The Lost Heiress

17

They questioned me. “What have you done?” they raged.

I was silent. I dared not tell them the worst of it.

Sorrows of Kest

“ I CAN’T BELIEVE,” Galen growled, “that you were stupid enough to do it.”

Tallis and the Sekoi exchanged glances. “Never mind that now.” She pressed the warm cup into Raffi’s hands. “It’s all over, at last.”

The room was dark. They were sitting around the fire, Tallis in her young-woman shape, the door behind her open, so they could see the moths in the soft moonlight over the lawns.

Raffi sipped the warm ale. He still felt tired and guilty and dizzy. Yesterday they’d told him he’d been in the dream-coma for three days and nights. He knew now he’d never have gotten out of it on his own; Galen had come in for him, in deep, into the journey, because that’s what it had been, the Deep Journey that only Relic Masters should make. It would have killed him soon. Even now, a whole day later, he barely had the strength to make a sense-line, and fell over if he stood up.

The ale was honey-sweet. It made him feel better.

When he had woken, all he had wanted to do was be sick, and then sleep. But Galen had been relentless. He had forced him to tell the dream, all of it, every detail, before he had let him collapse into nausea. Now the keeper sat grim, his hooked face dark and shadowed.

“I’m sorry,” Raffi muttered. It sounded weak, and stupid. “I just . . . I didn’t think anything would happen to me.”

“You didn’t think at all.” Galen was haggard and weary; his fasting had made him thinner, and Raffi knew he had prayed over him and fought with him for control all the time of the dream-sleep. “It was a mess, boy,” he said fiercely. “You could have ruined everything.”

“But he hasn’t, it seems,” Tallis put in smoothly. She sat down on the floor, her back against the bench. “And now we must discuss these messages the Makers have sent. However they came.”

The Sekoi put a bony finger into its ale cup and stirred thoughtfully. “Odd messages too. And dispiriting.” It looked up. “The last part seems the most important for us. Do you agree that it seems to tell us that the Interrex is a small girl-cub, and that she is in the hands of the Watch? In a Watchhouse?”

Galen nodded gloomily.

“You mean that girl who put her hand up?” Raffi went cold. “She’s the Emperor’s granddaughter? But she’s one of the enemy!”

Tallis shook her head. “It may be her. It may be the number round your neck will be more important. Nine fourteen. Remember it. At least we have a clear idea where to look. Keilder Wood is not far from here.”

Galen was sunk in his bitter mood. “We know where to look. But it’s worse than we thought. They may know who they have. If they do, we’re finished.”

“They’d have already killed her,” the Sekoi put in.

“Maybe. But even if they had no idea who she is, the child’s mind will already be twisted against us. This won’t be a simple rescue. She won’t want to come. It will be a kidnap.”

Thinking of the girl’s spiteful grin, Raffi thought Galen was more right than he knew.

“And anyway,” he said aloud, “how do we get in?”

Galen smiled strangely. “You know how. Carys must get us in.”

Tallis looked up. “Who is Carys?”

The Sekoi pulled a face. “That would take some explaining, Guardian. She’s a Watchspy. She may, or she may not, be a friend of ours.”

“Of course she is,” Raffi said hotly. He banged the empty cup down, annoyed. “She helped me. I saw her.”

“The Makers helped you,” Galen snapped. “And they appeared in forms your mind would recognize. But certainly Carys is our only way into a Watchhouse, so she must be told.”

The Sekoi looked uneasy, but it said nothing.

Tallis stared into the fire. “And if she betrays you?”

“She’s had that chance before.” Galen glanced at her, his face edged with flame. “I believe the Makers want her. They are stronger than she is.”

For a moment, in the silence, an owl hooted softly outside. Then Galen tugged a string of the green and black crystals from around his neck and began to wind them absently around his hand, something he only did when he was really troubled. “There is one thing in the vision that concerns me even more,” he said at last.

The Sekoi edged forward. “And me.”

Raffi had been dreading this. “You mean the thing in the Pit.”

“Yes. The thing writing in the dark room.”

They were silent. Even here the mention of the Pits of Maar chilled them. No one had ever gone into them and come back; whatever horrors Kest had begun were still there, in all his workrooms and laboratories, breeding and mutating out of control.

