First Rider's Call (22 page)

Her sovereign was also a man. She had witnessed his humanity. Tears over the fallen at the Battle of the Lost Lake. Expressing his passion for the land of Sacoridia and its people, even when forced to kneel and submit before his traitorous brother. A walk in the gardens and a chaste kiss on her hand, the glimmer of humor in brown eyes, the warmth of his touch . . .

The man frightened her more than the king.

When she opened her eyes, he was gone. Only Mara stood there in the doorway, peering at her, then glancing down the corridor with a bemused expression on her face.

FOOTPRINTS

“Put this book on the top shelf.” “This book” was
Lint’s Wordage,
a compilation of famous quotations. Karigan gazed at the thick tome with dismay, but gamely reached for it with both hands.

“No,” Captain Mapstone said, not even looking up from her papers, “use only your right hand.”

Karigan obeyed. If this was what it took to prove to the captain her arm was sound, so be it. Immediately the weight of the book pulled on tender joints and muscles. Swallowing back a curse, she walked across the room to the captain’s bookshelves. She raised the book, her arm quivering, while what felt like daggers twisted in her elbow joint. She couldn’t seem to lift the book any higher than her waist. She just hadn’t the strength.

Still she tried, gritting her teeth against the pain. A rivulet of perspiration glided down the side of her face and tears overflowed the edges of her eyes.

Captain Mapstone left her papers and crossed over to Karigan. Gently she removed the volume from her shaking hand. Karigan sobbed with relief, and slipped her strained arm back into its despicable sling.

“When you can shelve this book,” the captain told her, “I’ll take you off light duty. With Master Destarion’s approval, of course.”

Karigan glared at the offending book.

“In the meantime, I’ve some documents for you to carry over to administration.”

Karigan tucked the documents under her arm—her good arm—and set off from officers quarters across the castle grounds.

The welt and bruise had nearly faded from her temple, and Destarion’s cold treatments were working wonders on her elbow. But not enough. She couldn’t even help much at the stable because too much of what was needed to be done required lifting and carrying.

Karigan found light duty all too reminiscent of what her father had her doing before she gave in to the Rider call: going over inventories, ordering supplies, assisting Mara with scheduling, running errands . . .

The irony of the situation was not lost on her.

She glanced at the sky. The change in weather she’d been expecting had held off. The day was bright and lovely.

 

The records room was located in the bottom level of the administration wing. Karigan didn’t know the area well, for she usually had little reason to venture there. It was usually the Chief Rider who handled administrative duties. The corridors were mazelike, a regular warren. The rough rock-work and the low, arched ceilings indicated she had entered an older part of the castle.

She strode along, worrying about when she’d be able to ride again. Was there some way she could convince Captain Mapstone that her arm didn’t have to be perfect to ride? How would she ever get her arm in shape to lift that bloody book?

Caught up in her concerns, she rounded a corner and kept striding until, with surprise, she found herself in the dark.

An abandoned corridor. The castle had been added on to over the centuries. Originally it had been more of a fortress keep rather than the large, sprawling structure it now was, but as the castle population shrank in peace-time, inhabitants moved into newer, more spacious sections, abandoning the old corridors.

Karigan had been in some of these deserted corridors once before. The Weapon, Fastion, was her guide. The Weapons, he said, were the only ones who really knew their way through the old sections.

She sighed at the memory of walking through abandoned corridors in the dance of a single candleflame; of a sense of timelessness. It had been a frightening experience and she had no desire to blunder down those dark, ancient passageways again.

She turned around to head back, but a figure hovered on the edge of her vision in the dusky space where light spilled into the dark. Her brooch stirred.

She perceived a swirl of green cloth as the figure swept by her, retreating down the corridor into complete darkness. The ring of boots on stone sounded strange, as though separated from her by the distance of time.

“Wait!”

Her cry carried into the dark, down countless unknown corridors where, perhaps, no living voice had been heard for a very long time. The footsteps faded out and there was no response. Though she did not like the thought of sending her voice into that darkness again, she tried anyway.

“Hello?”

And then in answer, only silence.

Who would go running down a pitch black corridor? A ghost?

She swallowed, not really wanting to know, for she had dealt with ghosts before and hoped herself free of them. She hastened from the dark corridor with a shiver, but when she stepped blinking into the lit corridor, she paused. It all could have been her imagination.

Cursing her own curiosity, she stuffed her papers into her sling and grabbed a lamp from a nearby alcove. Shadows leaped when she returned to the abandoned corridor. Light glinted dully off an old suit of plate armor some distance away.

She examined the floor. A layer of dust coated the flagstones—not too thickly, as the air currents that flowed through the active sections of the castle must find their way here—but it was thick enough to pick out distinct footprints. Her own set went a short distance, ser pentined by the tiny footprints of mice. A second set, much like her own, clear and new in the lamplight, ran off into the dark. And there was something more. Karigan knelt, and setting the lamp aside, touched the floor. Splotches of water.

Who had run by her? Why hadn’t they acknowledged her?

Then, even as she gazed at the footprints, dust filled them in, erasing their existence. The drops of water evaporated. All this though nothing shifted or swirled, her own footsteps remaining unchanged and clear.

Heart pounding, she grabbed the lamp and exited the corridor, the dark rolling in behind her retreating lamplight.

But a prickle of premonition on the back of her neck warred with that simple explanation.

