The Shattered Mask (32 page)

“It’s a miracle nobody heard the traps going off,” he whispered.

“It’s a ways to the house,” she replied, “and I doubt anyone wanders the grounds on a chilly night like tonight if he can avoid it. Still, there are guards somewhere, so let’s be careful.”

He inclined his head. She motioned for him to follow her, then skulked to the right.

Shamur used all her old tricks to approach the mansion. She instructed Thamalon to stay low, take advantage of every bit of cover, and look before he moved. She kept an eye out for tripwires and odd depressions or humps in the earth that might mark the site of a mantrap, for all that the snowdrifts made them difficult to spot. She stalked behind rather than in front of any light source, such as the glowing magical lamps which the Talendar had mounted here and there on posts, lest she reveal herself in silhouette or cast a shadow. And she crept to the leeward, so no watchdog could catch her scent.

For a while, she was on edge, but by the time she and Thamalon slipped by the first patrolling spearman, she had relaxed and begun to enjoy the challenge. Win or lose, live or die, the incursion was grand sport. Never had she felt more

alive, more keenly aware of her surroundings or of her own body. She savored the beauty of the fat, almost luminous snowflakes and the bracing kiss of the cold breeze, even as she eased along with a sure grace that made silence all but effortless.

But she supposed that Thamalon, who had never been a burglar, might well be finding their venture nerve-wracking. She glanced back over her shoulder and was pleased when he gave her a nod that suggested that if he wasn’t having fun, he was at least bearing up well under the strain.

She glided forward, then the world twisted itself into a nightmare.

One moment, she was calmly leading Thamalon past a marble statue of a lammasu, a winged lion with a human head, the flowerbeds encircling its plinth, and the ring of stone benches surrounding those. The next, everything shifted. Though Shamur didn’t actually see them move, she was virtually certain that all the objects in view had changed position, and though she couldn’t make out exactly how their appearances had altered, they now seemed ugly and vile.

On the night of Guerreh Bloodquill’s opera, Shamur had seen her surroundings abruptly alter in far more overt and astonishing ways. Statues had come to life, and space had folded, opening gateways to the far reaches of the world. But none of those transformations had affected her as this one did. She shuddered, and her stomach churned. Behind ner, Thamalon let out a moan.

She struggled in vain to compose herself, and then a skeletal creature in a ragged shroud swooped out of the darkness, its fleshless fingers poised to snatch and claw. At that moment, it seemed the most terrifying threat she’d ever encountered, and, sobbing, she whipped out her broadsword and hacked at it. From the corner of her eye, she saw Thamalon pivot to confront a skull-headed assailant of his own.

Panic robbed her sword arm of much of its accustomed skill, and her first blow missed. The revenant whirled around her, scratching and gibbering, exuding a foul stink of decay, and when she turned to keep the dead thing in

front other, her own motion seemed to cause the landscape to shift even more violently, albeit undefinably, than before. A surge of vertigo made her reel.

The phantom picked that moment to pounce at her, and despite her dizziness, she did her best to cut at it. Her stroke swept into the undead creature’s black, rotting cerements, and it vanished. The blow also spun Shamur off her feet.

As she peered frantically about, she found that her disorientation was all but complete. Spatial relationships made little sense. From moment to moment, she had difficulty determining which objects were adjacent to one another, which were near and which were far. Though she coujd have sworn she had blundered about in a complete circle, she never so much as glimpsed Thamalon or his attacker. She could hear him grunt and his boots creak, but couldn’t figure out from which direction the sounds were originating.

Another spectral assailant floated toward her. She clambered to her feet and staggered to meet it. The revenant seemed to disappear. Then she discerned that the stone lammasu, which a moment ago had appeared to be on her right, now loomed on her left. Assuming she could trust that perception, in the course of just a few steps, she’d managed to spin herself completely around. Which in turn meant that the phantom was even now rushing at her back.

She whirled, cutting blindly. The broadsword struck the phantom’s yellow skull and swept it into nonexistence.

