The Rose of Sarifal (11 page)

High above, Marikke hung twisting in her chains, surrounded by grinning wolf-men. She also had made her own kind of interior descent, a way to protect herself from the pain in her shoulders and her wrists. She couldn’t tolerate the sight of the great sleeping creature curled up on the table, or the boy clutching its greasy fur. And so she closed her eyes and imagined herself walking down the steps of a building in Caer Callidyrr, the city in Alaron where she had first met Lukas and the others, the entire crew of the
Sphinx
. Often, when seeking respite from the cares of the present, she would transport herself back to a place she had known, and not necessarily one where she’d been happy. In this case, she was in a stone three-story guildhall in the middle of a warren of stone streets, far from the upland village where she’d been born in a cottage in a grove of larch trees. But the floor plan of the guildhall was a complicated one, and in her mind she hurried by the empty courtroom where she had first glimpsed the tall ranger and his genasi friend, talking to Aldon Kendrick, applying for some kind of license, and, as she later discovered,
negotiating for the Savage’s release. Destitute, she had left Kip in an exorbitant inn and had come here to pursue any chance of honest employment, and maybe some that had not been so honest, a quest that had led her ultimately to Lukas, who needed a healer for his expedition. These locations in her memory were like the corridors and cramped rooms where they had taken place, and finally in her mind she found what she had been looking for, a narrow back passage and a twisting stair, which in reality had led her to the narrow office of the secretary of religious affairs, a dry young man who had rejected her credentials and had barely allowed her to speak, so contemptuous he was of her country manners and her country clothes.

Now the room was empty. In her mind she crept across the floor and peered into the inner sanctum, where in real life she’d never penetrated, the lair of the functionary who had ultimately refused her permission to practice her craft inside the city limits. In her mind it was a spare, open place with windows along one side that overlooked a stone courtyard, a fountain, and a tree.

Her nostrils were full of the stinking cavern, which among other things had been used as a latrine by generations of lycanthropes. And her ears were full their foul music—below her Argon Bael recited his incantations, while the rest of the beasts had broken into a kind of ragged, howling, wailing chorus that nevertheless contained vestiges of rhythm and melody. But in her mind she was immured in a stone room in
a stone building in a stone city, surrounded by stone battlements. And it was here, nevertheless, that someone found her, someone she least expected, who scratched at the inner door and then came in, a little girl of perhaps eight or nine, with muddy, bare feet and dirty, broken fingernails, her brown hair a mess, wearing a torn green dress, an urchin from the streets. Marikke knew who she was.

“Oh, sweet goddess,” she murmured.

Chauntea smiled. Her lips were thin and chapped. Ghosts of freckles covered her brown cheeks. “You are hard to find,” she said, her voice light and soft.

“I looked for you. I called you but you didn’t come,” lied Marikke, even though she knew what the goddess would say next.

“Did you? Then what are you doing in this place? This is not my house. This is not where my servants look for me.”

She came forward across the floor toward the windows, and with one hand she pulled and twisted at a lock of her long hair. “I think you are hiding. I think you are afraid to ask what you must ask.”

Outside in the courtyard, the fountain had overflowed, and water was spilling over the tiles. And the tree, old and stunted, had pushed out some new shoots. Marikke knew what would happen if she stayed. The tree would overflow like the fountain, a chaos of green. Vines and tendrils would force themselves past the shutters and into the room itself. In time, they would pull the stones apart, and the building would collapse.

“I’ll give you a hint. It is my will,” said Chauntea, “that the Beastlord should be free.”

At these words, far away, past the sweating cave beneath the mountain, down deep in the abyss, in a field of wildflowers Kip the shifter, who understood cats, reached down to stroke the fur of the black hunter in the grass. Marikke couldn’t see that far. Wearily, in pain, she opened her eyes, because she heard a new sound that had disturbed the savage music around the table, dispelled it in an eruption of shrieks and screams.

Someone stood between the torches at the entrance to the cave where the tunnel wound down from the surface, a golden elf with a red, flickering sword. An enormous leopard and an enormous wolf had leaped past him into the chamber of the tomb and were ripping into the lycanthropes along the walls, many of them still in the middle of their transformations—the leopard had the snout of a yellow boar caught in his claws, while the wolf had closed his teeth behind a panther’s neck.

S
UKA IN
P
RISON

T
HAT SAME AFTERNOON
F
FOLK SLAVES HAD COME INTO
the prison at Caer Corwell and had removed two of the interior bars in Suka’s cage, according to the instructions that Lady Ordalf had left as an incentive. In fact all of the bars were bolted rather than welded to the iron ceiling and the iron floor, which convinced the gnome that the leShay queen had used this ploy before. Perhaps during her long lifetime she had discovered that coercion was simpler and more dependable than either loyalty or trust.

One flabby soldier had worked inside the cage while four others kept watch. They had taken one bar of the twenty on either side that separated her from the fomorian and the lycanthrope, whom the jailer had cut to quarter rations in preparation for the feast. The good news was that in her human shape, the lycanthrope would break through a tenday earlier than the bloated giantess—not that Suka was particularly concerned about the danger from that side. Although the pig-woman was more than twice her size, she seemed passive
and disconsolate rather than fierce. Besides, the gnome was still armed. She surrendered her most obvious weapons when she was imprisoned, but had retained several others secreted around her body, protected from discovery by a layer of misdirection.

