Maledicte (45 page)

Within him, Ani whispered, let Me make it better, let Me make them all suffer. Give yourself to Me.

No, Maledicte thought, pushing away from a wall, taking the corner too fast, his boots skidding on the polished wood. He saw another stairwell and raced for it. Janus had a plan; Maledicte had to trust him. There was no alternative. It was only their old game, made more risky. Miranda had done the running before, dashed away with stolen goods, or the weapons to be hidden. She had always been able to outrun the blame, and Janus—had always been able to deny it.

This was more of the same, all part of the plan.
Janus’s plan,
Maledicte thought, savagely.
Not mine.
His breath tore in his chest, his heart hammered; he grabbed the railing of the stairs, saw more guards coming up them, just two, roughly woken and still addled with sleep. He shrieked and dove forward. The first man took the blade in the face and collapsed instantly, blood bubbling through the wreck of his nose. Maledicte tumbled down the stairs on top of the other, using the man’s body to cushion his own bones against the risers’ edges.

Panting, Maledicte slit the man’s throat when he started, clumsily, to fight back at the base of the stairs.

If he could only get outside the palace, the night itself would hide him; the clouds of rooks would shelter him, as safe as any babe—In the disused dining room, Maledicte leaned against the wall and retched, wiped his bloody blade clean on the shrouded table.

Trust in Me, Ani whispered, coaxing, gentle, as compelling as Her first words to Miranda had been. Huddled beneath the altar, the salt burning her eyes, her skin, her scraped flesh, and Ani asking, What wrong has been done to you, little one? Tell Me what you want….

Now Her words were gentle again, the strident, bloody harridan only a nightmare image in his heart. Why trust Janus? Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve been, you’ve done for him. And is he the man you thought him to be? Hasn’t he lied to you? Can you trust him? There’s only Me to protect you, now.

Maledicte sucked in his breath, quieting its wheeze, ignoring Ani as best he could. They had lost him, albeit briefly. Best to make the most of it. Curtains draped the far wall, and Maledicte, hoping for windows, yanked them back. Painted gardens, sunlit, even in the dark of night. Maledicte laughed wildly; he hated this court, the overwhelming falsity of it all, where not even the architecture could be relied upon to be honest.

Footsteps sounded outside the doors. He ran for the servants’ entrance, yanked the door open at the expense of its hinges, and dashed into the dark corridor beyond, the door listing in the jamb, a clear pointer to his direction.

Darkness and shadows and enclosed walls struck both Maledicte and Ani nerveless—the specter of Stones again. If he were caught—to spend the last moments of his life in a cell—Maledicte ran blindly down the hall, toward a faint spark of light growing in the distance. A maid with a lantern crept out of a room to see what was happening. She opened her mouth to shriek, but Maledicte pounced, snatched the lantern, and pushed her into the center of the hall. Gasping for breath, shocked, she sprawled across the smoothed floorboards, watching as he retreated. Maledicte grinned. Let her lie there in a stupor; let the damn guards trip over her, and buy him a few precious moments.

He wanted more stairs, more windows, some hint of where he was. Why had Janus never given him a map of the palace when he had known it must come to this?

Maledicte shivered, though his skin was hot with sweat, and the lantern’s heat burned his left hand. He had no answer for himself. He was bent on escape, and thinking was for later.

His feet pounded along the hall; the servants’ passageway, though narrow enough to prevent the guards from surrounding him, was stripped of carpeting, and his steps echoed like pistol shots. They could track him by that alone, and he had no idea which of the doors held more stairs, winding their ways, mazelike, through the palace. There had been stairs in the dining room, but he had fled mindlessly past them, and the pursuing guards, their cries audible now, made doubling back impossible. The dining room would have needed to be connected to the kitchens, and the kitchens always opened out to the world. Maledicte pushed open the next door, slid through it, and shut the door again.

A woman repairing sheets looked up at him, the needle held in her mouth, the thread dangling. It dropped and Maledicte lunged at her. “Not a word.” He blew out the lantern, slid himself under the sheltering drape of the sheet she was sewing, pressed the sword tip up against her belly. “Not a word,” he said again, his voice rough with fear. Had he been in court, he would have done his best to disguise that weakness, but here his desperation could only insure her obedience.

