Strands of Starlight, page 31
There was suddenly a short gap in the vigilance of the gate guards. Terrill opened his eyes. He was shaking.
Mirya stared at him. “What . . . was that?”
“Something I did not show you before.”
“I didn't know you could do that.”
“I can, and you can also.” Terrill took a deep breath, and his strength returned. “But think before you do it: what is it that you intend to accomplish? And are you willing to take the consequences and the responsibility for altering them?”
Someone started laughing riotously at the main gate of the outer wall. Two men walked out of the keep's guardhouse and strolled across the garden to see what the matter was.
“Now,” whispered Terrill.
Event he torchlight seemed to flicker and die down slightly as they raced for the gate, bent low, taking cover behind the rosebushes. Terrill passed through the entrance first, grabbed Mirya's arm as she arrived, and pulled her farther into the courtyard and down the wall.
“Mere moments . . .”
The laughter continued and a soldier walked out of the door to the keep, across the court, and through the gate they had just passed. He was smiling, as though he anticipated hearing a good jest, which, Mirya knew from the webs, he would.
In a moment, they were in the keep, down a short corridor, and at the base of the tiled stairs that led to the upper floors.
“I know this place,” said Mirya. “I was hauled up and down these stairs many times.” The memory made her legs ache and her spine tingle.
“The ladies' quarters?”
“Up. The floor above the council chambers and the judgment room.”
As they ascended, they heard music. Trumpets, horns, drums. The music grew louder as they passed the kitchen level and the sitting rooms. A third level. “What is this?” said Terrill.
“Dining room. Servants' quarters off to the side. You can smell the reek of dinner.”
“I can.”
“Council chambers are the next level, then the sleeping rooms.” Again, something in the lattices made her bristle unconsciously.
She had little time to puzzle over it. The music peaked at the council chamber level, but the lattices had altered, the futures had shifted, and on the floor above and the floor below, a whiff of torch smoke entered the stairwell. There was movement on the steps.
“One coming up, one coming down,” said Mirya, catching her breath. There was no time to judge better, and Terrill was already moving. They darted down the corridor and into a window embrasure.
Hearts beating, they leaned against the marble wall. Ascending and descending torches drew near, paused, and passed. The music rose behind a door ten yards down the hall. If the men on the stairs said anything, it was lost in the din.
When the stairwell was dark again, they prepared to continue, but a sudden fanfare of trumpets and horns blared into the hallway. The doors were thrown wide. Bright light spilled into the corridor.
Terrill glanced through the open window. “Outside, quickly. There is a ledge.”
They scrambled out and perched. The ledge was shallow, but the wall was dark. They would not be seen. “It is good to know that this is here,” said Terrill calmly. He made himself as comfortable as possible and examined the layout of the surrounding courts and walls.
Mirya settled back into her stars, and her heart slowed. Inside, the fanfare ended and men began passing down the hallway. Again, she felt the strange discomfort. Very close now.
“Baron Roger,” came a smooth, urbane voice.
“What do you want, mouse?”
Mirya stiffened, eyes wide. Terrill glanced sharply at her.
“The papal legate, Monsignor Gugliemino, has been pressing for information. The letter that Clement received from the priest in the Free Towns was obviously effective in arousing a certain amount of suspicion, and the legate is not at all satisfied that Bishop Cranby is unavailable for questioning.”
“So? What of it? The bishop is most certainly not available. For all I know, the bishop may be lying in the middle of some road with his throat cut.”
“Dear Lady.” Mirya's fists were clenched, and she was staring, unseeing, into the night.
“Mirya . . . what is it?”
“That's him.” She was whispering, but there was savagery in her voice.
The men who were speaking stopped by the window. “A pleasant night, Baron.”
“For us, maybe.” Roger of Aurverelle laughed, and Mirya's anger flamed white-hot.
“I intend to have her questioned further tonight.”
“Do that. And tell that Hound of God to get some results. Gugliemino wants a reason for Clement to sanction the cursade, and so we have to give him something.”
