Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (25 page)

“There are those—in the palace and out,” said Brâk, “who, if you will forgive my saying so, my lord prince, never trusted this ‘recovery’ of your father's. Or that of your poor lady wife. And the things that have been rumored about her, and about what servants have witnessed in the palace and especially in this private quarter she has lately had set aside for her, sound too much like other rumors concerning those who, like her, suffered death from the plague, and later … came back.” His dark eyes met Gareth's. “She died,” he asked softly, “did she not?”

Gareth looked aside. Then, after a moment's silence, he drew a deep breath and returned the merchant's compassionate gaze. “Yes. I … did a foolish thing. I should have known better.”

Brâk held up his hand, and shook his head. “There are many in the city,” he said, “who could not accept, and who made the choice you made. Who among us who loves would not do the same? Many in the city have come to the conclusion that you did since then. And many still fight that conclusion with all that is in them, not wanting to understand what they know in their hearts to be true.”

“That my wife is a demon?”

“That all those who return are demons. I don't know how many I've spoken to in the streets who say, ‘It may be true that some are, but my beloved is one of the true resurrections.…’ And there have been no true resurrections. Only more careful demons.”

He glanced across the lane at the gate to the wood-court. It opened a crack, and a white cloth waved twice, as if a servant shook out a rag. Then it closed, but Jenny could see that it did not close all the way.

“So.” Brâk touched the short-sword he wore beneath his quilted cloak. “Where can we find you, my lord, after we come out—if we come out?”

“You can find me in my father's hall,” Gareth said quietly, and fell into step with Brâk as he moved down the lane toward the little door. “Or my father's prison.”

“She said her illness had made her think about how she had used her life, and what she owed to the gods,” recounted Gareth as Brâk closed the postern behind them. They were a goodly company by that time, for while Brâk spoke nearly a dozen men and women had melted like ghosts from the surrounding lanes, grim-faced and quiet and armed with the weapons of their trades, butcher knives and hammers and knots of lead. There were hasty introductions, clumsy salaams among the wood-piles, the whispered names of husbands or children or wives vanished or killed. Gareth's hands were kissed and John's shoulders slapped encouragingly.

“We were in the market square, lord, a fortnight ago, but there were too many guards for us to rush the stake.…”

“Just as well, as it turned out,” said John. “Though I didn't think so at the time.” Inside the court another dozen servants waited, and nearly a score of the Palace Guard, led by the dark-browed Captain Tourneval who'd arrested John on his return to Bel, and whom later Gareth had spoken of as a loyal man. He bowed to John—Jenny saw no trace of the demon in his eyes.

Only a man doing as he was ordered, she thought, and loyal to his King.

Gareth led the way, up an enclosed stair and then right, through a pillared gallery beneath a hall and thence into a cloistered garden, snow glimmering wanly among uneven mats of neglected hedge and mounds of overgrown vine. “She asked for the whole of the old Queen's tower, the keys to all its doors and rooms, because it was closed off from the storerooms. Even the servants never come.” There was a gateway of wrought-iron openwork, locked, leading into a second, smaller garden. One of the town conspirators was a blacksmith who'd brought tools.

“She didn't know much about the ways of servants, then,” Brâk remarked dryly as the blacksmith forced open the gate. “Nor did the demon who took her know a great deal of how humans will take advantage of any place where they can meet their lovers, or hide stolen tablecloths, or take a few minutes to rest between scouring pans and carrying wood.” A couple of the red-liveried servants traded glances and embarrassed grins.

“I'm sorry no one came to you before this, m'lord,” added a man in the rough garb of a stable-hand, speaking to Gareth. “Seems like everybody whispered about the sounds we'd hear, coming from the old Queen's chapel, but nobody'd talk about it out loud. Nobody'd admit of being there, for fear she'd hear—”

“She showed you a gentle face, lord,” Tourneval said, striding beside Gareth, his sword drawn.

“She was gentle,” Gareth said softly. His voice cracked a little, then steadied. “Gentle and loving and kind. And kindness … isn't something that can be counterfeited. Not even when the one you're deceiving desperately wants to see it.”

“We only feared that in your indignation, you'd speak of it to her. Or to one who might get word back to her.”

