Whisper of Waves

61

23 Eleasias, the Year of the Wave (1364 DR)

BERRYWILDE

She didn’t like to move around when the voices started. If she did, they might see her, and though she didn’t know what they might do, didn’t know if they could even do anything at all, she was afraid.

Phyrea didn’t like being afraid. It felt weak. If felt bad.

The night air was full of sounds. Crickets chirped and the wind rustled leaves. People were speaking in empty rooms. Someone was crying-a woman. She tried but couldn’t count how many there were. One moment there was nothing, no sound at all, then the next it was as if a party was going on in the next room.

She didn’t want to sleep on the sofa in the library, but there were half a dozen rooms between there and her bedchamber, and the voices came from at least one, so Phyrea waited. She sat on the very edge of the stiff leather couch, her feet flat on the floor. She was cold, and she shivered, though the late summer air was very warm.

The voices quieted, but the woman was still crying. Phyrea wiped a tear from her own cheek and thought, Stop crying. Stop crying.

She imagined that the woman’s baby had died. She held the limp form, heavier in death than in life, cradled in her quivering arms. The sobs tore at her body and ripped her spirit from her. Her mouth twisted sideways and would not close. Her face tensed with the rest of her body and she couldn’t open her eyes. Why did it have to happen? Why did her baby have to die? The fever wasn’t that bad. He had nursed that afternoon, but by nightfall he’d fallen into a sleep she couldn’t wake him from-a sleep he would never wake from. After he drew his last breath, she held hers as long as she could, perhaps hoping she could die with him. If they died together it would be as if nothing bad had happened at all, but soon she drew in a breath and knew that she was alive and he was dead, and that was when she started to cry.

The crying stopped, and Phyrea stood up so fast her head spun and she almost fainted. She closed her eyes, wiped away another tear, and just stood there for a moment while her head cleared. Her baby didn’t die. She never had a baby.

She took a candle from a candelabra and left the library with it. Wax dripped onto her finger but she ignored it. It wasn’t that hot. There were no voices in the next room. She kept her eyes on her feet as she walked, in case there was something she didn’t want to see.

She crossed the first room telling herself she wasn’t the mother of a dead baby.

She crossed the second room imagining the feeling of the red-haired man’s skin. It would be firm but soft. It would thrill at her touch.

She crossed the third room wondering if she would ever go back to the city again.

She crossed the fourth room wondering if the man with red hair would take her back to Innarlith or stay with her at Berrywilde, whiling away the days in bed, bathing together, making love on the floor. At night he would hold her while the ghosts moaned and wailed and they would never be able to scare her again.

She crossed the fifth room, the room right before her bedchamber, but only halfway before she saw the man and stopped.

He sat on a chair at the little table where she often ate in the morning and where she had tea late at night before the voices made her reluctant to go from the kitchen to her room in the dark. The man was old, withered with age, his shoulders stooped and sagged as if even sitting there he labored under a crushing weight.

Phyrea let the breath she was holding out through her open mouth, not making the slightest sound.

She didn’t want to look at the man. The candle shook in her hand and wax dappled the floor at her feet. A drop hit the top of her little toe and made her hiss. The man looked up at the sound. He looked directly at her.

Their eyes met and he was the most terrifying thing and the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She could see the lines of the chair, the corner, the pattern on the little rug on the floor beneath him-all that through his body. He was not made of flesh and blood but of a blue-violet light. His body, his face, and his eyes all formed of starlight.

Phyrea tried to hold her breath but couldn’t. She panted. The man didn’t speak, but she had the strong impression that he wanted to. He’d appeared for some reason, hadn’t he? He’d crossed the gulf from death to life-why? To tell her something?

She didn’t want him to speak. She was afraid not of what he would say but of what his voice would sound like. What would a man made of starlight and a will that resisted death itself sound like?

Then she noticed the scar on his cheek. It was in the shape of a z, uneven and angry. She’d seen that scar before, on one of the portraits. What surprised her most was that she’d remembered. She didn’t think she’d studied any of the old paintings in sufficient detail to match a scar from one to the scar on a ghost’s face, but there it was.

The man nodded then. He knew she saw the scar, knew she remembered his portrait, but how?

The man faded away, leaving an empty chair. There were no more sounds, no crying and carrying on.

Phyrea could have taken four steps and been in her bedchamber. She could have gone quietly to sleep and forgotten all of it by morning.

Instead, she turned and went back the way she came. She walked with purpose, her steps assured and steady, her hand no longer shaking, the wax no longer burning her. She had come to know the house so well that she found the room in the dark and didn’t even hesitate for the slightest moment until she stood looking up at the portrait of the man with the scar on his face.

The room was one of a dozen dining rooms. The long, wide table had been covered in thin canvas, the chairs draped in linen shawls. She’d told the staff, before she dismissed them, that she had no intention of entertaining.

Candles sat waiting in an elaborate gilded stand on a sideboard. She lit them with the candle in her hand, then blew it out and dropped it on the floor. The portrait hung on a wall richly paneled in dark wood. Phyrea reached up and took hold of the framed canvas in both hands. She lifted the picture up and away from the wall. It was heavy and she nearly dropped it on her bare feet, but managed to stagger back and lower it gently to the floor. She leaned it against the sideboard then pushed the candles closer to the wall.

