In the blackness of the rear wall, a small square of more velvety black had appeared and, in it, the white oval blur of faces.
As soundlessly as she could, she edged her way to the back of the cell.
Tazey was wearing her boy’s breeches and a man’s embroidered black shirt, all smutched and filthy now with mud and slime and what looked like soot. Jeryn’s usual prim, formal outfit of hose, trunks, and a stiffly braced doublet were as grimy as his sister’s.
Starhawk breathed, “Sorry, but we just had the chimney swept yesterday—come back next week.” They both put their hands over their mouths to keep from giggling with relief.
She ducked down and crawled through the narrow black slot in the wall; there was the faint scrape of wood as Jeryn replaced the hidden door. Small hands groped for hers in the darkness, and they led her, half stooping, half crawling, a few paces and around what felt like a corner. Then with a hiss and sneer of metal, a lantern-slide was uncovered to show them in a narrow passageway with a sharply sloped roof. Roaches longer than Starhawk’s thumb scrambled for cover from the light.
Jeryn whispered, “This runs behind all the cells.”
Starhawk nodded. “It’s an old trick, if a prisoner turns stubborn. Put him in a cell with his partner and station a man to listen to them talk when they think they’re alone. Or if he’s a Trinitarian, hide a man here when the priest comes to hear his confession. It looks like it hasn’t been used in years.”
They were staring at her with wide eyes; Starhawk felt her hair, sticking straight up, all stiffened with sweat and blood, and the puffy, discoloring bruises on her face and half-exposed breast. “I’m fine,” she added. “The Chief...”
Jeryn whispered, “We heard. We were behind the wall.”
Tazey added softly, “Father’s gone to sign the bill of execution, but the law states it must be posted from sunrise to sunset before a man can be killed. He—” She swallowed. “He hasn’t been hurt.”
Starhawk had half guessed, from their lack of panic, that the Wolf had at least a few hours left. Exhausted and shaken as she was, the sudden release from stress made her eyes sting nonetheless and her throat ache. With an impulsive move, she hugged the girl to her, fighting to keep from breaking the armor of her calm. There was no time for it now.
“I—” Tazey hesitated, biting her lower lip. “I can use magic to get the guards away from him. I don’t think it will be hard.” She spoke swiftly, as if admitting something which hurt her; but once it was said, she relaxed a little. She looked far better than she had yesterday in Wenshar; better even than she had on the silent trip back across the desert—less withdrawn and hagridden. Starhawk guessed she’d used magic to get out of her own room—as their friend she had certainly been watched—even as she had laid sleep-spells on her watchers two nights ago. You can sometimes un-be what you are, the Hawk thought, but you can never unknow that you were it. Tazey had made her choice. For her there was now no going back, if indeed there ever had been. She went on, “We can...”
Starhawk shook her head. Her mind was working fast, running ahead. Her immediate fears for the Wolf were assuaged. She was thinking like a trooper again. “No,” she said. “Listen, what hour of the night is it?”
They looked at one another, then Tazey said, “About the third.”
“All right.” Starhawk drew the children close to her, keeping her voice low, for the tunnel would carry the smallest noise. “People are still awake—they’re still alert. We can’t make a break-in until two or three hours after midnight, when most people are asleep, and when the guards will be tired and stale—not only the guards on the Wolf’s cell, but the guards around the corrals.”
Huddled, squatting, in the narrow space beside her, they nodded, accepting her soldier’s wisdom. She could see Jeryn tucking that piece of information away in his mind for another time.
“The Chief was right. These killings aren’t going to stop until we know why they started. We need to know what the Witches of Wenshar knew. We need Kaletha’s books.” She looked at them in the upside-down glare of the shaded lantern, two grimy royal urchins sitting with their chins on their knees in the stinking spy-tunnel behind their father’s dungeon, dark eyes and green shining through the tangles of their dust-streaked hair. “Are you kids game?”
“Do you know every tunnel and cellar in Tandieras?”