They crossed the second garden, still more overgrown. The day's intermittent flurries of sleet had blurred away any tracks from the unkempt mounds and hummocks of snow in its center, but where the surrounding colonnade sheltered a long crescent of old snow Jenny saw a woman's tracks, small feet in the tall-soled shoes fashionable at Court, and mingled with them the heavier tracks of a man. Man and woman had come and gone this way many times since the snow first fell, tracks over one another, and always those same two. In one place the snow was rucked up and stained brownish with old blood, as if someone had knelt there and used it to wash her hands.

Gareth halted, looking down at the scraped muck. From the door opposite, decorated with exquisite carvings of the Twelve Gods, came the foetor of old blood, the lingering pungence of charred meat. Jenny, standing among the group of servants and guards, met John's eyes. All her own horrendous memories passed in a nightmare stream through her mind. She tried the door, and it was locked. John would have drawn Gareth away, but the young man said, “No. I need to see.” The blacksmith—his name was Dor—came forward again with his tools.

The Chapel of the Twelve was dark, and not very large. Pendant vaulting, delicate as lace, lost itself in blackness overhead. Only the extreme cold kept the air even remotely breathable. In summer, the place would have been a hell of flies. Jenny looked at the chains, and the bloodstains, and the things all laid out on what had been the altar-table of the Twelve, implements uncleaned after their last use and ready for their next. There were a few crystals left, flawed topazes, and a number of low-grade opals in a dish. Jenny's own eyes were mageborn, and she hoped the dense shadows hid at least some of this from Gareth, but looking up into his face she couldn't tell, in the sickened light, what he felt or thought. There was a smell, too, of turned earth, coming from a small door half-hidden behind the altar: turned earth and rot. Behind her, one of the guards flinched aside, gagging.

Before she could stop him, Gareth walked past her into the desecrated chamber, and Jenny hurried at his heels. “You don't need to see that.”

“I need to see all,” he said, his voice quite calm. “I'll need to charge her with it.” But she sensed that what he sought was enough anger to turn him against one who looked so much like Trey.

From that half-open door by the altar a stair no wider than a man's shoulders led down to what had been a crypt. Tourneval and Brâk had lanterns. The grubby light showed a floor dug up, tiles thrown carelessly in heaps along the walls, with no attempt at tidiness or thought to replace them. Mixed with the tiles were clots of dirt, smelling of mold and worms and worse things. Whatever was buried there hadn't been buried deep. From the wet black earth hands stuck out, and here and there parts of skulls. One of them still trailed long black goreclotted hair.

Behind her on the stair Jenny heard the shocked whispers as guards and servants passed word back of what they saw, or struggled to come forward to see, or back to seek the outer air.

“So this is how they make the crystals you spoke of ?” Gareth asked her, still in that voice of unnatural calm. “With magic raised from deaths like these?”

“I think so, yes,” said Jenny. “But were there no need for them to raise such power, I think they would still kill thus, for sport.”

When they came up the crypt steps and out of the chapel into the raw cold of the garden, Gareth said to Brâk, “Of the others in the city, the other women who were resurrected by demons, were any with child? Have any given birth, since their resurrection?”

And Brâk shook his head. “None that I've heard of, Prince.” He looked around him, at the servants, and the rabble of artisans and laborers and merchants whose beloveds had died and returned. But they all shook their heads, men and women both.

The young dandy Abellus said, “M'father went to see women who were with child, I know that, but none so far advanced as … as your lady was.”

Gareth pushed up his spectacles and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “Come, then,” he said. “I've seen what I needed to see. They'll have Polycarp in the council chamber. We can charge them with this there.”

When they reached the King's council chamber, however, they found the room empty, and not even pages in the antechamber to tell them what was happening. “That doesn't look good,” John remarked, ambling into the vaulted and tapestried round room with his air of deceptive laziness, his hands tucked into his belt. “When the servants are keepin' their distance you know there's trouble. They expected to try him here this mornin', though—” and he nodded at the logs and kindling laid ready in the clean-swept fireplace, the longlegged silver braziers standing behind the chairs and the cloths laid over the tables. “Which means Goffyer reached 'em with word—”

“Guards,” Jenny interrupted, hearing the swift tramp of boots in the stair behind them. John and Brâk and Tourneval's guardsmen all drew their swords, but Gareth held up his hand and stepped into the council room's antechamber as a small squad came in from the corridor, some clothed in the crimson tunics of the royal house, others in Sindestray blue. The captain was the big fair freckled man who'd taken Polycarp yesterday, a demon glitter in his eye.

