Hounds of God (12 page)

Alf shook his head and smiled. “Patience, patience, my
lord Bishop. When Alun is in his tomb and I have settled my affairs, then we
go.”

“Two days,” Jehan mused. “Three at most.
Good. I’ll be ready. And heaven help you if you try to leave without me!”

The light came back slowly. Infinitely slowly. Its focus was
dim, more suggestion than shape: vaulted arch, loop of chain, clustered shadow outlined
in flamelight. A lamp—lamps, set in a wheel of iron. But only one was
lit, the one directly overhead.

Anna blinked. She did not know that lamp. There was nothing
like it in any room she could have been sleeping in. But then she seldom woke
with hurts in so many places, with a throbbing in her head to match the
throbbing in her hands.

She raised one. It was stiff, swathed, bandaged. The sleeve
was indubitably her own, the tightness of her white linen camise, the embroidered
edging of her third-best cotte, gold on russet.

Her hand fell again to a clean rough sheet, a blanket she
did not recognize, heavy and well woven though not rich. There was a pallet
under her, a bare floor, a wall beside her of smooth pale stone. Four walls, a
heavy door—she did not know any of it.

Something stirred against her foot. She recoiled, knotting
against the angle of the wall.

It was only a hound. A white alaunt with ears more red than
brown, crouched at the foot of the pallet as Anna crouched at its head. A heavy
collar circled its neck, with a chain welded to it and welded again to a ring
in the wall. Even had the beast tried, it could not have reached Anna; the
chain was too short.

Anna’s heart slowed its pounding. She was not afraid
of a hound. This one was very beautiful.

It—she. A bitch, her teats swollen with milk, her
belly distended as if she were newly delivered of pups.

Beneath the sheltering body something moved, a tail, the
pink tip of a nose. Two half-blind, half-formless creatures, seeking each the
sustenance of a nipple. One was male, red-eared like its dam. The other,
female, was all silver-white. Or, no; pale, pale gold. The exact color of—

Anna snapped from her crouch. Bright witch-eyes gleamed
strangely in the beast-faces, Thea’s, Cynan’s, Liahan’s; Thea’s
temper snarled in the collared throat. Those fangs were deadly sharp; Anna’s
fingers remembered beneath the bandages.

Yet she dropped to her knees well within striking range and
gripped the collar. It was massive, all iron, and welded shut; though not
precisely choking-tight, it gave not an inch to Anna’s tugging. Her
fingers found evidence of Thea’s own futile efforts, fur worn and roughened,
the beginnings of a gall.

Anna could not breathe properly. She found herself at the door,
beating on it, gaining no response. It was bolted as solidly as a castle gate;
the grille above the level of her eyes looked out upon darkness. For a long
moment she dangled, clinging to the bars, biting back a howl. Then she dropped
and turned.

Thea had not moved. Her eyes held a glint of mockery.

Anna faced her again. “This is a joke,” she
said. “The Folk are playing pranks again. Morgiana—the things an
Assassin will laugh at, even a tame Assassin—”

Thea’s muzzle wrinkled. Anger, scorn, or both.

“It is a joke,” Anna persisted. “It can’t
be what it seems to be. We were in the tower, and Alun was falling hopelessly
in love with his own prophecy, and—”

A stab of pain brought her up short. This time Thea had not
broken flesh, only nipped it scathingly. Anna hit her.

Tried to. One could not hit air and fire. Even air and fire
in an iron collar, with ears pressed flat and fangs bared.

Very slowly Anna sank down, huddling into her skirts. She
was cold, and not only with the damp chill of stone untapestried and
uncarpeted, with neither hearth nor fire to warm her.

Anger was no help. She had been in the White Keep, warm and
glad, and now she was elsewhere. And Thea—Thea was a shape-changer, that
was her nature, the white gazehound her most beloved disguise; but not collared
and chained and in visible discomfort, perhaps even in pain, her children
transformed as was she, not after she had labored so long against her very
nature to bear them in their proper forms.

“Thea,” Anna said as steadily as she could, “Thea,
if this isn’t a joke or a game, you had better put an end to it. Your
babies are too young yet for shape-shifting.”

