by Carol Berg
“What do you want with me?” I said.
“This is about Jacopo.”
My hackles rose, along with a rush of guilt at the thought of my recent promise to my old friend. “Jacopo is not involved in my business. Leave him be.”
“I’m neither a fool nor blind,” snapped the sheriff. “I saw him talking with you not a half-hour since. I just want to know if he understands what he’s doing. Is this some kind of playacting like you did in Grenatte or is he in need of my help?”
Despite my efforts to dismiss Graeme Rowan and his worries, the day shifted uneasily. “Jaco is in Montevial to sell barrels,” I said. “That’s the truth.” Tell me if you know something more. “Jaco often comes to Montevial to trade.”
“Don’t lie to me about this. You oughtn’t put him in this kind of danger. As if his keeping such company wasn’t bad enough…” Rowan stepped back a bit and rubbed one elbow. “I’m out of my depth, as you well know, but you’d best not be ignorant of the risks you take. It’s naught of a secret that the odd little man was in Dunfarrie those weeks ago, seeking his servant with the bad temper. But do you know who else come hunting the two of them on that day, swearing me silent and claiming the whole business to be some matter of spies? It was your brother’s man, my lady… and with him those damnable priests.”
There it was! Darzid and the priests—the improbable connection, joined in the hunt for D’Natheil and Baglos. But if it were true… Dared I believe Rowan just because his tale matched my instincts?
“This doesn’t surprise you?” he said, wrinkling his brow.
“Only that you would tell me…” But the evidence was stronger than Graeme Rowan’s word or my instinct. Three riders had stayed back at the edge of the meadow when Darzid came hunting… and I felt again my inexplicable shudders when I’d noticed them. The priests… the Zhid…
Unimpeded by any argument from me, Rowan rushed onward. “They each went their own way after questioning me—the captain and the priests—but I saw them together again in Grenatte. And now the priests are after you and your friends… and I see Jacopo helping them along the way, first at your place and then at the house in Valleor. Blessed Annadis, do you have any idea what they did to your friend’s servants?”
“Jaco help the devil priests? You’re mad!” Why was I allowing Rowan to lure me into his snare? Gods, he was a sheriff! Our lives were forfeit if he uncovered proof of what D’Natheil was, and here I was with explanations on the edge of my tongue. Jaco, the kindest, dearest person on the blasted earth… Rowan’s accusation made a lie of everything he’d said already, serving only to remind me of his other secrets and lies.
“How can I believe you, Sheriff? Perhaps your story might be more trustworthy if you had let me witness this great conspiracy for myself. You were quite anxious to get me out of Grenatte, as I recall. One might think you didn’t want me to see the meetings that took place there.”
A movement behind the sheriff caught my attention, but I quickly averted my gaze. Rowan had not sensed the tall figure gliding silently down the shadowed alley.
“I knew enough to guess that your presence in Grenatte was a violation of your parole,” he said. “You couldn’t afford to be anywhere near those people.”
“And so you successfully defended the law from my depredations, while allowing Giano to go on his way—and yes, I heard what they did to the professor and his servants.”
“Giano had committed no crime. Not then. You had. Or were about to.”
“And so I’m to be grateful to the one who saves me from my own perverse wickedness and points the finger of blame everywhere but at himself.” Anger consumed all my uncertainty, making my limbs and voice tremble—fury at a murderer who could come so near convincing me of his honesty and at myself for listening to him. “I’m to confess all my crimes to my generous savior, the upright servant of the law, one who protects us all by exterminating children and scholars. Who else have you murdered, Sheriff? Tell me the names of all your victims.”
Graeme Rowan flushed the same scarlet as the flaming emblem on his coat, but before he could say more, something large and heavy crashed down on his head. I drew back into the corner of the wall as he toppled into the dirt. Even in the sudden quiet, the street noise seemed as remote as my own woodland, allowing my own doubts and accusations to scream warnings.
