The Fall of Ventaris (16 page)

She stepped into a narrow corridor, and through doorways on either side she caught sight of armories stacked with spears, swords and clubs, and barracks crammed full with bunk beds and chests. Here she saw blackarms in various states of disrobe wandering about, some coming off duty, others catching a nap between shifts. One of them spied her and gestured brusquely. “To the left, Feaster. There’s only one back there, shouldn’t be hard to pick him out.” Duchess nodded and hurried along in that direction.

The passage ended at a small anteroom furnished with two chairs and a rickety table that bore a single lit candle. The anteroom was empty, but the adjacent cell was not.

Unlike the imperial dungeons, deep beneath the palace, the cells in a sheriff’s hold were not designed for long-term imprisonment. They held prisoners only until they could be moved to the dungeons, or else questioned and then released. Pollux, of course, was apparently a special case. She guessed that moving him to the imperial dungeons would be tantamount to admitting his wrongdoing, which no one wanted. And so here he stayed, caught between Takkis’ sense of duty and the empress’ unwillingness to suffer scandal. For all she knew, Violana intended to leave him here until he had the decency to die. Duchess was happy to oblige Her Imperial Majesty.

She peered carefully through the iron bars, squinting in the dim light. She made out the shape of a man, sitting on the floor, legs folded before him. When he did not move she coughed, trying to get his attention. He lifted his head slightly, his face veiled by long stringy hair – she could not make out the color. Even sitting motionless, knees below his chin, but he was clearly a large man. Duchess lifted her basket and smiled hopefully, but Pollux did not respond. Apparently the guard had spoken the truth.

She watched him, wondering how to convince him to eat without talking and proving herself a false feaster. She rustled the basket. Nothing. She reached inside and lifted the tart, holding it up to the light. Still he did not move. Unwilling to turn back now, she sat on the floor, placed the tart on her lap, and proved that she, too, could wait.

His stillness was unnerving, and he seemed impervious to the discomfort of sitting on a cold stone floor. She mirrored him, still and silent, but she worried. If the door guard were to be believed she was not the first feaster to visit, but Pollux still wasn’t eating. Was he truly trying to starve himself, or was he just wary? He was surely aware of the discomfiture his crime had caused, and Jadis had suspected she was merely a cat’s-paw for a more powerful figure. Perhaps Pollux thought the same. Perhaps he was even expecting an attempt on his life, in the form of a charitable cake.

She’d lost track of how much time had passed, but the next thing she knew Pollux was slowly rising. Yes, he was a big man, at least as tall as Antony although not as broad. She got to her feet as well. He stretched and moved towards her, and even unshaven and unwashed, there was pride in his step, and a lithe, fighting grace. He regarded her through the bars, his haggard face unreadable. His hair was brown, she now saw, like his scraggly beard, speckled here and there with gray. His eyes were gray as well, like steel.

“Go away, Feaster. I told your brethren the same.” His voice was a bit rusty but still strong, deep and pleasantly masculine. She made no reply but instead offered the tart once again. He looked at her more closely this time, and she was about to step prudently back when his hand shot out between the bars and seized the front of her cloak. He pulled her roughly forward and she gasped, catching herself just short of a frightened squeak. She mustn’t make a sound that would bring the guards back here...

“Who are you?” he whispered. She tried to jerk away but his grip was like iron. He shook her like dog with a rat with its teeth. “
Who
?”

She could slip out of the cloak, but that would reveal her to the blackarms waiting outside and ruin her plan. She sighed. In life, as in tiles, sometimes you had to lay down a bet and hope it paid off. “A friend,” she replied in a low voice.

He sniffed. “I have no friends.”

“Do you want one?” she asked.

His eyes pierced her. “And what do you offer me,
friend
?”

She considered a moment, smiled, then held out the hand holding the tart. She’d crushed it slightly when he’d grabbed her and the top had cracked open — a gash of red and the smell of cinnamon. “An escape,” she whispered.

