“You’ve an insolent tongue, Exile.”
“I believe I’ve been told that before. It is company brings out the best . . . or worst . . . in me.”
Her wide mouth could display every subtlety of humor—this time wicked teasing. “Are you saying that you have no wish to remain with my pets?”
“I’ve come here to learn, and I think I’ve learned all your pets can teach. I was hoping you could do better.”
She cocked her head at me. “So what will you give me in exchange for my teaching? Perhaps you will tell me your name.” Curling tendrils of golden hair brushed her bare breast, and I became uncomfortably aware of my skimpy loincloth.
I cast my eyes to the safe, dull paving and shook my head, hoping to discover my duty somewhere in my uncontrolled imaginings. “Ah, lady, that is a difficult thing. The custom of my people is to give names only to guest-friends and kin. You and I have scarcely met. Perhaps there’s some service I could offer you instead.”
A cold wind gusted through the dark lattice of the roof, and a blurring before my eyes left the lady swathed in a white fur cloak with a hood draped gracefully over her lustrous hair. She smelled of flowers and wine and scented candle smoke. “Do you play music?”
“Alas, no. Instruments go out of tune at my touch,” I said.
“Sing, then?” Laughter and teasing flitted across her face like summer lightning in a clear sky.
“Only when sacred duty demands it. I’ve been told I sing like a wild boar.” Someone had told me that when I was sixteen. For one brief moment I could see a different face . . . beautiful, too . . . but then Vallyne traced an ivory finger across my chest, and the violet eyes of my memory brightened to blue-touched green, red-gold skin paled to alabaster, and dark hair caught golden fire. I could not remember the other one’s name.
“Games, then. Perhaps you could give me a challenge that my usual opponents cannot provide.” The lady took my arm, and we strolled toward the black-barred gate. The dogs whined and whimpered about my bare feet.
“I’m likely to be better at games than music, but I’ll confess I have less experience at them.”
“What kind of useless man are you? Clearly an uncivilized brute warrior, and I have a surfeit of those in this castle. I’ll wager you’re illiterate as well.” The gate swung open without word or touch.
“On the contrary, madam. I cannot claim wide scholarship, but I can both read and write. There was a time when I was employed to do those things.” My heart twisted as I said it, and I thought that a curious reaction. Who finds poignancy in memories of servitude?
The gate swung closed behind us, and my friends the dogs howled in sorrow as the lady led me into the castle passageways. “I have no use for writing. Who would read it? But reading . . . I delight in books. I shall have to try you at that.”
“As you wish, my lady.”
I wondered if I was to be a slave again. Though Vallyne’s hand lay softly on my arm, I could not shake the sensation of manacles being locked about my wrists. But as we walked through the castle to her chambers, I forgot to care about it. She filled the passageway with the music of her laughter, and I drank it in as the desert sand drinks rain.
CHAPTER 24
“This will be your resting room,” said the flickering demon, whose voice sounded like tolling bells and who smelled as if he were late for his own funeral rites. I pressed my hand discreetly to my nose to block out the stench. His physical form shifted between human-shaped and piggish, and the more agitated he was, the more of the foul odor poured out of him. His name was Raddoman, and he was some minor functionary in the lady’s household. “The mistress wants you kept close, so you can attend her as she pleases. She has commanded clothes to be shaped for you and human food to be made and brought as you need it.” He clearly did not approve of such condescension.
He waved me into a small room, crowded—as were all the rooms in the castle—with furniture, artwork, and objects of every kind. Painted dishes were piled on wooden chairs that were lined up against the walls. Vases of frost flowers stood on tables stacked with brass boxes and wooden cups, baskets and bottles and statues of horses and dogs. Two black-lacquered footstools were stuffed under tables, because there was no room beside any chair where you might have wanted to use them. A rolled-up rug blocked the opening of a hearth, and stacks of wood and hods of coal stood in a corner behind a tall bookshelf, quite unreachable. Somewhere behind a cabinet with glass shelves, loaded with all manner of trinkets like mirrors and brushes and enameled cups and magnifying lenses, was a tall, narrow window. Snow blew in through the open shutters, frosting everything in the room with a fine dusting of white. Nowhere could I see a bed or anything similarly useful.
