The Waters Rising (19 page)

Chapter 3

Pursued by a Witch

W
hen they had fallen behind the travelers from Woldsgard, the duchess sent her men back to Altamont while she and Jenger followed more slowly. It had long been his business to be attentive to his mistress’s moods. Though he did not know why the recent encounter had set her off, he knew very well she was in a temper.

“Now that you’ve seen the soul carrier,” he said soothingly, “you should be satisfied and relieved.”

The duchess snarled. “I’ve seen her, yes, but not where she should have been, which was where they camped! What was that nonsense about not hearing wolves? They should have heard wolves!”

“You’ve told me that the sendings from the machine don’t always arrive in the form you intended.” His mouth was dry, as it often was when his mistress was upset, for her anger could turn on any convenient target. He concentrated on keeping his voice calm and soothing. “You’ve told me it can happen without any purposeful intervention at all, simply because the moon was in the wrong quarter or because the machine is very old. You even described it to me as being like a card game. You said even a skilled player cannot win every hand. So, since it’s obvious no one in that witless group we just looked at would have any idea about the matter, your wolves must have been hunted down by one of those unexpected fluctuations or malfunctions you’ve told me about.”

The duchess shook her head angrily. “The child can’t be more than four or five. What would she have been doing alone in the forest?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, the only evidence of frustration he allowed himself. “As I remarked at the time, your spy may have been mistaken. The castle swarms with children, and perhaps she saw one of them up to some mischief, but what does it matter? The Duchess of Wold is dead; long live the new Duchess of Wold.” He forced a smile. “Your way into his heart is open if it should be his heart that interests you. Why obsess about a child?”

“I care nothing for his heart, Jenger, as you know well. And it isn’t so much the child I worry about as the place she comes from: Tingawa.” The duchess raised one nostril as though scenting something foul. “While Mirami and I were at the court of King Gahls, the court seer cast the bones. He warned me of a shadow in the direction of Tingawa.”

“The court seer? My lady, oh, consider him. A man so old he cannot see his own face in the mirror? So feeble he needs two attendants to get him out of bed in the morning! And so, he has seen a shadow! I’ll wager that he sees little but shadows! He usually delivers them in assortments: half a dozen dismemberments, a fire, a flood, perhaps an invasion of vampires or kraken.” He relaxed slightly as he saw her smile.

“As he did, yes.” She gestured fretfully. “Perhaps it’s simply that this soul-carrying business seems unbelievable, outlandish to me. The very word ‘Tingawa’ sets me on edge for some reason. Is it really their custom?”

He adopted a ponderous and thoughtful expression, weighty with assurance. “Ma’am, it seems unbelievable only because it is outlandish. Tingawa is far away and many of its customs seems strange to us, though I believe we have adopted the habit of bathing in the winter, which seemed equally outlandish when we first heard of it.” He smiled sweetly at her, willing her to return his smile. “I assure you it is a true custom, frequently spoken of, particularly among the noble houses. Tingawans of dynastic families have a fanatical attachment to their ancestral lands, their temples, their ancestral ghosts. They feel a continuity that is longer than their lifetimes. Part of it is merely historic but the larger part might be called spiritual.”

“Spiritual,” she spat. “Nonsense.”

“I merely use their word. They would say spiritual. The spirits of the people who have kept the land are considered to be integral parts of that land, the very essence of the land, and if they die in some distant place, it is imperative that they be brought back to their own place, their own people. Why, even their diplomats have people attached to their legations to serve as soul carriers if that role becomes necessary.”

Her Grace the duchess chewed her lip, her twisted mouth changing her face into a gargoyle’s mask, harsh and unlovely. “They may say spiritual, but I say nonsense. Land is merely land; trees are trees; rivers are rivers, all of them ours to do with as we will! We have taken the world and subdued it, it belongs to us, not we to it, and custom or not, I will deal with this so-called carrier, she and those who brought her here.”

