XIII
Des felt the presence of the women in the corridor before Pen heard the key in the lock. Swiftly, he huddled himself up on the cot facing the wall, drapery drawn over his head, simulating a prisoner in deep depression at her fate. Rather as Idrene had looked when they’d first come in, come to think.
He trusted he wouldn’t have to attempt a geas. Apart from the challenge of trying to cast it on three subjects at once, the trouble with using a geas on a person—as contrasted with an animal—was that when it wore off, the person remembered.
“Madame Gardiki?” The dedicat’s voice was not unkind. The other two presences seemed bored but watchful. “Your dinner is here.”
Idrene’s voice had been a warm alto. Pen lightened his baritone and shoved his face into his pillow. “Just leave it on the table. I’ll get to it.” And, after a calculatedly reluctant moment, “Thank you.”
Rattling and bustle, as they took the old meal tray and left the new one, refilled the pitcher of drinking water, refreshed the ewer on the washstand, swapped out the chamber pot in the discreet commode chair in the corner. Herded back to the doorway. The dedicat’s voice, tentatively: “Is there anything else you need tonight, Madame?”
Pen shook his head into his pillow.
“Goddess bless,” said the dedicat, and withdrew with her silent outriders.
Oh, She does! thought Pen as the lock clicked over once more. It was the one thing he’d wanted most from this dangerous masquerade: a clear half-day’s start for Idrene and Nikys. The attendants would not return till dawn, barring some random bed-check. Should that occur, Des could rust the lock to slow their entry, and he could . . . well, no. That would trap him on the wrong side of the door. Hiding under the bed was bound to fail, being the first place to search. Cabinets and chests would be as bad, had they existed.
Pen went to the deep window and looked out. In the last level light, a few golden sails hurried toward the harbor of Guza. He wondered if Nikys was aboard one, or if they’d already landed. The specks were much too far away to make out figures aboard.
The window had wooden shutters on this side to close against the drafts. Would parchment or glass be substituted in winter? If not, it would make for a gloomy chamber. The opening was taller than wide. He could not fit in his shoulders square-on, but turning sideways he might slip through easily. Lying along the grainy sill, he put his head out for a survey.
He looked into a wide gulf of air, across the darkening blue strait, and down a dizzying slide of stone to a distant necklace of rocks with the white lace of surf foaming over them. Mountaineer or no, the drop was as appalling as it was awe-inspiring. A thin crinkle might be the lower reaches of the penitential steps. An upper course, hacked into bare rock, still lay sixty feet below his window. He shuddered, and determinedly found another direction to study.
Left and right, he could just make out the apertures of the fourteen other windows cut on this level. No ledges, no handholds to even begin to entice him out. He was secretly relieved. Twisting his neck, he studied the jutting joists and braces of the balconies twenty feet up. A man with a grappling hook and a death wish might make something of that, but he had brought neither.
His escape, when it came, would have to be through the corridor. Somewhere to his left, the precipitous stairway must rise to the level of the buildings and climax at a gate other than the closely guarded, and presently raised, drawbridge. Such a postern was doubtless locked and barred for the night, which was fine from this side even without magic.
That exit would leave him to make his way down all two thousand steps in the moonless night. Never had he been more grateful for Des’s dark vision. At least it seemed unlikely he’d have to crawl over any other climbers on the curves.
Feeling heartened to have a clear plan, he washed his hands, sat, and consumed Madame Gardiki’s dinner. It was a cut above the seminary food in his old student refectory; probably the same as the ladies of the Order were sitting down to eat together somewhere. The portions could have stood to be a little more generous. A search of the room after he’d cleaned his plate turned up only a small bag of almonds, which he methodically cracked and ate by way of dessert.
There would still be too many women abroad in the precincts to venture out yet. He emptied his own clothes out of his sack and gratefully put them on, then used Madame Gardiki’s hairbrush to tidy his still-black hair and tie it into a proper queue. Gathering up her few belongings, he put them in the sack by way of trade. He might have a chance to give them back to her. Her dress he would put back on over his tunic and trousers, to give the proper silhouette to any watchers he might encounter in the darkened halls, later.