“I will see to it.” The accent was of Maris: cultured, urbane, a trifle ironic.
A dry laugh. “You don't have much choice. Do you, mouse?”
“My lord, I would ask—”
“That I speak to you as an equal, mouse? That I actually treat you like a man?”
“Baron Roger, I do have recourses. Conceivably, the Church would be grateful to one who—”
There was a thump, and the man started to strangle.
“You will have me to deal with should any thoughts of that nature come into your head,” said Roger. “Do you understand?”
A muffled, choking sound.
“Do you?”
The sound of a body falling, then: “Aye, my lord.”
Mirya was fighting herself, for her instinct was to plunge back through the window, sword drawn. But that would have been the action of a fool, and she did not need the lattices to tell her that. Painful though it was, she held herself in check, eyes blazing, knuckles white.
“Are you certain?” said Terrill.
She nodded, shifted her weight a little, peered cautiously into the corridor. There, a few feet away, she saw the man who had raped her, the man she had sworn to kill. He was dressed in blue silk and red velvet. His surcoat bore the arms of Aurverelle, his gold chain of office those of Hypprux.
The man with whom he had been speaking slowly picked himself up off the floor. No one moved to help him. Mirya recognized the dandy who had entered the keep. “I shall be downstairs,” he said.
“Be sure you get something out of that whore tonight,” said Roger. “Monsignor Gugliemino doesn't sound like a patient man.”
The hum of idle conversation arose once again. Roger and the fop moved off down the hall, the music resumed, and the corridor cleared.
Mirya crouched on the ledge, unmoving, rigid. Terrill examined her uneasily. “Mirya?”
“I'll be all right,” she said softly. “Now I know.”
Chapter Thirty-two
They climbed back into the corridor when the last footfall had died away. Mirya stood, forced herself to relax, searched for the stars from which she had been torn by the sound of a terribly familiar voice. Her anger burned in her belly like a mugful of vinegar, and her hand dropped to the pommel of her sword.
“Servants will be coming along soon,” said Terrill. “We must act quickly.”
Mirya was still fighting herself. The man's unexpected appearance had taken her completely off guard, and she was stumbling in her efforts to regain balance. The stars. Where were the stars?
Terrill touched her. She did not notice. With a glance at the hall and the doors, Terrill put his head to hers. Mirya's night sky blossomed suddenly, and she sighed. “My thanks.”
“You will have to get over that,” he said. Footsteps in one of the rooms. “Come.”
Their feet were silent on the parquetry and on the stone stairs. Up one level were the sleeping chambers and the women's rooms, but they paused to examine the lattices and to listen.
The upper floors were quiet. “Sleeping or vacant?” whispered Mirya.
“It is hard to tell. Ah, there is a guard.”
There was indeed, but something seemed odd about him. Mirya wondered for a moment, then: “He's asleep, the idiot.”
“Have you any idea how you will look in on Janet?”
She shrugged. “I've got an idea. It's not very subtle, though.”
Terrill smiled. “Whatever is appropriate is good.”
“The guard is asleep. I'm . . .” She looked at him as though for permission. “I'm an Elf. . . .”
Terrill nodded.
“I should be able to avoid waking him.”
“More than likely,” he said. “Be at peace.”
Words came to her lips unbidden. “Ai, Elthiai, ea sarena . . .”
Terrill's eyes flickered at the Elvish words. “Have no fear. When you are in the room, call up your memories of George and Anne and find Janet's lifeline through them.”
She climbed slowly, cautiously. Her soft boots were soundless, but accidents could always happen, and no amount of attention or foresight could guard against every possible permutation of future potentials. She chose her steps with care, kept a hand on Rainfire.
She watched the guard's awareness. He was deeply asleep, beginning to snore. Images flashed by her: a hard day sweeping out the stables, a heavy dinner, a little too much wine. . . .
