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Sister Leoma was high up on her list of suspected Sisters of the Dark. Though she hadn’t been put to a test, she had been a part of putting Verna in here. That was proof enough. It had been dark and she hadn’t seen the other t
hree, but she had a list of suspects in her head. Phoebe and Dulcinia had let them in—against her orders. However reluctantly, they had to be placed on the list, too.
Verna started pacing the small room. She was beginning to get angry. How dare they think they could get away with this?
They had gotten away with it.
A scowl settled in. No, they hadn’t. Ann had given her this responsibility and she would live up to that faith. She would get the Sisters of the Light away from the palace.
Verna touched her fingers to her belt. She should send a message. Dare she, in here? What if she were caught? I could ruin everything. But she had to let Ann know what had happened.
Her pacing halted abruptly. How was she going to tell Ann that she had failed, and that because of her, all the Sisters of the Light were in mortal danger and she had no way to do anything about it? Jagang was coming. She had to escape. With her in this prison, none of the Sisters would know to escape.
And Jagang was going to have them all.
Richard leaped from the horse as it skidded to a halt. He glanced down the road and saw the others far below galloping to catch him. He rubbed the horse’s nose and then started to tie the reins to an iron lever on the dropgate mechanism.
He glanced over the gears and levers, and then tied the reins to the end of a gear shaft instead. The place he had at first started tying the reins was the release lever to the huge gate. A good yank, and the portcullis could come crashing down on the horse.
Without waiting for the others, Richard started into the Wizard’s Keep. He was furious that no one had awakened him. A light is burning in the windows of the Keep for half the night, he thought, and no one has the nerve to wake the Lord Rahl and tell him.
And then, not an hour before, he had seen the lightning, and the bloom of light racing outward in an expanding ring through a clear sky, leaving in its wake a smoky layer of clouds.
A thought coming to him, Richard paused before he went into the Keep and turned to look down on the city. At the bottom of the Keep road other roads branched off, leading away from Aydindril.
What if someone had been in the Keep? What if they had taken something? He had better tell the soldiers to hold anyone trying to leave. As soon as the others reached the Keep, he would send one back down to tell the soldiers to bring back anyone leaving and to seal the roads.
Richard watched the people on the road. Most were coming into the city, not leaving. There were a few leaving, though: what looked to be a few families with handcarts; some soldiers going out on patrol; a couple of wagons with trade goods; and four horses, close together, trotting past the people on foot. He would have them all stopped and checked.
But checked for what? He could take a look at the people himself, after the soldiers brought them back, and maybe tell if they carried anything magic.
Richard turned back toward the Keep. He didn’t have the time. He needed to find out what had been going on up here, and besides, how would he know if it were a thing of magic? It would be a waste of time better spent. He needed to get to work with Berdine and translate the journal, not paw through families’ belongings. People were still leaving, not wanting to live under D’Haran rule. Let them.
He marched through the shields inside, knowing that the others would be blocked when they arrived. The five of them would be upset he hadn’t waited for them. Well, maybe the next time they would wake him if they saw lights in the Keep.
Shrouded in his mriswith cape, he made his way upward, toward where he had seen the lightning hit the Keep. He avoided passageways that he could sense were dangerous, and found other routes that at least didn’t raise the hair at the back of his neck. Several times he sensed mriswith, but they didn’t come near.
In a wide room with four corridors leading from it, Richard stopped. Several doors stood closed. One had a trail of blood leading to it. He squatted and inspected the smeared trail of blood and determined that it was actually two trails: one leading into the room, and one leading out.
Richard flung open the mriswith cape and drew his sword. The clear ring of steel echoed down the corridors. With the point of the blade, he pushed the door open.
The room was empty, but it was far from ordinary. The wood floor was scorched. Sooty, jagged lines were seared into the stone as if an enraged lightning storm had been trapped in the room. Most puzzling, though, was the stone block of the walls; here and there huge blocks of stone hung halfway from the wall, as if they had come near to toppling out their place. The room looked like it had nearly come apart in an earthquake.
There were blood splatters all over the floor, and to the side a big pool of it, but because of the fire that had blackened the floor, it was all dry as dust, and told him little.
Richard followed the trail of blood from the room until it led to a door to the outer rampart. He stepped out into the cold air and immediately saw the splashes of of blood spilled across the stone. It was recent—within the last day.
