Master of the Cauldron (31 page)

Sharina felt a moment's surprise that the spectators outside really did back away so that sufficient light penetrated the alcove. She'd been thinking in terms of what would've happened back in Barca's Hamlet—basically nothing, except those in back would've shoved forward harder.
These
men were disciplined soldiers.

Both coffins had been wrenched open; the lids lay askew, half-blocking the already narrow aisle between the benches. The one on the right held a woman. The bronze must have fitted tightly enough to slow decay in the decades since her burial: dried flesh and even some of the skin clothed the skull, pulling the jaws open as if to scream. Her hair had continued to grow for a time after death but without the normal pigment; it formed a red-gold mass.

The other coffin was empty. Tenoctris touched the velvet lining with the bamboo sliver, her lips pursed in an expression of bright interest.

“Oh, this is terrible!” said Madder, who'd entered behind the women. “How could this have happened?”

“Yes, I was wondering the same thing,” said Tenoctris. “There must have been a good deal of noise, even though this alcove is on the opposite side of the mound from your dwelling. Could the persons who did this have climbed over the wall, do you think?”

“No,” said the gardener forcefully. “No. Not without our noticing it, I mean.”

He grimaced. “I'll admit it's been months since me or the staff have been up the mound proper,” he said. “Some of the oleander needs pruning bad, I saw that on the way up, and I apologize. But the vineyard we work on daily, and the tracks'd show up in the dirt if nothing else. They must've
flown
in—oh!”

“Go on, Master Madder,” Tenoctris said. “Did you see something flying over the mausoleum?”

“No, no, it's not that,” Madder said, kneading his forehead with callused fingers as though squeezing the thoughts into line. “Only a month ago—no, I'm a liar, longer than that, it must be near two, and at the dark of the moon. We all had dreams, me and the mistress and the three boys who sleep in the shed too. And in the morning, the gates were unlocked.”

“What do you mean by dreams?” Tenoctris said. She touched the satchel Sharina had taken from the servant when they started up the mound, but she moved her hand away immediately.

“Bad dreams,” Madder said. “I can't tell you more than that—and I wouldn't if I could, they were
bad
.”

He rubbed his forehead again and shrugged. “We searched, I don't mean we didn't,” he said. “We get plenty people trying to climb the walls and steal fruit, you bet, and they don't try again after they heal from the first beating. But nothing was gone—”

He looked up sharply. “I could tell, you know,” he added belligerently. “You may think I couldn't, but I know my crop!”

“I'm sure you do,” Tenoctris said calmly. “But you didn't go up to the tombs themselves?”

“No, milady,” Madder said with another scowl of inward-directed anger. “No, I surely didn't. It's not like foreign parts, you know—there's nothing in the coffins but the bodies.”

“Yes, of course,” Tenoctris agreed. “The wealth of the dead, like their temporal power, remains with their heirs.”

She smiled, but her face had the look of someone viewing a future that
held a great deal of difficulty. “The trouble is,” Tenoctris continued, “that there's other kinds of power than that granted by money and political position. It would appear that a wizard with the ability to cast a spell of deep sleep was looking for Stronghand's body in order to get additional power. And it would seem that he's gotten it.”

 

“You'll be well paid for this,” Garric said to the pair of servants who'd just given him and Liane their outer clothes. He took the rear pair of handles of the handbarrow heaped with used bedding.

The young male servant blinked and swallowed, looking terrified. Garric didn't suppose the fellow was afraid of anything in particular, but he was obviously concerned that anything so unusual meant some formless disaster was waiting to pounce. The middle-aged female sniffed, and said, “I hope I know my duty well enough to do it without thinking your highness needs to pay me extra!”

“Even so,” said Liane, taking the front handles. She unlatched the door and stepped into the hallway, her head bowed.

It was drizzling outside, so the servants'd had an excuse to raise the hoods of their short gray capes. The guards had still checked them when they came down the hall with clean bedding—but they wouldn't, Garric hoped, bother to do that again when the servants left.

