Strands of Starlight (40 page)

Blue and white. Blue and silver. She nodded to the painting, remembering the starlight in Her eyes, and slowly, without a sound, she left the room, passed the sleeping guard, descended the stairs. “She's there, and well,” she said to Terrill.

“Good. Mika now.”

Mirya remembered the dungeon well. It was reached by a back flight of dingy stairs that spiraled steeply down from the ground floor. A guard was stationed at the bottom, always present, watching the juncture of the two corridors that led away from the stairs. At the farthest end of the north passage, around the corner of a short crossing, was the torturer's chamber, large and well equipped. It was located at a good distance from the stairs so that any screams that leaked out from behind its thick door would stay at dungeon level.

Mirya and Terrill left the upper floors of the keep, scanning ahead down the stairwell. Empty. Quiet. The man guarding the entrance to the keep was eating a cold pasty in the porter's lodge just off the doorway. He was vigilant, but he did not see them as they slipped down the stairs and around to the back of the keep.

The door to the dungeon stairs was thick and stoutly bound with bands of iron. Mirya examined its latch and hinges. She did not need lattices to tell her that they were rusty and would squeak if opened.

“We'll have everyone in the castle down our throats.”

“Peace,” said Terrill. “Humans, it is true, might, but . . .”

His voice trailed off as he took hold of the latch and paused. Mirya thought that he was waiting for a break in the probabilities of discovery, but it finally dawned on her that Terrill was moving the latch so slowly that it would make no sound.

She marveled at both his patience and his control. In five minutes, he had lifted the latch, and he proceeded to slowly open the door. When there was room, they slipped through. Noiselessly, with agonizing deliberateness, he reclosed the door.

In the fetid darkness of the stairwell, he straightened, wiped his face, pointed down the curving walls. Only then did Mirya notice the cries drifting up from the lower level. They were muffled, distant, almost inaudible, but they were obviously those of a woman.

With anger that had abruptly turned to ice, Mirya centered herself, found her stars, and moved down the stairs. Terrill followed, and he made no comment when she drew Rainfire. He had, in fact, already drawn his own weapon.

Even at a run, they were as silent as they were lethal, and the guard at the foot of the steps looked up just in time to see the flash of an elven sword. He did not even have a chance to cry out. Sprawling into a pool of stagnant water that mixed swiftly with his own blood, his headless body rolled over twice before it stopped, twitching.

Beyond the single stroke that she had placed with calculated efficiency, Mirya paid no further attention to him. She listened, followed the warp and weft of the lattices, then pointed—as she had feared she would have to—up the north corridor.

Screaming. Louder. Demented. But also, in the lulls, there was the incongruous sound of impassioned speech.

Dear Lady!

Ahead, the webs contracted into a blurred knot of indistinguishable events. They could know nothing of what would happen until they were well into it.

“Heavy fighting.” Terrill commented almost casually.

The corridor was dark only to human eyes, and they ran northward, reached the crossing, turned in the direction of the screams.

In another lull, they heard a man's voice, shouting, commanding, imperious.

“
Confess, woman! Weren't you sodomized by the Evil One? Haven't the Elves shown you how to use this sack of corruption that is your body, this carrion bag of mucus. . . .?
”

The iron door reverberated with the sounds. Mirya knew it well. They approached, the nexus of existence and future unwinding in their minds, Moments from now, the criss-crossing strands of starlight turned into hazy nebulosity.

Terrill put his hand on the latch, looked at Mirya. “Are you afraid, Elf?”

She stared at him, incredulous. The screams continued.

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Are you angry?”

She could have chiseled the iron door with her anger, but she forced her voice to be even. “I don't believe that's a legitimate question.”

Terrill looked at her. Calm. Analytical. Dispassionate.

Her eyes said it:
Dammit, Terrill, open that door!

Terrill moved, swinging the door wide. Ruddy torchlight poured into the corridor along with the stench of vomit, urine, and old blood, but Mirya was already springing through the opening, driving at the men who were suddenly looking up at an unexpected and frightening attack, driving toward the body of a woman stretched on a table in the middle of the room.

