The Dragon of Despair (60 page)

BEE BITER CAME
darting to Firekeeper, his blue and red feathers with their black barring quite dramatic in the late-summer light. The little kestrel might lack the peregrine’s dramatic stoop, but he possessed a trick as wonderful, for he could hover in the air almost like a hummingbird, a great advantage in hunting his much smaller prey.

The wolf-woman was drowsing in a tree near Hasamemorri’s stable. She had tried the hayloft in the stable, but the flies had been too much. Blind Seer was in the tree with her, having accepted her assistance in making his way to a limb strong enough to take his weight. The pair made a startling sight, or would have had the tree’s thick leaves not hidden them from everyone but members of the household. Even Hasamemorri’s maids were becoming quite accustomed to oddities—a thing that, in any case, they accepted as normal from foreigners.

Firekeeper awoke instantly, inspecting the kestrel through slitted eyes.

“You’ve been gone long enough,” she said lazily, enjoying a good yawn. “We were beginning to think that someone had drawn you down from the air and we were going to need to rescue you.”

Bee Biter fluffed indignantly and Firekeeper laughed.

“Don’t be so hurt. At least we would have come and found you. That’s some comfort surely. So where have you been?”

“Scouting,” the little hawk replied sharply. “Not lolling idle in the trees.”

“And what has your scouting found?” Firekeeper rolled slightly, bracing her back against the tree trunk and shifting her position as effortlessly as she would have on the ground.

“At last,” the kestrel said, calming as he grew interested in his subject, “I have found the wingéd folk who dwell in this place. It wasn’t easy, nor were they happy to learn you are here and meddling again.”

“Who would dream that it would be easy to find them?” Firekeeper replied, deciding to ignore the latter comment, though Blind Seer growled. “The wise riders of the winds would not make their presence too easily known, especially in a city where there are those who pride themselves on their beast lore.”

She snorted slightly to herself as she recalled that particular New Kelvinese sodality. She had been in and out of their walled gardens repeatedly, Blind Seer with her, and the so-called masters of those places had never spotted either of them. Grudgingly, though, she had to admit admiration for the wide variety of beasts they kept. All were Cousins, at least as far as she had been able to tell, else she would have freed them, but each and every one was healthy and unbroken in spirit.

Surely the Beast Lorists would love to have Royal Beasts for their collection—and the wingéd folk who risked themselves keeping watch on the humans for all their people would be particularly vulnerable.

“So you found your brothers and sisters,” Blind Seer said from where he sprawled on a broad limb, paws dangling down on either side as if he were some great cat. “What news had they?”

“Not as much as I could wish,” Bee Biter replied, turning his head to clean between his sharp curving talons where pink fleshy evidence remained that he had stopped to eat before finding them. “They have watched but have little to report. Melina goes nowhere but within Thendulla Lypella. At first she traveled some, but moons have waxed and waned since last she crossed the gates. The Granite Tower from which you stole the artifacts remains quiet and unused.”

Firekeeper hadn’t expected otherwise. If Melina had done something noticeable from the outside then surely someone would have reported before this. She sighed.

This was no good news, especially in light of her friends’ reports the previous day from both the embassy and the marketplace. The wolf-woman hadn’t understood all the fine details, but she had understood enough.

Melina was becoming important and influential—with more people than her new mate. The New Kelvinese did not uniformly like her, but she had control over many of those well-placed in the pack. The anger of the lesser ones, rather than helping Firekeeper and her associates, was more likely to give them difficulties as the lesser ones turned their fury with their new queen on those from her homeland, much as a low-ranking wolf might beat up one still lower in the hierarchy.

It all made perfect sense, and made Firekeeper all the more certain that delaying a move against Melina was as foolish as letting a herd of elk form a defensive circle.

“If there is no news from the wingéd folk,” she said, “who must by their nature watch from outside, then we must go inside.”

“Inside?” asked Bee Biter. “Inside Thendulla Lypella? How? You lack wings and, forgive me, wolf-child, but humans’ walls are high and well guarded.”

“I know,” Firekeeper replied. “Had there not been confusion and had I not had Elation and Bold to watch for me, I doubt I would have escaped last winter. I do not plan on going over the walls. I plan on going under.”

Blind Seer snorted softly.

“As we did last time?” he inquired. “Those tunnels reeked then and it was the cold season. They may be choking now. And remember, dear heart, then we had a guide.”

“I think,” Firekeeper said, “that it is time we had a guide once more.”

SOME HOURS LATER
Firekeeper succeeded in hunting out Grateful Peace—Jalarios, as she must remember to call him—finding him resting from the heat of the day in the relative coolness of the stone-flagged kitchen. He was alone, and to make certain they were not surprised Firekeeper set Blind Seer and Bee Biter to guard. In as few words as possible, the wolf-woman outlined her need.

“We not learn from outside,” she concluded bluntly. “Walls hide too much. Last time you is inside. Now…”

She shrugged. Her point was clear and logical, and she saw no reason to belabor it.

“So you want me to take you into the sewers,” Grateful Peace said, “and through them into the areas beneath Thendulla Lypella.”

“Yes.”

Peace could be as still as stone when he wished, but Firekeeper had noticed that he tapped his fingers together when thinking about something that agitated him, a restlessness he was indulging in now.

“They know we escaped that way last time,” he said. “It is unlikely that the ways are as open.”

Firekeeper merely cocked a eyebrow at him.

“And it’s going to reek. Last time there was some ice.”

Firekeeper, though the wolves teased her about being nose-dead, actually had an acute sense of smell for a human. She didn’t like the idea of subjecting herself to the contained scent of subterranean filth, but she saw no way around it.

