Substituting another woman for a beheading would be impossible: the substitute would surely make some inapt comment before the blade fell. But one whose soul had been eaten would say only what she was told to say. If Vendriel noticed any difference in the one Zago brought back, he might ascribe it to the process of stultification. She would let them argue about it, for she would be long gone.
It remained to subvert Zago, and she thought of that as child’s play until she tracked him down to the exercise room where he was coaching Gnepox in the use of the manqueller. Her heart sank when she observed how the childcatcher clung to the handsome youth while guiding his strokes, how his hand lingered in patting the novice headsman’s muscular rump.
“Come to help us practice?” Gnepox said with a laugh when he saw her. “You’re just what we need!”
Infuriatingly, Zago didn’t even look up from his rapt kneading of the young man’s shoulders, but Glittitia’s eyes bored into him and willed him to notice her slinking forward in her artfully disordered gauze.
“Leave us,” she ordered. “I require a word alone with this wretched creature.”
Zago at last looked up with a cool insolence she hadn’t thought he could command. “Go ahead and talk to him,” he said. “I won’t listen.”
This tickled Gnepox, and the pair of them whooped like giddy boys while Glittitia raged. Her one word in Vendriel’s ear could formerly have squashed a dozen Zagos, but she had thrown that power away. Forcing her eyes back to her goal, she swallowed her bile.
“Gnepox, please. Have I ever asked you a favor?”
He swung his big sword in a whickering wheel not far from her neck. “You soon will.”
The slum-vermin parodied a lordly gesture of dismissal that he had probably observed for the first time that morning. This further amused Gnepox, who winked at his new friend and sauntered out. Zago stared at her even more insolently as he folded his sinewy arms and said, “Know, Lady, that I have no use for girls.”
Glittitia let her nominal garment waft away and slid close. Her deft fingers woke fully what Gnepox had stirred.
“Then let me teach you one for a woman,” she breathed.
To Zago, sex required no more preparation than spitting in someone’s face or kicking his backside. It was accomplished almost as quickly, and the effect was often the same. But to Glittitia, who had never known such rude treatment, it was a perverse ecstasy. It was as if a step onto a low and familiar stool had been transfigured into a breathtaking flight to a cloud. She could have torn out her vocal chords for all the inanities they squealed in the span of ten fluttering heartbeats.
Preoccupied with a study of human parts he had never much noticed before, he failed to sense her disgust. She shifted away from his fumbling touch. His childish curiosity annoyed her as much as anything, and she tried to distract him.
“How does one become a—” the word was so distasteful that she feared it might offend him, too, but no euphemism existed—“a childcatcher?”
She breathed again when he stopped behaving like a suspicious housewife at a poulterer’s and addressed the question: “I was once a Ghost Rat. That’s what we called ourselves, and it was a fine thing to be. We lived in a ruined palace, one of those half-sunken ones on the Canal of Six Delights. We shared what we stole and drowned anyone who tried to steal it back. I suppose I had a mother and father, but the Ghost Rats were all I ever knew. We stole children sometimes, so perhaps that’s how I got there.”
“Maybe you were stolen from a noble family,” she said, perking up at the similarity to a romance by Porpolard Phurn. “Maybe you’re the true heir to some fabulous estate. Is that a birthmark?”
“No, someone’s boot did that yesterday. My mother was no doubt a whore and my father one of her clients.”
It was impossible to connect this dull beast with the thrill he had inflicted on her. She recalled his unseemly conduct at the audience, his unsavory show with Gnepox. Once more she had to swallow her exasperation before it could spoil her plan. She urged him to tell her more.
“Many children of that class escape being rounded up,” he said, “but when they reach puberty, there’s no escape. They must go to the Archimage, and everyone turns them in. I shaved, I pretended my voice hadn’t changed, but I was big and loud and couldn’t hide well. If no one else did, the Ghost Rats would have betrayed me to earn special treatment. So I betrayed them first. I arranged an ambush for the whole lot. My reward was apprenticeship to a childcatcher.”
