The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) (45 page)

Time passed. The torch burned lower. It would have to be replaced soon. His thirst increased and his legs grew weary from standing, but he dared not relax them. His wrists were no better than meat-wrapped bone. The panic welled in him again, and the fear for the others. Was Madra in another cell like this? Maybe she was enjoying the attentions of her jailers.

The thought made him twist in his chains, heedless of the pain. He shouted and screamed, the damp air scraping his arid throat, and finally he fell silent.

Hours passed. The torch guttered, sank, and finally went out, leaving him in impenetrable blackness. A whimper crept unbidden out of his throat, and he turned it into a snarl.

Eventually there was a rattle at the door, and a key turned in the lock. His heart jumped. He heard the door swish open through the straw, and then there was a glimmer of light, a low spill dancing in someone’s hand. It shed a yellow glow of illumination that revealed fingers, a dark sleeve and a hood with the face shadowed.

The door swung shut again.

The spill was set in a niche to one side, and the monk-like figure approached him. Despite himself, he shrank against the wall.

The hood was thrown back and he was looking at Jinneth, her face a maze of shadow and light, black darkness and yellow flame; two diamond brilliances shone in her earlobes.

She came forward until her robe touched his chest, and her face tilted up to his.

‘Greetings, Michael Riven,’ she murmured, her voice a silken touch in the low light. ‘I told you we would meet again. How do you find your new lodgings?’

Words crammed his mouth like a logjam. His breath clicked in his throat. He felt painful tears ooze out of his blood-covered eyes and streak his cheeks. This had been a face he loved, one he had never thought to see again. And here it was with the flame playing on it as though it were the glow of the peat in the bothy, looking at him with those eyes. And he had come to hate it.

‘You’re not my wife,’ he croaked, and he saw surprise widen her eyes for a second.

‘Indeed,’ she said, her voice as low as the beat of a swan’s wing. ‘I am no one’s wife now.’ Her voice sharpened dangerously. ‘You and your friends saw to that.’

‘Where are they? What have you done with them?’

She smiled. ‘They live yet, never fear.’ The smile broadened. ‘Is not irony a delicious thing? That I should flee you, only to have you delivered into the palm of my hand?’

‘Hilarious,’ he grated. Her nearness was dizzying him. He could sense the warmth of her under the thick robe, smell the perfume that rose from her throat.

‘Who are you?’ she asked him as she had once before. ‘Where do you come from?’

He stared at her for a long moment, remembering other expressions on that face, other things in those eyes. He heard laughter that had died at the foot of a mountain long ago.

‘I am Michael Riven, from Camasunary on the Isle of Skye, and I am a Teller of Tales,’ he said clearly. And he felt that by saying it, he had somehow committed himself to something. A course of action, perhaps. A certain conclusion. But he did not care. He knew who he was and what he did, and that was enough.

‘Strange names,’ Jinneth said softly. There was an odd brightness in her eyes. Her hand came up and he flinched, but it caressed the old scars on his forehead. Her face creased with puzzlement. Dried blood flaked off under her touch.

He bent his head, with his heart thundering in his ears, and at the familiar angle his lips met hers. She did not draw back. Her tongue dipped delicately at his. His broken lips bled against hers, and he tasted the blood in both their mouths. His chains clinked. He had leeway enough to bury one hand in the rich darkness of her hair, to run his fingers on the nape of her neck—and then she pulled away.

He could have wept with loss. For a moment, an instant only, he had been kissing his dead wife.

There was a hardness about her face that he had not seen before; a hint of cruelty. She smiled again, and became a stranger, an enemy. His grief was shunted aside by rising anger.

‘You bitch!’ he spat.

His blood ringed her lips. She looked like a vampire.

‘I wish to know more,’ she said. ‘I wish to know many things. I wish to know why you and your friends are here, where you are going. These things you will tell me.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘You will tell me, Teller of Tales. Or else the frowning girl who has accompanied you on your errand—and whom you care for, I think—will be lent to our Sellswords for a little while. We will see if the attentions of a dozen mercenaries cannot lift her frown.’