Shamur noticed she was panting. She struggled to control her breathing and thus her overwhelming terror. She had to figure a way out of this trap now, this second, before yet another dead thing hurtled at her.

It didn’t make sense that she was so profoundly afraid, gasping, shaking, her heart pounding. She’d encountered apparent distortions of space and time before, and though the revenants were foul and unsettling, she’d faced far more formidable adversaries in her time. She suspected that she and Thamalon had triggered some sort of magical field of disorientation, dizziness, and terror. It was possible that the

phantoms weren’t even real, just one illusory aspect of a trap intended to immobilize its victims until one of the patrolling warriors happened by.

She clung to that notion for a heartbeat or two, until another keening wraith dived at her, at that point logic gave way to raw, animal fear. By the time that, slashing wildly, she dispatched the thing, it was hard even to remember what she’d just been thinking, let alone put any faith in her conclusions.

How could the ghostly attackers be phantasmal when they looked and sounded so real? How could the warping of the landscape be a mere deception when she could see the world dancing and contorting around her? And even if it was all in her mind, that didn’t mean there was any way to escape it. She was going to die here, the revenants would claw her apart, her heart would burst from fear, or—

At that moment, when sanity was slipping from her grasp, Thamalon reappeared in her tear-blurred field of vision. He hadn’t had a chance or else in his distress hadn’t remembered to remove his buckler from his belt, and she desperately, reflexively snatched at his unweaponed hand.

Their fingers met. He turned his head and saw her, and, plainly feeling the same frantic need for contact as herself, he yanked her to his side.

Clinging to Thamalon anchored her somehow. For ,the moment at least, terror loosened its grip. Suspecting this was the last lucid interval she was likely to get, she tried to reason her way out of the trap.

She couldn’t trust her eyes, her ears, her nose, or her perception of direction, yet surely there was some aspect of reality the enchantment hadn’t muddled. Despite her awkward, flailing swordplay, the revenants had never actually touched her, and perhaps that meant they couldn’t. That would imply that the magically induced confusion didn’t extend to her sense of touch.

She and Thamalon had been approaching the mansion from downwind. Perhaps if she kept the frigid, howling gusts in her face, and didn’t permit any other cues to mislead her,

she could lead her husband out of the area tainted by the spell.

Unfortunately, that would mean closing her eyes, and what if she was wrong, and the phantoms truly existed? She’d have no way to defend herself as they ripped her apart!

With a snarl, she thrust that crippling thought away. If she was wrong, she and Thamalon were dead anyway. “Walk with me,” she said, squinting her eyes shut. “Don’t let go of my hand.”

Her lack of vision didn’t end the fear, the nausea, or the sense that the world was writhing and jerking around her, nor did it keep her from hearing the wails or smelling the fetdr of the revenants. She struggled to ignore all such distractions and focus only on the frigid caress of the wind. Thamalon jerked on her hand as he lurched about swinging his long sword at the apparitions.

Then he stopped and murmured, “Valkur’s shield, you did it. You got us out.”

Shamur opened her eyes to find the world returned to normal. She looked back toward the marble lammasu. No wraiths were streaking in pursuit of mortal prey.

She drew a long breath and let it out slowly, to calm her racing heart and purge the dregs of the terror from her system. “The Talendar must give interesting garden parties.”

Thamalon grinned. “I imagine they only set the snare at times when no one is supposed to be in this part of the grounds.”

“You think? And here I thought they prided themselves on their sense of humor. Are you ready to press on?”

“When you are.” They sheathed their swords and sneaked toward the house.

Like Argent Hall, the Talendar mansion had once been a stark donjon, but as their wealth increased and their taste for luxury and ostentation grew apace, the occupants had modified and extended the building to a far greater extent than the Karns had ever imagined. Old High Hall had

become a sprawling, rococo confection graced with a profusion of friezes, cornices, arches, and similar ornamentation. It was a truism in Selgaunt that the Talendar never tired of stripping away the old decorations and replacing them with something more fashionable or even avant-garde, and scaffolding currently extended along a portion of the west wing. The framework looked as if would provide an easy means of ascent to an upper-story window, but given the family’s reputation for wariness, Shamur suspected that appearance was deceptive. A mantrap waited up there somewhere, or at least the two spearmen walking the alures on the roof were watching the scaffold with special care. Crouching at the edge of the open space surrounding the keep, she looked for a safer means of access.

