WindDeceiver (39 page)

“But there are many here,” Sabrina assured her. “Rachel is here.”

“And his lady,” Meggie agreed, thinking of Catherine McGregor.

“I don’t feel that sensation now that we are inside, do you, Mistress Ruck?” Sabrina asked.

Meggie lifted her head and seemed to sniff the air. She shook her head. “No. Whatever it was, it’s stopped.”

“Well, we aren’t going to find Conar just standing here,” Chase said. He glanced around.

“Where do we start, Meg?”

“Are your crystals safe?” Meggie asked. At the men’s nod, she pursed her lips. “Check and be sure, will ya?”

Chase rummaged in his robe and pulled out the rawhide purse which held the cluster of crystals she’d given him. He hefted it in his hand. “Shall I tie the string of it to my manhood, Meg, just to be on the safe side?”

“I’ll shove that pouch up your tight little ass if you don’t stop mouthing off to me, Montyne!” Meggie snapped. “So there won’t be need for me to be worrying that you’ve lost it and some fool has captured your reckless self!”

Montyne blinked. Not only at her crudeness but at the vehemence with which she had spat it at him. He staggered as the old woman jabbed him in the chest with a sharp finger. He grunted with the pain of it.

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“Put that pouch back in your robes and secure it, boy! That’s your passport to freedom and don’t you be forgetting it!”

“As well as Conar’s,” Sabrina said quietly.

Stuffing the little pouch back inside the lining of his robe, Chase stood there, chastened and contrite. He didn’t dare look at Kharis for fear Meg would think he was being condescending again.

“Now, listen up, the two of you,” Meggie growled. “This is what I want you to do while Sabrina and I go looking for the other women--“

Meghan’s hands stilled on the needlework she was doing and lifted her head slowly. Her fading eyes narrowed and her aged ears cocked sharply. She listened for a moment, the needle half-way through the fabric on which she’d been working. Absently, she pushed the needle on through, unaware that her hands were finishing what her mind was not cognizant of doing. She pulled the thread up and her hand stilled once more. Yes, she thought, laying her sewing in her well-padded lap and listening more closely to the winds blowing about Abbadon Fortress, there had been a definite shift in the Veil.

“Grandmother?” one of the young sewing girls inquired, seeing the elderly lady just staring off into space. “Is something wrong?”

Meghan turned her head toward the girl. “No, Deanna,” she said and smiled, her toothless grin relieved. Something is right for a change.”

Miriam and Celene, who were working at the loom, paused and looked at the old woman.

Both women had been feeling odd all morning and now that it was middle ways the afternoon, neither of them had been able to concentrate on even the simplest of tasks for with every passing minute, they had felt that strange nudging that had been occupying their thoughts all day.

Meghan’s wrinkled face puckered as she sought to gather in more of the sensation that had touched her. She had already acknowledged the presence of two new Daughters into the fortress, as well as their Sentinels, but there was something else, something, or someone, calling out in a voice begging for help.

“What is it, Mother?” Miriam asked the old woman.

Meghan held up her hand, demanding silence. Once, about half an hour before, she thought she had sensed a calling, but when she’d listened hard to hear it, it had suddenly faded and she had felt a great sadness loom out of the Veil. The sadness had come to her and she had known whose thoughts were stumbling blindly about the cosmos and she had sighed with regret. Now, it was not just his sadness she was feeling.

Meghan laid her sewing on the table beside her. “He’s in the catacombs and he’s lost.”

“In the catacombs?” Miriam asked. “Why would he be there?” She reached out and took her daughter’s arm. “I thought you told me he was not scheduled to be taken from his cell today.”

Celene stared at her mother. “They said there would be no games until his hands were healed.”

Miriam’s mouth tightened. “They lied.” She put aside the wool in her hand and stood up.

“Can you fathom why he is in the catacombs, Mother?”

