The White Tree (41 page)

"What will Samarand do when she finds you've murdered the keystone of her desire?" Dante shouted after them. He heard them speak in Gaskan to each other, then the door clunked shut. A lock snapped into place and the hallway went silent.

Dante stood, wincing at his rib and hip, brushed dust from his trousers. Other than himself, the dust, and the lantern flickering by the door, the room was completely empty. At least it was clean. He felt calm, somehow, as if his few minutes with Larrimore had spent all his available emotion. Feeling stupid, he tried the door and was almost glad that it didn't budge. He had nothing in his pockets but some of Nak's papers and his torchstone. He sat back down in the middle of the room. Had anyone ever learned to teleport themselves? What was the point of all he'd learned if he couldn't use it to escape a simple dungeon?

He could probably blast down the door, he thought. Murder the guards Larrimore would have posted outside. Still, anything drastic depended on being certain they were going to kill him or Blays or both, and he had the odd conviction that wasn't the case. He'd planted the seed of doubt with Larrimore, thrown him with that crazy scripture of prophecy, if only by a little. Larrimore didn't strike him as the kind of man who put too much stock in anything—likely why Samarand had taken him as her captain—but he was the captain, and if he was off consulting with anyone it would be with her. As the holiest of their order, perhaps she would put a little more weight in the possibility of Dante's importance.

He'd wait and see, then. Doing anything rash would ruin both their chance to assassinate Samarand and his ability to learn the nether through the structured instruction of this place rather than through whatever fragments he could scrape together on his own. They'd decide either to kill him or use him. He wouldn't act until he knew which.

Time went by. Without a window on the sky he had no way to tell how much. He conjugated irregular verbs for a while. He killed some time holding his breath for as long as he could, then waited for his gasps to subside and tried it again. He made a methodic sweep of the room, poking every stone up to the eight-foot ceiling, tapping his toe against every block in the floor. None were false or loose. He hadn't expected they would be, but he liked to think someone who'd shared this room before him had made an effort to escape rather than let himself rot, clapped up and forgotten.

It wasn't until he could no longer forestall urinating that he grew angry. There were no buckets, no holes in the floor. They hadn't exactly forgotten about him in a few hours, either. It was deliberate. They wanted to reduce him to an animal. Degrade his pride. He did his business in a corner and laid down on the other side of the room, breathing through his mouth. After a while he even slept.

Dante woke to pitch darkness. He jerked upright, flinching as if he expected to bang his head. The lantern had gone out. He groped for the near wall, leaning forward until his fingers brushed stone. He let himself wake up for a minute. Torchstone in his pocket. He cocked his head, listened for the scrabbles of rats or anything else lurking in the blindness. There was no need for light, the room was practically a complete seal. Darkness couldn't hurt him. For a while longer he sat there, listening to himself breathe. Maybe it was a good thing he was still locked up. Maybe that meant they had lots of things to talk about.

His stomach gurgled. He had no way to know how long he'd slept, but from his stomach, insistent but not yet pained, he guessed it had been some twelve hours since he'd eaten lunch shortly before they'd dragged him here. He sucked on his fingers, straining his eyes against the inky darkness. He stilled his mind. A coldness like exposing wet skin to a breeze crept over his hands. He thought on the nature of the shadowsphere, the all but solid substance of its delumination, a deeper blackness even than that of this room. He bent his mind to define the sphere by what it wasn't. By its un-ducklike properties. He laughed through his nose, and as his breath touched his palm he could see the creases of his skin, white and illusory as a flash of pain. It winked out at his surprise and he cast back out for its feeling, gathering it in like rope onto a pier. First a spot: and then he saw his hand, his wrist, it expanded over his arm, the dust on his knees and the smooth stone floor. He stood slowly, willing the light to grow. His line of sight bubbled outward until all the room was lit in ghostly white. It had been so simple. What else could he do if he took the time to think about it?

Metal scraped on metal on the far side of the door. Dante started. The bolt clicked. He swept his thoughts clean and popped back into darkness in time for the light of the hall to spill into his chamber as the door swung open.

