As Gadriel opened the portal a slender man immediately rose to his feet.
Caliph was mildly disappointed. He had been harboring a suspicion that the man from the train platform, who’d called himself Alani, would turn out to be Zane Vhortghast. He had asked the zeppelin crew how they had found him, whether there had been a spy, but no one would give him a straight answer.
As it was, the spymaster looked nothing like the pock-faced man he’d seen under the streetlamp in Crow’s Eye.
Caliph did not have time to examine the room before Mr. Vhortghast was at the doorway, shaking hands, smiling and bidding the High King to please follow him for there was much to see and much to do.
As they hurried down the hall, Caliph saw Gadriel look after him with an expression of fleeting paternal concern.
The spymaster was a wiry creature several inches taller than Caliph. He moved with profound grace and was dressed no doubt for the occasion, sporting a luxuriant herringbone suit of dark material. His face moved like malformed clay and two dark eyes had been thrust like chunks of pewter into the sockets. Overall, Caliph thought it was a visage that could easily have been hacked from a block of lard.
“It’s good to meet you,” Caliph was saying. “I hadn’t heard of you until this morning.”
He had noticed the spymaster’s teeth. They were ungodly: strange brutal slabs of gray ivory that had been worked with ghastly results by some dentist on Bloodsump Lane. There were faint glitters in his mouth that hinted at metal pins and makeshift attachments.
“I’m fairly insidious.”
Caliph smiled affably. “Really? How insidious are you?”
Mr. Vhortghast grinned. A sight capable of cracking glass. “Sometimes when you’re sitting under the chain and you let one drop you get a splash that comes up and snaps you right in the hole. It’s alarming but you tend to forget about it almost immediately after it happens. I’m like that. I’m the cold water that makes your ass pucker.”
“I see.”
Together, they reached the south courtyard where a carriage was already waiting. A Pandragonian man with long lemon-colored hair and skin as brown as chestnuts stood by, wearing an open shirt and roomy pantaloons. He carried a chemiostatic sword on his hip. The green light of the cell in its pommel turned his hand a ghastly undying color.
“This is Ngyumuh,” said Vhortghast. Ngyumuh bowed slightly at the waist. “We’ll have additional security as we make our tour but you won’t see them.”
Ngyumuh opened the carriage door for both men and once they were inside shut it again.
Caliph watched the Pandragonian man climb up alongside the driver as the carriage lurched forward.
Vhortghast sat across from him, noticing where Caliph looked and what caught his eye.
“You’re a watcher of people,” Caliph surmised.
Vhortghast said nothing but looked out the window as they trundled across the drawbridge, over the moat and into the the Hold: Isca’s only independently walled borough.
“Bit of a mess in the Herald, eh?” The spymaster looked apologetic. “But nothing we can’t fix.”
“What? You mean about the witches?”
Vhortghast nodded.
Caliph glanced back at Isca Castle. The high tower rose like an incredible needle from the midst of half a dozen lesser spires, all of which gleamed yellow on the west side, slowly melting out of the cool blue shadows in the east.
“Do you know anything about them?” Caliph asked.
Zane studied him as though gauging whether Caliph was really ignorant.
Caliph threw his hands up.
“Look, I didn’t expect to find a pack of women in the middle of the woods. I’m asking you what you know about them.”
The spymaster glanced out the window as they passed the brown dragons of Octul Box.
“Of course I know about them. But the details concerning Shr
dnae Witches are always foggy. They hide behind layers of deception. If a witch hunter shows up in Mir
yhr with a valise full of gadgetry for detecting holojoules, folks direct him, as they’re supposed to, toward Eloth where they know he’ll find nothing but gruelocks and death.
“They despise Stonehold for reasons I’m sure you picked up in history class. But they’re more secretive than the Long Nine.”
“I see. But that’s it? I mean, what do you know about them?”
Vhortghast looked offended as he tapped his fingers on his cane.
“They’re loose fish. Soiled doves. They’re trained from prepubescence up to give better spread than the Rose Courtesans in Iycestoke. Is that graphic enough? A witch in the right position can tie a baron or barrister tighter with the laces of her stockings than with a length of rope.
“They’re a political entity. Once the governments of the north hunted them. Now, in Miryhr at least, the witches are the government. Really, your majesty. What is it that you want to know?”
Caliph supposed that pretty much covered it. There wasn’t much there that he hadn’t heard before. But the thought of Sena doing strange things, secret things for an underworld organization put a coldness under his skin.
He looked out the window at half a dozen strange towers in the direction of Temple Hill. Above the pitched rooftops and shanties that clung like barnacles to decrepit town houses and gray tenements, the towers rose like bones.
“That’s Gilnaroth,” Vhortghast waved at the looming stone shapes, “the citizens’ necropolis. Anyone who can afford it is buried in Marbolia, the upper crust’s cemetery located in Os Sacrum.”
Caliph nodded. “Yes that’s right, that’s not far from Candleshine—I used to live there.”
“I know.” Mr. Vhortghast regarded Caliph shrewdly.
Caliph frowned. “You seem to know an awful lot about me. I’m told you saved my life several times while I was at Desdae.”
“Only three. Three in eight years isn’t bad.”
“I’d like to hear the details.”
The spymaster smiled wanly.
“Well, twice it was Saergaeth—though that’s not common knowledge and we have no proof to substantiate it. But he gave up after the second attempt. We sent him a clear message that you were quite safe and would continue to be quite safe so long as you were at school. Those were two and three. The first occasion was actually some stray effort—we’re not sure whether it was funded by a government or an independent company.”
“I see. And how do you do it? How do you come by your information—?”
“Whispers, gurgles. It’s the usual network of filth. Like a sewer system, really.” Vhortghast drew a handkerchief from his vest and wiped his hands as though conscious of some asomatous stain.
“The bigger the city, the more advanced the network. Not many people like to work in the sewers and you could say the same about spy networks. There’s no trick. Just like a city engineer memorizes the various tunnels and cesspools, I remember the names and places and take note when things change . . . when people die.
“And now I’d like to hear how you gave my men the slip. How did you get out of Desdae without being seen?”
“I went out the attic and down a tree. Maybe your men need better training.”
Zane Vortghast smiled.
The sinister towers of Gilnaroth had already fallen behind a series of pubs and restaurants that fronted stores at ground level while upper windows revealed apartments and trendy domiciles of artists and musicians whose wrought-iron balconies dangled with plants and banners welcoming the new king.
WELCOME TO BARROW HILL, KING HOWL read one of the softly curling banners.
“How do they know I’ll see?”