“Captain Leodograce.” Gareth stepped forward even as the man began to speak, cutting off whatever it was he would have said. “Where is my father, and where have they taken the council meeting concerning my cousin Polycarp?”

“Polycarp, m'lord?” The captain shook his head. “I've heard nothing of the Master of Halnath—this is the first I've heard he's still in the city. And your father is hunting today. But before he left he heard rumors—lies, I'm sure—about some that say you've had traffic with demons, and with those that caused the plague. For that reason you're to come with us, to wait on his pleasure—”

“You've a gie short memory,” remarked John, emerging from the crowd at Gareth's side. “Seein' as how it was you who took Polycarp yesterday, an' killed two of his men. Their blood's still on the snow of the wood-court.”

Leodograce's lip went up to show his teeth like a dog's. “You believe this man … ?” He turned to his squad. “Take them.” His gesture took in servants, artisans, guards. “Bring the Prince. Kill the rest.”

John strode toward the red-cloaked captain, raising his sword, and Jenny saw the captain and one other guardsman flinch back as if they'd been burned. Leodograce cried, “You! Take him, men!” and backed away fast as his soldiers came forward, and Gareth said, “Touch me on pain of treason.”

The soldiers hesitated, looking at one another and at Tourneval, all except for the one other demon soldier, who had retreated to the back of the group. Gareth, tall and stooped and surprisingly kingly despite the rumpled clothing and broken spectacles, looked at one of the crimson guardsmen and said, “Where is my father?”

The man hesitated, then said, “He's gone to the prison tower, lord.”

“Dog!” Leodograce whipped his sword from its sheath and lunged at Gareth. But when confronted with actual fear of death, the demon had no courage, and would not step near. When John lunged at him, only brandishing his sword, the captain broke and fled from the room, the other demon soldier at his heels. There was clamor in the hallway, the crash of a man being thrown against the wall, and footfalls retreating; the men of the squad stared at the door in astonishment and considerable confusion.

“Who among you is for the Prince?” demanded Tourneval of Leodograce's confused squadron.

One of the blue-clothed Sindestray guards ventured, “Those who traffic with demons—”

“… lie about those who do not,” Tourneval replied, and stepped aside to let Gareth stride ahead of them out of the anteroom and down the hall.

So it was at the head of a good fifty armed men and women—some of whom didn't look any too sure about whether they wanted to be allies or jailers—that Gareth entered the prison tower. The original guards, both Tourneval's squadron and Leodograce's, had been joined by others still as they passed swiftly down the great staircase of the new palace and along the galleries leading to the prison tower in the old. More servants joined the company, too, some bearing kitchen knives and others clubs or rakes. Even the fat, elderly Badegamus appeared, toddling anxiously at Gareth's side and saying, “Please don't hurt him, Prince. I mean, please make very, very sure of what you're doing.…”

But Jenny noticed that he carried his beribboned staff of office like a war-hammer rather than a cane.

The gate that led from the gardens of the new palace into the great central courtyard of the old was barred. An ancient portcullis, amber with rust, had been let down in what had been the original stronghold's main gatehouse: “Oh, for pity's sake,” snapped Tourneval. “Do they think we can't get through the Long Gallery upstairs? Everybody—”

“Don't do that, guv'nor,” said a groom. “That's the way everybody goes. They'll be up there with bows in the minstrel gallery, sure as check. But the wine cellars connect up, too, and the backstairs passages. You will go easy on my lord, won't you?” he added, to Gareth. “I mean, he may just not be in his right mind.…”

Jenny scouted ahead listening, when the servants led them down through the wine vaults, but evidently the demons had had little use for servants, and had possessed none who could have told them of this way through. “Leave 'em guarding the Long Gallery, if that's what they want to do,” remarked John as they all edged between the massive kegs of Somanthus vintage and southern sherry wine. And Jenny held up her hand for silence, listening.