The other novices were older, one or two young women like Celia, and a handful of mature women who were probably widows. These would all be full nuns within the year, unless the abbess found them unsuitable or unless they changed their minds.
The novices, holding their candles, lined up in ranks in front of the black nuns. They began a new song then, one that startled me so much when I heard the words that I nearly spoke out. This had better just be something symbolic out of the Bible.
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. Because of the savour of thy good ointments, therefore do the virgins love thee. The king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.” I almost felt I should rush over to the girl Antonia’s age and cover her ears-but she was singing too.
The door beside me opened, and Celia came in: dressed like a bride and carrying roses.
She walked very slowly, not looking at Hildegarde and me or at anyone else. Her black hair hung loose over the shoulders of a white lace gown and down to her waist in back. It would all be shaved off by nightfall, I thought. White ribbons and white rosebuds formed a headpiece. The singing continued until she reached the middle of the chapel, facing the bishop and abbess, and halted.
Joachim stepped forward. First the bishop’s address, I thought, then the prayer by the abbess’s chief priest, then, right after the Amen, I would say my piece. Two Amens, I told myself. Don’t be hasty. Then the second prayer, then Celia would pronounce her vows, then-
The bishop had just opened his mouth to speak when there were quick footsteps in the passage outside, and the door burst open. The abbess took a step forward, eyes snapping at this interruption. A woman hurried into the chapel but froze when everyone turned to look at her.
She wore a dark blue dress and a white apron-housekeeper, I thought. Before the abbess’s glare she became silent and rigid, even started to walk out backwards. The novices’ candle flames swayed in the slight breeze from the open door.
But after only a few seconds the housekeeper remembered the reason she had come with such urgency and stepped forward again. “Excuse me, Reverend Mother, but it’s a very important message for the bishop from the cathedral.”
Joachim crossed to stand beside her. She spoke quickly and in an undertone, which a quick and highly irreverent spell allowed me to overhear. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, Your Holiness, but a pigeon-message just came in, and it said at the top that you must receive it at once. It’s something about your goddaughter.”
The blood turned to ice in my veins. Antonia!
“Excuse me just for a moment, Reverend Mother,” said Joachim quickly and hurried away. Without excusing myself at all, I was right behind him.
The housekeeper led us up flights of stairs and down echoing, vaulted corridors to a little enclosed courtyard off the kitchens. The pigeon loft was on the far side, and several maids stood there, looking uneasy. One smiled with relief when she saw me. “Oh, are you named Daimbert? A second pigeon just arrived, with a message to you from the royal castle. It says it’s urgent.”
Both messages, Joachim’s and mine, were ultimately from Theodora. She had, it appeared, bullied the cathedral priests into letting her use the telephone in the office there to call Yurt. When Gwennie told her I wasn’t home, she had instead sent a pigeon-message to Joachim, at the same time as Gwennie was writing a message conveying the gist of the phone call to me. “She was nearly hysterical,” Gwennie wrote at the end.
Hildegarde came panting up. “There you are!” she said cheerfully. “When you both left the chapel so abruptly I knew it had to be something pretty important! I’m afraid I don’t have my weapons with me, but it shouldn’t take long to stop back at the castle for them. What’s happening?”
I felt almost hysterical myself. “It’s Antonia,” I managed to gasp. “And all the other children of Caelrhon. Cyrus has piped them out of town and no one can find them.”
My heart was pounding so hard it was almost impossible to think clearly. The flying carpet, I told myself over the roaring in my ears. It could fly a lot faster than I could. Even with a detour back to the castle to get it, I would still reach Caelrhon faster than by my own unaided flying. And if we had to quarter and search all the rivers and forests and fields around the city, it would be good to have the fastest transportation possible.
“Tell Celia I’m sorry, but she’ll have to have a different spiritual sponsor,” I said to the bishop and shot off, not even caring if it was irreverent to fly within the precincts of the nunnery.
This was so horrible I couldn’t let myself believe it. It had to be some mistake. The children had gone for a picnic and someone had started a foolish rumor. They would all be home, laughing to hear how frightened everyone had been, by the time I reached Caelrhon.
The pit of my stomach didn’t buy any of this.
A summoning spell like the one Cyrus had used on the rats, I thought as I flew madly back toward the castle, but a spell with a subtle change to summon children instead. Feeling aggrieved at the bishop for making him give up the prayer sessions where people essentially came and worshipped him, at me for exposing his use of magic, and at the mayor and council for not coming to find him in the seminary with some even better reward than the key to the city, he — or the demon-had decided to take his revenge through the children. His piping would have drawn them all as surely as it had drawn the rats; Antonia, whose flair for magic made her particularly susceptible, wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Now I just had to try to find some clue to show where they had gone. Not taken downstream and dropped off like the rats, either to drown or wander away, I tried to persuade myself. According to Gwennie’s account, fuller than what Theodora had written the bishop, Cyrus had invited a number of his old friends, the children from the artisans’ quarter, for a country stroll. Antonia’s friend Jen had apparently been one of them, and Antonia had gone along. Adults had heard piping in the distance, but only Theodora had realized, when she felt a faint tug herself, what it meant, and by then other children were leaving their chores and their games to race through the city streets and out the gates. By the time the grownups went after them, every child under fourteen was gone.
But was there even more to this? Had Cyrus been especially interested in my daughter? He had seemed to know who I was when we first met, and if he was, as I intermittently suspected, part of Vlad’s planned revenge on me, then seizing Antonia would be doubly sweet, since he was already furious with me. Any of several people could have told him I was Antonia’s father-Theodora’s neighbors, even the Lady Maria, who had been so uncharacteristically closed-mouthed since coming home. Was summoning the rest of the children both generalized revenge and also a chance to conceal his nefarious plans for one particular child?
I flew over the walls of the royal castle and went straight to the Lady Justinia’s chambers. “I need your flying carpet, my lady,” I said with minimal effort toward politeness. “And I need it now.”
Her automaton leaned threateningly toward me. “This is passing abrupt, O Wizard,” Justinia said coolly. “The carpet is mine, given me by the mage Kaz-alrhun for my own transportation to safety, not for the convenience of western wizards and their daughters.”
I didn’t have time to explain properly or to respond to the sarcastic note in her voice. “Antonia’s been kidnapped by an evil wizard, and I have to go after her.”