The door swung open and guards spilled in like a piled mass of hunting dogs.

“What do you want?” she said, her voice shrill, going shriller as Maledicte leaned his weight on the blade. A thin line slid down the blade, as thin as her linen thread, but dark, and forming a slow droplet at the end. Maledicte caught the drop on his fingertips, lest somehow the guards hear that small act of violence over their searching. They yanked open all the connecting doors, threw the loose piles of sheets around the room, until the seamstress cowered, bending her face near to her waist. Maledicte could see her features, distorted by fear, through her pale linens.

The guards left, slamming the door again, and Maledicte slid away from her. “Please,” she said. “Please.”

Maledicte knew killing her would buy him time, prevent her from shrieking that he’d turned rabbit and bolted back the way he’d come, but her blood was already streaking his blade; the sight of it made his stomach churn. A fine time to lose the taste for it, he thought bitterly, but Ani only laughed.

If you won’t come to Me, why should I help you? She asked.

Maledicte put his hand over the seamstress’s mouth, put the blade to her throat; the woman paled, her tongue licked out nervously to touch dry lips.

Maledicte pulled away, the blade no more bloodied than before, and ran. He had reached the dining room again when he heard the muffled violence of her screaming.

Fool, Ani said within him. Betrayed fool. Lose yourself in Me and I will aid you. He clattered down the stairs, burst into the kitchen, and found it overfull of guards, watching the exits.

Maledicte turned and fled back upward, aware of the upstairs contingent approaching. “Help me,” he whispered.

Yes, Ani said, Go always upward, and the rooks will aid you. He kicked the stair doors shut in the guard’s face as the first man reached it, and he kept going up, past the landing to the servants’ quarters, past the point where the stairs were kept in good condition, and became friable, bowed with time. He stumbled, but kept going, secure in the knowledge that these stairs were blind. There were no doorways to open up at his side, disgorging guards or Particulars. No maidservants to trip over, just a straight shot to the sky.

An explosion snapped through the air in the hall; the plaster near his face puffed into dust, and Maledicte spat. Pistols.

He turned and cursed them for cowards. The Particular drew another pistol and fired again, then screamed as the pistol exploded in his hand. Ani’s doing, or pure luck. It didn’t seem to matter. The stairs came to an abrupt end, spilling him out into a jumbled attic.

Upward. In the shadowed ceiling, the door to the rooftop was hinted at by a darker patch, a square with a telltale latch. He climbed the pile of aristocratic refuse and forced the latch back, even as the guards swarmed in and spread out, creating a net of flesh and swords.

Maledicte levered himself up and through, and found himself on the flat roof of the palace, the night air cool and crisp in his face, and the sky alive with wings. Within him, Ani spread Her wings, stroking his fears back.

He laughed, stood over the trapdoor, and took the head of the first guardsman to climb through, pushing the body back down onto his colleagues. Maledicte kicked the head through as an afterthought and dropped the trapdoor closed.

There was nothing there to hold it closed; the latch was on the other side, but the very fact that only one man could come through at a time acted like a weight on the guards below. Maledicte left the trapdoor, ran to the edge of the roof, and looked down. Dizzyingly far, the ground seemed as unattainable as the sky as a means of escape. He leaned over the edge, testing the wall for scalability. In this part of the castle, it was old stone, not soft mortar and jutting brick. More, Ani showed no inclination to grant him preternatural skills again, and only a fool tried to descend a sheer stone wall.

Beneath his feet, the muttering panic of the guards went quiet and orderly; one voice cracked out above them all. Echo, taking charge. At least there was that at the end.

He watched the trapdoor lift, disgorging Echo, who rose like a stage demon, flung aloft by his guards, pistol in one hand, sword in the other, and a length of chain mesh guarding his throat.

Maledicte danced toward him as Echo leveled the pistol, eyes narrowing. The puff of smoke, the ricochet of sound struck Maledicte a moment after the lead did. He stumbled, but the ball had only penetrated his leg; Ani chased it out, healing its intrusive heat, absorbing the hurt. Maledicte reached out with his sword and took the pistol from Echo’s hand, flung it off the roof.

