He determined to go straight back and report to her. Glad of a reason to leave this dreary place, he turned to go.
An anguished scream rent the stillness. He stood unmoving, barely breathing, as the scream rose to a peak then died away. It was the voice of a woman in torment. Chills crept down his spine and he shivered. Elija lived in daily fear of torture. Since Emly had fled the palace a hobgoblin of dread regularly whispered in the back of his mind that one day he would be questioned by the palace inquisitors. Dol Salida had clearly believed Elija knew more about his sister’s whereabouts than he was saying, hence the urquat games. And he had listened with revulsion as soldiers spoke with relish of the agony inflicted on the intruders they had captured.
The woman screamed again, the sound echoing through empty spaces, and he forced himself to move. Frightened but fascinated, he hurried across the library into another vast chamber and looked around in the dim light. Steps ran up to higher levels at both ends. He heard another scream and ran across the room and through an open door. He raced through corridor after corridor, all empty, devoid of life. Then the cries stopped and he stopped too, despairing. This palace was larger, even, than the Serafia and it would take days to search it. But he could not leave if the woman needed help. He resolved to work his way downwards for, he thought bleakly, that is where dungeons lie.
He was creeping along a low, dismal corridor, his thoughts dark, when he heard a soft sound to his right. It was a stealthy movement, a sucking, moist sound of flesh on flesh. Elija stopped, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, gooseflesh crawling up his arms. He stood frozen. Infinitely slowly he turned his head and there, sunk into the wall, was a low wooden door.
Gathering his courage and as stealthily as a cat, Elija stepped up to it and put his ear to the wood. Again that same wet, clotted noise. Holding his breath he leaned on the door and it creaked open slightly. The stench which rolled out made his belly rebel, but he peered in, breathing through his mouth. It was dim inside, lit by small, dirty windows. He could see nothing so he slipped over the threshold and stood waiting for his eyes to adjust. Slowly the chamber came into view. He was standing at the top of wet stone steps, the floor far below him. There was movement down there but he could not make it out. The smell was repellent, of stagnant water and mould and rotted bodies. What was that on the floor? He craned to see, one hand on the door handle, ready to flee.
Something soft touched his fingers and he whirled round, flailing at it, crying out in fear.
A small old woman, pale and wrinkled, with wild white hair and clad in a filthy shift, leered at him from the doorway. She grinned up at him, delightedly pawing at his chest and shoulders, her touch disgusting, her black eyes huge, insane. Frantic with panic, he tried to push her aside and get out of that terrible room, but she clung to his arm, her flesh clammy and cold. She was quicker than him and stronger, for all her great age. The only way he could go was into the room and he backed away and tried to slam the door on her, trapping her arm, careless of hurting her. She screeched, high and grating, and dragged the arm out. Elija leaned on the door and closed the latch with shaking fingers. There was no lock or bar, nothing to stop her getting in. He willed it to stay shut, watching the handle, waiting for it to move. He thought he would go mad if it did.
After a while his breathing started to deepen, his heartbeat stopped its wild knocking. What to do now? He dared not go out. He had trapped himself.
He turned around and looked down again. His gaze penetrated the darkness. The floor was covered by a film of thick liquid, liquid which shimmered and rippled as if alive. He stared into the corner where he had seen movement. Just rats, he hoped. He drew his knife, something he had been too panicked to do as the creature clung to him. He stepped gingerly away from the door, fearful it would fly open, but it remained shut. Holding the knife in front of him he crept down the steps, looking back over his shoulder every few heartbeats. As he reached the last step he stopped.
In the corner of the chamber, twisting in the moving water, he could see a decaying body, naked and sheened with cloying trails of mucus. The body of a wizened old woman with white hair. Dead, surely. But as he watched the pitiful figure lifted wrinkled hands to him, imploring. Elija stumbled back on the slimy steps, his legs failing him, stomach rebelling. Surely this creature was the same as the one that had pawed at him in the doorway. How could it be?
