No more was I. Shadows swallowed the corners; sounds chittered along the ceilings; a foul smell which was not sewers came and went at intervals. The place displayed luxury without comfort, ostentation without art. I hated it. Each day saw the arrival of people paying calls, not only people from Bray but from all the cities up and down the shore. Some of them, who hinted to Sophia’s butler that they had handled her grandfather’s business (wink, nod, wink), she declined to speak with personally, leaving it to the servants to put them off with evasion or hauteur or whatever worked best.
Sophia learned of a man in Bray who located people, and she hired him to find any still living who had served the house in Stentor’s time. When they were ferreted out, she spoke with them, giving them generous gifts in return for information. From one of the former gatekeepers, she learned where Benjamin Finesilver’s bones had been hidden. She sent for them to be moved into the tomb of the d’Lornschildes, directly above the tomb that held Stentor himself, but she planned no vengeance on those who had followed her grandfather’s orders. We had both learned from the Gardener that old vengeance is like old cake: still seeming sweet, but so dry that one invariably chokes on it.
Some days, I simply had to get away from the place, and since there was always marketing to do, I took the basket and strolled down into the town to spend a few hours among the sellers of eggs, fruit, vegetables, fish—many of them things I had eaten in Swylet—and in the little alleys where stilt walkers and fire-eaters, fortune-tellers, magicians and jugglers amused the populace. One I most enjoyed was a Trajian, long-armed and long-legged, with a furred little body and a face like a sloth, a visual cross, I thought, between that animal, a teddy bear, and a monkey. He always finished his act by putting out a little table and two chairs, then seating a doll in one of the chairs, a doll dressed as a crowned king. The Trajian juggled the table, the chairs, the king, who promptly came apart in the air, arms, legs, body, head, crown, all seven parts spinning off in different directions, only to be skillfully gathered on the fly and reassembled. Each time I saw the performer, he looked directly at me and smiled. This confused me a little. Trajians, so the Gardener had told me, kept themselves at a distance from people of other races, for they were a people many times unjustly accused of everything from laying misfortune to the spread of dread diseases.
Knowing this for the nonsense it was, I smiled at him in return, and dropped a coin in his bowl each time I went. On the fourth or fifth such occasion, I turned from leaving my gift to confront a bulky man in the livery of Von Goldereau’s house, obviously drunken and belligerent. “Yul bring bad down on us,” he growled, laying his hand on my shoulder, to push me back. “Y’ve no right smilin’ at the likes of that!”
“Oh, sir,” cried the Trajian. “She was only being amused at the juggling…”
“And y’filth, y’ve no right speakin’ to me at all,” said the ruffian, flinging out one huge arm that caught the juggler across the face.
I heard his neck snap. I felt the juggler die. Everything became very still and very hot. “You,” someone cried in a great voice that echoed down the street as though a cataract had shouted in a stony canyon, the reverberations continuing as in a monstrous bell. “You have brought down bad fortune upon yourself and your house. You will leave no child; you will gain no profit; you will taste no food. From this moment, your body will shrink into nothingness, for I, the Healer, take life from you to restore what you have unjustly taken!”
And I laid my hands upon him. For one instant he looked surprised, then horrified. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell, gurgling, his face turning white. The crowd drew away from me as I knelt beside the juggler, putting my hands on him. I felt the life flow into him, the life I had taken from that other. I felt the bone knit. I felt the heart beat beneath my hands, like that of a bird.
He opened his eyes. He said, “You look so like her, so like sweet Queen Wilvia…” And then he fell into sleep. He had healed completely; I knew it to be so.
A female of his kind, dressed like a princess, came from the wagon with several other of her kind. “I am the wife for whom Yarov, Juggler to the Queen of the Ghoss, paid a great price,” she said. I knew it was the way of Trajian women to introduce themselves so. I nodded respectfully to her, and her people picked the juggler up and took him away.