Garric pulled the door to behind him as he followed Liane out. A three-wick lamp hung over the doorway. It was placed to illuminate the faces of people coming from either direction down the hallway, while those beneath it remained in shadow.

The guards were discussing the upcoming wrestling match between a Blood Eagle file closer and a Blaise armsman from Lord Rosen's regiment. They didn't pay any attention to the servants leaving the royal apartments and shuffling down the hall.

“What they oughta do,” one of the Blood Eagles said, as Garric and Liane rounded the corner at the slow pace of tired servants, “is let us fight the local talent with training swords. That'd show 'em what's what!”

“That'd be the quickest way to start a for-real war, at any rate,”
said the ghost of King Carus, shaking his head with a rueful smile.
“And I wouldn't be surprised if Gyganes—”

Carus knew all the Blood Eagles by name, as well as virtually every
other soldier in the royal army whose name Garric had heard even once. It was an ability Garric doubted he'd have been able to equal if he'd made it his life's work.

“—knew that just as well as I do. Of course, we can't have common soldiers deciding policy for the kingdom, and it's nice that the ruler isn't spoiling for a fight either. The way I was when I was king.”

Grinning along with his ancestor, Garric said to Liane in a low voice, “It's a pretty pass when the fellow who's supposed to be running the kingdom has to sneak out of his room, or he wouldn't be allowed to go.”

They walked more briskly now that they were out of sight of the guards. These corridors made do with a lamp at each corner, and those would burn down by morning.

“
I'm
not sure you should go,” said Liane. “My agent certainly thinks the business is dangerous, and he's not easily alarmed.”

“If there's wizardry involved…,” Garric said. “And there is, Dipsas is a wizard, and what else'd she be doing in the vaults under the palace? If there's wizardry, then nobody's more fit than you and I to judge what's going on. Except for Tenoctris, of course, and if she were here, I'd insist on going with her or sending Cashel.”

“I'm not disagreeing,” Liane said, looking over her shoulder to smile at him. “I'm just saying that I understand why others might.”

She paused by a door covered by a swatch of age-rotted tapestry nailed to the jamb and transom. “This is the room,” she said, then tapped twice on the wood—with the ivory hilt of the little dagger Garric had seen her kill with, he realized.

The door swung outward, frame and all. There was no light inside. “Watch the hole!” an unfamiliar male voice whispered. “Half the floor's gone in here, that's why they closed it.”

Liane slipped in, elbowing the door wider: they couldn't leave the load of washing out in the hall without attracting attention. Garric followed, closing the panel behind him. The shutter of a dark lantern scraped open. The light of the single candle behind a lens of thin horn blazed like a burst of sunlight.

“Who's he?” the voice demanded; a sharp-featured youth in the bleached-white tunic of Earl Wildulf's palace servants, Garric saw. “You weren't supposed to bring anybody. Anybody!”

“You know who I am,” Garric said. “Now tell us where Dipsas and the countess go at night.”

The room contained a broken bed frame and a litter of smaller objects, but it wasn't completely filled with junk the way the suite turned over to Garric had been. The floor, concrete poured over a lattice of withies, had sagged when a supporting beam gave way; half the slab had then collapsed into the darkness beneath. The response of whoever was in charge of palace maintenance at the time had been to close the room instead of trying to repair it.

When Garric glanced into the hole, he could understand why nobody'd wanted to work down there. He grinned. He wasn't looking forward to it himself.

“You weren't supposed to tell anybody who I am!” the youth said peevishly to Liane. “My life's in danger, you know that!”

“All our lives are in danger,” Liane said calmly. “Yours will be in less danger if you stop angering me when time is so short. Where does the wizard go?”

The spy twisted his mouth as if for another complaint, then caught himself with a shrug. “Right,” he said. “Right, and anyway, what's done is done.”

