Return of the Exile

10 Over the Wall

Afec was waiting for her when she came back from the midday meal. He looked her over carefully and said, “I know my skills are as good as any Keena’s, but I don’t believe I have seen anyone heal as fast as you. The swelling is almost gone from your eye, the bruises are gone from your throat, and look at your hand! The cut has closed over already.”

Linsha made a noncommittal shrug. “That blue paint works wonders,” she said.

Of course he didn’t entirely believe her, but when she wasn’t more forthcoming, he led her to a quiet room away from the noise and bustle of the early afternoon activities and spent an hour telling her the schedule of events of a royal Tarmak wedding and her expected role.

She listened for a while and picked up the gist of the ceremony. There would be many prayers, a blessing of the couple, and a procession where she had to walk while Lanther rode a horse. The bride was supposed to be accompanied by family and attendants, but since Linsha had none, she would walk alone as befitted the Drathkin’kela. There seemed to be much talking and feasting involved. That was good. She didn’t even want to think about-let alone discuss-the wedding night. She understood from Lanther’s pronouncement the night before that the wedding night would begin immediately and wouldn’t end until he set sail for the Missing City. Her mind balked at that and began to wander elsewhere while she thought of ways to hide a small dirk in her dress. Or did the Tarmaks wed naked like they fought? Now there was an image that made her stomach churn. No, Afec had mentioned a dress at one point. Her thoughts trailed away on another tangent.

A yawn sneaked up on her and slipped out before she could stop it. If Afec noticed he did not stop. He continued in his modulated voice telling her about her greetings to the Empress and the Emperor. Obviously the marriage of an Akkad was an important event and the Tarmaks made the most of it with much drinking and feasting. She yawned again, and this time Afec broke off his talking and sent her to her pallet with strict instructions to rest.

Before he left her, he gripped her wrist. “Do not plan anything for tonight,” he whispered. “I am looking for something that might help. If you wait, I feel the weather will change tomorrow.”

Linsha squeezed his hand in reply and without argument went to her room. She was smiling. It seemed she had a new weapon in her arsenal: an ally.

Linsha did not think she had slept at all, but when Callista entered the tiny sleeping chamber, she started awake and saw the room was nearly dark. The buxom courtesan laid a small lamp on the table and posed in place.

“What do you think?” she asked, pride and a little mischief clear in her voice. Linsha squinted in the dim light and saw the courtesan looked rather more buxom and plump than usual under her plain linen shift.

Callista flashed a grin, reached under her shift, and pulled out a wad of dark fabric. “Tarmaks do not pay attention to slaves. I found these in the laundry and borrowed them.” She laid the clothing on Linsha’s recumbent form and dropped down beside her to see her reaction.

Sitting up, Linsha held the clothes up to the light. The busy courtesan had found a dark green silk tunic—probably from one of the minor nobles who lived in the second circle of offices, treasuries, and craft rooms. The pants were a pair of heavy silk formal pants that on a tall Tarmak would reach only to the knees. On Linsha they were baggy and came neatly to her ankles.

Linsha hugged the courtesan in gratitude. “These will work quite well. Thank you!”

“If they help us get off this forsaken island, I would steal the wardrobe of the Empress herself,” Callista replied fiercely.

“Are you sure you want to risk an escape?” Linsha asked. She wanted to be sure of the young woman before she committed either one of them to such a risky endeavor. “We do have a choice. We can stay here and hope Lanther will eventually come back for us. We can wait here and hope Crucible is still alive and tries to find us. Or,” she paused, her intent in deadly earnest, “we can try to convince Sirenfal to fly us out. If we can find a way to release her, and if she is strong enough to fly.”

The courtesan studied Linsha’s expression, her cornflower blue eyes half-lidded in thought. “I don’t think either one of us believes Lanther will ever free us from this island.” Rubbing the silk between her fingers, she asked, “Do you think Crucible is still alive?”

Linsha did not answer at once. She saw again in her memory the field of battle wreathed in smoke, stinking with blood and littered with the dead. She remembered the pain in her hands and the unutterable exhaustion and grief that overwhelmed her. Before her stood a man, badly wounded and bleeding heavily, a man half-dead from the evil dart she had pulled from his back. He had lied to her and betrayed her trust for as long as he had known her, yet the need to see him again burst on her like an arrow piercing her chest. She covered her face with her hands.

To her surprise, Callista put an arm around her shoulders. “You miss him, don’t you?” she whispered.

More than I ever imagined, Linsha said to herself. But to the courtesan she replied, “I don’t know if he’s still alive. And if he managed to survive the battle, I don’t know if his wings healed enough for him to fly.”