Expressionless, D’Natheil gazed down at the fallen sheriff. Slowly he pressed the tip of his sword into Rowan’s neck, first dimpling, then pricking the tanned skin, blood quickly outlining the steel. I remembered the way he had pressed the dagger into the attacker at Kellea’s shop— smoothly, inexorably, relishing his own lethal prowess. My stomach and spirit rebelled, and I laid my hand on his arm.
The startled Prince jerked his head around. After a long, defiant glare, he withdrew his blade and slammed it into its sheath.
I dropped to my knees and rolled the flaccid Rowan onto his back. Blood and dirt covered his left temple. Truth glared up at me from his blue coat. Third from the bottom was a wider space than between the other brass buttons and a dark thread broken off. The remaining buttons were identical to the one I drew from my pocket.
“Someone’s coming.” The Prince pulled me to my feet and gestured me deeper into the alley, glancing over his shoulder at the street. Rowan’s “friend” was after us again, no doubt.
Shudders crept up and down my spine as we hurried through the shadowy maze of alleys, past stomach-curdling heaps of refuse, dodging a ragged, toothless woman tending a smoky fire, kicking aside chickens and feral dogs. D’Natheil halted abruptly where the lane opened into a small, weedy courtyard surrounded on all sides by tall warehouses. Beyond a clutter of stained dye vats, splintered crates of empty spools, and a skeletal apparatus that I realized was a broken loom standing on end, was a wooden stair, clinging precariously to one of the buildings. After a moment’s watching, the Prince led me through the courtyard and up the stairs. He tapped three times on the dark-painted door at the top of the stair. A bolt slid, and the Dulcé let us in.
Mountains of mouse-chewed scraps of yarn and cloth lay about the huge, dim attic, layered thickly with gray dust and a century’s worth of dead flies, moths, and beetles. An entire civilization of spiders had abandoned their webs under the rafters, especially in the low space where the steeply pitched roof met the front and back walls. This was not the same room where I’d left my friends that morning.
D’Natheil, crouching so as not to knock his head on the downsloping roof, positioned himself by a window with a broken shutter that looked out over the street below. Before I could say a word, he burst out, “You were gone a very long time. Very long.”
“Well, it’s been quite a day,” I snapped. “But I would have eliminated a few of the more unpleasant encounters, if I’d known they would annoy you.” I was too tired, too hot, and too disturbed to put up with a rude prince, however talented at rescuing he might be.
He glanced at me briefly, his expression cold, then turned his attention back to the street. “But you’re well.” He wasn’t asking. He was telling me.
“Your arrival was timely. How did you happen to be there?”
“You were in need.” He offered no more, and I looked at Baglos for further explanation.
The Dulcé had rebolted the door and was shoving a pile of broken crates up against it. “Earlier today, as we were returning from the market, we heard men making inquiries up and down the streets of this district, asking after a woman and two men, one man short and dark, one tall and strongly made. So we did not return to the other room, but found this place instead. I waited for you all morning by the palace gates, but you didn’t come, so we met here to think how to find you. After only a short time, D’Natheil ran out the door, saying, ”She calls. She is taken!“ ”
“I was careless. Jacopo is in the city on business. He wants to help us, and, like an oaf, I stood in the middle of the street talking to him. The sheriff was watching. When he saw me with Jaco, he pounc
ed.” What game was Rowan playing? Why induce me to mistrust Jacopo? I thought they were friends. I rolled the brass button over in my palm, shock and anger tainted by profound unease. “Rowan wasn’t dead?” I hadn’t even checked.
“No.” It was winter in the corner where the Prince sat peering out of the window. Was he angry that I’d kept him from killing the sheriff?
I chided myself for lack of resolution. Rowan had been a part of the horror at Ferrante’s. In his blind adherence to the law he had allowed himself to be seduced and corrupted by the very thing he claimed to hate. He was our enemy and deserved to die. But for a moment, he had been very convincing…
“Now that you are safely with us again, was fortune kind?” said Baglos. “Did you acquire the object of your search?”
