Daughter of Ancients (36 page)

Not for the first time in my life I wished I were taller. My toes clenched inside my boots as I willed them to stay on the narrow ledge while I stretched for the windowsill just above my head.
Come on,
I told myself
. Reach. The ledge is plenty wide enough. You won't fall.
The flagstone terrace seemed very far . . . wickedly far . . . below me. But I was determined to see.

I levered myself upward. When I poked my head around the lead-trimmed glass and peered over the sill, flickering beams of sapphire and violet light dazzled my eyes. My stomach curdled—height-sickness surely—and I closed my eyes and rested my head on the sill, gulping air to fight my nausea.

By the time I could open my eyes again, the colored light had vanished. But fifty guttering candles left murky yellow pools on the tiled floor. The illumination was sufficient to identify the chamber as a lectorium—a sorcerer's workroom. Long tables lined the walls. Alongside rows of jars, flasks, small tins, and boxes lay piles of silver and brass rods, blocks, and sheets. Off to my right, in the corner of the outer wall, stood a massive hearth.

In the center of the room stood another long table. On it lay a dead man. I believed he was a man from the shape and size of his boots, which were pointed toward the window, and I believed he was dead from the way his arm drooped from the side of the table, his flaccid hand sporting three elaborately jeweled rings that glinted dully in the candlelight.

For a moment I debated whether I should try to climb through the window and take a closer look or perhaps raise an alarm. Surely the Lady knew he was dead. Perhaps she'd gone for help, yet no Dar'Nethi would leave a dead man abandoned. Before I could decide what to do, my toe slipped off the ledge.

I clung to the windowsill, scrabbling to find the invisible strip of stone below me. The only visible foothold was the outsloping edge of roof tiles to my right, across an impossibly wide gap of stomach-churning emptiness. Desperate, unable to find the ledge, I stretched my boot toward the roof, wedging myself between the edge of the roof and the opened casement. With a jolt, my boot slipped once more, breaking off a piece of a red clay roof tile and sending it crashing to the terrace below. I hung there breathing heavily.

“Get out of here.”

For a moment I thought the harsh whisper came from the man on the table, but I knew every aspect of death, and there was no possibility that person was anything but dead. Someone else was inside the room, deep in the shadows where the dying candlelight no longer reached. Though he spoke quietly, I knew at once that he, not the man on the table, had been the one arguing with the Lady, the one who had waked me with his cry of anguish that morning.

“Hurry. Go,” he said again.

“Why?” I suppose his whispering convinced me that he had no more authority in the Lady's house than I did.

“You've no business here with your spying.”

“And you? What are you doing here? Nothing good, I'll wager.”

“I am no concern of yours.”

“I can judge that for myself.” I twisted around, pulled up, and hooked my elbows over the sill, my boots relinquishing the slight reassurance of the roof edge in favor of imaginary footholds on the smooth-dressed stone.

“What's happened here? Who are you?” I refused to make any guesses as to the identity of either the dead man or the voice from the shadows.

Just then, I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel paths out in the gardens, and a few shouts. A woman's nasal voice called out, urgently. “. . . something breaking . . . an intruder . . .”

From inside the room, the man whispered again. “Get away from here. Not down. Go over the roof to the southwest corner. Where the roof joins the downslope from the cloistered walk, you'll find a rain gutter. It drains into an overgrown corner where the dustbins are kept.”

His breathing was harsh and unhealthy, and I wondered again if the speaker was really the man on the table after all, but just on the
verge
of death.

“Do you need help?”

“Demonfire, will you just do it? I won't have you—Just go. If you value your life, do as I say.”

Torches flared into life around the corner of the building. Someone shouted that the side gate had been left open. More shouts of warning. I was becoming more interested by the moment in the escape route he described, though truly, I told myself, I had nothing to fear from the Lady. Only embarrassment at prying into her business. Only a reprimand for violating the single strict rule of the hospice. Vasrin's hand, what if my father was dismissed from the hospice or I was forbidden to visit him again?

