The Rose of Sarifal (17 page)

“Stay away from the bars,” he admonished, a sallow, fat-bellied man whose skin stank of his unhappiness. He was speaking not just to the gnome but to Poke and Marabaldia as well.

Suka’s skill was misdirection. The trick was, she thought, to keep the guards from realizing that they themselves were under attack. This was, after all, the moment when the gap between the bars was large enough to let the fomorian into her cell. They had been starving Marabaldia in anticipation of this day, and therefore had to expect a certain rowdiness—it was the whole point of what they were doing. If the
giantess just sat glumly in her cage, Lady Ordalf would be disappointed. She wanted Suka to be torn apart, punished for her treason against the fey.

So when one man was up on the stepladder, unbolting the long bar, and the other man was on his knees below him, Marabaldia sidled over to the gap. “Stand away!” said the turnkey, but he didn’t mean it.

The moment the bolts were loose she smashed her way through, upending the stepladder, kicking over both the men. At the same time, Suka started yelping like a rabbit and running round and round. She stumbled over one of the men and cut him over the eye with one of her secret knives. The idea was to make him bleed as if injured in his fall. Marabaldia had wrenched the ten-foot iron bar from its frame and made a show of chasing after Suka with it. In the pursuit she knocked the men over once again. One of them, bleeding like a pig, crawled on his hands and knees toward the cell’s sliding door. The turnkey, shouting commands, had come into the cell to meet him, help him to his feet, the archers close behind. Marabaldia had caught Suka now, and made as if to strangle her while the gnome reached up and freed the clasp of her iron mask, which dropped away.

Even now, because of Suka’s feigned terror, the turnkey still imagined he was breaking up an altercation between inmates, and his task was to remove his people, lock the sliding cage, and let nature take its course. But Suka slipped out of the giantess’s grasp and scampered for the opening. One of the archers brought up his bow
just as Marabaldia heaved her iron bar and caught him in the chest. Then Suka was out into the room. The turnkey hadn’t moved. The gnome uttered a charm of misdirection as the bolt from one of the crossbows passed over her shoulder and crashed into the wall. She reached the brazier and kicked its leg, spilling the charcoal from its pan, scattering the coals. Now in that noisome, sweating room the most concentrated light came from Marabaldia’s eye. Again, the turnkey hadn’t moved. Suka slid into the final archer’s legs just as he released his bolt, and that was that.

And when the men were locked inside her cell, she led the way up the spiral staircase, up toward the surface and the streets of Caer Corwell. She remembered coming down three levels, and on the second floor she found the entrance to the main stairs leading up and down, wide stone steps around a square shaft. Peering down, she couldn’t see the bottom, but only endless galleries lit with fire, brighter and brighter the deeper she looked, a spectrum of infuriated colors. She went the other way, climbing up into the darkness, though when they reached what must have been the ground floor of the brick prison, they wandered through a series of dusty, ruined, windowless rooms without finding any exit.

“Shit,” she murmured, hiding her distress. She was the one with the plan, she reminded herself, though in fact all of her thinking had ended here, with them breaking through the wide doors into the courtyard and then into the street. She had thought it might be
evening, had imagined the fresh soft air. Shit, shit—she must have been spending too much time with Lukas, and some of his stupidity must have rubbed off on her. This was the fey she was dealing with. There was no gate to the outside.

They stood looking at each other in the empty room, a big, high-ceilinged useless cube with only a single doorway. Light came from a remnant of the searing fire that rose up from the bottom of the stairwell. It curled over the threshold. Opposite, an expanse of moldy brick. But surely this was where the gate had been. What purpose otherwise could the room have served?

They had taken the three crossbows and other weapons. Marabaldia had her iron bar, and Suka had filched a long, hilted knife from the turnkey’s belt. Poke had dressed herself in the clothes of one of the archers, leaving him naked. She stood breathless in her most human shape, a strong fleshy woman with an upturned nose, long hair down her back, and a powerful set of teeth.