That left her shawl. He eyed the window, and thought he might put the wrap to best use by pitching it out to be found on the rocks below. Leaving her gaolers to wonder if they were searching for an escapee, or the body of a suicide carried off by the tide, a theory supported by her still-locked door. That should be good for some splendid misdirection.
Satisfied, Pen drank a couple of glasses of water to assure he wouldn’t oversleep past dawn, then lay down on the cot for a restoring nap.
* * *
Someone was calling him. Ake . . . p . . . ake . . . up . . . wake . . . up!
Des . . . ?
A heavy hand gripped his shoulder, and Pen froze, mentally scrambling to prepare some burst of action. Or magic. Or both.
About time! cried Des.
And then an anxious male voice murmured, “Mother . . . ?”
. . . Oh, said Des. Dear.
It was not a voice Pen recognized. Certainly not Adelis’s. Pen let his snatched-up chaos carefully leak away. Sighed. And said to the wall, “By which I’d guess you must be Ikos Rodoa.”
The figure, a black hulk in the darkness, gasped and recoiled. The faint starlight and sea-light glimmering in from the window barely allowed eyes to distinguish shadow from substance, though Pen thought he might have sensed him by the smell, a long workday’s worth of dried sweat. Des, light.
The colorless clarity of Pen’s night-sight sprang forth, revealing a sturdy man with broad shoulders, Cedonian-dark hair, and rounded features that might be pleasant were they not clenched in dismay. The man whipped a blade from his belt, but did not at once attack, possibly because he could not tell Pen’s head from his tail in the gloom.
Not quite sure what was going to happen when he remedied that, Pen said, “I’m a friend. Don’t cry out,” and allowed the pair of candles on the washstand to flare to life. The sudden yellow glare seemed searing to dark-adapted eyes, and they both blinked and scrunched their lids against it. The wavering knife blade winked flame.
Why did every Cedonian he met start by trying to stab him? Slowly, Pen rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed, holding his hands open and still.
“You’re not my mother!”
Pen suppressed an acerb reply in favor of efficiency. “Madame Gardiki escaped earlier. Your effort is admirable but a bit late.” Wait. The door . . . the door was still locked. The rush of shock at last cleared the sleep fog from his brain, and he added sharply, “How in five gods’ names did you get in here?”
The man pointed mutely at the window.
Pen jerked up and strode to stare out, to be confronted with a confusing mess of cables, pulleys, and a couple of dangling loops that resembled, and may have been, canvas saddle girths. He followed four long ropes upward to where they were apparently hooked to some balcony joists. He didn’t look down again, because that would be too unsettling. “Ah,” he said, a little thickly. “That’s right. You’re the bridgebuilder.” He drew back inside.
“Who in the Bastard’s hell are you?” Ikos demanded.
Or out of it, murmured Des, as intent and perplexed as Pen.
“My name is Penric. I’m . . . helping Nikys rescue her mother.”
The dark eyes flickered at his half-sister’s familiar name, if Pen was guessing this right. “Why?”
The simple answer had worked before, and had the advantage of being true. “I’m courting Nikys.”
“Oh.” Ikos sheathed his knife and raised a large hand to scratch through his mop of short-cut hair. “Time someone did that.” His eyes narrowed. “D’you know what’s going on? I’d stopped in at Mother’s house a few weeks ago. Neighbor said she was arrested, and General Arisaydia blinded in Patos. Why they’d take her if he’d already been blinded made no sense to me, but I followed on and tracked her here. Took me another week to figure how to get her out.”
At his expectant look, Pen said, “Adelis’s sight recovered, and he and Nikys escaped to Orbas.”
“Huh! That’s a miracle. But that explains. Those idiots at Thasalon court have sure made themselves an enemy now.” He nodded shortly.
Pen was rather fascinated by just how fast Ikos connected the political gaps in this complicated tale. But then, he was a Cedonian born and bred.
Ikos frowned around. “Is that water?” He strode to the washstand and drank directly from the pitcher, long gulps, then paused to stare, puzzled, at the candles.