Jeryn glanced over his shoulder at her and flashed her a shy grin. “Just about.” There was a trace of pride in his soft, treble voice. Broken out of its habitual sullenness, his peaked face looked more handsome and less pretty than usual. He wiped away the soot that had coated them all on their way through an old hypocaust, leaving a large, pale streak amid the general filth.
Jeryn had crossed the big, musty-smelling kitchen cellar without light, by touch in the dark; he’d flashed the lantern-slide, once, to guide Starhawk across. Long training in night scouting had taught her to take in the cleared pathways at a glance. She’d negotiated the expanse of piled sacks of potatoes and wheat, clay oil jars as tall as Jeryn was, and knobby, dangling fronds of onions and herbs without a sound that might be heard by those whose footsteps creaked over their heads. She could hear Tazey making her way softly now, moving in the dark, as the mageborn could.
The boy’s cold, fragile little fingers sought hers. “I used to hide anywhere, when Uncle Nanciormis wanted me for sword practice, or riding. And it wasn’t that I was a coward,” he added, a crack of hurt suddenly breaking his voice. “That is—it isn’t cowardly not to want to do something you can’t do if it’s dangerous, is it, Warlady? I mean, I’m not afraid of horses—it’s just I—I can’t ride the wild ones the way Tazey does, and I know it. But Uncle...” He hesitated, ashamed. “Uncle told Father I was a coward for not wanting to do it and a sneak for running away from lessons. I tried, I really did, to climb ropes and scale walls and things, but I...I just can’t. That’s—that’s why I had to find the Chief out in the desert in Wenshar. Because he—he’s a better teacher. I mean, it’s boring, but he’s careful you won’t get hurt, you know? Sometimes I thought...” He stopped himself, let go of her hand and, by the sound of it, wiped his nose hastily with a sleeve which would leave it blacker than before.
Starhawk felt that knobby small hand in her own, remembered the thin legs, the pipestem wrists. He hadn’t the strength that would have gotten him safely through the more dangerous elements of training, and Nanciormis was clearly a teacher who found it easier to blame his pupil’s failure on anything but his own careless ineptitude. It was easier, she thought, remembering her own earlier humiliations in Sun Wolf’s school for warriors, to hide from the lessons than to be mocked.
“I did try.” Then, as if ashamed of the crack in his voice, he turned toward the small door, hidden behind a wall of wine tuns whose wooden sides were thick with dust. “Through here.”
Starhawk paused, as Tazey ghosted up beside them in the darkness. “Wait a minute.”
She took the lantern from Jeryn and flashed a quick gleam in the direction of the shelves nearby. As she had suspected, remembering her convent days, in addition to red wheels of wax-covered cheese and bags of ground flour, they also contained empty flour sacks, folded neatly for the myriad purposes of the kitchens. She took one of them, removed the lid from a barrel of dried apples, and collected half a dozen, then borrowed Tazey’s knife to cut a substantial chunk from one of the cheeses. After stowing it in the sack, which she tied through her belt, she neatly turned the rest of the cheese toward the wall so the cut would not be noticed until someone wondered why all the mice and roaches in the Fortress were converging on that particular shelf.
“When we run for it, the place is going to be like a polo game with a hornet’s nest for the ball,” she whispered. Shoving two more sacks through her belt, she followed Jeryn to the little slit of a doorway behind the wine tuns. “I’m not going without something to eat.”
As Starhawk had suspected, the empty quarter of the Palace was as deserted as the
ruins of Wenshar itself. Even had they known she had escaped, she doubted anyone would have searched there before sunup. Moving like a ghost through the bleached skeletons of the decaying walls and sand-drifted cells, she admitted they had a point. From across the deserted compounds, she could smell the faint, nauseating waft of old blood, like the stench of a three-day-old battlefield, and recalled the horror she and the Wolf had found, all that was left of Egaldus—remembered, too, Incarsyn’s blood splattered not only over the walls of the room that had been his, soaking the sheets of his bed where the largest part of his body still lay, but the gore that had dripped down from the ceiling as well. The room lay on the edge of the empty quarter, where Nexué and Egaldus had both died.
