The Lost Heiress #2 (17 page)

The Sekoi looked uneasy, but it said nothing.

Tallis stared into the fire. “And if she betrays you?”

“She’s had that chance before.” Galen glanced at her, his face edged with flame. “I believe the Makers want her. They are stronger than she is.”

For a moment, in the silence, an owl hooted softly outside. Then Galen tugged a string of the green and black crystals from around his neck and began to wind them absently around his hand, something he only did when he was really troubled. “There is one thing in the vision that concerns me even more,” he said at last.

The Sekoi edged forward. “And me.”

Raffi had been dreading this. “You mean the thing in the Pit.”

“Yes. The thing writing in the dark room.”

They were silent. Even here the mention of the Pits of Maar chilled them. No one had ever gone into them and come back; whatever horrors Kest had begun were still there, in all his workrooms and laboratories, breeding and mutating out of control.

Tallis too looked grim. She got up and closed the door, and when she came back they saw she was an old woman again, her hands frail. Carefully she lowered herself into a wooden chair. Then she said, “Tell us what worries you, keeper. All secrets are safe here.”

Galen wrapped the beads around his fingers. Finally he said, “I’ve never told anyone this. Ten years ago, when he was dying, my master told me a great mystery. He told me that many who had been high in the Order had suspected something so terrible that they dared not record it; it had never been written down. It was based on an ancient lost text of Tamar’s, and on rumor, dark talk, the gabblings of a few, barely sane, who had claimed to have seen it in visions.”

“It?” the Sekoi breathed.

Galen looked away. When he spoke again his voice was harsh. “The rumors were that Kest had not tampered only with animals. His last experiment, they say, was on a man.”

Raffi stared. He felt the terror of the dream sweeping back over him; for a moment the Pit gaped under him and he felt himself falling into it, snapping his eyes open as the Sekoi hissed.

The room seemed much darker. Raffi was afraid now, wished Galen had never spoken of this. Fighting to stop trembling, he edged closer to the fire.

Tallis said, “I have never heard this. Could even Kest do something so monstrous?”

Galen took some time to answer. Finally he said, “Who knows. These are whispers and dreams. But if Kest had meddled, if he had taken a man and made something else out of him, something grotesque, a creature that could live long lifetimes, that had an evil intelligence greater than any animal’s, what an enemy that would be.”

“Living in the dark,” the Sekoi muttered. “Letting others do its work.” The creature’s fur was swollen around its neck; it looked tense and distant.

“Your people know about this?” Galen asked.

The Sekoi’s yellow eyes blinked. It put its cup down slowly as if choosing what to say. “There is a name,” it said, “in the darkest of our stories. A being. Not a man, not Sekoi, not a beast. A creature of evil. Immortal, too hideous to look on. We call it the Margrave.”

The fire crackled, splitting a log in a shower of sparks. The Guardian tapped the chair arm. “If you feel able, Raffi, can you tell us more about what you saw? Was it a man?”

“I don’t know.” He couldn’t, he didn’t want to think of it clearly; the memory dodged away, was a cold terror. His hands shook and she noticed and put her own over them. “Don’t be afraid, not here.”

He looked up at her. “I think . . . it had been a man. The shape of the face was too long . . . I didn’t see it properly.”

“If you had, you would not be speaking.” She turned to Galen. “You think he saw this thing?”

“I think the Makers are warning us,” he said bleakly. “We’ve always wondered at the Watch, how it grew so fast, how it defeated us, and all the time none of us knew where it came from. If this is the mind that rules the Watch, then it’s still the legacy of Kest . . .”

No one answered. Galen rubbed his face wearily. It was the Sekoi who stirred, kneeling suddenly and piling new logs on the fire, so the dry wood crackled cheerfully. “None of this concerns us now,” it said firmly. “We have to find this girl-cub. And I suppose you’re right about Carys, keeper, though you know I have doubts about her. How will we send to her? Shall I go?”

Galen glanced back, his eyes black and sharp. “Thank you, but no. I’ll tell her. The Crow will tell her.” Tallis was watching him, intent. He smiled, and at once the sense of weariness among them broke; Raffi almost felt the warmth creep back into the room. Until the keeper said, “We leave tomorrow.”

The Sekoi looked doubtfully at Raffi. “Will he be ready?”

“He’ll have to be.” Galen turned to Tallis. “It’s been good to live in this place. Even though we have to leave it, it cheers me to know it’s still here.”

The Guardian smiled at him. “For those who hold the faith, keeper, it will always be here.”

 

 

 

STANDING ON THE WET LAWNS in the morning, looking back at the house, Raffi knew what she meant. He thought that Artelan’s Well had put something in him that hadn’t been there before, something so deep he could hardly feel it. But it was there, a small hard gem at the center of him. He touched it with his sore mind. It was no use wishing they could stay; it would be too hurtful even to think of that.