The men were clustered, and the first went down within seconds. Webs parted and shifted, potential futures were examined, rejected, or chosen. Mirya kicked an unarmed man away because there was a method to her task, and those opponents who held weapons had priority.

The dandy who had spoken with her rapist a short time earlier was coming in quickly, sword drawn, and his skill had some subtlety: he could be a formidable opponent.

But he had his weaknesses, and Mirya knew them immediately. Bending, she slashed his legs out from under him, then straightened and caught him across the throat. As the spume of blood spattered the room, she spun and slammed Rainfire's pommel between the eyes of the torturer, a man she recognized from her own time in the dungeon. “Old scores, you bastard.”

He looked uncomprehending, but his skull had been shattered. Eyes glazed, he slumped to the floor.

Mirya was no longer concerned with him. She was focused instead on the man who was about to hew off the prisoner's head with an ax. Before she had time to move, though, a blur of motion streaked at him, and Terrill ended the threat, doubled back, and finished off a soldier who was bolting for the door to raise an alarm.

Mirya turned and opened a gash in another soldier. He looked down at his wound unbelievingly, as though he would weep. Rainfire ended his sorrow in the next moment.

There was a Dominican present, and he had fled to the far corner of the room. Mirya assumed that he was the interrogator. He was a pale, intense man with dark rings around his eyes from long nights of reading or, she guessed, questioning.

She pointed at him with her sword. “Your time is coming.” Then, crouching, she put her entire weight behind a thrust that severed the spine of a captain of the guard that Terrill was fighting. At the same moment, Terrill's stroke went through him from the other side.

The battle lasted only a minute. Mirya was abruptly aware that the only sounds in the room were the dull whines of the bloody figure on the rack.

“Cut her loose, Terrill, please,” she whispered as she turned to the friar. “I'll help in a moment.”

She stepped deliberately toward the Dominican, sword ready.

“I will shout,” he suddenly declared.

“Shout then,” said Mirya as she advanced. “This chamber is deep and isolated so that those above us cannot hear.”

He stepped back and bumped against the wall.

“Do you know who you have been interrogating, man?”

“She is a known and confessed witch.”

“She is not. Her name is Mika, and she is a midwife and a healer. She is one of the only flakes of gentleness and nobility in a land otherwise infested with men.”

The friar held his ground. “You are not going to kill me.”

Mirya stopped in front of him. He embodied everything she hated.

His eyes widened with realization. “Please—”

She slashed expertly, economically, reflecting almost with bitterness that he would feel very little pain.

When she turned around, she became aware that the white fire of her healing was burning fiercely. Terrill was trying to comfort Mika, but he looked up as Mirya approached. “Bones broken,” he said softly. “Many. She is bleeding within and without. She has lost sight in her right eye, and the hearing of her left ear. She has been burned over most of her body. She is dying.”

Mirya shook her head. “The torturer was skilled: he would not have let her die.”

“But she is old.”

“Yes, she is old.”

Her power was coming up fast, burning along her spine, and she had no intention of gainsaying it. She searched among the stars until one called to her, and when she reached Mika, she wrapped her mind about it and put her hands on the mutilated flesh.

A searing burst of passion and energy rocked her, white light so intense she though she might go blind. Her hands were burning.

“
Ai, Marithiai!
” she cried. “
Hyrialle a me!
”

Then she was falling through darkness so profound that even her elven eyes could not pierce it. In an instant, she felt Mika's pain and fear, felt the crack of bones, the pain of red-hot tongs, the agony of dislocated shoulders. But she was aware also of the star that she cradled in her mind, and she clung to it, embracing the power and the love.

“
Elthiai!
”

A flash of blue and silver, and the room came back. She pulled her hands away from the warm, sound flesh that she had created. Terrill was staring openly at her. “Mirya!” he said in awe. “Fair One! Healer!”

The midwife's eyes were unseeing, for Mirya had tended to her body only. Mika whimpered, her pain having become too habitual for mere physical healing to eliminate it. Terrill gathered her into his arms, trying to soothe her, but she strained against his grasp as she had once strained against the ropes that had held her.

