The Vanished Queen

by Lisbeth Campbell

Anza walked forward almost soundlessly on the carpet. She bobbed her head politely and waited for him to address her.

  “So you’ve come from my lawyer, have you,” he said, tapping the end of a pen against the wood. “Have you got the Milayan contract with you, or did he send you to tell me to my face that there’s a problem with what I want?”

  She took the three copies of the contract out of her bag. “These are ready for you to sign, sir. You will get one back after it’s countersigned.”

  “Patience, patience,” he said, reaching for the copies. “Let me read it first. Let’s see, where were we? The third paragraph, I think. Yes, that’s right. Here’s the change. Good, that’s fine.” He read on, his thick finger moving down the page a line at a time.

  The room was warm and quiet and dim, and Anza was glad he had not invited her to sit. She would have fallen asleep. A dog yipped elsewhere in the house. Through an open window she heard the distant sound of hoofbeats.

  “What does this mean?” Nikovili asked, pointing at a paragraph near the bottom. Anza leaned forward and was glad to see that Radd had prepared her for the question. Nikovili had not understood it the three previous times either. She explained again.

  “Humph,” he said. “And Pashke Izr has agreed to it?” The question appeared to be rhetorical, because he picked up the second page of the contract without waiting for an answer.

  The horse sounded closer. Quite a lot closer, actually. And more than one, galloping, much too fast to belong to a tradesman’s wagon and probably too fast to belong to a coach driven by anyone other than a very reckless young man, if that. She couldn’t hear wheels. She glanced nervously at the windows.

  “Well, I suppose I’m wasting my money if I pay my lawyer and don’t follow his advice, yes?” He dipped his pen in the inkwell and signed his name in an expansive flourish. He pulled the next set of papers to him.

  Waiting, Anza feared he was going to compare the documents word for word to ensure that the copies were identical. Her hand ached in anticipation of copying the damn thing yet again. Then he signed them all and sanded the signature. The horses had stopped.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, blowing lightly on the ink.

  “Tell your master to come see me sometime,” he said.

  She put the contracts back in her bag, bobbed her head again, and started for the door. A large thud shook the room. In four fast steps she was at a window, pulling aside the curtain. Eight horses, their trappings bearing the royal seal. Booted feet tramped along the corridor toward the room.

  They couldn’t be coming for her, not that many. Which meant they were coming for Nikovili and might leave as soon as they had him. The wooden wall panels in front of her had a crack between them. “To the right,” Nikovili said, his voice shaking, and she saw the handle, cleverly built into the carvings on the panel. She pulled the door open and slipped into a closet. Nikovili had not moved from behind his desk. He held a vicious-looking knife.

  She closed the door. The closet was dark and dusty and crowded. She felt about, found a chair and a few wooden boxes. She pinched her nose to keep out the dust. The back of the chair had a broken slat. It might make a weapon. Gods.

  From the sound of it, several soldiers entered and crossed the room. Something heavy fell with a clatter. A man grunted.

  “What are you doing?” Nikovili shouted. “Stop it, stop—” He screamed, fell silent.

  Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, Anza told herself. Her mouth had gone dry. The dog was barking frantically.

  “Get all his papers,” one man said. “Tear the desk apart. Check the books. Check every square inch of this room. I’ll send someone else in to collect the prisoner. What are you waiting for, girls? Get started.”

  A drawer slid open, and paper rustled. Wood creaked and splintered. As soon as the commander’s footsteps faded away, one of the other men muttered something. A third soldier laughed.

  Paper again. Drawers and cabinet doors. The sliding sound of books being pulled out on a shelf. Footsteps. A new voice said, “Here’s a crate for what you find. I’ve come for the prisoner.”

  Nikovili moaned. The dull slap of a fist hitting flesh.

  “Need any help?”

  “Naw, I can lift him.” She heard a grunt of exertion.

  “I wouldn’t want to have that lardy ass near my face.”

