"Let's get trained then," he said. "Time to become a spy."
The door was locked.
He tried it several times, shaking the latch hard, but the door was heavy and the lock solid; it refused to budge.
He pounded on it and called out. "Ilian? Care to let the new trainee out for a bit of food?" There was no answer. He knelt down and peered through the keyhole; only the bare stone of the passageway's far wall was visible.
He pounded harder. "Jedron? Is this another test? Going without breakfast?" The shouting made his head ache.
The window was small; too small to climb out of, but at least it opened, rotating out with a tiny brass crank. Silverdun cranked it all the way open and stuck his head out. The salt breeze was bracing.
Silverdun's room was on the side of the tower opposite the courtyard. The wall here practically jutted out directly from the turgid water. Only a few sharp rocks and a narrow hint of a path separated the tower from the sea.
"Auberon's balls," said Silverdun. He sat down heavily on the mattress. Here was yet another cell.
At least this one had a soft bed for a change.
Perrin is nestled in his mother's lap, her arms wrapped around him against the sudden evening chill. They are on the veranda overlooking the south lawns. Beyond the row of peach trees, a group of men from the village are repairing the low wall that surrounds the manor. Perrin likes walking along that wall; he can go the entire length of it, and even once made it all the way around the giant rectangle without falling off.
Mother leans in and kisses the top of his head, inhales. "Your hair smells like sunlight," she says.
lana comes to speak to Mother. She's one of the servants, and is always kind to Perrin. "Lady," she says, curtseying. "A moment, if I may." She nods meaningfully at Perrin.
"It's all right," says Mother. "Go ahead."
lana doesn't seem to approve, but she goes on anyway, and suddenly she no longer acts like a servant. "I've decided that you will lead prayers tomorrow morning, so be ready."
"Oh," says Mother. Perrin turns in his mother's arms to look at her face. lana has just spoken to Mother as if she were the servant, and lana her mistress! But Mother is smiling. "I am honored, Mother."
Why is Mother calling lana Mother? Perrin is confounded.
"I trust your judgment, Daughter," says lana. "If you believe the boy is ready ..."
"I believe it."
"He may not attend until his tenth birthday, you know."
"That is only two years from now."
lana smiles. "It is a good thing. For him to be brought up in Aba's light. But we must be careful."
"Yes, Mother."
lana curtseys, and she is a servant again.
When she is gone, Perrin asks, "Is lana really your mother?"
"No, silly. Grandmama is my mother. lana is my teacher in the Church."
"Aba," says Perrin. He knows about Aba. "Aba is a god," he says.
"Aba is God beyond gods," says mother. "He is first among kings."
Perrin is confused again. "I thought Uvenchaud was the first king."
Mother laughs. "Uvenchaud was the first king of Faerie, yes," she says, "but he was not a god."
"We are descended from Uvenchaud."
"Your father likes to say that, yes. But that was many thousands of years ago. I think at this point in history, more Fae are descended from Uvenchaud than not."
Perrin thinks about this. He points down to the villagers working at the wall. "Mother, are they descended from Uvenchaud too?"
"So many questions you have!" scolds Mother, smiling.
"Are they?"
Mother makes a funny face. "I suppose."
"Then aren't they noblemen as well?"
Mother laughs again, this time out loud. He loves the sound of her laughter. "Yes, I suppose they are."
"Then why don't they live in a manor like we do?"
Mother's smile fades. She looks at Silverdun. "Being noble has nothing to do with living in a manor, Perrin. That is the world's way, not the true way."
"Are you an Arcadian then?"
"Yes I am."
"Will I be an Arcadian too?"
"When you are older, you will go off to school in the city and you will learn many things, and then you will decide what sort of man you want to be."
Perrin doesn't really know what she means. "Can I go with you to the prayers? I want to hear you read them. Please?"
Now mother becomes very serious. "No you may not, and you mustn't ask again. And Perrin," she says, almost in a whisper, "you are never to speak of Aba, or of my conversations with lana, or of our prayers to anyone. Do you understand?"
"Even Father?"
"Especially Father."
"But why?"
"Your father and I agree on most things," says Mother. "But on one very important subject we have a fundamental difference." She looks so sad when she says this, and Perrin hugs her tight.
"Can't you compromise?" says Perrin. "You always say if I have a disagreement with another child I should compromise."
"In some matters there is no compromising."
Perrin feels a tightness in his stomach. "Do you want to watch me go all the way around the wall?"
"Of course I do," says Mother, and her smile returns. She stands him up and brushes his hair with her fingers. "You're getting so very big."
"Make sure you watch," Perrin says.
"Come here," says Mother. She hugs him, puts her face against the top of his head, and inhales. "My sunlight."
He turns to run off, but Mother catches his collar. "Remember what I told you. It's very important, and I must know that I can trust you."