Silently, she slipped by him, pushed aside a thick hanging, and entered the large room. Curtained couches lay against the walls, and the sleepers were breathing softly.
I am here in the Chateau . . . and George and Anne are in Saint Blaise, but we are all a part of the Dance . . . we all stand upon the same earth, breathe the same air, partake of the Lady. . . .
She let her mind drift back to her memories of the mayor and his wife. Gradually, George and Anne became as distinct as if she were looking at them. They were sleeping, Anne curled up against her husband. Her head was on his shoulder and his arm was about her.
She realized that she was seeing them—across distances, miles, forests, rivers—as they were at that moment. Peace. Be at peace. The hand of the Lady be on you.
For a moment, she wondered at the faint shimmer that seemed to surround Anne as she lay with George, then she descended into their thoughts and waited quietly until she saw Janet. In moments, she saw—felt—the girl's birth, her growth, her joys, her sorrows . . . the sparrow she once kept as a pet. . . .
Shaking herself away from individual memories, she concentrated instead on Janet, examined her life, felt it until it was familiar and easily recognized.
She slid back to the present and the Chateau and cast about in the room, sorting through the patterns of the sleeping women. For a minute, she was afraid that Janet was not in the chamber. But then she saw the familiar weave of her life, and she slipped silently down the length of the room and stood over the sleeping maiden. Janet was safe, and as Mirya scanned her potential futures, she saw that the girl probably would continue to be so. It was impossible to be sure, but she had done the best that was possible, even for an Elf.
Janet slept soundly, and Mirya was reminded strongly of Lake at those times when the half-elven infant dipped into human sleep. But there was another similarity, too, for Mirya became aware of the shimmer about Janet's body, like the one that had surrounded her mother. And standing in a darkened room that was filled with the sounds of the even breathing of many women, Mirya knew that in some time long past, there had been love between mortal and immortal, that Janet and Anne could trace some part of their heritage back to the same blood that now flowed through her own veins.
But just before she broke her link with Janet, Mirya saw one future that broke away from the others, crossed a complex network of lines and probabilities, and finally entered a knot where all potentials became obscure and muddled, the same knot in which she would meet her rapist for the last time. Shuddering, she let the vision go and wound up staring at the wall above Janet's couch where hung a small painting of the Virgin.
Blue and white. Blue and silver. She nodded to the painting, remembering the starlight in Her eyes, and slowly, without a sound, she left the room, passed the sleeping guard, descended the stairs. “She's there, and well,” she said to Terrill.
“Good. Mika now.”
Mirya remembered the dungeon well. It was reached by a back flight of dingy stairs that spiraled steeply down from the ground floor. A guard was stationed at the bottom, always present, watching the juncture of the two corridors that led away from the stairs. At the farthest end of the north passage, around the corner of a short crossing, was the torturer's chamber, large and well equipped. It was located at a good distance from the stairs so that any screams that leaked out from behind its thick door would stay at dungeon level.
Mirya and Terrill left the upper floors of the keep, scanning ahead down the stairwell. Empty. Quiet. The man guarding the entrance to the keep was eating a cold pasty in the porter's lodge just off the doorway. He was vigilant, but he did not see them as they slipped down the stairs and around to the back of the keep.
The door to the dungeon stairs was thick and stoutly bound with bands of iron. Mirya examined its latch and hinges. She did not need lattices to tell her that they were rusty and would squeak if opened.
“We'll have everyone in the castle down our throats.”
“Peace,” said Terrill. “Humans, it is true, might, but . . .”
His voice trailed off as he took hold of the latch and paused. Mirya thought that he was waiting for a break in the probabilities of discovery, but it finally dawned on her that Terrill was moving the latch so slowly that it would make no sound.
She marveled at both his patience and his control. In five minutes, he had lifted the latch, and he proceeded to slowly open the door. When there was room, they slipped through. Noiselessly, with agonizing deliberateness, he reclosed the door.
