The Rose of Sarifal (16 page)

B
UT IN
C
AER
C
ORWELL, TIME WAS OF THE ESSENCE
. A
T
least Suka thought so; she was eager to be gone. The others were obviously more patient. Suka had discovered after many recitations of
Oh, Father Dear
that Marabaldia had been imprisoned close to ten years. She had made line after line of little scratches in the sallow bricks, in time-honored fashion, as if counting the days indicated some sort of action or commitment. Suka was amazed. After a tenday she was ready to jump out of her skin. She hung from the bars, performed mental puzzles, logical and arithmetical, made endless circuits of her cell, invented conversations with imaginary people, rehearsed variations of what she’d do to Lukas when she saw him again (The cold shoulder? The swift kick in the crotch?). The pig-woman lay motionless, a sow in a sty, wallowing in the filth of her despair (and in actual filth, too), gnawing on the discarded carrots and radishes of regret, scratching the fleas of self-indulgence—Suka could draw out these metaphors forever, in her frantic and myriad attempts to keep her mind alive.

Poke was the sow’s name, bestowed on her by the ginger slut of Moray, as Suka privately referred to Lady Amaranth, most unfairly, as she herself would have conceded. Like the ritual inking of the tattoos, Suka imagined, these naming ceremonies were a solemn occasion, perhaps some absurd version of a knight’s investiture: rows of lycanthropes in their white shifts, all holding candles, and the ginger slut intoning variations of “Arise now, Poke, and bear your name with honor. Arise now, Prod, and you, Bat-shit.”

Poke didn’t move, didn’t turn her head, only followed Suka’s endless gyrations from the corners of her eyes. Only at night in the darkness did she come alive, during “story time,” as the gnome referred to it, or the hundred and one tales of Lady Amaranth, her virtue and her beauty. Fine, thought Suka. Whatever—eladrin were wicked hot. Cold and hot. It was a well-known fact, part of what made them so creepy and grotesque and horrible and bad. They were slutty and sterile at the same time. Everybody wanted to have sex with them and nobody could.

Poke had built a boat to please her, to carry a message to her sister, and the boat had sunk immediately, burned by the nagas, while Poke had drifted in the water, cold and miserable, hour after hour …

“Wait,” said Suka. “Hold your horses. That’s not what you said before.”

Poke, who never liked to be interrupted in these orgies of self-punishment, opened her eyes. Suka could see them glittering in the darkness. “I mean,” she said,
“the other night, the first night you told us this whole damn same exact sad story, you said you had come here with a letter for the Claw. Captain Rurik. From Lady Amaranth.”

“That’s right,” said Marabaldia in her soft, sweet voice. “I remember that too.”

“Lady Amaranth has no deviousness,” amended Poke. “She knows nothing of any rebellion. She trusts her sister from the time she was a little girl. It is I, since I have been here, who have changed the direction of her mission, now I know the truth …”

Poke’s speech, absurdly formal and yet punctuated with little grunts, always made the gnome smile. And she was interested in this: The pig-woman had showed more gumption than she would have guessed. Although if the ginger slut of Moray was really on the level, whether in her dealings with Lady Ordalf or on any other subject, then she was different from any other eladrin in the history of Faerûn, because the rest of them were unequivocally as bent as corkscrews.

“Tell me,” said Poke, “do you believe in Captain Rurik? Do you believe that such a man exists? Or is he …?”

Suka reassured her, though to tell the truth she didn’t particularly believe in him. But (who was she kidding?) it wasn’t as if she wasn’t brimming with fey blood, and hadn’t her own store of deviousness. So sue me, she thought, while at the same time she imagined she could use this part of the conversation to reveal her plan, how when the Ffolk wardens removed the last bar that
separated the gnome from the fomorian, then they could use Marabaldia’s evil eye to freeze them in their tracks—or something. Suka didn’t know enough about the eye to have got much farther in her thinking, although she had some questions: Could you turn it off, or was it always on? If it was always on, did fomorians get involved in idiotic situations where they froze or disabled each other without wanting to, a husband and wife, say, over the dinner table or in bed, or else children playing in a nursery? Over the past days Suka had amused herself by inventing various scenarios, none of which were useful now. She didn’t mention them to Marabaldia, especially since the fomorian seemed suddenly shy around the subject, which was obviously a private thing. “Of course we can control it,” she’d protested.