  They all laughed. A door shut.

  Silence for a while. Then: “C’mon, you, we’d better look behind this fucking portrait.”

  “Ugly, ain’t it? ’Cept the girl, she must be a nice piece now if this painting has any likeness. Heave on three. One, two, three.” A loud thump.

  “God on the tree, what the fuck is this frame made of?”

  “Careful there, if the king takes this house, we’re on the hook for anything we damage.”

  “Not the desk, lieutenant’s on the hook for that one.”

  The search continued, punctuated by occasional sneezes and cynical comments. Anza waited, rigid with tension. She hoped they would not take the command to search every inch literally. The closet was hot, and her shirt was sticking to her. She had managed to tamp down her fear, but she was sure it would erupt again if they found the door.

  At last one man said, “That’s enough, don’t you think?”

  “We’d better roll the rugs up. Good thing it’s stone underneath, or he’d have us lifting every floorboard. You take that one and I’ll take this one, and then we can do the big one together.”

  “We don’t need to do that.”

  “What’s it—damn it, I hear him coming. Do it.”

  The lieutenant’s voice said from the direction of the doorway, “Is that everything?”

  “Just as soon as we check under the rugs, sir.”

  “Hurry it up.”

  There was a gap of about a foot between the edge of the rug and the closet door. Boots scuffed on stone. The soldier breathed heavily, coming closer. He must be right in front of her now. She closed her mouth. He moved on. A soft thud as he kicked at something, probably the rolled-up rug. He walked back noisily over the bare floor.

  “All right,” the lieutenant said an endless minute later. “Get that crate.”

  They left as loudly as they had come in. She waited. It would not do to stride out overconfidently and be caught by someone left behind. She let herself breathe more normally and relaxed her muscles and waited.

  After a while the room was so still that she was certain she was the only person left in the house. She came out. The curtains had been pulled open, and the room was painfully bright after the dark closet. Gripping the slat had left deep red marks in her uninjured palm. No horses remained outside.

  The desk itself was in one piece, but the drawers were good only for kindling. Books lay open on the floor and piled haphazardly on the shelves. The painting leaned against the wall. She smelled spilled ink. Between the ink and any of Nikovili’s blood that had fallen on it, the best rug was ruined. Someone would cut it into smaller pieces and sell it on the black market to a merchant who wanted to look richer than he was. Nikovili would never see it again.

  Radd was not going to get paid, either. And Pashke Izr’s Milayan glassware would have to find another buyer. What had Nikovili done? It seemed unlikely that he was in the resistance, but he could easily have said something disloyal or cheated the wrong person. Most of the merchants cheated each other. The answer might be in the boxes in the closet, but she was not going to risk knowing anything more. Ignorance was safety.

  The front door was shut. Locked, if the lieutenant was as experienced as he had sounded. She tried anyway. No good. She went in search of another way out and found a door in the kitchen.

  It was unlocked. Doubtless they had been unable to find the key. To her relief there was no blood anywhere. The servants must have yielded immediately. She went out into a sunny kitchen garden, the herbs arranged in neat rows, blossoms on the bean poles. A black and white cat lazed in the sun. She could almost hav
e imagined herself in her aunt’s garden, her feet bare and dirty, her hands smelling of onion and basil.

  The resistance had taught her to be careful, and she peered around the corners of the mansion for any posted guards. Karolje would not want to take chances on looters. She saw no one. The gate was open as it had been when she came, the iron bars swung back against the brick wall. She edged carefully along the wall to the entrance. The trees on the street obscured all other shadows. She took one tentative step through the gateway.

  A soldier caught her by the arm. She froze. Her heart raced in her chest.

  “Got you,” the soldier said.

  She kicked at his shins, but he knew what he was doing and was at least twice her weight. He easily moved his leg out of the way of the kick and jerked her arms behind her. A second later she was shackled.

  The metal cuffs were almost too loose for her hands. The soldier must have seen that too, because he struck her hard on the jaw, and she blacked out.