Sythiphoran faces are notoriously hard to read, but he read hers. He said, “Yes, it was a bad thing to do, and I’m a wicked man, but I’m alive, and I’ve still got my soul, whatever that is.”
“Oh, Zago!” Thinking of her own peril, she wept.
Unlike any man she had ever known, he ignored her tears. “Teach me more about the uses of women.”
“No, Zago! No, I ... oh, very well.”
* * * *
The childcatcher agreed to her plan, or pretended to, but that evening as she made ready to visit the Sythiphoran enclave to look for a double, she was seized and confined to
her rooms. No explanation was given.
* * * *
Glittitia had pictured spending her last hour as a cogitant woman in bittersweet contemplation of Frothirot’s airy spires while the million catches and dirges and ballads of its noisy citizens rang across the canals where her funeral boat glided. She would stand tall and proudly indifferent, a doomed empress of romance. No one would notice the tear that glittered on her cheek as she thought of her far-off home in Sythiphore, and of all that might have been.
She had never imagined these precious moments soiled by thoughts of how fine Zago looked with his hair and beard curled and his broad shoulders draped in the gray traveling-cloak of the household regiment. Nor had she imagined being distracted by the slaves who rowed the boat: not the dead ones that Vendriel the Good kept prudently close at home, but incogitants who smiled and bobbed their heads each time she glanced their way. They didn’t know it, but she was going to be made just like them, and their brainless eagerness to please seemed cruelly ironic.
She gave in to a temptation that had nagged her since leaving the Vendren Palace and made to brush Zago’s shoulders, but the captain of their escort batted her hand away.
“But he’s dusty!” she protested. “You’re a soldier, surely you can see that.”
“Orders.” The man was grimmer even than Death’s Darlings were supposed to be, as if this were his own last voyage. She supposed he was outraged to see a childcatcher dishonoring his uniform.
“I was told that the First Lord put a protective spell on this cloak.” Zago muttered with unmoving lips, like a fellow prisoner. “I’m not to disarrange it in any way.”
“Let me wear it.”
He squeezed her hand. She cursed herself for finding this not just comforting but thrilling. He kept the enchanted cloak, though.
The touch thrilled Zago, too, and he again caught himself stupidly counting the guards. They still numbered the total of three hands’ fingers, each was bigger than he, each had the hilt of a manqueller angled high above his helmet. He might snatch one of those swords and surprise a few of the soldiers, but then numbers would tell. Glittitia might swim away, but he would sink straight to the bottom in his ironbound boots.
The only thing to do with sources of confusion, he had found, was to eliminate them quickly. Glittitia confused him more than anyone ever had, so he had quickly reported her dimwit escape-plan to Gnepox. Vendriel the Good had relayed him his eternal gratitude, for whatever that was worth. That should have settled the matter, but she still confused him. He prayed that he could see his mission through without doing something stupid, but suicidal plans for saving her hopped through his mind like a plague of toads.
The traffic of boats and barges thinned, then vanished completely as they entered the Canal of Swimming Shadows. Zago studied the oarsmen, who smiled at him and bowed. He couldn’t say if he had
caught any of these slaves as children. If so, they didn’t hold it against him. Neither would Glittitia. Once her soul was wizard-food, she would sing Hurrah for Zago! the marching ditty he had composed for his flocks on their way from the Archimage’s garden, if he told her to. Much as he loved that song, he doubted he would have the heart to hear her sing it.
They moored at the dock of the umber palace, where he guided the group up to Bruised Jasmine Street and the westgate. It was the most familiar place in his workaday life, but visiting it in this strange company, in such strange clothes, wrenched it into the world of unpleasantly vivid dreams. The door to his worst fears looked less menacing than shabby, grimed by the fists of childcatchers and by so many small fingers that had tried to find a last grip among its intricate carvings.
