Battle: The House War: Book Five (54 page)

Given the presence of Swords—not to mention Duvari himself—they wouldn’t be necessary.

She wasn’t prepared for the stairs. That the palace had stairs was not a surprise; the Terafin manse had many, and many of those were hidden behind the rooms occupied by the House members. But these stairs lay to the left of the martial hall, as if they were an afterthought; there were no visible doors, no possible reason for the existence of the stairs themselves implied by the otherwise impressive, if spare, architecture.

The Kings Swords’ led the way, and the Kings followed, as did the Exalted, the Queens, and the Lord of the Compact. Jewel, however, reached the top of the stairs and froze there, placing her hand against the nearest wall to steady herself.

“Terafin?” Sigurne said. She had pushed her way past the Chosen, Teller, and Shadow; Avandar had stepped aside to allow her passage.

The stairs were wide and flat; they did not curve—as stairs often did within the palace. They traveled down, in a gentle slope, the darkness alleviated by magestones. There were no rails, stone or otherwise; they were hugged by wall on either side. But their end, from their height, could not be seen.

“Jewel.”

She swallowed.

“What is it? What do you see?”

She shook herself. “Stairs,” she said softly. “Were they—were they always like this, these stairs? Or did they—did they change when the columns changed?” She looked past the guildmaster. Avandar, Shadow, and Teller were waiting; it was Teller’s gaze she sought. He lifted a hand in exquisitely graceful den-sign:
Yes, same
. He knew what she saw, here; he knew what it reminded her of: the undercity.

She could not, and did not, say as much, although Sigurne’s presence by her side made clear the full failure of her composure.

“These stairs are, to my knowledge, unchanged. They are not remarkable, and they are not, beyond the magic required for illumination, enchanted in any way the Order could discern.” Sigurne frowned as Jewel slowly withdrew her hand. “Why are they of concern?”

Jewel shook her head. Perhaps because she spoke with Sigurne, and not with the Kings, she said, “I’ve seen stairs like this before. The same stone. The same slope. They’re not as wide, but—” She shook her head again. With the marching order, such as it was, changed by Jewel’s hesitance and Sigurne’s concern, she continued down the stairs in the wake of the Kings.

* * *

The descent was not steep, nor was it short. Jewel was aware that basements were often used for food storage, and for records storage when records considered of minor import were retired for filing considerations. The Terafin manse had several such rooms. She assumed the palace had more.

But basement rooms did not often require the height the descent implied. The Chosen could, once again, walk four abreast; Avandar continued to hold his position to Jewel’s left, but Sigurne now took the right, and Jewel granted it because Sigurne was much older and could use the wall as a rail. Jewel, in theory, didn’t require the support.

The air was cool. It was not damp; it was dry. A hint of a breeze blew up the stairs, chilling her. She glanced at Avandar.
Did you feel that?

He nodded. His jaw had set in a tighter line. No one who was not familiar with the domicis would mark it. Shadow shoved Avandar out of the way. Jewel glared at the cat, but his eyes—eyes that were as golden, now, as the Kings’, failed to meet hers; they were scanning the stairs ahead.

“Terafin,” Sigurne said. “We tarry.”

Jewel nodded and began to walk more quickly. The air grew colder; she was not attired for the outdoors.

“Be careful,” Shadow told her, voice dropping into a low growl.

“Did the stairs always descend this far?” she asked Sigurne. When the guildmaster failed to answer, she turned. “Meralonne.” She couldn’t see him; he was behind the line of Chosen, themselves behind Teller and Avandar.

“I have never been asked to study
Avantari
in any depth,” the mage replied. “I cannot therefore answer your question. Trust your instincts here.”

Her instincts told her to turn around and head back up the stairs, leaving the god-born and the Kings’ Swords to their exploration.

“These stairs are old,” Meralonne continued, as she forced herself to ignore his advice. “I would have said, if asked, that they predate the Empire of the Twin Kings.”

“And the Blood Barons?”