Only when I felt the pain in my throat did I realize that great voice had been my own. When I went through the marketplace on my way home, people stood aside and lowered their heads. One or two, I touched, for they were in pain, and the anger that had moved me was still strong enough in me to heal them. The Gardener had told me of this, this avenging fury, but I had not known I could feel it. I was not sure I ever wanted to feel it again, though I knew I would not be able to withstand it.
Gradually, the workmen at the mansion accomplished their tasks. Outbuildings filled up with leftover lumber, tools, ladders, and paint. One old stable held enough powdered charbic from Cantardene to mothproof ten mansions. In time each problem was solved, each bit of wreckage was removed or repaired, each group of workmen was paid and went away. The place became orderly, clean, and quiet, and for the first time, I thought we might have time to reflect upon why Sophia had returned to Bray, what we would do about the mansion, and what she might accomplish here. Sophia, however, had a remaining concern that she mentioned to me over breakfast:
“I’ve been considering this discomfort we feel. You know, we haven’t even looked in the cellars.”
I shuddered, thinking first of the effusive old man who had brought the keys. The cellars could not be in any better condition than the rest of the house and might be worse. Sophia ignored my shudder and went to get the keys, which were heavy and unnecessarily intricate. Or so we thought until we had penetrated past the second door, at which point we went back and quietly closed and locked the doors behind us in order to prevent inadvertent interruption.
“Where did he get these?” demanded Sophia, holding out a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg, the topmost from a keg of similar stones. “I’ve never seen jewels like these.”
“There’s a world’s ransom here,” I replied, wishing desperately that the Gardener were with us.
“Let’s just look quickly, then close it all up,” Sophia urged. “This isn’t something we can deal with now.”
Even our quick look disclosed endless stores of treasure, none of it in the least corrupted, not even the fabrics: cloth of gold embroidered with emeralds, cloth of silver dotted with sapphires, cloth of diamond in the original bolt, woven from crystalline thread as made only by the Pthas and never by any race since.
“An old city,” I mused, on recognizing this latter fabric from a sample the Gardener had once shown me. “Someone has found a great treasure-house of ancient times.”
Beyond the last door, triple-barred, triple-bolted, triple-locked, we came upon an unlit tunnel where a lantern was set upon a table next to a stoppered bottle of lamp oil and a cane with a protruding sword tip. This last, I picked up as I followed Sophia, who carried the newly filled and lit lantern. The tunnel had not been formed by men. It was part of a natural cave, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
“He found this place,” I said with certainty. “He had the rest of the cellars dug around it, but this one he found!”
“Yes,” I said sadly. “And he had the doors built, then closed in the men who built them.” I followed her pointing finger to the cluster of desiccated flesh and protruding bones against the wall. Four men, or what had been men. They wore the shackles of bondsmen, and they had written their fate in their own blood on the floor beside them. “He does not want anyone to know what is here.”
Turning aside from this pathetic message, we stopped momentarily, for the cavern split into a Y, each arm blocked by an iron grille before a viscid, quivering curtain. To the left, the curtain was pale, lit with rainbow gleams. To the right the curtain was obsidian, not quite opaque, with shadows moving in it. Scattered folds of yellowed paper and the drie
d corpses of weirdly shaped creatures had penetrated the grille and were stuck to the walls and the floor before the dark curtain, some of them outside the grille. Moved by an instinctive revulsion, I used the tip of the sword to flick the creatures through or into the curtain of light, only to see them flair and vanish into nothing. Meantime Sophia picked up one of the papers, unfolded it, and read:
“‘Four thar of gems for each little human male.’” And another. “‘A qualux of woven gold for half a dozen children, very young.’
“What was he doing?” cried Sophia, a whispered cry, full of horror. She picked up the other papers and unfolded them, reading them out:
“‘Why don’t you answer! Five thar of gems for each little one. We need many!’
“‘Why don’t you answer!’
“‘Why don’t you answer!’
“‘We don’t have enough little human ones! We must have more! Answer or we will seek business with humans elsewhere on Chottem! We will send them to suck you dead.’”
I put my hand on Sophia’s arm, silencing her. “Shh, look there!”
