“Unlike some people, I don’t find it necessary to wander off sightseeing every time I enter a new city.”
He smiled. “Maybe you should. Your horizons could do with rather a lot of broadening.”
Dirk left the table before she could respond to that, so she settled for calling him a few choice names under her breath to vent her wrath. The innkeeper, seeing that she was alone again, hurried to her table to see if she wished to order more ale. She declined the offer, deciding to drink the remainder of Dirk’s unfinished ale instead.
She drank determinedly, then took the chain with its tiny silver bow and arrow out of her pocket and fingered it thoughtfully. She had never owned a piece of jewelry before. In Mil, jewelry was something you stole and then fenced to the Brotherhood for whatever you could get for it.
It really was a pretty little thing. But it was frivolous and she could not believe Dirk had risked their last remaining coin to win it. With a snort of disgust for Dirk and his stupid present, she slipped the chain over her head and tucked the pendant inside her shirt. The little bow rested just above her breast and the silver was warm against her skin.
She would keep it there until she decided what to do with it.
Chapter 45
It was a mixed blessing being away from Avacas and the Hall of Shadows, the High Priestess mused. On one hand, she didn’t like being out of touch with what was happening in the capital. On the other hand, all the events of import appeared to be happening around Antonov at the moment, and wherever he was, so she would be.
She was filled with a deep sense of satisfaction, now that Morna Provin was finally dead. For years she had privately fretted about the wisdom of letting that treacherous bitch live, but was helpless to do anything about it. In some bizarre pact that only men seemed prone to making, Antonov had given Wallin his word that Morna would remain unharmed while the duke lived, and so she had, for nigh on twenty years.
But it was over now. The Queen of Darkness was dead and good riddance to her.
Interesting, though, that someone had put an arrow through her left eye, putting an early end to what had been, up to that point, a very entertaining spectacle.
Antonov was certain Dirk Provin was responsible. She had scoffed at the suggestion until she had learned the fate of the Calliope. The destruction of Antonov’s ship was a particularly exquisite form of revenge. It would take someone who knew Antonov well to understand what his ship meant to him. Perhaps it was Dirk who killed Morna, although to make such a shot under pressure was not a skill that she thought the boy owned. He was a scholar, not a warrior, and the bow and arrow was the weapon of the lower classes. If Dirk had been responsible, she doubted he actually loosed the arrow that killed Morna himself. He must have had an accomplice. Probably one of his Baenlander cohorts.
That Marqel had stumbled across such amazing intelligence regarding his whereabouts was a stroke of good fortune that was long overdue. It was a pity that the girl had let the half-wit return to his ship, but to arrest him on Nova meant involving the Queen’s Guard, and once that happened, Kirsh would have learned of it and the boy would have been handed straight over to the Lion of Senet. While Belagren enjoyed a cordial relationship with Kirshov, his first loyalty was to his father. It would never have occurred to him that the High Priestess might want or need news of Dirk Provin even more than Antonov.
Belagren would have dearly loved to get her hands on Dirk. Or find Neris Veran. She was not particularly bothered which. She needed one of them. She needed someone to get through that damn Labyrinth.
The gate that had killed three of her people by showering them with acid had finally been cleared, only to reveal yet another barricade farther along the tunnel. How many of those damn things had Neris constructed? They had broken through twelve gates so far. Surely this was the last one?
The cost of keeping her people in Omaxin was draining her, the constant need to justify the expenditure to Antonov even more so. The Lion of Senet had agreed to fund the expedition when she was at the height of her power. But as the years dragged on, he began to question both the need and the cost of the venture.
Realizing she had just read the same sentence three times, Belagren threw down the letter she was holding in disgust. It was from Rudi Kalenkov, the Shadowdancer she had left in charge of the excavation in Omaxin.
Rudi was a small, ferrety little scholar with a good eye for organization, but the letter contained nothing but bad news. The engineers who had been examining the latest gate estimated that to dismantle it was going to cost a small fortune, and who knew how many lives. She had long ago given up thinking that anyone other than Neris could actually open it, unless, by some unforeseen miracle, she was able to find Dirk Provin, and then somehow convince him to aid her. Rudi needed workers brought in—stonemasons, laborers and the like—and they all expected to be housed, and fed and paid.
“Bad news?” Madalan inquired from the desk by the window, looking up from the more mundane dispatches from Avacas that Belagren could not be bothered with.
“Is it ever anything else from Omaxin?” she grumbled. The High Priestess walked to the window and looked down over the crashing ocean far below. “Why doesn’t it get any easier, Madalan?”
“It’s the price we’re paying for embarking on this course of action with only half the information we needed,” Madalan reminded her.
“We’ve Ella to blame for that,” Belagren snapped.
Madalan didn’t answer her. The High Priestess looked down at her aide with a frown. “You’re not agreeing with me.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Madalan pointed out.
“You think it’s my fault?”
“I think we’re all responsible, in part. The excitement of our discovery overruled prudence, I fear.”
“You’ll be fearing a damn sight more if something occurs that we haven’t forecast,” Belagren warned. “Goddess, do you realize that I wake every morning before the second sunrise, just to assure myself that it happens?”