Pen quickly redirected his attention. “When you got Madame Gardiki out”—had he planned to transport her on that terrible contraption, like a timber being raised into place?—“what were you going to do with her?”
“Couldn’t take her home, they’d look there. Eventually. Same problem hiding her in my work crew. I figured to send her to some friends in Trigonie. I built a bridge there two years ago.”
All right, that was reasonable, although there was a bit of a gap between dangling from a balcony on Limnos to surprising some host in the duchy of Trigonie. It didn’t sound much more tenuous than any of Pen’s plans. Each of their schemes, it seemed, were sound in their ways. Until they’d run headlong into each other . . .
And now there was a problem. Two problems.
Ikos evidently felt it, too. Propping his fists on his hips, he looked Pen up and down. “Brother-in-law, eh?”
Pen mentally fitted the term on Ikos in turn, and felt disoriented. “If she’ll have me.”
“Then I suppose she’d be upset with me if I left you here. Mother’d likely have words, too.” He sighed in a very traditional male-put-upon-by-women manner. Possibly not completely sincere. Given the amount of trouble he’d put himself to, unasked, to arrive in this spot.
Pen had one dress between them, and he didn’t think it would fit Ikos, shorter and squarer than Penric anyway. Pen would have to use his dark-sight to guide the two of them through the precincts as quickly and quietly as possible, and take a chance on encounters with the residents. Maybe Ikos would have a clue where the stair-postern lay.
“We had better go out together,” said Pen.
“Aye,” Ikos reluctantly agreed.
Pen started for the door. Ikos started for the window.
They both stopped. “Where’re you going?” asked Ikos. He pointed seaward. “Way out’s that way.”
“You . . . propose to take us both in your, uh, device?” Des actually screeched: He’s not getting me up in that thing! Pen winced.
“Why not? I was going to take my mother. It’s perfectly safe to twice her weight and mine. I tested it.” He rubbed his stubbled jaw. “What’s the matter? Got no head for heights?”
“I do reasonably well at them,” said Pen, while Des gibbered, No, no, no! “But that’s a lot of height out there.” If it was true a dying man saw his life flash before his eyes, Pen thought that fall might give enough time for all thirteen of his and Des’s.
Ikos shrugged. “Way I figure, once a drop is enough to kill you, any more you add makes no difference.”
“A reasonable argument.”
No it’s not, it’s insane!
Pen went to take another look at the contraption, and check the clock of the stars. The two girths, he judged, must be intended as seats like bosun’s chairs. The succession of pulleys was more complex, the logic of their sequencing not immediately obvious to his untrained eyes. It was certainly an ingenious device.
Des radiated something like murderousness at his open intrigue.
Pen raised his glance to the horizon to check for any recognizable constellations, and drew a harsh breath. The stars to the east were melting away into the steel gray of dawn. He turned back to the room. “It’s much later than I’d thought.”
Ikos tilted one hand back and forth. “The stairs were about what I’d calculated, but walking my way across under the balconies took longer than I’d planned. May be faster going back for the practice.” He hesitated. “Slower for the added weight.”
“I think we’d better try my way.”
“Which is what?”
“Sneaking.”
Ikos’s mouth screwed up in misgiving. “How’re you getting out the door?” He paused. “How’d you get in here, for that matter?”
“I’m good with locks.”
“Well, so would I be, if I had my tool belt with me. Left it behind for the weight, though.” His eyes narrowed at Penric. “How do I know there aren’t half-a-dozen guardsmen the other side of that door, waiting for me?”
“There aren’t. Yet. Besides, if this were that sort of trap, better to have them on this side of the door. You’d be trussed like a chicken already.”
A long, thoughtful silence. “I like my way better.”
How was he to persuade Ikos to trust him in three minutes, when three months had not sufficed for his sister Nikys? Pen sucked breath through his teeth. Threw up his hands. “Fine. Your way. So long as it’s now.”
