Raven's Ladder (36 page)

“I need to know this,” he said.

“You’ll find out soon,” she said. “Cyndere has a scheme and a part for you to play in it. She knows you’re a stonemaster, a strategist, a king with powers at his command.”

“That’s what she was hinting at. The plan!” He sat up straight. “Cyndere plans to rescue the Cent Regus captives. That beastman she sent to me. He’s helping her, isn’t he? He’s going to help her save the prisoners!”

“Who do you think rescued Partayn?”

“Give me a moment.” Cal-raven rose and paced back and forth on the balcony. “Oh, this world is too big. Too many slaves. Too many monsters. I am king of Abascar. That should mean something. I should be able to fix what is broken. But I cannot go to the Core to help the slaves. I have a clear vision, a path I must not stray from. Yet if I refuse to help Cyndere, what kind of man am I?”

When he closed his eyes, the white burn was waiting for him like a signal flare.

Somewhere down the avenues a woman had begun to sing. A familiar voice. Then another rose in harmony—and that voice, too, was known to him. Cal-raven looked out to sea.

Emeriene stood and limped to his side, threading her hands between his arms and sides, clasping them at his belt. “Forgive me for my jealousy.”

“Jealousy?” He turned to her and drew swirling lines on her back with his fingertips. “You have no rival for my attention but a city, a destination.”

“You love her, don’t you? She’s as beautiful as her singing voice.”

He did not answer her.

She rested her cheek against his chest. “Go to New Abascar, Raven. Make a home with one whose heart is not already in pieces.”

“The ax has already fallen. I’m alone, Emeriene.”

“You can do something about that. Seers have persuasive potions you might slip into her drink.”

In surprise he looked down into her sincere, suggestive gaze. And then the edge of her scowl quivered, and she broke into a laugh, pushing him
against the railing. He pretended to push back, and she pretended to stagger, grabbing his tunic and leading them inside. She sat down on the edge of the bed again, then lay back. “I cannot send you away.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s so unfair. I never get what I want.”

“Nor I.”

“We could run away,” she said, but her voice told him she knew they could not.

“And where would we live? Where would we have any kind of rest?” He set his elbows on the bed, pushed his arms beneath her shoulders, cupped the back of her head, and leaned in to kiss her. She turned her head.

“Let me give you what I can.” She reached into a pocket of her robe and drew out a small glass vial. She opened it in the space between their eyes, and rich pungency, thick and soft as velvet, clouded the air.

“What…” He blinked as his view of her face began to blur. “Slumber-seed oil. No, not…again…”

“A few hours of deep sleep.” She touched the mouth of the vial, then dabbed his scars. The drops felt cool as tears.

He sank forward into her embrace, and they were both asleep, entangled like a puzzle. Painful needles stitched together their memories and their dreams.

Tabor Jan stared at the names carved into the bottom of the bunk above his own.

He tried memorizing them, closing his eyes and reciting them, hoping it would help him sleep. Here in the hollow of this watchman’s wall, his mind was like a farglass in the hands of an anxious watchman, searching through the sights of the day, magnifying some, drawing back from others. So many new experiences had dazzled him, but there was so little time to make sense of anything or to ponder what to do about it.

In those moments when the memories began to shift into bizarre dreams, the soldier above him would turn and shake the rickety bunk.

Bunkrooms inside the walls—there would never have been any such
thing in Abascar. Cal-marcus’s walls had been meant to withstand trouble. Bel Amica did not seem designed to withstand any kind of siege, except insofar as every entrance was carefully watched and every visitor questioned.

At times he wondered if the watchmen were the engine that kept currency flowing in Bel Amica, for they spent their days gazing down at all the pleasures, delicacies, drinks, fashions, and opportunities being sold in the marketplace. He could see the boats sailing in from the mouth of Raak’s Favor; he could see what they carried out to the islands of the Mystery Sea, where new communities would live, work, harvest, and play.

What kind of courage will it take for Cal-raven to blaze a new trail in view of all this?

He went to the window. A long path of stone branched out from the rock below and into the Rushtide’s waters, a peninsula that formed one of the harbor’s welcoming arms. The edges of those arms were pocked with caves where boats docked. He watched the boats come and go, watched the white burst of night-diving shallowbeaks flit from mast to mast so they could see fish rising and biting at bugs on the surface.

It’s always feeding time in Bel Amica
.

He looked to the horizon, where clouds were mustering.
Cal-raven is probably asking the Keeper for help
.

The sailors and dock guards were, he noticed, all standing still, as if observing some ceremony. Taking a closer look, he could see that they were watching one particular figure—a tall, awkward character who strode solemnly along a boardwalk, examining the boats, examining the docks.

The Seers are watching the watchmen. Do they worry we might actually see something?

He made himself a promise to go to those docks and have a look.

“Keeper, if you can hear me, then you’ll laugh, because I sound like a raving idiot. I don’t believe anyone pays attention to people who toss questions into empty space. But for what it is worth, I’d like you to give us a plan. And while you’re at it, show me what I’m supposed to do.”

A tiny bell rang at the entrance.

The soldier on the upper bunk shifted and snorted like a prongbull facing a challenger. Tabor Jan went to pull back the curtain.

The bald, smiling, thickly mustached man facing him was dressed in an infirmary robe, and he held out an empty chair in front of him, leaning on
it as if it were a crutch. Bauris. Tabor Jan remembered him from the infirmary. A strange character, clearly witless. But he had been a soldier once. That earned him some kind of respect.

“Abascar captain?” Bauris inquired.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Message for you.”

“From whom?”

“You’ll need a disguise.”

