“That prison is a scary place. There’s something evil there,” he spoke it plainly, watching the intent expressions on their faces as they listened to his words.
“Princess,” he spoke to the royal personage directly, feeling empowered by the remoteness of the mirror as the communicator, “I felt evil in there, at the top of the tower, evil as strong as any force I’ve ever known.
“And there were dead prisoners in the tower, just left in their cells, dead,” he added.
The women in the mirror had somber faces.
“When can I come see Mata?” Jade passed over the serious allegations as she thought of her sister and wrote from her heart.
“It’s best if you come after dark,” Silas answered, and he saw the two heads nod in agreement, then a word to the third woman made her nod as well.
“Let me work on trying to help Mata, and get some rest today, and we’ll communicate this evening, after dark,” he told the women. He was feeling his weariness once more begin to creep into his consciousness, as the adrenaline from the mirror discovery began to diminish.
“I’ll wait to hear you. Thank you, my friend!” Jade wrote. Silas saw a tear start to roll down her cheek, as he waved, then put the mirror back in the pack and pulled it free once again.
When he pulled it out, he saw the cloth that covered Dianu’s mirror. He placed his pack carefully on the thin mattress of the bed, next to Mata, then he turned her head gently to face towards the pack. Next, he positioned the mirror against the pack, propping it to angle towards Mata. Then, finally, he wrote a note: I need Healer help for my friend. Dianu, please watch the mirror to see me.
Lastly, he faced towards the east, collected his wits to think about Dianu, and then directed a message towards her.
“Dianu, this is Silas, the Speaker, speaking to you to ask for help. I need your help badly! Dianu, this is Silas; please look in your mirror and wait for me. Dianu, Silas is speaking to beg for healing help,” he sent the message more stridently than Wind word protocol called for, but his emotions and the strain of his adventure drove him to speak from the heart.
With that done, he pulled on his clean shirt, then picked up the pitcher and carried it down the flights of stairs to the ground floor, where he pumped water into the pitcher, and borrowed an unattended, empty pail to fill it as well, before climbing back up the stairs to his small room.
Chapter 9
When he reached his apartment, he realized he was hungry, and he wished he had gone to the market to get something to eat. He chided himself as he set the water down, then went to check on Mata.
Before he even focused on Mata, he saw Dianu, staring at the mirror, wearing a towel wrapped around her torso, her shoulders bare and gleaming with drops of moisture. When she spotted Silas, he face gave a sigh of relief.
“Who is that? What’s wrong with her?” Silas could read the motion of Dianu’s lips to recognize the words.
“She’s my friend,” Silas wrote on his pad as soon as he got it out of his pack. He was pleased that his voice had reached her so quickly. “She’s been hurt, beaten, and maybe,” he tried to find words to describe Mata’s condition. He didn’t want to openly declare that the girl had been a captive in a prison where an evil power lurked.
“She wasn’t treated well, and her spirits are broken,” he unartfully summed up Mata’s condition.
Dianu read his note, and considered the answer, then moved her own mouth speaking to him, but with words that he could not decipher or guess at from the movement of her lips.
“Wait,” he wrote to interrupt Dianu. “I can’t hear you. You have to write your words down and show them to me in the mirror.”
Dianu held up a finger in a signal for Silas to wait, then she left her dressing room in a hurry, a flash of her bare legs the last Silas saw of her.
A minute later she returned, wearing a robe, and carrying a large pad. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, with a pair of styluses sticking out behind her ears.
She grabbed one of the styluses, and began writing on the pad, writing intently for several seconds.
“Let me see her whole body, close-up and slowly,” Dianu directed. Silas obligingly faced the mirror towards Mata, and then slowly moved it from her head to her feet, angling from side to side to give his Healer friend a clear view of the full extent of the injuries Mata has suffered. When he finished, he turned the mirror back so that he could see Dianu.
She was writing again. “You need to bring her here to me, so that I can treat her properly. She needs help,” the note said.
Silas shook his head negatively immediately. “We’re hiding,” he scribbled quickly. “I can’t afford to move her; if she’s seen, she’ll be taken into custody,” he had to admit a part of the truth.
“Then let me come to her; tell me where you are,” Dianu wrote the note as fast as she could.
“We’re in a different city, in a faraway country,” he wrote to the woman. “Just tell me what I can do to tend her.”
He saw the expression of disapproval on her face as she wrote slowly on her paper.
“Can you go to the market and buy some things?” she asked.
Silas didn’t even bother to speak, but just nodded.
“You need these,” Dianu wrote and she produced a list of a dozen items, which Silas diligently copied.
“Thank you Dianu. I’ll Speak to you when I have everything,” he wrote back.
“Silas. One last thing. Get some sleep my young friend; you look like you need it,” Dianu gave a melancholy smile. Silas closed his eyes and mirrored her smile as he nodded his head, then he slipped the mirror in his pack.
Within two minutes he had rearranged Mata so that she lay beneath the bedcovers. He hoped that would keep her comfortable while he was gone to the market. He bent and kissed her forehead, then picked up his pack and slipped out of the room. Silas remembered the herb vendors of the markets in Amenozume. He had visited them on occasion during his first visit to the island when he or he and Prima had visited to purchase pain-relieving remedies and cures.