“Even so. I do not think they now lead to dungeons.”

“Did they, once, in your opinion?”

He was silent.

She continued down the stairs. “If it were Summer,” she asked, “would it be so damn cold all of the time?”

To her surprise, he laughed. His laughter bounced off bare stone to either side; Shadow’s growl deepened. She understood why; there was something in Meralonne’s laughter that felt diametrically opposed to mirth or amusement.

* * *

To her surprise, and to her great relief, the stairs came to an end. The flat, smooth gray of descending stone gave way to a floor that was not much different; the walls continued to either side. Magelights in ornate brass claws were spaced evenly three quarters of the way up the walls; the ceilings were high, but flat. Jewel placed a hand on Shadow’s head and left it there because the cat was warm. He radiated heat.

The Kings’ Swords could now be seen in the distance, and Jewel, mindful of dignity, closed the gap between them as quickly as she could. If the stairs had been long, and the descent deep, the hall was shorter. It ended in an arch that was a carved relief protruding from otherwise featureless stone. No runes, in any language, graced it.

To the right and left of this arch, two similar arches stood; they, however, opened into something other than gray stone. The Kings’ Swords separated, standing with their backs to either side of the hall, facing outward. Jewel, Shadow, and Sigurne passed between them, followed by the rest of the Terafin party.

Only when she stood between the two open arches did Jewel stop. She glanced to the left and right, and saw that the Kings and the Exalted currently occupied the room on the left. She wanted to ask Sigurne how drastic the changes in these rooms were, because the answer might tell her how the rooms had once been used. Instead, she passed beneath the arch of the leftmost room, entering it.

It was illuminated from within, and the light was bright and even; there were no obvious magestones along the walls, none embedded, as was the current spare style, in the ceiling. The ceiling itself was high, but unlike the one that capped the hall, it wasn’t flat. The Kings stood in what Jewel assumed, upon entry, was the center of the room; the Exalted were not far behind. They were silent as they watched her enter.

The walls were not flat, bare stone; they were, like the back wall of the Hall of Wise Counsel, intricately carved. Unlike the wall in the Hall of Wise Counsel, none of the reliefs in this room shed the ambient glow that spoke of enchantment. Like the Hall, these walls were adorned by figures who seemed to be emerging from the wall itself. Some were faint, a hint of clothing or armor, a slight protrusion of hand; their faces were delineated by nose, chin, eyelids. But others were carved so completely they almost appeared to be standing statues set as close to the wall as possible. Were it not for the continuity of the relief, they might appear to be entirely separate from it.

The Crowns watched as Jewel passed them and began to walk around the room’s perimeter, the great cat by her side. Avandar followed behind, his eye on the panorama of figures that had been carved here by—it appeared—the hands of the earth itself. Teller chose to stand beside Sigurne in silence. He wasn’t watching her; his gaze was absorbed, whole, by the room itself, and judging from his expression, was likely to remain that way unless the room suddenly disgorged a demon—or worse.

The floor was of stone, but it wasn’t gray; it was a dull copper color. It was flat and smooth, except where runes had been engraved across its seamless surface. She glanced at the partial figures as she walked, and stopped once: she recognized the woman carved in stone. Almost without thought, she lifted her hand, her fingers stopping a hair’s breadth from the hands of the figure itself.

“Ariane,” she said, the word rising slightly, as if there were any question at all of her identity. Of the figures, she was the most prominent; she wore armor the color of her skin; her left arm was lifted as if in greeting or farewell. She wore sword, and a slender horn; neither of these were remarkable. But her hair seemed to move as it trailed down her back; strands of fine stone raised in a wind that touched only her.

Shadow hissed. “I don’t
like
her.”

“I’m certain the feeling is mutual,” Jewel told him. She stepped away from the Winter Queen, wondering as she did what the Summer Queen might look like. She didn’t ask. Instead, she followed the curve of the wall—and it was curved; it followed no straight edges—until she reached a second figure she recognized. This one was not yet free of the confines of stone; her back was part of the wall. But her hair, like Ariane’s, flowed freely over her shoulders, curling in its fall toward her waist.