Sophia looked at the dark curtain where a deeper shadow was being cast by something passing there, a thing with several legs, at least four arms, and a limber body that writhed like a snake.
I took the papers from Sophia’s hand, picked up the others that were scattered about, and said, “We are in danger here. We must send word to the Gardener! And we must relock all these doors and hide the keys, for what may come, indeed, what may already have come through this gate is something that must get no farther into the house.”
We passed the old bones on the way out. I did not mention the message written in blood, which Sophia had not seen. Stentor had not merely left his workmen to starve. He had beaten them first. Both of us were pale and shivering when we returned to the upper floors of the mansion. “This is an evil house,” said Sophia. “I thought so when I saw it, telling myself that it was only because it was dirty and unkept. Well, we have cleaned it and mended it and set it in order, and it remains evil. What am I to do?”
“For now, nothing,” I said, though my aversion was as great as her own. “I agree, it is an evil place. Instead of moving into the mansion as we planned, you and I can continue living in the little house in the back garden. Let us hide these keys, and meantime I’ll tell the Gardener what we’ve found.”
That night I sat up very late writing a long letter describing what we had found below and enclosing the strange notes we had picked up from the floor. I knew that when she left us in Bray, she had planned to go on to many distant places, seeking information. I knew she could not keep close watch upon us at the same time. Still, I hoped she was within reach. I went to a back gate that opened upon the graveled alley used by tradesmen and collectors of trash. A horseman waited there, and I put the letter in his hand, whispering, “Quick as may be.” He was her messenger. She had told me he would be there in case of emergency.
The next day Sophia told the housekeeper we would not be moving from the little house in the garden. The housekeeper bowed politely and said nothing. What difference did it make to her where the mistress slept or dined? If truth be told, the servants probably thought it spoke well of her, for all of them disliked being in the house of Stentor d’Lornschilde after dark.
I Am M’urgi/on B’yurngrad
When Ferni could not find my trail, he returned frantically to the inn where we had been staying and sent messages off in six directions asking for aid from the Siblinghood. He had returned his borrowed flier to the Order after we arrived at the inn, so he spent the rest of a frustrating day attempting to locate another one, meantime assuring himself that if the abductors had wanted me dead, they would have killed me where I slept at the riverside. He concluded, as I had done: They wanted me for something else; therefore, I was alive.
By the time he found an available flier, it was already dark. Since he would not be able to see the trail until morning, he ate a tasteless meal and lay down, requiring of himself the long discipline that would clear his mind and let him sleep. Not long into that sleep, a dream insinuated itself, a dream of me standing before him, taking his hands in mine, chanting. In the dream, he concentrated upon that chant, listened to it with all his attention.
“I am well,” I sang. “I am here, not far away. They who hold me are tribesmen. They believe I alone can kill the many ghyrm among them. I have told them I need help, but they say no, so you must summon the help I need. Go to the Siblinghood. Tell them. Get from them all the things I will need, including a finder. Be sure you bring knives. Fly here at dawn tomorrow, bringing help. Now waken and remember!”
And with that he awoke, the whole thing clear in his mind: how I sounded, what the camp looked like and where it was located, what I needed, what he had to do! “Bless you, old shaman woman, wherever you are now,” he muttered as he dressed himself. “You taught her well!” I was still there, watching, when he said it.
It was not long after midnight. We had not brought ghyrm-hunting supplies to the inn with us, but a Siblinghood outpost was only a short flight away. When he arrived there, however, it did him little good, for a very junior member was in charge who seemed to know little or nothing about where anyone in authority might be or when such a person might return. Ferni passed on the new ghyrm information to be added to that already in the file, then he requisitioned everything useful the more helpful supply officer would let him have, including a finder, though Ferni himself had not been certified to use one.
“Don’t you even try to use it,” the supply officer instructed sternly. “They do wicked things to the minds of those who are not inured to them. Leave the cover on the basket port. Land as near to her as you can get, put all the stuff out of the flier, then get out of there. Don’t try to rescue her. Wait until we get set up to do that. I know M’urgi, and she can take care of herself. She knows the tribes as well or better than anyone else in the Siblinghood.”