His eyes fixed on the pastry, and in that gray gaze she saw resignation. She felt a pang of sympathy. Pollux’s life as a White was over. Even if he escaped his cell no one in the city would give him shelter, and the son he had imperiled himself to care for would be no better off. His honor and his child: he’d sacrificed one for the other, and now it seemed he was destined to lose both.

The man seemed to reach a decision, and in a flash, she was free and the pastry was gone. He downed it in two large bites and an enormous swallow, coughed dryly, then retreated into his corner. “Tell your masters you’ve done your job. Go.”

Without a word she left him to what he thought must be his fate. She hoped that the grace of Mayu, the wit of First Keeper Jadis, and the work of her small hands were enough to prove him wrong, lest the gods make fools of them all.

Chapter Ten: To the dogs

It wasn’t the first time the hunting dog of the gods had come in handy.

The last time she’d taken liberties with Teranon she’d stood on his back to climb out of Baron Eusbius’ art gallery. The stone likeness of the noble beast she now crouched behind was larger than that other hound, but he served just as well. Teranon was not the only statue in the small grassy area behind Savant Terence’s house, nor was he the largest, but he offered the best spot from which to watch unobserved.

She rubbed a face that still stung from the scrubbing it had taken to wash away the clay and ash makeup. She’d returned to her apartment by fourth bell fully intending to rest, but after washing up she found she could not sleep. Although there was nothing left for her to do about Pollux except wait, she tossed and turned for a full three bells before she gave up the idea of napping. Despite her resolve at leaving old ghosts to rest, she’d found herself again thinking of Savant Terence, and if he’d somehow betrayed her father in exchange for a position in court. It shouldn’t matter what had happened so long ago, and yet somehow it did. That was when the idea of visiting his house went from idle musing to full-fledged plan, and she found herself climbing the hill for the second time that day, hoping to slip into Scholars before the gate was closed and the blackarms started asking questions.

She had managed to do so, and spent the next few hours skulking about the district, in this alley or that back yard, and for once she welcomed the arrival of the evening fog, which made hiding easier. It wasn’t as if she were attempting to gain access to Garden, with blackarms and Whites patrolling every inch and where any outsider discovered would be questioned harshly. If she were caught here, she could say she was heading back to the Shallows after some tryst with a scholar.

The house was where she’d been told it would be, nestled just under the district’s eastern wall. Getting into the small enclosed garden had been easy. After climbing the inner walls of Tyford’s “office,” scaling a seven-foot mortared brick wall was child’s play.

Then it was all crouching behind Teranon and waiting.

She had watched carefully the end-of-day activities of the household. The mapmaker himself arrived home not long after Duchess was in place, and by the sounds went straight to dinner. Another figure could be seen moving through the house to the same room – either a servant or his daughter Darley, she supposed. Later, a middle-aged woman in servant’s garb left from the back door. A cook or a maid, she guessed, but not live-in, who would make her way back home to the Shallows and return in the early morning. Duchess was relieved to see her go. Two fewer ears to hear Duchess prying at doors and picking at windows.

“Thiefing isn’t just about hanging from rafters and creeping through the shadows,” Tyford had once told her. “A good thief knows how to
wait
. You wait in the dark for someone to come, or go, or until the coast is clear. You wait and wait, trying not to make a sound or get a damned cramp. If you learn anything from me, girl, you better learn how to wait.” And so she had waited.

To keep herself occupied through the long, slow count of the bells, she went over what she knew of the man on whom she was spying. Savant Terence’s wife had passed away some ten years before, and he did not visit whores, nor drink to excess nor gamble. Except for the fact that he’d been a close companion of the late Marcus Kell, Terence was a poor subject of gossip.
 

His daughter, however, was
far
more interesting. Apparently, Darley had recently been seen in Wharves, in the company of a half-Ulari boy named Finn, a stevedore...or so he appeared. She hadn’t been able to get details, but apparently Finn made a side income from getting the high-born the things they wanted but dared not be associated with. A pairing to conjure with, certainly, although she wondered how Darley was managing to sneak away to see her paramour. The blackarms who guarded the district would be loathe to let an unescorted woman of status pass the gate by herself, at least without sending word to her father. A man of the same age and circumstance would most likely go unquestioned, she thought sourly.