“You have another way in?” she asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

“If I were still the Dragon’s Eye,” Peace said, “yes, I would, but I am not and I do not. At least for now the sewers are our best way to penetrate Thendulla Lypella.”

“Then we do this thing,” Firekeeper said, “tonight or tomorrow—soon.”

Peace stared at her, then shrugged.

“I did force myself on your company by offering myself as a guide,” he said, “and I suppose this is guiding. You and I alone?”

“And Blind Seer,” Firekeeper said.

“But of course,” Peace said. “We will need lanterns. I think it would be best if we didn’t disturb the workers’ caches.”

“As you say,” Firekeeper replied, trusting Peace to prepare properly. “I speak with others. They have thoughts, too.”

“Let us keep our group small,” Peace interjected quickly, “at least initially.”

“Very,” Firekeeper said. “I have thought for one to bring. Edlin.”

“Lord Kestrel?” Peace looked surprised.

“Edlin is great mapmaker,” Firekeeper said. “Even Shad say so.”

Grateful Peace blinked at this last, an apparent non sequitur worthy of Edlin himself, but he didn’t comment.

“A mapmaker would be useful,” he admitted. “I will be occupied working out our trail, and you do not write, do you?”

Firekeeper shook her head fiercely, feeling once again her inferiority in this area.

“Since will stink,” she said, “I not be sure Blind Seer and I sniff our trail back. Best to have map.”

Grateful Peace nodded.

“Good tactics, Lady Firekeeper. You are thinking like a general.”

Firekeeper wasn’t sure she liked this comparison. From what she’d seen, generals were involved in getting large numbers of people killed. However, perhaps good planning got few killed. That had been the case in King Allister’s War.

She swelled a bit at the compliment, wolf-like, thriving on admiration and praise.

“I speak Edlin and others. You get lantern. Maybe,” Firekeeper added hopefully, “sewers not stink so much. Rain has been in the mountains and even in city. Maybe it wash stink away.”

XXIII

SAFELY IN HIS SIDE
of the Cloud Touching Spire, Toriovico removed the First Healed One’s book from its locked chest. The chest—its exterior intricately carved and polished ruddy oak, its interior lined in exotic aromatic woods and padded in shining midnight blue satin—was far more lovely than the book. The book was thick and solid, its covers bound in age-darkened leather, its pages heavy vellum, peculiarly unyellowed by age.

Indeed, the book’s very unremarkableness was one of the remarkable things about it. Several former Healed Ones had attempted to make the tome more remarkable—to inscribe legends on the front cover in gold or to adorn the plain binding with costly gems. Their efforts had met with spectacular failure. Not the greatest Illuminator nor the most skilled Lapidary could anchor anything at all on the book’s dull exterior.

Except for the occasional slipcover ordered by those who could not accept that a tome so extraordinary remain so superficially ordinary, the book remained as it was, protected from and isolated by time.

There was one exception to the now universally acknowledged rule that the book could not be changed. Whatever the current Healed One chose to write upon those pristine vellum pages remained—at least, it remained to his eyes and to those of his successors. No one else could see anything written there at all.

A corollary oddity to this was that the book never ran short of pages. Toriovico had tried to count those remaining, but he never came up with the same number twice. Finally, he gave up, contenting himself with the knowledge that there always was enough blank space for whatever he cared to write.

As a small boy, Toriovico had sat in his father’s lap when his father wrote in the book. He had been fascinated by the way the dark ink would flow from the quill and vanish on the yellow-white of the page. Sometimes he had insisted on poking his finger under the quill, just to make sure the ink was real. It always was and the bluish black stains had sometimes lasted for days, much to the dismay of his nurses.

When Toriovico had been anointed the Healed One, he had opened the book and been startled to see writing on what had always been an infinity of blank pages. On that first opening, he had been compelled to turn the pages to the beginning and there had read the words that had transformed his universe.

Later there was no such compulsion and Torio had browsed, randomly, fascinated by this tangible link to his predecessors. Their handwritings had varied from spidery to bold, from neatly formed letters that could almost pass for printing to cryptic shapes that had to be stared at for a long while before their similarities to recognizable letters became clear.

One hand had been heartbreakingly familiar, and this was the one section of the book Toriovico never read. His father had written for himself, and for Vanviko, the son who had not lived to succeed him. Toriovico had no desire to see what that Father had written about him, secure in his knowledge that little Torio would never read those words.

Therefore, when he had first grown lonely in the burden of his terrible secret Toriovico had left several pages between his father’s words and his own creamily pristine. Only then had he felt comfortable in setting his own quill to the page. He’d half expected the words to vanish before his eyes as they had when his father had done the writing, but they had remained, crisp and clear, and sadly saying less in their tidy little symbols than what he had hoped to express.

Despite his dissatisfaction with his own prose, the book had become friend and confidant, and though Toriovico continued to express himself best in dance, he found some contentment in this outlet.

This afternoon, however, Toriovico did not turn to where he recorded his own journal. Instead he turned to the very beginning, where the First Healed One had written. Skipping over the initial pages with their disturbing revelations, Torio moved to where the First Healed One, like his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons to follow, had recorded his most private thoughts.

Toriovico was seeking some mention, any mention, of what lay beneath Thendulla Lypella. The First Healed One seemed obsessed with the small details of life.

We must have silk. There is no way we can prosper without it. How to keep the growing rooms the correct temperature without recourse to regulating spells?

Agitation today to tear down Ashnernon’s old palace. I realize the people need building materials, but I am reluctant to face my fellows when they return and find their houses in ruins—or worse—vanished altogether.