I glanced downward and swallowed hard. “There's only one problem. . . .”

“What now?”

“Heights. There's no possibility I can get from here to the roof, much less traipse about on it. I'm about to toss my dinner just where I am.”

“You're about to—Earth and sky!”

The shouts were coming closer. I clung to the wall, praying they wouldn't look up. My right boot started to slide slowly down the smooth stone, and my heart slid upward into my throat along with my stomach contents and a choking moan. A well dressed man carrying a torch jogged to a stop far below me. But just as my fingers quivered and slipped, and my knees turned to mush, I experienced a mind-ripping reversal.

All at once every sense screamed at me: my skin was on fire, my ears deafened by a roaring tumult that could have been an avalanche on Mount Siris. My vision went out of focus, and then slammed me with a blinding cascade of images until I thought my eyes would be torn from their sockets. Worst of all, my hands screamed in pain as if the cool stone windowsill had been converted in an instant to molten steel. Their strength ebbed until I knew I must let go and fall to my death.

But these sensations passed more quickly than I could encompass what was happening, and then they were replaced by . . . something else. With a burst of strength I gripped the sill, halting the treacherous sliding of my boots. Then I lowered my feet slowly until they touched the narrow ledge below. I astonished myself with my own facility, flattening my face against the wall, clinging like a spider and creeping along the ledge until I could reach for the roof edge and swing my legs up onto it silently. Unfortunately this action resulted in my face pointing downward, right off the edge of the roof. I suppressed a moan of terror.

But the sight of a second servant conversing with the first and not yet looking upward gave me a motive to retreat and incentive enough to try it, though it was not at all the route I would have chosen with the slightest sober reflection. I slithered backward up the rough clay tiles, gradually rotating until I was pointed up the pitch of the roof. Then I crawled upward, catching the buttons of my tunic on the arced edges of the tiles, cutting my hands on a broken one, holding my face close to the curved tops that stretched before me like a miniature mountain range.

As soon as I was out of sight of the guards, I scrambled to my feet, and, not believing my own temerity, I ran lightly across the roof. I didn't seem to give even a thought to which direction was southwest, but my instincts were right as I found myself in the valley between the pitch of the Lady's roof and that of the cloisters that stretched off toward the main house. I followed the white stone rain gutter, and with no more care than if I had been taking a walk in a garden, I dropped off the low-hanging edge of the roof into the dark, weedy corner where the sickly-sweet smell of rotten fruit and stripped bones told me the dustbins lay. I landed right in the center of them, the only place I could have landed without knocking them over in a servant-attracting din.

I sped out of the wood-fenced enclosure and through the waning night, taking a long way around the gardens until I was sure I was not pursued. Not wanting to wake my father, I huddled in the corner of his garden and waited for the pounding of my heart to subside. Not too long afterward my knees turned to water and my bones to porridge, and I felt sick and weak and wholly unable to explain how I'd done what I'd done. I'd heard of the surge of the blood that makes men and women capable of deeds well beyond the limits of their strength and endurance when faced with great danger to those they love. But I had been in no such extremity of dread, only a cowardly fear of heights and a yearning to avoid the embarrassment of breaking my neck in a place where I had no right to be.

I rolled over and heaved up my well-churned dinner into the well-tended begonias. Somewhere in the midst of this humiliating collapse, I acquired the idea that I had to go to Avonar and tell someone about what I'd seen. But it seemed so ludicrous, I didn't pay it the least attention.

 

When the sun came up, I went in to Papa. He was still sleeping soundly, so I warmed the water in his bedside pitcher and cleaned myself up a bit. The night had been so strange; I was almost surprised to see my own ordinary face in the glass. How could I ever have run across a roof? I got height-sick when I climbed a tree any more. I knew exactly when it was I had lost my ease with heights—on the day I sat quivering in the highest branches of my favorite reading tree, mortally terrified that I would fall from my perch and land in the pool of my mother's blood.

