The Element of Fire (42 page)

The room was long, with many windows to look out onto the garden court, their lace curtains woefully inadequate to stop the drafts. Roland paced tensely, rubbing his cold hands together, ignoring his knights and unsure of just what he was waiting for.

Falaise appeared in the doorway, half-supported by the Queen's Guard Lieutenant Gideon. Past them, Roland could see two of the Queen's gentlewomen waiting outside, huddled together like children expecting punishment. Holding tightly to the lieutenant's arm, Falaise managed to cross the room, then collapsed at Roland's feet. He looked at Gideon in bewilderment, and the lieutenant bent over the Queen, saying, "My lady, you must tell him."

"Tell me what?" Roland said. Sickness hit the pit of his stomach suddenly, and he groped for the table to steady himself. He remembered that Falaise had disappeared at the same time as Denzil.

Falaise looked up at him, her face tear-streaked and frightened, but something in his expression must have encouraged her because she said, "My lord, I should have spoken days ago."

Roland listened in agonized silence to Falaise's story of more treachery, of how Denzil had deliberately kept the Queen from leaving the city so that she would be in his power. "Before this, he had offered me marriage if you were to die, Your Majesty. I... I don't mean to accuse him but..."

"No." Roland had to stop her. He didn't want to hear how she had concealed treason out of fear of him. He understood her reaction to his mother's death now. She had been counting on telling this to Ravenna first, counting on Ravenna to protect her from him.
More nails in my coffin,
he thought. "It's all right, really. I don't blame you. There are... Other things have come to light which... Perhaps you should go to your ladies now."

The lieutenant led her away, and Roland stood at the table, staring at his own reflection in its polished surface. He had never loved Falaise, knew he never would, but this was the first time he had realized that he might have saved a great deal of trouble bysimply making a friend of her.
When Denzil is with me it's as if I can't think.
His fist struck the table and the face in the reflection twisted.
Oh God, let him have an explanation.

* * *
 

Thomas didn't remember much of the trip back to the palace. They bound his wrists and got him on a horse, and he leaned over the saddlebow, unable to sit up. The cold grew intense as night took the city in a dark wave and the freezing air was raw on his throat and lungs. His stomach was cramping with nausea, and dizziness kept overwhelming him.

He came back to full consciousness only when they were passing through St. Anne's Gate. He lifted his head and shook back the hood of the cloak someone had thrown over him.

They were passing between the Cisternan Barracks and the Mews, as he had days earlier bringing Galen Dubell into the palace for the first time.
I couldn't have been more helpful if I'd been in the plot with them,
he thought. He hadn't even been able to get them to kill him.

The barracks were a gutted ruin. The wooden panels over the three arched doorways had been torn open, exposing the dark pit of the interior and the piles of snow that had drifted inside. With the outer gate closed and guarded, the assault from within the palace would have caught the Cisternans completely by surprise. In the narrow corridors of the ancient stone structure the attack by the fay must have had the devastating effect of a hunter blocking all the holes but one of a rabbit warren, and then releasing his ferrets.

The gates into the old siege wall stood open. As they rode through and toward the towering wall of the Old Palace, bogles dropped out of the eaves of the two long stone city armories across the court. Gray-skinned, ugly, distorted creatures, their yellow eyes gleamed in the gathering darkness. Each was short and squat, their arms hanging disproportionately long and their wide mouths grinning with rows of pointed teeth.

Sniggering in almost human voices, the bogles ambled toward them; the nervous horses shied away.

They stopped in the paved court beneath the bulk of the Old Palace, where lit sconces illuminated the high double doors of the westside entrance. Thomas managed to get off the horse on his own without falling. He held onto the saddle a moment while his head and legs became reconciled with the notion of standing. The troopers hung back from him now, watching him warily. He wondered if it was due to his unpredictability or his apparent familiarity with Grandier.

Inside the circular entrance hall the few lamps made hardly a dent in the shadows. This area of the Old Palace seemed remarkably undisturbed, the untouched rooms and short halls leading off into darkness and silence.

Grandier was standing beside him suddenly, and Thomas was too weary to be startled. Grandier said, "This way."

Both Dontane and the sergeant in charge of the Alsene troops turned to look at him, but Grandier ignored their unspoken questions. He said to Thomas, "I want to show you something."

Grandier led the way down a lesser-used series of rooms, lit only by the lamps the soldiers carried, and to a staircase leading down to the lower levels. At the third turn of the stairs Grandier led them into an old stone-walled corridor, and Thomas realized they were going toward the same cellar where the keystone had been concealed. He looked at Grandier walking beside him, but the older man's features betrayed nothing.

As they moved through the cold rooms the flickering light revealed the sheen of sweat on a soldier's face, a white-knuckled grip on a swordhilt or musket that told volumes about the troops' relationship with the fay invaders.

They reached a plain wooden stair leading down, and were now roughly backtracking the route they had taken away from the cellar the night of the attack, but heading toward the lower passageways they had been unable to reach because of the collapsed corridor. The strain of the fight had exacerbated the pain in Thomas's bad leg and it was protesting this treatment, but he managed not to limp too obviously.

The stairs led to an unblocked passage below the storerooms, and the stale air carried the fetid smell of death. Thomas' thoughts kept turning back to Grandier's shape-shifting ability.
Not that way. I don't want to die that way.
He had given up everything else--his honor, his right to say he had never killed a helpless opponent, his claim on his ancestral lands. Voluntarily or pushed to it by circumstance, bit by bit everything had gone to win a few years or a few months or a few days of political stability in a world where so few others seemed to care, and most of them were dead now. He was willing to die for duty's sake but the thought of giving up his identity turned his heart to ice.

There was light up ahead, from a place where there should be stygian darkness. Abruptly raucous noise, growling, and a high-pitched keening echoed off the stone walls. A few more uneasy troopers drew their swords.