Tabor Jan waited for an explanation. When none came, impatience brought him close to shouting. “I must put on a disguise to hear the message?”

Behind him the slumbering watchman growled, smacked his lips together, and murmured, “I thought I saw one of them twitching.”

Tabor Jan glanced backward.
I’m trapped between two ranting crazies. But the one standing in front of me is wide awake
.

“You’re coming up to the challenge,” Bauris continued. “You’ll need a disguise. Take it, or you’ll never get inside to learn the truth.”

“Truth about what?”

“What the birds want to tell you. Here’s the best part. You’ll have witnesses.”

“Witnesses? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Bauris shrugged sadly. “Certain fires will never be lit without kindling.” He turned and, using the chair as if it would give him forelegs, he planted it out in front of him, then walked up to it and did this again, measuring his path step by step up the corridor.

“If you ever want your wits back,” Tabor Jan muttered, “you’ll find them at the bottom of the Tilianpurth well.”

He went back to the window. A crestfisher, sitting on the flagpole that slanted from the wall outside, turned its massive fan-feathered head to stare at him.

“Got something to tell me?”

The bird dropped from the pole and soared a graceful line down around the opposite tower.

“We have to get a plan and get out of here,” Tabor Jan sighed.

Trying to wake Cal-raven before dawn proved impossible. The slumberseed oil had drawn him down so deep that Emeriene could not inspire more than a moan.

“I’ll kick myself for years.” Shrugging off her robe, she quickly donned her modest blue gown and head scarf, then strapped the cast back on her leg. “I’ve imagined a night like tonight so many times, but it never played out like this. Dreams are kinder.”

Cal-raven turned over so all she could see were his bare shoulders and his red braids hanging down to the pillow. His labored breathing would cease for long spells of silence, and then he would gasp or shout something, which made her worry that other sisterlies would hear a man’s voice in her room.

“There it is!” the king of Abascar shouted. “Do you see it?”

“No,” she laughed. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” She seized him by the shoulders, sat him up, and drew his tunic over his head. “You’ll never know I took this off you. And if you did know, you’d never believe that I did it to cool your fever.”

He sat there with his head hung down, murmuring.

“This time,” she said, “I’m not going to wait around for you to save me. It was a foolish dream. Cyndere gets up every day and pushes on, and she’s lost so much more than I have.”

She pulled his white jacket on, then drew that black stormcloak around his shoulders. “I’m taking you out of here as carefully as you came in.”

She walked to one of the tiny recesses in the wall where a candlestick burned low. Blowing out the candle, she lifted the ribbon of cloth beneath and slid her fingers around the back edge of the slightly raised stone on which it rested.

On the other side of the room, the mirror came loose in its frame and turned slightly, opening a door just behind it. A salty breeze moved into the room, and a few bewildered moths stumbled into the air.

“Come on, then. Both our spirits need lifting, and I know just the
thing.” She brought a glass bottle from the table, uncorked it, and put it to Cal-raven’s lips. He swallowed, choked, and leapt to his feet. “Let’s go for a stroll,” she said.

Emeriene brought Cal-raven down through the old kings’ secret passages with a blindfold over his eyes, which may have been necessary, but it was also fun. Cal-raven was still so muddled by the slumberseed oil he could not walk a straight line. She let him wander into more than a few pillars and gave him one long stairway to navigate by himself until his whispers were as angry as shouts.

“You deserve a lot more punishment than this,” she said. “Wait until you see the tattoo I stained on your belly.”

He paused, then drew a handful of stone from the wall, broke it to harmless pebbles, and cast them down after her. She was still laughing after the shower had gone silent.

Unmasking him, she led him onto the watchman’s path over Queen Thesera’s garden of rare foreign flowers and trees, and as they breathed in those strange perfumes, he began to relax.

They had walked here during the nights when he was a spy. She had come down to this walkway in the evening, retracing her steps in search of an earring that had gone missing. The earring did not turn up, but she did find a talkative, unfamiliar watchman who seemed quite uninterested in his work.

They had discussed what might live on those faraway stars, what treasures might be discovered along the bottom of the Mystery Sea. They imagined what they would do if given islands all their own. He made her laugh. But he also startled her with his willingness to invent things for his island—creatures, places, enchantments.

“Isn’t it strange,” she had said, “how most of us reach an age where we just fold up our imaginations and stuff them into our closets? I think I’ve learned more about you from these impossible dreams than from anything else you’ve said.”

“Then let me tell you something impossible,” he had said, turning and leaning her back against the wall.

Anticipating the nature of the pending announcement, she’d gasped, “Who are you?”

“I’m the prince of Abascar, commanded to break into Bel Amica and tear down the walls that conceal Queen Thesera’s intent to destroy House Abascar.”

She had laughed at that, waiting for him to surrender the joke.

“In truth,” he said, “I’ve only come across one danger to report. There is a thief in Bel Amica who can, without giving any indication of her intentions, snatch something from my chest and leave me wondering what I must do to get it back.”

Audacious. Ridiculous.

He had opened his hand to reveal a rose bloom exquisitely sculpted from stone, with the gem from her earring set in the middle.

For the next several nights, she had crept from her chamber to walk with him along the wall. He had been eager. She had been nervous. Their kisses were quiet promises that someday they would walk together beyond the circuit of their secret.

When the watchman assigned to that path returned, Emeriene directed Cal-raven to another stretch of Bel Amica’s wall. She had taken to visiting Cyndere at night, and Cyndere, trusting her servant and asking no questions, let her climb out the window on a long rope to drop down and meet her mysterious friend.

“These memories are sweet,” Cal-raven said now as they reached the pillar where he had first given her the rose. “And they’re going to ruin my day.”