Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Category: Science
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He put off his courtier’s garb and put on the robe and vest-cloak the wool merchant had died in, just for luck. Boots, shoes, barefoot? Which would be more secure, upon the slippery stones and slates? Barefoot, he decided. But he slipped on his shoes for one last, practical expedition.
“Betriz?” he whispered loudly through the door of his office antechamber. “Lady Betriz? I know it’s late—can you come out to me?”
She was still fully dressed for the day, still pale and exhausted. She let him grip her hands, and leaned her forehead briefly against his chest. The warm scent of her hair took him back for a dizzy instant to his second day in Valenda, standing by her in the Temple crowd. The only thing unchanged from that happy hour was her loyalty.
“How does the Royesse?” Cazaril asked her.
She looked up, in the dim candlelight. “She prays unceasingly to the Daughter. She has not eaten or drunk since yesterday. I don’t know where the gods are, nor why they have abandoned us.”
“I couldn’t kill Dondo today. I couldn’t get near him.”
“I’d guessed as much. Or we would have heard something.”
“I have one more thing to try. If it doesn’t work…I’ll return in the morning, and we’ll see what we can do with your knife. But I just wanted you to know…if I don’t come back in the morning, I’m all right. And not to worry about me, or look for me.”
“You’re not abandoning us?” Her hands spasmed around his.
“No, never.”
She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s all right. Take care of Iselle. Don’t trust the Chancellor dy Jironal, ever.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“There’s more. My friend Palli, the March dy Palliar, knows the true story of how I was betrayed after Gotorget. How I came to be enemies with Dondo…won’t matter, but Iselle should know, his elder brother deliberately struck me from the list of men to be ransomed, to betray me to the galleys and my death. There’s no doubt. I saw the list, in his own hand, which I knew well from his military orders.”
She hissed through clenched teeth. “Can nothing be done?”
“I doubt it. If it could be proved, some half the lords of Chalion would likely refuse to ride under his banner thereafter. Maybe it would be enough to topple him. Or not. It’s a quarrel Iselle can store up in her quiver; someday she may be able to fire it.” He stared down at her face, turned up to his, ivory and coral and deep, deep ebony eyes, huge in the dim light. Awkwardly, he bent and kissed her.
Her breath stopped, then she laughed in startlement and put her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. Your beard scratches.”
“I…forgive me. Palli would make you a most honorable husband, if you’re inclined to him. He’s very true. As true as you. Tell him I said so.”
“Cazaril, what are you—”
Nan dy Vrit called from the Royesse’s chambers, “Betriz? Come here, please?”
He must part with everything now, even regret. He kissed her hands, and fled.
THE NIGHT SCRAMBLE OVER THE ROOF OF THE ZANGRE, from main block to Fonsa’s Tower, was every bit as stomach-churning as Cazaril had anticipated. It was still raining. The moon shone fitfully behind the clouds, but its gloomy radiance didn’t help much. The footing was either gritty or breath-catchingly slippery under his naked soles, and numbingly cold. The worst part was the final little jump across about six feet to the top of the round tower. Fortunately, the leap was angled down and not up, and he didn’t end a simple suicide, wasted, spattered on the cobbles far below.
Bag jerking in his hand, breath whistling past his cold lips, he half squatted, trembling, after the jump, leaning into a bank of roof slates slick with rain beneath his hands. He pictured one working loose, shattering on the stones below, drawing the guards’ attention upward… Slowly, he worked his way around until the dark gap of the open roof yawned beside him. He sat on the edge, and felt with his feet. He could touch no solid surface. He waited for a little moonlight; was that a floor, down there? Or a bit of rail? A crow muttered, in the dark.
He spent the next ten minutes, teetering, hands shaking, trying to light the candle stub from his pocket, by feel, with flint and tinder in his lap. He burned himself, but won a little flame at last.
It was a rail, and a bit of crude flooring. Someone had built up heavy timbering inside the tower after the fire, to work on some reinforcement of the stones so they didn’t fall down on people’s heads, presumably. Cazaril held his breath and dropped to a solid, if small and splintery, platform. He wedged his candle stub in a gap between two boards and lit another from it, got out his bread and Betriz’s razor-edged dirk, and stared around. Catch a crow. Right. It had sounded so simple, back in his bedchamber. He couldn’t even see the crows in these flickering shadows.
