by Greg Keyes
She needed that knife to cut a strip of cloth. She couldn’t wait much longer, either, or she would lose so much blood that she wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.
Cursing under her breath, she rose unsteadily and minced back toward the light.
He was lying facedown, and something about his position suggested to her that he wasn’t faking. The lamp had fallen but hadn’t shattered; it lay on its side guttering, nearly out. She propped it up. He’d dropped his knife, too, and hers was still poking out from between his ribs.
Trying not to faint, Alis took his knife and carefully drove it into his spine, as she had intended to do earlier.
That drew a gasp from beside the stairs. Then a whimper.
The girl. She had forgotten the girl.
“Stay there,” Alis said tersely. “Stay just where you are or I’ll kill you like I killed him.”
The girl didn’t answer; she just continued whimpering.
Alis righted the lantern, cut a piece of her breeches, tied a tourniquet, then sat down to catch her breath and listen. Had anyone heard the Nightstrider scream? If they had, would they be able to determine where it came from?
Eventually, yes. That meant she needed to get back into the tunnels, the ones men couldn’t remember. They would have a hard time following her there.
“Girl, listen to me,” she said.
A face peered up from the bundle of gray cloth.
“I don’t want to die,” she said softly.
“Do what I ask, and I promise you that you will live,” Alis told her.
“But you killed him.”
“Yes, I did. Will you listen to me?”
A small pause.
“Yes.”
“Good. Do you have food? Water? Wine?”
“Reck has some food, I think. He had some bread earlier. And wine, I think.”
“Then get it for me. And anything else he has on him. But don’t try to run. You’ve heard how knives can be thrown?”
“I saw a man on the street do it once. He split an apple.”
“I can do better than that. If you try to run, I’ll put this right in your back. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ellen.”
“Ellen, do what I asked you. Get his things and bring them here.”
She watched the girl approach the body. When she touched him, she began to cry.
“Did you like him?” Alis asked.
“No. He was mean. But I’ve never seen someone dead.”
And I’ve never killed anyone before, Alis thought. Despite her training, it still didn’t seem real.
“Ellen,” Alis asked, “do all the guards have girls with them?”
“No, lady. Only the Nightstriders.”
“And what are you doing with them, exactly?”
The girl hesitated.
“Ellen?”
“The king says there are secret tunnels down here, tunnels that only girls can see. We’re supposed to find them for him. The men are to protect us.”
“Protect you from me?” Alis asked, feigning a little smile.
Ellen’s eyes gleamed with terror. “N-no,” she stuttered. “The king said a murderer was loose in the dungeons. A man. A big man.”
Ellen had worked as she spoke and had assembled a little pile of things. She picked them up but seemed more reluctant to approach Alis than she had the dead man, which made good sense.
“There,” Alis said. “Good girl.”
“Please,” Ellen whispered. “I won’t tell.”
Alis hardened her heart. The only advantage she had was Robert’s belief that she was dead. If the girl described her—or, worse, knew who she was—that advantage would be lost. She tightened her grip on the knife.
“Just come here,” Alis told her.
Blinking away tears, the girl approached.
“Do it quick, please,” Ellen said, so low that Alis almost couldn’t hear.
Alis looked into the young woman’s eyes, imagined the life going out of them, and sighed. She gripped her shoulder and felt it trembling.
“Keep your word, Ellen,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me. Just say he excused himself to answer nature’s demands, and then you found him dead. I swear by all the saints it is the right thing to do.”
Ellen’s face shone with wary hope.
“You won’t throw the knife at me?”
“No. Just tell me how you came into the dungeons.”
“Through the Arn Tower stair.”
“Right,” Alis muttered. “Is it still guarded?”
“By ten men,” Ellen confirmed.
“Is there anything else you know that might help me?”
The girl thought for a moment. “They’re filling the dungeons in,” she said.
Alis nodded wearily. She already knew that, too.
“Go on,” Alis told her. “Find your way out.”
Ellen stood and took a few trembling steps, then ran. Alis listened to her skittering footfalls recede, knowing she should have killed the girl—and glad she hadn’t.
Then she turned her attention to the Nightstrider’s things.
He didn’t have much; after all, he hadn’t come down there to stay. It was more luck than anything else that he’d had a kerchief with a piece of hard bread and cheese wrapped in it and greater luck still that he’d brought a wineskin. She took those items, his knife, a leather strap from his baldric, the lamp, and his tinderbox.
Alis had a little bread and wine, then hauled herself up and returned to the relative safety of the ancient passageway.
When she felt she was far enough away, she stopped and dressed her arm again. The wound wasn’t as bad as she feared; the knife had been forced into the two bones of her forearm and had lodged there until she tore free. That was why he hadn’t been able to stab her again and again, as she had him, or turn the knife in the wound.
Yes, this had been, all things considered, a lucky day. Or night. She no longer had the faintest sense of when it was.
She reckoned it had been more than a nineday that she’d been trapped down there. But it might be more than twice that, since she had gone there to free Leovigild Ackenzal.