Tallis too looked grim. She got up and closed the door, and when she came back they saw she was an old woman again, her hands frail. Carefully she lowered herself into a wooden chair. Then she said, “Tell us what worries you, keeper. All secrets are safe here.”

Galen wrapped the beads around his fingers. Finally he said, “I’ve never told anyone this. Ten years ago, when he was dying, my master told me a great mystery. He told me that many who had been high in the Order had suspected something so terrible that they dared not record it; it had never been written down. It was based on an ancient lost text of Tamar’s, and on rumor, dark talk, the gabblings of a few, barely sane, who had claimed to have seen it in visions.”

“It?” the Sekoi breathed.

Galen looked away. When he spoke again his voice was harsh. “The rumors were that Kest had not tampered only with animals. His last experiment, they say, was on a man.”

Raffi stared. He felt the terror of the dream sweeping back over him; for a moment the Pit gaped under him and he felt himself falling into it, snapping his eyes open as the Sekoi hissed.

The room seemed much darker. Raffi was afraid now, wished Galen had never spoken of this. Fighting to stop trembling, he edged closer to the fire.

Tallis said, “I have never heard this. Could even Kest do something so monstrous?”

Galen took some time to answer. Finally he said, “Who knows. These are whispers and dreams. But if Kest had meddled, if he had taken a man and made something else out of him, something grotesque, a creature that could live long lifetimes, that had an evil intelligence greater than any animal’s, what an enemy that would be.”

“Living in the dark,” the Sekoi muttered. “Letting others do its work.” The creature’s fur was swollen around its neck; it looked tense and distant.

“Your people know about this?” Galen asked.

The Sekoi’s yellow eyes blinked. It put its cup down slowly as if choosing what to say. “There is a name,” it said, “in the darkest of our stories. A being. Not a man, not Sekoi, not a beast. A creature of evil. Immortal, too hideous to look on. We call it the Margrave.”

The fire crackled, splitting a log in a shower of sparks. The Guardian tapped the chair arm. “If you feel able, Raffi, can you tell us more about what you saw? Was it a man?”

“I don’t know.” He couldn’t, he didn’t want to think of it clearly; the memory dodged away, was a cold terror. His hands shook and she noticed and put her own over them. “Don’t be afraid, not here.”

He looked up at her. “I think . . . it had been a man. The shape of the face was too long . . . I didn’t see it properly.”

“If you had, you would not be speaking.” She turned to Galen. “You think he saw this thing?”

“I think the Makers are warning us,” he said bleakly. “We’ve always wondered at the Watch, how it grew so fast, how it defeated us, and all the time none of us knew where it came from. If this is the mind that rules the Watch, then it’s still the legacy of Kest . . .”

No one answered. Galen rubbed his face wearily. It was the Sekoi who stirred, kneeling suddenly and piling new logs on the fire, so the dry wood crackled cheerfully. “None of this concerns us now,” it said firmly. “We have to find this girl-cub. And I suppose you’re right about Carys, keeper, though you know I have doubts about her. How will we send to her? Shall I go?”

Galen glanced back, his eyes black and sharp. “Thank you, but no. I’ll tell her. The Crow will tell her.” Tallis was watching him, intent. He smiled, and at once the sense of weariness among them broke; Raffi almost felt the warmth creep back into the room. Until the keeper said, “We leave tomorrow.”

The Sekoi looked doubtfully at Raffi. “Will he be ready?”

“He’ll have to be.” Galen turned to Tallis. “It’s been good to live in this place. Even though we have to leave it, it cheers me to know it’s still here.”

The Guardian smiled at him. “For those who hold the faith, keeper, it will always be here.”

STANDING ON THE WET LAWNS in the morning, looking back at the house, Raffi knew what she meant. He thought that Artelan’s Well had put something in him that hadn’t been there before, something so deep he could hardly feel it. But it was there, a small hard gem at the center of him. He touched it with his sore mind. It was no use wishing they could stay; it would be too hurtful even to think of that.

Before them the wicker walkway stretched into mist; beyond it the Unfinished Lands steamed and hissed. Tallis kissed each one of them and stood back, her arms at her sides.

“May Flain go with you. May Tamar be at your back and Soren smooth your way. And when you find her, bring the child to us. For anything the Watch can do, we can undo.”

Bleakly Galen nodded. Then he turned and led them into the fog.