My father slept late. Unable to contain my curiosity long enough to submit my adventures to his sensible review, I wandered into the public rooms of the hospice, watching and listening for any sign of the Lady. Or any alarm about screaming men or dead ones. Or anything. I saw nothing but the usual busy morning of a great household, servants and attendants bustling about, a few residents and a few visitors, all with averted eyes, settling in their accustomed spots in the library or the sitting rooms.

After an hour of drifting about the place, keeping my ears tuned for any interesting word, I started across a small courtyard only to encounter the consiliar Na'Cyd speaking to a tall distinguished woman who stood twisting a kerchief in her fingers. In the ordinary event, I would have turned back to respect their privacy, but on one of her hands the woman wore three rings—elaborately jeweled rings identical to those worn by the dead man in the Lady's chambers. I hurried past them to the doorway on the other side of the courtyard. Once through the door, I stopped and pressed my ear close to the door opening so I could hear what was said.

“. . . only this morning,” the consiliar was saying. “She'll be away for a fortnight or more, but said to tell you that she will certainly join you in Avonar for G'Dano's funeral rites.”

“The Lady was so kind,” said the woman, sobs making her speech breathy and uneven. “Insisting it was not my fault, even though I was the one who hesitated to bring him here. He was so brave in his illness, I thought, perhaps—as Prince Ven'Dar says—we should accept it as a part of his Way. But when he could no longer speak to me—If I had only brought him here a few days earlier.”

“You must have no regrets, mistress. The Way still winds through this gentle place. Even the Lady cannot help everyone who comes to her door. Come, permit me to stay with you as you stand vigil with the good G'Dano.” He took her arm and led her through the cloisters into the house.

All right, so the man on the table had been gravely ill and died before the Lady could help him. That was reasonable enough. A great number of those who came here were on the brink of death. Why had I been so quick to assume foul play? Why had I allowed someone else . . . someone who wouldn't even show his face . . . to convince me to run away like
I
was some sort of criminal? I needed to tell the princess why her lover kept his gloves on all the time.
A fortnight
. . . perhaps I should ask Na'Cyd where the Lady had gone, so I could follow her.

Uneasy and exhausted from my adventures of the sleepless night, I dragged myself back to my father's apartments. It was almost midday. Papa was sitting in his garden absentmindedly dabbing at a bowl of soup with a soggy piece of bread. When I bade him good morning and kissed his thinning hair, he didn't even look up.

“Papa, I need your advice . . .” I told him what had happened. He nodded and made murmuring noises of interest.

“So, what if the man in the room was
him
? What if he was stealing something or doing something awful and he's trying to make
me
look like the thief? If I find the Lady and warn her . . . what if he's there and accuses me?” I stopped pacing and knelt in front of my father. “Papa, what should I do?”

“I'm sorry, dear one, what did you say?” His face was loving and sympathetic, but absolutely uncomprehending. “Will you stay for supper, then? Is something wrong?”

I laid my head on his lap, and he patted my ugly hair. “Of course I'll stay, Papa. Nothing's wrong. I just need to sleep for a while. Then we'll have supper and play sonquey.” Or perhaps we could pull out a pack of lignial cards and explore what vagaries of Dar'Nethi inheritance could explain why a Speaker's daughter could not unravel the simplest puzzle without coming to the conclusion that she was dreadfully worried about a monster she had vowed to expose.

I threw myself on Papa's couch and dropped off instantly, thrust without delay into an incredibly vivid dream. I was frantically trying to climb a mountain of red clay, and had a constant, unshakable sensation that someone was looking over my shoulder, but every time I'd turn to look, no one was there.

Just after sunset I awoke to find Papa dozing by the fire. I emptied the basket of bread from his untouched dinner tray, laid a brightly woven blanket over his knees, and then kissed him and left by way of his garden. Cramming the bread in my mouth, I slipped through the deserted courtyards to the Lady's house. If she was truly gone away, and no one could or would answer my questions, then I had no choice but to seek answers for myself.