"I promise," he says.
As he's running down the south lawn, she calls out, "Don't disturb the noblemen fixing that wall!"
"I won't!" he shouts back.
He makes it almost all the way around, but falls by the back gate, scraping his knee. He cries, and Mother comes and scoops him up, carries him into the house, and there is warm supper and music and play and the softness of sleep.
Silverdun sat up; at some point he'd drifted off to sleep again, but now hunger roused him. The door was still locked, and pounding on it still produced no response from Than or Master Jedron.
This was ridiculous; the mental equivalent of the paperweight to the head. A tactic meant to do what? Unnerve him? Test his patience? Annoy him? If so, it was succeeding admirably.
Clearly Jedron had no intention of allowing him out of the room, so it was going to be up to Silverdun to escape. Surely Everess and the odd, brooding Paet hadn't gone to all this trouble only to have Silverdun starve to death in a tower room like a doomed princess in a tale.
He began with the door. The bands around the wood and the lock were of iron plated in silver. Silverdun's attempts to use Elements or Motion against the door only succeeded in worsening his headache. Several painful shoves with his shoulders proved that it couldn't be forced, and he nicked the blade of his rapier trying amateurishly to pick the lock. If he'd had a bit of wire he might have tried picking the lock, although he wouldn't have had any idea how to do that given all the wire in the world.
"Damn you, Jedron!" Silverdun shouted, punching the door and immediately regretting it.
Breathe. Think. Be calm. Losing his temper wasn't going to accomplish anything. And if Jedron was watching him through a peephole or with clairvoyance, Silverdun felt sure that his anger would only give the old man pleasure. Clearly no one was coming to help him. He couldn't force the door. The window was of no use. He certainly couldn't spellcraft his way through the stone of the walls or the ceiling.
There must be something in the room that might help him. If nothing else, that stray bit of wire for him to practice his lock-picking skills with. He knelt and looked under the bed, finding nothing. He opened the drawers of the small bureau and felt around inside them, then pulled each drawer out and inspected it top and bottom. He pulled the bureau out from the wall and f
elt the back. He tipped it over and examined its bottom. Nothing. He took the mirror from the wall and found that it was indeed hung on its hook by a length of wire, but after a moment's experimentation it became clear that the stuff was far too flimsy to be of any use at lock picking. The bed frame was of wood, fitted with pegs, not nails.
After several minutes, Silverdun had been over every solid item in the small room and found nothing that might help him in any way. All that was left were the pillow and the mattress. Angrily, Silverdun stabbed at the pillow with the tip of his sword, sending goose down flying. The sight of the feathers floating aimlessly to the floor incensed Silverdun for some reason he could not explain, and he began to hack furiously at the mattress with the edge of his blade, sending clouds of down into the air. Again and again he struck at it, ignoring the pain in his skull.
He'd nearly shredded the entire mattress when he both heard and felt his sword strike metal. There, in the midst of the now-ruined mattress, was a silver key. It had been hidden in the mattress. Silverdun snatched it up and put it in the lock. It fit perfectly.
Master Jedron and Than were standing in the hallway. Jedron was smirking.
"Took you long enough," he said.
"And what, pray tell, was the point of that exercise?" Silverdun barked. "To teach me how to disarm bedclothes?"
"No," said Jedron. "It's to teach you to stop waiting around for other people to tell you what to do and think for yourself for a change."
Jedron peered into Silverdun's room. A layer of goose down covered the floor. "I hope you don't mind sleeping on wood slats," he said, smiling. "Because that's the only mattress you're getting."
-MaTula,''The Secret City"
imha awoke in his tiny chamber freezing, with the same pit of dread lodged in his stomach that had been there for weeks. Despite the chill, his chest and arms were covered in perspiration. Every day now he awoke feeling the same way. The cold, the unease, the sweat. Timha dressed quickly, pulling on his robes and a long cloak that did something to keep the chill out, but the robes absorbed the sweat and left him feeling a bit slimy.
It was always cold in the city. Always cold, always gray. No matter where Timha went, the wind always seemed to find its way at him, invading his robes, making him shiver anew, a hundred times a day. Even the fires in the common rooms seemed to burn colder, with a sickly blue aura around them. Timha couldn't remember the last time he'd felt warm.
He left his chamber, taking care not to look out the windows that he passed in the hall on the way to the stair. He kept his eyes on the floor, concentrating on the millennia-old patterns in the tiles, faded and cracked, but still clearly visible; a vision of an earlier era. Timha and his colleagues were led to believe that the city had been built even before the Rauane Envedun-e, the Age of Purest Silver, when magic filled the world like sunlight. Well, it was certainly old. It needn't be that old in order to impress Timha.
