the room; all were closed.
One of them, to his left, was difficult to look at; he seemed to be unable to focus on it. Another ward, he thought. That was surely the landgrave’s study, and Reva was presumably
inside.
He had come to rescue her, but now that he had come this far, he didn’t want to go in there. He really, really didn’t want to go in there. Even though he knew that was just the ward, and not his own heart, he still could not bring himself to move toward it, or even look directly at the door. He swallowed bile at the very thought, and looked down.
And inspiration struck him. He was in a cellar, kneeling on stone flags that were presumably laid directly on the earth; all the Mother’s power was here at his fingertips. He was not a true sorcerer, since he was untrained, but he was a witch, was he not? Though he had long denied it, he had inherited his parents’ talents, and he had taken lessons from Nivain and Tazia while they traveled. He had worked a few spells successfully, including that ward the night before.
He spread his hands on the stone and felt the cool strength beneath, and drew it upward through his arms and into his body.
It was as if sunlight had burst through clouds; the warding burned away, and the door that had been a terrifying threat to his sanity a moment before was suddenly just painted wood. He lifted his head to stare at it, then slowly got to his feet, brushing off his knees as he rose.
He gazed at the door for a moment, feeling the earth’s power through the soles of his boots.
It was just a door. If not for the spell guarding it, he would not have known it was any different from the other three. He stepped forward and grasped the handle, half expecting to find some other magical defense.
He did not. Indeed, the door was not even locked. Presumably Lord Allutar had thought the repulsion ward to be sufficient protection. The knob turned easily, and Anrel swung the door open.
The good-sized room beyond was lit by a single thick candle upon a battered table in the center of the floor; the walls were rough whitewashed stone, rather than the fine plaster or finished masonry Anrel had seen everywhere else in this house. A few chairs and a pair of benches were shoved back against the walls, leaving most of the stone floor around the central table bare and empty. Shelves on one wall held an assortment of tools and books, and these were not the elegant leather-bound editions intended for lending or for show that Anrel had seen in the library, but the battered and dog-eared volumes of a working professional. The tools included not just the usual mallets, blades, and ironmongery that one might find in any workroom, but assorted jars, skulls, bones, and twigs, as well as a dozen carefully draped snakeskins and some dried flowers. Lord Allutar clearly used a varied assortment of the arcane arts.
That much was unremarkable, and similar to every sorcerer’s study Anrel had ever seen. Less common, though still far from unique, were the several pairs of chains and manacles bolted to one wall, starkly black against the whitewash. Two pairs of these manacles were in use, securing Reva Lir’s wrists and ankles as she sat dozing on a simple wooden chair; she was slumped forward, her dark hair hiding her face, and the dim candlelight washed her in shadow, but there could be no doubt of her identity—she was still clad in the dark blue dress she had worn to the reception, and who else could be there?
She did not stir as Anrel stepped into the room. With a glance back at the stairs, he quietly called her name.
She still did not respond. Worried, Anrel crossed the room and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
She started, and looked up. “Anrel?” she said. She quickly peered past him, as if she expected to see other people there with him.
“Yes. I was—”
“I can’t hear you,” she interrupted, speaking far too loudly for Anrel’s liking. “I can see your lips move, so I know you’re speaking, but I can’t hear you. Lord Allutar put a spell on me—the only human voices I can hear are his and that man Hollem’s.” Her voice rose. “I can’t even hear my own.” She stared at him desperately.
Anrel blinked and fell silent. This was a complication he had not anticipated. He frowned, then held a finger to his lips.
She nodded. Then she, too, frowned. “I need to tell you something first,” she said in a loud whisper. “Lord Allutar was in here last night, asking about you. He said my father claimed to be holding you captive. He said Father had offered an exchange of prisoners.”
Anrel nodded. “I know,” he said.
“Are you here to take my place?”
Anrel shook his head.
“You’re trying to rescue me, then?”
A nod. “How?”
“I don’t know,” Anrel said, but of course Reva couldn’t hear him. He gave an exaggerated shrug.
Then he looked at the manacles, which were very solid iron, and which he was fairly certain were warded. He considered the hearing spell—he had never heard of such an enchantment before. It was obviously a binding, probably nothing terribly difficult, but rather clever in concept, Anrel had to admit. She might have other spells on her, as well, and for that matter, simply by setting foot in this room he might have triggered any number of wardings that would alert Lord Allutar to his presence.