Lately, also, in the darkness, when the lanterns had burned low, Suka had taken the habit of singing to the lycanthrope in her hoarse alto voice to keep her own spirits up and to make some kind of contact, under the general supposition that two females of any race or species would have to have something in common, as long as both wore tattoos.

She sang ballads from the highlands above Myrloch Vale where she’d been born. She sang the songs her father had composed for her, altering the words to popular melodies in order to fit some specific occasion, a naming day, or a broken tooth. Her father had been a drinker, probably still was if he was still alive—she’d left him after her brother died, sick of the tyranny of the leShay. She’d shipped out to Alaron, where eventually she’d met Lukas and the others. Now she was back.

On the fifth night of her captivity the lycanthrope had surprised her by speaking in the Common tongue: “Sing that other one, the one about the girl who died young.”

She was referring to
Oh, Father Dear
, the only sad song in Suka’s repertoire, a story so melancholy it was almost a joke, or at least her own father had thought so. The girl had died of consumption pretty much at the exact moment when her lover, a bold sea captain whose
leg had been blown off in some episode of Northlander skullduggery, arrived at her door.

Suka’s father, in between grimaces and smiles, had always managed to squeeze out tears over this piece of sentimentality—displaced tears, for he was never able to weep at the mess he had made of his own life. And perhaps the lycanthrope, also, could respond to it this way—Suka sang it for her twice in a row, and the second time she found herself inventing, as her father had, new and more preposterous details—the lover, subsequently, had his other leg blown off after he had agreed to marry the girl’s younger sister, who had died of heartstop upon hearing the news, and so on, and so on, and by the end Suka herself was crying also, as her own situation at that moment didn’t seem so good. Lukas was on a fool’s errand on the island of Moray, which presumably was full of lycanthropes less soft hearted than this one.

Oh, father dear, don’t curse and sigh when I am dead and gone, / I’m going to a better place that I will call my own
.

Hmm—maybe not. Her father’s sense of the ridiculous was almost his only good quality. But this would have been too much even for him, unless he was really drunk.

Tears in her eyes, she laid her cheek against the bars of the lycanthrope’s cage. She missed her friends, missed Lukas especially, though in many ways he was the most harebrained captain who ever lived, willing to risk all of their lives, endlessly, for trifles. Or else not trifles, exactly, but for his own exaggerated sense of loyalty; to
redeem the golden elf out of prison, he had agreed to follow the stupidest mortal in the history of humanity into an obvious trap. And now, for her own sake, Suka had no doubt, he had embarked on a half-baked and utterly unplanned assault on the most star-cursed island in the Moonshaes, in the service of an evil queen who would not hesitate to double-cross him and probably had already. Even so, Suka knew, he would return for her or else die trying. He was an old-fashioned fellow, with a sense of honor and all that. And he had given his word.

Only in a universe where the gods did not exist, he’d once remarked, would mere cleverness or ruthlessness ever find their own reward. Real gods, he imagined, would reward transparency above all things, transparent motives, a transparent heart. And of course so far they had rewarded him, he claimed, if not with riches, then at least with friends.

Remembering him, missing him, the little gnome rubbed her pink hair against the bars. Without even listening to herself she had come to the end of her song. But now she hesitated, first frightened and then amazed, as the lycanthrope’s hand slipped through the gap left by the missing bar, and touched her cheek where the tears had fallen, the sharp edge of her cloven fingers scraping them away.

“Do not be sad,” said the lycanthrope in her low, grunting, distorted voice. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

And then—wonder of wonders—from the other side of the gnome’s cell, where the fomorian giantess
was sprawled against the bars, came another voice, also speaking in the Common tongue. “You have nothing to fear. We saw you lay down your life for your friends.” Her voice was soft and even, beautiful, almost. “Now they are starving us for your sake. What are we going to do about that?”

Suka couldn’t think of anything, at least not right away. She thought it was a good idea to change the subject. Misdirection was her skill, and soon the giantess was telling her story, which, as it turned out, was every bit as melancholy as
Oh, Father Dear
. Her name was Marabaldia, and although Suka mightn’t necessarily have guessed by looking, she was the most beautiful fomorian in the entire Underdark, and certainly on Gwynneth Island. A girl from a powerful family, renowned for her artistic and musical talents, she had convinced her mother to allow her to marry her deserving sweetheart, a boy from a different tribe. The date had been set, and Marabaldia was the happiest girl in her cave or tunnel or whatever—Suka, listening, had to keep reminding herself that everything was happening by torchlight, underground—when fate intervened. Her own father dear, who had abandoned her when she was small—or at least smaller, Suka thought, not willing to believe she had ever been the size of, say, a gnome—now reappeared with a new bridegroom, who was as rich as he was old and ugly—though, again, Suka wondered how anyone could tell, especially in the dark.

But the lovers had run away, and after a series of hair’s breadth escapes had found their way up to the surface,
following a seam of some precious, glinting mineral up from the Underdark and into the deepest cellars of Citadel Umbra in Winterglen forest, the palace of Lady Ordalf’s son and heir, the leShay Prince Araithe. Initially welcoming, he had betrayed them like the scum-sucking piece of dragon shit he was, selling Marabaldia’s lover to their pursuers while keeping her hostage for the sake of some scheme she had never known or understood. Araithe had shipped her here, as far away from Umbra as he could manage, where she’d languished in captivity for a long, long time. She imagined the leShay had forgotten all about her.