No! cried Des as he crossed the room, wadded up the shawl, and pitched it out, to Ikos’s evident bafflement. He reconsidered his sack. If he was staging a convincing suicide, the personal effects would need to be left in place, right. He grabbed it up and circled the room again, putting things back. Shoved the sack and dress under the mattress. “Right, ready—”
The lock rattled. Pen whipped his head around and rusted it stuck before Des could even voice an objection. “We just ran out of time,” he whispered. “Go.” He held a finger to his lips as thumps sounded on the door.
Ikos oozed sideways through the window. Penric glanced back. On the other side of the door, the sturdier attendant was trying her hand turning the big iron key. Pen ran a hair-thin line of rust through its barrel and grinned as it snapped off in the lock. He was fairly sure the sharp words that resulted, muffled by the door, weren’t ones a lady was supposed to say in the Daughter’s Order. Or anywhere else.
He added an extra burst of corrosion to guarantee the half-key would stay jammed in the face of anything short of a hammer and chisel, drill, and crowbar. Or an ax.
Ikos’s feet kicked and disappeared. Pen eased his torso through, watching the man, one arm wrapped around a rope or vice versa, bend up and thread his legs through the loop of a girth. He wriggled it under his hips, straightened his spine and shoulders, and braced the other arm over the suspending eye and swivel and across his chest. He rotated dizzyingly, snaked his hand around the second suspension rope, and swung the girth toward Pen. “Just like that,” he whispered. “Then hold still and leave the rest to me. You can’t help, and I don’t need interference.”
Des wailed as Pen copied the procedure. The girth closed up tight around his narrow hips as it took his weight. He clamped both arms around the suspending lines, gripping each other.
It wasn’t often that he spoke sharply to his demon, but he did now. Des, we’re committed. Settle down and keep your chaos strictly to yourself until I say otherwise!
A sense of a whimper, and a tight, unhappy ball within him. She would be surly for days, unless he made it up to her somehow. A process she would probably seek to stretch out to the maximum benefit to herself, once she regained her tone of mind. Minds. Apology-gifts to a nonmaterial person took some ingenuity.
Assuming they survived. Well . . . assuming he survived.
I do not wish to end up in an ugly engineer, she whined. Or a dolphin.
I don’t think he’s ugly. Sawed-off and tough-looking, sure. Pen chose not to look down to try to spot dolphins frolicking in the distant waters.
Ikos set about hauling on one pulley-rope after another, in some balanced pattern known only to himself. The swaying jerks of the girth at each yank did unpleasant things to Pen’s stomach. But, slowly and methodically, they began inching upward.
As they passed the window above Madame Gardiki’s room, Pen held his breath, but no awakening dedicats or acolytes tripped over to look through and take in the sunrise. And the man-rise. He could do things to disable their alarm cries like the Xarre mastiffs, but if it seemed an offense to him, it was possible the goddess would think so as well.
At least, Pen consoled himself, he had spared Madame Gardiki this ordeal. Unless she would have enjoyed it. From their few minutes of acquaintance, it was hard to know. She might have liked the part about seeing her elder son hard at work, and cleverly. Pen was pretty sure she wouldn’t have liked his risks.
Pen rotated toward the sea view, watching the thin red line of light start to glow behind the Cedonian mainland, eating up the steel gray. On any other occasion, the return of the sun would be a delight. Pen longed for an eclipse. The new moon was in the wrong place for it, alas.
The vertical progression lurched to a halt just under the balconies, and Ikos commenced a complicated dance with his pulleys of tightening three lines so as to loosen and ease the one in the rear from its joist, unhook and extend it forward, rehook it, and repeat. They moved north in the thinning shadows at an excruciating pace. Ikos, above him, was breathing heavily and sweating. Pen tried to estimate the distance and time left to make the end of the row, racing the advent of the sun like very anxious, very careful slugs.
The gaolers with breakfast would be a good long stretch getting through the door. First would come time wasted trying to extract the broken key, initially seeming an annoyance rather than an emergency, then more in futile attempts to unstick the lock. Some running back and forth to find the tools for the job, and wake the women in charge of them. The hinges had been on the inside, inaccessible, or he’d have rusted them as well. The planks were thick oak, which were going to need that ax. Or a battering ram. Only once they’d broken through could they know their prisoner was missing—or suicided—and set up a cry. The echoes of woodchopping would be Pen’s sign that he and Ikos had very little time left.
