The Born Queen (20 page)

All fanes have a limit. All fanes have a demand. They take and they give. If I don’t finish this in time, the voices will make me one of them. My body will starve. I’ll never see Aspar or Winna or Zemlé again.

He pushed himself up, trying to keep his panic down as the susurrus slowly waxed.

I finish, then. I finish.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Z
O
B
USO
B
RATO

T
HE GUARDS
took Cazio down several halls and through the kitchens, where red-faced women in tan aprons and white head scarves labored about a hearth big enough to walk into without ducking. He wondered briefly if they meant to cook him or at least threaten to, but they pushed him on through the kitchen just as the scent of boiled beef and green vinegar sauce began to waken him to how very hungry he was.

He glanced at a large knife on a cutting table, still red from butchering. If he could get his hands on that—

The guard behind him jabbed him with his sword.

“No,” he said. “Don’t think about it. They want you alive, but they didn’t say anything about hamstringing you.”

Cazio half turned. “There are six of you, and you’re still scared of me. Come on. Let me have the knife and you can keep your swords. I’ll show the ladies what a man really is. If they ever knew, you fellows have made them forget, I’m sure.”

He raised his voice a bit more. “What about it, ladies? Would you care to see a little sport?”

“I would at that,” one of the women replied. Her face was a little wrinkled, but in the right places.

“Shut that, you,” another of the guards said.

“Why?” the woman asked. “What will you do?”

“You’d best not find out.”

“Threatening women,” Cazio said. “Very, very brave.”

“Listen, you Vito scum—”

“Don’t be stupid,” a third guard said. “He’s just trying to goad you. Just keep your head and mind your orders. This is a simple job. Do it.”

“Right,” the fellow just behind Cazio said, and gave him another push.

“Sorry, ladies, another time,” Cazio said.

“Promises, always promises,” one of the women shot back as he was forced out of the kitchen and into a cellar, where once more his mouth watered as they moved among amphorae of olive oil, kegs of grain and rock sugar, sausages and hams hanging from the rafters.

“All right,” Cazio said. “Lock me in here, then.”

“Not quite,” the big fellow behind him said. “Dunmrogh doesn’t have a proper dungeon, but this will do. Stop.”

They were standing in front of a large circular iron plate set in the floor. It had a handhold cut in it, which one of the guards used to lift it up, revealing a dark hole a little less then a pareci wide. Another of the guards then uncoiled a rope and tossed one end into the pit.

“Now be good and climb on down,” the fellow said.

“Just let me take a few sausages with me.”

“I don’t think so. And don’t imagine the women from the kitchen will help you. We’ll be chaining the lid down. I don’t reckon any of them are lock picks.”

Cazio already had noticed the six heavy iron eyes protruding from the stone around the trapdoor.

Not seeing any alternative, Cazio took the rope and let himself down into the darkness.

He went slowly, trying to use the light while he had it to see what he was being held in. That didn’t take long. The shaft was narrow enough that he could touch opposite walls by stretching out his arms—if he could do that without falling. More interesting were the hundreds of stoneware niches set into the sides of the shaft.

“I hope you left me some wine,” he called up.

“Weren’t any when we got here,” the guard called down. “Worse the luck.”

The rope suddenly went slack, and Cazio was falling. He yelped, but before he could do much else, his boots struck stone. His feet stung and his knees buckled a bit, but otherwise he was fine.

The shaft opened into a dome-shaped chamber about ten paces wide, the entire surface of which was riddled with the bottle-sized niches. He turned, trying to scan every inch of it before they took his light, but he didn’t see any way out or any wine.

Why would someone have such a nice cellar and no wine?

The iron lid slammed down, clanging so loudly in the small space that it hurt his ears, and he was in utter darkness. After a moment he heard chains dragging and settling and then nothing.

He stood there for a moment, then sighed and dropped down to sit cross-legged, trying to sort out his options.

The shaft was too high for him to reach, but with some effort he probably could use the wine niches to climb up the dome and get purchase enough to scale it and reach the trapdoor. But what then? He could wait there, hoping to surprise whoever came next, but how long would he have to wait? And would they really be surprised? Only if they were idiots.

Still, he marked that down as a possibility and moved on.