He pointed his thumb toward the hole where the floor had been. “I've left markers on the walls with mushroom spores. When your eyes adjust, you'll see them. It's not the same path Dipsas takes at the start—it's a rabbit warren down there, there's tunnels off every direction and I don't know where half of 'em go. Anyway, you'll join her route about two levels down.”

“Won't Dipsas see the markings and know someone has followed her?” Liane said with a frown.

“No, they take lamps, her and the countess,” the spy explained. “If there's any light at all, you can't see my marks. And even if they did—”

He shrugged again. “Chances are they'd figure it was natural, it seems to me. You get that sort of glow in caves. That's where I gather the mushrooms.”

“Then you'd better close your lantern,” Garric said, “so our eyes can adapt. They're there tonight, Dipsas and Balila?”

“Right,” the spy said, sliding the cover over the lens. The smell of hot iron and candle smoke was suddenly more noticeable, though that was
probably because Garric's eyes no longer distracted him from the odors. “They started down at their usual time, an hour ago. I've followed them three times when I wasn't on duty, and they always go the same place.”

The spy made a sound with his cheek as though he'd tasted something sour. “The bird and that jabbering little moron the countess keeps with her, they went too,” he said. “They always do. I don't understand why. I
don't
.”

He's frightened,
Garric realized.
But not, I think, by anything he could put a name to.

“He seems a sensible fellow,”
Carus remarked with his usual grin. It was always daylight at the place where he stood in Garric's mind.
“So perhaps he just doesn't like wizards.”

“I see a glow down there,” Liane said, her voice calm, but perhaps too calm.

“There's a ladder here to take you down the first part,” the spy said, sounding embarrassed. “Look, I can't go with you tonight, I'm on duty in the message room. I ought to be there now.”

“No one's asking you to come,” Garric said. He shifted the belt holding his dagger so that it was over the borrowed tunic instead of under it. His sword was too long to conceal from the guards, and in the close confines of the tunnels a dagger might be more useful anyway. “You've done your job, and more.”

“It's really pretty clear,” the spy said. The door opened. As his silhouette slipped into the hallway, he added, “You shouldn't have trouble.”

“I'll lead,” said Liane. Garric heard the
tick
of the long reed she'd concealed on the handbarrow, then the creak of the ladder as it settled under the girl's slight weight.

Garric followed, smiling as he thought of the way he had to sneak around in order to carry out a task he really was the best available person for. He hadn't seriously thought of forbidding Liane to come, though he was frightened at the risk to her. She'd been in worse places than this was likely to be, and she'd likely put herself in worse ones yet as long as she survived: for the kingdom's sake and mankind's sake.

A life spent hiding until Evil triumphed wasn't a life of safety in any real sense. Garric wouldn't order Liane to waste her abilities in that fashion, any more than he was going to allow his well-meaning guards and advisors to force him to twiddle his thumbs.

He could see the markings clearly, irregular bars of yellow-green that didn't illuminate any more than themselves. The floor at the base of the
ladder was firm but scattered with bits of something that scrunched beneath his feet—fallen plaster, perhaps, or tesserae loosened from an ancient mosaic.

Liane handed him one end of her sash, several times normal length but hidden till then beneath the tunic she'd gathered above it. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready,” said Garric, and drew the dagger. He might have done better to keep his hand free, but for the moment the hilt gave him a little extra confidence as they started into the near darkness.

When Garric got used to it, he
did
find it surprisingly easy to navigate through the cellars. The phosphorescent markings were adequate, each within sight of the ones before and after it. Even more important, the path itself was clear. The spy must've spent considerable effort preparing the route instead of simply scouting and marking it.

“He's a good man,” Garric said aloud.

“All Liane's people are,”
said Carus, grinning like a bear in a honey tree.
“Between her and Tenoctris, I've had to change my opinion of wizards and spymasters both!”

“He had reason to be angry,” Liane said, her reed brushing across the ground ahead of her with a
tick-tick-tick
. “But I couldn't warn him that you'd be with me. Just in case he were caught, you know.”