Labyrinth Gate (23 page)

She rose after a moment and went to stand near him. “I have long known, Colonel,” she said in a slow, husky tone, “how you wish to be of service to me.”

“Your highness,” he said profoundly, and offered her a deep bow. “It is my greatest desire.”

“First, you will assign three of your most trustworthy men to report to me all the movements of Lord Felton. I suspect his lordship of certain—indiscretions.”

He inclined his head but showed no emotion at this charge.

“Good,” she said. “You, with the rest of your troop, will ride north. I must be apprised of certain activities that may be a danger to my person. And if you complete both these charges successfully—” She rested a hand on the sleeve of his military coat, letting her voice trail off.

“Your highness.” He dropped to one knee. “I pledge to serve you, with my life if need be.”

She smiled. “Don’t be careless of your pledges, Colonel. Sometimes the full price must be paid.” But she took him by the hand and raised him up. “Let us hope you find the reward worthwhile.”

For a moment he forgot himself, and let his eyes wander over the curve of her figure.

She chuckled, and he dropped his gaze quickly. “I have great faith in your desires, Colonel. Now go, and report back to me when you are ready to leave. I will give you further instructions then.”

He bowed and left.

She stood motionless for a long while. The colonel occupied her thoughts for only a brief moment: he was a pawn, to be used and discarded for what gain he could bring her—and she had no doubt that she would find him useful. He was a man of little imagination and great ego. He would serve to fuel her magic; that was enough. Lord Felton concerned her more. Immune to the lure of gold or flesh, he might well prove the greatest barrier to her plans. Silent and pensive, she rang at last for one of her waiting women.

“Bring my cards to me,” she said when the woman arrived. “I will be on the balcony.”

She simply held the cards for a time after they were brought to her. At last she set them down on the little sidetable that was the only furniture on the balcony. The summer sun bathed the cards in its mellow afternoon light as she regarded them, flipping through them one by one. She stopped finally when she reached The Heiress.

“Yes.” An expression of great satisfaction crossed her face. The card was brown at the edges, as if it were deteriorating slowly, and a trace of the decay also showed at the very center. “It progresses well, indeed,” she muttered, and laid the card on the table. The Heiress, young and clear-faced, gazed into a mirror, seeing the clarity of her face reflected within. And in the reflection, so that one knew it stood on the wall behind her, arched a latticework on which climbed a thick-leafed, blooming briar-rose.

C
HRYSE ROSE FROM THE
table at which she sat transcribing to greet her husband with a kiss. Above their heads, the canvas ceiling stirred, brought to life by a dusk breeze; the heavy material of the tent muffled the wind’s eerie call across the valley. The kiss prolonged, metamorphosing into an embrace.

“Would you put that thing down?” asked Chryse finally, shifting so that she could speak. “It’s incredibly uncomfortable.”

Sanjay chuckled and pulled away from her. He laid the sketchbook which had been pressing into her back down on the table and, as he removed his coat, examined the lined sheets of paper she had been working on. “Oboe?” he asked as he draped his coat over the back of her chair. “Are you composing?”

“Sanjay!” She picked up the coat. “Would you please hang this up? I get really tired of telling you.” She held it out.

For a moment he did nothing; finally he took it. “Don’t worry,” he said as he went to the makeshift wardrobe in which their clothing was stowed. “I get tired of you telling me too.”

There was a brief silence.

“Maybe we should change the subject,” said Chryse. “Yes, I am.” She sat down at the table and gazed pensively at the music sketched in on the staves. “You know I’ve been collecting the songs the workers sing, and it has been becoming increasingly clear to me that they fall into three categories: rhythmic work songs, the kind of thing that helps pass the time in tedious labor—here—” She shuffled the papers and brought out a sheaf with dark notes scrawled across the page, small words written around and underneath the stave, “and what we would call folk songs in general—”

“Is that two categories?” He stood now with his hands on her shoulders, leaning to gaze over her head at her work.

“No, that’s the first one. Work songs and folk songs and sad romances set to music. All very familiar in content and style. The second category is hymns—A Mighty Fortress, high-church stuff, you know the thing.”

“Well, actually, I don’t, but I’ll take your word for it.”

