“Good. I had hoped you would cooperate, which would only lighten the burden on Mr. Harlowe.”
“I want to see him,” she said. “Prove to me he is alive, or I won’t answer any questions.”
“I am afraid you are not in a position to make demands. You will have to take me at my word. If you choose not to cooperate, we will get the answers out of Mr. Harlowe, and I guarantee he won’t find it a pleasant experience.”
Karigan considered her circumstances, the manacles on her wrists. She could leap across the desk and throttle Dr. Silk, manacles or no. He would not be expecting it, not from a female. But that wouldn’t help Cade, nor would she be able to overcome every guard in the palace. No doubt they would execute Cade as soon as they got whatever information they wanted from him. He had betrayed the empire. He had started an uprising in Mill City. They would make an example of him.
The only course she saw was to make an ally of Dr. Silk. There was no reason to hide her identity or where she was from, not anymore. She would gain his confidence and maybe make things easier on Cade. She would buy time to figure out what to do. She took a deep breath trying to gather her composure. “I assume you are a man of some influence in the empire,” Karigan said.
Dr. Silk preened. “I do have some influence. My father is second in power to the emperor. It is not openly acknowledged; it is understood in the emperor’s inner circle.”
“And you are an archeologist? Like the professor?”
He frowned. “I oversee all archeology throughout the empire. The professor was merely one of many who answer to me. I am the emperor’s special consul on antiquities and true history.”
Here was a man, Karigan thought, who was obscured by his father’s shadow, who wanted to be regarded as important on his own merit. “We both know,” she said, “that the empire’s true history is, in fact, false.”
“Those words are heresy.” But Dr. Silk was not angered by her statement. He looked intrigued. “What makes you believe such a thing?”
“Did you know I was born here?” Karigan asked. “Right in this very area, which was once known as Corsa, the province of L’Petrie. You see, I was born over two hundred years ago.” Dr Silk was a rapt listener. “I attended school in Selium, and then I went to Sacor City to serve King Zachary Hillander. You want to know my name? In my time, I am known as Rider Sir Karigan G’ladheon, a Green Rider of His Majesty’s Messenger Service.”
Dr. Silk paled, looked shaken. He gripped the armrests of his chair. She had caught him off guard. He must not have expected her to be so forthright, or maybe it had something to do with the information itself. She smiled to herself. Instead of feeling like she had given away a part of herself, announcing her name and title made her feel more powerful. She no longer had to hide.
“Well,” Dr. Silk said, visibly trying to regain equanimity, “that would certainly explain a few things.”
Karigan relaxed in her chair, her shackled hands resting on her lap. She had him now. If he was anything like the professor, he’d be overcome by his curiosity of the past. He would not even realize she had taken control of the situation.
“I have so many questions that I hardly know where to start,” Dr. Silk said, the eagerness in his voice confirming her thoughts.
“I would be happy to answer your questions,” Karigan replied. “There is no reason for me not to, except for the matter of Cade Harlowe.”
“I told you—”
“Hear me out, please. You told me you are a man of influence, and I’d wager you can influence how Mr. Harlowe is treated.”
“He is your lover,” Dr. Silk said with distaste. “Do not try to deny it.”
Imperial spies must have found out about it somehow. She tried to suppress a shudder of revulsion. “All right, I won’t deny it.” Her easy admission once again appeared to surprise him. The next part was not as easy to say. “We both know that Mr. Harlowe will be executed.” Not if she could help it, of course. “I will answer your questions, but I expect to have your personal assurance of his well being until . . . his execution.”
“Well—”
“Furthermore, I will want to see him one last time.” Before Dr. Silk could interrupt, she hastily continued, “I know you said I wouldn’t be able to see him, but I have something to offer in exchange.”
“Oh?” He could not seem to help himself but look intrigued. “And what would that be?”
“You know that Green Riders have special abilities, do you not?”
“Yes, I have heard this. The foundation stud of our enslaved true healers was a Green Rider, from before the emperor conquered your Sacoridia. We have carefully bred the line to maintain and enhance the healing ability.”
It was her turn to be shocked. He couldn’t mean Ben Simeon, could he? The only Green Rider known to fear horses? Poor Ben, enslaved and bred to produce more healers? She’d been cold ashes before when she thought Cade already dead, but now there were embers glowing within. They threatened to flare, but she subdued them. She needed Dr. Silk.
“You will tell me of your ability?” Dr. Silk asked eagerly.
“I will show you,” she said. “If you personally ensure I can see Mr. Harlowe.”
“I am a man of influence as you say, but alas, even my influence goes only so far. My father would not permit it. Besides, I could always use Mr. Harlowe’s welfare as leverage to force you to show me your ability.”
“My ability cannot be coerced. If I feel I am being threatened, or Mr. Harlowe is being used as leverage, it will not work.” It was pretty much a lie, and he’d probably see right through it, but she had to try. “Would your father necessarily have to know about my seeing Cade? It could be between you and me.”
He said nothing, weighing her words, no doubt.
“Look,” she continued, “we both want something, and we can both make it work to our mutual benefit.”
Dr. Silk laughed. It was a scratchy sound. “You did say you were born to merchants, did you not?”
