The Margarets (43 page)

The Gardener had asked me to accompany Sophia to the city of Bray, as otherwise the heiress would be without friends or confidantes. It became obvious that more than mere friendship was needed as soon as we arrived at Stentor d’Lorn’s mansion. Even though workmen had been sent ahead, we knew it would take both of us to deal with the mess.

Battalions of men and women with shovels and buckets and washtubs were still laboring to erase what a few decades of leaking roofs and inattention had allowed to accumulate. The carpets, which had been thickly strewn with Cantardene charbic powder to keep them safe from vermin, were rolled against corridor walls. These had to be taken out of doors on a day the wind blew toward the sea and there well beaten before anyone could breathe in the same room with them. Many of the furnishings were simply falling apart. The walls were mapped with continents of mildew crossed by wandering tributaries of cracks. While the entire planet of Chottem was still relatively primitive so far as plumbing and sanitation went, the mansion had been built before even that low standard had been achieved.

Sophia and I took up residency in a small house at the back of the property that had been occupied by a
watchman’s family, a place to which we could retreat from the stench of sewers, the reek of paint, and the chatter of hammers.

There were also interruptions. Von Goldereau d’Lornschilde dropped by frequently, usually to be told we were not home. We heard it rumored that he had challenged Sophia’s identity, on the grounds that Stentor’s granddaughter should be older than Sophia appeared to be. Hearing of this, Sophia summoned an attorney and sent him to Von Goldereau with a message saying that friends of the Siblinghood were granted the favor of youth, as indeed, we were, and members of the Siblinghood would be glad to testify for us. She and I had aged mostly on the Gardener’s time.

A day or two after we arrived, a strange old man came with a bunch of keys, which he said Stentor d’Lorn had put in his keeping with instructions they were to be given to his granddaughter and none other.

“There’s a man been looking high and low for these,” the old man said. “Name’s Von Goldereau d’Lornschilde.”

“He didn’t know you had them?” I asked him.

“No. He looked among the mighty, never thought to look among us, the little folk.”

“Why did d’Lorn leave them with you?” I asked.

“Oh, I owed him a favor, ma’am. He took my son, Fessol, his name is, when he was only six years old. Stentor d’Lorn took a liking to him and sent him to another world to be educated and made into a fine gentleman. Told me if I’d keep these keys until his granddaughter came to reclaim them, she’d see I got to go there, see my boy, how wonderful a life he has.”

I shivered when I heard this, for no reason except that such an act of charity was out of character for the man who had brooked no opposition from anyone during his life, and who had killed his son-in-law out of hand—as was well known in Bray. Sophia, however, took the keys without comment, asking only for the oldster’s name and where he might be found, that she might properly reward him when she learned where his grandson had gone.

A goodly number of cooks and butlers and other assorted functionaries were hired and let go again before the heiress had assembled a staff that could, in her opinion, acquit itself well in opening the house to guests.

“Anytime soon?” I asked in dismay.

“Not soon, no,” said Sophia almost fretfully. “I want to be an influence for good on this world, and this house…it works against me! I’m not comfortable in it.”

No more was I. Shadows swallowed the corners; sounds chittered along the ceilings; a foul smell which was not sewers came and went at intervals. The place displayed luxury without comfort, ostentation without art. I hated it. Each day saw the arrival of people paying calls, not only people from Bray but from all the cities up and down the shore. Some of them, who hinted to Sophia’s butler that they had handled her grandfather’s business (wink, nod, wink), she declined to speak with personally, leaving it to the servants to put them off with evasion or hauteur or whatever worked best.

Sophia learned of a man in Bray who located people, and she hired him to find any still living who had served the house in Stentor’s time. When they were ferreted out, she spoke with them, giving them generous gifts in return for information. From one of the former gatekeepers, she learned where Benjamin Finesilver’s bones had been hidden. She sent for them to be moved into the tomb of the d’Lornschildes, directly above the tomb that held Stentor himself, but she planned no vengeance on those who had followed her grandfather’s orders. We had both learned from the Gardener that old vengeance is like old cake: still seeming sweet, but so dry that one invariably chokes on it.