Chryse turned her head enough to make a face at him, but immediately rummaged back through the papers to withdraw four sheets of manuscript paper that were starred at the top: “And then there’s this.” She held up the sheets, shaking them as if their presence in the air was explanation enough. “It doesn’t match anything I’m familiar with—and god knows I had every survey course the university offered.”

“Yes,” said Sanjay, musing. “You used to say you were looking for something.”

A perplexed look crossed her face. “I did, didn’t I?” she murmured. “Because, Sanjay, I think I’ve found it.” She spread the four sheets out before her, a few lines of sparse notes, a few words penciled in below. “Fragments, that’s all I get. These two were being hummed by two of the laborers. One of them said it was just aimless humming, but look at this correspondence here—” she began to point.

“You know I can’t read music. Why don’t you sing it?”

“It’s so strange,” she said. “But exactly right for what it is. Now this, what he hummed—” She began to sing. She had a clear mezzo, carefully trained and quite precise. It was a peculiar little tune, never quite resolving into a definite cadence, but not quite meandering either. “And this,” she continued, “is what I heard one evening while I was out watching the stars.” She sang again, using a slightly different color in her voice. “Do you see the correspondence?” she asked when she had finished.

“Chryse, what do you mean, you heard it one evening?”

“Exactly that: as if some person, or some
thing,
were just over the next rise. Maybe it was an echo. Or a ghost. Not quite a voice, but not any instrument I’ve ever heard, either.”

“Have you seen anything strange here?” he asked suddenly, moving to sit in the other chair.

She shrugged. “Other than that it’s a strange place—no.” She looked up abruptly from her paper to examine him carefully. “I suppose you have.” It wasn’t a question.

He nodded, looking a little sheepish. “Not anything I could really explain or even describe to you, but other—” He opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Other presences.”

She rubbed the end of her pen along one corner of her mouth. “It strikes me that we’re not much surprised by things anymore.” Not waiting for an answer, she went on. “This third one—another little song, but with nonsense syllables. The woman singing it said it was, and I quote—” She read from a note penned at the bottom of the sheet. “‘A song to keep the demons away, miss, me grandpap were a witch and knew such things.’ And this fourth one—it had lyrics—half nonsense and half a fragmented tale of two lovers, a hunt, and a murder—not exactly a murder—a sacrifice, perhaps. The man who sang it said it’s an old song passed down in his village, which is the nearest habitation to this place, for what that’s worth. His grandfather had it from a wandering sorcerer, who had it from who knows where, and he said it’s a powerful charm.” She frowned suddenly.

“What are you thinking?”

“Don’t laugh at me, love.” She stopped, grinned self-consciously. “As if you would, being where we are.” She traced a finger across the notes. “I don’t think it’s human music. It’s really caught me—it’s almost as if I’m compelled to compose, using—not any one of those tunes, really, but—” In the yellow glow of the lanterns hung from the crosspiece of the tent, her face held an intent, serious concentration. “It’s all an organic piece, like a circle, or—or a long series of spirals. It doesn’t really have an end or a beginning.”

“Sing it for me,” he said, taking her hand in his.

“No.” She shook her head, withdrawing the hand. “I can’t. I don’t dare. Not until it’s finished. It’s too strong. I think it’s going to be a symphony, but I don’t have any control over it at all.” She grimaced, with a swift, determined movement sweeping the papers into a neat stack. “What have you done today?” she asked in a totally different voice, brisk and curious.

“Funny you should mention spirals.” He opened his sketchbook. Page after page of beautiful, precise illustrations revealed themselves as he flipped through the volume. Half-ruined walls rising from earth, graced by faint traceries in the stone and the rumpled form of a sweating laborer with a pick-ax; a delicate flower, detailed even to the finest suggestion of texture; a three-story building of a slightly alien cast traced over a sketch of rubble, the construction of his artist’s imagination.