In the fetid darkness of the stairwell, he straightened, wiped his face, pointed down the curving walls. Only then did Mirya notice the cries drifting up from the lower level. They were muffled, distant, almost inaudible, but they were obviously those of a woman.
With anger that had abruptly turned to ice, Mirya centered herself, found her stars, and moved down the stairs. Terrill followed, and he made no comment when she drew Rainfire. He had, in fact, already drawn his own weapon.
Even at a run, they were as silent as they were lethal, and the guard at the foot of the steps looked up just in time to see the flash of an elven sword. He did not even have a chance to cry out. Sprawling into a pool of stagnant water that mixed swiftly with his own blood, his headless body rolled over twice before it stopped, twitching.
Beyond the single stroke that she had placed with calculated efficiency, Mirya paid no further attention to him. She listened, followed the warp and weft of the lattices, then pointed—as she had feared she would have to—up the north corridor.
Screaming. Louder. Demented. But also, in the lulls, there was the incongruous sound of impassioned speech.
Dear Lady!
Ahead, the webs contracted into a blurred knot of indistinguishable events. They could know nothing of what would happen until they were well into it.
“Heavy fighting.” Terrill commented almost casually.
The corridor was dark only to human eyes, and they ran northward, reached the crossing, turned in the direction of the screams.
In another lull, they heard a man's voice, shouting, commanding, imperious.
“Confess, woman! Weren't you sodomized by the Evil One? Haven't the Elves shown you how to use this sack of corruption that is your body, this carrion bag of mucus. . . .?”
The iron door reverberated with the sounds. Mirya knew it well. They approached, the nexus of existence and future unwinding in their minds, Moments from now, the criss-crossing strands of starlight turned into hazy nebulosity.
Terrill put his hand on the latch, looked at Mirya. “Are you afraid, Elf?”
She stared at him, incredulous. The screams continued.
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Are you angry?”
She could have chiseled the iron door with her anger, but she forced her voice to be even. “I don't believe that's a legitimate question.”
Terrill looked at her. Calm. Analytical. Dispassionate.
Her eyes said it: Dammit, Terrill, open that door!
Terrill moved, swinging the door wide. Ruddy torchlight poured into the corridor along with the stench of vomit, urine, and old blood, but Mirya was already springing through the opening, driving at the men who were suddenly looking up at an unexpected and frightening attack, driving toward the body of a woman stretched on a table in the middle of the room.
The men were clustered, and the first went down within seconds. Webs parted and shifted, potential futures were examined, rejected, or chosen. Mirya kicked an unarmed man away because there was a method to her task, and those opponents who held weapons had priority.
The dandy who had spoken with her rapist a short time earlier was coming in quickly, sword drawn, and his skill had some subtlety: he could be a formidable opponent.
But he had his weaknesses, and Mirya knew them immediately. Bending, she slashed his legs out from under him, then straightened and caught him across the throat. As the spume of blood spattered the room, she spun and slammed Rainfire's pommel between the eyes of the torturer, a man she recognized from her own time in the dungeon. “Old scores, you bastard.”
He looked uncomprehending, but his skull had been shattered. Eyes glazed, he slumped to the floor.
Mirya was no longer concerned with him. She was focused instead on the man who was about to hew off the prisoner's head with an ax. Before she had time to move, though, a blur of motion streaked at him, and Terrill ended the threat, doubled back, and finished off a soldier who was bolting for the door to raise an alarm.
Mirya turned and opened a gash in another soldier. He looked down at his wound unbelievingly, as though he would weep. Rainfire ended his sorrow in the next moment.
There was a Dominican present, and he had fled to the far corner of the room. Mirya assumed that he was the interrogator. He was a pale, intense man with dark rings around his eyes from long nights of reading or, she guessed, questioning.
She pointed at him with her sword. “Your time is coming.” Then, crouching, she put her entire weight behind a thrust that severed the spine of a captain of the guard that Terrill was fighting. At the same moment, Terrill's stroke went through him from the other side.
