Broken blade, p.23
Broken Blade, page 23
“I’m very sorry about the state of your . . . bedroom,” he said, sounding both deeply embarrassed and confused. “The baroness has told us to treat you as the most honored of guests, and we would normally have given you one of the tower rooms, but she also asked that we put you in a place where the sun doesn’t shine. She specified no windows and as many feet of wood and stone between you and the sky as we could manage. That made things . . . difficult.”
“It’s perfect,” I said. “Mayl—your baroness is a very wise young woman.” I lowered myself gladly onto the bed. It felt wonderful.
“We had to take the latch off the door because it wasn’t really designed to be opened from this side. So just give it a shove when you want to get out. There’s no privy down here, but I can bring you a piss-pot if you’d like.”
I tried to answer, but all I managed was a mumble before sleep reached up and pulled me under.
Something cool and wet touched my forehead, and I blinked my eyes open. A shadow crossed through the dim lanternlight that came in through the door of my little sleeping chamber. My eyes flicked upward. Triss hung on the wall above and to my left, his paw extended toward my face, where a wet cloth lay just above my eyes.
“How do you feel?” he asked quietly.
I stretched. Tentatively at first, then with more enthusiasm. I was stiff and a little weak but not really sore anywhere except my throat, which, for reasons unknown, felt awfully hashed. I was also seriously hungry.
“I feel pretty good, Triss. Apparently a solid night’s sleep in a nice bed was just what I needed.”
A wry chuckle drew my attention to the foot of the bed. Maylien stood just inside the doorway, with Bontrang perched on a leather pad on her shoulder.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Try a week’s sleep interspersed with bits of delirium,” said Maylien.
I looked at Triss. “Really?”
He shrugged his wings. “That’s what they tell me, but I couldn’t really say. I’ve only been up and around since sunset yesterday myself.”
“What happened?”
Triss contracted briefly in embarrassment. “Apparently, I did. The magelightning hurt me much worse than I let on—”
“Triss . . .”
He looked off to the side. “At first I didn’t want to worry you because you were in rough shape, too. You needed to stay focused on getting us clear of the Elite. After, I knew you’d be mad that I hadn’t told you, and I was so busy just holding myself together that I could barely string two words together. It just seemed easier not to have to argue about it.” He shrank again. “I’m feeling much better now . . .”
“You should have told me, you muttonhead.” I reached up and ran a fingertip along the underside of his jaw, reveling in his scaly solidity.
“I know. I’m sorry. When we couldn’t get you to wake up after I did yesterday night, I was really worried.”
I glanced a question at Maylien.
She shrugged, but only with the shoulder opposite Bontrang. “I don’t know. You’d need to talk to a healer who specializes in mage care to figure out what happened there. If I had to guess, I’d say that for most of the week, Triss was draining your magical reserves away faster than you could replenish them, and it took you some time to recover after he stopped. Call it soul-exhaustion maybe, since nima rises from the well of the soul.”
“That sounds ugly,” I said.
Maylien nodded. “We weren’t entirely sure either of you was going to make it. If the healers hadn’t been able to get you to drink some clear soup and rice-white in your brief rounds of waking delirium, I don’t think you would have.”
“That’d explain the throat then. That rice-white stuff tastes like it runs three parts paint thinner to one part water.”
Triss gave me the hairy eyeball but didn’t say anything. I pushed myself up and back to lean against the wall in a half-sitting position—the longer I was awake the better I felt . . . and the hungrier. Like a monster that had been wakened by hearing its name, my stomach let out a quite audible growl.
“So, if it suddenly occurred to me that I was ravenous, what would be the chances of my getting something to eat?”
“Well, if you’re up to moving, I can take you to the kitchens and see what’s available. Otherwise, I’ll send someone to get you something.”
“Let’s go then!” I flicked the blankets off, then hurriedly recaptured them when I realized I was naked.
Maylien blushed prettily and looked away. “I forgot about that. Let me arrange some clothes for you.” She backed into the hall.
“You weren’t so shy on the road,” I teased.
“Uh, about that . . . just a moment.” She turned and said over her shoulder into the hall, “Chul, could you find a pair of pants and a shirt for our guest?”
“Of course, Baroness.” From the tone of his voice, Chul didn’t much like the idea of leaving his baroness alone with me, but he didn’t argue either.
Once the sounds of Chul’s moving away had grown faint enough to indicate some real distance, Maylien looked back at me, her expression carefully blank. “I have to apologize for my conduct on the road, Aral. As Heyin has been at pains to remind me, the duties and conduct demanded of a baroness are not at all the same as those of the Rover’s apprentice I used to be. When we were alone together on the way here, I treated you as I might have treated a fellow Rover in my traveling days. I said and did things that were not in keeping with my present obligations. I’m very sorry if I gave you an impression I shouldn’t have.”
