The Seven-Petaled Shield (56 page)

“But I am here,” he said, covering her hands with his
own. She was trembling. “I am here, and soon we will get you out of here.”

Tsorreh shook her head. “I cannot take the risk. This may be the last time. I must take the chance that is given to me.”

As if exhausted, she leaned back against the wall, holding on to Zevaron, grasping his hand as tightly as a drowning man thrown a rope. She placed the other hand on her chest, then slipped it between the folds of her gown. The torchlight shifted, so that for an instant, Zevaron saw a gleam like gold shining through her skin.

“Ah!” A cry burst from her lips. Her face contorted.

“What is it?” She
was
ill, he was sure of it. His mind filled with the thousand things that could have happened since her arrest. She could have been beaten, tortured, contracted a terrible disease—

Her fingers clenched around his. He made no attempt to pull away. Instead, he tried to hold her, praying the spasm would pass and she would be able to tell him in what manner she was hurt. He did not know what he could do, but he had a sailor’s knowledge of tending cuts and bruises, broken bones, and once a gangrenous leg that had to be cut off.

She was speaking now, words so low and urgent, he could not make them out, only their rhythm, as familiar as the beating of his heart. Verses from the
te-Ketav
, perhaps prayers, supplications, ancient phrases of hope and comfort.

No, not just comfort…
purpose
.

“My son, forgive me.” Her whispered words shot through his heart. “I never meant to lay this burden on you in this way, I never meant—it is our only hope, believe me, please—
forgive me.
”

Her grasp on him tightened, harder now than steel or the inexorable grip of the sea. She clung to him, pulling him closer.

“It’s all right,” he stammered. “I’m here, I’m here!”

“The stone must not be lost!”

Then she slapped something against his chest. His breastbone flexed and his body shuddered as if he had been
struck by a piece of rigging torn loose in a storm. Air burst from his lungs. The muscles of his chest clamped down, adamantine, unyielding. His vision blurred around the edges. In panic, he struggled against her hold. He fought to force breath through his constricted throat.

Darkness lapped at him. Something sang in his ears, high and sweet and terrible, deadlier by far than the sea.

An oval shape, a woman’s face, blotted the fading light. “I am so sorry. Remember, Gelon is not the enemy. Qr is only the shadow of the greater. The stone will teach you…Forgive me…”

Pain seared him, dying away into darkness.

“Z
EV? I’m sorry to interrupt—Zev?”

Zevaron blinked, and the moment of strangeness passed. Once more, he knew who he was and where he was. Rousing, he tasted the dank air and felt the hardness of the stones beneath his knees, the slime under his fingers.

“I’m all right, Danar. Just a moment.”

He could not remember how he had gotten here, half-kneeling in front of Tsorreh. Her hands lay across her outstretched legs, limp, palms upward. From the way she was sprawled and the angle of her head, he feared she had fainted. Before he could reach out to her, she stirred. Her eyes opened and a smile of inexpressible sweetness passed over her face.

“Go,” she said in a voice that was thick and slow. “Take my blessings and the hope of our people with you.”

He gathered her in his arms. Her body felt all bones, as fragile as a bird’s. “I will come back,” he whispered against her ear. “By all that is holy, I swear it. I will save you.”

“You have already saved what is most dear to me, my Zevaron.”

Danar stood at the door, arguing with the official, insisting loudly that Tsorreh be given food, water, and a clean cell. The man lifted his hands and protested that he had no authority to do such things.

“Then you will do it on
my
authority, do you understand? Or I will take every moment of her suffering out of your worthless hide!”

“No, no! You must leave! I have already exceeded my orders! This is all the time granted to you! Away, away with you now! Guard, lock the cell.”

Zevaron clambered to his feet. His body felt unexpectedly heavy, as if he had labored hard all day. Behind his breastbone, in the center of his chest, he felt a crushing pain, as if his heart were weeping. He steadied himself against the door frame.

Danar touched his arm. “Let’s go, my friend, that we may soon return, and this time with your mother’s freedom.”

*   *   *

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Zevaron had no memory of returning to Jaxar’s compound, only a vague impression of color, of light, of tall white buildings and people sweeping past him. He might have eaten, but what and when he had no memory. Lycian’s voice rang distantly through the garden atrium. Someone spoke to him, steward or servant or perhaps even Jaxar himself.

