The Rose of Sarifal (41 page)

How hungry she was! In Moray she’d had simple things to eat, potatoes fried with onions, rabbit stew. But the genasi’s words brought her back farther than that. They opened a door back to the past, through which she could catch a glimpse of the great kitchen in Karador, and the chefs slaving over their brass cauldrons, and the stewards carrying the covered silver dishes up the stairs, and the steam rising from the plate, and the smell of ortolans, blinded, force fed, drowned in brandy, then roasted and eaten whole.

“Ortolans,” she said. “It is a songbird from beyond the sea. My mother said you could taste its whole life in one bite, and your life with it.”

The whistle of the wind.

“Ortolans,” repeated the genasi. Then, after a moment, “My friend and I will leave this island soon. The goddess showed me something when I was lying here, something far across the Sea of Swords, maybe in the country where the ortolans grow. You will not hurt him,” said Gaspar-shen, “by pretending even for a little while that you could share his fate, or he could share yours.”

She could not tell if he was asking her or telling her, or both. And there was no time to answer him, even if she knew what she might say. Because Lukas had reappeared in the tunnel’s mouth, and then was clambering up the pile, scattering the vermin. He carried weapons, the long, curved sabers of the drow. With one of them he slashed them free. Gaspar-shen closed his eyes and opened them. “Here we are,” he said—unhappily, she thought, but it was hard to tell. She rubbed her wrists and ankles, labored to her feet, then sat down suddenly and waited for a spell of nausea to move away. The air was full of ash. She wiped her gritty lips then tried again.

“Look,” said Captain Lukas. He led them down the slope and out into the larger cavern where they had fought the drow. “There’s no one here,” he said, and showed them what he’d found, a few drow soldiers lying in contorted positions, as if they had been picked up and discarded, flung against the rocks. This was where Lukas had found the swords.

But in a smaller, adjoining cave, he showed them a pavilion of scarlet cloth, lit at the corners with flickering oil lamps. Inside, laid out on a padded cot, they found the hierophant lying dead. Her face was bruised and torn, her arm and shoulder bound into a sling of spider silk. A wad of webbed silk, stained with blood, was laid upon her chest. But these wounds were not what had killed her. Her face was gray and bloodless, and there were marks upon her throat where the goddess had savaged her.

As they watched, one of the oil lanterns guttered and went out.

“We must be quick,” said Lukas.

He found the way they’d come, the way Amaka had led them down, and they climbed up the narrow passage into cooler, cleaner air. They carried the lanterns, but they were almost empty, and they blew out in the first breeze. After that they felt their way, for it was very dark, with just a trace of phosphorescence on the rocks. Lukas reached back for her hand. She would let him touch her for a little while more. Do not be fooled by any chance resemblance or feeling. She pressed her palm against his palm, laced their fingers together. It was easy in the dark. She remembered how she had kissed him on the battlements above the gate at Caer Moray. Soon she would kiss him again. She was like a goddess on this world. No one could judge her. If her sister had despoiled her in the gardens of the citadel, maybe even that was a good thing. It was best to know your enemies. She would have her revenge. She had a thousand years to plan it.

They climbed the steep stairs. She trusted Captain Lukas. When they reached the wider ways of the second level, she felt a surge of gratitude. She would reward him. So at the entrance to the brick tunnel, the fomorian road that ran toward Synnoria in the south, and north descended deep into the Underdark, she paused. She knew where she was. She recognized the smell. She held Lukas by his left hand, and with her other hand she took the sword from him and let it fall with a clatter. The tiles were smooth under her boots. She pressed him up against the flat wall and kissed him, and with none of her old uncertainty. Because this was the last time she would see him, she would enjoy this moment in all its melancholy power. The passageway was deep in darkness, and she pushed him back until she could not see his face. Instead she supplied in her mind’s eye his short brown hair, his blue eyes and thin lips. She touched his nose and cheek as the goddess had touched her.

Nearby, invisible except for a few dim, snaking lines of light, the genasi cleared his throat. “In the city of Uzbeg on the Golden Way, they make a confabulation of chocolate and nut cream, baked and then sealed in a layer of silver so thick and so hard, it must be opened with a lock and key.”

Lukas said: “Why don’t you climb up a little farther the way we came, and see if you can find some kind of light up here. We’ll wait for you.”

A doubtful whistle in the darkness. “Yes, Captain,” he said, either humbly or else ironically, it seemed to Amaranth.

When he was gone, she bent back to the task at hand, kissing Lukas so fiercely, as if to leave the imprint of herself upon his mouth. She let him touch her more intimately also, let his hands move over her body, and he surprised her by the lightness and delicacy of his touch. But when he slid his fingers inside her clothes, she stopped him after a while, thinking how he would be dead when she was a great queen. And when his children’s children were dead, still she would reign in Karador.