But there wasn’t much to move on to. He felt his way around the chamber in the vague hope of finding some hidden exit and rapped on the floor searching for evidence of a hollow but found no sign of either. He hadn’t really thought he would.

He searched the niches again, one at a time, on the chance that something useful had been left in one: a bottle of wine, a knife, anything to use as a weapon. Again he found nothing, and an attempt to break one of the ceramic niches to get an edge only hurt first his hand and then his foot.

His stomach was starting to complain, and he hurt all over. With an acquiescent sigh he made himself as comfortable as he could on the floor. Maybe something would present itself tomorrow.

He awoke from a dream of another wine cellar visited under happier circumstances, unsure whether he had been asleep for an hour or a day. He was distantly aware that something had wakened him but couldn’t recall what it was.

He sat up and was wondering whether it was worth his while to stand when he heard a muffled thump.

His first thought was that the trapdoor was being opened, but then the thump repeated itself, and he felt the floor vibrate. His nose itched, and he suddenly found himself sneezing. The air was full of dust.

The sound seemed to be coming from the wall, so he went to it and placed his hands against it. This time, when the impact came, he felt it through the clay and made out a thin shattering sound.

The next was louder still, and the one after that was suddenly sharp and unmuffled, as if he had been underwater listening and suddenly had surfaced. He felt air move against his face and smelled sour wine.

Whatever it was hit again, and he felt clay shards pepper him. He shifted to put himself beside the rapidly growing hole.

Suddenly light came pouring through, so bright that at first he thought it must be the sun, until a lantern poked through the hole and he realized it was just his light-starved eyes playing tricks on him.

“Cazio?”

Oddly, for the first heartbeat he didn’t recognize the voice, although in the entire world it was the one most familiar to him.

“Z’Acatto?”

A grizzled face pushed through the opening behind the lantern.

“You’re an idiot,” the old man said.

“How—”

“Just get through here,” the swordmaster snapped. “With your luck, they’re on their way to get you now.”

“Right,” Cazio said. He got down on his hands and knees and pushed the rubble aside until he could crawl through.

What he entered was another underground chamber, and from what he could see of it in the light of z’Acatto’s lantern, it was really enormous. A sledgehammer leaning against the wall testified to the method the older man had used to rescue him, and to make matters even odder, on this side of the wall there was a door frame that had been withed and plastered over.

“So there
was
a secret exit,” he murmured as he stood.

“Sealed up a long time ago.”

Cazio studied his mentor for an instant, then threw his arms around him. He smelled of wine and many days of sweat, and for a moment Cazio thought he was going to cry. He felt z’Acatto stiffen, then soften and return the embrace, albeit tentatively.

“I should have known,” Cazio said.

“All right, enough of that,” z’Acatto said. “We don’t have time to go all weepy. Here, take this.”

He handed Cazio Acredo.

“Where did you get that?”

“Some soldiers were fooling around with it and left it in the hall near the kitchen. It wasn’t Caspator, but I figured it was probably yours.”

“Thanks,” Cazio said. Then he smiled. “You stayed.”

Z’Acatto’s brows collapsed in a frown. “Not on your account,” he said, wagging his finger. “I told you I was going back to Vitellio, and that’s still my plan.”

“You must be healed by now. You could have left months ago. Or has the Church been here this whole time?”

Z’Acatto’s eyes lit up with familiar mischief. “No, they only arrived a nineday ago. I found another reason to stay. Do you know who
built
this place?”

“I don’t know. The Dunmroghs?”

“The Dunmroghs? They’re the last crows to land here. This castle was built two hundred years ago. Back then the land was carved up into petty kingdoms by the knights of Anterstatai. Does that give you a clue?”

“Should it?” Cazio said. “The only thing I remember about the knights of Anterstatai—oh, no. You’ve got to be joking.”

Z’Acatto’s smile broadened. “Douco Cherfi daz’Avrii.”

Cazio took another look at the room they stood in and realized that all of the wine smell did not come from his old teacher. He was in another cellar, much vaster than the first.

“Impossible.”

“Come along,” z’Acatto said. “We’ll want to be far away when they find you missing.”

