Emriana fought against that image. She needed to remind her senses to work, needed to keep moving, functioning. She had tried singing-when? how long ago?-thinking that hearing herself would help, but she was unnerved by the way her voice sounded in that place. Instead she reached out around herself.
The walls imprisoning the girl were certainly real enough. She could feel them when she pushed out with her hands. Beyond that sensation, though, they had no substance, no qualities. They were neither hot nor cold, smooth nor rough. They simply held her in the midst of the nothingness. She could follow the surface with her hands, rising to her knees and finding eight corners. She could not quite stand, for the ceiling was too low. And she could not quite lie down, either. It was a box just big enough for her to sit, to draw her knees up to herself protectively, to waste away.
Junce Roundface had not been lying when he had told her she would spend a long, long time in there. That thought nearly made her start screaming again.
"Please," the girl pleaded, her voice resounding in her skull but nowhere else. "I want to get out." She waited, listening, but there was nothing. No sounds, not even the roaring in her ears. "Please!" she screamed.
Nothing.
Emriana curled up into a ball and lay on her side. She would have liked to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. She was simply left with her thoughts.
Later-an hour? a year?-Emriana became aware of something. It was not clear what she had noticed, but just the fact that she was noticing anything at all snapped her out of a sort of stupor. She rose up onto her knees, turned her head, tried to determine which sense had detected something.
It was light.
Very faint, above her, a pinprick of light had appeared. The light grew, became a window, grew still more, dazzlingly bright, making the girl cringe. It became one whole side of her prison. It burned her eyes with its brightness, but she was oh, so thankful just to feel pain in her eyes.
Emriana blinked repeatedly and managed to focus on the scene beyond her prison, through that window.
She spied a room, one that she vaguely remembered from another time. A large bed stood against a distant wall, with a couch to one side and a dressing table beside that. It was a woman's room, draped with bright, colorful tapestries and illuminated by numerous pierced lanterns hanging from the walls and ceiling. Textures, temperature, length, and form all seemed wonderfully welcome right then, even if a recollection nudging at the edge of her memory was vaguely unsettling. Emriana knew that if she could just think hard enough, it would come to her.
At that moment, a woman dressed in a formal gown stepped into view in front of her precious window, blocking out the rest of the world. The owner of the room, triggering all of those memories.
Lobra Pharaboldi.
Denrick's sister.
Emriana gasped and shrank back. The look on the woman's face told Emriana that she was not being rescued.
"Hello, Emriana Matrell."
"Please let me out," the girl began, crawling right up against the window, pressing her face as close as she could, hoping she looked sufficiently anxious that Lobra would take pity on her and not blame her for what had happened to Denrick. "I don't know how I got in here, but if you could ask someone, or have a wizard perform a divination, I'm sure you could let me out, and-"
"Hush," Lobra said, her voice soft and yet commanding. "Not just yet."
Emriana felt tears on her cheeks. "Please?" she begged, and she thought she sounded rather pitiful, like a child. "Please?" she repeated.
"Oh, I will let you out in a moment," Lobra said, smiling just a bit. "To serve your penance for the crimes you and your family have inflicted upon me."
"I didn't mean to do anything," Emriana began, feeling frantic to convey remorse, anything to win Lobra over. "It was an accident, a big misunderstanding, and I'm sorry for that. It would never, ever happen again," and she went on, babbling anything she could think of to convince Lobra that she should be allowed to get out of the mirror.
"Hush," Lobra repeated. "There is someone here who would like to see you," she said, looking up, past Emriana, to some place out of the girl's field of view.
Denrick Pharaboldi strolled around the side of the window, stepped right up and knelt down, that familiar, terrible, wolfish grin spreading wide. "Hello, Emriana," he said. "It's good to see you again."
CHAPTER 4
"Lavant knows we're watching him," Falagh said, sounding impatient. "He must. He hasn't said anything of consequence to Lord Wianar since we began."
"Perhaps," Grozier replied, leaning over Bartimus's shoulder and watching the scene displayed on the wizard's mirror.
The glass was smaller than the one in Bartimus's chambers at House Talricci, handy for travel, but it made viewing the images more difficult. Since they were performing the viewing in the sitting room of House Pharaboldi, it was a necessary inconvenience. He would have liked to use the larger one, the exquisite glass he had been ordered to fetch from the dungeons of the Generon, for it was much more suitable for scrying. But the woman Lobra had it in another room, along with one of the shapeshifters, who had taken the form of her dead brother.
Bartimus wondered if she had some ability at magical scrying, too.
"Stop shaking it!" Grozier ordered. "It's hard enough to see what's going on."
The wizard sighed and held the small mirror still, wishing his employer would stop putting so much weight on him. Grozier's breath stank of salted fish roe, a delicacy served at the celebration and something Bartimus knew the man enjoyed.
"He doesn't seem to be paying any attention to our spy, though," Grozier continued. "I think Lavant would have taken action if he suspected something."
"Well, if the two of them try to wander off alone and put some distance between themselves and our planted guard again, that might be a good clue that they sense trouble," Falagh replied. "Maybe he and the Shining Lord just aren't willing to discuss their private matters with guards standing about, and if your doppelganger insinuates himself into their midst one more time, they are bound to realize he's shadowing them."
"Perhaps," Grozier said again, sounding doubtful, still peering into the mirror. "Give it a little more time."
Bartimus thought Falagh's initial plan had seemed promising. After Junce had shown the lot of them where the magic mirror was stored and then vanished to deal with other issues, the scion of House Mestel had suggested that their duplicate Pilos wait a bit before carrying out his ruse with the Darowdryn family. Instead, Falagh had suggested, they should have him transform into the likeness of a Generon guard and get near Lavant. He reasoned that attempting to use Bartimus's magic to scry directly on either Lavant or Lord Wianar might trigger some magical defenses one of the men had in place, but focusing the magic on another figure who could get close to them might let them overhear a conversation with little chance of getting noticed.
Thus far, the high priest and the ruler of Chondath had done nothing but make small talk, and frankly, the wizard was growing bored. He didn't much care to return to the party, not so much because he would rather be somewhere else, but because he so often got lost in the middle of conversations. He always found himself mulling problems in his head, letting his mind wander over spells he was developing. Being drawn back into a discussion in which someone was waiting for him to reply to a missed question made him uncomfortable, so he tended to keep to himself at public events, standing off in the corner and avoiding groups. That wasn't much fun, either.