“It’s a weapon you carry all the time,” Suka said now, her curiosity overcoming, for the moment, any sense of diplomacy. “I mean, even a swordmage,” she said, thinking of the Savage, “puts the damn thing down when he goes to the privy—” an unfortunate image, and Suka suddenly regretted it. Marabaldia was nothing if not modest, and had a good deal of trouble with the waste buckets and water buckets the Ffolk left for them, always waiting until darkness, when Suka, from the other side of the cell, could hear her nervously slopping around. Not wanting to embarrass her, the gnome always feigned sleep. One night Marabaldia had even washed her clothes.

“It’s not a weapon,” she protested. “Besides, I can’t get free.” Suka, close to the bars along her side, reached
in her hand as if to comfort her, but instead at the last moment ran her little fingers along the back of the fomorian’s bulbous head, under her hair, releasing the catch. Then she drew back her hand as quickly as she could in case she had violated some long-established cultural taboo, which had to be punished, say, by biting or dismemberment. She hoped the effect, to Marabaldia, was that the iron and leather half mask over her eye, which had been her constant bane for many years, had fallen away as if by magic, or else in answer to her own prayers to Selûne, the goddess of maidenhood and the moon. She burst into tears, and when she raised her head, Suka could see in the almost-total darkness, for a moment, some vestige or version of the beauty she had boasted of.

“Do you think he will still love me?” the fomorian asked softly, “after all these years?”

Suka knew what she meant, and she found herself affected, especially since Marabaldia could not possibly be so stupid that she did not guess or know or understand that the bridegroom she remembered was now probably long dead.

Then she turned her head. Her eye shone softly in the darkness, and Suka found herself unable to look somewhere else. What her father had described as something evil and disgusting and destructive did not seem that way. She stared into it, and she was caught.

Which didn’t mean she couldn’t move, but that she didn’t want to. “It’s not a weapon,” Marabaldia had said, which Suka now believed. Doubtless you could use it
that way. But anything could be a weapon. You could kill somebody with a feather, not that she’d tried.

It was like watching a play—tiny figures on a distant stage. Or standing in the dark outside the lighted window of a tiny house and peering inside. And what you saw was hard to recognize, because you’d come in in the middle and, squinting, could discern, in this case, well, what was it? Suka found herself immobile, pressing her face against the bars, wondering if it were possible that she was staring in through Marabaldia’s eye into the proscenium of her brain, or else perhaps a screen on which mental images could be projected in black and white and various shades of gray: She saw a smoky, spitting phlogiston torch, burning in an iron lantern hanging from a stone ceiling. Under it there was a silent fight between two animals, a hooded serpent and some kind of deep-chested, clawed monstrosity with a tiny head and a circle of needlelike teeth. The snake had twisted itself around the monster but taken terrible damage, its side slashed to rags. The image faded, and under the same lantern Suka saw a party or a masked ball, with men and women dancing in formal gowns and suits. In the background, musicians played silently on violins and guitars. A handsome couple spun and twirled under the lantern, and it took Suka a moment to realize they were fomorians, and she was watching an entire festival or celebration of fomorians, none of whom looked either grotesque or gigantic, because (Suka guessed) the images were being filtered through Marabaldia’s perception, her memories or
imagining—Suka was unsure which, or in the case of the monsters whether she was watching a language of symbols rather than events. The dancers disappeared, their place under the lantern taken by a blurred sense of movement, of drow soldiers marching in a line, black skin, black armor, and gleaming white hair. They carried swords and shields, spears and longbows, and now they seemed to break out of the confines of the tiny mental theater where Suka watched, entranced, alone in the audience, and past her into the darkness of her cell, a line of ghostly images suddenly interrupted and cut off as Marabaldia blinked.