The corridor turned, and the first thing Thomas saw was that a large chunk of the stone wall had been knocked out, allowing a view down into the cellar. Grandier moved to the edge, and after a moment Thomas followed him.

The Unseelie Court had found a home here. Fay with long emaciated bodies and huge leathery wings flew in lazy circles over the foul revelry below. There were hundreds of them, bogles, spriggans, formless creatures like the boneless that had attacked them in the street. The mockery and distortion of human and animal forms was endless and infinitely varied. Thomas could see them much more clearly this time, perhaps because they were not troubling to conceal themselves anymore. The light came from a mist that crept up the walls and wreathed around the giant columns supporting the ceiling.

This opening had been made at about the second level of the cellar, and the wide pillars met the ceiling another two levels above them. Below were the remains of two flights of stairs and the narrow well that had enclosed them, now a mound of broken stone and shattered wood. Corpse-lights flitted around the stairs and the tops of the columns.

The unnatural light was bright enough to let Thomas see the dark openings in the ceiling for the air shafts and the doors through which the larger siege engines had been lowered. Chains and frayed ropes hung down from some of those doors, the old system of block and tackle. Thomas said, "They fly up those shafts."

"Yes." Grandier's gaze was on the unholy revelry below. "It protects them from daylight, but gives them access to the surface." He turned back to the others and said, "Dontane, they seem disturbed. Go down and ask them what's wrong."

Dontane moved forward, threw an unreadable look at Grandier, then started the awkward climb to the bottom of the cellar.

"So he is a sorcerer," Thomas said.

Grandier glanced at him. "He's learning. He had been refused admittance to Lodun, and in anger he came across the border to Bisra, and to me for teaching before my arrest. I refused him, because I felt he lacked moral character." He smiled, amused, apparently, by this earlier self who had had the leisure to make such judgments. "Trust was a very important issue, among those of us who practiced sorcery in Bisra. The merest suspicion of necromancy, or anything else the Church could interpret as traffic with demons, was death. But after I escaped from the Inquisition, I sought him out. I had discovered I needed a man who lacked moral character. He was at Lodun with me after I was Galen Dubell, but one of the masters learned he had been across the border, and became suspicious of him. The rumors that I had come to Ile-Rien had already started, you see. So I sent him on to contact the Duke of Alsene for me, which he did through our unfortunate and foolish Lord Lestrac."

Dr. Braun had visited Lodun frequently, Thomas remembered. "You killed Braun because he recognized Dontane."

"I would have had to eventually, anyway."

Thomas watched Dontane pick his way down the remains of the steps and said, "Are you sure he's not the one who turned you in to the Inquisition?"

"Oh, good try." Grandier smiled. "No, that man is dead."

Dontane had climbed halfway to the bottom, and now one of the winged sidhe flew to meet him, cupping its wings to hold itself in midair, gesturing and shouting at him in a high-pitched shriek. Dontane turned and waved at Grandier, his posture betraying irritation. Grandier said, "It appears this needs my attention." He nodded to the Alsene sergeant, then looked back at Thomas. "I'll see you shortly, Captain."

Without Grandier's presence, the troopers muttered nervously as they made their way back, but Thomas was too preoccupied to notice.
Why did he want me to see that? What did it accomplish?
A will-o'-the-wisp followed them part of the way, playing in the unlit wall lanterns and taunting them silently.

Thomas felt each step of the various stairways as a short stabbing pain. By the time they reached the upper floors of the Old Palace he was limping badly. They entered one of the smaller halls that had been set up as temporary barracks, now occupied by a few sullen troopers gathered around the hearth fire, and they passed through it into an attached suite. The last room had been stripped of furniture and wall coverings, and it was dark except for what light flickered uncertainly in from the lamps in the anteroom.

Thomas watched tiredly as one of them pounded an iron spike with a set of manacles attached to it into the wall. With respect for his unpredictability, one held a pistol to his head when they untied him to put the manacles on.

The chains were short but he was able to sit down against the wall. The troopers withdrew into the anteroom to huddle in a nervous knot near the hearth.

He tested the set of the spike in the wall to see if it could be worked loose, but it held firm.
Well and truly caught this time.
He rested his pounding head back against the cold wood, and tried not to think.

"I didn't believe they would let you live." It was Aviler's voice. Between the dim light and the distraction of various injuries, Thomas hadn't seen the other man chained to the opposite wall. The High Minister's dark-colored doublet was torn and bloodied, and from the livid bruises on his temple it seemed he had not been taken easily.

Thomas closed his eyes a moment, damning the fate that had consigned him to be imprisoned with Aviler. Then he said, "Grandier wanted me alive, and if you imply I'm in league with him, I'll kill you."

At the moment it was a supremely empty threat, but Aviler answered, "Don't take me for a fool, Captain."

"I don't know what else to take you for." Thomas sat up and gingerly felt the back of his head. His hair was matted with blood, and there was a sizable lump composed of pure pain.

"You can take me for a man who did not acquire my power in a Queen's bed."

"Yes," Thomas agreed. "In her bed, on the daybed in the anteroom, on a couch in the west solar of the Summer Palace, and other locations too numerous to mention, and if you had the slightest understanding of Ravenna at all, you would know it never made one damn bit of difference as to whether she took my advice or not. And no, your father handed you your power wrapped in ribbon on his deathbed."

The High Minister looked away. After a long moment of silence, he said, "I expect it doesn't matter now."

Already feeling the bite of the manacles on his wrists, Thomas expected it didn't matter either.

Aviler rubbed his eyes, making his own chains jingle slightly. "Galen Dubell really is the sorcerer Grandier, then. Denzil told me something of it when he brought the Queen to me, but under the circumstances I don't place much confidence in his word."