by Martha Wells
Nicholas was seized by a sudden vertigo and then the sickening sensation of falling. An instant later he realized he was falling, just as he landed hard on a smooth stone surface. It didn’t work, he thought. We’re still here. But the rumble of the collapsing warren was distant, a barely audible echo, and the shaking of the ground had become a mere tremble.
Nicholas pushed himself up on his elbows. It was pitch dark and he could hear water running. He said, "Madeline?"
There was a heartbeat of silence that stretched into eons, then he heard her say, "Unh," or something like it.
A warm white glow sparked and grew, revealing the rounded brick roof and flowing channel of black water of one of the newer sewers. Nicholas was sprawled on the walkway and Madeline was only a few feet away, sitting up and rubbing her head. Arisilde was steadying himself against the wall and the light was coming from a jewel-like orb of spell-light suspended in the air over his head. He looked down at Nicholas and said, "That was close. Two feet to the left and we would have materialized inside the wall."
"Thank you for the precipitate exit, Ari," Nicholas said. His head ached and when he tried to sit up his stomach lurched threateningly. He was thinking he might have to lose consciousness now.
There were voices down the length of the sewer, the yellow glare of lanterns. "Now who’s that, I wonder?" Arisilde said, mildly curious.
It was too late, anyway. Arisilde and Madeline will just have to handle it, Nicholas thought, and then he did pass out.
Nicholas drifted back to awareness believing he was in his own bed. He rolled over under the tangle of blankets and reached out for Madeline. It was her absence that really woke him.
He sat bolt upright. The room was opulent. Heavy oak panelling inlaid with rare woods, a garden scene tapestry old enough to have been hung when Rogere was on the throne, equally antique and priceless Parscian carpets spread casually before the marble mantel as if they were rag rugs. He was in the palace, obviously.
Cursing, he slung the heavy coverlet aside and struggled out of the bed. He was dressed only in a linen nightshirt. As he looked around for his clothes he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the mantel and gave a startled exclamation, thinking it was someone else. Bruises had turned the side of his face a dull green-black and his right eye was puffy and swollen. Yes, he remembered that. This is bloody wonderful, Nicholas thought sourly, continuing the search for his clothes. It was going to make assuming a disguise damned awkward.
As he was opening and shutting the array of carved and inlaid cabinets in futile search the door opened to allow in a very correct and disapproving upper servant, attended in turn by a very correct and expressionless footman. "Can I assist you, sir?"
Nicholas straightened up. "My clothes."
"We had to destroy most of them, sir. They were . . . not salvageable."
This was what he should have expected but at the moment it only increased Nicholas’s fury. Making sure to enunciate each word clearly, he said, "Then I suggest you get me something to wear."
The servant cleared his throat. He had obviously expected his charge to be somewhat more overawed by his surroundings. "The physicians felt it would not be wise—"
"Bugger the physicians."
They brought him clothes.
Nicholas dressed hastily in the plain dark suit that mostly fit and boots that were a little too small. He wasn’t sure if the consternation of the servants was due to his refusal to accept his status as a prisoner, or that they had simply expected him to spend most of the day in bed, moaning. The place in his chest where he had been stabbed felt, and looked like, he had been kicked by a horse.
The servants didn’t try to stop him but the majordomo hovered conspicuously as Nicholas stalked through the antechamber and salon and out into a high-ceilinged, pillared corridor. He paused there, noting the presence of two palace Guards who appeared startled to see him.
This might be the King’s Bastion or possibly the Queen’s. The carved panelling on the walls was certainly old enough and the marble at the base of some of the columns bore cracks and discolorations from age. He started to turn to the majordomo to ask where the hell he was when he saw Reynard coming down the corridor.
Reynard looked in far better shape than Nicholas but his brow was creased in a worried frown. They must have sent for him in the hope that he could exercise some sort of restraint over Nicholas.
"Where’s Madeline?" Nicholas asked as soon as he was within earshot.