A red-gold sliver crested the distant hills, then became a crescent, a ball, and then too bright to look upon. The boundary of blue shadow on the slope below dropped like night’s floodwaters receding. From behind the thick walls of the Order, occasional light voices echoed, too muted to make out words. In some courtyard beyond the blue roofs, a choir of several voices began a hymn, echoing and eerie with the distance. No ax-blows yet.
Ikos, just above Pen, kept grimly working. Penric, reminded of his duties as a divine and otherwise feeling to be inert cargo, began praying. There was nothing in the least rote about his morning’s tally of the gods here, no.
Within Penric, Desdemona moaned. He could feel the chaos roiling within her, a growing pressure like a bad stomach about to heave up. My demon is seasick. The last thing in the world he needed was for her to begin vomiting unshaped disorder into the rigging that suspended them above a plummeting death. Or anywhere else nearby. He stared around like a frantic nurse looking for a bucket.
The most likely thing in sight was a trio of seagulls, rising with the morning breeze and cruising the balconies for scraps. He wondered if the ladies of the Order ever amused themselves throwing tidbits to them to be caught in midair. The pale scavenger birds were shore pests, considered sacred to the Bastard as the only god who would have them. Bastard’s vermin were always allowable sacrifices.
All right, Des, Pen thought in some exasperation. You may have one seagull. Just one.
A burst of gratitude and chaos caught a bird on the wing as it swooped above the balcony under which they were making their transit. With a loud pop, it exploded in a shower of feathers, blood and bones turning to dust as they fell in the white flutter. Pen winced.
That was a lot of chaos. Des must have really been in distress. Feel better now?
The response, had it been aloud, would have approximated the hostile noise one would expect from a friend bent over a ship’s rail who’d just delivered an offering to the sea.
Ikos stared up through the gaps in the boards with a disconcerted expression, but any exclamation was caught by strong teeth biting his lip.
From inside the open door to the balcony, a startled female voice said, “What?”
Another more distant voice called, “Hekat, are you coming?”
“I’ll catch up in a moment. You go on ahead.”
The sound of a door closing. Pen and Ikos both froze as footsteps rapped out onto the balcony boards.
Pen caught sight of the blue tunic and skirt of an acolyte as the woman bent over to pick up a few blown feathers and roll them in her fingers. She looked up. She looked down.
Both men peered back through the board-gaps. Ikos tried a friendly smile. It just made him look like a bandit delighted with the prospect of cutting a throat.
Middle-aged acolyte. How many women named Hekat could there be in this order? Dozens, for all Pen know. She wasn’t an albino. But there might, unless he was fooling himself, be a faint echo of her brother in the fine frame of her face, much the way Ikos’s more robust bones echoed Nikys’s. Pen feared to attempt the delicate seizure of her vocal cords with Des in such disarray. As she opened her mouth to cry out, he was driven to take a different chance.
He tapped his lips twice, looked up into the brown eye he could see, and said clearly, “Surakos.”
Slowly, the mouth closed, though the stare intensified.
Ikos swiveled his head and glared at Pen in complete mystification. Pen held up a hand begging silence.
“What,” she breathed, “has Sura to do with this?” A wave of her hand encompassed the lunatic configuration of tackle and men hanging from her balcony joists.
“It would take about an hour to explain in full.” Which they surely did not have. “But I promise you, when he comes out for your birthday in the autumn, he’ll tell you everything. It should be safe for him to speak by then.”
There. The birthday visit was personal information that no one who did not know Bosha could be privy to. Would it be coin enough to buy her trust?
“Why is it unsafe now?”
At least he had her attention focused on her brother, and not on the intruders’ blasphemy. “Thasalon court politics.”
That eye-scrunch might be a wince. “Oh, gods,” she said, in a voice of loathing. “Not again.”
“He’ll be all right if you say nothing of what you’ve just seen. Except to the Lady of Spring. You can pray to your goddess. She might even speak for us.”
Now the eye grew indignant. “Do you expect me to believe you have some sort of, of holy dispensation for this?”