“Calliastra.”

She continued to walk.

“Corallonne.” Of the three she had named, Corallonne was the most remote. And of the three, she was the only one Jewel actually touched; she rested her fingertips against fingertips of stone, mirroring the tentative gesture. Where Ariane was cold and forbidding, Corallonne was not. It wasn’t that she looked weak; she didn’t. But there was, to her, the hard, weathered quality not of stone, but of ancient trees; she endured, and in enduring, she might offer shelter from blistering heat or driving wind.

Jewel continued to walk. At the curve of the wall farthest from where the Kings now stood she approached the figure of a man. He had no wings, but she recognized him anyway. The Warden of Dreams. She wondered, then, if he had a name at all. She felt no need to stop; she was awake. She walked, glancing up at the ceiling; it was shadowed in a way that suggested a dome, the only part of the room that was not well lit.

She stopped again, not because she recognized what she approached; she didn’t. She wasn’t certain anyone could. It was roughly the height of the rest of the reliefs, and it had limbs, one of which was a normal leg. It had feathers, which implied wings, and a face—of a type. Scales, leather, short fur, hair, combined in a way that defined chaos.

“Shadow, do you know what this is?”

Shadow growled. “It is
nothing
,” he said, batting it with his right forepaw before stalking ahead. “It is nothing
and
it
smells bad
.” Jewel followed in his slightly noisy wake, glancing once over her shoulder at the creature he’d dismissed. Shadow nudged her. She almost fell over, righting herself in silence because the words she wanted to say were so far beneath the dignity of her position as Terafin, she might just as well slit her own wrists as speak.

Shadow came to a stop.

Jewel looked into the hooded face of a person she had never seen before, but knew instantly. Her features were curiously muted, almost nondescript; she wore loose, flowing robes, folds carved in stone that completely obscured her feet. Her hands were raised and cupped over her heart’s center, her head bent in their direction; if she had hair at all it was completely obscured by the fall of her hood.

Her hands were empty.

Jewel took an involuntary step back; if Avandar had not smoothly done the same, they would have collided.

Jewel
.

She didn’t—couldn’t answer him. She was watching the statue, in relief, a prayer to
Kalliaris
on her lips. It didn’t help. The statue raised its head, brought its hands to its chest, and took a step forward, separating, in that motion, from the wall that still contained everything else.

“Terafin,” it said, which was worse.

“Oracle,” Jewel replied, above the sharp cutting chill of winter wind.

* * *

The semblance of stone never left the Oracle’s visage; nor did her hands, exposed and empty, suddenly become flesh and blood. Yet robes of gray did move at the behest of the chill wind, and where folds of stone cloth rubbed against each other, they produced the sound of chisel against hard rock. Jewel stood her ground as the Oracle approached. She was no longer certain that what she saw could be seen by any of the other observers.

The Oracle lifted her chin. “Your Majesties,” she said. “Exalted.”

Jewel turned then. The Kings stood behind Duvari and three of their attendants; they were rigid. Duvari was not. If the appearance of a speaking, moving stone sculpture was unexpected, his expression betrayed no surprise. What it did betray was business, calculation of risk. He spoke; his words didn’t carry to Jewel’s ears, although she saw the movement of his lips.

“No,” King Reymalyn replied. “Your objections are noted, but we will remain.”

King Cormalyn added, “Your recommendation is also noted, Lord of the Compact, but we have our reasons for limiting access to these rooms. Sigurne Mellifas is present, as is Member APhaniel; we will place our safety in their hands should protection of an arcane nature be required. As to the rest, we are not without defense here, in the lee of winter.” He smiled. It was the sharpest edge of a smile Jewel had ever seen on the face of either King. As he turned the whole of his attention to this unexpected visitor, the smile dulled. “You are the first of the firstborn.”