After a few moments, she noticed a sort of secondary portal projecting from the body of the house, bordered by pilasters and capped with a block of carved stone more than half again as tall as the recessed door itself. Just above that coping were round stained-glass windows, that, if her memory of various dances and parties wasn’t playing her false, ran along the wall of a clerestory overlooking one of several spacious halls.

She pointed to the entry, and Thamalon nodded. They waited until neither of the guards were looking in their direction, then darted up to the portal and crouched in its shadow. ‘„

Shamur quickly climbed to the top of the capstone, then, feeling vulnerable and exposed to the view of the sentries above her, examined the windows. She hoped they’d been designed to open. Otherwise she’d have to extract one from its frame, a time-consuming process that would greatly increase the likelihood of someone catching sight of her.

But fortunately, it wasn’t going to come to that. A moment’s scrutiny revealed the simplest of latches. She worked a thin strip of steel between the stile and post, popped the fastener, cracked open the window, and peeked inside at a shadowy gallery illuminated only by a single oil lamp burning at the far end. No one was in sight.

Shamur tied off a thin rope and dropped it to enable Thamalon to ascend to her as quickly and quietly as possible. When he joined her, she freed the line, coiled it, started through the window, and froze.

“What’s wrong?” Thamalon whispered.

“Nightingale floor,” she replied, “built to squeak when anyone treads on it. I am rusty. I nearly failed to notice in time.”

He peered past her at the gloomy interior of the building. “It’s a marvel you noticed at all.”

She shrugged the compliment away. “You can generally tell by the kind of wood, and the pattern in which the planks were laid.”

“Does this mean we can’t go in this way? “

“Luckily, no, but you must step precisely where I do.”

“Very well. Lead on.”

She did, taking care to trust her weight only to those spots where she reckoned the floorboards made contact with the joists beneath. She and Thamalon reached the arched entrance without either making a sound.

After that, they crept through the keep, listening for the voices and footfalls of others, ducking for cover and avoiding being seen whenever possible, strolling casually and pretending they belonged in the mansion when observation was unavoidable. Had they waited another hour or so to break in, there would have been fewer people roaming about, but Errendar Spillwine had taught Shamur that shortly before midnight was an advantageous time to enter a wealthy house. Many of the occupants had either retired already or were preoccupied with preparing to do so, and unfamiliar persons walking the corridors were less likely to excite alarm would be the case later on.

Finally, lurking in the doorway to a playroom full of balls, dolls, toy men-at-arms, and hobbyhorses, the Uskevren spied what they had been searching for. A brown-haired young man with a wispy mustache and the characteristic slim frame and wry, intelligent face of the Talendar, some bastard son of a female servant, perhaps, judging from

the fact that he wore an ill-fitting hand-me-down doublet cut in last year’s style, ambled rather unsteadily down the corridor.

The youth was alone. Indeed, as far as Shamur could tell, no one else was even in the immediate vicinity. So she lunged from the doorway, seized the lad, poised her dagger at his throat, and hauled him into the playroom. Thamalon shut the door behind them.

As she’d expected, the youth smelled of wine, but she saw no confusion in his wide, bloodshot eyes. Perhaps fear had sobered him up.

“What do you want?” he croaked.

“Tell me about the plan to assassinate the Uskevren,” she said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Shamur believed him. It made sense that few members of the household would be privy to a criminal conspiracy. “Then tell me where Ossian Talendar is.”

“Gone.”

She increased the pressure of the keen edge against his neck. “Don’t lie, or I swear to Mask, I’ll kill you.”

“It’s true! He left a couple hours ago and took some of the warriors and Lord Talendar’s mage along with him! Some other wizard in a moon mask went along, too, somebody I never saw before.”

Shamur and Thamalon exchanged glances.