“So Crucible is out.” Callista said firmly. “Then I say here we are and here we will stay unless we do something for ourselves. I do not want to stay.”

The courtesan’s gentle gesture and firm words were enough to help Linsha regain her self control. She rubbed her face hard and forced her memories back into the cellars of her mind. She needed her wits with her if she was going to penetrate the palace’s defenses and make her way undiscovered to the dragon’s cave.

All she had to do now was wait for Afec.

The fourth day before Linsha’s union to Lanther passed as any other day in the Akeelawasee. The day came hot and clear. Linsha ate and exercised by herself, since the other women avoided her and she completely disregarded them. She felt stronger and less sore, and her eye was almost back to normal. Late that afternoon when the Tarmaks dozed in the afternoon heat and the insects droned in the acacia trees, Linsha had to endure another long discussion about Tarmak traditions and the responsibilities of a royal wife. After one tedious lecture, Linsha made an indelicate noise, rolled over on her back in the grass, and said, “Why don’t you just say the husband has all the rights, all the fun, all the privileges, and the wife does nothing more than jog in circles, lay on her back, and have babies?”

Afec tilted his bald head. “Do you want children, Lady Linsha?”

She sighed at the very idea. “My dear Afec, I am thirty-four years old. I have been a Knight of Solamnia for almost twenty years. My days to want children can be numbered on one hand, and they vanished years ago.”

“But what about the Akkad-Dar? He is expecting you to bear his sons.”

“He can expect all he wants. I will never—”

She stopped in astonishment when the Damjatt leaned over and laid his hand on her mouth. “Don’t make rash vows, my lady. Do what you must to survive. A Damjatt philosopher once said, ‘Seeing into the darkness is clearness. Knowing how to yield is strength.’ ”

Her eyes opened wide then narrowed in speculation. Gently she took his hand and lifted it from her lips. Still holding his callused fingers, she said, “Is that what you’ve done, Afec? Do you see into the darkness? Is that how you survived so long?”

His face looked weary to her and his skin seemed thin and dry. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, Linsha thought he had fallen asleep. But eventually he sighed and made an answer. “When I was a little boy, my clan was overwhelmed by the Tarmaks. They took the young people for slaves and slaughtered the rest. They made me a eunuch and put me to work here. It was only after that I started having visions. I have been in the palace nearly fifty years, serving the Tarmaks, biding my time. I thought it was too late for me, but now you are here. You have spirit and compassion. And you fight.” His voice dropped until she could barely hear him. “You are the Drathkin’kela.”

Linsha pushed up on her elbows and stared at him, her mouth slightly open. The intensity of his voice surprised her; the meaning of his declaration took her breath away. His tone was unmistakable. It was pure awe.

She was about to make some sort of reply when he climbed stiffly to his feet and looked toward the palace brightly gleaming in the afternoon light. “If you will excuse me, Lady. I will leave you to your contemplation. The Empress wishes to see you tonight so that you might choose a dress. I will come for you when she is ready.”

Linsha, whose idea of formal dress involved armor and polished chain mail, looked over the array of colored robes and long dresses and immediately lost interest. The Empress’s rooms were much more intriguing. No tiny barracks-style sleeping chamber for her. The Empress had a large suite of rooms for herself and her slaves that included a meeting room, dressing rooms, a private bedchamber, and a bathing room. The entire suite was decorated with exquisite fabrics, leopard pelts, potted trees, and various weapons.

Afec cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to the clothing. Linsha shrugged. She couldn’t have cared less what she wore.

The Empress surprised her though. After fitting her with a green wrap dress that barely gave her room to take a stride, she presented Linsha with a long-sleeved black robe embroidered with a blue dragon that curled sinuously around the sweeping hem.

“Your quartal,” the Tarmak woman said proudly.

Linsha looked so quizzical that Afec hastened to explain. “You have no family to represent you, so you have no family quartal. Umm, that is what you might call a family crest or a clan emblem. All the old Tarmak families have one. The Empress thought a dragon would be appropriate for you.”

Linsha thought about that and ran her hand lightly over the exquisite blue silk embroidery. It was a blue dragon, a dragon of evil, a minion of Takhisis. But it was a dragon, and something about it reminded her of Cobalt, Sara Dunstan’s remarkable blue. It seemed better to Linsha to have her own symbol than to be faceless in the presence of the Akkad-Dar. Bowing, she expressed her thanks to the Empress.

After the meeting, Afec escorted her back to her quarters. At the wide door into the building, he handed her the robe and the green dress. As he passed it to her hands, he made a respectful bow and murmured so only she could hear, “When you go to the dragon, use the powder for the guards only in an emergency. Wear the belt. It will protect you from the priests’ magic. The liquid is for the dragon. Make her drink it. It will help her regain her strength.”

