The Soul Weaver (32 page)

She sank to her knees, her head bowed.

I raised her up quickly. “Take care of my friend, Nithea. Send Zanore for me if he wakes.”

Then I took the pale princess by the arm and propelled her into the passageway. “If you ever again lay your hand on one of my people without my permission, I will cut it off. Do you understand me?”

She tried not to answer, but I held her tight until she nodded her head.

“Paulo was right. I am the king of this desolation, and I plan to get you out of it and back where you belong as soon as possible. But until then, you are my guest, and you will behave like it whether anyone is paying attention to you or not. You will treat every servant, every beggar, and every person, no matter what their appearance, with the respect you expect for yourself. This is
not
Leire.”

She remained silent, her pale face rigid, her lower lip trembling.

We found Vroon, and I dispatched him to install Roxanne in guest apartments as befit her rank, leaving instructions that she was to be clothed and fed and allowed to go anywhere she liked, but that she was never to be left unguarded. The rest of the day I spent securing my position in the Blue Tower.

I had Vroon interview all the tower servants, weeding out any who demonstrated too much loyalty to the Guardian. The maintainers I dismissed entirely, forbidding the Singlars to exact revenge on them for their crimes in the name of the Guardian, but threatening to revoke that protection at the least provocation. In their place I installed twenty Singlars that Vroon designated as trustworthy, men and women who had stood witness in the audience hall. I granted these Witnesses their names along with their duties and believed, somehow, that no sovereign would ever enjoy troops so loyal as these. By “unlight,” the hour when the lamps went down, I'd done all I could do.

I returned to my apartment to check on Paulo and found him sleeping peacefully under Nithea's eye. I bade the woman good night, but before I could find a new bed of my own, a servant brought an urgent message from Vroon, asking me to come to the Guardian's rooms. I hurried up the stair to the third level, through an open foyer, and down a passage toward several Singlars, who stepped aside and bowed when I arrived. My leathery friend Ob stood just inside the doorway. With a thud that shuddered the walls, he dropped to his knees, crossing his thick arms across his chest. His voice boomed in massive distress. “Failed.”

“Failed . . . Has the Guardian escaped?” My mind was already racing to the Source. Would the Guardian damage it? Set it against me with lies?

But Ob shook his red-tufted head. “Dead.” With Ob's word, the world itself mourned. His wide shoulders were trembling.

I squeezed past the bulky Singlar into the Guardian's large, sparsely furnished bedchamber. Evidently the Guardian had decided he would rather be dead than give me a decent answer. He lay on his bed, wearing his gold circlet. His blue robes were smooth and orderly, his hands folded primly across his chest, holding the ruby-studded key. The only discordant note in his presentation was the black swollen tongue lolling out of his mouth.

The untimely death of one's adversary was not the best way to begin a reign. I had wanted to expose the Guardian's misdeeds to all the Singlars before deciding what to do with him. But hiding his death would be very difficult. I picked up a small gold flask that lay on the floor beside the bed and sniffed it. The faint odor was sickly sweet. Moving closer to the dead man, I bent over and sniffed his mouth. Not at all nice. “Handle this carefully,” I said, giving the flask to Vroon who had followed me into the room.

He took it gingerly, scrambled around the floor until he found the glass stopper that had rolled under the bed, and closed the flask. Ob knelt by the door, head bowed, quivering in shame.

“Vroon, how do you dispose of dead bodies here?”

“We dig them into the ground, Majesty. Under a tappa field, so they are still part of the Bounded.”

Though I left the gold circlet on the Guardian's head, I removed the ruby key from his cold hands and dropped it in my pocket. Then I turned to the leathery man.

“Ob, stand up.” I spoke as a commander, briskly and without sympathy.

The leathery man lumbered to his feet, standing as straight as possible with his deformed back, and kept his eyes pinned to the floor. The Singlars in the passage drew close to the door. Vroon stepped forward, anxious. “My lord, please—”

I held up my hand to silence Vroon. Softness could ruin a strong man. I needed Ob strong. “Ob, I charge you to dig the Guardian into the ground as is your custom. Bury this poison flask with him. Choose two Singlars to help you. Make no honor or special ceremony out of what you do, but do not hide it. And to all who ask, you will answer clearly and willingly that the Guardian took his own life out of selfish pride and shame at his failure to heed the Source in the matter of the king. Some may be angry at his death and make accusations against me. But you will not fight them or hurt them in any way, except to save your life or that of your assistants. Do you understand your orders?”

Ob straightened his shoulders and bowed deeply. “Majesty.”

As he came up, I motioned for him to look at me, forcing his watery red-and-yellow eyes to meet my own. “Next time, watch closer.”

As the wide brown man set to his duties, I stumbled my way to the royal apartments on the fourth level, fell into a bed the size of a banqueting table, and slept for an entire cycle of the light.

By the time I crawled out of the royal bed on my first morning as the Bounded King, Vroon had taken most efficient charge of my household. A young male servant with only one ear and a wooden stick for a leg was waiting for me with a tub of steaming water and fresh clothes suitable for royalty. I accepted the fine-woven red shirt and black breeches, black hose, and calf-high boots—all of them, amazingly enough, made exactly to my measure—but diplomatically postponed wearing the gold-encrusted doublet and elaborately jeweled belt. Feeling properly human after the bath, I sent the servant to inform Princess Roxanne that I would wait upon her in an hour, then grabbed two hunks of hot bread, dripping with butter and honey, from a tray beside my bed, and set off to see Paulo. With my breakfast had come word from Nithea that he was awake.