She raised the top half of her body, as if trying to sit, and water and slime poured out of her mouth. She struggled to speak, stickily, before sinking back.
Elija turned and fled back up the steps, his boots sliding on the slick surface. Careless of what was waiting behind it, he dragged open the door and ran out into the corridor. Panic-stricken, he looked wildly about him. There was no one in sight, just a wet trail leading away through the dust on the stone floor. Elija leaned his hands on his knees and vomited over and over until his stomach was dry. Afterwards, exhausted, his legs shaking, he wiped his mouth and looked up and down the corridor once more, wondering which way to go.
Then he heard the same woman’s scream. Much closer. It was a human sound, however terrifying, a sound of sanity and he raced towards it. Reckless now, he called out, ‘Hello!’ as he ran. Then, at the far end of yet another empty chamber, he saw a pale hand reaching out from a dark recess in the wall. He stopped. A woman’s voice called, ‘Help us, please!’
He ran over. There was a sturdy wooden door with a barred opening. Through the bars he could see a fair young woman, her face red and tearful. When she saw him she gasped and pleaded, ‘Help us! Please, sir!’
‘What can I do?’ he asked, thinking he was in no fit state to help anybody.
‘My lady is in labour. It’s going badly and I don’t know what to do.’ She chewed her lip, holding back tears. ‘We’re prisoners. Can you free us?’
Elija looked past her. Unlike the rest of the palace, dirty and deserted but for the terrible old woman, this room was furnished, with rugs on the floor, and he could see a window out to bright daylight. On a narrow bed lay a dark-haired woman. She was moaning in distress, the sheets beneath her bloody. As he watched she cried out again, more weakly.
But the door was locked. Elija looked around for a key, above the door, beside it, but there was none. He looked over his shoulder, terrified he might see the old woman again.
‘Where are we?’ he asked the servant, who was gazing impatiently at him, waiting for him to do something.
She frowned. ‘What do you mean, where are we? Don’t you know, boy?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I will find out. I will fetch someone,’ he promised her. ‘I will tell the empress of your plight.’
There was an agonized cry from inside and the servant turned back to the bed. She spoke to the woman in labour then returned and told Elija urgently, ‘No, not the empress! Whatever you do, please don’t tell the empress. Tell Giulia Rae Khan. Tell her Fiorentina needs her.’
It seemed to take Elija for ever to find his way out of the haunted palace and, with the exception of a burly, shabbily dressed man who lay snoring in a chair, a cudgel and an empty beer barrel beside him, Elija saw no one. He guessed this was the women’s guard.
At last he arrived outside. He looked around, sucking in the fresh air. He was in the palace courtyard he had seen from above. It was deserted like everywhere else. Weeds grew long at the base of huge black iron gates. The gates were heavily barred.
Conscious of time pressing, Elija followed the palace wall, eventually coming to a tall tower. There, in the niche between wall and tower, he found a short passageway, a dog-leg, leading to a timber door set deep into the darkness of the wall. It was barred but not locked and he set his shoulder to the bar and, heaving with all his might, lifted it off its brackets. He pushed the door open. Light flooded in and he peered through, his heart in his mouth, to find he was outside the palace.
He sighed, weak with relief, and looked around. The palace, clad in black stone, loomed above,
and above that was the bulk of the Shield of Freedom. In front of him a wide path made of crushed white shells wound up the mountain. He followed it upwards, relieved to be out yet anxious for the woman in labour. He saw no one but very soon came to another gateway flanked by heavy sandstone pillars. These gates were open. Elija crept in, nervous of what he might find. He saw a wide courtyard paved with golden stones, and beyond it a sandstone fortress squatting on the flank of the mountain. An armed soldier stepped into his path, sword drawn.
‘I need help,’ Elija told him.
The man snorted. ‘You’ll find no help here, lad. Be on your way.’