I had almost forgotten the journal. “Yes, I found it.” I pulled the bundle from my pocket and peeled away its threadbare covering. Even the Prince was drawn to see. The three of us gathered around an old crate, the only thing in the room that would serve for a table. All my irritation, all my fears, and all my questions fled in anticipation of revelation.
“My husband worked for over a year translating this. He got through most of it, though there were some entries he was never certain of, where the meaning of a few words could change the whole sense. We had to destroy his translation, but I suppose the two of you can read this easily.”
D’Natheil ran his fingers down one page, but yanked his hand away as if it had burned him. “I cannot read the ancient tongue,” he said, curtly, and stood up again.
Baglos turned a page, examining it closely. “If you command me so, my lord prince, I could translate the entire work.”
D’Natheil looked at me. “Is that what you want?”
“The critical part is the map.” Trying not to let anxiety make me heavy-handed, I thumbed through the fragile pages until I found the one where the Writer had sketched the elusive puzzle. D’Natheil returned to the makeshift table and crouched down beside Baglos. As the two of them examined the page, I studied their faces, eager to see the first sign of understanding. It did not come. First one and then the other shook his head.
“These symbols have no meaning for me,” said D’Natheil.
“Nor for me,” said Baglos, scratching his beard.
D’Natheil wandered back to the window. “Detan detu Dulcé,” he said. “Translate the symbols in the diagram.”
“Detan eto, Gire D’Arnath.” Baglos ducked his head in D’Natheil’s direction and proceeded to study the crude drawing further.
As the sky over Montevial blazed orange, then cooled into evening blue, the clamor from the street quieted, and the odors of supper—frying fish, boiling cabbage, baking bread—hung on the air. D’Natheil sat with his back against the wall, his arms resting on his drawn-up knees as he stared through the irregular hole left by the broken shutter. I fidgeted. The Dulcé pored over the page, turning it this way and that, covering parts of it with his hand, scratching symbols and lines on the splintered crate with a rusted nail, until I thought that the only activity left for him was to stand on his head. Then he began to leaf through the journal, reading, it appeared, but at a pace ten times the ordinary. But at the last he carefully closed the journal, placed it in my hands, and bent his head to D’Natheil. “It is not in me, my lord.”
“What conclusion do you draw from it?” The Prince spoke from his corner.
“Only this, my lord. It is not a map. Or better to say, it is not a map as we understand maps. The symbols do not match any set of landmarks or roads in the area of the Dorian Wall. There is some other meaning here to which I have not been given the key.”
“Well done, Dulcé.”
Baglos bent his head again.
“What do you mean, it’s not a map?” I grumbled, staring at the dilapidated little volume. “The Writer says it on the page just previous. He was upset at how the local J’Ettanni lord had used Av’Kenat to terrorize his subjects, and so he’s gotten the map to the stronghold. He didn’t trust his memory, so he wrote it down. He wrote everything down.”
“I cannot say what he did with what he learned, my lady,” said Baglos. “But he did not draw a map.”
“How can you know? I still don’t understand why it is that D’Natheil can command you to read an ancient language and you can do it, but he can command you to translate this… diagram… and you cannot.” These two and their magics and their moods and their condescending explanations pricked at my patience like woodpeckers at dawn.
D’Natheil stretched his legs out straight and deigned to look at me. “Master Dassine has given me this understanding. A Dulcé can know those things that have been instilled in him by his own study or experience or by transference from other minds. My command as his madrisson enables him to search through himself for anything related to my desire. If he has acquired sufficient knowledge then he can tell me what I wish to know or use what is in him to find it out. He knows enough to state that this is not a map, but he has not the necessary information to know what it might be instead. It is not a fault in him.”
“It would have been helpful if he could have told us this an hour ago.”
“This is the gift of the Dulcé… and their burden. To acquire knowledge and dispense it and to obey the commands of his joined madrisson to the very limits of his life—such is the service of a Dulcé who accepts the madris.” He shifted his blue gaze to Baglos, quite serious. “To take a Dulcé as Guide must be a rare privilege, I think.”
