"You have another way in?" she asked, trying not to sound hopeful.
"If I were still the Dragon's Eye," Peace said, "yes, I would, but I am not and I do not. At least for now the sewers are our best way to penetrate Thendulla Lypella."
"Then we do this thing," Firekeeper said, "tonight or tomorrowùsoon."
Peace stared at her, then shrugged.
"I did force myself on your company by offering myself as a guide," he said, "and I suppose this is guiding. You and I alone?"
"And Blind Seer," Firekeeper said.
"But of course," Peace said. "We will need lanterns. I think it would be best if we didn't disturb the workers' caches."
"As you say," Firekeeper replied, trusting Peace to prepare properly. "I speak with others. They have thoughts, too."
"Let us keep our group small," Peace interjected quickly, "at least initially."
"Very," Firekeeper said. "I have thought for one to bring. Edlin."
"Lord Kestrel?" Peace looked surprised.
"Edlin is great mapmaker," Firekeeper said. "Even Shad say so."
Grateful Peace blinked at this last, an apparent non sequitur worthy of Edlin himself, but he didn't comment.
"A mapmaker would be useful," he admitted. "I will be occupied working out our trail, and you do not write, do you?"
Firekeeper shook her head fiercely, feeling once again her inferiority in this area.
"Since will stink," she said, "I not be sure Blind Seer and I sniff our trail back. Best to have map."
Grateful Peace nodded.
"Good tactics, Lady Firekeeper. You are thinking like a general."
Firekeeper wasn't sure she liked this comparison. From what she'd seen, generals were involved in getting large numbers of people killed. However, perhaps good planning got few killed. That had been the case in King Allister's War.
She swelled a bit at the compliment, wolf-like, thriving on admiration and praise.
"I speak Edlin and others. You get lantern. Maybe," Firekeeper added hopefully, "sewers not stink so much. Rain has been in the mountains and even in city. Maybe it wash stink away."
Chapter XXIII
SAFELY IN HIS SIDE of the Cloud Touching Spire, Toriovico removed the First Healed One's book from its locked chest. The chestùits exterior intricately carved and polished ruddy oak, its interior lined in exotic aromatic woods and padded in shining midnight blue satinùwas far more lovely than the book. The book was thick and solid, its covers bound in age-darkened leather, its pages heavy vellum, peculiarly unyellowed by age.
Indeed, the book's very unremarkableness was one of the remarkable things about it. Several former Healed Ones had attempted to make the tome more remarkableùto inscribe legends on the front cover in gold or to adorn the plain binding with costly gems. Their efforts had met with spectacular failure. Not the greatest Illuminator nor the most skilled Lapidary could anchor anything at all on the book's dull exterior.
Except for the occasional slipcover ordered by those who could not accept that a tome so extraordinary remain so superficially ordinary, the book remained as it was, protected from and isolated by time.
There was one exception to the now universally acknowledged rule that the book could not be changed. Whatever the current Healed One chose to write upon those pristine vellum pages remainedùat least, it remained to his eyes and to those of his successors. No one else could see anything written there at all.
A corollary oddity to this was that the book never ran short of pages. Toriovico had tried to count those remaining, but he never came up with the same number twice. Finally, he gave up, contenting himself with the knowledge that there always was enough blank space for whatever he cared to write.
As a small boy, Toriovico had sat in his father's lap when his father wrote in the book. He had been fascinated by the way the dark ink would flow from the quill and vanish on the yellow-white of the page. Sometimes he had insisted on poking his finger under the quill, just to make sure the ink was real. It always was and the bluish black stains had sometimes lasted for days, much to the dismay of his nurses.
When Toriovico had been anointed the Healed One, he had opened the book and been startled to see writing on what had always been an infinity of blank pages. On that first opening, he had been compelled to turn the pages to the beginning and there had read the words that had transformed his universe.
Later there was no such compulsion and Torio had browsed, randomly, fascinated by this tangible link to his predecessors. Their handwritings had varied from spidery to bold, from neatly formed letters that could almost pass for printing to cryptic shapes that had to be stared at for a long while before their similarities to recognizable letters became clear.
One hand had been heartbreakingly familiar, and this was the one section of the book Toriovico never read. His father had written for himself, and for Vanviko, the son who had not lived to succeed him. Toriovico had no desire to see what that Father had written about him, secure in his knowledge that little Torio would never read those words.
Therefore, when he had first grown lonely in the burden of his terrible secret Toriovico had left several pages between his father's words and his own creamily pristine. Only then had he felt comfortable in setting his own quill to the page. He'd half expected the words to vanish before his eyes as they had when his father had done the writing, but they had remained, crisp and clear, and sadly saying less in their tidy little symbols than what he had hoped to express.
Despite his dissatisfaction with his own prose, the book had become friend and confidant, and though Toriovico continued to express himself best in dance, he found some contentment in this outlet.
This afternoon, however, Toriovico did not turn to where he recorded his own journal. Instead he turned to the very beginning, where the First Healed One had written. Skipping over the initial pages with their disturbing revelations, Torio moved to where the First Healed One, like his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons to follow, had recorded his most private thoughts.
