Being unfurnished, it seemed large. Fleabag began slinking around this vast circular emptiness, nose to the floor, pausing from time to time to analyze some detail of scent.
Little Chicken threw down his bundle and went to peer out of the nearest casement. Mother Unonini sniffed disapprovingly at the billow of dust he had raised.
Rap was still overwhelmed by his giddy sense of height. Combined with farsight, it was intoxicating, exhilarating, almost terrifying. Far, far below, a mother nursed her baby in a dark basement room, with the rest of her family asleep around her, bakers' apprentices were already stoking their masters' fires; a lover tiptoed past a bedroom door on his way home…
Was this what it was like to be a sorcerer? Did warlocks perch like brooding eagles, high on their towers in Hub, watching all Pandemia laid out below them, naked and defenseless? The wardens, being the strongest sorcerers of all, must have a range enormously greater than Rap’s—had Bright Water really sensed him all the way from Hub? Was she even now slumped naked on her ivory throne in her own chamber of puissance, scanning the north, waiting for those ripples she had mentioned, ready to strike down any evil use of magic? What would such power do to its owner? He shivered.
The chaplain noticed. “I warned you that you would freeze up here!” Satisfied that her prediction had come true, she pulled her cloak tight with her free hand. But Rap was wearing a fur parka over his doublet and he was not cold at all; in fact it was the first time he had been comfortable all day.
“It isn’t that. Mother?”
“Mmm?”
“If the Four guard us all against misuse of magic—”
“I do not wish to talk about the Four! Certainly not here.”
Which is what Rap had been about to ask: Why had she been so reluctant to discuss the warlocks? Why was everyone, always? He had rarely heard them mentioned, ever.
“Look there!” The chaplain raised her lantern a fraction and pointed to the southern casement. “It’s different!”
Little Chicken, having failed to see anything much to the north, now moved around to peer out eastward. He found glass puzzling, because it did not melt when he breathed on it.
The southern casement was certainly larger than the others. The dormer was higher and wider than the other three and held not only the main arched window, but also two smaller lights flanking it. Rap tried to remember if he had ever noticed that lack of symmetry from below, and concluded he had never really looked properly. The pattern of lead between the panes was more complex and less regular, and that was another minor difference, but the panes showed just as black against the night outside.
“I wonder why?” Puzzled, the chaplain walked over toward it.
The window began to glow.
She stopped with a hiss of surprise. The many tiny panes between the leads were of all shapes and all colors, decorated with pictures and symbols: stars and hands, eyes and flowers, and many others less comprehensible, all vaguely visible in a pale gleam as if the moon were out there. The colors were as faint and faded as a very old manuscript—sienna, malachite, ochre, and slate. Rap’s eyes saw them, but farsight told him there was only a window there with nothing unusual about it. Yet when he tried to make sense of the visual images, he felt as if they were changing. Each one was constant while he stared at it and altered as soon as his attention strayed. An umber bird’s head in the upper right corner was now much lower than it had been. A ram’s horn inexplicably seemed to curl to both right and left at the same time, and an image of a tawny flame writhing, a rose-and-lilac wheel turning… He shivered again.
Mother Unonini backed away and the moonlight died beyond the glass.
Little Chicken grunted angrily. Abandoning the east casement, he began stalking round to the south, one hand on the dagger in his belt, his shoulders bent forward, looking very much like Fleabag investigating a porcupine.
“Stop!” both Rap and the chaplain said at the same moment.
But Little Chicken kept on, walking slowly on the balls of his feet. The casement began to glow again, and this time the light was different; it was warmer and restless—not the moon, but firelight? Firelight at the top of a tower, seven stories above a castle that itself stood a hundred spans or more above the sea?
“Stop!” Rap said again, more urgently. He laid down his own burden—it held cups and food and useful things that might make a noise if dropped—and he hurried forward.
The light changed again, dramatically. By the time he had reached Little Chicken and grabbed his shoulder, the window was a blazing, seething brilliance, too bright to look at—surges of ruby, emerald, and sapphire stabbing amid flashes of ice-white like the facets of a giant diamond. Now certainly the symbols were changing more rapidly, flickering in the corners of the eye. Even to study a single pane was impossible against that glare.
Rap pulled and the goblin yielded. They backed away and the brilliance faded again until they were standing once more in the glimmer of the lantern. Rap’s eyes hurt and the insides of his eyelids were stained with blurs of many hues.
Stiffly the chaplain rose from her knees, where she had been praying. Her face was pale and drawn in the gloom. “Magic!” she declared unnecessarily. “A magic casement!”
“What does it do?” Rap asked, still keeping a firm grip on Little Chicken.
“I don’t know! I’m a priestess, not a sorcerer. But I think you had better stay well away from it.”
All Inisso’s other secrets had gone, but that one was built into the walls and could not be removed. Was this why the mysterious Doctor Sagorn had come up here with the king, to a room Inos had never been told about?
“Oh, I agree. Keep away!” Rap added in goblin.
Little Chicken nodded. “Bad!” He turned his back on the offending window.
“You still want to stay here?” Mother Unonini asked.
Rap nodded. “It’s the safest place. And I can use my farsight from here.” He would have to sit on the stairs to do so, below floor level, but she did not need to know that.
“Yes, but what can you do?” She had asked that question a dozen times.
He gave her the same answer as before. “I don’t know. But somehow I must warn Inos that Andor is not what he seems.”
She came close and lifted the lantern to study his face. “For her sake, or yours?”
“Hers, of course!”
She continued to stare. “If the people want a king instead of a queen, then they are not likely to accept a factor’s clerk, you know.”
Rap clenched his fists. “I was not suggesting that they would!”
“Do you think you can overhear what he says to Inosolan?”
Fury flared up in Rap, and evidently his expression was answer enough. She lowered her lantern. “No. I apologize, Master Rap. That was unworthy.” She pulled her cloak tighter. “I shall go, then. You had better come down and replace the dresser.”
Rap nodded. “And we’ll push the door closed behind it.”
The chaplain nodded. “Of course—but remember that it creaks. I shall return tomorrow night, if I can, and bring some oil.” She shivered. “I must be crazy! I hope that I am interpreting the God’s words correctly… and that They were a benevolent God, on the side of the Good. Kneel and I will give you a blessing; I wish I had someone to bless this night’s work for me.”
NINE