Knowing he was right, wretchedly glad that it was no worse, Joanna nodded miserably. With a deep bow, Caris faded into the darkness of the hall. She stood still for a few moments with her hands resting on the satiny wood of the doorframe, wishing she knew, if not what to do, at least what to feel. Though the attic stairs ran close to her room, she did not hear his soundless tread as he ascended.
As Caris had guessed they might, both he and Antryg were gone from the house by the time Joanna woke. She had breakfast with Magister Magus, during which a solemn manservant in a truly startling livery of rose-hued plush announced that the Marquise of Inglestoke had arrived and awaited audience, and left him robing philosophically for the pursuit of his trade.
Although Antryg’s spell of languages allowed her to understand and be understood, Joanna had no idea of the written word. Caris, aware of that, had drawn his map to Narwahl Skipfrag’s house on Cheveley Street in careful detail, and she had no difficulty finding the place. It was about two miles from the square where Magister Magus had his lodgings, through crowded streets of shop fronts, offices, and squares of tenement lodgings where costermongers yelled their wares from handcarts and beggars whined to the passers-by; but having walked almost eighty miles in the last week, Joanna found the distance no concern.
It was only when she was within half a block of the place that she saw that two sasenna guarded its door.
She halted on the pavement, looking up the short flight of granite steps to the narrow frontage of the house. She shifted her purse on her shoulder, slipped the map from the pocket of her voluminous skirt and checked it, and counted doors from the corner—but in her heart, she knew the guarded door was Narwahl Skipfrag’s. He was a friend of the wizards; the black livery of the sasenna was of the soft, samurai-like cut of the Church sasenna, and she could see the sun emblem of the Sole God like gory flowers upon their shoulders.
For their benefit, she looked up and down the street again, sighed, and shook her head, then walked away down the flagway, still gravely studying her map.
At the corner, she turned and shoved the map into her purse. This was a larger street, bustling with foot and carriage traffic and redolent of horse droppings, garbage, and flies. Across the lane a furniture mender had moved most of his shop out onto the flagway to take advantage of the forenoon sun; a noodle shop run by a couple of braided-haired Old Believers released clouds of steam into the air and Joanna shuddered, thinking what the heat must be like inside. She walked along the pavement until she found the narrow mouth of the alley and, with a slight feeling of trepidation, picked up her skirts and turned into that blue and stinking canyon.
As she had suspected from the layout of Magister Magus’ house, the houses of this row all had little yards behind them—by the smell of it, with the privy up against the back fence. Garbage choked the unpaved lane; nameless liquids reduced the dirt underfoot to nauseous slime. Against the faded boards of the fences, the red wax of the Church’s seal stood out brilliantly and saved her even the trouble of counting back gates.
She glanced up and down the alley and put her eye to a knothole in the rickety gate. There was no one in the narrow little yard, but, as on the gate, she could see the Church’s seal had been affixed to the back door at the top of its little flight of steps. She tested the gate, pulled her Swiss Army knife from her purse, and slipped it under the seal, breaking it from the wood; then she pushed the gate softly open and went in.
The house stood silent. Empty, she thought—but in that case, why post guards?
The only friend the wizards had at Court, she thought. The Regent had turned back, returning to Angelshand, perhaps—going to visit Cerdic, certainly... Caris had said he was growing increasingly paranoid....
She was aware of her heart beating achingly as she mounted the steps and leaned over to look through the window beside the door.
She saw a library, shadowy and barely visible giving an impression of comfortable, old-fashioned chairs and a heavy chimney breast with carving over it. No fire—but then in summer there wouldn’t be.
Joanna took a deep breath, formulated her cover story about a dying sister who must see Dr. Skipfrag or perish, and thrust her knife under the wax of the seal. It cracked clear; she found her wallet, extracted a credit card, and used the thin, hard plastic to raise the latch.
