Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (24 page)

“Even if we get him away—even if we get to Halnath,” Gareth continued, “what can we do about the demons then? They've taken root here, they can't be exorcised—”

“They can't be exorcised now,” said Jenny. She strode fast, keeping up with the Prince's longer legs, the cold wind billowing in her plaids. “After the Moon of Winds, their power will lessen. Spells of exorcism will work again.…”

“There won't be a Realm left by the Moon of Winds!” said Gareth desperately. “My father … there's trouble with the Prince of Imperteng again, and if Polycarp is killed, the whole March is going to split away. People are beginning to flee the city, even at this season. There was a riot yesterday in Deeping, and if the gnomes turn against us—”

“I've a theory about how the demons here can be dealt with.” John glanced right and left as they crossed the square, then headed for the quiet back-streets that led around toward the palace. “It isn't only to cause pain and grief that demons take on human bodies—they need 'em for protection in certain places as well, an' I think Prokep is one of 'em. If that's the case, just count up who goes missin' at the Moon of Winds.”

“And I tell you we may not have until then,” the Prince said grimly. “And if the Realm holds together through that, what happens after Folcalor frees Adromelech from his prison? You say their power will be weaker, but they'll be everywhere, fighting one another, if what you've told me is true. And you know as well as I do that there will always be men who'll ally with demons, out of greed or malice. What then?”

Gareth and Jenny both halted in the quiet back-lane to look at John, who pushed up his spectacles with one bloodstained grubby finger and scratched his nose. “Aye, well,” he agreed. “I'll have to give that part of me plan a bit more work.”

There were guards stationed all around the Palace Hill. Had the market square been crowded, as it customarily was at this time of the morning, the men stationed in the arcade might have been inconspicuous enough, but in the stormy weather their crimson cloaks stood out even in the shadows, like splashes of blood.

“I count twelve,” John whispered, drawing back into the shelter of Wellspring Lane and peering around the corner of a house painted with mermaids and flowers.

“There's another one at the end of this lane,” whispered Jenny. She pulled Thane and Prince by their cloaks into the nearest turning. Eyes half-closed, she listened for the creak of swordbelts, for the faint squeak of armor-buckles and the clink of metal on the plaster of house walls.

The neighborhood between market and palace was deathly quiet. It wasn't only the sneer of the wind around turnings and over the moss-greened tiles of the roofs that kept people indoors, or the flecks of sleet in the air. Like the zone of stillness in the Winterlands woods, which hinted to Jenny of the presence of bandits hiding in the thickets, she could hear in the silence the fear that emanated from the waiting guards.

“For a short little gnome, Goffyer made gie good time to the palace,” murmured John as they stepped back into the tightly shuttered doorway of one of the district's numerous chocolate shops to reconnoiter. “Think you can get us past, love?”

“They're my father's guards,” Gareth protested, indignant. “I can order them—”

“I wouldn't try it, me hero.”

A small squad of soldiers in the blue and white livery of Lord Ector of Sindestray's private company strode past the end of the street, heading for the fashionable district where Bliaud's house lay. Jenny said, “Who do you think will speak for you if both Trey and your father claim that you've been ‘acting queerly’? If in your absence a bowl of blood, or a mirror painted with demon signs, were found in your chamber?”

The Prince opened his mouth in shock, and closed it again, and a look of gray weariness passed across his face. He had, thought Jenny, lost his wife, and his unborn child, less than a fortnight ago; had undergone not only that grief, but the added agony of renewed hope, eaten away by the acid of doubt and still more dreadful grief. He had been Regent, virtually King of Bel, and had fought for his father's realm against betrayal by a cousin he had trusted. Then the Realm, too, had been taken from him, and the father he had cared for and loved, while at his feet opened the dark threat of still more terrible days to come.

He was fighting still, as wounded men will when their blood is up. But his heart and his soul had been hurt, perhaps mortally. Jenny could see it in his eyes. She touched his arm again, and he made a smile, and covered her hand briefly with his bare, cold-reddened fingers, then dug out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Badegamus will let us in,” he said, his voice steadier than Jenny had thought it might be. “He can still be trusted. Or he could as of last night, anyway. We can send him a message.…”

“They'll be watchin' for that lad,” said John. “Let's see what things look like round the kitchen quarters.”