His fists clenched and unclenched helplessly in their chains. His eyes blazed, but he bit his mouth shut.

‘You are stubborn and you are proud. Not altogether bad qualities in a man, but hardly suitable in your present situation. I will let you think on it for a while in the dark. Reason often comes more quickly when one is left alone without distractions. For now, farewell.’ She curtsied to him as though he were a prince. Then the hood was thrown up again, the spill retrieved from its niche, and she left him with the darkness.

He heard no footsteps retreating after she had gone, and had noticed none approaching before she entered, so perhaps the heavy door blocked out sound. That was a small heartener. It meant he was not necessarily isolated from the others. They might be in the next cell, or down a corridor.

He slumped against the wall, his legs trembling with tiredness. What was she after? What could she hope to gain by this? Except revenge, of course. Maybe she believed him to be some sort of powerful wizard and hoped to harness him for her own ends.

But would a powerful wizard really have allowed himself to be captured so easily?

He moved his wrists in their chains, the iron slicing into his flesh. She would hurt Madra. No secret was worth that.

It was eerie. The woman who was his wife’s image would hurt the girl he had come to love after her. Punishment for adultery. His laughter barked harshly in the cell, bouncing off the walls.

And halted abruptly. There was another sound in the cell—a scraping of iron on stone. He stiffened, his eyes stabbing the blackness uselessly.

Then he smelt it. A whiff of smoke in the stagnant air. The pungence of Phrynius’s pipe.

Iron rattled in the corner, and there was a wheezing intake of breath. A voice cursed disgustedly. ‘Blasted sewer muck!’, and the straw rustled.

‘Phrynius!’ he exclaimed.

‘Shut your noise! By all that’s holy, I’m too damned old to be clambering about in storm drains, consorting with rats—even polite ones. A man of my station. What times these are!’

There was a breath of bad air on his face and a bony hand laid itself on his shoulder, making him jump.

‘Light. Just a moment.’

A glow began in the cell, a blue-white radiance. It was a piece of straw. The healer was holding it aloft, and it shone like a lantern. He eyed it critically, and then nodded.

‘Magic,’ Riven breathed. Absurdly, he felt like laughing.

‘Aye, magic.’ The healer’s eyes looked him up and down, and he sighed. ‘A pretty mess you are in. I heard the she-wolf’s visit.’

‘She’s been and gone.’

‘Indeed. So we have some time.’

‘Where are the others? Have you seen them? Are they all right?’

Phrynius raised a long finger to his lips, then he touched Riven’s manacles with the tip of the glowing straw. They fell from his wrists at once, clattering to the wall, and the old man winced. Riven sagged forward and fell to his knees.

‘No time for that!’ Phrynius snapped. ‘We have work to do, you and I. Places to go and people to see.’ He cackled briefly, seeming diabolical in the werelight of the straw. ‘Come.’ And he hauled Riven to his feet with astonishing strength.

‘Where are we?’ Riven demanded.

‘The Duke’s dungeons. I know them well.’ Phrynius cackled again. ‘He used to put me down here when his gout lingered too long, but always he had need of me again.’ His face grew petulant. ‘I don’t know why you needed me here. There is enough power in you to hoist yourself and your friends out of this scrape ten times over—if you could but use it.’ He glanced around at the stone walls. ‘This was my cell. There is water running in these hollow walls, over the ceiling and in the sewers beneath.’ He grinned. ‘It is a cell to contain magic, but no one needs magic to loosen a grating. The idiots. I never had the heart to tell them, but then they never put me here for long. A chastener, the Duke used to call it. And he would fill me with mulled wine and apologise afterwards. Nobility is a strange thing.’

‘The door,’ Riven said. ‘Can you open it?’

‘Oh no, my boy. Water in there too—and wards and spells. The Duke has magicians of his own, or had. No, not by the door are we going.’ And he twitched the straw light back towards the hole in the floor with the displaced grating.