“The very best.”
“Very well.” She could tell he was trying to sound indifferent, but she could hear the underlying eagerness in his voice. “As long as you remain cooperative and answer my questions, as well as show me your ability, I will find a way to let you see your lover. You will just have to trust me to keep my end of this . . . bargain.”
She nodded. “I will accept your word, on your honor, as you will have to accept mine.”
“Agreed.”
Karigan gave him the traditional merchant bow to seal it. “I am at your service.”
Dr. Silk nodded gravely in return. “Then let us begin with questions, shall we? About your ability—”
“Not until I see Cade.”
“That will take time to arrange.”
Karigan shrugged. “I will not show you, or talk about it, till I see him.” She imagined Dr. Silk glaring at her from behind his specs as the silence lengthened between them. She did not capitulate.
As though they had not spoken of her ability or Cade, he folded his hands upon the desk once again and began to speak. “I have a number of questions, which you have agreed to answer. As improbable as it sounds, the fact that a person from so long ago is sitting before me now, there is precedent for it. One only has to look to the emperor or my father for that. But unlike either of them, if you are who you say you are, I gather you have not been living among us for these two centuries but are only recently arrived. And if that is, in fact, the case, how is it you came to be here?”
The questioning, and her answering, were both very like what it had been with the professor. Dr. Silk listened avidly to the story of her journey into Blackveil.
“Some of the materials we’ve found and preserved make mention of a Green Rider named Karigan G’ladheon, and that she vanished into Blackveil and never returned,” he said.
Karigan had
no idea what documents and artifacts he might have access to, so she could only shrug and continue, telling him of the looking mask, how she smashed it, and—
“You smashed it? An artifact of such amazing power?” He looked like he wanted to reach across the desk and shake her for her stupidity. The professor had not responded this way when he’d heard about the looking mask. “Why? Why did you give up such an opportunity? To hold the balance of the world in your hands?”
She shuddered. “I did not want the responsibility.” It had not been her place. It was the responsibility of the gods to wield such power, not some small, fallible mortal. She also had not wanted to be held captive by the power, forever separated from her world, her friends and family, to be its guardian. Is that why the mirror man had tried passing the mask on to her? Had he tired of his guardianship?
Dr. Silk shook his head, clearly aghast over the choice she had made. Men like him could never understand. They did not care about the responsibility, only the wielding of power over others, only power for power’s sake, so they could stand over other men and not be the one at the bottom of the heap, who is looked down upon by those above.
“Also,” she said, “breaking the mask prevented Mornhavon the Black from possessing it.” As bad as the empire was, she believed the world would be in far more dire straits had Mornhavon controlled the mask.
Dr. Silk looked thoughtful, but he gestured that she should go on with her tale, and so she recounted how she’d ended up as part of a circus performance in the current time period.
“Ah, so you were the ambulatory corpse Rudman Hadley complained so bitterly about,” Dr. Silk mused. “I don’t know why it upset him so much when it increased ticket sales thereafter. Well, that’s one mystery solved. In an effort to solve the mystery of you, I’ve my experts going over some very interesting items we’ve found in the secret compartments of your wagon. My experts will judge their authenticity, but I suspect they will corroborate your tale. I must admit, I have had questions about you for a while.” He leaned on his forearms on the desk. “You see, my eyes are not very good with ordinary sight. You probably find my office to be dark. My eyes are sensitive to light, even with my lenses.” He tapped the rim of his specs. “It was an accident some time ago, with an etherea engine. It altered my sight. Do you want to know what I see when I look at you?”
Fascinated despite herself, she nodded.
Dr. Silk removed his specs. He gazed at her with nacreous eyes that gleamed in the low light. His pupils were tiny and gray, his eyelashes stark white. Karigan, who had seen many extraordinary things in her life, was not repulsed or taken aback but more curious.
He looked mildly disappointed by her lack of reaction. “I learned the hard way not to look directly into an etherea engine when one threatens to implode, which happens occasionally,” he said, “though I’ve never heard of anyone else being thus afflicted in such accidents. However, I believe . . . my altered sight is, in a way, a gift, for all that it pains me, and makes everyday vision different. For instance, here is what I see when I look at you. I see an aura of green clouding around you, and dark wings. Tell me, do you know what it means?”
DARK WINGS
Dark wings. It was not the first time she had heard this. It was Fergal Duff, his Rider ability just emerging, who said he’d seen dark wings around her. She stared hard at Dr. Silk, his eyes agleam with pearlescent fire. Fergal was able to sometimes see auras around other magic users. What Dr. Silk had seen sounded very much like that. Could this accident of his have brought out the same sort of ability as Fergal’s? In her own time, might he have heard the Rider call? No, she thought. He was not Rider material.
“Well?” he asked. “Have you nothing to say?”
She shook her head. “No. I—I don’t know why you would see such a thing. I don’t know what it means.”
