Clearwater Dawn (5 page)

In the shadow that spread from where the evenlamp shone behind him, his eyes caught a subtle change of contrast on the corridor stones. Barely visible, even to him, so that he hadn’t noticed it with the light facing him before.

Running from the door where he stood, heading southward along the route he’d been about to take, he saw a regular alternating pattern. Bare footprints, spaced at a walking pace. Smaller than his foot by a half-hand where he crouched to inspect them, low to the corridor floor. Breathing gently on the stone, he saw one outline take sharper shape, the moisture of his breath chilling just slightly on matte-finished marble, highlighting the trace marks that bare skin left behind.

The leather of the shoes she’d gone without would have been nearly silent, he thought, but leather could slip if one found the need to run on the well-soaped Bastion floors. Barefoot on stone gave the best balance of silence and speed.

As he slowly followed, he saw that she was walking, not running. Careful steps, high on the ball of the foot, trying for silence like those who didn’t know how to walk silently did. No one with her, no other footprints alongside or following except his own.

Then halfway along the corridor, the tracks stopped. He marked where she’d turned to the left, stood to face the blank expanse of wall there between the doors of the younger princess and the twins. Beyond that point, nothing.

Chriani carefully fished his mother’s pick from his sleeve. Along the smooth plaster of the wall, moldings of dark oak were spaced at regular intervals, the steel spike scraping carefully along the two seams to both sides of where the footprints vanished. No gap there that he could see.

Along the floor, though, he felt the slender steel point slip into a narrow depression. A space within the wall itself, accessed through the hair’s-breadth gap between baseboard and floor.

It took him precious moments to find the catch, three times fishing in that narrow space with three different picks before he felt the wire, pushed it carefully to one side, then the other. There was a faint click that he only heard because his ear was to the wall, no outward sign of what he’d done. But where he pushed with effort, a body-wide section of lath and plaster pivoted, one section of molding on the door where it swung out, the other hiding the seam on the opposite side. Something pushed back on it, a counterweight hidden, shifting silently. In the faint light of the corridor behind him, a narrow stone staircase climbed a circular shaft.

Chriani felt a chill trace through him where he saw the footprints continue up the first half-dozen steps before they twisted off into shadow above. A secret staircase, not uncommon in the Bastion, but this was the first he’d found on his own. A thing to be smugly proud of under other circumstances.

Except that the princess was missing, and Chriani knew where those stairs led. His mood was as far from smug as it had ever been.

Where the alarm had echoed from the stones, sudden silence fell, the last set of three strikes fading against the undercurrent of distant sound, rising now. Konaugo, as captain of the watch, would have arrived at the staging ground outside, would be giving orders. Chriani heard shouts from the distant great hall, listened for Barien, hoped for the familiar bark of the warrior’s voice, but the echo in his mind was the only place it came.

Stay with her…

He shook his head to clear it. Behind him, the door swung shut with a faint click and a hiss of trapped air. Ahead, Chriani moved in silence, not looking back as he climbed.

—
Chapter 2 —

WITH THE DOOR CLOSED, there was no detail in the gloom for even Chriani’s eyes to pick out as he went, but he counted on the fact that those eyes saw better than all but a handful of the others in the Bastion. People with a secret, like him. He’d see the light of anyone above him long before they saw or heard him, he knew, but all the same, he felt the chill of fear again.

He was ascending to the prince’s tower. He slowed his breathing, faster than it should have been.

He’d never been to the tower before. Had never known anyone who’d ascended to the three stories above the prince’s private chambers, the secret spaces where not even Barien and the other guards went. The tower was the domain of Chanist’s court wizards and healers, it was said — their laboratories and libraries and sanctums there. This much all the garrison knew, but beyond that bare fact were only rumors, of which even the least disturbing were disturbing enough.

Chriani moved carefully, feeling his way along the rough stone of the wall for a count of fifty-five steps from the bottom. He’d expected doors at any of the floors he must have passed, but there was nothing until he heard the end of the stairwell ahead before he felt it. The faint echo of his breathing came back to him as he approached a blank wall, took a moment to find the catch from this side, the same mechanism as the hallway below.

He listened carefully before he pushed through into the middle of a silent corridor. To both sides, he saw the telltale glimmer of evenlamps, but their light was shaded by the endless ranks of shelves that distracted his eye, cost him a moment to get his bearings. He was on the uppermost level, that much was sure. No windows here from which to spy the city or the stars, but the corridor looked to be a perfect reflection of the prince’s court below, running mostly north to south, hard turns west at either end. But where the corridors of the prince’s court were almost unnaturally pristine in their emptiness, these tower corridors held an uncountable mass of books and scrolls. Shelves lined the walls to both sides, barely enough room for two people to pass between them in spots. Even quieter here than it was below.

No guards patrolled here, he knew. In the rumors that spilled from the tower like rain off the Bastion’s slate roof, it was said that no guards needed to. They’d caught a pair of tyros in the tower once, not quite two years before. The pair of them had been just past beardless, and apparently deciding that breaking into one of the secret libraries of the prince’s mages would be a faster path to glory than completing the pledge of service they’d signed.

Where Prince High Chanist avoided the excess of wealth and trappings that could easily have come with the title, it was known that he did have a passion for antiquities, spell-touched and otherwise. Books and scrolls predating the history of the Ilmar filled his vaults, it was said. Volumes of lore that had come from the Imperial capital of Ulannor Mor itself before the end.