“Be at peace,” he said. “You are among friends.”

“She doesn't hear you, Terrill.”

Grief was heavy in his voice. “I know.”

There was another kind of heat glowing within Mirya now, one that she felt in her heart. It filled her, eased her, comforted her, made her want to reach out to Mika as she had reached to George and Anne. And she knew that she could.

“Hold her steady, Terrill.” Her hands were gentle as she placed them on Mika's head, and Terrill's eyes widened again when he realized what she was doing.

Almost immediately, Mirya lost cognizance of Terrill and of the room. The blackness she had experienced in the physical healing was nothing compared to the infinite and impenetrable void that had opened in the midwife's mind. If Mika were falling through this, she might well fall forever.

The dark closed around her like a fist. She felt Mika's terror, felt, redoubled now, the pains and the tortures. Darkness . . . but there was blood everywhere, and it reeked in the back of her throat.

Mirya was starting to grow angry, but she caught herself, quelled it, forced herself to confront the dark, searched for the stars.

Faintly, she heard Terrill's calm voice. He spoke as he had on that first day in the meadow when she had stood before him, tired, frustrated, angry. “Center yourself,” he said. “You are here, and I am here, and Mika is here. We stand on the same earth, breathe the same air. . . .”

She was drifting through a night sky then, the stars cold and clear and infinitely powerful. A web flowed among them, but not the web of future and past. Mirya looked at the strands, examined the weave, recognized it as Mika. Her totality. Her being. Parts of it were fragmented by fear and madness, but most of it, the greater part, was intact, beyond the reach of men.

But the parts that were shredded, Mirya could touch, could heal. She seized strands, called upon the stars for strength, and began to reweave the pattern. She worked by instinct, feeling parts of Mika flick by as she fused the lattices,, the midwife's memories flowing into her own when she touched them.

Hyrialle a me!

And as she worked, she saw that she had taken on yet another responsibility: for as she could heal, so she could also change. She knew what Mika's pattern should be, and for now, she merely blunted memories and softened the torments. But had she so desired, she could have made Mika eternally joyful, or a genius, or a musician, or . . .

She paused, the last strand mending in her hands.

. . . or elven.

She knew the stars shining through the web that was Mika and knew how she could fuse one into the other and remake the woman's being from the very core. Varden had not changed her own nature deliberately, but for a moment Mirya saw as he must have just before whatever power that burdened him flared into incandescence and bent his will to unknown ends.

For a time, Mirya let herself rest among the stars, soaking up their light and peace, reflecting upon the profound and unlooked-for effects of her transformation. And when at last she came back to the dungeon room, she looked into Mika's clear eyes and sighed softly. “Be at peace, Mika.”

“Fair Ones,” said Mika, staring with wonder. “Why have you done this for me.”

There was not a shred of recognition in the midwife's eyes. Mirya smiled a little sadly. “Because, wise one, whether you know it or not, you helped me once. And Elves do not forget.”

Terrill's eyes were haunted. “It is true,” he said softly. “We do not.”

The cathedral bell tolled matins in the quiet night that had blanketed Hypprux. Giuseppe Gugliemino started up from his couch at the sound, and his thoughts whirled for a moment before he remembered where he was.

He had not been sleeping soundly, and he knew it would be some time before he could drift off again, so he got up, lit a candle from a torch in the hall outside his room, and began to read his office, his voice whispering dryly through the room.

But his mind drifted beyond the words. There had not been a night he had spent in the Chateau during which he had slept well. Clement's suspicions regarding Aloysius Cranby were not popular here in Hypprux, and the closeness of the keep, the surreptitious murmurings, and the tension between Roger of Aurverelle and the marshal all made Gugliemino wonder about poison in his food or a convenient accident.

Who cared if Cranby's mentor had been Jaques Fornier! If Benedict had won fame for burning a few thousand Cathars, what of it? Did Cranby honestly believe that the Throne of Peter was to be bought with blood?