Completing the strangeness, a yoked troop of children rounded the corner and shuffled toward them. A brute whose strut proclaimed him to be either the Emperor of the Thallashoi or a complete lunatic brought up the rear, prodding them with a hooked bill. He stopped short and stared in bewilderment at the armed strangers. Obviously he didn’t recognize Zago, but Zago knew him as a colleague called Plistard. They were not friends.
Glittitia gripped his hand with all her strength. Perhaps he saw with her eyes, perhaps he had become a different person, but he had never noticed how piteous the children looked, how utterly despairing. Though some of them sobbed, the tears had long dried on their dirty faces.
“Free those scum,” Zago told the captain. “We don’t want them cluttering up our mission, do we?”
“Free those other scum,” the captain told his men.
Bellowing, Plistard laid into the meddlers with his bill. A soldier fell with a cracked head, swords flashed, loose children scrambled everywhere.
“Back to the canal!” Zago whispered, giving his prisoner a shove. “You can swim, can’t you?”
“Are you insane? The Canal of Swimming Shadows?”
“Go, it’s your only—”
“What are you doing?” The captain loomed over them.
“Comforting the prisoner.”
“Comfort her inside. We have things under control,” he said and gestured at Plistard’s disconnected wreckage with his dripping sword. But he held Zago’s sleeve before he could obey. “Listen: if you see the Archimage, don’t mention his visit to our First Lord’s coronation.”
“Why should I?”
“Good fellow.”
Drawing Glittitia with him, he pounded at the gate as he had done before. It opened as it had done before.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You did what you could.”
“You don’t know.”
As he had never done before, he passed through the gate. The garden was alarmingly tranquil. Among susurrant fountains and murmurous bees, the palace napped like a friendly brown beast. The only person in sight was a gardener with the face of an alert monkey under his wide hat.
“Welcome,” he said. “We don’t get many adult guests.”
Zago felt Glittitia nudge him, but he didn’t know why. He said, “We’ve come to see the Archimage.”
“Ah. Well. He doesn’t see many people, you know.”
“We come from Lord Vendriel the Good, First Lord of the Frothoin, King of Sythiphore and the Outer Islands, Sword to the Gastayne, Scourge of the Thallashoi, Hammer to Morbia, Beloved of Sleithreethra, and Tiger of the House of Vendren,” Zago recited as he had been intensively coached.
“That may impress him. Come along and let’s see.”
When the gardener had gone ahead, Zago whispered: “Why do you keep poking me?”
“It’s him, don’t you see? Pretending to be a servant. Wizards are always doing that. Haven’t you read Porpolard Phurn?”
“I don’t read,” Zago said, “but I think he’s only the gardener.” He heard himself mutter, “I’ve never seen anyone so brave as you.”
“Perhaps I should scream and weep, but I feel numb. Let’s get it over with.”
He held her and kissed her in his unskilled way. Then she wept.
* * * *
The room they entered was vast, but its only other attribute that Zago immediately grasped was stupefying heat. The day was warm, yet a fire blazed in a hearth at the end of the closed and thickly draped room. Still the only soul in sight, the gardener pattered across a black plain of mirror-polished marble until his figure markedly shrank.
Zago crept forward, and Glittitia hung on his arm, preferring the comfort of his presence to the shadows behind them. He felt her gaze on him, though he preferred not to look and verify the feeling. No one had expected hope or help or anything else from him in a very long time, and he hated it.
He had almost accepted her silly notion about the gardener when an angular arrangement of drapery beside the hearth shifted to disclose a face. Glittitia shrieked. Zago might have, too, but a spasm locked his lungs.
Too far off to hear, the servant spoke while the face listened, or perhaps not. It was immobile as a mask of dark wood, and just as inhumanly dry, although the gardener gleamed with sweat from his few moments in the stifling heat. Zago was uncertain whether the Archimage sat in a chair whose covering echoed the muddy tones of his vestments, or if there were no chair, and he stood or squatted in robes that concealed a body of unlikely shape. This remained a puzzle even when they had edged close to the intolerable hearth.
“Zago,” the Archimage whispered. “The children often speak of you.”