Suka had no experience of the Feywild, or of the Underdark beneath the lake, where the Feywild had first extruded onto Gwynneth Island. She had been born in Myrloch Vale. It was her father who had come up with the host of creatures, good and evil, that had burst from that crystal, shining pustule into the world of men, displacing them from the land of their ancestors, chasing them from their homes. Suka’s father had been a slave in the retinue of some fomorian lord, who had freed him for the sake of his good company, his subtle playing on the pipe and harp. Suka had never known her mother. Everything she had heard of the darkness underneath the mortal realm, where the gnomes led lives of torment, packed like maggots in the belly of a corpse, came through him, a drunken, easy-hearted old scoundrel who never told the truth. There were sun-drenched landscapes in the Feywild also, Suka knew, beechen glades where the elves and the eladrin ruled, in the perpetual autumn of their lives.

She found herself pressing her body against the gap in the bars, reaching her hand up toward Marabaldia, who had knelt down over her, so that their faces were almost level. And when the fomorian opened her eye again, Suka gasped, for she saw a face she recognized, the gray-haired, spotted, bloated visage of her old dad himself, lying asleep on the broken-backed settee, perhaps the last time she had seen him when, scarcely grown, she had stood in the doorway of their stupid little house in the sodden, stupid little village above the vale on the way to Crane Point. In Leaffall she had watched the eladrin hunting parties ride through.

She hadn’t woken him when she left. Marabaldia blinked again, and Suka saw the cliffs above Llewellyn Harbor on the straits of Alaron, when she first saw the
Sphinx
racing the gap and then coming about, its raked masts crowded with sail. No one there had ever seen such a ship before, though there’d been copies since, and right then Suka decided she would find the man who built that ship and join his crew and sail the seas with him, not realizing he would turn out to be one of the most chuckle-headed commanders who ever lived, looking for trouble as a burr looks for a dog’s back.

And as if liberated by the sight of the little ship as it came flying over the bar, cleaving the line between the dark water and the light, she saw Lukas, tall and gawky, turning toward her with a long, slow smile. She saw Gaspar-shen, his strange companion, the water haze around him, the lines glowing on his bald head, caught as if interrupted in one of his perpetual conversations
about food—they were never really about food. He never actually ate any of the things he talked about. And the Savage, the golden elf, his face haughty and guarded also. Only once, when he thought he was alone, had she seen him with his black shirt unbuttoned, seen the terrible scars along his spine. And then the cat-boy and the priestess, whom Suka hated, with her incessant droning in the service of the goddess. Better to pretend the gods didn’t exist, and thus escape their notice. Marikke had come aboard the boat not because of any skill or help she could provide, but because of Lukas’s half-baked sense of chivalry. She had needed rescuing from the slums of Callidyrr, and the shifter too.

Once the gnome had spoken her mind to Lukas, who had laughed. “You don’t like her because she is a woman—” Marabaldia blinked, and Suka saw nothing more. She found herself grasping the bars of her cell, her face inches away from the fomorian’s, who grinned, displaying fearsome teeth.

“Hello,” she said, and Suka leaped back.

So after that, everything was easy. Minion of a corrupt state, the warden in Lady Ordalf’s prison had no idea what he was doing. The fey queen had pretended she would remove one set of bars every five days, in order to provide Lukas with an incentive, and guarantee his return. But it was doubtless confusing to follow the wishes of a liar, whose only constant was her perpetual bad faith and her refusal to explain her motives, especially to a human slave who she regarded as a cross between a slug and a wad of excrement. Besides, she hated the gnome, who she
regarded as the most loathsome kind of traitor—one who had managed to escape the web of lies with which she had encircled her own kingdom. She had no interest in keeping Suka alive. She wanted her to die a terrible death, torn apart by her race’s ancient adversary. Only that, in Lady Orlaf’s mind, would restore the proper balance to the world. In addition she was far away among the crystal spires of Karador, and her commands were muted by distance. As a result, the warden had unbolted two bars in six days, and now came again on the evening of the ninth, and Suka and Marabaldia were ready.

“Let’s go find him,” Suka had said, meaning the fomorian’s lost bridegroom, sold to his doom by the treacherous Prince Araithe.

The Ffolk soldiers came in, three men with crossbows, two with wrenches and a stepladder, and the warden with his hoop of keys. The archers arranged themselves in a triangle while the turnkey unlocked Suka’s cage.