"She’s all right, I’ve had word from her." Reynard took his arm and drew him behind a pillar where they could speak in comparative privacy, much to the consternation of the majordomo and the Guards. Lowering his voice, Reynard said, "She left before you and Arisilde were found by the Prefecture. She wasn’t sure what our status was with the palace and thought at least one of us should be on the outside."
Nicholas nodded. "Good." A little of the tightness in his chest eased. She’s alive and she’s well out of this. He tried to get his thoughts together. "Is Crack here as well?"
"No, I thought it better if no one in authority got too curious about him. Once he gave us the map and told us where you were, I had him hauled off to Doctor Brile’s surgery. Fortunately for the men who did the hauling, he was too exhausted to put up much of a struggle. I received word this morning that he’s patched up and recovering nicely."
"And Isham?"
"He was well enough to sit up in bed and demand to know where we were and what had happened Brile said, so he should be all right in a few days. He’s a tough old man." Reynard hesitated. "It’s too bad Madeline’s grandmother—"
"Yes, it is." Nicholas looked away; he didn’t want to discuss Madele. "Did Madeline say where she would be?"
"No, but there was something else she wanted me to tell you. This note was in our code, by the way, so it’s not as if half the palace knows our business." Reynard glanced idly around, unobtrusively noted the location of the Guards and lowered his voice a little more. "When you were down in the sewer and Ronsarde thought he wouldn’t make it out, he told her he had some papers hidden under the floor in his apartment and that she was to make sure you got them. It can’t be about Macob or he would have told us before this, surely."
Nicholas started to reply then stopped, arrested by a sudden memory. A memory of a moment that had never taken place. The garden at the old house at Lodun, and speaking to Edouard while he listened to Macob’s scream of rage. The last thing Edouard had said was if I had known it would worry you so much I would have told you about the letter. He said, "No, I think I know what it’s about."
"Oh." Reynard was a little nonplussed. "Well that’s good, anyway, because she went to Ronsarde’s apartment last night to retrieve the papers and found the place had been ransacked. Whatever it was, it’s gone now."
Of course it is. Nicholas closed his eyes briefly and swore. Montesq runs true to type, as usual. "Is Ronsarde here?"
"Yes, I was just over there, though I couldn’t get in to see him. He’s going to recover according to the physicians."
Nicholas thought hard. An idea was beginning to form, though there were some things he had to make sure of first. He looked at the guards loitering nearby, then turned back to Reynard. "Are you free to leave or are they watching you as well?"
Reynard hesitated, his expression hard to read. "Nic, Giarde has offered me a colonel’s commission in a cavalry regiment, the Queen’s First. As a reward for sounding the alarm over Macob, I suppose."
"That’s a very prestigious regiment," Nicholas said. His throat was suddenly dry. He had known Reynard had never wanted to leave the cavalry. He was a military man at heart and would still have been in the service if he hadn’t been unfairly driven out.
"Yes, service to the Crown and all that. Ronsarde apparently said some complimentary things, too." Reynard cleared his throat.
"Have you accepted it?"
Their eyes met and Reynard’s mouth quirked in a smile. "Not yet."
"How coy of you." Nicholas paused, and suggested cautiously, "Before you do, can you get some messages out of the palace for me, without anyone knowing?"
"Well, I’m not a Queen’s officer yet."
Ronsarde was ensconced in a suite of rooms in the King’s Bastion and there were a number of physicians, upper level palace servants, and officials of the Prefecture in attendance. Nicholas talked his way through the anteroom just as the inner doors opened and the Queen emerged with her train of attendants. Nicholas tried to duck behind a pedestal bearing a bust of some late bishop, but she spotted him and cornered him against a cabinet when he tried to retreat.
"You’re awake," she said. She eyed him with that startling directness, then turned to study the china ornaments in the cabinet. "Did you know where it was?" she demanded.
Nicholas was aware he hadn’t properly bowed to her but it was impossible now as she had him backed into a corner. At least, he decided, she was armed with neither the cat nor Captain Giarde. "Did I know where what was, your majesty?"