Meghan turned her head slightly to one side and probed the Wind. “He is trying to keep thoughts of death away from him.” She squinted. “He wants to summon one of us to him and knows if he thinks of the deaths this morning--“ The old woman’s eyes filled with tears and she looked up. “Three more of his men were killed today.”

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“One of us should go to him,” Celene said, getting up from the loom. “He knows me. I believe he trusts me.”

Meghan nodded emphatically. “Go,” she ordered in a rush of worried breath. “See to him, but watch yourself, Daughter.”

Miriam glanced about at the curious eyes of the other women. She sensed their excitement and willingness and she went to her mother and knelt down. Taking Meghan’s hands in hers, she looked up into the fading eyes. “We are not alone, are we, Mother?” she asked.

Meghan shook her head. “No. Others have come to help us.” She looked away from her daughter’s eager face. “It has begun.”

Celene held the torch high as she stepped carefully down the narrow stones cut into the cavern wall. Ahead of her, there was pitch blackness, cold and pervading darkness that leapt back begrudgingly as the light from her flare advanced. Her silk slippers were damp from the moisture on the rough stone and her teeth were chattering more fiercely together with each step down into the vastness of the catacombs she took. Cursing her lack of thought at not bringing along a cape, or at the very least a shawl, she stepped down from the last stone riser and looked about her.

The walls of the cavern were slick-looking, moisture dripping visibly down the rockface in some places and showing incandescent trails where it had once fell in others. There was a noxious odor coming from the stone and, upon close examination, Celene found a strange growth of dusky mold lined along cracks and crevices in the stone. The smell tickled the hairs in her nose and made her sneeze, the sound echoing out from her like ripples in a pond.

Conar’s head snapped up as the faint sound came to him. He was far away from the source of that vague noise and although he didn’t understand why, it didn’t alarm him. Coming slowly to his feet, he searched the darkness, squinting to see, but no light reached him. He moved along the wall, feeling his way, easing his feet forward, not knowing what might lie before him and remembering all too well his experiences in the cavern beneath the Monastery of the Wind. He didn’t want a repeat of those painful events.

Celene studied the sand at her feet and could see no fresh-looking footprints that would suggest the Outlander had been this way. The indentions in the sand looked ancient and she wondered when the last time was that a human had passed this way. Squiggles and curving lines told her there were underground creatures lurking about, but she had never been one to worry about such things and she didn’t want to start doing so then. Thrusting the squirmy, slithering, crawling concerns from her mind, she took the closest pathway among the catacombs, trying not to look at the stacked skeletons that had been shoved against one another inside small niches in the wall.

He stumbled against something that gave way beneath his hand as he reached out to break his fall. His arm went into some declivity in the rockface and he felt sticks of some sort: smooth and thin. They rattled as he drew his arm back. Something dropped down on the back of his hand and scuttled over his knuckles, scampered between his third and fourth fingers. He yanked his hand back with a cut-off yelp of disgust, shaking it to rid himself of the feeling of those tiny legs on his flesh.

Celene stopped. She turned and listened. There had been a small cry, a sound that had reached her ears. Lifting the torch, she quickly looked away from the pile of bones that had tumbled down from their resting place and were lumped together at the base of one wall. She hurried on, toward the sound of that cry.

Conar wrinkled his nose, bothered by the faint stench of something odorous wafting in the still air. He stretched his hand along the wall, stopped when his fingertips dipped into a jagged WINDDECEIVER Charlotte Boyett-Compo 183

hole in the wall. Feeling along it, he frowned in the darkness as he tried to think what these irregular openings could be. He was afraid to put his hand inside one for fear something else would light on him. Instead, he traced the circumference of the hole with his hand and was even more puzzled by its size. Moving on, he encountered more openings in the wall and grew more and more concerned.

The smell here was worse for there were fresh bodies jammed into one section of the rockface. Celene knew these were the men executed the day the Outlander had been brought into Abbadon. She lifted a section of her robe and held it to her nose to blot out the putrid stench of decay, gagging as she happened to glimpse bloated faces and staring, sightless eyes among one group of corpses.