Pen knew they did, or at least Nikys had, but it seemed unwise to test the gods. Or the acolyte. “I make no claims. Sura can tell all.”
She sat with a thump, fingering her handful of feathers. “He’d better,” she muttered, and Pen knew they were safe. He motioned for Ikos to continue.
Ikos shot him a hot look that suggested Surakos wasn’t the only one who would be interrogated later. But he started working his pulleys and hooks again, and they recommenced their onward lurch.
Acolyte Hekat went to the gap between her balcony and the next—and last, thankfully—and hung her head over to watch their progress. “That’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. What in the world is it in aid of?”
“Right now, removing two men from a place they should not be as expeditiously as possible. With our heartfelt apologies, I assure you.”
“Were you looking at that seagull?”
“What seagull?” Pen produced an innocent blink.
She sucked breath through her teeth and gave him a gimlet glower reminding him of how the Jurald Court cook used to successfully squeeze confessions out of him about the missing pastries. Followed by a cuff to his ear and, usually, another pastry to eat on his exit. “Is Sura going to explain that, too?”
“If I get another opportunity to see him, I’ll make sure he can,” Pen promised.
When they swayed out of her view, she was still sitting cross-legged rolling the feathers in her hand.
Pen discovered Ikos’s plan for descending from the balcony end to the stairs when they arrived, and it was even more horrifying than he would have guessed. It consisted of Ikos lengthening Pen’s suspension rope and setting him in motion like a pendulum, swinging some twenty or more feet over to where the rising steps curved out of sight to their pilgrim-gate. “It’s perfectly safe,” the bridgebuilder asserted in a whisper. “Just don’t get out of your girth till you’ve found your feet. If you slip before then, we just try again.”
Pen managed his landing on the third attempt. Desdemona, crying, insisted she wanted another seagull, but he held her off.
There followed a heart-stopping interlude watching Ikos twist himself around under the balcony, fiddle with ropes, and loosen all four hooks of his evil contraption. Pen had to detach his girth and clip its doubled line to a mysterious eye-bolt in the rock face, which held it taut for Ikos as he slid down with his machine in tow. An unclipping and undoing, a rapid winding-up of rope around the engineer’s arm, and the loosed end cleared its joist and fell, leaving nothing at all in its wake. Ikos somehow drew the eyebolt anchor out of its socket in three pieces, leaving only an anonymous square hole. Pen couldn’t quite see if there were any other such holes pocking the rockface.
Then another maddening delay while Ikos sat down and carefully wound and folded it all into a tight, heavy bundle, no trailing ends. Pen supposed it was how he’d packed the thing up here. In the dark, all last night. Pen really wanted to take it away from him and just heave it into the sea, but Ruchia, managing to get her one-twelfth voice heard through the general cacophony that was the upset Des, agreed it would be better to leave no evidences at all. As Ikos had already concluded, apparently.
Ikos made a final survey of the balconies, then frowned aside at Penric. “Wordy bastard, aren’t you?”
In so many ways. “It’s my stock-in-trade.”
“I’ll be wanting to hear more about that, later.”
“I hope you’ll get a chance.”
Pen reflected on all that the weary Ikos had done, starting last night at dusk. And for weeks beforehand, it seemed. All that patient labor, and no pleased mother to show for it at the end after all. He regarded the start of the two thousand steps, and murmured, “Would you like me to carry that pack?”
Ikos huffed, thick eyebrows rising in surprise at him. “Aye.”
Two pilgrims on the steps. It would be no unusual thing to see (and mock, probably) and their details would be indistinguishable from a distance. Pen felt very penitential indeed as he hoisted the contraption, which turned out to weigh about thirty pounds mostly in coiled rope, on his back. As he started down in front of Ikos, he could finally hear the faint crunch of ax-blows leaking from one far window.
A last look up before the rising stone eclipsed her found Acolyte Hekat still leaning on her railing, looking down studying them. He made the tally of the gods broadly over his chest at her, tapping his lips twice by way of farewell.
She touched her fingers to her forehead in return salute, and Pen thought her brother might not be the only member of her family with a strong ironic streak.