‘The sewers,’ Riven said slowly. Phrynius nodded, his black eyes gleaming. ‘All the way back to my home. We could follow them, if they had not burnt it down.’

‘How did you get away?’

‘Their eyes did not see me. They are incurious things, soldiers. It took little effort on my part. You and your friends had given them such a battle that they were not inclined to stay longer. They torched my home, and left with your bodies trussed up in a wagon.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No matter,’ Phrynius said crisply. ‘I saved the most important of my books and a few other things are there yet, buried in iron. They’ll keep. For now, liberty is on my mind, for you and your friends. And for the two maids especially.’ His face darkened. ‘This is not a good place for them. There are worse things than death for women. So come along.’

He tugged Riven over to the corner and peered down into the gurgling depths of the drain.

‘I’ll never make it down there,’ Riven protested.

‘I think you will,’ the healer retorted, and promptly began lowering himself into the narrow hole, hissing and grimacing with effort. The last Riven saw of him was a clutch of bony fingers gripping the edge of the drain. Then they were gone, and there was a splash and a flurry of curses from below.

‘Come on. We haven’t all the time in the world to burn!’ The old man’s voice echoed out of the wet blackness.

Riven cursed as well. The hole was too narrow. But he lowered his legs through it nevertheless, his skinned wrists burning with effort. The edges of the hole caught at his pelvis, and then scraped at the flesh of his shoulders. He squirmed, terrified of getting stuck. His feet sank into chill water, and he wondered how deep it was. Then he could feel Phrynius’s hands fastening on his legs. Like a cork from a bottle, he came through the hole all at once and pitched down into werelit water with a phosphorescent splash of spray, bowling the healer over. But Phrynius surfaced an instant later with the glowing straw gripped between his teeth, streaming evil-smelling liquid.

‘Pah!’ he spat, taking the straw out of his mouth. ‘You are as clumsy as a pregnant cow, and as unaware of your potential. But there’s no time for that. Put the grating back, and let’s be on our way.’

Riven did as he was told, gagging at the smell of the dank air in the sewer. They were in an arched tunnel six feet high, the walls slimy with filth, and two feet of noisome water running through it. There was the odd plop of a wayfaring rat, but hardly any other sound. The current that tugged at his knees was sluggish and thick, and he shuddered at the thought of what it was doing to the open wounds that covered him.

He splashed down the sewer in Phrynius’s wake, following the bobbing light of the glowing straw. The arch of the roof grew lower as they continued and he found he had to stoop, though the old healer in front of him was still able to walk erect.

‘How far away are the others?’ he asked in a whisper, but the curved walls echoed back the sound grotesquely over the plash and gloop of the water.

‘Not far,’ Phrynius hissed back. ‘We go to meet friends first. Hold your noise. We are passing under the lower barracks.’

As if to prove his point, a torrent of liquid suddenly gushed down from an opening above them, and Riven had to leap aside to avoid it. He retched at the smell, and thought he saw Phrynius’s teeth shine in a grin.

‘That was a privy being emptied.’ Then he had turned away, and was leading him onwards again.

Riven saw other tunnels to his left and right as they continued. Some were as wide as roads, others low as culverts and almost choked with water or mud. There were areas of moonlight as they negotiated past gratings open to the sky, and other areas black as pitch where the crude bricks that formed the sewers had slumped and spilled outwards, leaving spaces barely big enough to crawl through. On the whole, the tunnels they followed grew narrower, lower, more full of water, and more frequented by rats. Riven felt instinctively that they were travelling deeper all the time, making their way to the bowels of the city above. He began to wonder how deep the sewers went.

At last they halted. The narrow way they had been following dipped sharply, the filthy water rising up to meet its low ceiling. There seemed to be no way forward. Phrynius, however, seemed pleased.

‘Nearly there,’ he said, with obvious satisfaction.

Riven frowned at him. ‘You mean—’