His first stop was a vendor, a wizened old man who sat on a stool behind a long, skinny table of dried and powdered ingredients. Silas showed him the list. “Do you have all these?” he asked.
“What’s that one say?” the old man asked as he pointed a trembling hand at the third item on the list.
“Green Duchess leaves,” Silas answered shortly.
“I though it said ‘greet duck egg sleeves,” The man chuckled. “Your handwriting is sloppy. Kids don’t have patience to do anything properly these days.”
“I was in a hurry!” Silas answered. “Do you have all this?” he impatiently cut to the point.
“I have it; can you afford it? You’re getting enough things to treat ten or eleven people,” his vendor inquired.
“I have this much,” Silas pulled out half the coins he had in his purse.
“These are interesting; they’re from the mainland nations. I don’t see the likes of them too often here. Of course, it stands to reason, with those eyes of yours, you have to be a foreigner,” the man said. “I only need these,” he plucked a few of the coins from Silas, leaving most of the metal weight still resting in his palm.
“And you’ll need to go to the dry goods store to get the corn starch and the flour,” the man told him as he began to place small quantities of several dried herbs in pieces of paper that he twisted closed.
Silas went next to the dry goods shop as directed, and bought more items there, then went into the market and bought fruit and bread and cheese and meat for the room. As he began to leave the market, he overheard a fragmentary conversation between two dustmen that sent chills along his spine.
“Did you hear what Chester saw down at Koch prison?” one of the men said to the other. “He said he counted thirteen bodies that were carried away in carts.
“And I heard tell there were strange noises and colored light last night during the storm. There’s something bad
going on down there. I’m staying away from that part of the city,” the first worker said to the other as they both trundled their wooden barrels on wheels along an aisle in the market.
“I doubt all that; I think Chester probably saw the bottom of too many pints of ale last night, knowing him,” the other man downplayed the dramatic report that had frozen Silas’s heart. “With the Guild taking over control of the prison, it’ll be running in tip top shape in no time.”
“The Guild?” the first dustman asked.
“So I heard one of them tell the other while I was cleaning the alley behind their temple the other day. They already control most of the workers in the prison, so they can do what they want and the crown doesn’t have any idea,” the second speaker reported, just as the pair went forward at an intersection where Silas had to turn away.
Silas lowered his head and walked in as inauspicious a manner as possible, anxious to keep his golden eyes out of the sight of the people in the market and along the street. He was feeling vulnerable; the mention of the trouble at the prison made sense, terrible, frightening sense, and he didn’t want to contemplate that his identity might become associated with the escape from the prison somehow.
He reached the warehouse and climbed the stairs once again to the upper floor. When he entered his room once more, he saw with relief that Mata was still sleeping in the bed, breathing regularly as she lay under the covers.
He ate a handful of berries and a slice of bread with cheese with a cup of water from his pitcher to restore his strength, then he opened his pack and pulled out all the supplies that Dianu had ordered him to collect. He arranged them all on his table top, and finally pulled his mirror out of the pack and looked at the glassy surface.
He saw the Ivaric warehouse, once again filled with men who were gathering weapons from the stores that were retained in the warehouse. He’d not seen men taking on arms in many days, but he didn’t have time to think about the meaning of the resumption of the activity. He shoved the mirror into his pack, then pulled it out again, this time showing Dianu’s dressing room, a room that had been altered to include a tabletop on which there were many ingredients displayed in dishes, ready to be used.
The clever healer had decided to set up a demonstration for Silas, to help him concoct the medicines that Mata needed to heal. A shadow appeared in the corner of his mirror, then Dianu appeared. She waved as she held her pad up to the mirror.
“Are you ready to begin?” she asked.
“You’re brilliant!” Silas underlined the adjective, making his correspondent laugh.
“First, we want to put a salve on the bruises; this is the easiest thing to do – it’s a good way to start. You will need to mix,” she wrote a list of items that Silas copied. “Now watch me and repeat my actions,” she instructed.
Silas did as directed, and several minutes later he had a cup containing a paste of brownish color, with a consistency that was unlikely to drip or run after being applied to a wound. He pulled Mata’s blanket back as he held the mirror in one hand, then began to dab his medicine on the many dark yellow, purple, and red patches around her body. He rolled her over to tend to her back until he was finished.
“What now?” he asked.
“That will make the bruises heal quickly,” Dianu told him. “We need to tackle the other problems now; it’s going to get more complicated.
“Do you know if she has any internal injuries?” the woman wrote on her pad. “Has she vomited blood, or peed blood?”
“She hasn’t vomited since I rescued her several hours ago, and,” he paused, embarrassed to even write about delicate matters, “I haven’t see her pee.” He held the pad up to the mirror, trying to look away, as if to not be associated with the topic.
“Take the mirror over to her and let me examine her,” Dianu wrote. He let the mirror provide the eyes that Dianu needed, as he let the Healer scan Mata’s thigh for any signs of bloody smears or leakage, then look at her stomach contours.