Timha made it to the staircase without glancing out a single window. It was strange how they attracted the eye, despite the deep unpleasantness that looking outside engendered. It was the sky. Timha did not need to see the sky today. Not today when the dread was so bad that it felt as though his insides were liquefying.
All night the intricate dance of the Project paraded before him in dreams. He could not escape those motions; the precision and complexity of them consumed his waking hours and his sleeping ones as well now. Not that he slept much, or well.
Timha was still seeing those motions when he emerged in the dining hall, glowering at the other journeyers and their apprentices. They seemed at ease, restful, even content as they sat lingering over their breakfasts before the stoves that were never quite hot enough. Well, why shouldn't they be content? Each had his or her own little bit of the overall structure of the Project to contend with, and it was challenging, rewarding work for them. They knew that their presence here meant that they were the best and most respected thaumaturges in the empire, long may it sail. They knew that when their work here was done they would retire, wealthy and respected, to villas on the fore moorings of the fairest cities, perhaps even the new City of Mab itself.
What they did not know was the thing that made Timha sweat at night, that made him lightheaded and anxious nearly every moment of the day. They were spared this knowledge because it would do no good for any of them to know.
"Morning, Timha," said Giaco, one of the Elements experts, leader of the group who were working on improving the outer shell. "How are things in the heart of the beast?" Giaco and his team were close with one another; several of them had taught together at a university in one of the flag cities. They were working on the project of their lifetimes, with access to only the best supplies and research materials, a limitless budget, and an army of apprentices who would gladly do anything they asked. Moreover, they were doing all this in Mab's own Secret City, one of the most hallowed locations in all of the empire. This was Mab's redoubt. This was where she had come to have her children, where she mourned the loss of her husbands. This was where Beozho wrote his Works. Giaco and his friends were in paradise.
Timha hated them for it.
"Things are progressing very well, thanks," said Timha primly. He sat at a table by himself, took tea from an apprentice without looking up, and tried to ignore the dance that twirled in his mind. The cruel irony of his position struck him now as it often did, that he was suffering not because he was a poor worker or because he was intellectually inferior to his fellows, but rather because he was their better. Master Valmin had taken Timha under his wing early on, brought him into the core team, gone over the more esoteric and taboo portions of the Project with him. At the beginning, they had all been excited, and none more so than Timha. It was the position of a lifetime. And while he certainly had reservations about the use of the Black Art, Valmin had assured him that it was for a noble cause, that evil could indeed be harnessed for good.
For the sake of the empire, Valmin had said, an encouraging smile on his face. Think of the soldiers who gutted their enemies on the battlefield, of the generals who sent their troops into the fray knowing that not all of them would return. All great enterprises, Valmin had told him, have some element of darkness at their heart. Better to name it and know it, to contain it so that it did only the harm it was intended to do.
What Valmin had not told Timha, or perhaps had not known himself, was that working the Black Art was not something one did lightly. It was powerful but draining, both mentally and emotionally, and the feeling of ... Timha could only describe it as sinfulness never left him, though Timha believed in neither Aba nor the Chthonics, nor anything else for that matter. The Black Art wormed its way into your bones. Its harsh workings yielded impressive results, but each day Timha had felt as though a part of his soul were draining away.
And that was before all the trouble had begun.
It started with a realization that Timha himself had made, reviewing an extremely complex passage in the notes of Hy Pezho, the Project's original creator. Timha had read the passage over and over again, trying to deduce its meaning and finding himself unable. He'd brought it to Valmin, who had retired to his own quarters with it for most of a day. When Valmin had emerged, it had been with a dour face. Their task was going to be much more difficult than they had at first believed.
Valmin had been given the most prestigious portion of the work, and he had shared it with Timha and a few select others because they had proven themselves the best of the best in their respective fields of study. And now they were the ones who would have their throats cut by the Bel Zheret if they failed. The others would be sent home, perhaps with a bit of disgrace, or more likely with no comment at all, and Valmin and Timha and a few others would be gutted like fish and left to rot in the stinking basements of the Secret City where the raw materials for the Black Art were kept.
Timha shuddered at the thought. The basements were the only things that bothered him more than the sky.
Nothing was what it was
supposed to be.
Timha lingered over breakfast, but it still ended too quickly. He made his way down a twisting corridor to Master Valmin's chambers. The doors were manned by a pair of armed guards who opened the door for Timha, waving a deglamouring wand over him, relaxing their grips on their weapons only when they determined that Timha was indeed Timha.
Valmin's office smelled of burnt tea, chalk, and bitter herbs. Valmin was already at his desk when Timha entered. The room was filled with stacks and stacks of books, most of which were unavailable to the general populace. Some were proscribed by Mab, forbidden even to Master Valmin himself, and the fact that these books were currently resting open in front of Valmin was as good a sign as any that the Project was in deep trouble.
Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow Page 10