He shook his head, speaking softly but urgently. “Your family and your powerful friends have undertaken an ambitious project, very ambitious. Very important. Perhaps it is so important it should not be interrupted by a child? Even a Tingawan child?” He flushed, his nostrils narrowed. “The queen, your mother, has remarked that this is a time for concentration. In my presence, she recalled a time in her forefathers’ land when his people found that ridding themselves of a minor annoyance stirred up the hunters, and she has been plagued by them ever since. The hunters are still there, my lady. Be careful. It would take very little to turn a sweet-faced nothing of a child into a blessed martyr.”

She turned a look of such hostility on him that he felt the cold inwardly. He barely kept himself from cringing.

“You would do well, Jenger, not to speak of my mother. Matters between my mother and me are our business, not even remotely yours.”

Then, suddenly, she smiled at him, herself sweet faced and charming. “My mother would no doubt disapprove. She disapproves of most of the things I enjoy. Nonetheless, I will dispose of the soul carrier, her guardians, and any other Tingawans who may be so arrogant as to alight on Norland’s side of the sea because they have no right to offend me by being here in the first place!”

The curve of her lips had almost drawn his eyes away from the frozen, empty depths of her eyes. He pretended not to see them, smiling in return. Sometimes looking into Alicia’s eyes was like looking death in the face, and no easy death at that!

“Surely you are too powerful to be offended by a child! I don’t understand why it would be worthwhile!” he cried, shaking his head in frustration, knowing even as he spoke that he would have done far better simply to stay silent.

She tilted her head, making a pretty face as she considered this. “The woman I cursed took her own sweet time dying, Jenger. She should have been dead years ago, the day after I put the cloud on her. Oh, I know, I forgot two of the steps in the process and got another two out of order, but it still should have been lethal enough. At least I had sense enough to have the machine make copies, many, many copies. She fought me. How many times have we camped near Woldsgard, you and I, or ridden by, so I could release a new copy of the cloud? And before you joined me, I went, season after season. I don’t know how she did it, I don’t know who her confederates may have been, but however and whoever, no one opposes
me.
No person, no child, no creature! I repay opposition with defeat. I repay delay with death. She thwarted me; now I will thwart her. You’ve said she really wanted her soul carried to Tingawa; I will repay her by seeing it does not happen. It will amuse me.”

“And anything that amuses you, you find worthwhile?” he murmured.

“Believe it, Jenger, always.” And she smiled again, so sweetly that he felt an instant’s deadly fear. He had been her follower for some time. Sometimes, she had given him a strange, addictive sort of ecstasy. On certain occasions she had given him power. Sometimes, briefly, he had thought she considered him a friend. Occasionally, he had considered himself her friend. Briefly. Yet, most often he had been merely utilized, and sometimes, as today, he found himself playing a game with rules he did not know against a viper he could not see. He knew it was there, somewhere, its fangs exposed, its venom ready, behind her face, behind her eyes—her eyes that sometimes went empty, so that looking into them was like looking into a tunnel that had no end yet became no smaller the farther it went, a tunnel with a red light at the far end of it. There were things living in that light: ugly, sinuous movements; hard, dreadful words; a hideous, tingling laughter. Each time he felt them, his skin tightened and erupted in gooseflesh, as though he had been caught in an avalanche and was dying of cold.

It had happened half a dozen times since he had been with her. Each time, he told himself it was only imagination. Each time he was not reassured, for he knew it was real. That other place or that other person or . . . those other creatures were there, at the bottom of her eyes. Or, if not at the bottom of her eyes, then somewhere else that she saw from within herself. Wherever, whatever it was, she knew the way to it or them. Perhaps she went there sometimes, to amuse herself. Perhaps that was really where she lived in those hours and days when no one knew where she was.