“Worrying won’t make the second sun rise,” Madalan said, with infuriating logic. “The next Age of Shadows may not even happen in our lifetime.”
“And you don’t think I need to know that for certain?” she demanded. “You don’t think that I would love nothing more than to go to Antonov tomorrow and assure him that his sacrifice was worth it? That in return for the life of his son the Goddess has assured me there’ll not be another Age of Shadows for a thousand years?”
“Why not tell him that anyway?”
“Because with my luck the very next day the damn second sun will disappear again!”
“It’s got to be worth consideration, though. I don’t really understand all that stuff Neris told us, but I do recall that he drew a very big circle in the dirt. Presumably, the next Age of Shadows isn’t due for a long time yet.”
“I can’t build a whole religion on a probability, Madalan.”
“Not when sex, drugs and human sacrifices work so much better,” the older woman agreed wryly.
Belagren turned on her savagely. “Don’t say that! Not even in jest. You’re the right hand of the High Priestess of the Shadowdancers! Do you realize what would happen if people thought you had no faith?”
“I have faith,” Madalan assured her. “Mostly in your ability to turn every circumstance to your advantage. You’ll find a way to deal with this, Belagren. You always do. Besides, you might end up finding the Provin boy. If Marqel’s information is correct. Not that I trust a lot that comes out of the mouth of that sly little bitch.”
Belagren smiled briefly. “But she’s our sly little bitch. Actually, I think I’m starting to grow quite fond of her. Do you believe she had nothing to do with Caspona and Laleno dying?”
“Not for a minute,” Madalan declared.
“Neither do I,” the High Priestess agreed. “But she’s covered her tracks well.”
“A little too well for my liking,” Madalan complained. “Be careful, Bel
agren. She could turn on us just as easily.”
“Don’t worry,” Belagren assured her old friend. “I can handle one grasping little Dhevynian thief.”
The assurance did not satisfy Madalan much, but before the other woman could answer, there was a knock at the door. Belagren impatiently called permission to enter.
“My lady?”
“Yes, Marqel?”
“There is a messenger here from the mainland. From the Lord of the Suns.”
Belagren glanced at Madalan and rolled her eyes. “Just what I need! More trouble from that senile old fool in Bollow.”
“It’s not like Paige to send you anything,” Madalan pointed out with a curious frown. “He can barely bring himself to speak your name.”
“Shall I show him in, my lady?” Marqel asked.
“I suppose you’d better,” she sighed.
Marqel returned a few minutes later with a young man of about twenty, wearing travel-stained leather trousers and a linen shirt, not the yellow robes of a Sundancer that she was expecting. The messenger bowed and handed over an envelope bearing the Lord of the Suns’ seal. Belagren accepted it and looked at the young man curiously.
“You’re not a Sundancer.”
“No, my lady. I’m a courier. I usually work out of Bollow delivering messages between there and Talenburg.”
“The Lord of the Suns employs couriers, now?” Madalan asked with a raised brow.
The young man shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, my lady. I only know that I was paid to deliver this to the High Priestess as quickly as possible from Bollow.”
“And is the Lord of the Suns expecting a reply?” Belagren asked.
“If he is, my lady, he didn’t instruct me to wait for it.”
Nodding thoughtfully, she dismissed the courier and broke the seal on the letter. She snapped the folded page open with a flick of her wrist, a little surprised to find it written in an unfamiliar hand. As she read the contents, the blood drained from her face. She was forced to sit down before she was halfway through it, feeling faint before she got to the end.
“My lady?” Marqel asked in concern.
“Get me wine, Marqel,” she ordered, feeling light-headed.
“A large one.”
The young Shadowdancer hurried to obey. Madalan rose from her seat at the desk and walked across to Belagren.
“What’s wrong?”
“Read it.” Belagren was incapable of saying anything else. She thrust the letter at her old friend with a shaking hand.
Madalan read the letter, her eyes widening in shock. “This can’t be genuine!”
“And if it is?” Belagren asked tonelessly.
“This is a trick! It has to be! Paige Halyn thought this up as some sort of desperate last-ditch attempt to discredit us!”
The High Priestess shook her head. “He’s not capable of anything so inventive.”
Marqel returned with the wine and handed it to the High Priestess. The girl was burning with curiosity, but was wise enough to say nothing. Belagren accepted the goblet and downed the entire contents in a swallow.
“Get me another,” she ordered. “And find that messenger before he leaves the palace. I need to know how long ago he was dispatched from Bollow.”
Marqel was smart enough not to question her orders. She filled the wine glass again and left without so much as a hint of defiance. Perhaps she was finally learning her place.
“Belagren, there’s an old saying, you know. If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is.”
The High Priestess nodded. “Oh, don’t worry, Madalan. I’m sure there’s more to this than meets the eye.”
“But—”
“But I can’t ignore it. At worst, it means I will be able to give Antonov something he desperately wants.”
“And at best?”
“At best, we are saved,” the High Priestess told her aide, shaking with disbelief, almost too stunned to accept that, out of nowhere, a miracle had landed in her lap. “If this letter is genuine, we are saved.”