“You weren’t looking for me at all,” Cazio accused.

“Not until yesterday, no. But I have to eat, and the kitchen women told me you were imprisoned in the empty cellar.”

“Thank the saints for your sotted obsessions.”

“Yes,” z’Acatto acknowledged as he led Cazio through the vast storeroom. “I was down here when the Fratrex Prismo and his men arrived, so they didn’t catch me. I don’t think they even know about me.”

“They haven’t searched here?” he asked.

“They don’t know about this place, either,” z’Acatto said. “The douco sealed it off before he left.”

“Why?”

“To keep his wine safe, I imagine. He left the small cellar as a decoy. I’m sure he expected to come back.”

“Then how did you find it?”

Z’Acatto turned on him fiercely, hand on his heart. “I
knew
it had to be here. The douco was the greatest collector of wine in the world. He would never have been without a real cellar.” He waved around at the thousands of bottles.

“Aging for a hundred years. Of course most of it is vinegar now, but some is still potable. Enough for me to survive on for several months, at any rate.”

Cazio nodded. He had been noticing the piles of opened bottles that littered the floor.

“How many of the douco’s reputed cellars have we broken into now?” Cazio asked. “I remember the one in Taurillo when I was sixteen and that one in the house of the Meddisso of Istimma.”

“And the one in Ferria,” z’Acatto said. “But those were all different. They had all been in use. This one is pristine, and the barbarians living here never thought to look for it. Did you know even the small cellar they had you in was empty? Even before the Church arrived. Nothing they drink here improves with age, so why bother?”

They had reached a small, arched passage, but Cazio stopped in his tracks, incredulous.

“Are you saying you found it? Zo Buso Brato?”

Z’Acatto chuckled. “Four bottles,” he said. “And one from the year of the May frost.”

“Saints. I can’t believe—how was it?”

He frowned. “Well, I haven’t tasted it yet.”

“What? Why not?”

“Not the right time,” the swordsman replied. “Come on.”

“But where is it?”

“Safe.” He ducked into the passage. “Keep quiet in here. This passes near places where we might be heard.”

Cazio still had plenty of questions, but he kept them in.

The passage soon entered a larger and very smelly one littered with trash and filth and prowled by rats. A faint susurrus echoed within it.

Z’Acatto shuttered the lantern, and for a moment they seemed to be in pitch darkness. But after a moment, Cazio began picking out a little light coming from a narrow grate above them.

Z’Acatto, apparently waiting for his own vision to adjust, started off again. As they passed under the grate, the general buzz sharpened into the sound of a pair of women talking, but they weren’t speaking the king’s tongue or Vitellian, so he couldn’t make any sense of it. One of them sounded like the bold kitchen woman.

They passed under a few other grates, and then they traveled in darkness until z’Acatto reopened the lantern.

“We’re not under the castle anymore,” he explained.

“This leads out?”

“The douco liked escape routes. That’s how we got into the one in Taurillo, remember? And that’s how I found this one.”

Not much later, they emerged through a trapdoor onto a wooded hillside. Below, a wide river flowed lazily by.

“Here we are.”

Z’Acatto held up a leather bag. Inside were four bottles carefully wrapped in many layers of linen.

“We’ll drink these when we get back home,” he said.

“That sounds good,” Cazio sighed. He meant it. To be sitting in the sun of the Piato da Fiussa drinking rare wine with z’Acatto, no worries about men who couldn’t be killed with swords or what was really going on in Anne’s mind or murder dressed up in fine clothes. Some cheese, some pears, a girl who wasn’t a queen or handmaid to a queen—

Austra.

Anne was supposed to be sending her to Dunmrogh. How long before she got here? Was she here already?

“I thought you would come around,” z’Acatto said. “There’s another bag down there with some drinkable but unexceptional wine; food, too. If you’ll get that—”

“I can’t go back,” Cazio interrupted. “Not yet. There are a few things I have to do yet. And I’m going to need your help.”

Z’Acatto shook his head. “I told you, I’m going back.”

“I’m not asking you to get involved in this war of Anne’s,” he said. “But Austra is in trouble, and I need to warn Anne about the Fratrex Prismo. After that—”

“Hespero,” the swordmaster muttered.