  * * *

  She woke curled on cold stone in the dark. The chilly air stank of damp and shit and fear. Her arm ached where she had been grabbed, and the side of her face was swollen and tender. The shackles had been removed.

  For a long time she lay still. She was in the Citadel cells. Her mind kept twisting away from that fact, tossing up instead memories of the fight with Rumil, the rain, the woman in the teashop. If she thought about where she was, she would have to think about what might come next. Even in her village there had been stories about Karolje’s dungeons.

  At last the cold got her moving in both body and mind. She came clumsily to her feet and folded her arms across her chest. They had known she was still in the house. But it was Nikovili they had been after, not her. She had a chance, slim though it was, of being released. As long as they thought she was insignificant, as long as they focused on Nikovili instead of her, she could keep from betraying anyone. Taking her was a mistake.

  Karolje didn’t make mistakes. Tyrants never did. Anything that happened that should not have was soon recounted as deliberate. Accidents were transformed into intent. The people who Disappeared had never actually existed. She had known that before she came to the city. Without that knowledge, she would not have survived. The way to survive Karolje was to keep the past at your back and always march forward.

  Had her father been kept in a cell like this, perhaps this very one? She explored cautiously with her hands. The stone was rough, the natural limestone of the place. The cell was narrow, not long enough to lie straight in, and so low-ceilinged that anyone much taller than her would have to bend. There were gaps between the door planks, but not wide enough to get even her thin fingers in. A metal grate at the bottom slid aside for food. She was in a hole. Better that than a torture chamber.

  Leaning against the door, she listened. She heard outside the cell the nervous tap of finger on wood and a faint hiss that might have been a whisper. The tapping was rhythmic, obsessive. Otherwise she seemed to be alone.

  She thought of the resisters who had been captured last night. Was it one of them whispering in the dark? Or had they already been killed, bodies taken off the island and left in the pits on the lake shore? Common criminals were jailed on Beggar Island, and Karolje had a prison in the mountains for those he held alive. Wherever she was, it was transitory, a place between interrogations. The prisoners were probably all either suspected traitors or disobedient lords he wanted to punish. Executions usually followed a day or two after being captured.

  She wondered what Radd would think if she did not come to his office tomorrow, how long it would be before he worried. Would he dare to look for her at all? It was a lonely, barren question. She did not want to be one of the Disappeared.

  After a while the tapping stopped, but the whispering continued, the hiss of a snake, of a gas jet, of an arrow in the air.

  * * *

  Much later, the darkness was shot with blazing light that hurt her eyes. The cracks between boards threw brightness into lines on the back of the cell. Flickering and the smell of smoke told her it was a torch. Footsteps, boots on stone again but with none of the reverberation of an open space. They slowed. A key turned in the lock of her door.

  She squeezed her eyes shut in a futile attempt to hold back everything she knew of Karolje’s torture chambers. He employed all the ancient methods of physical pain, and if that didn’t break a person, he brought in a Truth Finder. They were priests of a sort. The stories said they could know all your memories and if they did a Minding the pain didn’t leave for days and sometimes you went blind or deaf or mute. She had seen a victim once, a fellow student at the College. When he was released, he had been like a three-year-old, drooling and wetting his breeches and unable to read. His father’s face she would never forget, a rigid controlled mask with terrifying anger blazing from the eyes.

  He has had his Truth Finders trying to pry secrets from my mind. Mirantha had written that. She had not been driven mad. It was possible to survive.

  I won’t be afraid, she told herself. I won’t. When she was target-shooting, she found a stillness at her core and rested there, the world motionless and meaningless. She reached for that stillness, that calm. She could go to pieces when it was over.

  She found enough detachment not to panic when a soldier yanked her out and chained her hands again. Fear was an abstract thing, an idea, a word. Pain had no meaning. Her mind took in its surroundings, registered what happened, but found no reason to respond. Her heart beat in slow, majestic thumps with hours between them.