The air turned cold. Behind his closed eyelids, tatters of images, vivid and incomprehensible, fluttered like dead leaves. Here and there, he recognized the shape of a woman on horseback against an ocean of silver-green grass, banners in the wind, an army of lifted swords, mountains of ice, caverns vast and lightless, far deeper than those through which he and Tsorreh had fled. Invisible currents swirled them all away.

He awoke, slowly coming back to himself. He lay on his sleeping pallet in Jaxar’s laboratory. A faint tang of metal and chemicals hung in the air. His knee joints popped as he got to his feet. One end of the table had been cleared of equipment and now bore a bowl and pitcher of water and a plate of cold boiled onions, flatbread, olives, and a small piece of salty white cheese. The smell of the food roused a ravenous hunger within him. He ate it all, washed his face and hands, and went downstairs.

Jaxar was sitting in the garden, shaded by one of the willowy trees, his legs propped on a bench heaped with pillows. He glanced up at Zevaron’s approach and set aside his pile of letters.

“My boy, you are looking considerably better than when Danar brought you back here after visiting Tsorreh two days ago. You have eaten, I trust? Is there anything else you require?”

“Only to know—
two days?
Surely, I cannot…No, I see.” That would explain why, although he had just eaten enough for two normal breakfasts, his body still craved food.

Jaxar dismissed the servant at his elbow and indicated the seat beside him. “Do not think harshly of yourself. Even the mightiest man must rest. Our bodies are flesh, after all, not iron. I know something of how they can fail even the most determined spirit.”

Zevaron sat, struck by the older man’s kindness. In that moment, he saw Jaxar not as a fat old cripple, but a person with a keen mind trapped in a mound of decaying flesh.

“I cannot rest, not truly, until she is free and safe.”
And we are well away from this place.

“How will it help her if you are too exhausted to even get out of bed?”

Zevaron opened his mouth to protest further, then closed it. Had he fainted in Tsorreh’s cell? He must have lost consciousness; one moment they had been talking and, within the blinking of an eye, he’d found himself on his hands and knees. In his years with Chalil, he had known two men subject to falling fits. Their limbs would flail about, hurling their bodies to the deck, and when they came to themselves, they had no knowledge of what had happened. Chalil said that for one of them, the fits began after a head injury, but the other had suffered in this way all his life.

It must have been the air, Zevaron thought, the close dank air of the cell, added to the intensity of his feelings at seeing his mother again. He shuddered inwardly at the thought of her remaining in that terrible place for even one more hour.

“What news of my mother?” he asked.

Jaxar’s heavy, drooping features turned somber. He told Zevaron there had been no response to his entreaties, nor had Danar been able to visit Tsorreh again. Zevaron heard a new harmonic in the old man’s words. He sensed that without sources of information, without connections and relationships, Jaxar was disarmed. Helpless. Blind. Frightened. Anything he said would only sap Jaxar’s one remaining weapon, his confidence. The Gelon were creatures of settled lands, of cities and laws. Of traditional family alliances and networks of influence. It was time to make his own plans.

*   *   *

He needed help, that much was sure. Once he had eaten and drunk and bathed, Zevaron’s strength returned. When he manufactured a pretext to leave the compound alone, Jaxar made no objection.

In the river-harbor district, it did not take long to determine which of the men drinking at open-air stalls, the layabouts and casual laborers, had ties to Denariya or the sea wolves of the Mearas. A gesture here, a phrase there, established him as one of them. Here he could find men, men without qualms about breaking any number of Gelonian laws. Perhaps men who were eager to do so.

Finding a way into the prison would not be easy, but leaving it would be even harder. He needed men who were resourceful and cunning, ruthless in a fight. And he needed a boat to take them downriver, with a pilot accustomed to slipping past the Ar-King’s tax officers. Such men would not come cheap, even those who had no reason to love Gelon. Zevaron identified three sound men, all of them pirates, he would swear, plus two more he was less certain of.

