Lightborn (37 page)

She could but hope he was nowhere near, or that he had rethought his service, because she could not think of a way out of this trap other than by magic.

As soon as the door closed behind the guards, she was out of the chair, sonning around the room. All the walls were solid, but the ceiling—the ceiling had a large recessed area, like the sealed windows in a house once Lightborn. It would open to flood the room with sunlight, and it was far beyond her reach. She set her ear against the door, listening with all her being for sound outside. Nothing. She pressed bare hands against the metal of the lock, concentrating on the structures within. If she could sense the working of a body through her hands, and heal tissues with her will, why shouldn’t she realign the mechanism of a lock? Though the anatomy of locks was another thing Balthasar had not thought to learn, or Ishmael to teach her—surely his eclectic knowledge included
that
—and she would be sure to tax them each with that when they met again.

She prodded frantically at surfaces. Oh, sweet Imogene, let this work; let her live, to tax them.

She felt something shift within the lock, and pressed deeper, and felt the soft vibrations as cylinders fell and the pronounced click as the shaft dropped back. She groped for the handle, turned it. A thin sheet of cool air, redolent of darkness and safety, washed over her fingers as the door cracked open. No shouts of alarm came, no heavy shoulder jammed the door closed. She eased the door just wide enough, and slid through, and closed it very quietly behind her.

No one sonned or seized her. For several breaths she simply stood with her back against the wall, coming to believe both that she had been put in the room to die and that she had escaped it.

Escaped
it
, but not the archducal palace itself. They would be back to confirm her execution. She must find somewhere to hide until sunset, when she might escape in truth.

Then she heard a door close, very softly, at the far end of the corridor. Someone had come into the corridor, someone moving as stealthily as she. More so, because the murmur of skirts would be audible. A man, therefore, and alone.

She heard a click against the baseboard, as though a shoe had tapped it. The brush of a foot on carpet, close. A breath, almost at her ear. She swung her bare hand up, clouted a head with her forearm. Sonn rang off the bones of her skull, but she had him, her hand gripping the side of his face, her magic pouring into him. Recognition came with the touch of the feverish heat of his skin, the feverish workings of thought. She caught him as he slumped against her, unable to do more than slow both of them in their fall, and shield as best she could his right arm. They sprawled together on the bare floor, his cane toppling heavily across her skirts.

She struggled up on her elbow, her fingers reaching for his face.
Vladimer.
He was dressed for travel in a long coat and stout boots that would give his ankle support, his right arm held in a sling. Her sonn resolved a revolver in a waist holster, and a bulky bag of something soft in his left pocket. His blood was sour with drugs, the strong sedatives that had surely been used to subdue him and the stimulants he must have taken to counteract them. Within the wound, the torn muscles were beginning to heal, but the bullet had cracked bone, and the inflammation around that was still fiery. She had to struggle not to extend healing. She did not want him fit and able to thwart her. And for Sylvide, he deserved to suffer.

What could she do with him? The moment she released him, he would start to wake. Once he woke, he would raise the alarm, if he did not hunt her down himself.

But if anyone knew how to hide in the palace, and to leave unobtrusively,
he
did. She slipped her left hand into his coat and eased out the revolver. She remembered the gunman at the station, dying with a bolt from Vladimer’s cane in him, and nudged its weight off her skirts. Oh, sweet Imogene, she was not Vladimer’s equal, in speed or cunning.

Should she simply compel him?
If anyone deserved it, he did. And she still had her touch; she had just proved so.

But if she did so, it would make her the sorceress she was accused of being.

His sonn caught her as she backed away, his revolver in her right hand, trained on him, his cane in her left. Her sonn caught him as he pushed himself to a sitting position. His hand went to his empty holster, clenched, and twitched away. “Lady Telmaine.” His expression was angrily ironic. “Congratulations.”

“
I’m leaving.
Don’t try and stop me.”