Toriovico was seeking some mention, any mention, of what lay beneath Thendulla Lypella. The First Healed One seemed obsessed with the small details of life.
We must have silk. There is no way we can prosper without it. How to keep the growing rooms the correct temperature without recourse to regulating spells?
Agitation today to tear down Ashnernon's old palace. I realize the people need building materials, but I am reluctant to face my fellows when they return and find their houses in ruinsùor worseùvanished altogether.
Herbalists report disturbing die-off of some medicinal plants. Mold seems likely culprit. What do they expect me to do? Botany wasn't my line!
Sat through the dullest ritual imaginable, all the while my mind was spinning through how to deal with the Primes. Some members are showing disturbing initiative. This cannot be. We don't want a repetition of what's going on over south of the White Water.
Years later, as the First Healed One had come to realize that his fellow Founders were unlikely to return, the entries became filled with deeply sorrowful recollections of the homeland he would never again see. Even as he clung to those memories, the Healed One became more determined that the colony would not lose sight of its heritage.
Those were the years in which the ritual dances and choral performances were instituted, in which the cult for preservation of original architecture had become entrenched. Now the Healed One sought to establish a dynasty that could carry on his self-imposed deceptions. Soon, the reason for maintaining those deceptions became intertwined with the simple need for establishing an unbreakable hold on rulership.
He must have gone a little mad, Toriovico thought sadly. Mo wonder with his health so poor and his hope all but gone.
Whether for these reasons or others not mentioned in the portions of the First Healed One's journal Toriovico had read, the First Healed One did not appear to have often ventured beyond a few sections of Thendulla Lypella. Certainly, he had not gon
e beneath the Earth Spires.
Toriovico placed more hope in the sections of the book written by the Second Healed One, a man popularly remembered as the Restorer.
In any other culture, the Restorer probably would have been known as "the Builder," for he authorized the building of more structures in his comparatively short reign than did any other Healed One. However, the Restorer was his father's son to the core. New buildings were constructed under his aegis, but they were built along old patternsùeven to the perpetuation of design elements that Toriovico suspected had been practical when magic existed to whisk one up and down great heights or to provide light to secluded interior chambers.
It was during the Restorer's tenure that Thendulla Lypella had gone from being a hodgepodge of related buildings to the dramatic Earth Spires, that Thendulla Lypella had become a living maze, that the scattered walls between structures had been connected into one inviolable fortification.
It was in the Restorer's writings that Toriovico hoped to find some hint of what Melina had located beneath the city.
His hopes were not merely based on the Restorer's reputation. He had noticed that the books Melina had been so absorbed with had been older volumes and had been naively pleased that she took such an interest in her adopted county.
After he had danced the curious swaddling from his mind, Torio had gone to Melina's suite and noted as many of the titles as he could. Lest Tipi report his interest to her mistress, Toriovico had locked the maid in the bathroom and had dropped a few jealous comments that would make her think that what he searched for was evidence that his wife had taken lovers.
A large number of the books on Melina's shelves were from the time of the Restorer. Rather than duplicate her labor and risk that the key volume or volumes were secreted elsewhere, Torio placed his faith in his predecessor.
It was a shaky foundation on which to build his own tower. The Restorer had been a practical man, even to his ink, which was a pedestrian brown rather than the more exotic blue preferred by his father.
After his initial shocked reaction to learning the truth about the Healed One's plans for the kingdom, the Restorer had almost pointedly eschewed recording his personal reactions to events. Instead he had noted page after page of measurements and formulae for estimating stress, torque, and other such arcane engineering problems.
In the early days of his reign, the Restorer had recorded what was in essence his manifesto:
To build and preserve a cityùa kingdomùso fine that when the mages from across the sea shall return, they shall see our wit and wisdom, and so rule us fit inheritors for those arts that have been taken from us.
Almost pathetically, the Restorer's desire had been the same as that of the father he never mentioned in all his writingsùto make of New Kelvin a place worthy of those who had abandoned both the land and her people.
Toriovico continued reading, skimming over charts and diagrams that were alien and incomprehensible to his way of thinking. It was not until Torio reached the later entries that the Restorer began to include text explaining what his current batch of sketches meant.
On a hunch, Torio looked at the dates and did some counting. Yes, these explanatory notes began to appear after the Restorer had contracted the cancer that would cut his life comparatively short. Although this dry engineering mind did not overtly state that this was the caseùor maybe he had spoken of the matter more in personùhe was no longer writing for himself but for the son who would succeed him.
Had Toriovico's father done the same? Like the Restorer, he had known that his death was looming. Like the Restorer he had not avoided facing the reality. Torio put the thought from his mind as an unwelcome distraction. It did not matter what his father had done. What mattered was the current crisis.
It was among the Restorer's notes that Toriovico found the first hint of what might have drawn Melina into the tunnels beneath Thendulla Lypella.
The words were cryptic and brief, not as if the Restorer were hiding anything, but as if he was writing about something he expected his reader would understand, and therefore he need not employ his nagging energy to explain. Even so, there were tantalizing fragments, a bit here and there from which Torio thought he could piece something together.