It was probably best that he had refused to accompany her. On her way back out of the dungeons she’d found that the passage was heavily guarded. That wasn’t good, because it meant her presence had been detected, and it was the only sure way she knew to get out.
Even so, the labyrinth of passages obvious and obscure was so baroque that there had to be another point of egress. She wondered how they knew she had entered the dungeons, but Prince Robert wasn’t stupid. And due to his…condition…he was able to remember the hidden ways. He must have posted guards or set up some sort of alarm. Possibly Hespero or some other churchman had helped with that, but it may have been as simple as flour on the floor to record her tracks. She had been moving in darkness, after all, and wouldn’t have seen it.
For the last nine days the usurper had been finding the passages and blocking them up. The dungeons shuddered with the work of royal engineers, mining and sapping.
There were plenty of passages that he hadn’t found, but none of them seemed to go anywhere except back to the dungeon. And the dungeon was being systematically filled in and closed off, at least those sections which might allow her access to the castle. One whole section—complete with prisoners—had been sealed off already. Those trapped there weren’t dead yet; sometimes she could still hear them pleading for food and water. Their cries were getting weaker, though. She wondered what they had done to end up in the dungeon in the first place and whether they deserved their fate.
Feeling a little better as the food dissolved in her belly, she headed back into the depths. There was one area of the dungeons she had avoided, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t have to brave it, even though it was one place Robert dare not cut off entirely. But she could no longer bow to that fear; the food sh
e’d just taken was probably the last she would get. Whether Ellen said anything or not, a Nightstrider was dead, and Robert doubtless would increase the size of his patrols.
She had lived until now by taking scraps from prisoners, and she’d had a fresh source of water up until two days before, when the walls had blocked it off. Now the only water she had access to was dirty and diseased. She knew that mixing the wine with it would allow her to drink it for a while, but the wine would last only for a few days at best.
From here on out, she would only get weaker.
So she turned toward the whispering.
It wasn’t like the voices of the prisoners. At first she’d thought it was her own thoughts, talking to her, a sign that she was going mad. The voice didn’t make much sense, at least not in words, but what words it spoke were freighted with images and sensations that did not belong in a human head.
But then she remembered a trip to the dungeons with Muriele and knew that the voice she heard was that of the Kept.
The Kept was called that to avoid naming what it really was: the last of the demon race that had enslaved both Men and Sefry—the last of the Skasloi.
As she drew nearer to his domain, the whispering grew louder, and images brightened, scents sharpened. Her fingers felt like claws, and when she put her hand against the wall, she felt a rough scraping, as if her hands were made of stone or metal. She smelled something like rotting pears and sulphur, saw in bright flashes a landscape of scaly trees without leaves, a strange and huge sun, a black fortress by the sea so ancient that its walls and spires were weathered like a mountain. Her body felt at turns small and enormous.
I am me, she insisted soundlessly. Alis Berrye. My father was Walis Berrye; my mother was born Wenefred Vicars…
But her childhood seemed impossibly far away. With effort she remembered the house, a rambling mansion so poorly kept that some rooms had floors that had rotted through. When she tried to picture it, however, she envisioned a stone labyrinth instead.
Her mother’s face was a blur surrounded by flaxen hair. Her father was even dimmer, though she had seen him only a year ago. Her elder sister, Rowyne, had blue eyes, like her, and rough hands that stroked her hair.
She’d been five when the lady in the dark dress came and took her away, and after that it was ten years before she saw her parents again, and then they had just been bringing her to Eslen.
Even then they hadn’t known the truth of the matter, that the reason she had been returned to them was so that the king would notice her and take her for his mistress.
Her mother died the next year, and her father came to visit two years later, hoping Alis could persuade the king to grant him funds to drain the festering swamp that had crept over most of the canton’s once-arable land. William had given him the money and an engineer, and that was the last she had seen of anyone in her family.
Sister Margery with her crooked smile and curly red hair; Sister Grene with her big nose and wide eyes; Elder Mestra Cathmay, iron-haired and whip-thin, with eyes that saw into everything—they had been her family.
All now dead, the voice taunted. So very dead. And yet death is no longer very distant…
Suddenly there was a sense of floating, and it took Alis a moment to understand that she was falling, so many and strange were the sensations that came with the voice.
She put out her arms and legs in a flailing attempt to find something to grab. Incredibly, she succeeded as her palms struck flat against walls before they were half-extended. Pain shot up her arms as if they were trying to yank from her shoulders, and the agony of her wound wrenched a scream out of her. Then she fell again, her knees and elbows scraping against the walls of the shaft until white light blossomed in the soles of her feet and struck up through her, knocking her cleanly out of her body and into the black winds high above.
Singing brought her back, a rough, raspy canting in a language she did not know. Her face was pressed against a damp, tacky floor. When she lifted it, pain shot across her skull and down her spine.
“Oh!” she gasped.
The singing stopped.
“Alis?” A voice asked.
“Who is that?” she answered, feeling her head. It was sticky, and she found a cut at the hairline. None of her bones seemed to be broken.