The house was empty. She knew it, standing in the brown dimness of the hall. Carefully, she untied and removed her low-heeled shoes, cursed her yards of petticoat as she gathered them in hand to keep from knocking over furniture, and moved as soundlessly as she could along the wall toward the stairs.
In the bedroom on the second floor, she found a ruffled bed, the covers flung back but the creased sheets long cold. A drawer was open in the top of the highboy; peering into it, Joanna could see that something had been taken hastily from it scattering cravats and gloves. On the marble top of the highboy a few grains of black powder were scattered, and the experience of the last week had taught Joanna the look and smell of old-fashioned black gunpowder.
Silently, she ascended the next flight of steps.
From uncurtained windows, a whitish light suffused the attic; the trapped heat of days made the room stuffy. The smell of old blood nearly turned her sick. It was splattered everywhere, turned dark brown now against the white paint of the walls and the pale plaster of the ceiling; little droplets of it had dripped back onto the pooled and rivuleted floor. For some reason, the sight of it brought back to her the memory of how hot the sasennan’s blood had been, splattering against her face; she shut her teeth tightly against a clench of nausea.
The calm part of her that could analyze program glitches at three in the morning and that told her it was stupid to fall in love with a middle-aged wizard in another universe asked, What the hell could have caused this?
Curious, she took a step forward. She drew back her stockinged foot immediately as it touched something sharp. She saw it was a small shard of broken glass. When she bent to pick it up, she saw there were others, sparkling in the wan light on the bloodstained floor and, she noticed, embedded here and there in the walls, as well. She held the shard up to the light. It was edged with old blood.
With a nervous shake of her hand she threw it from her. She didn’t know why, but there was something in the touch of it that filled her with loathing and with fear. There wasn’t a great deal of glass—not more than one smashed beaker’s worth—but it was widely scattered. Picking her way carefully, she crossed the room to the laboratory tables beneath the dormer windows on the other side.
It had been a long time since she’d taken her Fundamentals of Electricity course in college, but she recognized most of what she saw there—primitive cell-batteries with their lined-up dishes of water, a vacuum pump, and crudely insulated copper wire. An iron-and-copper sparking generator sat in the midst of a tangle of leads, and a glass Volta pistol gleamed faintly in the sunlight on a comer of the table. Other objects whose use she did not know lay among the familiar, archaic equipment—convoluted glass tubing and little dishes of colored salts. At the back of the litter sat a seamless glass ball, silvered over with what looked like mercury, gleaming evilly in the diffuse light. Joanna shrank from touching it, repelled without knowing why. Above the table, in the middle of the whitewashed wall, was the fresh scar of a bullet hole; beside her hand, the wooden table’s edge was also freshly scarred, as if someone had smashed a glass vessel against it in a rage.
Her first thought was, Antryg would know what happened.
Her second, as she heard the soft jostle of an unwary step of booted feet somewhere in the house below her was, I have no line of retreat.
They’ll have seen the broken-off seals, she thought, even as she scanned the low ceiling for a trap door to the roof. There was none. The windows might have been made to open once upon a time, but they had long since been barred to prevent the ingress of thieves. She thought, There’s a wardrobe in the bedroom—they might pass me by and I could get out behind the
m... She had to fight with everything in her to walk, silently and carefully, instead of running to the stairs.
It cost her her escape. The two sasenna and the man in the gray garb of a Witchfinder had just reached the second floor as she came silently around the corner of the narrow stair.
Chapter XIV
“WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS, GIRL?”
Joanna did not look up. The Witchfinder Peelbone’s eyes, like his voice, were thin, pale, and very cold and filled her with the panicky sensation that he knew everything about her; she kept her gaze down on her hands, which lay like two detached white things on the grime-impregnated table top before her. She could feel her heart hammering against her ribs beneath the blue striped cotton of her boned bodice and the crawl of panic-sweat down her back, but some small voice in her mind kept repeating, Don’t say anything. He can use anything that you say, but he can’t use your silence.