Some days, I simply had to get away from the place, and since there was always marketing to do, I took the basket and strolled down into the town to spend a few hours among the sellers of eggs, fruit, vegetables, fish—many of them things I had eaten in Swylet—and in the little alleys where stilt walkers and fire-eaters, fortune-tellers, magicians and jugglers amused the populace. One I most enjoyed was a Trajian, long-armed and long-legged, with a furred little body and a face like a sloth, a visual cross, I thought, between that animal, a teddy bear, and a monkey. He always finished his act by putting out a little table and two chairs, then seating a doll in one of the chairs, a doll dressed as a crowned king. The Trajian juggled the table, the chairs, the king, who promptly came apart in the air, arms, legs, body, head, crown, all seven parts spinning off in different directions, only to be skillfully gathered on the fly and reassembled. Each
time I saw the performer, he looked directly at me and smiled. This confused me a little. Trajians, so the Gardener had told me, kept themselves at a distance from people of other races, for they were a people many times unjustly accused of everything from laying misfortune to the spread of dread diseases.

Knowing this for the nonsense it was, I smiled at him in return, and dropped a coin in his bowl each time I went. On the fourth or fifth such occasion, I turned from leaving my gift to confront a bulky man in the livery of Von Goldereau’s house, obviously drunken and belligerent. “Yul bring bad down on us,” he growled, laying his hand on my shoulder, to push me back. “Y’ve no right smilin’ at the likes of that!”

“Oh, sir,” cried the Trajian. “She was only being amused at the juggling…”

“And y’filth, y’ve no right speakin’ to me at all,” said the ruffian, flinging out one huge arm that caught the juggler across the face.

I heard his neck snap. I felt the juggler die. Everything became very still and very hot. “You,” someone cried in a great voice that echoed down the street as though a cataract had shouted in a stony canyon, the reverberations continuing as in a monstrous bell. “You have brought down bad fortune upon yourself and your house. You will leave no child; you will gain no profit; you will taste no food. From this moment, your body will shrink into nothingness, for I, the Healer, take life from you to restore what you have unjustly taken!”

And I laid my hands upon him. For one instant he looked surprised, then horrified. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell, gurgling, his face turning white. The crowd drew away from me as I knelt beside the juggler, putting my hands on him. I felt the life flow into him, the life I had taken from that other. I felt the bone knit. I felt the heart beat beneath my hands, like that of a bird.

He opened his eyes. He said, “You look so like her, so like sweet Queen Wilvia…” And then he fell into sleep. He had healed completely; I knew it to be so.

A female of his kind, dressed like a princess, came from the wagon with several other of her kind. “I am the wife for whom Yarov, Juggler to the Queen of the Ghoss, paid a great price,” she said. I knew it was the way of Trajian women to introduce themselves so. I nodded
respectfully to her, and her people picked the juggler up and took him away.

Only when I felt the pain in my throat did I realize that great voice had been my own. When I went through the marketplace on my way home, people stood aside and lowered their heads. One or two, I touched, for they were in pain, and the anger that had moved me was still strong enough in me to heal them. The Gardener had told me of this, this avenging fury, but I had not known I could feel it. I was not sure I ever wanted to feel it again, though I knew I would not be able to withstand it.

Gradually, the workmen at the mansion accomplished their tasks. Outbuildings filled up with leftover lumber, tools, ladders, and paint. One old stable held enough powdered charbic from Cantardene to mothproof ten mansions. In time each problem was solved, each bit of wreckage was removed or repaired, each group of workmen was paid and went away. The place became orderly, clean, and quiet, and for the first time, I thought we might have time to reflect upon why Sophia had returned to Bray, what we would do about the mansion, and what she might accomplish here. Sophia, however, had a remaining concern that she mentioned to me over breakfast:

“I’ve been considering this discomfort we feel. You know, we haven’t even looked in the cellars.”