Vladimer levered himself to his knees, and climbed slowly to his feet, bracing his elbow as he leaned against the wall. The posture was painfully reminiscent of Ishmael. “May I have my cane, please?”

“Not unless you help me.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bulky roll of soft material. “That’s exactly what I came to do. Take off your jewelry, open the door, and spread this”—he held out the roll—“on the chair.
Hurry!
”

She propped the cane against the wall, well out of his reach, and inched forward to take the bag. It was surprisingly heavy and filled with a soft fine powder that smelled of ash. Vladimer’s expression shaded from sardonic into savage at her recoil. “It’s a cursed poor reward for Blondell to be used this way, but do it, woman! Spread him out, drop your baubles on top of him, and let’s go.”

“But why—”

The ferocity in Vladimer’s tone told her how intensely he resented those orders, and how much they bound him.
That
made her believe him. Nevertheless, she used the cane to jam the door, knowing that mere threat of death would not deter him from her destruction. One-handed, she spilled the residue of a man on the chair and on the floor, and then fumbled Bal’s love knot from her neck, her wedding rings from her hands, and dropped the necklace on the chair, the rings on the floor. As she did so, she heard from overhead a heavy mechanical thud and the grinding of gears. Vladimer lunged for her, caught her gloved wrist, and heaved her out of the room. The door slammed.

The sear on her skin faded. When he lunged, she had been convinced she was dead, there and then. She scarcely believed that he had chosen to pull her from the room rather than trap her there. She scarcely believed, again, that she was alive.

“Pick up the cane,” Vladimer said hoarsely, leaning against the door.

She crouched, and did so, handing it warily to him, lethal tip leading. He had shot Sylvide, betrayed herself, deceived his brother, and just risked and saved her life. Was he now playing out a cruel, subtle game of revenge that would still end in her death in an unknown place?

“The Borders are under attack,” Vladimer said. “Janus just had a telegram from Stranhorne.”

“Bal?” she said breathlessly. “Ishmael?”

“Would you move, woman? We can’t stay here to debate it.”

She leveled the revolver. “Mistress White Hand. We’re going to let her out.”

From his poised stillness and his intent expression, he was considering his options. Anger steadied her hand, lent her expression a hardness he must believe.

“If that woman were Darkborn, she would be your husband’s mistress.”

He knew how to cut deep, Vladimer did. She was not going to explain to him that this was the obligation of one prisoner to another. “That is my business,” she said with a lady’s cool disdain, “and none of yours.”

Grimly, he yielded. “We need to get out of the corridor, anyway; they’ll be down any minute.”

There was no sound from the other side of the paper wall when they entered Floria’s room. Suddenly dreading the implications, she whispered, “Mistress White Hand?”

“Telmaine?” The Lightborn woman’s voice was husky, with fear or shouting. “Telmaine, my lights are orange. I could have less than an hour before they go out completely. If your being here means anything, please, get them to open the skylight!”

She had thought as much. “That’s what—” A signal from Vladimer changed a
we
to an
I
. “I’m here to let you out.” She waved to Vladimer, resolved that if he did not understand, or refused to understand, she would repeat her request aloud. He was at the desk, feeling under it; she tensed, but he came up holding a key. She said, “I’m going to put the key to the outer door into the
passe-muraille
. The rest is up to you.”

“Thank the Mother, Telmaine,” Floria breathed. “I thought I was going to die like . . .”

You need not tell me.
She took the key from Vladimer, laid the key inside the
passe-muraille
, and closed the hatch. “Done,” she said.

She heard Floria’s hand scrabble in the hatch. “Thank you,” she breathed.

Telmaine set her back against the paper wall, something she would never have imagined doing before last week, preferring the Lightborn to the Darkborn behind her. Vladimer had withdrawn to the door, his head angled to listen to the sounds outside. And there were sounds outside—men’s voices, speaking low as they passed by. Floria started to say something, and Telmaine hushed her sharply. She did not need to expand on it, not to the vigilant. She heard footsteps whisper away on the other side of the paper wall, and was trapped in the dilemma of either risking speech or risking having Floria leave before Telmaine asked her what she
must
. She strained uselessly to sense what lay behind the wall, appalled at how, in a bare few days, she should have become so dependent on her magic.