When I arrived, Nithea had him propped up on pillows and was feeding him tiny spoonfuls of a thick whitish substance that smelled like rotten fish.

“Demons, have you come to rescue me?” he said weakly.

“Only to see that you're not making Nithea too miserable with your complaining.”

“She's got me so flat, I couldn't lift a horse's tail, then shoves more of this mess down me so I'll puke out what insides I've got left. I thought it was a new torture from the Guardian.”

“You look better,” I said. And so he did. Some of the swelling had gone down in his face, his color was healthier wherever he wasn't purple, green, or black, and his eyes had a spark of life in them.

Paulo screwed up his forehead and looked me up and down. “You look cleaner than last time I saw you, and your outfit's pretty fine, but I think this lady should work on your busted face for a while and leave me be. You look like a mountain fell on you. What do you think, Nithea?”

“The king said
you
were to be made well before anything else. I do his will.”

Paulo squinted up at me. “The king . . . I was right, then.”

I shrugged.

Nithea took the pillows out from behind him and rolled him onto his side. I sat on a stool beside his bed and told him what I'd done.

“So why haven't you gone to the Source yet?” he said, wincing as the woman spread a salve over the lash marks on his back.

“I just woke up. I had to come here first.”

He kept looking at me.

“All right, I don't know. It's what I wanted . . . what I came here for . . . the whole reason we got caught . . .”

“You're scared. That's what.”

“I'm not scared. I'm just waiting for you to get on your feet again. You heard something ‘not right' in that cave, and I didn't. So, maybe you need to be with me when I go back.”

He pressed his face into his pillow, muffling a miserable groan. Around all the cuts and bruises he had gone a sickly yellow. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “This lady and her tree milk have done for me again.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

Nithea shook her head, holding up four fingers, then five, but her eyes smiled reassuringly above her veil. So it would take more than a day, but he would be all right.

“I'll come back later when you're feeling better.”

Nodding to Nithea, I left the room and headed down the stair in search of Roxanne.

Was Paulo right? Was fear what made me feel like a battle was going on in my chest every moment we stayed here? My connection to the Bounded was very deep. The land, the people, the problems . . . Every day, the place revealed itself a little more. I could look at the Singlars and know what names they would choose. I understood what had to be done to release them from their peculiar confinement to their towers, and I was already trying to figure out how they might share the wonders of the gardens. But I didn't
want
to know these things or feel them. I didn't belong here. I had to go back and clean up the mess I'd left behind in Leire, and then find some place to hide where no one could ever find me.

 

I wasn't looking forward to my interview with Princess Roxanne, but unlike the Bounded, she was full of surprises. She wasn't waiting for me in her apartments, but was bustling about the audience hall, peering into every nook and cranny, pulling back curtains, examining columns and doorways and every handsbreadth of the walls. Two Singlar women, dwarfish like Vroon, trotted after her on their stubby legs, while a male servant observed her from the wide doors to the rotunda.

The princess had gotten cleaned up as she wanted. Her hair hung heavy and damp halfway down her back. Evidently no one had found any gowns to fit her, so she wore a simple wool robe, much too large, that she had tied at her waist with a gold cord. Not very elegant, but the color, a rich blue, made her light hair look like gold thread.

When she saw me enter the room, she immediately altered course and hurried across the floor, planting herself in my way as if I had intended to walk past her. Her face, now that it was clean, looked like a fine sculpture, perfectly smooth, and rounded just enough to look soft. But you could have struck sparks from her eyes. They were gray, like steel. “So I'm a prisoner again. A fine rescuer you are.”

Why had I decided to visit her? Yes, I'd been harsh with her. And this was a strange, ugly place, bound to be frightening for someone with no experience of sorcery. But her father had burned sorcerers alive, slaughtered them and anyone who knew them: my father, Tennice's brother, their friends, the infant they had thought was me. I had no reason to think the princess would do any different in his position. I ought to put her off the Edge.

“You are free to come and go as you like.”

“What a polite thing to say. But
most
houses provide doors and windows that make it a bit easier. Do you see any such things hereabouts?” She pulled back a green curtain, only to drop it again once she had shown me the blank wall behind it. With her lips pressed together, she strode from one drapery to another, nearly tearing them from the wall to illustrate her point. “And my chambers have none either. But then perhaps you still have plans to cut off my skin if I complain.”

She was certainly afraid—the Lords had taught me to smell and taste fear—but she did a good job of hiding it. I followed along behind her, hands clasped behind my back. It was true I had told Vroon to give her rooms without window slots. I had thought peeking through them might frighten her worse than she was already.

“Didn't these women tell you how to leave the tower?” I nodded to the dwarfish women just out of politeness. They turned scarlet, placed their hands on their ruffled white collars, knelt, and bowed their heads to the floor. Roxanne glared at me. I nudged the women to get up, wishing myself ten leagues away. I'd give her a quarter of an hour and that was all.

“They only told me this ‘think of yourself out' idiocy. Does it give you pleasure for your servants to be insolent or were you testing my obedience? I didn't kill them for it, nor give them even a gentle slap for their rudeness.”

“But it's the truth. They just don't understand that you're not used to such things. This is . . .”

“. . . not Leire. Yes, I remember.” She spun on her heel, almost causing me to collide with her. “So tell me, O great king, where in the blighted universe are we?”