Linsha saw two woman approaching and quickly laid a hand on his wrist. Without a change in his expression, he nodded goodnight and shuffled away. Holding the dress and the robe and the items he had hidden in their folds, she watched him go until he disappeared in the direction of his small workroom.

She hurried into her sleeping chamber where she hung up the wedding finery and hid the small items with the dark green tunic and pants under her pallet.

With the patience born of a hundred past clandestine missions, she lay down on her pallet to wait.

Sometime close to midnight Linsha woke to the cry of the wind under the eaves. Lying still for a time, she listened to the sounds of the sleeping room, and when she heard nothing more than the moan of the wind, the creak of the timbers in the roof, and the common noises of the sleeping women, she rose silently to her feet. She gathered the bundle of clothes and the items she had collected and held them close to her body, then she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. If anyone found her and asked, she would say she couldn’t sleep and was going to the privy. However, there was no need for subterfuge. The sleeping quarters remained quiet, and the halls were empty. Linsha hurried down a corridor and slipped outside.

The wind greeted her with a roar and a bite. The clouds she had seen in the western sky had bulled in after sunset and now covered the entire sky in a black velvet wrap. The clouds’ consort, the wind, roared and rolled over the palace grounds with a strong smell of rain on its skirts.

Linsha took a deep appreciative breath of air and hurried to the cover of a thick planting of shrubs and trees. She changed into the dark clothing, wrapped a gray scarf around her head, and tied Afec’s knotted belt around her waist. She hadn’t had a chance to ask him why he felt the belt was important to ward off the priests’ magic, but it made a good place to hang the small bag of powder and the container of liquid he had given her, a pair of archer’s gloves, and several lengths of a strong lightweight rope she had borrowed from the exercise room. She shoved her light tunic and the blanket out of sight and rubbed dirt over her hands, face and ankles. In this gloomy night, she knew she would be very difficult to see.

A shadow among the tossing shadows, she flitted through the windy night across the grounds to the hedge and stood at last at the foot of the circling wall. If she was right, the guards would be changing soon, which would give her the distraction she wanted to slip over the wall.

Low voices spoke on the parapet above her, and Linsha abruptly realized the change of the guard was already occurring. On silent feet she eased up the stairs by the tower and pressed into the darkness where the tower bulged out from the wall. An archway bisected the tower to allow the guards to pass through and to give them access to a ladder that led up into the higher levels of the watch turret. Linsha peered cautiously through the tower entry and saw six guards quietly conversing along the wall on the other side. Three were leaving and three would be staying. Or four. Hadn’t she counted four the other day?

Footsteps clattered overhead and a trap door suddenly opened in the tower ceiling. A guard climbed down the ladder and hurried to join the others. Another conversation ensued between the two watch leaders.

Linsha eased into the darkness of the tower archway, straining her ears to hear their voices. It was difficult to catch what they said over the roar of the wind and the crash of the surf below, but she thought she heard the Tarmak words for sick and three.

The Tarmaks saluted one another then four marched for the stairs, leaving only three on the walls. Linsha grinned. Apparently one of this guard unit was ill and they didn’t feel it was important enough to replace him on a night like this. So much the better.

Before the Tarmaks decided to move in her direction, she whisked out of the entry and snatched out a length of rope that already had a loop tied at one end. Tossing the loop over a crenellation, she settled the rope as far down as it would go and pulled the loop tight. In the deep gloom of the cloudy night, it was barely visible against the stone, and only if you knew where to look for it. She slipped on the archer’s gloves—the only type of gloves she had been able to find—cast a quick look at the tower, and let herself down thirty feet. As soon as her feet touched the ground, she followed the base of the wall away from the tower toward the narrowest width of ground.

From the base of the wall to the edge of the rocky escarpment was a mere six paces, a very difficult width to utilize if you were crazy enough to attack the palace from that direction. The land had been cleared of brush, rocks, and any kind of cover, but Linsha had the distinct impression that the wall in this section was not so much to keep enemies out as to keep people in. The other day when she sat on the battlements she had seen that this wall was the only one. Unlike other, more vulnerable sections of the palace that had two large defensive walls, this part had one, and one steep, rocky promontory that jutted out into the sea.

She found the place she wanted and eased out away from the wall. On a moonlit night she would have been hard pressed to creep away from the wall without being seen, but she was lucky on this black, gusty night. As long as she did not attract attention with sudden movement, she should be able to creep over to the eroded crevice she had noticed earlier and drop out of sight.