Now they heard a noise from the direction of the light, an ominous clanking and the stamp of heavy feet. “We have to leave,” whispered the gnome. “Can you find a way?”

Unspoken was the obvious, that Lady Ordalf had sealed the gates not with bricks and mortar but with something more subtle, a woven pattern of illusion. Suka, in one of her first jobs after leaving home, had traveled with a circus among the small towns of Alaron. One of her teachers had been a hypnotist who could
make his subjects stagger around stupidly, looking for the opening to the tent. Moving her head back and forth, Suka felt some of the same queasiness, the same inability to see what was plain and clear. Marabaldia’s eye was useless now.

Worse was a feeling of numb hopelessness, which Suka knew was part of the spell—it didn’t help to know it. The excited rush of her escape was over. Doubtless the Ffolk wardens three floors below had already succeeded in freeing themselves, and had summoned some terrible power to recapture her. Perhaps all of the events of the past hour had been plotted in advance by Lady Ordalf and her slaves, part of a web of fey deceit more complicated than the future of a single stupid gnome—what had made her think, years ago, when she left her father’s house, that she could ever truly get away?

She heard the rhythmic smash of iron boots back in the antechamber the way they’d come. Marabaldia stood with tears her in eyes, wearing the threadbare blue dress she’d been arrested in so many years before. Her bar sagged down. She was stuck in the same funk. Only the lycanthrope seemed unaffected. She snorted, and struck the floor with her bare foot, carving a line through the dust and plaster rubble, revealing a stripe of old mosaic. Beyond the threshold, the sound had stopped.

They heard a soft, sibilant voice speaking in the Common tongue. “Who is there?”

Suka said nothing, only bowed her head. She recognized the source of her weakness in that voice. Nor was she surprised when the eladrin slipped into the
room, a tall, gray-haired man who was underdressed for any kind of fighting. He wore a soft, embroidered linen shirt open down his chest, moleskin trousers with a tasseled codpiece over his groin, and soft, high leather boots. Instead of a weapon, he carried a pair of leather gloves.

“Bravo,” he said, striking the gloves across his palm. “Your ingenuity must be commended. I am pleased I am not too late to offer my protection. Princess Marabaldia—of course we’ve met. Partly I am here to offer you your freedom, and conduct you back to Umbra in the dignity you deserve. And you,” he said, turning his attention to the lycanthrope. “As soon as my mother told me about you—well, she might have expected I would come. Perhaps that is why she broke her word to the brave captain—this small game she plays, with the removal of the bars.” He nodded at the iron bar in Marabaldia’s hand. “Am I right in thinking she had … accelerated her schedule? I think perhaps she wanted to forestall me.”

He slapped the gloves across his palm, the only sign of anger, Suka thought, that he permitted himself. His voice was low, his face calm, full of the predatory beauty of the leShay. “I will not draw you into our family squabbles. But is it true you’ve seen my aunt, the Lady Amaranth?” He smiled. “It must seem strange to hear me call her that—my mother’s sister. Her half sister, of course. But she is … younger.”

All this, Suka imagined, had to do with the politics of inheritance among kings and queens who lived for
many hundreds of years, and yet whose bloodlines were so meager. Her own problems seemed suddenly tiny, whether she escaped this labyrinth or not, whether she lived or died. She stood with the crossbow in her hands, and yet defeated.

Marabaldia, however, wasn’t ready to give up. “How could you have left me here for all these years?” she cried. “How could you have stolen my love from me? Were you jealous of the one little thing that was truly mine?”

Prince Araithe’s eyes trembled with amusement, though his lips maintained their placid smile. “Oh, my dear,” he said, “never think that. All of this has been a sad misunderstanding, for which my mother is to blame. It was not until seven days ago that I learned where she had kept you. Luckily, all this can be fixed, because we are speaking of a trivial amount of time. A mere tenth of a century. Please believe me, your lover is waiting for you, though at the moment I cannot quite recall his name.”