I felt like all the air had abruptly left the room, or like I’d caught a solid kick just under the ribs. In either case, I found it very hard to draw the breath I needed to reply as I should. It wasn’t about sex, though it could have been nice if things had gone that way. It was about the sudden severing of a connection that had only begun to form, the first such connection I’d tried to make in years.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said quietly. “I should have remembered why you sought me out and treated you like the baroness I intend to help you become and . . .” I trailed off lamely, unable to say “not like Jax or one of the other Blade women”—that wouldn’t be appropriate either. Finally, after the silence had gone on too long, I forced out, “I should have treated you like a baroness and not an old friend.”
Bontrang hissed sharply, and the look on Maylien’s face shifted from blank to tightly closed. I felt even worse. But before I could do anything to repair the situation, Chul returned, and Maylien stepped aside to let him into the room.
“Thank you, Chul. Could you make sure that . . . my guest is dressed properly, then bring him up to the kitchens for food? Aral, I’ll see you later. I’ve got things to attend to.”
And then she left me.
18
“I guess the real question is whether you want to try to shut the place down cold now or just have someone nip in and take a quick look around,” I said.
With sunset a half hour off, Maylien, Heyin, and I sat high up in a massive old oak tree on a heavily forested slope. Across the deep narrow valley below us, a small stone-walled keep stood on the edge of a fast-moving little river. Bontrang had chosen a perch above us, up where the branches wouldn’t support a human’s weight, while Triss opted to stay hidden within my shadow as he did most of the time I was in company.
The keep sat well down under the shoulder of the opposite ridge, centering the open scar of the cut where they’d quarried the limestone for the outer walls. The setting of the tiny stone-and-timber fort felt more than a little off to me, as though the builders had been more interested in keeping the place out of sight than making it truly defensible.
Oh, it had most of the usual defensive accoutrements, high outer walls of smooth-cut stone, a narrow moat fed by the stream that ran through the valley, corner towers with light catapults . . . But big ancient trees stood all around it within easy bowshot of the walls, and a ballista or other siege engine on the ridge would be able to hammer the central tower almost unimpeded. An attacker using burning pitch could set the place alight in minutes.
It might be strong enough to repel a casual assault by unskilled rabble, but it would never hold against a determined assault from even a moderately well-armed force. On the other hand, its tiny size made it a damned hard problem in terms of infiltration. That was why Maylien had asked me to have a look at it now that I was up and around again. She didn’t want to pay the blood tithe of a frontal assault for an unknown return, especially since Sumey might be able to use such an attack against her at court. And Heyin had flat refused to let his baroness go in there herself when they “had a damned sneaking specialist sleeping off a bender in the basement!”
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to have heard that particular debate, but then, I am a sneaking specialist.
“I think we should start with a quick look around, Aral. If you’d be willing to oblige me.” Maylien’s tone sounded just as stiff and formal as it had every time we’d talked since I shoved my foot down my throat two nights before. “We might need to make a major assault at some later point, but I’d like to know what my sister is using the keep for first. She’s got a habit of tucking her dirty work away where it’s hard to find, like that dungeon she had you locked up in back in Zhan.”
I nodded. As I’d found out yesterday, Maylien had tracked me down by the simple expedient of having a spy in her sister’s house who’d gotten her a list of Sumey’s city properties. The Old Mews dungeon had been in the basement of the fourth building on the list. Knowing that told us that it had probably been Sumey who started the fire as well rather than Devin. I was frankly relieved by the thought—it felt better to believe that my onetime friend hadn’t sunk so low.
“Whatever she’s doing here, she’s kept it awfully quiet,” said Heyin. “And I don’t like the feel of the place. We’re only about an hour’s hard ride from the Marchon seat at Shaisin, but the countryside’s as empty as if we had a nest of petty dragons living in the forest, and that’s just not right. The ground’s lousy for farming and technically baronial land, but the timber’s damn good. There ought to be illicit loggers and charcoal-men about, or poachers at the very least. It’s not natural.”
“Has Sumey declared the area off-limits in any formal way?” I asked.
“No,” replied Heyin. “There aren’t even the usual dire warnings posted at the bounds. Everyone knows it’s baronial land and legally off-limits, of course. But most times and places that only makes sure the poachers stay extra quiet. It doesn’t scare them away.”
Maylien spoke. “When Heyin and I came out here last week, I asked a couple of the smallholders around the edges of the land what they knew about it. These are people who aren’t afraid to defy my sister’s rule. If they were, they wouldn’t be talking to me or I to them. But not one of them is willing to trespass here, nor talk much about why that is. I got a few bleats about the haunted castle and a few more about the night-walking dead, but that was it.”
“Seems like awfully fresh construction for a haunted castle,” I said.
Heyin nodded. “I checked into the rumors of night-walkers as well—I’d heard from those same folk before ever I brought Maylien to see them. But there don’t seem to be any more disappearances or unexplained corpses turning up around the edges of the wood than you’d normally expect to see in this kind of country.”
“The forest proper is completely empty of people?” I asked.
“It is,” said Heyin. “But you can’t confine ghouls and ghasts to one area like that. Especially not when there’s potential prey to be had by crossing the boundaries.”