I shuddered, thinking first of the effusive old man who had brought the keys. The cellars could not be in any better condition than the rest of the house and might be worse. Sophia ignored my shudder and went to get the keys, which were heavy and unnecessarily intricate. Or so we thought until we had penetrated past the second door, at which point we went back and quietly closed and locked the doors behind us in order to prevent inadvertent interruption.

“Where did he get these?” demanded Sophia, holding out a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg, the topmost from a keg of similar stones. “I’ve never seen jewels like these.”

“There’s a world’s ransom here,” I replied, wishing desperately that the Gardener were with us.

“Let’s just look quickly, then close it all up,” Sophia urged. “This isn’t something we can deal with now.”

Even our quick look disclosed endless stores of treasure, none of it
in the least corrupted, not even the fabrics: cloth of gold embroidered with emeralds, cloth of silver dotted with sapphires, cloth of diamond in the original bolt, woven from crystalline thread as made only by the Pthas and never by any race since.

“An old city,” I mused, on recognizing this latter fabric from a sample the Gardener had once shown me. “Someone has found a great treasure-house of ancient times.”

Beyond the last door, triple-barred, triple-bolted, triple-locked, we came upon an unlit tunnel where a lantern was set upon a table next to a stoppered bottle of lamp oil and a cane with a protruding sword tip. This last, I picked up as I followed Sophia, who carried the newly filled and lit lantern. The tunnel had not been formed by men. It was part of a natural cave, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

“He found this place,” I said with certainty. “He had the rest of the cellars dug around it, but this one he found!”

“Yes,” I said sadly. “And he had the doors built, then closed in the men who built them.” I followed her pointing finger to the cluster of desiccated flesh and protruding bones against the wall. Four men, or what had been men. They wore the shackles of bondsmen, and they had written their fate in their own blood on the floor beside them. “
He does not want anyone to know what is here.
”

Turning aside from this pathetic message, we stopped momentarily, for the cavern split into a Y, each arm blocked by an iron grille before a viscid, quivering curtain. To the left, the curtain was pale, lit with rainbow gleams. To the right the curtain was obsidian, not quite opaque, with shadows moving in it. Scattered folds of yellowed paper and the dried corpses of weirdly shaped creatures had penetrated the grille and were stuck to the walls and the floor before the dark curtain, some of them outside the grille. Moved by an instinctive revulsion, I used the tip of the sword to flick the creatures through or into the curtain of light, only to see them flair and vanish into nothing. Meantime Sophia picked up one of the papers, unfolded it, and read:

“‘Four thar of gems for each little human male.’” And another. “‘A qualux of woven gold for half a dozen children, very young.’

“What was he doing?” cried Sophia, a whispered cry, full of hor
ror. She picked up the other papers and unfolded them, reading them out:

“‘Why don’t you answer! Five thar of gems for each little one. We need many!’

“‘Why don’t you answer!’

“‘Why don’t you answer!’

“‘We don’t have enough little human ones! We must have more! Answer or we will seek business with humans elsewhere on Chottem! We will send
them
to suck you dead.’”

I put my hand on Sophia’s arm, silencing her. “Shh, look there!”

Sophia looked at the dark curtain where a deeper shadow was being cast by something passing there, a thing with several legs, at least four arms, and a limber body that writhed like a snake.

I took the papers from Sophia’s hand, picked up the others that were scattered about, and said, “We are in danger here. We must send word to the Gardener! And we must relock all these doors and hide the keys, for what may come, indeed, what may already have come through this gate is something that must get no farther into the house.”

We passed the old bones on the way out. I did not mention the message written in blood, which Sophia had not seen. Stentor had not merely left his workmen to starve. He had beaten them first. Both of us were pale and shivering when we returned to the upper floors of the mansion. “This is an evil house,” said Sophia. “I thought so when I saw it, telling myself that it was only because it was dirty and unkept. Well, we have cleaned it and mended it and set it in order, and it remains evil. What am I to do?”

“For now, nothing,” I said, though my aversion was as great as her own. “I agree, it is an evil place. Instead of moving into the mansion as we planned, you and I can continue living in the little house in the back garden. Let us hide these keys, and meantime I’ll tell the Gardener what we’ve found.”