"It was buried back in some salon, in a box no one had looked in for years." She glanced at him to see how he was taking it, and added, "That’s odd, isn’t it?"
He deduced that she was talking about Macob’s skull and that she was not accusing him of knowing its location, but trying to impart it as an intriguing curiosity. "It wasn’t as odd as some things that happened, your majesty."
She considered that judiciously, then nodded to herself. "Are you going to see Inspector Ronsarde?"
"Yes, I was."
She looked up at the large and well-armed Queen’s Guard who had been standing at her elbow throughout the conversation. He turned and suddenly a path opened through the crowd to the door into the inner chambers of the suite. The Queen stepped back so Nicholas could get past and he made his escape gratefully.
It wasn’t until he walked into the bedchamber that Nicholas realized that Ronsarde had been housed in a set of state apartments. The room was about the size of a modest ballroom, with two large hearths with intricately arabesqued marble chimneypieces. The enormous bed, hung with indigo curtains, was set up on a dais and had a daybed at its foot. Ronsarde lay in it, propped up by a mass of pillows with Doctor Halle and another physician standing nearby. Halle was pale and had a large bruise on his forehead but otherwise appeared none the worse for his experience. The Inspector, however, was too red-faced for real health. "I don’t want to rest," Ronsarde was saying in a querulous tone. "It’s ridiculous that— Ah!" He saw Nicholas and sat up straight. "There you are, my boy."
Nicholas walked to the foot of the dais. He wondered which Kings of Ile-Rien had slept in this chamber. No recent ones, since the furnishings were too far out of date. Rogere, perhaps? With the current Queen’s sense of humor that was all too possible. He said, "If I could speak to you alone. . . ."
Ronsarde looked at Halle, who sighed and reached for his medical bag. "I suppose it would do more harm to argue with you," Halle said. He gestured the other doctor ahead of him and clapped Nicholas on the shoulder as he passed.
Nicholas stepped up to the bed and as the door shut behind the two physicians, he said, "Your apartment has been vandalized."
"Yes, I know." Ronsarde’s welcoming expression faded a little. He said, "It was discovered when Halle sent for some of my things this morning. I knew it wasn’t you, since your men would have known where to look." He paused, worried. "Madeline did escape the sewers, did she not?"
"Yes, but she didn’t fancy palace hospitality."
Ronsarde let out his breath. "Sit down, at least, and don’t stand there like an executioner. I can tell you what was in those documents."
Nicholas sat down on the edge of the bed, aware of the tension in his muscles and a headache like a stabbing needle in his left temple. Ronsarde said, "I never stopped investigating the case surrounding your foster father. I say the case ‘surrounding’ him, because in some ways I now believe he was incidental to it."
Nicholas nodded. "It was always difficult to keep sight of the fact that necromancy is a magic of divination and of the revealing of secret information."
"Yes," Ronsarde said, gently. "Count Rive Montesq was Edouard Viller’s patron. Count Rive Montesq has been linked, through various circumstantial reports, to blackmail and illicit financial dealings. Two fields of endeavor in which the revelation of secret information would be of great benefit."
"And Edouard had a device, invented with Arisilde Damal, the most powerful sorcerer at Lodun at that time, that would allow a layman to perform magic."
"That was intended to allow a layman to perform magic," Ronsarde corrected. "As we know, and as Viller and Damal must have discovered almost immediately, the device did not function quite as anticipated and the wielder had to have some small gift of magic before it would work."
Nicholas looked down at his hands, avoiding Ronsarde’s perceptive gaze. "Montesq must have asked Edouard to use the sphere for necromancy, to discover secrets."
"Viller refused, not only because it was a violation of law, but because he couldn’t use it. He was not a sorcerer. Montesq, being a liar himself, did not believe Viller was telling him the truth. But Montesq wanted the power of the sphere. He is a man who craves power. It must rankle that he has to depend on hired sorcerers for magic." Ronsarde ran his fingers along the edge of the quilt thoughtfully. "He was Viller’s patron and it would have been easy for him to obtain keys to the rooms Viller was using for his work. He entered them one night after Viller had gone and he tried to use the sphere."