‘Is this the Khan palace? I need to speak to Giulia Rae Khan.’
The man hesitated then said, ‘Be off with you. The lady does not grant audience with anyone who asks.’
‘But I have a message from the lady Fiorentina. She needs help.’
Within moments, Elija was escorted into the palace, a cold and gloomy place inside. Flanked by guards he was taken into a huge hall, smoky and damp, with a mean fire in the great hearth at one end. Seated before it was a sharp-featured woman in a dark gown, her iron-grey hair piled randomly on her head. She peered at him short-sightedly.
‘Well, boy!’ she rapped. ‘Where’s Fiorentina? What do you know?’
She listened impatiently, her mouth moving, as Elija told her briefly what had happened to him.
‘Where is this place?’ she demanded, frowning ferociously. ‘Speak plainly, boy!’
‘Down the white path,’ he explained. ‘The black building.’
Her eyes gleamed. ‘The Iron Palace?’
Elija shook his head. ‘I don’t know its name.’
‘Amylas!’ she ordered. ‘Go to the Iron Palace immediately. Find Fiorentina!’
A sturdy, black-bearded warrior nodded, but said, ‘Yes, lady Giulia, but it will take days to break in. We do not have the men or the equipment.’
Elija spoke up. He told Giulia, ‘They don’t have to break in, lady. I left a door open.’
It does my old heart good, thought Giulia contentedly. Not only had the boy told her where Fiorentina was being kept, but he could tell her something of what went on behind the black gates of the Iron Palace. She was listening with only half an ear, the rest of her mind busy calculating what advantage she could gain from this.
‘But who are you, boy, and what were you doing there?’ she snapped, interrupting whatever he was saying.
‘My name is Elija,’ he said. Had he already told her that? He seemed very nervous. So he should be. ‘I live in the White Palace with my sister Emly. She is—’
‘I know who Emly is,’ Giulia retorted. Why did everyone think her so out of touch? She peered at him, searching his face for duplicity. ‘Do you know where she has fled to?’
‘No, lady,’ he said with the appearance of honesty. ‘Emly did not confide in me. That would have been foolish if she was determined never to be found.’
‘Of course it would,’ she agreed briskly. ‘And Archange is a fool if she ever believed it.’
Giulia ordered that the boy be fed and watered then she questioned him over the long afternoon as they waited for word from her men. He told her about their life, his and his sister’s, and about his journey that day. The longer she listened, the more surprised she was that so frail a boy had survived such a strange and perilous existence.
When she quizzed him about the White Palace and the empress he prevaricated for the first time and she was pleased, in a way, for she disapproved of disloyalty, however well deserved.
‘Loyalty is a rare beast on this mountain,’ she told him, ‘but I know it when I see it. Your name will not come up, I promise you.’
Elija asked, ‘Will she be all right? Fiorentina?’
It was a ridiculous question, and one she could not answer, and she snapped, ‘Children are born every day in this City. Thousands born every day in the world. It is as natural as breathing. It can be painful,’ she conceded, ‘but the girl is probably just making a fuss. She’s a soft thing, though she thinks not.’
She questioned him closely about the Iron Palace and, presumably feeling loyalty to no one there, he told her all he could remember. She nodded as he spoke, suppressing a smile. That the home of the Gaetas was abandoned did not surprise her. Jona’s brother Saul was believed dead in battle, and their sisters had not been seen for many years. And Giulia had always suspected that the Family’s fabulous private army was just that, a fable.
Elija’s words faltered when he told her of an old woman he had seen, and a creature in a flooded room. Perhaps he thought Giulia would disbelieve him, but she had the Gift of clear perception and she knew he told the truth as he had seen it.
‘Who were they?’ he asked her hesitantly, as if reluctant to know. ‘They looked the same, like sisters, though one was half-drowned, the other—’ he shuddered, ‘she was terrifying, small and very old but much stronger than me, and her eyes, round and staring, insane.’ He gazed at Giulia, seeking rational answers to soothe the nightmare.