The pair were caught easily enough. And though Chriani knew as well as they how harsh a punishment Chanist could have been meted out for their treason, the prince had simply sent the two scurrying out through the gates at dawn, in full view of the garrison and the residents of the keep and the gathering crowd in the market court. The job that the sorcerous wards of the tower had done to them was deemed punishment enough, it seemed, as well as acting as the more-important deterrent for the next troupe of fools who might think to try the same game.

Their hair might have grown back by now, Chriani thought. If it ever grew back at all.

He closed his eyes, made the moonsign. Slowly, he pressed to the floor, heard no sound. But where he looked, he saw the footsteps again, just beside him. Closer together where she’d stopped at the head of the stairs as he had, listening. Then she was moving again, Chriani following to the corridor’s end and westward as it turned along the tower’s north flank. Between the shelves on both sides, uniform ranks of blank doors were mercifully shut, Chriani glancing behind him at regular intervals, but there was no sign that he was anything but alone.

And then where the corridor turned south to again mimic the run of the prince’s court below, he saw the footsteps slow. Ahead, the corner opened to a wide side-hall whose shadows cloaked a sealed set of dark iron doors. The footsteps approached, ended there.

He felt his mind pull at the image he wished he hadn’t recalled, the two tyros charred black from head to foot. Shocked and deafened, hairless and naked where they ran like rabbits from the courtyard, the shadows of eyebrows and scant beards seared into their skin like clown’s paint.

In the light that spilled into the side-hall from behind him, his silhouette was a deeper shadow against the blank lines of the portal, unbroken except for a single keyhole. He approached especially slowly, made the moonsign again, knew that it wouldn’t do any good. Without getting anywhere close to touching, he sighted through the keyhole, saw light on the other side.

He’d picked a dweomer-trapped lock once. Only once, a child’s device. Barien had set him to it, a key-locked notebook sent by some Elalantar half-cousin, a gift to Lauresa that the warrior had managed to intercept and bring to his quarters one night. Just for practice, he’d said. Chriani had missed on the first attempt and felt a pulse of stinging force slam up through his arm and turn all his fingers blue. Barien’s laughter had helped him find his focus to succeed on the second try, but he’d had to wear gloves for a week.

He brought the picks out, felt for calm. Like before, he made his way within the lock by touch, feeling the same mechanism as on Lauresa’s door and all the others. A security oversight that he was certain the prince high wasn’t aware of. Someone should mention it to him, he thought numbly.

He heard the echo of Barien’s laughter in his memory again, didn’t know why it chilled him suddenly.

He couldn’t make the moonsign but he thought it furiously as he twisted the picks and pushed. He heard the faint click, felt the door press in just slightly under the weight of his fingers. And then, with a rush of cold insight, Chriani realized that though he’d been assuming so far that it was Lauresa beyond the door, he had precious little real reason to think that. The princess had gone missing from her chamber, then someone had gone barefoot from that chamber to the tower in the dead of night, but there were a hundred explanations that could tie those two things together, few of them optimistic.

He wished for his bow as he drew the shortsword silently, clumsily, no time to adjust the scabbard that was still clubbing at him with every step. Even after as many years as he’d tried, Barien had never succeeded in making Chriani anywhere near as dangerous in close combat as he was on the archery range. Watching the grizzled veteran on the training grounds had taught Chriani how to at least look menacing, though, and he went for that as he kicked through the door. Part of him wanted the element of surprise, part of him fearing whatever power the dark iron might still have in it, hoping that the leather of his boots would at least dull the pain.

But where he stormed in, there was nothing but the metal-echo slam of the door against the stone wall behind it, louder than he would have wanted if he ever tried that particular maneuver again. In three glances, Chriani took in the scene before him, two arms to the chamber, angled to each side around the doorway that opened up where they met. To the left, some kind of council table, black wood somehow even darker than the night outside the windows that framed it, no one there. To the right, a scriptorium of some sort, shelves stacked high with bound volumes and scrolls. No, a map room. Charts hanging from the walls to match several spread on another table, this one tall for standing, no chairs to flank it.

The Princess Lauresa was on the far side of that table, turned to him. Her too-familiar face caught the light of a single candle burning there, a flicker of fear and surprise in her expression that melted to anger in a single fleeting instant.

“How dare you?”

Chriani blinked. Nodded to her because he realized he’d forgotten to.

“Highness…”

“Speak when your words are requested,” she hissed. “If this brash entrance is precursor to assault in a stolen uniform of my father’s guard, give me the name of your next of kin and do your very best.” In her hand, a dagger flashed suddenly, Chriani not seeing it before. “Otherwise, look to that insignia you wear and remind yourself whom you take your orders from.”

She didn’t recognize him.

Three years since she’d last spoken to him, four years before that when they’d spent almost every day at each other’s side. But in the princess’s tone now, there was an imperiousness that he didn’t think he’d ever heard before. Not in her, at any rate. The stepmother’s voice, he thought, but the princess seemed to have little difficulty wearing it.

“Highness, you have my apologies…”

“I do not recall asking for apology, tyro.” She took two steps toward him, the dagger up in a two-handed posture, defensive, her eyes locked to his. She was in blue, he saw, a simple robe belted at the waist, dropping down to bare feet. Her hair was tied in two strands, hanging almost to the small of her back. At her throat, a pendant of lapis hung from gold chain.

“I was sent to watch you. Barien ordered…”

“Leave this chamber on the instant and I might see fit to keep this insubordination to myself.”

And even against the chill in her voice, Chriani found himself locked to her gaze. Hoping to find some sense of the past in those eyes, he realized. Some hint that she still knew him, even through the anger. A thing he hadn’t felt for so long now.

Instead, he saw the tip of the blade, dead steady. He felt his own anger twist deep in his gut, tried to fight it but already knew it was too late.