Before them the wicker walkway stretched into mist; beyond it the Unfinished Lands steamed and hissed. Tallis kissed each one of them and stood back, her arms at her sides.

“May Flain go with you. May Tamar be at your back and Soren smooth your way. And when you find her, bring the child to us. For anything the Watch can do, we can undo.”

Bleakly Galen nodded. Then he turned and led them into the fog.

Standing in Line

Apocalypse of Tamar

C
ARYS STEPPED BETWEEN the two oak trunks warily.

In the deep hollows, crisp leaves were piled; she stood knee-high in the forest’s debris. Above, the gnarled branches rustled in every breeze, a new gilt shower tinseling down. Under the slow pattering, she waited.

The wood was silent, its pathways lost behind trunks and branches.

But she knew they were here.

Careless, she leaned back against the oak trunk, squatting down in the fork between immense sprawled roots. Her crossbow was loaded. She could wait.

The dream had come two nights ago, just when she was running out of lies to tell Braylwin. A great black bird had perched on the end of the bed, some village girl’s bed she had borrowed for the night, and it had spoken to her with Galen’s voice.

“Keilder Forest,” it had said. “Near the Watchhouse.” And then it had gone, flapping out of the window as if it had really been there.

She turned at a cracked twig. A skeat eyed her coldly, then padded off among the bracken. As she watched it, she glimpsed a sharp face looking at her between branches and glanced away to hide a grin. It was the Sekoi.

Galen came out first, brushing between ferns, Raffi a shadow at his back. They squatted.

“Took your time,” she said coolly.

“We had to make sure you were alone.”

“The Watch are never alone.”

“Neither are the Order.” Galen looked sharp, as if power moved in him.

She grinned over his shoulder at Raffi. “You look older.”

To her surprise that startled him, even scared him. “Do I?” he breathed.

“Well, don’t worry. Not that much.”

The Sekoi had ambled over; it crouched in the deep leaf-drift. “All together again. How cozy.”

She made a face at it.

“We’ve found the Interrex,” Galen said quickly. “At least we know where she is.”

“She?”

“We think so.”

“In this forest?”

He looked hard at her, then tipped his head to where the distant edge of the Watchhouse roof showed beyond the trees. “There.”

Carys stared, astonished. “In a Watchhouse!”

“We think so,” he said again.

She whistled, then shook her head, pulling a leaf out of her hair absently. “No wonder you want me! How do you know she’s in there?”

“The Makers told us.” He was watching her steadily; she knew he suspected her, that he guessed something. Abruptly she laughed. “I never know what you mean when you say that, Galen. Well, if she is in there, you’ve got your work cut out. She’d probably slit your throat rather than let you take her.”

That stung him. His face darkened, and she saw suddenly how he hated this, that even the heir of the Emperors should have been tainted and corrupted by his enemies. And she hated it too. So much, she even surprised herself.

She tucked a stray hair behind one ear. “So what’s the plan?”

“I thought I’d leave that to you. You know these places.”

Indeed she did. Grim, bare classrooms, icy courtyards, the stark dormitories, the punishments, the ones who sobbed in the dark, who disappeared one day, never to be seen again. The guards, the passwords. Nowhere to hide. No way out. And what it did to you.

She looked up at him suddenly. “Listen, Galen, get out of here. Go now! Go quickly!”

At once the Sekoi hissed, its yellow eyes narrowing, “What do you mean?”

“She means,” Galen said softly, “that we’re surrounded by the Watch.”

The creature leaped up with a snarl. Galen never took his eyes off Carys.

“I can explain,” she said.

“I’m sure you can.”

“If you knew, why did you come?”

“Because I wanted to find out why.”

Harnesses clinked in the wood. Raffi was on his feet, feeling the sense-lines shatter, praying that Galen knew what he was doing.

Ten men on horses faced them. Each crossbow was firmly aimed. The horses were painted red; the men wore the black patrol-helmets of the Watch, their eyes bright in the slits. On the end of the line sat an extraordinary figure, a fat man in a great waxed coat, his puffed face rimmed with black, oily hair, perfectly curled. He smiled, his swollen fingers tossing the reins. “You must introduce me to your friends, sweetie.”

“Drop dead,” Carys said. Her face was hot and angry.

Slowly Galen stood up and turned. He stood, feet apart, staring calmly across the clearing. “I’m Galen Harn, Relic Master of the Order of keepers.”

Braylwin smirked. “Are you now. And I’m Arno Braylwin, Captain of the Watch, Spymaster, first grade, thief-taker, interrogator of sorcerers.”

Raffi felt cold. He couldn’t take his eyes off the nearest crossbow. One twitch, he thought, and sweated with the effort to keep still.

Braylwin gave a haughty nod.

One of his men slid down and brought a small set of wooden steps, garishly painted, which he put in the leaf-drift. One hand on the man’s shoulder, Braylwin climbed unsteadily down. Then he flicked some leaves off a log with his coattail and sat down.