The whole of the palace district was alive with guards, moving among the tall gray-stone houses like red-shelled ants. Jenny wrought a cautious glamour about herself, John, and Gareth, but she had little confidence as yet in these new abilities, and did not know their strength or their extent. It was even possible that this faint whisper of magic would draw the attention of demons. The stakes were far too high to risk capture.

“One thing I don't understand,” Gareth whispered, once when they stopped in a gateway, to let the swift clump of booted feet stride by in the turning ahead of them. “Why did Polycarp come back? They said they had him.… Or was Goffyer only saying that to hurt me? Like Bliaud talking about Milla and … and Danae. Polycarp left Bel the day after Trey … Trey died. Went back to the Citadel at my command. I can't imagine why he'd have returned.…”

“He returned to warn you, son,” John murmured, and glanced back over his shoulder at the younger man. “He sent you word asking you to meet him in the wood-court that opens onto the Cooksway, and of course Trey intercepted the message. He was taken yesterday, just after I talked to you.”

Like hunters in the Winterlands, they probed down the narrow streets behind the palace, made cautious expeditions along mews. They followed the distant line, glimpsed beyond turnings, of the old palace's tall, moss-smeared wall. Intermittent flurries of sleet kept them from meeting anyone, but at the same time made them conspicuous to whatever guards might glance their way. Jenny's hip ached, from the night's long walk, and sleepiness chewed at her bones. She wondered where Morkeleb might be, and what was happening to Ian and Adric in the north. Fleeting thoughts, fleetingly put aside.

Then she would look ahead of her at John's familiar wide shoulders and the way he turned his cropped bristly head, and her heart would turn over in her breast.

In Bliaud's workshop she could have kissed the flesh of his arm, when she bared it to daub on the poultice, and the memory of his kiss in the alley behind the Silver Cricket's stable-yard was a sunrise, through all the morning's blustery, brutal cold.

Whatever happens, she thought, I have that kiss. And I was able to tell him I love him. That even at my worst, I was doing the best that I could.

They were in the slightly shabby district behind the old palace, with its little shops and ateliers, its lines of laundry hung between the projecting fronts of those splendid decrepit town houses. All around them lay that silence still. Sometimes a woman would pass them on her way to a fountain, or a man carrying a delivery would go by in the lane. But no vendors' cries sounded in the street, no singsong wails of Applepie, penny a pie, sweet as summer honey …

“There's a man watching the end of the lane.” She touched John's shoulder, halting him. “Not a guard.” She listened, getting her bearings: The palace wall lay past a line of houses to their left, and she knew there were guards at the petitioners' gate, about a hundred feet down the Queen's Lane from where they stood. The Cooksway cornered around a tower to join the Queen's Lane, and as far as she could tell there was no one near the wood-yard gate, save for that single man standing just out of sight where the cramped lane turned into the wider way. The Cooksway was, of course, the main one into the kitchen quarters. She could smell the dung churned into the snow, and over the gray wall the warm scents of baking and brewing.

“Bugger.” John slipped the sword from its sheath beneath his cloak. “Whereabouts …? I see him.” He nodded toward the end of the lane, where a cart had been unharnessed and left to stand by the corner of the wall. “Can I circle back and around?”

“Yes—no.” Jenny listened hard. Her concentration wasn't what it had been twelve hours ago, but still she was able to sift out the muted babble of servants' voices—scullery maids, wood-haulers, watermen—from the palace itself. She heard the wind groan around the corner of the alleyway a few yards behind them, heard a woman in one of the houses say to her child, “All the little birds will be back in the spring.…”

“Someone's just past the turning behind us,” she breathed. “Two of them …” A boot crunched in the frozen muck as someone shifted his weight.

“Not a guard, either. At least he's not wearing a guard's armor or harness.” She half-shut her eyes, breathing deep. The last time she had slept, she realized with a kind of wonderment, had been in the snow-cave in Ernine, with Morkeleb crouching outside the door. She had dreamed of the mirror chamber. Dreamed of Amayon crying to her from his prison.

And the time before that, she had slept in the Deep, to be waked by demon voices whispering of slaves.

“I'm sorry. I can't …”

“It's all right, love, you're doing champion.” John touched a hand to her shoulder, then slipped away. She wondered where and when he'd last rested. The man behind the cart in the lane continued to watch the gate. Somewhere in the Dockmarket a clock struck the hour, answered by the bronze chime of the palace carillon, and Gareth's breath hissed. The fourth hour of the morning.