“Thank you, Raddoman. You’re very kind to show me the way.”
“I do as the mistress commands.” He snorted and shifted into his piggish form, disconcerting since he was taller than I. “I don’t like ylad.”
“I understand. Perhaps we can get to know each other better.”
He shuddered, and I worked not to gag at the cloud of stink. “I don’t like you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But mistress said to ask if there was anything you wished brought here, as ylad have different needs.”
“She is most kind.” I surveyed the mess again. “If there was water to be had . . . a pitcher of it, and a bowl I could use for washing . . . I would be very grateful. I think I can find enough else here.”
The demon grunted and disappeared.
In the next hour I sorted through the jumble, clearing a space in one corner and piling several rugs, some flat cushions, and some layers of cloth, unrolled and folded, into a fine bed. Though tempted to slip in between the layers and get warm, I kept up my exploration of the room. A lidded, knee-high jar such as merchants use for cooking oil would serve for relieving myself. I pushed and shoved at the furniture until I could squeeze in behind the shelves and close the shutters. Since the shutters did not quite come together properly, the effort succeeded in cutting down the wind and snow only by half. For good measure I unrolled another rug and stuffed it in the window opening. Better. Not warm—my blood felt like slush—but at least the storm was outside and not inside. Though I managed to unblock the hearth and get wood and kindling enough to lay a fire, I could find nothing to light it. A brief interval of blinding frustration reminded me that my hopes of returning melydda were but illusion, so I left it to go on to more profitable activities.
From the glass shelves I retrieved a comb, a spoon and cup, and a small, round red box holding scented cream I could use for soap. I felt as if I had unearthed treasure when I found two sharpened quill pens and a few sheets of coarse paper in a poorly woven basket, and I rummaged through boxes and trunks until I came up with a stoppered bottle of brown liquid that smelled like oranges, but behaved very much like watery ink. Somehow it seemed imperative to do something with my finds, as if touching pen to paper might give substance to my wayward memory.
I cleared off a small table by dumping a pile of coins, gaudy jewelry, nutshells, nails, and bits of string into another tall jar, then pulled up a flat cushion and settled myself beside the table. With the paper spread out before me, the pen dipped in the orange-smelling liquid, I considered my experiences and prospects, and wrote slowly and carefully,
Day 1.
Almost unreadable. My constant trembling spoiled my scribe’s hand; the fine brown line wavered and wandered this way and that like a drunkard’s path. For a while I could not think what else to write. At last I added,
I was taken from the dogs by Vallyne. Demons cannot play-act.
Nothing else presented itself, so I stoppered the ink and wiped the pen on a scrap of fabric torn from a larger piece. After another brief search, I folded the paper, put it in the small silver box I’d found, and set the box beside my makeshift bed, feeling a vague sense of satisfaction that seemed entirely out of proportion to the event.
When that was done, I sat on the bed, put my head in my hands, hoping to retrieve something of my mind. But before I could dig out my little hoard of treasured images from the depths where I had hidden it, Raddoman returned. This time he wore his figure of a bulky, sagging man with greasy brown hair and a wiry beard that stuck out in front of his protruding chin. An odd thing about the demons, even though they could appear a hundred different ways . . . or only as a streak of light when angled out of vision . . . it seemed quite easy to tell them apart. I would never mistake Raddoman for Kaarat or Vallyne or Denas or Vilgor, the purple-clad demon who had taken me from the pits. Even when they took on solid form, appearance was a very small part of their presence.
“Here’s clothes and this water foolishness. Be quick. The mistress will have you to her book-room.” He set down a fat pottery jar of indeterminate color, and threw a wad of black and red silk at me.
“And where is the book-room?”
“Cursed ylad!” the servant growled. “Can’t find your own backside if someone lays your hands on it. You’ll find the book-room beside the mistress’s resting room.”