On his way back to Jaxar’s compound, Zevaron planned his next step. He would need money for the men and for passage downriver, and then for a fast ship to Durinthe. In his pack beside the pallet in the laboratory, he still had the
better part of his fee from the merchant, Ranath. He could negotiate more from Jaxar as his reward. If only Jaxar had let them go when Zevaron had first pleaded for Tsorreh’s freedom! Then they would already be free of this place.

There was no point wasting his energy in useless anger at Jaxar when there was work to be done. Zevaron searched his memory for every detail of the old justice temple and the warren beneath it. The guards and gates were designed not to keep people
out
but to keep them
in
. Locked gates had posed little problem to Chalil, and these were simple devices. Zevaron was certain that they could be disabled to allow easy exit. But even at night, he doubted that Tsorreh could simply walk out of the temple. Perhaps there was another way.

The official who had taken him and Danar down to Tsorreh’s cell had mentioned a map showing the system of old mining tunnels. How much could he ask of Danar without revealing his plan? Which was the greater, Danar’s love for Tsorreh or his loyalty as a Gelon?

Perhaps he could find someone, one of the wharf rats he had bought ale for, who had once been imprisoned under the temple. He could bring a disguise for Tsorreh and create a distraction to get her past the guards, perhaps at night when the shadows would be their allies.

Zevaron returned to the compound at dusk, filled with ideas. It would take a day or two to arrange everything. Even if he refused to help, Zevaron did not think Danar would betray him. It would be better, however, to keep Jaxar himself ignorant and therefore, unimplicated.

*   *   *

He knew from the moment the compound gate opened that something was wrong. The outside bell was answered not by the usual steward, but by one of the kitchen maids. The slanting light could not hide her puffy, reddened eyes. When he asked her what was the matter, she sniffed and shook her head. A wordless shiver, cold like the ringing of steel on stone, passed through him. Jaxar had looked so ill that
morning. If he had gotten worse, had collapsed or, Most Holy One forbid, had died—

No, he must not think of it, lest, according to Denariyan superstition, he give power to that evil thought. Despite his anger, Zevaron did not wish the old man harm. He had known Jaxar only a short time, but enough to recognize his worth, and Jaxar had stood as a father to Tsorreh, protecting her as much as he could.

And Danar—how would he bear his father’s death?

Zevaron hurried to the house. The entrance hall was dark and empty. As he crossed the atrium, he heard voices from the family’s private quarters. The steward hurried along the colonnade with a pile of towels and a pitcher of something pungent and steaming. He glanced at Zevaron and missed a step.

“Thank the gods, you’re back!”

“What’s going on?” Zevaron said. “Is it Lord Jaxar?”

Lycian’s voice sliced through the perfumed twilight. “Danar, stop this unseemly display!”

Something crashed, pottery smashing against stone. Someone sobbed.

“Get inside,” the steward said, but not unkindly. “It can’t get any worse, your being here. And
he
needs you.”

Zevaron followed the steward to the private chamber adjacent to Jaxar’s bedroom. A row of oil lamps set along the wall ledge filled the space with overlapping spheres of light. Jaxar himself sat in his chair, propped on pillows, his face the same color as the sun-bleached linen.

Alive? Then what had put the household into such an uproar?

Danar slumped on one of the benches along the far wall, his body hunched over, his face buried on his folded arms. His back shuddered, great ripples of soundless weeping. Lycian stood over him. Her face was contorted, and she’d raised her hands in a dramatic gesture. She saw Zevaron and gave a yelp of surprise.

“Now the son has come slinking back to us,” she said,
making no effort to conceal her contempt, “doubtless to wring your purse for as much money as he can. Is there no end to these people imposing on your good will, Jaxar?”

“Lycian, you will be still!” Jaxar rumbled.

“Lord Jaxar, what has happened?” Zevaron asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

As Zevaron spoke, Danar looked up. The light of the oil lamps fell full upon his face. Zevaron’s gaze locked on Danar’s tear-bright eyes.

No.

Before he could draw another breath, before his heart had sent another pulsation through his body, he knew.

No.

The room went dim and then crimson-tinged. Lycian’s shrill voice faded. Jaxar shouted something at her, and she swept from the room. The steward set down the pitcher, dipped one of the towels in the infusion, and held it out to Jaxar, but the old man waved it away.