A flap by his head, as a crow landed on the railing, nearly stopped his heart. Shivering, he held out a bit of bread. It snatched the fragment from his hand and flew off again. Cazaril cursed, then drew some deep breaths and organized himself. Bread. Knife. Candles. Wriggling cloth bag. Man on his knees. Serenity in his heart? Hardly.
Help me. Help me. Help me.
The crow, or its twin brother, returned. “Caz, Caz!” it cried, not very loudly. But the sound echoed down the tower and back up, weirdly resonant.
“Right,” huffed Cazaril. “Right.”
He wrestled the rat from its bag, laid the knife against its throat, and whispered, “Run to your lord with my prayer.” Sharp and quick, he let its lifeblood out; the warm dark liquid ran over his hand. He laid the little corpse down at his knee.
He held out his arm to his crow; it hopped aboard, and bent to lap the rat blood from his hand. Its black tongue, darting out, startled him so much that he flinched, and nearly lost the bird again. He folded its body under his arm, and kissed it on the head. “Forgive me. My need is great. Maybe the Bastard will feed you the bread of the gods, and you can ride on His shoulder, when you reach Him. Fly to your lord with my prayer.” A quick twist broke the crow’s neck. It fluttered briefly, quivering, then went still in his hands. He laid it down in front of his other knee.
“Lord Bastard, god of justice when justice fails, of balance, of all things out of season, of my need. For dy Sanda. For Iselle. For all who love her—Lady Betriz, Royina Ista, the old Provincara. For the mess on my back. For truth against lies. Receive my prayer.” He had no idea if those were the right words, or if there were any right words. His breath was coming short; maybe he was crying. Surely he was crying. He found himself bending over the dead animals. A terrible pain was starting in his belly, cramping, burning in his gut. Oh. He hadn’t known this was going to hurt…
Anyway, it’s a better death than from a flight of Brajaran crossbow bolts in my ass on the galley, for no reason.
Politely, he remembered to say, “For your blessings, too, we thank you, god of the unseason,” just like in his bedside prayers as a boy.
Help me, help me, help me.
Oh.
The candle flames guttered and died. The dark world darkened further, and went out.
Cazaril’s eyes pulled open against the glue that rimmed their lids. He stared up without comprehension at a ragged gray rift in the sky, framed in black. He licked crusted lips, and swallowed. He lay on his back on hard boards—the bracing frame inside Fonsa’s Tower. Recollection of the night came rushing back to him.
I live.
Therefore, I have failed.
His right hand, reaching blindly about him, encountered an inert little mound of cold feathers, and recoiled. He lay panting in remembered terror. A cramp gnawed his gut, a dull ache. He was shivering, damp, chilled through, as cold as any corpse. But not a corpse. He breathed. And so, likewise, must Dondo dy Jironal, on…was this his wedding morning?
As his eyes slowly adjusted, he saw he was not alone. Lined up along the crude rail that bounded the workmen’s platform, a dozen or more crows perched in the shadows, utterly silent, nea
rly still. They all seemed to be staring down at him.
Cazaril touched his face, but no wounds bled there—no bird had tried an experimental peck yet. “No,” he whispered shakily. “I am not your breakfast. I’m sorry.” One rustled its wings uneasily, but none of them flapped away at the sound of his voice. Even when he sat up, they shifted about but did not take to the air.
All was not drowned blackness since the night before—fragments of a dream coursed through his memory. He had dreamed that he was Dondo dy Jironal, roistering with his friends and their whores in some torchlit and candle-gilded hall, the board gleaming with silver goblets, his thick hands glittering with rings. He had toasted the blood-sacrifice of Iselle’s maidenhood with obscene jests, and drunk deeply…then he’d been taken with a cough, a scratching in his throat that needled rapidly to pain. His throat had swelled, closing shut, choking him, cutting off his air, as if he were being strangled from the inside out. The flushed faces of his companions had whirled about him, their laughter and derision turning to panic as it was forced upon them by his purpling livid features that he was not clowning. Cries, wine cups knocked over, shocked fearful hisses of Poison! No last words squeezed through that inward-strangled throat, past that thickening tongue. Just silent convulsions, laboring heart racing, viselike pain in the chest and head, black clouds shot with red boiling up in his darkening vision…
It was only a dream. If I live, so does he.