“This is my favorite.” Chryse stopped him for a moment. It was a sketch of Maretha, gazing intently at a low wall of undecipherable writing, one hand busy copying the shapes into a small notebook; behind her, hiding in a tumble of stones, one could see Mog and the recovered Pin, like two guardian cherubs, and much farther, on a distant rise, the sinister figure of a black-garbed man on horseback. “It will go down in history as Professor Farr the younger at her first major discovery. Maybe you should render scenes from Maretha’s life to parallel those saint’s tapestries of her namesake. I wonder why she never went to university?”

“Money, I expect. I don’t suppose they have scholarships. And I don’t suppose her father could have spared her from his work.”

“You sound a little cynical.”

“I think she’s put upon—at the beck and call of one self-absorbed man after the next.”

She cocked her head to one side, examining him with a speculative gaze. “That’s harsh, coming from you. You’re usually so tolerant.”

“Self-absorbed in different ways, but alike in their absorption, in their willingness to use others to gain their own ends. Although personally, I think the professor is the more selfish man.”

“Than the earl? What about the murdered infants?”

He considered, thoughtful. “It seems to me that blood would show.”

“That’s a cryptic statement.”

He shrugged. “Here. I went back to the south ridge today. Maretha asked me to do some sketches of the entire site. Since that tentative identification of the central area of the city, she wants to get a larger view, to see how what we’ve uncovered fits into the overall pattern.”

“Sanjay.” Chryse leaned forward, lips pressed tight, staring at the sketch in front of her. It covered both pages. “That’s not what it looks like.”

He smiled. “No. The sketches of what it looks like follow. This is my
impression.”

The lay of the ground was fairly exact in the sketch, but over it he had superimposed a series of concentric rings, like the ripples thrown out by a stone dropped into a calm pool, that bled a pattern onto the stone remains of the city. “Compare this,” he said, flipping back and forth between this sketch and the next one, a more formal and exact rendering of the valley and ruins, and the haphazard digging that dotted the area. “Circles, yes, causing the ruins to fall into a form that has shape, but not exact circles. You see by this slope, the bend of the curve that I perceive here, that in fact it forms a spiral.”

“And, in fact, a spiral centered precisely on that area where Maretha has had Thomas assign the largest number of laborers this past week.”

“Exactly,” said Sanjay. “She had a great argument with her father this morning over it. He wants to put most of the workers on that building we’re uncovering up on the western ridge.”

Chryse smiled slightly. “What is it he calls it? ‘The Evening Palace of the Great Sovereign.’ It sounds so grandiose. How does he even know it’s a palace?”

“I suppose one gets an instinct for things like that—sees patterns, correspondences—”

“Like you do?” She shook her head. “I’m afraid that I believe the professor’s instincts only go so far. I was up there about three days ago helping Maretha look over the walls for glyphs and frescos for her catalog. It could be a police station as far as I’m concerned. It’s in a perfect position for observations of the rest of the city, plus the forest north and both lakes.”

Sanjay shrugged, flipping forward another page to a sketch detailing the distant structure. “Well, evidently the professor believes it’s the endpoint of the procession—”

“Procession?”

“Didn’t you read his monograph on—you know, his interpretation of the frescos from Mantion and Eppot-Staw. The ritual procession of the great sacrifice, in which a young virgin priestess of the ancient goddess, or the Daughter, as they’d say now, is led to a sacred place and killed, for her—I suppose her life force—to enter and strengthen the power of the city itself.”

“Like Persephone dragged down to Hades?” Chryse asked.

“More a fertility ritual, I think. Death and rebirth.”

“Well, she married the King of the Dead, didn’t she? And spent half the year underground.”

“Maybe I was thinking more of Kali. You Westerners are so genteel.” He laughed as Chryse rolled her eyes. “In any case, that monograph got the earl interested in the professor in the first place.”

Chryse made a face of disgust. “Men always slaver over the thought of a nubile virgin, female of course, being sacrificed, as if it were some sort of sexual ritual as well.”

“Isn’t it?” He grinned and, pulling his chair closer to her, let a hand caress her waist. “Don’t women slaver over the thought of nubile young men?”

“Like our angel Lucias?” She laughed. “Of course we do.” She leaned forward to kiss him; her arms slid around him, pressing him close, his coat opening so that only the light cloth of his shirt and her gown separated their skin. “But this sacrifice business is nonsense—men are much more use to us alive.”