All this I saw, heard, knew of while lying on the bosom of the night. By dawn he had packed my personal belongings from the inn and was already hovering over the grasslands by the river. At first light, the shadow trail showed dark among the grasses, and he had not followed it far before he saw the smoke of our campfires. He hovered, waiting. I emerged from a hut, tribesmen gathered around me. I pointed upward at the flier, then down at the nearest clearing, and beckoned.
He put the flier down, took the supplies out, and laid them at the edge of the clearing. The last thing he moved was the basket with the finder in it, setting it carefully among the other tools of the ghyrm-hunter’s trade. He returned to the flier, saw me come out of the trees among the tribesmen, saw me wave at him with a lifting motion, which he obeyed. As he turned the flier away, he saw the men carrying the supplies back toward their camp. He was wondering, I think, whether they would move the camp at once to keep him from finding it again. No doubt he knew I would lead him to them again if they did so.
On the ground, I supervised the arrangement of my supplies.
“In my own place,” I demanded, pointing to the kit that held my personal things. Then at the basket, “That! Don touch that. I move it ovah on rocks, away from us. Don go near that!”
“I wahn see,” said their leader, reaching for the clamps that held the lid. “I see firs, no hahm.”
“Ssssss,” I hissed. “You see, you die! I see, I die. You wahch!”
I opened the port on the basket. The tentacle came out, reaching, moving side to side with a sound like the slithering of snakes. The men backed off, muttering among themselves. The smell reached them, and they went farther away. After a long minute, I took a newly delivered knife from its sheath and held it toward the tentacle, which screamed an ear-shattering sound and retreated into its basket. I closed the port and turned, hand on the lid clamps of the basket. “Now you wan see?”
Though the leader shook his head, he was obviously not content. “You hab this why?” he demanded.
I smiled sweetly at h
im. “Is findah, Dahk Runnah. Is findah ob ouder ghyrm. You say I find, you kill’m. Ah don dink so. I dink when ah find, you dry kill’m, dey kill you.”
“What we do?” he cried. “Mus do sompin!”
“We mus do sompin, yea, yea, sompin. But you wahn muck it? No? Den we dalk. We plahn. We dalkin’ much by the fiah. Now you go, get yoah people. Bring dem heah. I look dem ober, see dey hab no ghyrm, show you how knife wuk, an we make plahn.”
After more discussion, more argument, finally settled by Dark Runner, the tribesmen agreed to do as I asked, and two of them set out across the grasses to fetch the rest of the tribe. I, meantime, with a fine display of hauteur, told the ones remaining I was not to be disturbed, retired to my hut, rolled myself in the blankets provided there, reminded myself of a shaman’s discipline, and fell instantly asleep.
Meantime Ferni—as I learned later—though less worried than formerly, was no less agitated, for he had run headlong into an un-common and frustrating blockage in the normal operation of the Siblinghood. He had visited two other posts, saying he needed help, but the only people on duty were people who couldn’t authorize it; the people who could authorize it were somewhere else, having a mysterious meeting with someone or something important; they would get back to him.
In a fury of stamping about and muttering, “Well, if that’s the way they’re going to be, the hell with them.” His thoughts turned, as they frequently did, to Naumi. He would give up on the Siblinghood, for the moment at least, and go to Thairy for help. As Naumi had pointed out, he was only two days away, and Ferni knew I would be quite safe for two days, or for ten times that. Which did not mean he would put off rescuing me any longer than necessary, but which did mean he could take the time without feeling he had forsaken me.
By midafternoon, he was on his way. Half a day later he was at the transshipment point, where he rented a bed for a few hours and caught the earliest possible ship that would drop him at Point Zibit at noon, midnight, dawn, he didn’t bother to find out which. He did, however, have a hope that not only Naumi would be there but also the rest of the talk-road crew. Ferni had a high opinion of their joint abilities, and just maybe, they could come up with something new about the ghyrm.
The Margarets Page 42