He should not have mentioned the queen. Alicia hated Queen Mirami. Her own mother, and she hated her. A time or two he had thought he understood it, but at other times he did not. She had loved her father. He was sure of that. Alicia had loved Duke Falyrion with all the love she was capable of, and when she spoke of him it was with adoration, with grief and loss in her face and manner. She had said once that her mother had taken her father away from her. He had not dared ask her how.

He feigned a loose saddle girth and dismounted to tighten it, allowing her to put a little distance between them while he breathed deeply, trying to swallow the burning that filled his throat. When he mounted again, he stayed behind. The terror would pass. It always had before. It would again, he thought. He hoped. When they arrived at the Old Dark House, Jenger took the reins of the duchess’s horse and led it away, forcing himself to move in a matter-of-fact way, showing no fear, watching from the corners of his eyes as she ran, actually ran, through the great doorway. He did not want to know where she was going.

She went where he had never gone: down a long flight of stairs, through an anteroom, then into a room to which only she had the key. As always, when she entered, she checked her machines before she did anything else. First, the fatal-cloud machine. She had confessed to Jenger that she had made mistakes when she used it on the Tingawan woman, years ago, forgetting some of the details her
instructor
had given her, but she had reviewed the procedure afterward, and she would not make that mistake again. Second, the seeker-mirror machine. It would find anyone, or it would reflect anyone, depending upon how it was set. Third, the sending machine she had used last night. It was very old. It had buttons on it to control “the visuals,” “the sonics,” “the settings,” “the maps.” Her
instructor
had told her it sometimes malfunctioned. She would not use it again except to send a haunting. It still worked well enough for that! Fourth was the machine that watched and protected her. That’s all it did, its great bulk standing in a far corner, red eyes alert, just watching. There were other devices in the room, one that opened and shut the door, one that kept the room warm and circulated the air, one that showed her where her servants were, but the first four—no, three now—were the important ones.

Now that she had met the Tingawans, it was time to see what might be done about them—or at least one of them. From the cubicle in which she kept her precious things, she retrieved a very old package, stained by the spray of the sea, the tar of oiled ropes, the sweat of many different hands. It had been lying there for a very long time, locked away in her secret room, hidden on a shelf. Until today, she had not been moved to do anything with it, but now she opened it with hands so eager that only the iron control she held over her body kept her from trembling.

Inside were other wrappings, and still others, and at last, in a fold of oiled silk, a few black hairs obviously pulled out by the roots, a few scraps that only close examination would have revealed to be clippings from fingernails.

The duchess smiled a smile that even demons in hell would need to practice in order to achieve in such perfection. There was love of pain in it; enjoyment of torture; the rapture she felt when she observed grief and loss, especially when she had caused it; and now she could anticipate doing it all: torture, pain, grief, loss, all in one long-awaited achievement. She murmured, only to herself, “Ah, so, little Legami-am. I have all your hopes and longing in my hands, and they shall be the pathway to that large bale of muscle who guards the Tingawan girl. Bear, he is called. Well, we shall skin him. You shall summon your betrothed home long before he plans to go. It is my will that you shall summon him home. What a pity you will no longer be there when he arrives . . .”

N
ear the end of the first day’s travel from their camp near Riversmeet, the wagons from Woldsgard passed Abasio, who seemed to be waiting at the side of the road. Blue pulled the dyer’s wagon onto the road behind the others.

When they stopped for the night, Xulai brought Blue a horse biscuit and told both Blue and Abasio about the incident in the nighttime, though Abasio had suggested Blue not talk on this journey, as it might endanger all of them if it were known a horse could listen, remember, and repeat. Xulai badly wanted comforting from both man and horse, and at the moment, they were out of earshot of the others.

While Abasio pondered the storm, the wolves, the duchess and her men, Blue munched his biscuit, mumbling, “Not bad, but they made better in Artemisia.”

Xulai gave him a second one and said mournfully, “Abasio, Blue, Precious Wind says I did something else.”

“And what was that?” Blue mumbled around the last crumbs of his biscuit.