“I’m glad you came,” Maledicte said. “This wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

“I’ll see you dead,” Echo said. Behind him, the guards started to join them, and Maledicte pivoted, kicked the first one in the throat, and sent him backward. Echo’s blade whistled in the sky, coming for his chest, and the air was suddenly full of rooks. Echo flailed his sword, trying to clear them from his face, the stabbing beaks, the snatching claws, and Maledicte screamed, “He’s mine.”

The space between them cleared, the rooks pulling away into the sky like a windspout, flowing upward and then falling back toward them, circling them. “All your tricks won’t help you, now. Aris will see you hanged,” Echo said, closing.

Maledicte took the blow on his blade, skidded under the man’s weight, and stepped aside at the last, forcing Echo off his blade. Maledicte thrust, aiming for Echo’s exposed side, but the man pivoted and parried.

Maledicte stepped back, trying to keep an eye on both Echo and the door to the attic. Echo was not any of the fools that Maledicte had dueled previously, buoyed by tradition and stupidity; should Maledicte be struck from behind by a guard, Echo would finish him from the front without hesitation.

Maledicte jumped the low thrust Echo aimed in an attempt to hamstring him, and swept the blade outward, pushing him back. The trapdoor started to rise, and Maledicte leaped on it, his sudden weight forcing the guards back. But only for a moment. They shoved upward; Maledicte felt the wood shift beneath his feet, saw Echo’s blade coming for him, and tumbled forward, going head over heels away from the strike.

He knelt, heart pounding, blood singing in his ears, listening to Echo’s approach. Not an honorable fool, Maledicte thought, not loath to strike down a fallen man, but a fool nonetheless. Maledicte dropped from his knees to his thigh, rolling and turning. Echo leaned inward just as Maledicte pushed the blade up into his chest. He worked the blade through, then worked it free, letting Echo fall as the guards gained the roof.

Suddenly leaderless, they hesitated. Echo bled out before them; the rooks swirled, filling the air with their cries and feathers, and Maledicte levered himself to his feet, panting through bared teeth. They spread out loosely, but none approached.

Maledicte leaned back against the parapet, looking over them all. What now, he wondered. Fly, Ani urged him. Fly.

“I cannot,” he said, not caring that he spoke aloud. The guards flinched and one, braver than the rest, stepped forward. Maledicte shifted his grip on his sword, and said, “Don’t do that. Your colleagues aren’t going to support you and I’ll kill you. We’ll wait.”

The trapdoor rose again, and Maledicte found a smile at the pale gilt hair, at the blue eyes. “Janus,” he said. Now the game could continue—Janus’s plan unfurl.

“Sir,” the guard said. “Be careful. He killed Lord Echo.”

“And so you are all waiting for someone else to stop him. How brave of you all,” Janus said, his tone caustic. “Had you all rushed him, this would be done with by now.”

Maledicte felt his heart jerk and flutter, as if wings were beating in it. It was an act, he knew it was, but it felt—

He’s betrayed you, Ani crowed. You know he has. Thrown you over for ambition and a golden throne. Give your future to me. I’ll bring their city down on them all.

Janus would not turn on him—Maledicte clung to that certainty as he had clung to the wall earlier. Janus loved him more than the world itself.

Janus took a sword from the nearest guard and paced forward, his face set, as white as the marble busts that lined the king’s hall.

It was not the sword, or the implacability of his face that seeded doubt into Maledicte’s heart, but the clammy remembrance that Janus had waited for Maledicte to arrive before striking the child. That he had plotted to use the gods, and one so mad as that might dare anything. More still, the simple fact that Janus had had his wound dressed and his shirt exchanged for a fresh one. While Maledicte ran, Janus had been dressing for this moment.

“Ani,” Maledicte called out to the sky, his voice a croaking plea, his pain choking him. “Ani.”

The sensation burst over his skin like a thousand needles stabbing; his hands shook, and the sword fell with a clatter on the stone. He could smell it, the rough scent of new feathers springing out, cloaking his skin, letting Ani free. Beneath his feet, the palace twitched, like an animal waking, like a horse shaking off a bothersome fly, like wings unfurling.

The guards rocked on their feet, their eyes wild. Two of the Particulars fled for the stairwell and disappeared into it.

“No,” Janus said, stepping forward, his sword hand moving.

“Sir, the king wants him for a trial,” a guard called.