  He towered over her. They walked up two levels, then turned onto a long gaslit corridor. The fourth door on the right was guarded. It was metal, blocking sound.

  It led into a narrow, brightly lit white room. Inside were several soldiers, all but one in the familiar dark blue uniforms bearing the wolf’s-head badge of Kazdjan’s house. She was pulled in and made to stand in front of a fair-haired man with a thin face and narrow eyes dressed in dark grey. He did not carry a weapon, but others did.

  The floor was stained concrete, in the center of which was a rusty grate. Anza knew what that meant in an interrogation room, and she drew more tightly into herself. The plaster on the windowless walls was perfectly even and glossy. Easy to clean.

  “What’s your name?” He was harsh.

  Whips of varying sizes were mounted on the wall behind him. Two of the metal-handed stunning whips, a wire flail, a leather thong studded with brass, a rope divided into seven or eight strands with metal beads at the ends. A long, evil-looking whip that could wrap around a neck a few times. An ornate silver handle was attached to a thin woven cord of fire-twine that would blister the skin and corrode the flesh. Anza could endure pain, but a few lashes with any of those whips would have her blubbering and fainting.

  “Anza Istvili.” Her own voice was thin and weak. She had to squint because of the brightness. She was glad she had never carried her father’s family name.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a clerk to Radd Orescu.” It felt horribly inadequate.

  “Nikovili’s lawyer. Did Nikovili show you any documents?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she answered, knowing with dread that there was no right answer to that question.

  He stepped closer to her. “You’re lying.” His hand flicked, and the soldier behind her yanked on her hair and forced her to her knees. If her hands had not been behind her back, she could have grabbed the examiner around the thighs and pulled him down. He unbuckled his belt. It would be his trousers next.

  I am the arrow, she thought. I am the arrow. There is no pain, there is no fear.

  The belt came around her neck. He pulled. The edges cut into her skin. Tighter. Her throat compressed painfully. “Did he show you any papers?”

  She had no breath left to deny it. She shuddered, trying for air. Pressure in her head made it hard to think.

  The belt loosened slightly. She
coughed, her body jerking forward. The soldier behind her grabbed the chain and pulled her arms up, bringing her erect and sending pain like coals through her shoulders.

  “Did he show you any documents?”

  “No!” she yelled.

  The examiner pulled hard. Her cry of pain never made it out of her lungs.

  This is it, she thought with a calm certainty. She knew she would pass out before she died, but she did not think the examiner would stop until her twitching legs had gone still and the room stank with her death.

  The door opened. The soldier behind her took a step back. The examiner’s grip on the belt slackened. When she coughed and fell over, no one stopped her. She gasped for air. The new arrival was a handsome dark-skinned man who had impressively strong arms. The badge on his sleeve beneath the rank markers was a silver wolf in profile. She had not seen that badge on any soldiers in the city.

  The examiner said, “This is an interrogation, Captain. Your business can wait.”

  “He wants to see her. Now.”

  He. Who was he?

  “When I’ve finished.”

  “Now,” the captain repeated. “And send up anything you’ve confiscated.”

  “You exceed your authority.”

  “Do you want to test that?”

  The man behind Anza breathed in at the question. If this continued, the captain might use force. He could lop off the examiner’s head. The thought was sickening.

  “Have her, then,” said the examiner. “I’ll put this in my report.”

  The captain unlocked her chains. Her wrists were abraded. Sitting, she was wracked with coughs again. The captain waited until the fit had stopped to raise her by the forearms, not touching the marks on her skin.

  “Come.” He held her arm, firmly but not too tightly, and pulled her out of the interrogation room. She went without fuss. Whoever this man was, the examiner had been afraid, of him and of his command. She did not want to know what power lay behind him.

  They turned a corner and went up a flight of steps. At the top he halted and said, “I’m bringing you to the prince. Don’t try to run, or it will go worse for you.” He removed his hand.