“We know you have them.” She heard, rather than saw him rise from his big, carved chair on the opposite side of the table and heard the rustle of his clothes as he came around toward her. The room was windowless and lit by sconces backed by metal reflectors, one on either side of his chair; his shadow passed in front of one. When he stood beside her in the heat of the room, she could smell his body and the sweat in his clothes. She knew he was going to touch her; but even so, she flinched when he seized her hair and forced her to look up at him. “That’s an expensive dress,” he said quietly, and she hated the feel of his hand moving in her hair. “And your hair is clean. You spent last night somewhere. Answer me!”
His hand tightened, twisting at her hair unmercifully. She had forgotten from her grade school days how painful it was to have one’s hair pulled. She forced herself to look up into that narrow, handsome face, with the eyes of colorless, austere brown under colorless brows, gritting her teeth against the wrenching pain.
If I don’t say A, he can’t say B, she thought desperately. She had always used silence as a weapon in arguments and had found it an effective one against everyone from her mother to Gary. There was a spy novel, she remembered, wherein someone had sat through hours of interrogation in silence....
She remembered what Caris had told her about the Inquisition’s methods and felt sick with fear at the thought.
The grip released suddenly, pushing her away with force enough to rock her on the backless wooden stool where she sat. She caught her balance and looked up at the Witchfinder again, trying desperately not to feel like a sulky, defiant child, trying not to think beyond the moment. The cold eyes stared into hers; she was reminded of a shark’s eyes, with no more humanity in them than two round circles of metal.
“Such silence can’t spring from innocence, I think,” Peelbone said softly. “Very good—we know you are guilty of something. The only question is—what?”
She remembered him saying, We can’t afford these waters muddied. She would ultimately be guilty, she knew, of whatever was convenient for them, even as they would sooner have killed Caris, back at Kymil, rather than risk him cluttering up their case with truth. When she said nothing, she saw the long, bracketing lines around his mouth move a little, like snakes, with irritation.
He raised one white forefinger. Joanna heard the guard behind her stool step forward and didn’t resist when she was pulled to her feet; she was fighting a desperate terror, wondering how much they knew already and whether, if they searched her purse, they’d be able to backtrack to Magister Magus’ house from Caris’ map. She thanked the guardian god of wizards that she’d put the map in her purse instead of her pocket—there was so much other junk in there that it could easily be passed over.
The guard held her arms behind her, a hateful grip and terrifyingly strong. She expected Peelbone to strike her, as he had struck Caris back in Kymil. All her life she had managed to avoid physical violence of any kind, and the very unfamiliarity of being touched and handled added to her dread. But the Witchfinder studied her in silence for a few moments, then almost casually reached forward and ripped open her bodice, revealing the thin, sweat-soaked muslin of the shift beneath.
“Child,” he said quietly, “if I had you stripped naked and thrown into the room where the rapists are kept chained, it would not in any way impair your ability to tell us about your friends an hour later.” His disinterested eyes moved to the grinning guard. “Now take her away.”
It took everything she had to bite back the desperate impulse to cry Wait... as the guard pushed her out of the room and into the torchlit hall. Her jaw set, she kept her eyes straight ahead of her, forcing herself not to see the leers of the two other guards out in the hall or hear their comments; she saw only the smokestains on the stone arches of the low ceiling and how the shadows of the torches jerked and quavered in the drafts that came down from the narrow stairways to the guardrooms above. The St. Cyr fortress, at the tip of the island, which the city of Angelshand had long since outgrown, was an ancient one, and its very walls stank of the lives that had rotted to their ends there.
The cell to which they took her was a dank and tiny stone closet that smelled like a privy. By the light of the torch that burned smokely in a holder near the low door, Joanna could see that it had only one other human occupant, not counting roaches of a size and arrogance to make the San Serano orthoptera blush with shame—an old woman, wearing the remains of the black robes of a mage or an Old Believer, who sat huddled in the comer as Joanna was pushed inside and the heavy wooden door closed behind her. The woman barely looked up as the heavy bolts were shot outside. Joanna, trembling, stood for a few moments at the top of the short flight of steps down into the room.