He reached for a stack of the paper he kept near for the sketching out of choreographic routines, hesitated, and then instead turned to the end of the book to the portion where he had been keeping his own journal.
Poking his finger between the pages, Torio took up a pen. Awkwardly flipping between the sections, he started taking notes, slowly building from the Restorer's fragmented references a picture he found in equal parts intriguing and horrifying.
CITRINE SHIELD VENTURED from Hasamemorri's house with the hesitation of one who moves into utterly unknown territory. For her, the unknown territory was not the city of Dragon's Breath, but the going out on her own.
The woman once called Melina Shield might not have been a good motherùa concept with which Citrine was still strugglingùbut even at her most confused Citrine had no problem admitting that Melina had been addicted to control.
There were few places that Melina's children were permitted to go unsupervised. Jet, as a boy and his mother's favorite, and Sapphire, as the heir apparent to the family estates, had been granted a bit more freedom, but the younger threeùall girls and all most useful in their mother's eyes as potential marriage alliancesùhad been carefully supervised.
Indeed, the only reason Citrine had been permitted to roam in the gardens of Eagle's Nest Castle with no more supervision than the omnipresent gardeners and guards had been because Melina took great pride in this expression of the king's favor. Even so, Citrine suspected that if she had been a few years older that privilege would have been denied her. However, she had not yet "come out" as a marriageable prospect and children are permitted some indulgences.
That indulgence had led to Citrine's friendship with Firekeeperùa friendship that had, Citrine thought, struggling with a complex web of cause and effect, led to her mother's dishonor and eventual exile.
Blame as hot and heavy as the summer weather lay on Citrine's heart, dragging her down, splitting her into fragments that argued with each other. One of these fragments took the blame for her mother's fall. Oneùa thin, indignant voiceùinsisted that this was ridiculous. No one had forced Melina to enter into the intrigues that had led to her downfall. Only Melina herself was to blame.
But the blame voice, shame voice couldn't agree. Certainly if Citrine had been a better daughter her mother would have been happier. Melina wouldn't have needed the wonder and enchantment the artifacts promised. She would have been happy at home working, as her husband had done, for the betterment of her children.
Didn't Citrine have proof enough that she had been a disappointment? Hadn't her mother punished her by sending her to stay with the pirates? If she had been a better daughter, Mother would have taken Citrine with her when she went to New Kelvin. She would have taught her magic. They would have been together.
But Citrine had been a failure and a disappointment, good only to be used and discarded. The stumps where the two smallest fingers on her left hand had been cut off stung as if salt had been rubbed into them when Citrine tried to resist such thoughts. They were reminder enough that Citrine had ceased to matter to her mother.
Once she had sobbed when such thoughts filled her mind, but now Citrine let her heart weep quietly, imagining tears of blood leaking out and puddling in her body. Certainly she felt heavy and slow, wishing for sleep but unable to sleep when she tried. The oppression had become worse once they arrived in Dragon's Breath. Everyone else had things to do. Citrine had nothing to do but occasionally run an errand to Oculios the pharmacist or go for walks about the city with one of the others.
Sometimes the arguing of the voices in her head made Citrine stand outside of herself, yet another person, witness to what went on around her. Those were the times she tended to say things that disturbed peopleùlike her
remembering the rut in the road and realizing that it must have filled with water.
Elise had been disturbed by that incident, as Citrine's nurses and family members had been disturbed by similar incidents.
(Another voiceùa hard, cynical oneùlaughed mockingly.)
Citrine hadn't been able to explain, not even to Elise, whom she loved with an unguarded affection that she had never been able to feel for any of her blood sisters. The words came from the dull, watchful Citrine when they would. Afterward their content and form seemed to have come from someone entirely other than herself.
Citrine knew she had been brought to Dragon's Breath in the hope that confronting her mother would make her realize how horrible Melina had been to her. It seemed impossible. The closer she drew, the more she longed to see her mama, to be cuddled up in those shapely, elegant arms, to hear Mother sing the lilting chants she had used for lullabies on those nights she was home to tuck her daughter into bed.
That longing was why Citrine had written her mother almost immediately after their arrival in Dragon's Breath. Citrine had only blotted the ink a little, smeared it hardly at all. Later, Citrine had taken some of her own moneyùmoney she'd been given back in Hawk Haven by Sapphire and others who wanted her to feel less sadùand had paid one of Hasamemorri's maids to post the letter for her.
But Mother hadn't come to fetch her off to the palace, hadn't even asked after her as far as Citrine knew. That had hurt and Citrine had almost believed that Melina was as bad as everyone said.
Then, like a cool wind blowing through her overheated brain, Citrine had learned how Thendulla Lypella was a city within a city, cut off from the residents of Dragon's Breath.
Hope rode that discovery. Mother might not know about things happening in the city outside the Earth Spires. Hadn't everyone else been worried that now that Elise and Edlin had gone to see Ambassador Redbriar Melina would know that they were here? Didn't that mean they didn't think she had known before?
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