She laid her forefinger against his lips and whispered like a simpering, flighty, wavering human girl, “No—I mean … not here. Not here—it stinks of cyclopses and purple giants. No, I want to see you,” she said, though in fact the opposite was true, and she would never have allowed him to take such liberties in the light. “Take this as a promissory note,” she said, kissing him again, and then she whispered near his ear: “Imagine a blanket spread upon the dewy grass, and lanterns in the trees above our heads. Or else imagine us in the topmost tower of Karador, in my bedroom where I was a little girl, and the windows open, and the curtains of my bed drawn back, so we can look out over the waters of the lake. There are windows on every side.”

Unless he was a fool, that should be enough to tell him she was lying to him, she thought, feeling something in her heart of hearts, a stab of ecstasy or guilt. Do not be misled by any chance resemblance or feeling, she thought, pulling him down onto the floor, propping up in the corner of the wall. He stretched out
his long legs and she sat on them, her knees spread wide. They kissed for a while more, and then they turned their heads to watch a glimmer of light along the tunnel, the opposite direction from where Gaspar-shen had gone. It was not torchlight, but something softer and more varied, beams of light that moved along the blood-red walls. They heard the tramp of marching feet.

In time, Lady Amaranth got up, and straightened her clothes. She had not seen cyclopses since she was a little girl, when they had chased her and Mistress Valeanne on the way to Crane Point. Lukas got up too, and they joined hands and waited for a little while. But when she tried to pull away, or else pull him into some side passage, or else into some crack or crevice in the brick where they could hide, he would not come.

“Don’t worry,” Lukas said, for he had seen a little figure running out in front, backlit by the glare of the cyclopses’ eyes, tufts of pink hair standing out all over her head. Imagining that Gaspar-shen had just gone down the tunnel a few hundred yards, Lukas called out his name, told him to come back. Then he walked forward into the light, holding out his hands, astonished to see the gnome accompanied by these creatures. He recognized Marabaldia from her prison cell in Caer Corwell, though she had changed. Perhaps he also had changed, though it hadn’t been so long, after all. Less than a month, he thought—he scarcely knew.
He reached down for Suka’s hand. “Captain,” she said, “what a surprise.”

She looked Lady Amaranth up and down. He didn’t introduce them. There was no point. She stuck her tongue out, showed her silver stud. “I’ll tell you all that’s happened once we’ve stopped,” she said.

But Amaranth couldn’t hear her, wasn’t paying attention. While Lukas bent down to listen, while he squeezed the little gnome’s hands, Amaranth found herself staring up into the round, heavy-featured face of the fomorian, its right eye large and bright. Though in Karador she had heard of these grotesque and misshapen creatures, she had never seen one, and she found herself fascinated by its eye, which reminded her for a wistful instant of the portal that had carried her from Moray, the way the surface of it seemed to swirl in a circle then slide open like the mechanical aperture in her professor’s camera obscura, a device made of beaten copper, which she had last seen when she was a little girl.

And like that morning in Karador long before, she saw many things that had been hidden, or else only vaguely guessed at. She saw the forces of Citadel Umbra gathered around them in a circle, while an army of drow approached from underneath. She saw a trap that would crush all of them and steal her away. She saw the cyclopses struck down, and Lukas tortured to death for the liberties she had granted him. Every detail was clear
to her, as if these things had happened in the past and not some version of the future, and as if she were doomed to play them endlessly in memory. The fey stretched him out in one of their bright chambers, stretched and snipped his body in their delicate machines and made a game of him, and the genasi too. They cocked their heads quizzically, unused to cries of pain.

“My lady, this is the Princess Marabaldia,” said someone else, an old eladrin who had come up through the ranks of cyclopses, leaning on a woman’s arm.

“It is my pleasure to encounter you,” said the monster, her voice beautiful and low, her tone formal and polite. But Amaranth stared into her eye, and in its surface she saw a moving portrait of herself in her nephew’s arms, dancing stiffly and correctly as if in a darkened room. She could see her own back, the line of freckles underneath her shoulder blade, because her back was bare.

Oh, but one day she would be a queen, and the mother of kings and queens. As she watched herself, she heard with part of her mind the peculiar, airless voice of Gaspar-shen, as he came hurrying back. “I saw them,” he said. “Prince Araithe and his people. They have come from Winterglen—eladrin mostly, and a few drow. They are camped in the big cavern, a quarter mile from here. Many hundreds, it looks like. His mother is not with them.”

His voice was high and calm. Marabaldia had laid her spear against the wall. Now she picked it up. “I will be glad to see the prince again,” she said grimly.

“Captain,” said Gaspar-shen, “it is too many. There are warlocks and mages, and more than a hundred knights. Prince Araithe is very strong.”

“We’ve beaten him before,” said Marabaldia.

“That was Poke,” Suka reminded her. “And Poke is dead.”

Lukas felt Amaranth press his hand and then let go. He didn’t know who Poke was. But he felt immensely tired. He remembered the recent fight, the mounds of corpses, and he felt their presence in the darkness around him, beyond the limit of all these glowing eyes. Nor did their spirits reassure him. But the air was stale with their breath, and thick, and hard to breathe.