As for Terence, he apparently knew nothing of his daughter’s indiscretions, far too busy as he was with his work atop the hill. He wielded some influence on the imperial council, but Duchess had been unable to learn exactly how much. For all her
fruning
she didn’t understand much of imperial politics. Without knowing more she dared not openly approach the man. However, she’d come up with a plan. Like most scholars her father had faithfully kept a diary, and she thought that perhaps a look amongst Terence’s own would tell her much about his friendship with her father, what had become of the Freehold, and perhaps the current whereabouts of her brother and sister.
 

Duchess waited and watched while the fog receded and lights moved from window to window, but by tenth bell all the windows darkened except for one on the second floor that overlooked the garden. Darley’s bedchamber, she guessed, as young women did not occupy rooms overlooking the street. More time passed, and the sleep that had eluded her that afternoon nagged at her eyelids. To keep awake she mentally compared this house to her father’s city estate. She seemed to remember her own had been larger, with more extensive gardens, but she’d been smaller then, of course. She smiled a little at the thought that she might well be crouching a hundred feet from where she’d once lived.

Last bell had come and gone when a sound from the house snapped her to full alert. She looked up to see the shutters of a darkened third-floor window slowly folding open. A head poked out and turned this way and that, as if scanning the grounds. Duchess hunkered down behind Teranon, although she doubted she was visible in the dark. After a moment, a figure stepped out onto the ledge and began to climb down the ivy-entwined stone wall, moving with an unexpected dexterity. She watched as the shape — a young woman, Duchess now saw — placed her hands and feet with practiced ease. Clearly, this was not the first time she’d made the climb.
 

The woman reached the ground safely and without making too much noise, and Duchess saw she was clad in a dress of black or dark brown with a matching cloak. Before Darley, for it must be she, covered her head with a hood of the same color Duchess made out long hair, but in this light it seemed only black. Instead of moving towards the lane that would take her to the garden gate and then the street, Darley stepped onto the grass, moving directly towards Duchess and her faithful hound.

She felt a jolt of fear, and resisting the impulse to run, pressed herself more deeply into Teranon’s shadow. She was a fully cloaked member of the Grey, gods damn it, not some frightened child to run shrieking from a primped and perfumed scholar’s daughter. If worse came to worst she’d push the girl aside and flee, hoping to outrun the blackarms.

Darley stopped about ten feet away, before the largest statue in the garden: a mail-clad man standing with one foot on his helmet and his hand on the hilt of a sword at his waist. Some military hero or another, although Duchess could not remember his name. The stone image stood fully seven feet tall, mounted on a wide plinth, any inscription long worn away by wind and weather. Darley knelt, and for a moment Duchess wondered if the girl were praying. Then she felt around the base with her hands. Seeming to find what she sought, she laid herself against the plinth and pushed with all her might. The statue slid slowly backwards with a low grate of stone on stone, revealing a dark opening. Darley descended into the darkness, vanishing from sight, and Duchess heard the scrape of shoes on stone steps. A faint light came from the opening, perhaps from a candle or small lantern. Then the statue slid slowly back into place, sealing the passage and leaving the garden once again empty except for Duchess and Teranon.

After a long moment, Duchess rose, knees popping, and warily approached the statue. Darley was no mere scholar’s daughter, that was certain, and Terence no mere scholar. She wondered if the maps Terence made for the empress depicted not only what lay around the city but beneath it as well. Duchess’ own father had told her Rodaas lay atop the remnants of Old Domani, where Jana’s ancestors had dwelt for centuries before their abrupt departure. The great hill was riddled with long-forgotten tunnels and passages, and if rumor was to be believed, even a great necropolis. It would be easy for Darley to slip into her father’s study, peruse his maps and papers, and learn about this secret entrance. Now the mystery of how she escaped Scholars District was solved. Instead of moving
through
a gate, she was moving
under
one. The girl had courage, that was certain. Duchess herself had been beneath the city not long ago, and it was no place to idly wander.