The childcatcher tried to disregard this remark as he recited the rigamarole he had memorized about reviving old customs and making new friends. At least he believed he delivered the message, but when he had done speaking, he couldn’t recall what he had just said. It was impossible to think of anything but the browless, lidless, lipless mask that confronted him. While staring into the yellow eyes, he was struck by the queasy fancy that the Archimage was neither sitting, standing nor squatting at all, but had arrayed himself in restless coils. The patterned vestments were perhaps nothing more than his unnatural skin.
“Yes, Vendriel the Good, I know of him. I should have liked to attend his coronation, but the men apparently sent to invite me conferred outside my gate for a while and left without knocking. They stole my cat.” The Archimage brooded on this for a moment, but Zago couldn’t say if he was angry or merely perplexed. “He found his way home, though, none the worse for his adventure.”
Glittitia was surprised that she could laugh, if only bitterly, at Vendriel’s blunder. She regretted the laugh when the mask swiveled in her direction and the voice said, “This is the subject you wish ... treated?”
“No, I don’t wish it,” Zago said. “I spoke the First Lord’s words. If I spoke my own, I would beg you—”
“You’re uncommonly dusty, young man,” the Archimage interrupted.
A heavy hand snaked out of the confusing folds to buffet Zago’s cloak. He had placed little trust in Vendriel’s protective spell, but it dismayed him that it should be sniffed out and disposed of so quickly. He now felt more naked than in the presence of the First Lord. His shoulders shivered and crawled long after the touch had been withdrawn.
“What is it you would beg of me, childcatcher?” Before he could answer this, the wizard gestured with distaste at the dust now defacing his immaculate floor and told his servant, “Fetch a broom. Now, you wish...?”
“That you not eat her soul.”
“Her soul?” The angular face was thrust unbearably close. Neither Zago nor Glittitia could say who was now holding the other upright. “She may still have one. What about you, Ghost Rat?”
Those words tore a hard rind from Zago’s heart, and the pain of his boyhood treachery stabbed him as cruelly as it had on the night when he lay hiding outside the derelict palace of the Ghost Rats, grinding his fists into his ears to exclude the screams of children and thumps of clubs.
The pain almost at once gave way to an indescribable glow of pleasure. He didn’t see the faces of his lost brot
hers and sisters, nor hear their laughter, nor feel their comforting touch; but a forgotten warmth swelled inside him, the emotion he had known when he was with them. The souls of the Ghost Rats frolicked in this empty room, forgiving him and welcoming him. Impossibly and at long last, he felt he had come home.
The feeling faded, leaving a hollow that not even terror of the Archimage could fill. He had thought it unlikely that he ever would, but he wept for the friends whose souls he had traded for his own. He was on the verge of pleading, “Make me one of them,” but the Archimage forestalled him with the banal remark, “Ah, here’s the broom,” and the childcatcher found the strength to hold his tongue.
“Take it!” Glittitia whispered. “Do whatever he wants.”
He saw that the servant was offering him the broom to clean up the dust lately buffeted from his cloak. It seemed a strange offer to make a guest, but the ways of the mighty, let alone mighty wizards, were a mystery to him.
“Into the fire, would you?” the Archimage said.
The task was improbably difficult. At first the dust clung to the floor with a will of its own. When he plied the broom with new briskness, it was not at all like sweeping dust, it was more like tumbling a cumbersome bundle before the broom, an object that wriggled to evade him and thrashed back vigorously. It might have been an invisible, angry man, crippled or otherwise constrained, that he shoved ahead of him. The dust fought back even more violently when he reached the hearth, and he had to wield the broom like a club.
The fire blossomed out to singe his beard when the dust hit it, then screamed upward through the chimney in a twisting column.
“I hadn’t known what a filthy hole the Vendren Palace was,” the Archimage observed. “If I were you, I’d fly from it as far as I could. It would be wise to start now.”
Neither paused to question this or make their farewells. Zago reached the door first, but concern for his companion prompted him to leave it open as he sprinted through the garden.
The Throne of Bones Page 34