He appraised her a moment more with those disconcerting eyes of his before replacing his specs. “I believe you. It is how I see people—the aural energy around them. Sometimes there are patterns, but yours is different. It is why I first took an interest in Professor Josston’s supposed niece. You are . . . different. Josston was clever to come up with the story that you’d been in an asylum. How better to explain you? Here we have taken you prisoner, you were struck hard by the emperor’s Eternal Guardian, which was surely painful, you are in manacles, and yet you have not shed a single tear or begged to be let go. You bargained on behalf of Mr. Harlowe, not yourself. Most females would be making unseemly caterwauling nuisances of themselves in the same situation. You have exhibited no such normal female behavior, and you show no sign of shame at baring your face before strangers. I do not think you are mad, and these factors combined with the story of your arrival and the questions you have answered, lead me to surmise you are who you claim to be.” He paused then went on. “You mentioned you traveled into Blackveil with Eletians. We found on your person a small round crystal we associate with Eletians.”
“Yes. It was my mother’s, and it was only recently passed to me.”
“Your mother was an Eletian?”
“No. She was befriended by one who gave her the crystal.” Although Karigan had come to question how much she really knew about either of her parents, she was firm on at least that point: Her mother had not been Eletian.
“How did it come about, this friendship between your mother and an Eletian? At that time, Eletians were not prone to making appearances outside their forest.”
“I don’t know exactly.” That much was true, she thought. Somehow Laurelyn had sought out her mother and found her, but Karigan did not feel she needed to bring Laurelyn into this discussion with Dr. Silk. “My mother died when I was little, and I only found out about all this toward the end of winter. My winter.”
“So what are they used for, these crystals?”
“The Eletians, on the expedition, used them as a light source, like in the legends about how they collected silver moonbeams. Have you heard those?”
“Yes, yes, of course. But we can’t make the ones in our possession light up.”
“You have some?”
“Several, obtained from captives during the war.”
There was too much Karigan had failed to learn about the empire’s rise. Had the Eletians fought alongside the Sacoridians? Had the entire population been annihilated? What had become of them?
“I think they light up just for Eletians.” Some instinct prevented Karigan from admitting that she could illuminate her own with a touch. The less he thought she knew, the better.
“Magic?” Dr. Silk murmured.
Karigan shrugged. “Even in my time, we find Eletians to be very cryptic.”
Dr. Silk chuckled. “Can’t argue with that. This line of questioning is, of course, leading somewhere.” He stood unexpectedly and came around the desk. “Come with me, Miss G’ladheon.”
“Rider G’ladheon,” Karigan corrected. “Or Sir Karigan.”
“Come along.” Dr. Silk acted as though he hadn’t heard. “We haven’t all day.”
She held her tongue and followed him into a corridor. Accompanied by the guards who had brought her, they set off into the depths of the palace. This time she paid attention—not so much to the ornamentation, unless it provided a convenient landmark—but to their various turnings through the hushed corridors. When they came upon the fountain of the dragon this time, she stumbled to a halt and remembered. She remembered a dream that might have been more than a dream. Just like in the drawing shown her by the ghostly Yates, there were corridors to either side of the fountain. Yates had pointed to the one on the left. It led to the prison of forgotten days. She knew it with that inexplicable sense of knowing. Would Dr. Silk take her there? The scything moon was held captive there, whatever that meant.
For that matter, the riddle had gone on, telling her to seek it in the den of the three-faced reptile. Well, she was in Amberhill
’s den, but she didn’t get the reference to three—
“Miss G’ladheon?” Dr. Silk glanced back at her in annoyance. A guard shoved her forward, and they were off once again.
“Rider G’ladheon,” Karigan muttered.
They did not enter the passage to the left of the fountain, as she had hoped, but they took the one right after it. Close, but not close enough. Some ways down the corridor, a guard unlocked a stout door and opened it for them. She followed Dr. Silk into a chamber quietly lit. At first all she made out were stacks of wooden crates, then tables and cabinets draped in sheets. Dusty, odd-shaped glassware and copper tubes glinted on shelves. In the very back of the chamber was a darkened cell.
“This is the emperor’s old laboratory where he once studied Eletians,” Dr. Silk explained. “As you can see, it has not been used in some time since there have been no specimens to study until now.”
Lhean.
“At my dinner party, you saw the one I captured. You knew him, didn’t you? He came with you through time. He was on the Blackveil expedition. It is the only explanation.”
Karigan had been peering into the distant darkness of the cell, but now she turned to Dr. Silk. “He didn’t tell you?”
“He won’t speak most of the time, and when he does, it is Eltish gibberish. I’d ask my father to pry information from him, but I want him to be pristine when I officially present him to the emperor.”
Karigan shuddered at the word “pristine.”
“So, was the Eletian you saw at my party one of your companions?”
“Yes.”
He looked jubilant. “Then let us reunite you. Perhaps he will deign to speak if he sees you.”
He led the way between crates and tables to the back of the room to the cell. He raised a lever in the wall and a ceiling fixture threw cold light into the cell. There, behind steel bars, on a scattering of straw strewn on the floor, sat Lhean, legs crossed, hands on his knees, eyes closed as though he slept in the awkward position. Nothing of his armor remained, just the black clothlike membrane clinging to his skin, stiff-looking with dried ichor. His face was thin and pale, the radiance she associated with Eletians faded or absent altogether. He appeared not to sense their arrival.
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