The palace wall remained quiet. No horns blared. No harsh Tarmak voice yelled at her from the wall. No arrow slammed into her back. Only the wind roared over the stone walls and tugged at her body as she scrambled down the worn crevice and picked her way carefully to the steep edge. Fortunately the face of the promontory was not a sheer cliff like the high bluffs near the Missing City. The land dropped abruptly to the sea, but there was enough slope to make the descent possible. She debated with herself about using one of her two precious remaining lengths of rope as a safety line then decided to do it. She didn’t know what lay at the foot of the promontory. She might need a rope. It was better to be cautious than end up a broken wreck at the bottom, so she tied off a long length and climbed down the rocky face as carefully as she dared in the dark and tempestuous winds.

Rock by rock she crept along the steep slope, testing with her feet, feeling her way down. She watched as best she could for a crack or a shaft that might lead into the dragon’s cave, for she remembered in her dream seeing light filter through an opening in the wall of the cave. But if an opening was there, she did not find it in the dark.

Halfway down, she paused to give her aching arms a rest and saw the pale wash of waves breaking below her. They seemed to be washing up on a beach or a gravel bar or a shelf several paces away from the foot of the stone wall, which gave Linsha hope that she would have an area to walk upon as she searched for the cave entrance.

Her rope held through the long descent down the rugged slope until the last ten feet. As soon as the end reached her fingers, she tied a knot and anchored the rope on a slight outcropping where she hoped she could find it again on the way back up. She climbed cautiously down a few more feet, then her aching fingers slipped on a lichen covered rock, and she fell backwards off the rocks. She landed jarringly hard on her seat and was immediately soaked from her buttocks to her feet. For a painful moment she sat breathing hard, unsure whether to laugh at her absurd position or cry from the pain in her tailbone. She was on a small gravelly beach, a shelf of sorts, which extended from the foot of the promontory only about seven or eight feet into the water. Driven by the wind and tides, waves washed up the tiny beach.

Dripping and sore, Linsha climbed to her feet and looked both ways along the escarpment. There had to be an entrance to the sea cave. There had to be! She was staking a great deal on that fact. But she didn’t know exactly where it was, and she didn’t want to stumble onto a Tarmak guard in the dark. Which way should she go?

Just then the rain came. There were only a few warning drops before the clouds opened wide and dumped a deluge of rain on the land below. Linsha’s upper body was soaked in seconds. By sheer good fortune, she was looking to the right when she saw a brief flash of red light. It lasted only a heartbeat or two before it vanished in the torrents of rain, but it was enough for her to see a brief glimpse of a guard and a blackness behind him that could be the entrance to a cave. She shielded her eyes from the driving rain and made her way slowly along the rough foot of the promontory to the place where she had seen the light.

She was cold and thoroughly drenched by the time she reached the place where she had seen the guard, but the rain, the pain in her back, and the cold of the wind were nothing to the elation she felt when she saw the cave entrance. It was not very high, perhaps fifteen to twenty feet at its highest point, yet it was low to the ground, smooth, and wide enough for a sinuous brass dragon to slip through.

She proceeded with caution to the mouth of the cave and peered inside to find the guard. If there was one guard, there could be more.

There were two. She saw them sitting by a miserly fire hardly big enough to heat a cup of water. A lantern encased with a reddish glass sat on the floor beside one of them. They had chosen a rocky shelf to sit on that was higher than the main floor of the cave and protected from the wind and flying spray by a bulge in the cave wall.

Linsha found some shelter just inside the cave’s mouth and studied the situation. She quickly realized that she would not be able to slip by. The cave was not big enough to hide her movement from the sharp-eyed Tarmaks, and the guards didn’t look like they were planning to go to sleep any time soon. She could try to lure them outside, but if their suspicions were aroused they would be doubly dangerous.

She felt for the leather pouch Afec had given her and pulled it out. What was it? He didn’t tell her how to use it, only to save it for an emergency. She opened the small bag and took a sniff. The escaping fumes hit her brain and almost knocked her senseless. Her head whirled. She sagged against the rock wall, fumbling to close the bag. Ye gods, she thought, that was a fast acting powder. If a single smell would do this, what would a face-full do? She had to take several deep breaths to clear her lungs and head.

Slowly her thoughts slogged out of the drug-induced fog. Perhaps a frontal approach would work. She unwrapped her scarf, tore off the driest section she could find, and formed a small bag. Using extreme caution, she poured a small amount of the power into the fabric and tied the scarf piece with a loose knot. She swung the knot a time or two to check its swing, then she rose to her feet, covered her face with her hands and staggered into the cave.

“Help me!” she cried.