Suka’s mind was not moving quickly. But even she could tell the prince was lying. More than that, she thought she glimpsed the outline of some larger idea, which would not at this moment come into focus. What was the connection between Lady Amaranth’s story and Marabaldia’s? Was it a coincidence that the fomorian and the lycanthrope had been locked up in the same place? Was it a coincidence that Lady Amaranth had disappeared ten years ago, when Marabaldia had first climbed up from the Underdark into Citadel Umbra?

“I am here to make amends,” continued Prince Araithe. “Please—put down your weapons. My dear, look what I have brought you, an honor guard to escort you back to your own country.” He raised his gloves and half a dozen drow filed into the room. Their swords were drawn.

“And we have brought one of your servants to pull your carriage. And food for you, and a wardrobe of clean clothes. Please, allow me to make amends. You have nothing in common with this … gnome, unless you would like to keep her for your slave. As for this … pig …”

The trouble with eladrin, Suka thought, their weakness, if you wanted to call it that, was their inability to guess the feelings of lesser creatures. She saw Marabaldia stiffen with distrust, and raise her iron bar. But now the source of all the previous noise in the antechamber revealed itself: A cyclops guardsman ducked his head under the doorway and stamped into the room.

He was bareheaded, his single eye shining in the middle of his forehead, a new source of light in the now-crowded room. On seeing the fomorian he sank to his knees and raised his hands. At the same time Marabaldia’s eye, which had been dormant, caught up some of his light and turned it back. Suka could see it pass between them, a beam of golden radiance that might have been partly her imagination. She knew these cyclopses from ancient times had bound themselves to the fomorians in the Feywild and in the Underdark, worshiped them as gods. Now she guessed the reason:
Surely the effect of Marabaldia’s gaze was even stronger in a creature with one eye.

But at the same time she realized that the diffuseness of her thoughts, her inability to do anything here but watch and wonder, was part of the influence of the leShay prince, who was looking right at her, a contemptuous expression on his grotesquely beautiful features—she was earning his low opinion. The drow were ranged behind him, their black armor, black weapons, and black skins glistening as if oiled, their white hair and eyebrows … ah, gods, she felt a sudden pain in her head as if she had been struck with a hammer between her eyes, just at the moment she’d begun to ask herself what these malevolent elves, the source of so much suffering in their own dark lands, were doing here in Caer Corwell, allied with Prince Araithe. She took a step backward. It was obvious to her that the prince’s interest here was the lycanthrope, as he had confessed at first. That’s why he had come. Everything he had said to Marabaldia was a crude and obvious lie, which he imagined she was too innocent to understand. And Suka herself was utterly expendable as far as he was concerned. Why didn’t he give his orders to the drow? They stood like statues made of night, each in a different posture of defense. And why had he allowed the cyclops into the room? If his plan was to dispose of Marabaldia, didn’t he realize that this creature would die rather than allow it? He had sat back on his haunches, his face rapt and worshipful, his single eye gleaming as if lit with inner fire.

The pain in Suka’s head redoubled. Startled, she looked down at her own hands, and saw that she had raised her crossbow and had aimed it at the middle of the fomorian’s back. Her fingers grasped its levers as if their will was different from her own. Then in a moment she understood: She was to kill Marabaldia. And then the cyclops, enraged, was to tear her apart. There was no reason to risk injury to his beautiful dark elves, whom he was likely to consider as superior beings, more nearly on a level with himself. They were there for Poke, the lycanthrope. These other vermin he would leave to exterminate themselves.

Oh, her head hurt. She was astonished that the prince had left her thoughts so clear. His contempt was so profound, he hadn’t even bothered to confuse them. Or perhaps he took special pleasure in demonstrating that it was useless to understand. She stood with her feet braced against the crossbow’s recoil. Behind her, an empty expanse of brick—she knew the gate was there. But she couldn’t find it. Her hand tightened on the lever.