"Still alive?" Larrimore called. He walked inside, glancing idly to either side of the door, then saw Dante standing half in shadow at the far side of the room. Larrimore was silhouetted, his face unreadable. "Stinks in here."

"That's what happens when you treat a man worse than you'd care for your stock," Dante said.

"At least it hasn't dulled your tongue."

"How's Blays?"

"Untouched, despite my best counsel and his brilliant plan to try to brawl his way to wherever we might have you," Larrimore said. He raised a dark hand to his face. "How would you like to see Samarand?"

Dante snorted. "Do I have a say?"

"Of course not. But I thought you might be comforted by the illusion you did." Larrimore turned toward the door. "Come."

Dante squinted against the modest lantern-light of the hall. After a single day in the room it already felt strange to walk about relatively free—qualified only by Larrimore, the sheathed swords of the guards who followed him, the walls of the keep, the hundreds of soldiers within it, the walls around the keep, and, he supposed, his own need to stay here until Samarand lay dead at his feet. He stumbled and a guard put a hand on his back. He shrugged it away. His heart railed against his ribs. Samarand, face to face. He felt certain he could take her life if he sacrificed his own. Why had all this fallen on him?

They ascended to the entry hall and Larrimore strode straight back to the sets of doors at the far end of the room. A few soldiers and well-dressed men glanced their way. Into a hallway, through another couple doors, a tight spiral staircase. Dante stopped counting steps after a hundred.

Larrimore turned off on a landing a short distance from the top. Dante smiled at the heaving breathing of the others. He was winded, but not badly. All that running away had been good for something after all.

From there they entered a sort of fore hall, thick black rugs on the stone floor, weavings and paintings on the walls, elegant sculpture of the same make he'd seen on the temples within the city. They passed a window of purified glass and Dante stopped short. Below him lay the yard and the walls and the open street, and beyond that, across a yawning gap of empty space, the upthrust steeple of the Cathedral of Ivars soared into the sky. For all their height in the keep, a full two thirds of the church's spire towered above them. Dante was beginning to understand just how big the world was, but surely Ivars was the tallest thing man had ever built. Behind it, the dead city stretched for miles through swaths of gray and white stone, riverlike streets, black fringes of pines growing frequent between the first and second walls and thickly enough to resemble a forest in the crumbling fringes of the outermost city. To his north he could see the gray waters of the bay, the tree-painted arms of land holding it in place, the silvery line of a river feeding it and coursing off to the southeast. It was earlyish morning, he saw, eight or nine o'clock. He'd spent closer to twenty hours locked up than twelve.

"Enough goggling," Larrimore said. Dante pulled himself from the window and hurried to catch up. They drew up in front of a solid-looking set of doors and Larrimore rapped his knuckles against the wood.

A woman's voice filtered through the door and with a distant thrill Dante realized he understood the foreign words: "Come in."

The room was close, warmed and lit by a hearth at its far end. Samarand was seated in front of it, turned toward the door. She folded up the book on her lap and looked up. Her gaze caught on Dante a moment, then she smiled at Larrimore, who walked forward and bobbed his head. They exchanged a few words and Dante's comprehension of Gaskan-by-way-of-Narashtovik evaporated. He shifted his feet as their talk wore on. Samarand laughed regularly, pressing her hand to the base of her throat. His eyes settled on the hollow there, the white, fragile skin. He imagined slitting it. Gathering the nether and caving in her face. If he made the room go black first, he could probably do the same to Larrimore and the armsmen before they could stop him. He was more dangerous than they gave him credit.

"Dante Galand," Samarand said, standing and facing him. Her voice was soft but carried a current of command. Her words were Mallish, but accented with the thick consonants of Gask speech, an influence he hadn't heard when she'd given her sermon. He met her eyes. "I'm sorry you spent so long in that cell. I was out."

"My fault," Larrimore agreed, smiling. She gave him a look and he gathered his men and bowed out through the door.

"It was at least a step more civil than all those times you tried to kill me," Dante said, managing to keep his voice level.

"I've never seen you before today."

"In the fields. Coming for the book. Did I pass your test?"

"Was I ever out in those fields with you?"

"Whose men were they, then?"