Vladimer sonned her, drawing her attention; when she sonned him in return, he beckoned her, commandingly. “Mistress White Hand,” she hissed, and then, “
Floria?
”

From farther away. “Telmaine?”

“
Please
get a message to Balthasar. Tell him we spoke. It’s
very
important.”

“Telmaine—what’s been happening? I heard a terrible sound a while ago—a booming, and voices screaming from the street—”

“I have no time,” she breathed. “I have to go.” She followed Vladimer into the small antechamber, and waited while he listened at the door until he was satisfied. Then she followed him out, revolver in her hand. The spreading of the ashes, the leaving behind of her jewelry, those signaled the depth of his planning, the gravity of his masquerade. He meant to leave, and he meant to take her with him; that, for the moment, was sufficient.

Just before the heavy double doors, he turned right, and unlocked the small side door, opening it on a spiral stairwell that breathed coldly and moistly of underground. He started down it, moving carefully on steps that were dipped with centuries of wear. She went after, silently until the question became pressing, “Vladimer,
where are we going
?”

“I told you: the Borders.”

He had
not
told her—but she let that pass. “Kip said there was no underground connection between the city and the palace.”

“Did he?” Vladimer said, sounding almost amused.

“And even if there were, it’s miles to the station.” He could never walk it, even healthy.

He did not answer. They emerged in catacombs, storerooms of the old, underground palace, now occupied only by moldering crates and barrels of supplies long forgotten. Between vast stone pillars and beneath immense buttresses, she followed him. If he had brought her here to murder her, she would never be found. If she shot him now, she might never find her way out. One or the other, or both of them, would slowly rot. Immolation seemed the less obscene fate now.

He reached a gnarled wall, felt in his pocket. She hitched the revolver, but he only produced a piece of metal, with a hook on the end, dug it into a hole in the stone, and pulled. Stones ground on one another and drew apart. He slid through into the space beyond. She balked. His sonn caught her; before she could react, his cane was leveled, and if the tip wavered, at this distance he would not miss.

“I cannot leave you alive,” he rasped. “Sejanus wants you out of the city, where you’d be unable to twist any ensorcellment over him.”

“There is no ensorcellment!”

“
He doesn’t know that.
Nor do I. The dukes will be satisfied with a heap of ash, but Sejanus wants you gone.”

“And you gone as well?” she returned.

“And me, too.” His voice so dull with pain she nearly pitied him.

“We’re under the garden now,” he said, once more in control of himself. “It’s just a few hundred yards more. You might as well give me back that revolver if you’re not going to use it.”

Lips compressed, she shook her head. He shrugged, one-shouldered, and stepped back to let her through.

The few hundred yards felt like several miles. Her shoes had never been made for slippery flagstone, or for walking any distance, and she had neither coat nor shawl over her light indoor dress. Even when she pulled her gloves back on, her hands felt icy. She missed, acutely, the tiny weight of Balthasar’s love knot nestled against her throat. Back in the palace, was the evidence now being put before the archduke? When would they tell Balthasar—
the children
? She shivered and bit her gloved finger, tasting salt.

When Vladimer halted, she nearly collided with him from behind. The underground passageway continued, but he was stooping beside a low grille, and struggling one-handed with its mechanism. She let him struggle until it was plain that he was making no progress, and then silently offered her right hand to partner his left. Between them they got the grille open. On the far side, there was a long step down. He offered his sound hand to steady her as she slithered through, and accepted her bracing arms on his own descent. She sonned around herself in amazement. They were but a few steps from the edge of an underground canal. To their right, in a bay, a dozen flat-bottomed riverboats, like the ones she had played in in her youth, nuzzled the stone pier. Vladimer said, “Give me the cursed gun. You’ll need both hands, and I don’t want it going overboard.”