“Perhaps,” Madalan agreed doubtfully.
Marqel slipped back into the room and sketched a hasty curtsy. “Three weeks, my lady.”
“What?”
“The courier, my lady. He left Bollow three weeks ago.”
Madalan frowned. “That has to be some sort of record.”
Belagren nodded. “Which means our young friend is already in Omaxin. Or so close to it that it scarcely matters.”
“What are you going to do?” Madalan asked.
Belagren barely gave herself time to think about it. Time was the one thing she did not have.
“For now, I’m going to do as he asks, Madalan. I’m going to send a message by bird to Rudi today, and withdraw the Shadowdancers from Omaxin.”
“And after that?”
“After that, as soon as this damn wedding is out of the way, I’m going to have a word with the new Regent of Dhevyn.”
“Kirshov? Is it wise to involve him in this?”
“Not only wise, but essential, according to that,” she said, pointing to the letter Madalan was holding. When her old friend seemed unconvinced, Belagren smiled and looked at Marqel, thinking of a day several years ago on Elcast, when a desperate young man had come to her for help to save a young thief from the lash.
“Don’t worry about it, Madalan. Kirshov Latanya owes me a favor.”
Chapter 46
The northernmost town in Senet, and the last real outpost of civilization before they reached the ruins in Omaxin, was the small town of Tawell. It took Dirk and Tia close to two weeks to cross the grasslands of northern Senet bordering Lake Ruska, which separated Omaxin from the ancient city of Bollow. Game was sparse and they were limited by what they could carry. Their meager supplies had dwindled alarmingly by the time they reached the village. Unless the departing Shadowdancers left their excess food stores behind in Omaxin, Dirk thought, they were going to get very hungry trying to discover when the next Age of Shadows was due.
The barony of Tawell actually belonged to Alenor D’Orlon. It had been given to her as a child by the Lion of Senet while she was living in Avacas, and had been administered by Antonov’s people in her absence ever since. As far as Dirk was aware, Alenor had never laid eyes on the place.
Not that there was much to see. The township was small: little more than an inn, a blacksmith and a few scattered houses. The manor house was closer to the lake, several miles from the town. Dirk was not keen on stopping in the village, but Tia was becoming concerned about their supplies. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford it, she pointed out tartly. Dirk bore her stings stoically, thinking she would be far angrier if she knew what else he had done in Bollow.
“The whole purpose of coming all this way on foot was not to draw attention to ourselves,” he pointed out, as Tia walked beside him on the road leading into the village.
“That’s why you sneaked out of the inn in Bollow and made a name for yourself playing Rithma, was it? To be inconspicuous?”
“Bollow was different,” Dirk objected. “For one thing, it was a city a hundred times bigger than this place. They probably forgot about me an hour after I left the Rithma tent. They’ll remember us here in Tawell for months.”
“No, they won’t,” Tia assured him confidently.
“How do you know that?”
“Because we’re not the only strangers in town.”
As they neared the outskirts of the village, Dirk discovered Tia was right. There were a large number of wagons parked haphazardly on the common, brightly painted, in a wild cacophony of colors. The people around the wagons barely glanced at the two strangers as they walked along the road, more interested in setting up their own camp.
“Who are they?” Dirk asked.
He had never seen wagons like these before, or people dressed so strangely. The men wore large, loose trousers gathered at the ankles and tucked into short leather boots. The women wore similar shirts to th
e men, but most of them wore skirts that looked as if they were made of dozens and dozens of scarves tucked into the brightly enameled belts they wore.
“Sidorians, I think,” Tia told him.
Sidoria was, on paper at least, an independent nation, but its population was almost entirely nomadic. As they had few cities worth conquering, Antonov had left his northern neighbor largely untouched, preferring to dominate the more fruitful islands to the south of the mainland.
“I didn’t think they strayed into Senet if they could avoid it,” he remarked.
“Well, we’re pretty far north. I suppose they have to trade with someone.” She glanced at him with a hopeful smile. “I hear their food is pretty good.”
Dirk shook his head. “Now who’s trying to broaden her horizons?” he accused.
“I’m merely heeding your advice. You were the one who said they’d remember us in Tawell for months. The Sidorians, now, they’re nomadic. They’ll be gone in a few days, back across the border. It won’t really matter what they remember about us, will it?”
She actually had a very good point, but Dirk was disinclined to admit it, just on principle. “They don’t look like they’d welcome strangers.”
“How would you know?”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “It’s just a feeling I have.”
“So you’re a seer now as well as a genius?”
Before he could stop her, Tia turned off the road and walked over to the nearest wagon, where a young mother was tending three small children. Tia spoke to her at length, turning to point at Dirk at one point in the conversation. He had no idea what she was saying to the Sidorian woman, but both of them broke into gales of laughter, which—he was certain—was at his expense. A little after that, Tia called him over with a wave of her hand.
“This is Risilka,” Tia told him as he approached the two women warily. “She’s invited us to dinner with her family.”
“We’ve no wish to put you to any trouble,” he assured her, thinking Tia incredibly rude for forcing herself on these people.
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