She shook her head, gaze steady. "This isn't why I brought you here." She nodded to a chair across from hers. He fell into it, leaning his head against its high back.

"I bet the others were grateful for the chance to prove themselves," he said. She just smiled. He found it maddening.

"It's easy to forget," she said, "when Larrimore tells me of all the things you've done, you're still a child." He let that go. "The others were angry, too. They didn't understand at first. But the same drive that brought them to the book gave them the vision for what they could become. Two of them are present members of our council."

"Is that an offer?"

She laughed again, then touched her fingers to her lips. "You've made things difficult for me. I'd like you with us. We need talent now more than ever. But I need that book."

Dante made himself sigh. "I told Larrimore. The book I gave Nak is the same one I found in that temple."

"Indeed." She leaned back in her chair. She could have been discussing the health of a distant relative. He readied himself to reach for the nether.

"I suppose you've already made up your mind."

"Why would I have done that?" She frowned, showing the wrinkles around her mouth. "This isn't a formality. I wanted to see you for myself."

He narrowed his eyes. "Is Blays safe?"

"Your friend is fine."

"I want to see him."

She lifted one gray-flecked brow. "If it turned out I'd killed him, what would you do about it? Try to kill me?"

"That would be suicide," he said evenly.

"Here and now you and I are in this room," she said with the same easy power with which she'd given her sermon. "It's high and isolated. The doors are shut. I have one question: do you want the knowledge I can offer?"

His hands tightened on the chair's arms. "Yes."

Her blue eyes skipped between his. "Then give me the book."

"Look at these," he said, pointing his finger so close to his eyes he might poke them out, "and know I'm telling the truth when I say I've given you everything I have."

She stared at him the way you'd stare at a scorpion while deciding whether to crush it or leave it be and he felt a flickering around his mind. He jerked his head, then made his mind go as blank as when he sought to channel the nether. Burn in hell, he thought, but he saw no recognition cross her face.

"You're a snake," she said, freezing his blood, "but I see no lie in your eyes."

"Finally. Now maybe I can get back to my lessons."

"Heavens forbid I infringe on your time. Is that how you aspire to spend it? With grammar and vocabulary?"

"I need to know those things," Dante frowned. "You all speak more than one language."

"Yes, we're wise enough to know the world's a large place. And good for us. But you didn't travel all this way in hopes of learning your letters. I'm inclined to agree."

Dante leaned forward, trying to keep his eyes guarded. "Meaning?"

"If these were ideal circumstances, we'd be in no hurry to rush things along," she said, lifting the corners of her lips at what she saw in his face. "But they're not and we do. You'll continue your lessons with Nak, but we've got a lot of work and not enough hands to get it done. Larrimore will make use of you with some tasks more suitable to your skills than copying conjugation tables."

"What kind of tasks?"

She gave an ironic tilt to her head. "Trust my great wisdom will see they're matched to your ability and temperament. I'm not interested in wasting either of our time on tests."

Dante nodded, considering her placid face. He'd have training both formal and experiential. In the employ of her most trusted servant. A chance to at once realize his talents and stay close enough to find the right moment to strike her down. He couldn't have asked for more. He knew this was no fortunate turn of a die, though. He had made this thing happen. Through wit and will he'd put himself in position to receive this offer. He wouldn't squander it.

"I accept."

"Excellent," she smiled, appearing genuinely pleased. Dante still hadn't seen the violence and radicalism Cally'd claimed she'd ridden to power. For a brief moment, he wondered if the old man might have been wrong, if the Samarand he'd known years ago had let age temper her ambition with wisdom. People did change, he thought. He wasn't the boy he'd been three months ago. He'd become potent in a way he'd imagined would take years, had done things he never would have dared on his own. If he could reforge his personality so much in three months, what could Samarand have done in twenty years? Perhaps when she'd gotten the wants of her heart, she'd mellowed, satisfied with her power and her place. "You won't be seeing much of me, of course," Samarand went on. "I've got a lot to do beyond holding the hands of all those administrators who keep writing me for money and troops." She nodded at her desk, overflowing with signet-stamped letters. "Larrimore will tell you whatever we need done. Grow strong. We'll need you soon enough."