Beside her, Jeryn whispered, “Uncle Nanciormis said he—he saw the Chief’s face. Could—you don’t think—”
Starhawk knew what he was getting at, but deliberately misunderstood. “Could it have taken on the Chief’s features?” Jeryn, though that wasn’t what he’d meant, nodded eagerly at this more acceptable hypothesis. “I don’t know. That’s why we need to know about the Witches.” She halted, the chill of the night biting into her body through the rags of her torn shirt, stinging the bruises on her face and arms and making her wrenched muscles ache. When she turned her head, the short steel slip-chain around her throat pressed cold into the flesh. “The Chief said it was in a corner of a big adobe kitchen with the roof half fallen in and two ovens, catty-corner to each other.”
Jeryn nodded. “I know where that is.”
Tazey glanced worriedly over her shoulder. The night wind had fallen, and silence seemed to hang over the empty quarter like the darkness of sleep before dreams begin. Her voice barely touched that hideous stillness. “You don’t—You don’t think we’re in danger?”
Deadpan, Starhawk said, “Two out of three, we’re safe.”
“Two out of three?”
“If it’s you or the Wolf behind it, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Realizing belatedly she was being kidded, Tazey grinned shakily. “Oh, thanks.”
Save for the faint skiffs of wind playing hide-and-seek in the zebra moonlight beneath the broken roof beams, the dark kitchen was silent. Nevertheless, Starhawk waited a long moment in its doorway before entering. It was in her memory that Egaldus had been killed wandering at night in the empty quarter, and it was probably a safe bet that he hadn’t been seeking herbs to harvest in the dark of the moon. But nothing molested her. She raised her hand, signaling the children to come.
When Starhawk and Tazey lifted the grille clear of the pit, scales stirred on sand in the darkness below like the whisper of dead leaves. She slid the cover from the lantern and held it down in that black well. Something twitched in the darkness. As if jet beads had been scattered from a burst sack, the eyes glittered unwinkingly up at them.
Starhawk took a deep breath. Sun Wolf had told her about it; but, as with the fear-spells written on the grille, just knowing was not the same. “Do you think you can do it?”
Tazey wet her lips and hesitated for a long time, staring down into the dark. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know how. It’s—I know what Sun Wolf and Kaletha say about illusion, but—I can’t make them think a stick is something and your body is a stick. I just—I can’t feel what they’d feel. I’m sorry, Warlady.”
She looked wretchedly at Starhawk, as if expecting to be cursed for her failure—obliquely the Hawk wondered if her father had led her to expect that. She put a comforting hand on the square, delicate shoulder. “I’m certainly not sorry you admit it,” she said frankly. “And particularly that you’re not willing to try anyway.” She squatted on her haunches, hugging her knees, and stared down at the restlessly moving shapes below. The dry buzz of rattlers echoed against the low roof, rising to a harsh crescendo. In spite of herself, she felt her stomach curl with dread. “And even if you could deal with the snakes,” she added, “there’s still the scorpions.”
“Could you make the snakes go after the scorpions?” Jeryn leaned over their shoulders to look down into the pit, fascinated. “Make them hungry or something?”
Tazey thought that one over, and Starhawk swallowed a grin at the practicality of the suggestion. “I don’t think so,” said the girl doubtfully. “I don’t really know how to make them think or feel anything. I don’t know how they—how they think or feel.”
“So that puts out just making them fall asleep.” Starhawk rested her chin on her knees, considering the matter in the light of what the Wolf had told her of magic. “If scorpions sleep in the first place. I know snakes do—”
“Look,” said Jeryn abruptly. “Tazey—you stopped a windstorm or made it blow in another direction. Can you do other things like that? With the air, I mean?”
She frowned up at her younger brother, puzzled. “I—I don’t know.”
Starhawk cocked her head to one side. “What did you have in mind, Scout?”
“Well, snakes shouldn’t even be awake at night—neither should scorpions, because it’s too cold. Can you make it colder?”
“Yes,” Tazey said, then stopped, looking disconcerted.
“You’re sure?” asked Starhawk.
She looked a little uncertain, not at her answer, but at her sureness. “Yes. I—It’s like the wind.”