Mriswith, and parts of mriswith, littered the windswept rampart. Even though they were frozen, now, they still stank. Against one wall, a good five feet up, was a huge splat of blood, and below it, on the ground, a dead mriswith, its scaled hide burst open. If the spray of blood had been on the ground, instead of the wall, Richard would have thought it had fallen from the sky and been killed from the impact.
His eyes gliding over the mess, Richard thought it looked like what was left when Gratch fought mriswith. He shook his head in dismay, wondering what had happened.
He followed a trail of blood to a notch in the crenellated wall and found blood staining the stone to each side. He stepped into the notch and peered over the edge. It was a dizzying sight.
The stone blocks of the Keep plunged nearly vertically, flaring slightly toward their foundation far below, and beneath that the stone of the mountain itself fell away for what looked to be several thousand feet. From the notch in the wall, a trail of blood ran down the face, disappearing in the distance below. There were several big splotches in the bloody trail; something had gone over the edge, smacking the wall on the way down. He would have to send soldiers out to see what, or who, had gone over the edge.
He ran a finger through different trails of blood at the edge; most of it reeked of mriswith. Some did not.
Dear spirits, what had happened up here? Richard pressed his lips together as he shook his head. He drew the black mriswith cape around himself and vanished as he pondered, thinking, too, for some reason, about Zedd. He wished Zedd were here with him.
42
This time, when Verna saw the little flap open at the bottom of the door, she was ready. She dove toward it, shoving the tray aside and putting her face against the floor, trying to see out.
“Who’s out there! Who is it! What’s going on? Why am I being held here? Answer my questions!” She could see a woman’s boots and the hem of a dress. Probably a Sister who cared for those in the infirmary. The woman straightened. “Please! I need another candle! This one’s almost gone!”
She could hear the disinterested footfalls vanish back up the hall, and then the sound of the door and the big bolt being dropped into place as she ground her teeth and pounded her fist on the door. Verna finally slumped down on the pallet, comforting her hand. She had been pounding the door too often, of late. Her frustration was overcoming her sense, she knew.
In the windowless room, she had no idea anymore if it was day or night. She assumed that they brought her food in the day, and so tried to keep track of time in that way, but sometimes it seemed they brought food only hours apart, and at other times she was nearly starved to death before they brought it. She sorely wished they would do something about the chamber pot.
They didn’t bring her enough food, either. Her dress was getting quite loose at the hips and bust. She had wished, for the last several years, that she could be a bit smaller, as she had been before she went on her journey twenty years before. She had been thought attractive, in her youth. Her extra
weight always seemed a reminder of that lost youth and beauty.
She laughed maniacally. Maybe they thought so, too, and had decided to put the Prelate on a fast. Her laughter died. She had wished Jedidiah would see what was on the inside, instead of just the outside, and here she was longing for the outside, just as he did. A tear rolled down her cheek. Warren had never ignored what was inside. She was a fool.
“I pray you are safe, Warren,” she whispered to the walls.
Verna slid the tray across the floor toward the candle. She flopped down and snatched up the tin cup of water. Before she gulped it down, she stopped, cautioning herself to make it last. They never brought her enough water. Too often she gulped it down and then spent the next day lying in her bed daydreaming about diving into a lake with her mouth open, guzzling down as much as she wanted.
She put the cup to her lips and took a dainty sip. When she set it back on the tray, she saw something new, something other than the half loaf of bread. There sat a bowl of soup.
Verna reverently lifted it, inhaling the aroma. It was a thin onion broth, but it seemed a queen’s feast. Nearly in tears with joy, she took a swallow, savoring the rich flavor. She tore off a chunk of bread and dunked it in the soup. It tasted better than chocolate, better than anything she had ever eaten. She broke the rest of the bread into small pieces and dumped them all in the bowl. Swelling in the soup, it made the bread seem more than she could eat. But she did.
As she ate, she worked the journey book from its pouch in her belt. Her hopes sagged again, as there was no new message. She had told Ann what had happened, and she had received back a hastily scrawled message that said only “You must escape and get the Sisters away.” She had received no message since.
After she had tipped up the bowl and drained the last of the soup, she blew out the candle, saving it for later. She put the half cup of water behind the candle so as to help insure she wouldn’t spill it in the dark, and then lay back on the pallet, rubbing her full stomach.
She woke from a dead sleep when she heard the door lever clang as it was lifted. Verna put the back of a hand to her eyes, protecting them from the dazzling illumination that stabbed into the room. She scooted back against the wall as the door closed. A woman stood holding a lamp. Verna squinted in its blinding brightness.