I can’t cry now, she told herself desperately, her throat suddenly gripped by a surge of betraying pain and her eyes hot. It would weaken her, she knew; unless she kept keyed to this point, she could never face the Witchfinder in silence for the second interview she knew was coming. But neither Antryg nor Caris knew where she was—and even if they did, they would be unable to rescue her. I never wanted this, she thought, I never asked for this! I was hauled here...
Antryg had said, You are in this world under my protection...
Her legs felt weak as she descended the few steps. Raised in the protection of a technological society and under the enormous bulwark of Constitutional Law, flawed though it might be, she had never before found herself in the position of being so utterly without recourse. Her aloneness terrified her. Even if she told them everything they wanted to know and betrayed Antryg, Caris, and poor, cowardly, charming Magister Magus to torture and death, she had the horrible certainty that it would not help her. She could not explain how she herself came to this world. She was their accomplice against her will. She had done murder....
You didn’t panic then, she told herself grimly, and it saved you. For God’s sake don’t panic now.
A faint snore made her look down. The old woman, thin and fragile-looking, was curled up in the corner, sleeping with the light sleep of the very aged. As she watched, Joanna shuddered to see an enormous roach emerge from a crack in the stone wall and make its unconcerned way down the old woman’s shoulder. Her hand cringing from the task, Joanna leaned down and swept the thing away with such violence that it shot across the tiny cell and hit the opposite wall with an audible crack.
The old woman’s faded blue eyes opened and blinked up at her under lashes gone white as milk. “She was only walking, after all,” she said in a reproving voice. And, when Joanna blinked, confused, the old lady shook her head and gestured with one trembling finger at the other wall, where the enormous insect was just disappearing through a crack. “Not doing harm.”
Joanna swallowed queasily.
“They don’t eat much,” the old lady added, “and nor do I—so it’s not that they’re taking aught from me.” She squinted up at Joanna’s sickened face. “Were you raised in privies, likely you’d be loathly, too.”
“Sorry,” Joanna said and then, knowing what the old lady obviously expected, she turned toward
the departed cockroach. “Sorry,” she said, more loudly, and the old lady nodded her satisfaction.
For a long moment, those pale, ancient eyes looked up at her in silence; rather gingerly, Joanna gathered up her skirts and sat in the filthy straw beside her. “I’m Joanna Sheraton,” she said, and the old woman nodded.
“Minhyrdin the Fair they call me. Are they arresting the dog wizards now, too? For you’re none of the Council’s.”
Joanna shook her head. “No—at least, I don’t know. I’m not a mage at all.”
The old woman clucked to herself. “Never say so, child; they’ll put you in with the street girls or the murderesses, instead of in those cells built to hold the mageborn. They took away my knitting....” She looked fussily around her, as if half expecting to find it hidden under the straw. Joanna shivered and paranoically checked the straw around her skirts, hating the thought that one of the old lady’s pet roaches might be crawling in her several layers of petticoat.
You are going to be raped, tortured, and killed, she thought, and you’re worrying about bugs in your skirts? Tears of wretchedness and fear lay very close to the surface, but she couldn’t keep from smiling with wry irony at her own capacity for the trivial.
“How did you come here, then?” the old lady asked, as if they’d met by chance at a Mendelssohn recital.
Joanna folded her arms around her knees, finding a curious easing of her fears in talking. “I was trying to see Dr. Narwahl Skipfrog,” she said. “But I—I think he’s dead, isn’t he? Someone was killed there.” She shivered, remembering that gruesome scene. “In the attic—there was blood splattered everywhere, even on the ceiling. That must have been the arteries. It must have happened days ago but the place still stank of it. The Witchfinder’s men...” She swallowed. The bruises their grip had left were beginning to ache on her arms.
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