Not an answer, Starhawk thought, that would make sense to a non-wizard, but she had been around Sun Wolf and Kaletha enough to know that wizards spoke to one another in a kind of bookhand, with minimal clues that both understood for things which could never be explained to those who had not felt them.
Tazey edged closer to the brink and rested her chin on her folded hands. Jeryn stepped back, knowing by instinct that he must remain absolutely silent. The girl shut her eyes.
Starhawk did not pretend to feel, as Sun Wolf could, when magic was being worked. All she saw was a young girl in faded old breeches and a black, too-large shirt, her head bowed and her saffron hair falling over her face, sunk in a self-induced trance of concentration. But she saw in the moonlight the faint, cold mist begin to curl into the air above the inky shadows of the pit, like ground fog on a winter morning, and felt the hair prickle on her scalp. Jeryn stepped back a pace, his thin face catching with a fleeting expression that was not quite fear, not quite grief, as he looked at this enchanted stranger who had once been his sister.
Starhawk’s instinct was to throw something down into the pit, to make sure the terrible chill had worked its way upon the things below. But from her own early days of meditation she knew how easy it would be to break the girl’s desperate concentration. She knew, too, that there was no telling how long she could keep it up. She handed the lantern to Jeryn and tucked Tazey’s knife in her belt to force the locks with. With a whispered mental prayer to the Mother and to whatever of her or Sun Wolf’s mythical ancestors might be listening, she lowered herself by her hands down into the darkness.
She dangled for a moment, listening for the telltale swish of scales upon dust. Nothing but silence met her ears. Would the sound of her dropping, she wondered, break Tazey’s hold on the spells?
There was, as the mercenaries liked to say, only one way to find out.
She landed lightly, springily, knees bent. The light wavered and staggered over her head as Jeryn leaned down after her with the lantern. Its gleam reeled over scaled backs—black, brown, patterned in sand-hued lozenges or glistening like oil and pearls. One mamba flicked its tongue stuporously. That was all.
The cold in the pit was incredible, slicing through the rags of Starhawk’s shirt and chilling her to the bone. Her breasts hurt with it—she was glad of the small warmth of the hot lantern-metal so close to her fingers. Even in the desert dryness, her breath was a cloud of white steam. Tiptoeing so as not to step on any of the snakes, she made her way across the room and remembered to set the light far enough from the niche so that the heat from the flame inside would not revive any of the sleeping vermin. By the time she reached the niche itself, she was shiv
ering uncontrollably.
Scorpions covered the chest and the rafter above them, like metal plates sewn on a garment. Starhawk paused for a moment, rubbing her bare hands, loathing the thought of what she must do. It’s do it or go back out and think of something else, she told herself. After the roaches in the jail and the vermin in some of the inns you’ve stayed at, it’s no time to get squeamish now. With cringing fingers she reached forward and picked a jointed brown body off the lid and tossed it aside. It landed with a faint plop in a corner. None of the others moved.
Starhawk supposed she had done worse things in eight years of soldiering—retrieving the chest of gold pieces one sacked township had sunk in the latrine pit behind the town hall came to mind. But shivering in the cold, ensorcelled darkness as she crouched to force the locks, waiting for the breath of warmth that would tell her that Tazey’s concentration had failed and that she herself was, for all intents and purposes, already dead, she couldn’t think of too many.
There were thirteen books in one chest, five in the other. Two of them were so large and clumsy she could only carry them one at a time, picking her way back through the loathsome carpet of the pit, to hand them up to Jeryn. Her hands were clumsy with cold, barely able to close around the heavy volumes that she passed up to him in twos and threes, hoping there were no scorpions hidden within the bindings that would revive in the warmer air above. It wasn’t likely—the chests looked tight against moisture, sand, and the small, glue-eating vermin of deserted places. When she was finished, she closed up the chests again, picked a six-foot diamondback off the rungs of the ladder, and scrambled out of the pit, her bruised flesh shuddering with considerably more than cold.
Jeryn was looking at her, eyes enormous with awe. As she gently shook Tazey out of her trance, the boy whispered, “You’re braver than Uncle Nanciormis—braver than my father.”
The Witches of Wenshar Page 26