Before I risked his further displeasure by asking where the mistress’s resting room could be found, Raddoman twisted into a streak of mud-brown light, venting his stink and some long pent anger. “You oughtn’t be here, ylad. Bad enough you took what was ours, now you come here like you own this, too. I heard how you come . . . no weapons . . . saying you was here to see us and learn of us. Like you belonged. Like you thought to rule this land. Where will you send us when you steal this place away as you did the last?”
“Took what? Please, I don’t understand. I didn’t come to—”
But he didn’t let me finish; just tossed a pair of boots at me and left.
The clothes were very fine. Gray breeches, embroidered with black thread down each side. A wine-red silk shirt, open at the neck, with long full sleeves and buttons made of black pearls. Knee-high black boots of leather as soft as a woman’s cheek. I washed myself as well as I could with the icy water and the cream from the jar, and used the comb to make some order of my ragged hair. I told myself that it was only right to make a good appearance before the lady. She held my future in her hand. But truly it was her hand that I was thinking of, more than my future.
When I had the boots buckled, I peered out of my door and saw only a gray passageway. No one was about, so I stepped out . . . and was not in a passageway at all. Rather I found myself in a small room crammed with chairs of every type: tall backed, round backed, with arms and without, simple, ornate, with cushions, and plain. The room looked like a salon where low-degree petitioners might wait for a royal audience, though no one was there. I looked back through the doorway and saw my own room again, but across a small, empty foyer and up two steps. No use to worry about it. I threaded my way between the chairs toward the only other door. Another corridor. I stepped through, prepared for another unsettling transition, but this time the passageway stayed put. Movement through Denas’s castle was like going down a stairway in the dark, where you prepared for one more step but jarred your foot on flat ground instead. The passageway had innumerable doors leading off it, but I quickly found what I was after. The first opening was a tall, narrow doorway that led into an immense room completely lined with books.
Never had I seen so many books in one place. I had vague remembrance of living in a house where the owner valued books—a house where I had been a slave, I believed—but that collection could have been nothing compared to Vallyne’s library. The book-room walls were at least five times the height of a man, their true dimension lost in the gloom. Railed galleries on every side allowed access to the upper shelves, and there were three sets of stairs to reach them. Of all the things I might have expected to find in the demon realm, I had not conceived of books.
In the center of the room were three thick pillars wreathed with ice-sculpted vines, and from the pillars hung crystal lamps, creating a bounded pool of brightness in the universe of shadows. In this lighted triangle five elaborately dressed demons, three women and two men, reclined on pale red-cushioned divans, murmuring to each other even as they stared at me.
Vallyne was standing in front of them in her demon form—a silver brilliance in the light. When she turned to greet me, I had to force myself to keep breathing. She wore a gown of sapphire silk, draped enticingly about her pleasing shape and caught at one shoulder with a single diamond. Her green eyes widened with pleasure at my appearance. My flesh caught fire at hers.
“Exile! I thought you would never come. My guests despair of entertainment.”
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t know . . . was not fit.” My tongue, which had babbled so glibly in the courtyard, kept trying to escape my control. “I didn’t know the way.”
“Well, now you are here, you must not make a fool of me. I promised you would find a good tale. So”—she waved her hand at me—“go find one.” I stood stupidly until she fluttered her hands again. “A book, Exile. Find a book to read to us.”
I wrenched my eyes from her and walked to one wall. My fingers brushed over the bindings—every color of leather, cloth, and paper, some old and shabby, some pristine—and with dismay I noted that the language of the titles was unknown to me. I moved down the row, examining each one, squinting vainly in the dim light, hoping my eyes were fooled and that the words would make sense if I but looked hard enough. Faster and faster I hunted. I rounded the corner, and was relieved when the characters of the engravings took on familiar shape, at least, if not familiar words. So different languages were represented. That gave me some hope. A little farther and I came to one of the stairs. I climbed up and recognized a few titles as the language of the Fryth. A problem—I didn’t know Frythian. Up to the third level.