Cazaril lay back down upon the hard boards, curled around his bellyache, for half the turning of a glass, exhausted, despairing. The row of crows kept watch over him in unnerving silence. It gradually came to him that he would have to go back. And he hadn’t planned a return route.
He might climb down the bracing frames…but that would leave him standing in the bottom of a bricked-up tower atop a years-long accumulation of guano and detritus, crying to be let out. Could anyone even hear him through the thick stone? Would they take his muffled voice for an echo of the crows’ caws, or the howling of a ghost?
Up, then? Back the way he’d come in?
He stood at last, pulling himself up by the rail—even now, the crows did not fly away—and stretched his cramped and aching muscles. He had to physically shove a couple of crows from the railing to clear a place to stand; they flapped off indignantly, but still with that uncanny silence. He rucked up the brown gown, tucked hem in belt. When he balanced on the rail, it was a short reach to the tower’s rim. He grasped, heaved. His arms were strong, and his body was lean. One hideous moment of consciousness of the air below his bare kicking legs, and he was up over the stones and out onto the slates. The fog was so thick, he could barely see down into the courtyard below. Dawn, or just after dawn, he guessed; the lesser denizens of the castle would already be awake, this tag-end-of-autumn morning. The crows followed him solemnly, flapping up one by one through the gap in the roof to find perches on stone or slate. Their heads turned to track his progress.
He had a vision of them, mobbing him to spoil his next leap from the tower up to the main block, revenging their comrade. And then another vision, as his feet scrambled and his arms shook, of letting go, letting it all go, and falling to his welcome death on the stones below. A wrenching cramp coiled in his gut, driving out his breath in a gasp.
He would have let go then, except for the sudden terror that he might survive the fall, leg-smashed and crippled. Only that drove him up over the eaves to the slates of the main block’s roof. His muscles cracked as he lifted himself. His hands were scraped raw by their frantic gripping.
He was not sure, in this paling fog, which of the dozen dormer windows erupting out of the slates he’d emerged from last night. Suppose someone had come along and closed and locked it, since? He inched slowly along, trying each one. The crows followed, stalking along the gutters, flapping up in brief hops, their clawed feet slipping on the slates, too, at times. The mist beaded, glistening, on their feathers, and in his beard and hair, silver sequins on his black vest-cloak. The fourth casement window swung open to his scrabbling fingers. It was the unused lumber room. He slid through, and slammed it upon his black-liveried escort just in time to stop a couple of the birds from flying in after him. One bounced off the glass with a thud.
He crept down the stairs to his floor without encountering any early servants, stumbled into his chamber, and closed the door behind him. Tight-bladdered and cramping, he used his chamber pot; his bowels voided frightening blood clots. His hands trembled as he washed them in his basin. When he went to fling the bloodied wash water out into the ravine, the opening window dislodged two silent, sentinel crows from the stone sill. He closed it tight again and locked the latch.
He weaved to his bed like a man drunk on his feet, fell into it, and wrapped his coverlet around himself. As his shivering continued, he could hear the sounds of the castle’s servants carrying water or linens or pots, feet plodding up stairs and down corridors, an occasional low-voiced call or order.
Was Iselle being waked now, on the floor above, to be washed and attired, bound in ropes of pearls, chained in jewels, for her dreadful appointment with Dondo? Had she even slept? Or wept all night, prayed to gods gone deaf? He should go up, to offer what comfort he could. Had Betriz found another knife? I cannot bear to face them. He curled tighter and shut his eyes in agony.
He was still lying in bed, gasping in breaths perilously close to sobs, when booted steps sounded in the corridor, and his door banged open. Chancellor dy Jironal’s voice snarled, “I know it’s him. It has to be him!”
The steps stalked across his floorboards, and his coverlet was snatched from him. He rolled over and stared up in surprise at dy Jironal’s steel-bearded, panting face glaring down at him in astonishment.