This entire enterprise was beginning to look foolish in the extreme—but he was here, this was his beloved’s sister, and she needed his help. At least she seemed to want to escape; he had feared she might have been enchanted to want to hang. He reached for the shackles on her wrists.
She snatched her hands away, as far as the chains would allow.
“It hurts if anyone touches them,” she said. “Anyone but Hollem or Lord Allutar.”
Anrel grimaced.
It was plain to him now why Allutar had rejected any idea of turning Reva over to the city’s watchmen to be held at the courthouse; he could clearly hold her far more effectively here by means of his magic. Anrel had thought he might have ensorceled Reva so that she would refuse to leave, but he had never considered enchanted shackles, or hearing spells; he had assumed he could simply carry her out if he had to.
And perhaps he still could, if he could get her out of those manacles.
“Try not to scream,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him. Then he grabbed her arms, pulled them to one side, and reached for the lock on her right wrist to see whether there was some obvious way to open it.
Reva took a deep breath, but Anrel never found out whether she was preparing to scream or merely tensing against the anticipated pain, because he heard a sound that made him release his hold on her and whirl toward the door.
There were footsteps on the stairs.
33
In Which Anrel Confronts His Foe
The sorcerer’s study offered little obvious cover, but there was one place to hide in any room, as Anrel had learned in his years at the court schools. Moving as quickly and quietly as he could, he ducked behind the door and snatched the dagger from his boot.
The approaching footsteps came to the end of the staircase, and the sound changed as they moved from the wooden treads to the stone floor. They came closer, closer—and stopped.
“I did not leave this door open,” Lord Allutar’s voice announced. “Nor do I believe that Hollem would make such an error; he knows better. It has been not long at all since the wards were disturbed, and I encountered no one upon the stairs or in the hallway above. Further, I see the witch is still chained, so any attempt at rescue has not gotten far. I therefore think it likely that you are still here, whoever you are, lurking somewhere out of sight—behind the door, perhaps? Armed, I assume, and hoping to catch me unprepared? A vain hope, I assure you.”
Anrel held his breath.
Allutar sighed. “At times like these, I wish the tales of second sight had more of a basis in fact,” he said. “You, witch—who is here? Your brother? Your lover? After meeting him last night, I cannot believe your father would have the courage. Perhaps another witch, come to aid her fellow outlaw?”
Reva lifted her head, but said nothing.
“You do know I can compel you to speak,” the landgrave said warningly. “I demonstrated that last night.”
“Then do it,” Reva said. “I will not willingly aid you. Why should I, when you intend t
o hang me?”
“To save yourself the discomfort, perhaps? But please yourself.”
Anrel could not see Lord Allutar from where he stood, but he could see Reva’s face, and saw her tense; clearly, whatever magic the landgrave used to force her to speak was not pleasant. There was no need for Reva to suffer further; no escape was possible.
He slid his dagger back in its sheath. “Do not trouble yourself, my lord,” he said, stepping out from behind the door and tipping back his hat. “Here I am.”
“Indeed you are,” Lord Allutar said. He stood in the little lounge, clad in a fine silk dressing gown, one hand on his hip and his hair in disarray. He frowned at the sight of Anrel. “Do I know—”
Then he stopped in midsentence, and an expression of wonderment spread over his features. “Father and Mother—Master Murau! Is that you? Whatever have you done to your hair?”
Anrel sighed. “A misguided attempt at disguise, my lord.”
“But this is marvelous! How did you get in there? How did you get past the wards? I set those myself, and I know them to be effective, yet here you are, apparently untroubled—how? I had assumed the intruder must be a magician, either sorcerer or witch, but you are neither. Did you have help?”
“No, my lord.” He would not have admitted it if he had, of course.
“Then how . . . ?”
“I learned certain things from my uncle, my lord, and received four years of the best education money could buy.”
“Oh, but without magic! I am very impressed, sir! I knew you to be a clever and resolute fellow, but to make your way past my wards is truly an accomplishment. I admire your determination, however misguided it may be.” He sounded quite sincere, Anrel thought.
Anrel bowed mockingly in acknowledgment, but said nothing.
“And you are here in Beynos—astonishing! Then the witch’s father was not lying when he claimed to have seen you? Were you in truth lodging at the Boar’s Head? Perhaps I misjudged the old scoundrel.”
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