If Thea’s eyes had blazed before, now they blinded;
her snarl had risen to a roar. Anna caught her before she could lunge—stupid,
stupid; but her hands were tightly bound, protected.

At length Thea quieted. She crouched panting, trembling, her
short fur bristling.

Shakily Anna smoothed it. “You can’t,” she
translated.

She felt weak and dizzy. The Kindred were powerful,
invincible. Nothing could bind them, nothing compel them. Not prayers, not cold
iron, not any mortal prison. There was nothing they could not do.

Thea made a small bitter sound, half whine, half growl.

“But what? Who?
Why
?”

Thea could not answer. She could not even set her voice in
Anna’s mind; and that was worse than all the rest of it together.

Anna had never been a very womanly woman. In extremity, she
did not weep or storm or otherwise conduct herself as befit her sex. No; she
became very still, and she thought. Brooded, some might say, except that she
did not let revenge overwhelm her reason.

She returned to the relative comfort of the pallet, spread
the blanket over herself and her companions, and concentrated on staying warm,
still, and sane. It was cruelly hard. She kept seeing Alun falling and Thea
changing, melting and dwindling into a maddened beast.

Then darkness, and this. Whatever this might be.

At first she thought she had imagined it. A glimmer. A
humming. A tensing of the air.

She had no weapon, not even the little knife she used for
trimming pens. Thea’s head was up, ears pricked, a silent growl stirring
her throat.

Shadows shifted and took substance. Anna stared.

They remained: a bowl, two jars, a plate. The bowl held
meat, blood-raw; the plate a hard grey loaf and a lump of cheese, an onion and
a handful of olives. One jar sloshed with liquid; the other was empty, but in
shape and size eloquent enough.

Anna’s body knotted from throat to thigh. She had not
known she could have so many needs all at once, amid such a nightmare.

The air, having yielded up its burdens, was still. Anna
fought to quell her thudding heart. “What is this? Who plays these games
with us?”

Silence.

“Where are we? Who are you who taunt us with your
power?”

Nothing changed. No voice responded. No figure appeared
before her. She had been speaking Rhiyanan; she shifted to the
langue d’oeil
. Nothing.

“Who?” she demanded in ProvenÁal, in Saxon, in
Latin, and last of all, with fading hope, in Greek.

The closed door mocked her despair. She leaped toward the
grille and clung. Without lay only darkness and silence and empty air.

“Damn you!” Anna screamed at it, still in her
native Greek.
“Who are you?”

She could as easily have shouted at the stones, or at Thea,
who at least would acknowledge that she spoke.

Her hands cried pain; she unclamped them, dropping the
handspan to the floor. There was wine in the smaller jar, sour and much watered
but drinkable. She gulped down a mouthful, two, three, before she choked.

Thea wavered in front of her. She had a terrible head for
wine; she was dizzy already.

She blinked hard. The hound was on her feet, and the
wavering was not entirely in Anna’s vision.

Anna picked up the bowl. It was surprisingly good meat. She
set it where Thea could reach it. The witch-hound sniffed it, shuddered, turned
her head away.

“You have to eat,” Anna said.

Thea’s eye was as yellow as a cat’s, pupiled
like a cat’s, more alien even in that face than in her own.

“Eat,” Anna commanded her. “You were never
so fastidious before, when you didn’t need your strength except to play.
Eat
!”

Thea did not precisely obey. Rather, she chose to taste the
offering.

Anna had less restraint. She had to struggle not to bolt it
all down at once.

Like the wine, like the meat, the food was inelegant but
adequate, far better than any prison fare she had ever heard of. And it gave
her strength; it brought her to her senses, and woke her to a quiver of hope.
Whatever was to become of them all, certainly they would not starve.

oOo

Having eaten and drunk and put the chamberpot to good use,
Anna lay on the pallet.

Thea had finished the bowl after all and licked it until it
gleamed dully; she returned to her whimpering offspring and began to wash them
and herself. And that, reflected Anna, was a tremendous advantage; she might be
condemned to speechlessness, but she would be clean.

She could also sleep, abruptly and thoroughly, as Anna could
not. Anna stroked her flank, and after a pause, the small bodies nestled
against it. They were warm and soft and supple, a little damp still from their
cleansing, breathing gently.