‘Sciorra Gaeta,’ she told him briskly. ‘Head of the Gaeta Family. She has lived in the Iron Palace since it was first built but she has not been seen for more than a century. The other creature was one of her abominable reflections,’ she added, thinking he could not understand, but Elija nodded as if what she said made sense.
For the first time in years she found some sympathy in her heart for Sciorra. Although ancient and demented the woman, it seemed, was still trying to do what she had done with ease when she was young – people her world with reflections who would love her and serve her, and be a family to her now her own were gone. How many twisted reflections had been birthed and died over the centuries in that dreadful place, she wondered?
‘It is a terrible thing to be so very old,’ she told the boy.
She wanted to return to the subject of Archange but Elija had little to tell, except that the empress had been ill but now seemed recovered. There was no doubt now in Giulia’s mind that Archange was responsible for abducting the pregnant girl, and that Jona had conspired with her. But why maroon her in the Iron Palace? Why not whisk mother and child straight to the Serafia? There Archange could deal with them as she chose. Kill them or let them live.
She conceded to herself, grudgingly, that she had been wrong to confide in Jona about the baby. But with Marcus dead she needed allies wherever she could find them. And Jona had seemed the best candidate out of a limited set of choices, given the available information. But now Giulia would have the advantage again, if the babe was birthed successfully. She pondered how she might keep the child out of Archange’s malevolent clutches, and her scarred heart thrilled at the challenge.
‘Who is she, lady? This Fiorentina? Why was she imprisoned?’
Giulia, startled, stared at the boy. For a moment she had forgotten he was there.
‘She is no one,’ she told him briskly. ‘But her son will be a lodestar for all of us, if he lives. He is the son of … a Serafim. Do you know what that is, boy?’ She was surprised when he nodded. This boy might be useful, she thought.
‘Offspring of Serafim are rare. We were beginning to believe that the Guillaume children, Indaro and—’ She frowned. What was his name? ‘Rubin,’ the boy told her. ‘Yes, Rubin,’ she said. ‘They were the last, and they were a disappointment. Gifts often skip a generation. Their father Reeve is, was, very powerful. Perhaps their own get … Do they have children, boy?’
‘Rubin or Indaro? Not that I know of,’ he told her.
‘But a Vincerus son! That will be a wonder.’ If it lives, she thought.
‘Why, lady?’
‘Because the Vincerus Family was always the most powerful among us. A Vincerus son will always be the first contender for the Immortal Throne.’
Elija frowned. ‘But Archange is a Vincerus.’
Giulia snorted. ‘Never! She has used the name for many centuries to hide her shame and most people have forgotten. But I haven’t. I know her
best. And I know she is no more a Vincerus than you are.’
Fiorentina believed she was dying. She thought no one could endure so much pain and live. The sun had set and risen twice as she laboured, and now it was going down again and still the baby had not emerged. When it came out, if it ever did, she was sure it would be dead. She recalled the fearful dream of the old woman. Is it dead in there? She was certain now it was.
Alafair was useless. She had never delivered a baby before and knew nothing. Fiorentina had screamed at the girl, spat at her and cursed her with every filthy word she could muster and, in the end, she had even cursed her lord for leaving her like this. Then she had sobbed and appealed to Alafair for help, weeping into the girl’s skirts as she held her and crooned reassuring words which meant nothing. What had happened to the young man who said he would help them? Fiorentina asked it over and over but Alafair had no answer.
Now she felt her life slipping away, for she had no more strength and the sheets beneath her were drenched with her lifeblood. She drifted off, daydreaming of her years with her lord, a rich life, content and happy. Daily she had pondered how and when he had died, but there was no one to tell her, for everyone, almost everyone, who fought in the Red Palace that day was now dead.
The Immortal Throne (2016) Page 49