“It is I, Lo Videicho,” the voice replied.
The darkness was absolute, and the walls made strange the sound, but Alis guessed the speaker was no more than four or five kingsyards away. She reached down to her girdle and the dagger she kept there.
“That sounds Vitellian,” she said, trying to keep him talking so she would know where he was.
“Ah, no, my dulcha,” he said. “Vitellian is vinegar, lemon juice, salt. I speak honey, wine, figs. Safnian, midulcha.”
“Safnian.” She had the knife now, and securing her grip on it, she sat up. “You’re a prisoner?”
“I was,” Lo Videicho said. “Now, I do not know. They bricked in the way out. I told them they should kill me, but they did not.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You told it to my friend the music man, before they took him away.”
Leoff.
“They took him away?”
“Oh, yes. Your visit was quite upsetting, I think. They took him off.”
“Where to?”
“Oh, I know. You think I did not know? I know.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Alis said. “But I would like to know, as well.”
“I have lost my mind, you understand,” Lo Videicho confided.
“You sound fine to me,” Alis lied.
“No, no, it’s quite true. I am mad. But I think I should wait until we are out of these dungeons before I tell you where our friend was taken.”
Alis began feeling around for a wall. She found one and put her back to it.
“I don’t know the way out,” she said.
“No, but you know the way in.”
“The way in is—you mean the way into here, don’t you?”
“Yes, sly one,” Lo Videicho said. “You fell down it.”
“Then if you know that, why don’t you just leave? Why do you need me?”
“I would never leave a lady,” the man said. “But more than that…” She heard a metallic rattling.
“Oh. You can’t leave. You’re in a cell.” She must have fallen into an anteroom rather than the cell itself.
“It’s a palace, my palace,” Lo Videicho said. “But the doors are all locked. Do you have a key?”
“I might be able to get you out. We might come to some agreement. But first you must tell me why you are here.”
“Why am I here? Because the saints are filthy bastards, every one. Because they favor the wicked and bring grief to the kind.”
“That’s probably true,” Alis acknowledged, “but I’d still like a more specific answer.”
“I am here because I loved a woman,” he said. “I am here because my heart was torn out, and this is the grave they put me in.”
“What woman?”
His voice changed. “Beautiful, gentle, kind. She is dead. I saw her finger.”
A little chill went up Alis’ spine.
Safnian. There had been a Safnian engaged to the princess Lesbeth. She had gone missing, and word was that she had been betrayed by her fiancé. She remembered William mumbling his name in his sleep; it almost seemed he had been apologizing to him.
“Are you…are you Prince Cheiso?”
“Ah!” the man gasped. There was a pause, and then she heard a quiet sound she thought might be weeping.
“You are Cheiso, who was betrothed to Lesbeth Dare.”
The snuffling grew louder, but now it sounded more like laughter. “That was my name,” he said. “Before, before. Yes, how clever. Clever.”
“I heard you had been tortured to death.”
“He wanted me alive,” Cheiso said. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why. Or maybe he forgot, that’s all.”
/> Alis closed her eyes, trying to adjust her thinking, add the Safnian prince to her plans. Did he command troops? But they would have to sail here, wouldn’t they? A long way.
But he would surely be useful.
Cheiso shrieked suddenly, a throat-tearing howl of rage that hardly sounded human. She heard a meaty thud and guessed that he was throwing himself against the walls even as he continued to scream in his own language. She realized she was gripping the knife so hard that her fingers were numb.
After a time his shrieks subsided into full-belly sobbing. On impulse, Alis took her hand from the knife and felt her way through the darkness until she encountered the iron bars of his cell.
“Come here,” she said. “Come here.”
He might kill her, but death was so near, she had begun to lose respect for it. If a moment’s kindness was what sent her from the lands of fate, then so be it.
She could feel him hesitate, but then she heard a sliding sound, and a moment later a hand brushed hers. She gripped it, and tears started in her eyes at the contact. It felt like years since anyone had held her. She felt his hand tremble; the palm was smooth and soft, the palm of a prince.
“I am less than a man,” he gasped. “I am much less.”
Alis’ heart gripped; she tried to disengage her hand, but he held it all the tighter.
“It’s all right,” Alis said. “I only want to touch your face.”
“I no longer have a face,” he replied, but nevertheless he let her hand go. Tentatively, she reached up until she felt the beard on his cheek, then traced higher, where she found a mass of scars.
So much pain. She reached for her knife again. A single motion into the bowl of his eye and he would forget what they had done to him, forget his lost love. She could hear in his voice and feel in his grip that he was broken. Despite his bravado and talk of revenge, there wasn’t much left of him.
But her duty wasn’t to him. It was to Muriele and her children—and in a way to poor dead William. She had loved him in her fashion; he had been a decent man in a position no decent man ought to hold.
Like this Safnian prince.
“Prince Cheiso,” she whispered.
“I was,” he replied.
“You are,” she insisted. “Listen to me. I will free you from your cage, and together we will find a way out of here.”