Very carefully Anna lifted one, the silver-gilt creature who
was Liahan, cradling her. She fit easily into two joined hands, who in other
shape had made an ample armful.

Anna swallowed hard. The small things were always the worst
to bear. “We’ll get out of here,” she whispered into the
twitching ear. “Somehow. We’ll get out. I promise you.”

Prior Giacomo was in no very good mood. Never mind that the
day was glorious, bright as a new coin and touched with a fragile, fugitive,
springlike warmth. Never mind that he was free to enjoy it within certain easy
limits: the Abbot’s dispensation to walk abroad, good company in young Brother
Oddone, and an errand smoothly and swiftly completed, the collection of an
annual and strictly symbolic rent from a house of minor princes.

Crumbling old Rome looked almost fresh although its green
was winter-muted; the Tiber’s reek was only a twitch in the nostrils; the
pilgrims were crowding thickly and some were singing, one or two even on key:

“O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,

cunctarum urbium excellentissima....”

Prior Giacomo snarled and hid his head in his cowl.

Insult to injury—Brother Odone raised his own voice in
an echo as willing as its pitch was uncertain.

“…Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,

albis et virginum liliis candida—”

“One would think,” Giacomo said acidly, “that
after seven years in a monastery, even a cat would learn to sing on key.”

Oddone shut his mouth in mid-note and wilted visibly. But
nothing could quell Brother Oddone for long. After a judicious moment he said, “Brother
Prior, you really shouldn’t take it so hard.”

Giacomo’s scowl, with the brows black and beetling
over a nose as nobly Roman as his pedigree, would have put the Abbot himself to
flight. Oddone met it bravely and with the best will in the world. His Prior
was sorely tempted to strike him.

But Giacomo had learned discipline. Not easily, but by now
quite thoroughly. He restricted himself to a growl and a slight speeding of his
pace.

No, he should not take it so hard. It was not as if the
world had ended or the barbarians invaded, or his family lost the last of its
sadly eroded property. So his sister had taken the veil. He should be rejoicing
that another of his blood had found a vocation—and his favorite sister
besides, his pet, pretty Fioretta.

The veil he could have faced, if she had not gone mad with
it. He would have seen her into any convent in Rome and made certain that she
was well treated there. He could even have borne her departing elsewhere, if
any Continelli would dream of forsaking her city, if only she was content.

But this. Not for Fioretta Saint Benedict’s learned
nuns or Saint Anastasia’s holy nurses or the cloistered solitude of Saint
Anthony. No; nothing so simple or so reassuring. Fioretta had gone with the new
madwomen, Clara and her barefoot sisters, camp followers of the Friars Minor.
Her veil was a rag and her feet unshod, and when she was not begging on the
highroad she was ministering to those who were.

And she was not content at all. She was gauntly, luminously,
maniacally happy.

“Plague take the girl!” he burst out. “Why
couldn’t she have settled on something less drastic?”

“But if she had,” said Oddone with sweet reason,
“she wouldn’t be your sister.”

Giacomo had stalked forward another half-dozen strides
before the barb sank in. Oddone’s face was all innocence; his eyes were
guileless.

His Prior stopped short. The crowd of passersby eddied and
swirled. Already Oddone was almost swallowed in it, a weedy brown-cowled
figure, a sallow circle of tonsure. With a bark of sudden laughter, Giacomo
pushed in his wake.

Giacomo, though not tall, was solid, a respectable weight
even against a market-day mob. Oddone had neither height nor girth, and no
muscle at all. Once the current caught him, it swept him along like flotsam.

Giacomo snatched once, caught the wrong hood, stared into
startled eyes. Female eyes—and male ones beside them, promising murder.

It took him some little time to extricate himself; when he
looked again, Oddone was gone. Half a dozen tonsures bobbed within reach, and
half of those above Jeromite habits, but none was Brother Oddone.

Who, besides his body’s frailty, had been known to
faint for no reason at all, once even in the street. But that street had not
been so busy or so full of jostling humanity. Nor had it been so far from his
monastery; and he had a fine mind and the hand of an artist, but no head at all
for directions.

There was nothing for it but to go forward as Oddone must
have gone, and strain eyes and neck in searching for him.