 

The records room was a vaulted chamber of tables and shelves overflowing with books and scrolls and crates of paper. Lamps had trouble illuminating the vast space and shone like small, insignificant orbs. With no windows but arrow slits along one wall, it might as well have been night. A decorative frieze was lost to the shadows, and the torsos of carved figures soaring toward the ceiling were severed in half by light and dark.

A clerk sat at a writing desk. He was so absorbed in his penmanship he hadn’t heard Karigan enter.

“Excuse me,” she said.

The clerk squawked and bounced up from his stool, knocking it over, which in turn pushed over a pile of books on the table behind him. The cascading books toppled a barrel of rolled maps. He squawked again when he saw that the ink of his pen had splattered across his papers. Hastily he grabbed a container of sand to sprinkle on the wet blotches, but the container’s lid fell off, and the entire contents of the container poured out into a little mound on his papers.

The clerk could only stare at the mess.

He was so expressively mortified that Karigan nearly laughed, but knowing it wouldn’t be appreciated, she swallowed it back. She stepped forward and the little man jumped again, eyes wide through his thick specs, and his hand over his heart.

“I’m sorry,” Karigan said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I thought you were a . . .” But he just trailed off, shaking his head and muttering.

Feeling somewhat responsible for the mess, Karigan set aside Captain Mapstone’s papers on a nearby table and said, “Let me help you.” She set to work righting the map barrel, and re-stacking the books.

The clerk watched her for a moment, then shook himself and tended to his sand-covered papers.

“You don’t get many visitors here, do you?” Karigan said.

“Very few.”

She wasn’t surprised she had startled him, if he wasn’t accustomed to people walking in very often. He’d also been concentrating on his work and was probably unaware of his surroundings. Still, it didn’t account for the way he now darted his gaze about, as though he expected someone to leap out of the shadows at any moment.

Considering the dark ambiance of the place, and what appeared to be a solitary job, it would be easy for one’s imagination to run wild. The ancient surroundings, the life a building could take on of its own—the moans of the structure, its wheezings and exhalations as air currents shifted, the flickering shadows . . .

Yes, all fodder for the imagination.

Had her own imagination been similarly triggered when she stood in the abandoned corridor?

When she placed the last book atop the pile—a dusty volume containing a ten-year-old inventory of castle livestock—she turned to the clerk. He seemed to have the sand situation in hand, but he’d have to copy over the memorandum he’d been writing. The splotches of ink rendered it illegible.

Hoping she wouldn’t spook him again, she said, “I’m sorry you’ll have to start over.”

The clerk sighed and fiddled nervously with his black sleeve guards. “It wouldn’t be the first time.” He then gazed nearsightedly at her. “You’re not Mara.”

“No, I’m Karigan, and I’m helping out Mara and Captain Mapstone. I brought over some documents. And you are?”

“Dakrias Brown, recordskeeper.”

“Tell me, Dakrias, did anyone else come by here shortly before I arrived?”

“No. No one has been here all day, except the chief administrator, and that was hours ago.” He glanced anxiously about. “Why do you ask?”

“I thought I saw someone near here just a few moments ago.”

Dakrias’ gaze turned penetrating. “It happens sometimes.”

“What? You said very few come here and—”

“Yes, I did. I did, indeed. Very few
people.
”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am often here alone,” Dakrias said, “filing records, copying correspondence, that sort of thing. The other clerks call this place the crypt.” He frowned with distaste. “
They
are all on an upper level, in a more active section of the castle.
They
have windows. They just don’t understand what it’s like down here for me.”

“Why are you down here away from the rest of administration?”

Dakrias shrugged. “Too much effort to move hundreds of years of census records, and all the birth, marriage, and death registers . . . No one wants to deal with moving it—
no one
. It’s just easier to leave it be, because they know Dakrias Brown will take care of it, and they just forget about me. Hmph.
They
don’t have to be stuck down here.”

His eyes roved about the chamber. “This was once the library, before the castle expanded prior to the Clan Wars.”

A library . . .
A dark and gloomy one at that.

As if picking up on her thoughts, Dakrias jabbed his finger toward the ceiling shrouded in shadow. “Used to be domed with glass, but they built right over the top of it.”

Karigan thought she’d like to travel back in time to see how things once were. It was the way of civilization, she supposed, to tear down and rebuild, or to change and expand so the original structure was unrecognizable.

“So, I am here alone,” Dakrias said, “in this miserable place, except for the rats and the occasional visitor like you. And . . .” He trailed off as though not sure he should go on.

“And?” Karigan prompted.

He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a near whisper. “Sometimes—sometimes something catches the corner of my eye, as though a person were walking by the door, but when I look, no one is there. Sometimes I hear things, like distant whisperings or far off conversations, yet when I investigate, no one is there. Then, a time or two, I have felt something brush by me, but
no one was there.
” Dakrias shivered.

So did Karigan.

They both jumped and squawked. The two had been so drawn into Dakrias’ tale, they hadn’t noticed the entrance of the same unpleasant clerk Karigan had bumped into in the gardens. He strode imperiously over to Dakrias’ writing desk.

“Brown, where is that memorandum I wanted?”

Dakrias swallowed. “I’m—I’m sorry, sir, I—”

The man followed Dakrias’ gaze to the writing desk, saw the mess of splotches, and frowned. His specs flashed in the lamplight when he turned to glower at Dakrias.