Baglos flushed and ducked his head.
I remembered the Dulcé‘s unceasing questions during our travels and how he had worked his way so voraciously through Ferrante’s library. “So it must be that Baglos has encountered nothing in your world or ours that tells him where the Gate can be found or what the symbols in the Writer’s journal might mean.”
“To the best of my understanding, that is the case.”
“So we’ve come to the end of another road.” Disappointment hit me like a bludgeon, bringing with it the effects of constant worry and long traveling, lack of sleep, and the high emotions of the day. What in the name of sense were we going to do now? I could not even begin to consider it.
D’Natheil stretched out his long limbs on the filthy floor, yawned, and stuffed his cloak under his head for a pillow. “You’ll think of something.”
Before I could make a proper retort, he was snoring.
Baglos shared cheese and raspberries he’d bought in the market that morning, and then, before the light was completely gone, he curled up by the door and fell asleep as quickly as had his master. I, though still unsettled and confused, churning inside about Tomas’s dreams and Graeme Rowan’s accusations, was only a breath behind.
Shouts and screams and the shattering of glass yanked me from the depths of sleep. D’Natheil crouched beside the window, his back flattened against the wall. I hurried to join him, heeding his gesture of caution as I ducked under the sloping roof and dropped to my knees beside him. Baglos stood by the bolted door, his short sword drawn and ready.
I peered out onto a scene of chaos. The bright colored awnings were in shreds, and cloth, fleece, and spools of yarn were scattered and trampled in the muddy street. At least three people lay unmoving in the street muck, while foot soldiers flailed whips at the pressing, shouting crowd. Two soldiers dragged a young man from the dye shop across the lane toward a mounted troop of heavily armed soldiers guarding a roped cluster of men. A young woman clutching an infant ran out after them. A whip cut cruelly across her face, and she fell to her knees screaming. Several women surrounded the fallen girl and her child, restraining her while the soldiers kicked and slapped the struggling man, shoving him into the cluster of captives and fastening his roped hands to the others.
“A conscript gang,” I said. I had known of forced military service all my life, believing it an unfortunate necessity of Leiran dominance. Karon had been the first to tell me of its cruelty and of the poverty and desperation left in i
ts wake. I had never witnessed a conscription for myself. Soldiers didn’t come for men in the streets where I had lived.
“They feed.” D’Natheil was pale. Revolted. “This that we see. They feed on it, on the fear, on the wrongness of it.”
It took me a moment to grasp his meaning. “The Zhid feed on it? Is that what you mean?”
“Not the Zhid. Their masters. I’ve felt the masters’ hunger through all our travels—at the professor’s house, and again on the night of the fire. I just didn’t understand what it was. But seeing this, hearing it, feeling it, today I know. The masters devour the cries and the anger, the fear and the pain, and it makes them powerful. And their power creates and nurtures the Zhid.” The Prince’s voice overflowed with loathing.
The masters… the Lords of Zhev’Na, Baglos had called them. Merely thinking the name seemed to darken the day.
With the crack of a lash and the snarls and curses of the soldiers, the “recruits” were herded away. The wails of the bereaved echoed through the near-deserted street, mourning both the living and the dead. Little difference between the two—the living and the dead—I thought, for there was little chance the conscripts would ever come home. Even if the poor bastards survived their five years of service, they would likely be released somewhere hundreds of leagues from these streets where they’d spent their whole lives. They might spend the rest of their days trying to find their way home.
Never had I felt so small in the world, so alone in a hostile universe. Home. Somehow at that moment, the need to go home swept through me, a hollow craving so powerful, so physically real, that I had to press my hand tight across my mouth to keep from crying it aloud. For all the love and kindness that had blessed me there, Jonah’s cottage was not home. I had never belonged there or in Dunfarrie. Nor was home the place of my childhood, the ancient keep where Tomas believed I could somehow protect his child from his nightmares. My home was in ashes, and I was alone, more even than the Writer, the itinerant Healer who always found his way home…