“We’ll assume there are no internal injuries. We need to try to awaken her, to raise her spirits and give her hope. Mix these items,” she directed.
It was a long, complicated mixture of herbs that Silas followed through the many steps needed to produce a steeped tea that was bluish in color from all that had been added, crushed, drained, shaken, and settled.
“Now, tilt her head back and drop the mixture in, a little at a time, until she’s taken it all,” Dianu told him. “That’s all we can do for now. I’ll look in on you again in a couple of hours,” she promised.
“Thank you! Thank you! I feel like you’ve saved her life personally!” Silas wrote.
Dianu smiled and blew him a kiss, then left the room, while he repacked the mirror away, then sat on the bed. He cradled Mata’s head in his lap as he lay with his back against the wall, and then slowly dripped the liquid into her slightly open lips, a little at a time. When he finished, he placed the empty cup on the floor by the bed, then leaned back, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.
He dropped into a deep state of slumber almost immediately, and found himself dreaming about an extraordinary conversation.
“It’s L’Anvien,” a beautiful woman was speaking, as she sat alone on a throne, in a room that sat on top of a mountain, with winds whipping and howling around her.
“I didn’t think he’d be so bold as to stretch his infected reach across the water,” a man replied, a man who was suddenly sitting on a nearby new throne, one that was a solid stone structure, perfectly matched to the stolid, squat physical appearance of the man.
“Our boy could be in trouble; the situation is more grave than I realized,” he grumbled.
They were gods. Silas realized that he was eavesdropping on the gods. They had mentioned the name of the horror in the prison tower, and it displeased them. Silas knew he had been right to be fearful of the apparition; anything evil enough to displease a deity was more than a Speaker could expect to challenge.
“I wish I could have Kere lend some of that healing spring water to the boy; we could ask the sprites to carry it here to help him heal the girl and be on his way,” Kai spoke. The winds seemed to die down when she spoke, letting her words ring audibly with their bell-like tones.
“You know those confounded sprites would spill the spring water on themselves and then fall asleep before they even delivered it,” the stone god – Krusima mumbled. “Let the boy succeed or fail on his own.”
Kai turned and looked up at Silas, who was somehow perched above the gods. “You have a visitor now; time to go, young one. We’ll keep you in our thoughts,” the beautiful goddess spoke in a voice that was more motherly than his own mother’s voice had ever sounded.
Silas opened his eyes.
Mata’s head still rested on his lap. And Hamilton stood in the doorway, watching the two of them.
Silas lifted his hand groggily to his face, and wiped away the drool that moistened the corner of his mouth.
“You’re bolder than I ever would have guessed by looking at you, other than those strange eyes of yours,” Hamilton said. “When I heard the rumors in the street about the great calamity at the Koch prison, I had an inkling that you might have already stirred up trouble after your arrival.
“How is she?” he nodded at Mata.
“I gave her some medicine. I just have to let it run its course,” Silas said. He looked down at Mata; her face seemed to have more color in it, though he didn’t know if it truly did, or if he just wanted it to.
“I came to check on you, and to tell you something I forgot yesterday,” Hamilton spoke. “There’s an armory around the corner, in the basement of the building with the green doors. I have a membership, and you’re welcome to practice there as my guest. Prima mentioned that you like to use weapons,” Hamilton said.
“And you might need something to do for the next few days, besides watch your friend,” Hamilton added.
“Why’s that?” Silas asked, unable to decipher the simple comm
ent.
“It appears there’s a big storm rolling in; it could last for days,” Hamilton informed him, seeming to know that Silas would want to escape from Amenozume.
“Will it affect the shipping?” Silas asked. He tried to look out the window on the far side of the room, in an effort to appraise the sky and the weather outside.
“There won’t be any shipping for several days. The dock workers will all be idle. Things will get rough in the taverns around the harbor. I’d stay away from them if I were you,” Hamilton advised.
“I’ll be going now. Good luck,” he added as he pulled the door shut, leaving Silas and Mata alone.
A storm was moving in. Silas shook his head. Luck seemed to be against him. He wouldn’t have really believed that he was going to be able to leave the island as quickly as within a day or two, but having the option would have been nice. At the very least, he was going to get wet and drenched from going out of the building.
He sat back and relaxed. Perhaps he would go to practice his sword work at the armory. The activity would be a welcome change from monotonous sitting he foresaw for himself, sitting in the small warehouse room, watching Mata.
He carefully slid out from under her, then plumped the pillow and placed it beneath her head. She definitely looked healthier, he was sure. Dianu’s medicines were doing their jobs.
Silas grabbed an apple, then stood in front of the window, watching the late afternoon sun sink towards the western horizon. When it turned dark, he would call out to Jade, and summon her to come see her sister, the fugitive.
He still felt exhausted, his short nap having been too little sleep to make up for the long exhausting night of adventure he had spent rescuing Mata. He returned to the bed, then gingerly laid down on the edge of the mattress, next to Mata, moving slowly so as not to disturb her. He closed his eyes for a brief nap, and fell sound asleep.
The Pearl Diver Page 7