“You’re alive!” cried dy Jironal. His voice was indignant.
Half a dozen courtiers, a couple of whom Cazaril recognized as Dondo’s bravos, crowded dy Jironal’s shoulder to gape at him. They had their hands upon their swords, as if prepared to correct this mistaken animation of Cazaril’s at dy Jironal’s word. Roya Orico, clad in a nightgown, a shabby old cloak clutched about his neck by his fat fingers, stood at the back of the mob. Orico looked…strange. Cazaril blinked, and rubbed his eyes. A kind of aura surrounded the roya, not of light, but of darkness. Cazaril could see him perfectly clearly, so he could not call it a cloud or a fog, for it obscured nothing. And yet it was there, moving as the man moved, like a trailing garment.
Dy Jironal bit his lip, his eyes boring into Cazaril’s face. “If not you—who, then? It has to be someone…it has to be someone close to…that girl! The foul little murderess!” He spun around and stormed out, curtly motioning his men to follow him.
“What’s afoot?” Cazaril demanded of Orico, who had turned to waddle after them.
Orico looked back over his shoulder, and spread his hands in a wide, bewildered shrug. “Wedding’s off. Dondo dy Jironal was murdered around midnight last night—by death magic.”
Cazaril’s mouth opened; nothing came out but a weak, “Oh.” He sank back, dazed, as Orico shuffled out after his chancellor.
I don’t understand.
If Dondo is slain, and yet I live…I cannot have been granted a death miracle. And yet Dondo is slain. How?
How else but that someone had beaten Cazaril to the deed?
Belatedly, his wits caught up with dy Jironal’s.
Betriz?
No, oh no…!
He surged out of bed, fell heavily to the floor, scrambled to his feet, and staggered after the crowd of enraged and baffled courtiers.
He arrived at his invaded office antechamber to hear dy Jironal bellowing, “Then bring her out, that I may see!” to a disheveled and frightened-looking Nan dy Vrit, who nevertheless blocked the doorway to the inner rooms with her body as though ready to defend a drawbridge. Cazaril nearly fainted with relief when Betriz, frowning fiercely, came up behind Nan’s shoulder. Nan was in her nightdress, but Betriz, rumpled and weary-looking, was still wearing the same g
reen wool gown she’d had on last night. Had she slept? But she lives, she lives!
“Why do you make this uncouth roaring here, my lord?” Betriz demanded coldly. “It is unseemly and untimely.”
Dy Jironal’s lips parted in his beard; he was clearly taken aback. After a moment, his teeth snapped closed. “Where is the royesse, then? I must see the royesse.”
“She is sleeping a little, for the first time in days. I’ll not have her disturbed. She’ll have to exchange dreams for nightmare soon enough.” Betriz’s nostrils flared with open hostility.
Dy Jironal’s back straightened; his breath hissed in. “Wake her? Can you wake her?”
Dear gods. Might Iselle have…? But before this new panic closed down Cazaril’s throat, Iselle herself appeared, pushed between her ladies, and walked coolly forward into the antechamber to face dy Jironal.
“I do not sleep. What do you want, my lord?” Her eyes passed over her brother Orico, hovering at the edge of the mob, and dismissed him with contempt, returning to dy Jironal. Her brows tensed in wariness. No question but that she understood whose power forced her to her unwelcome wedding.
Dy Jironal stared from woman to woman, all indisputably alive before him. He wheeled around and stared again at Cazaril, who was blinking at Iselle. Aura flared around her, too, just like Orico, but hers was more disturbed, a churning of deep darkness and luminous pale blue, like the aurora he’d once seen in the far southern night sky.
“Whoever,” grated dy Jironal. “Wherever. I’ll find the filthy coward’s corpse if I have to search all of Chalion.”
“And then what?” inquired Orico, rubbing his unshaven jowls. “Hang it?” He returned a raised-brow look of irony for dy Jironal’s driven glare; dy Jironal whirled and stamped back out. Cazaril stepped aside to let the entourage pass, his gaze flicking covertly from Orico to Iselle, comparing the two…hallucinations? No one else here pulsed like that. Maybe I’m sick. Maybe I’m mad.