Triss flickered into dragon shape, showing himself. “You and I can’t, maybe. But a powerful enough necromancer could.”
“Is that what you think is in the keep, Triss?” I asked.
“No.” Triss’s tongue flicked out. “The deeper shadows in the forest on the way here didn’t taste as I would expect them to if there were someone like that around, not enough rough magic. But it can be done, and the shadows don’t taste quite right either . . .” He shook his head in frustration. “There’s something almost familiar there though I haven’t been able to place it.”
“Well, the sun’s nearly down,” I said. “So, why don’t I just slide over there, have a look around, and save us further speculation?”
“I agree that’s our best course of action,” said Maylien. “Shall we go?”
“I don’t think that ‘we’ should go anywhere,” I said.
Heyin spoke at the same time, saying, “Baroness, we discussed this already. Surely you’re not planning on going with him?”
“Of course I’m going,” replied Maylien. “The whole reason for bringing Aral into our plans was so that he could get me through my sister’s defenses come the day of the challenge. If that’s going to happen, we need to practice working together against the nastiest security my sister can put together. If either one of you can think of a better way to do that than to have me go with Aral here and now, you’re welcome to tell me about it.”
“I’m convinced,” I said, though I didn’t much like the impersonal sound of “bringing Aral into our plans.” It made me feel like a piece on a game board instead of a human being. “Let’s go.”
Heyin said something unintelligible under his breath, but he didn’t elaborate or make any other argument, just sighed loudly when Maylien and I started down the tree.
I pointed across the moat to the guard slowly walking back and forth atop the nearest of the keep’s little towers. All of the towers had guards, but this one was farthest from the front gate and the weakest link in the defense.
“That’s our first hurdle, right there. We can’t get over the outer wall without doing something about him. You can’t anyway. I could probably get past him on my own, but if I’m going to carve a hole big enough for you to follow me through, he’s got to either die or take a convenient nap. This is your domain and your mission, so it’s your choice as to which.”
Maylien grimaced. “Which would you recommend under the circumstances?”
“There are pluses and minuses to both choices. Dead is easier, and it’s permanent. There’s no chance of the guard waking up and sounding the alarm. It’s also not something we’ll be able to conceal later. Leave a corpse, and they know someone ghosted a guard. Get rid of the body, and they’ll still be pretty sure that someone killed the guy. Perhaps most importantly, if I do ghost him there’s no bringing him back. Right now all that we know he’s guilty of is working for your sister. He could be every bit as bad as those torturers who had me strung up in Tien, but he could just be a local kid who needs to make a living.”
“What about putting him to sleep?”
“That’s significantly harder to manage without using magic, which would light us up if your sister’s got another petty mage like Lok around. I have to get in close and dose him with opium and efik or cut off his air for a bit. Either way is imprecise. He could die, or he could wake up too early, or not all there. Best way to deal with too early’s to tie him up, but that’s as good a calling card as ghosting him would be if he’s found or wakes up. There’s no way to pretend we weren’t here if he’s discovered gagged and bound. Even if he’s not, there’ll be rope burns and other signs. Knocking him out and tying him up’s still my first choice, though. I’d rather not ghost anyone who might not deserve it.”
Maylien frowned. “My sister’s kept this place even quieter than she did that nasty little dungeon in Tien. Considering the kinds of things that was set up for, and the unholy . . . pursuits my sister has taken a liking to in the last few years, I really doubt that anyone here is an innocent lamb. But you’re right that we can’t know that without investigating first.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and straightened her spine. “I’m the rightful Baroness of Marchon. That man over there is one of my people, even if he does work for my sister. He deserves the benefit of the doubt. If you can put him to sleep without too great a risk to yourself, do it. If you can’t . . . if there’s any real chance that he’ll give us away or harm you, kill him.”
“Wait here. I’ll throw a rope down when I’ve taken care of him.” I slipped down to the edge of the moat and eyed the water.
It looked cold and smelled wrong somehow, swampy and rank where it appeared clean and clear. I didn’t really want to swim, but the heights of the walls relative to the surrounding trees made for an impossible sail-jump. Also, if I swam, I’d be much harder to see coming. So I edged my way out onto a root in order to ease myself into the moat quietly. Dim moonlight cast my shadow on the surface of the water, and Triss let out a hiss, then quickly changed shape and spread dragon wings wide between me and the water.
“Back up,” he whispered urgently.
“Why?” I asked, but I was already moving.
“Faster.”
Up on the tower the guard turned and looked our way, raising his lantern as he did so. I flattened myself in the leaf litter under the trees, and Triss flowed over me, covering me in shadow. Together, we waited for the guard to turn away.
“What’s wrong?” I asked once Triss finally signaled that the guard had moved back to his normal pattern.
“Something in the water,” said Triss. “I don’t know what, but when I touched the surface, I could feel things moving around down in the deeps. It tasted like the shadows under the trees. I don’t think swimming would be wise.”
“And I don’t think we can make the tower’s deck with a sail-jump,” I replied. “It’s simply too far above the nearer trees.”
