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“I know. How did you find me?”
“The priests are in a rage, claiming they are owed a sacrifice. A raiding party had taken a powerful captive, rumor said, but the members of that raiding party would not speak of it. The Feather Cloak need answer no questions.”
“Feather Cloak?” She recalled Feather Cloak, that stern and pregnant leader who had banished her from Ashioi country.
“Sanglant’s mother is Feather Cloak.”
She caught a surprised laugh, making a kind of a snort. Sanglant’s mother had grasped the reins of power among the Ashioi. What had happened to the other Feather Cloak?
“It was Feather Cloak who told you I was here?”
“It was not. I am her prisoner, but I have other sources of information.”
No doubt a woman—some flint-eyed warrior girl who spilled the truth to him in the hope of gaining his smile and, perhaps, a kiss. Women could be stupid, that was certainly true. Liath did not hope to be one of those women today. Hugh was certainly lying, she just wasn’t sure what part of his story was false, and which truth.
Blessing is recovered. Alive. Living.
“I want a knife before I’ll come up,” she said, “to defend myself with. I have no reason to trust you.”
“If you don’t trust me, you’ll remain their prisoner. At their mercy. Do you know what the priests do to their sacrifices? Why they are called the blood knives?”
“I want a knife. Or I won’t come up.”
“If I drop it, it might hit you.”
She slid backward along the wall ten paces, and called. “A knife, or I won’t come up.”
“I pray you, Liath. If we wait too long, we may be discovered.”
“A knife.”
He wanted her so badly that he betrayed himself. An object rasped along rock. Silence swallowed its fall, then it rattled on stone.
What manner of fool gave a knife to a prisoner?
How had Hugh of Austra come to be allied with the Ashioi?
She moved forward in darkness, knelt, and patted the ground until its cool blade came under her hand. Good iron, this. The hilt bore an embossed crest which she read by touch: the letter ‘A’ surrounded by a circle.
“Liath, you must hurry,” he said.
She rose, gripped the rope, and looked up. The rock clouded her vision, and the vision that lay beyond those things seen with the open eye. Rock was heavy and slow moving, but there was something there, a presence. It was as if she could smell the edge of Hugh, like smelling a perfume: lavender for beauty, wolfsbane for deadliness, and something less tangible, twisted and rotten.
She could not quite grasp him, but she forged with her awareness as high as she could reach up the rope to a place where it tightened against a curve in the ceiling, perhaps a narrow vertical tunnel. There, where the rope receded into oblivion, she kissed the sleeping fire within it, and told it to burn.
His shout woke fire. The rope burned hard, far above her, just out of her sight. The red glow spit flakes of ash, and she yanked. The rope tumbled down around and on top of her, the fraying end smoldering and blackening at the tip.
“Ai, God! Liath!”
No need to answer. She had what she wanted. The glow gave just enough light for her salamander eyes. She coiled the rope over and under around shoulder and torso like a bulky sash, holding the slowly burning end out away from her, and tested the knots of the complicated arrangement of food and drink tied up against her body. It would hold.
She pushed into the darkness. When she approached the black spire, she found what she had prayed for: a stairway into the depths.
10
IN the late afternoon he rode into a clearing ringed by stately beech trees just coming into leaf. Beyond lay a tangle of mixed woodland with many massive trees listing sideways or fallen to the ground and slender saplings and a thick layer of shrubs grown up in a profusion that blocked all lines of sight. An ancient wall formed a crumbling pattern within the clearing. No place along the wall was more than knee-high, but it provided a barrier of sorts where otherwise they must lie open to whatever the forest might bring them. Within this ruin he found canvas tents being erected and fires burning and the deer being skinned and butchered and prepared for spit roasting over the remains of stone hearths. The offal was thrown to the hunting dogs, to keep them strong, although in any village such fare would have been served up as a stew. Alain had put aside some bones saved out from yesterday’s dinner, and these Rage and Sorrow gnawed on while he walked through the camp speaking here and there to servants and soldiers.
He came at length to the cloth screens set up on poles that divided the main portion of the camp from the smaller camp where the nobles would eat and sleep. No guards patrolled this gate, situated where a second inner ruin lay within the first.