She realized she was getting close to the end of the newest part of the catacombs and would soon be in the vast cavern beyond. Such knowledge pleased her immensely for she was acutely uncomfortable among the dead of Abbadon Fortress.

He stopped, narrowing his gaze as a flare of light off to his left caught his attention. He stepped back, pressing himself against the wall, shifting over when he felt another of the openings behind his back. The light played just a few feet away, dripping among the craggy rocks and he was able to discern some of the terrain around him. As the light grew in intensity as it came toward him, Conar McGregor’s vision sharpened, focused, and he found himself staring across at a wall dotted with three foot wide holes dug into the stone.

“Catacombs,” he whispered, pushing away from the wall against which he had been leaning. His eyes flared and he fell back, screaming, jamming his hands out in front of him to keep away the horrors that were only inches from his bare chest. He slammed into the far wall and slid down it, gaping at what he had found.

Celene shrieked with terror as that piercing scream rent the air. She nearly dropped her torch at the sound for it had come from just ahead of her. Trembling, more afraid for the Outlander than for herself, realizing it had been his ungodly scream she had heard, she moved forward, the torch nearly touching the low stone ceiling.

She found him kneeling on the floor, his arms wrapped around his shivering body. He was mumbling, his lips moving but no intelligible sound coming out. He was staring at the far wall, his attention riveted there, and he was not even aware that he was no longer alone. Even as she went to him, reaching out to touch him, he did not shrink away from her nor did he acknowledge her presence in any way. His entire focus was on the wall before him and when she turned to see what it was he was looking at it, Celene heard him whispering.

“Look what they’ve done,” he said. His voice was brittle, ragged. He rocked back on his heels and lifted one trembling hand. “Look.”

She didn’t want to look.

And she didn’t want him to, either.

“Milord,” she said in a soft, calm voice. “You must come with me.” She put her arm around his waist.

“Why?” he asked, cocking his head to one side and Celene knew he was not asking the reason she wanted him to accompany her.

“Men do evil things sometimes, milord,” she answered him, feeling him quivering beneath her touch. She drew him toward her, not surprised when he leaned against her.

“Did I do this?” he asked, his voice small like a child’s and just as bewildered.

“No, milord Conar. You did not.” She jabbed the end of her torch down into the sand and put her arms around him. “You surely did not.”

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Conar McGregor seemed to collapse in her arms and he bent forward, laying his head in her lap, his face buried in his hands. She smoothed his hair, listening for the sobs she thought he would make, but all she heard was his labored breathing as though he were striving hard to keep his composure.

He slid his fingers from his eyes and stared once more at the atrocity stacked against the wall. Common sense told him the bodies would not be shoved into the niches ranged about the cavern until they were stiff and easy to handle, easy to manipulate into the gaping holes of the catacombs. He shuddered violently.

“We must go, milord,” Celene said, listening to distant sounds that warned her someone was coming. “You can’t stay here.”

He stared at faces, bloated and rigid in death, that he had known all his life. Faces he had loved. Faces that had smiled and laughed and looked back at him when admonishment when he had done something supremely arrogant and stupid. Faces that had been as dear to him as the air he breathed. Faces that, even in death, were as beloved as they ever were.

“They did not blame me,” he said, lowering his hands as his gaze took him to Tyne Brell’s dull eyes. “They never did. No matter what I’d done, they never blamed me.”

Celene took her arms from around him and picked up her torch. “Milord, someone is coming. We must go.”

“How am I going to explain this to Teal?” he asked as he looked at Roget.

“Milord!” she hissed, finally breaking through to him. He sat up, hearing those distant sounds now. His face hardened and he reached out to grip her hand. “Celene, go,” he ordered.

“Go and bring me back a sword.”

“A sword?” she gasped. “Milord, no! You must come with me. Once they take you back into custody, the games will begin again!”

Conar turned his head to one side. “The games?”