Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

“Gildas says you’re to be his slave,” said the boy. “I didn’t see how he could force you.”

I shoved myself to my feet. “He won’t. Help me with this palliasse.”

Using the lamp flame to burn through the rope webbing, we unstrung half the bed and ended up with several moderate lengths of rope. I had Jullian pile the palliasse and quilts back over the half-strung frame, using the broken chair to create a hollow like a badger’s burrow at one end, while I rested my woozy head between my knees. Great gods how was I ever going to accomplish anything?

“Can you tell me what guards watch Stearc and Gram?” I asked from my odd position.

“There’s always one or two in the passage except when they all go down to beat Thane Stearc in the morning and when they…hurt…him in the evening. Nikred or Crado mostly. Both of them in the day. At night they take turns for rounds, changing at Matins and Lauds and again at Prime.” Matins—morning at midnight. Lauds was third hour, Prime sixth—the dawn hour in summer. “I try to keep the Hours here. I thought…I hoped I might help him.”

“And this torturing happens the same time every night?”

“Between Vespers and Compline…when they call the last watch but one before Matins. Crado says they like him to know when it’s coming.”

“All right.” Slowly I sat back onto my heels. The boy perched on the rumpled bed, two or three steps away, his body a wiry knot. “So tell me how the cells are laid out, if you can.”

In moments he had sketched an outline of the prison block in the sooty remnants of my lamp. I planted the image in my head, then had him rub it out with his boot. “Clearly you’re a good observer. So did you happen to note the guards when they brought you up the stair earlier?”

Though his eyes flicked between my face and my glowing hands, he did not falter with his answers. “One at each level. Sometimes when Gildas brought me to walk in the inner ward or to study the map, I’d see two at the hall level.”

I popped my head up, blinking until the windows took their proper places instead of whirling one atop the other. “To study the map—the big one in Sila’s sleeping chamber?”

“Aye, that’s it. Gildas doesn’t understand what she does with it, so he studies it when she’s not there, and he has me study it, too, so I can remind him of details he might forget. It maddens him that no paper or pens are allowed here, save the map, your grandfather’s book, and the Aurellian book he uses to interpret the maps.”

The great map…its luster of age and art and magic…its shifting images…had captured my imagination. I closed my eyes and envisioned the green and ocher washes over the wordless fiché. Made for those who could not read words—Danae, then, or halfbreeds like me and Sila. Just as in the book of maps, Janus’s secrets lay exposed for all to see, if only I knew how to look at it. “Does Gildas say what he suspects about the map?”

Jullian shook his shaggy head. “Only that the features change over time. He thinks the old woman knows a secret about it that even Sila doesn’t know, and that bites him sorely.”

A map made for the Danae…but Kol had shown me they could not interpret maps, even ones without words. What would prompt Janus to make them a map—a map that Sila found use for and that held place in the gap of secrets between Sila and Gildas and Ronila?

I felt the sun slipping lower. Both enlightenment and vengeance must wait, for I’d yet to come up with a route out of Fortress Torvo. “Where did they take you to walk?”

“Gildas would walk me in the inner ward—”

“—where half the north end wall has collapsed? Piles of rubble all around?”

“Aye.” Wind rattled the window bars. Jullian scrambled back onto the bed, shivering, burrowing slowly into the quilts.

I pushed myself up to a squat, summoned all my resolve, and stood up. In hopes that movement might shift the clay in my limbs and rouse some insight, I crossed the room, raking fingers through my hair, trying to reconstruct the scene I’d glimpsed through Sila Diaglou’s arrow loops. “The broken wall once supported a row of privies hanging out over the court. Do you recall seeing a drainage canal on that end of the yard? It would only make sense…the sewage draining out of the privies into the canal.” Unless the privies had been put in after the canal was rerouted, or no one had considered draining the muck from an inner court that was naught but a well in which to trap one’s enemies and pour down death on them.

“A cistern sits in the middle of the court, but I didn’t see a canal. If it’s there, it’s full of rock.”

I grabbed my heaviest wool shirt from the clothes chest, convinced my leaden feet to carry me back to the bed, and dropped the shirt over Jullian’s head. Then I took myself to the window, bathing my skin in the cold afternoon. “Did you notice any grates around the walls? Something as tall as my knees?”

His head popped through the shirt’s neck hole, his eyes curious. “Aye, I saw a rat squeezing through a grate…just south of the broken wall…at the ground where a canal might run…”

I grinned as he wrestled his arms into the warm gray shirt and retied his rope belt to tame its bulk. “I know going inward seems an unlikely route to the outside, but it might serve if we can find no better. You can find the way to this yard in a hurry?”

He gave me his most scathing look. It was all I could do to keep from ruffling his filthy hair.

Footsteps echoed on the stair. I knelt in front of Jullian and took his cold hands in mine. “A woman is going to come here soon. You must hide in the burrow you made, and make not a sound, not a sneeze, not a prayer, no matter what you hear or think you hear. You’ll come out only when I tell you.”

He nodded, solemn faced, curious, but not so frightened anymore.

“Gildas thinks to torment me by prisoning us together, knowing you’ll see what this vile enchantment does to me and what Sila Diaglou intends for me to do here every night. But then, he doesn’t believe in angels or aingerou or any other blessing that a god might send to sinful men. We’re going to show him different.”

M alena arrived with the early nightfall. I waited behind the door. In the instant the door opened, breaking the barrier ward that bound the room, I touched the lock and quickened the spell I had built throughout the day. Anticipation held my bones rigid…with so much depending on a blindworked spell in an unfamiliar lock…and every alternative sure to draw blood.

As the girl crossed the room with a supper tray, I buried my face in my hands, listening for the latch. The guard on the stair pulled the door shut. The pins and levers moved…and stopped short, as if a small clot of dirt, oil, and bronze shavings, about the size of an armaments game piece, had slipped into the works and prevented them seating properly. I smiled into my fists.

Again Malena wore naught but flimsy shift and braided hair. Again she set out warmed wine. I had eaten nothing since the previous night, and even the prospect of maggoty bread would have set me ravening had I not spent the last half hour practicing what Kol named closure, attempting to subdue every sense to my will. Three times in the past hour echoes of the doulon had threatened to unhinge me, wreaking havoc in my head and shooting spasms of pain and desire through breath and bone. But I had cut them off like rotted limbs. No matter desire, no matter temptation, no matter perversion, neither Gildas nor Sila Diaglou would control my deeds this night.

“Where is the boy?” said my chosen mate, forgoing all pretense of holy ardor. “I was told he would be here. We’re to send him out to Jakome when the time comes, unless you wish him to watch.”