"And it didn’t work," Nicholas said.
"The failing could not be his, of course, so he tried again. He brought a hired thug, who took a beggar woman off the street for him, and he tried the necromantic spell in Macob’s time-honored fashion. And it did not work. So he left and allowed Viller to take the blame."
Nicholas said nothing.
Ronsarde hesitated, then added carefully, "It helps to know why something occurred, when one is reconstructing a chain of events, but it can also cloud the issue. You can’t be faulted for suspecting that your foster father had actually committed the crime he was executed for. The evidence was overwhelming and he was the only one directly associated with the situation who had a motive to use necromancy. His desire to speak to his dead wife was well documented during the trial. And he wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t tell you what had happened. And you knew he was keeping something from you. The power of the ‘why’ obscured the ‘how.’ " His mouth twisted ruefully. "It can happen to anyone. It has certainly happened to me."
Nicholas shifted. His shoulders ached from tension. "What was in the missing documents?"
"They were sent to me a month ago. I was pursuing the matter from the only direction that was left to me: that Edouard Viller knew something detrimental to Montesq and that he did reveal this information to someone before he was executed. To that end I was tracing and contacting his correspondents. I had had no luck. Then I was sent a package of letters from Bukarin, from the daughter of a man Viller had corresponded with for some time, a doctor of philosophy at the Scholars’ Guild in Bukarin. The man had died before Viller was executed. The daughter had received my request for information that was directed to her late father and sent me all Viller’s letters that she could find among his papers. One was unopened. It had been sent only two days before the dead woman was discovered in Viller’s workroom, but had arrived after the man it was addressed to had passed away. In it Viller describes the curious incident of Count Rive Montesq’s request that Viller use his device for necromancy."
"Why didn’t he tell me?" Nicholas said. The words sounded oddly hollow.
"Montesq must have threatened your life to insure Edouard’s silence." Ronsarde spread his hands. "It doesn’t matter. We have all that we need. Montesq will suffer for his crime."
"You don’t have the letters anymore." Nicholas shook his head. "Montesq knows. He’s been preparing all this time while we were pursuing Macob."
&n
bsp; Ronsarde’s brows drew together.
"He sent Fallier after me and directed Lord Diero of the Prefecture to arrange your arrest," Nicholas explained. "He has known all along. He is well prepared by now to deal with a public accusation."
"It doesn’t matter how well he has prepared. It won’t help him."
"Don’t be naive."
Ronsarde glared at him, but his expression turned worried when Nicholas got to his feet and said, "I assume I’m to be detained here."
"For your own good," Ronsarde said, watching him carefully. "Only until Montesq is formally charged."
Nicholas nodded. "I’m going abroad and my man Crack will be looking for a new position shortly. You need someone to watch your back, who could help with your work. Would you consider taking him on?"
"Crack would certainly be adept at frightening away any old enemies in search of revenge," Ronsarde admitted. "I assume he was innocent of the murder charges against him?"
Nicholas smiled, a trifle ironically. So Crack’s real identity hadn’t escaped Ronsarde’s notice either. "Any in-depth investigation of the extortion branch of Montesq’s little empire will reveal that Crack was framed for those charges."
"All right." Ronsarde nodded, then asked sharply, "Where are you going?"
"You’re the greatest detective in Ile-Rien," Nicholas said. He put his hands in his pockets and strolled to the door. "Figure it out."
His next visit was to Arisilde, who had been given a smaller suite of rooms on the same floor as Inspector Ronsarde. It was less difficult to obtain entry and Nicholas was soon sitting in the chair next to his bed. "How are you?" he asked.
"Oh, better, I suppose." Arisilde’s long pale hands plucked anxiously at the coverlet. "Have you heard anything about Isham? No one here seems to know."
"He’s at Doctor Brile’s house, awake and recovering." He told Arisilde what Reynard had heard about the Parscian that morning.