Why am I doing this? she asked herself. What am I looking for?

She had practice finding secret doors. She was a thief after all, and in the Second Quarter everything worth taking was worth hiding in a secret place. Phyrea knew what to look for; she just didn’t know why she was looking for it.

There it was-a hairline crack in the paneling, played in along the grain.

She felt along the edges and imagined she could feel cool air blowing from inside. She pressed where her instincts told her to press, but nothing happened, so she pressed in other places, then ran a fingernail along the line of the seam.

That went on for a very long time, and Phyrea shifted her weight on the sideboard many times, climbed down and stretched even, looked at it from a distance, and from so close the tip of her nose touched the wood wall.

When the door popped open she breathed a sigh of relief as if she had finished something, as if just opening the door was what she’d come there to do, but it was just the beginning.

It didn’t creak or make any noise at all when it swung open, though Phyrea imagined it had been closed for decades at least. Her father had never mentioned anything about secret passages, and he wasn’t the type to have them put in or to use them. He didn’t like people sneaking around.

Behind the hidden panel was a space no bigger than a cupboard. The walls inside were rough brick, mortared in that messy, unfinished way that implied the mason didn’t expect anyone to see his handiwork. A wooden ladder was bolted to the far wall and descended into utter blackness.

Am I really going to do this? Phyrea asked herself. The words formed clearly in her mind, as clear as if she’d spoken them aloud.

She took a deep breath and held it, staring at the ladder, then exhaled slowly through her nose. Taking a candle from the sideboard, she leaned forward and stuck her head into the dark space. She looked down, but the meager candlelight only showed more ladder. She couldn’t see the bottom.

Still holding the candle in one hand, she crawled into the space and tested the ladder with her foot. It held, seemed strong, and she was light, especially dressed in a simple silk nightshirt. She didn’t stop to think. If she had, she would have realized at least that she was unarmed and might have done something about that. Instead, she started climbing down the ladder.

After a dozen rungs she started to imagine that the ladder had no end, that she’d lowered herself into some bottomless pit and would climb down forever and ever. She didn’t bother looking down. Her arms hurt, but she continued to descend.

Her bare foot touched stone, and Phyrea was almost disappointed that the ladder hadn’t gone on forever. She guessed she was thirty feet below ground.

She was in a crypt.

The candlelight was all she needed to see the confines of the small space, maybe fifteen feet square, the ceiling only inches from the top of her head. In the center of the room was a knee-high stone slab, and on the slab was a casket. The workmanship was fine, the wood heavy and the hardware gleaming gold, sparkling in the flickering light of her candle.

The man made of light stood over the casket, looking down.

Phyrea’s blood went cold, and she started to shake again, which made the candlelight dance and jitter, sending crazy shadows dancing through the crypt.

The man looked so sad. He wanted her to open it. She stepped forward, and he disappeared.

Phyrea had trusted her interpretation of the ghost’s desires enough to find the secret door and climb down the ladder in the pitch dark. She’d stopped thinking some time ago, actually. She was doing what she thought she was supposed to do, and her mind couldn’t begin to function on any sort of analytical level.

She stepped to the casket on the spot where the man made of starlight had stood. She tried the lid with one hand, holding the candle above her. To her surprise-and no small dread-the lid opened easily. She grimaced and winced at the sight of the skeleton that lay there, wrapped in the dried, worm-eaten silk of its burial shroud. It was some distant ancestor of hers. It might have been a great uncle or great grandfather, and she didn’t even know his name.

The corpse wore no jewelry and the coffin bore no inscription, but lying along the length of the desiccated corpse was a sword.

Phyrea gasped when her eyes finally took it in. The scabbard was pure gold, intricately engraved with serpentine dragons that appeared to writhe in the flickering candlelight. The hilt was gold as well, the handle wrapped in black leather that had been worked with the same dancing dragons. A magnificent cluster of sapphires capped the pommel.

She picked up the sword, amazed by how light it was. The gold alone should have weighed twice as much or more. She kneeled and dripped a little wax on the dusty stone floor then set the candle down, careful not to let her silk nightshirt fall into the flame.

Phyrea drew the sword and had to gasp again. The blade glowed in the dark crypt with a light of its own. The metal looked like platinum, but Phyrea thought it might have been adamantite. The blade itself was beautiful, wavy and graceful. She didn’t know the word for it. Was it a falchion?

She looked down at her long-dead relative one more time then closed the casket.

He’d wanted her to find the sword. She didn’t know why.

The climb up the ladder was difficult holding both the candle and the sword, but in time she made it back up, closed the secret door behind her, and replaced the painting. She carried the sword cradled in her arms like a baby back to her bedchamber. She didn’t see the ghost of the man with the scar on his cheek again that night and slept with the scabbarded sword in the bed with her.

Her dreams were of the red-haired man, holes in the ground, explosions, and blood on a wavy blade of glowing adamantite.