“All Ector will need is someone accusing Polycarp of collusion with demons,” the young man whispered desperately. “His father was a traitor—he was brought up a hostage in the palace, with me and Rocklys. All winter there's been unrest in the Citadel, and in the Marches it rules. We can't let them kill him—put him to the Question …”

Jenny lifted her hand for silence, hearing John's feet stop. There was a quick scrunch—feet moving in snow?—and John said, “Don't try it. Put that down where I can see it.”

And a deep voice said, “Lord Aversin?”

“You won't recognize me.” The voice at the end of the lane was so soft, Jenny could tell, glancing sidelong at Gareth, that he heard nothing but a murmur. But to her ears, the accent of the South was strong.

“I do, though,” said John's voice, and Jenny heard the metallic hiss of his sword being sheathed. “You'll be Brâk, won't you? You didn't ever walk all the way from the mountains of Tralchet here by yourself ?”

There was the whisper of a deep bass laugh. “We cannot all ride flying machines, lord.”

Brâk, thought Jenny. Chief of the escaped slaves in the Tralchet mines, to whom John had given poppy powder from Jenny's medicine bag to knock out the guards at the outer gates. Later John had left maps of the territory between the Tralchet mines and the northernmost of the King's small Winterlands garrisons, so that the southerner could lead the escaped slaves to safety.

They had never seen one another's faces, but knew one an-other's voices, from the speech they had exchanged in the dark.

John stepped briefly from the shadow to snap his fingers twice, signaling Gareth and Jenny to come. Behind them, Jenny heard boots in the mud and turned to see the other watcher emerge into the lane as well. His drab clothing caught in the wind to reveal a flash of exquisite lace at sleeves and throat. Even as he came near she recognized Bliaud's younger son, Abellus, no demon glint in his somewhat mild brown eyes but a grimness to his mouth that hadn't been there when he and his older brother, Tundal, had parted company from their father at the fortress of Caer Corflyn in the summer.

“My family is a powerful one among the merchant guilds of the South,” Brâk was saying as Jenny, Gareth, and Abellus came close. In the shadowy slot between the buildings the dark lines of his facial tattoos formed a mask through which his eyes glinted like a beast's in darkness. “I was all the summer making my way south to them again. Then this winter I heard rumor concerning you, Lord Aversin, and concerning the gnomes buying or stealing human slaves, even from the Far South where they no longer dwell. I came to Bel with my uncle's next shipment of coffee and silk, and since I have been here I have seen evil things.”

“What, evil things comin' in an' out of the kitchen gate of the palace?” John gestured down the Cooksway, to where the gate of the wood-court could be just seen, in a sort of turret in the palace wall. “Don't tell me their cook is possessed as well.”

Brâk chuckled again, the unvoiced breath of one who has lived for years in fear of making a sound. Jenny guessed he was in his forties, with the first brush of frost on the long black braids, and beneath the line of the tattoos, a mouth both sensual and firm. He was well dressed against the cold, in quilted wool, and his boots were unobtrusively expensive.

“This is me lady Jenny Waynest,” John said, taking her hand and presenting her to the merchant, who salaamed deeply and made a motion as if to lift and kiss the hem of a nonexistent skirt. “And this's me lord Gareth, Prince of Bel, who was Regent for the old King.”

“My lord.” The merchant bowed again, though not so deeply, and pressed his fist to his brow. “We heard you had gone to the mage Bliaud's house—”

“Who's ‘we’?” asked John, and Gareth said, “What's happening? They're trying the Master of Halnath this morning.…”

“It is why we're here.” Brâk glanced up the lane as Abellus salaamed first to Jenny, then, deeply, to the Prince.

“Everyone's always complaining how servants gossip,” said the wizard's son. “Well, they might be servants, but they ain't stupid—fact is, my valet's a dashed sight more brainy than I am, not that that's praising him to the stars.… Never was one of the clever sorts, you know.” He tapped his temple and shook his head. Like Gareth, he dyed his curled love-locks—the two that escaped his velvet hood were a lively green. “The aunts always said I was the fool of the family—well, me and Papa, anyway. But nobody ever said you had to be able to run up double-column accounts to see when someone you know isn't someone you know anymore. 'Specially now. Papa”—he paused—“where was I? Oh, the servants.”