A short extravagant hallway flickered with amber glass on either wall. Lit by candles in hidden guardrooms, the narrow colorful panes covered arrow slits; the paneled ceiling: murder holes. Isca Castle had not been in danger of siege for so long that its defensive architecture had been concealed with more aesthetically pleasing fixtures.
At the top of a second staircase, the grand foyer engulfed them like bits of food under domed glass. To the north, the great staircase curled down from the second story, ending at the foot of one of several pillars that framed a series of four lofty arches to the grand halclass="underline" a room that currently glowered in darkness. Other doors led to guardrooms, the kitchen and the east wing.
The silence was interminable. Sena’s thoughts reduced to the book hidden in Caliph’s bedroom. The emotional impact of the orchestrated ambush at the theater and now the empty abandoned corridors of the castle were sinking in, fomenting into panic.
Vhortghast said something soft and unintelligible, probably because the wrongness of their surroundings was also affecting him.
“I’m going to have a look,” said Sena.
Zane hushed her savagely but she ignored him. They had made enough noise coming up the stairs that any unfriendly ears in the nearby rooms would certainly have heard. Caliph looked at her apprehensively.
“I’ll be fine. Trust me.” She pinched him and slipped away, moving up the stairs.
Caliph nearly cried out, almost pleaded with her to come back, but he didn’t. The oppressive quiet in the castle seemed to crush his ability to shout.
Zane had drawn a long knife from his belt. It curved away from his forearm like a claw. He was circuiting the foyer. Checking doors. Peering into various rooms. He let Sena go without a word and Caliph realized suddenly that the spymaster’s only responsibility was to the High King’s safety.
Caliph swore and headed for the grand hall, determined to turn on some lights.
“Your majesty—?”
Caliph didn’t answer. Like at the opera house, he had had enough. He strode into the darkness and immediately fell over a large obstacle. Three bodies lay in a low pile, obscured by the darkness of the archway. Caliph scrambled up, stifling a shriek. His fine suit was smudged with blood. Zane pulled him back, picked up a sword from the fallen guards and handed it to him.
Caliph’s terror was burning off as his anger mounted. He would find whoever had done this.
Sena had always lacked confidence in her abilities as a Sister of the Seventh House. Her accelerated ascension and keen awareness of her unfair promotions had resulted in timidity and self-doubt.
In crisis, she often choked.
But the dangers she had faced since spring had begun to chip away at her insecurity. She had survived two, possibly three attempts on her life if she counted tonight—though that was a bit premature. She had moved the C
srym T
through Skellum under Megan’s nose.
Her diffidence had begun to crumble.
Without shoes, without a weapon, she slid from the great staircase into the blackness of the upper hall. To the west, the white marble and tall windows of the grand hall’s second story chilled the air like a solid cube of ointment. Leaf shadows twirled and danced in swaying rhythms across the floor. She headed east toward the High King’s bedroom, up another set of marble stairs.
When she reached the fourth floor, she had yet to see a guard. A post, flooded with yellow lamplight, revealed a game of cards left in midplay. One chair rested on its side. There were no other signs of struggle. Coins still stood in little stacks or lay in piles indicating ownership and the unclaimed pot. A switchblade had been left beside one man’s winnings. Sena snapped it up in passing and drifted down the lofty passage to the west.
By now, her evening gown was in shreds. The kick pleat had continued to tear. What few diamonds were left hung from threads. Her movements were fluid, unrestricted.
The paneled walls marched west.
Great vases and indistinct statues twisted up in menacing shapes. Dozens of candles petaled the walls with daylily orange while orchid-colored shadows leapt from side tables and potted trees.
Sena slid below a bank of mullioned palladian glass, keeping to the darkest part of the passageway. Not even twenty feet in front of her, the High King’s bedroom doors hung open. Narrow, ornate and twelve feet tall. Like most doors in the castle, they swung on four hinges: a moving piece of wall.
A gruesome splatter on the wood paneling beside the doors looked purple in the light from the window, like someone had hurled a bottle of milk at the wall, bursting its contents explosively—only the liquid wasn’t white.
Sena could smell the faint cloying reek of bungled wetwork. Like a slaughterhouse. The gagging stink of burst entrails.
At the door she stopped and listened.
Silence.
She had just set her muscles in motion, building momentum to dart from the shadow under the window to the shadow of the bedroom, when a tall thin man walked out from the narrow crack of blackness.
Sena pulled up short and diverted her energy into a spin that planted her shoulder soundlessly against the north wall. Still in shadow, she rested at a forty-five degree angle to the man-thing’s flank.
The tall creature stretched its fingers and glanced around as though tasting the air. He looked frustrated. One of his hands dribbled gore and his sleeve flapped heavy and red. He must have been seven feet tall. Bone thin. White saggy flesh hung from his neck and hollow deep-set eyes glittered with pink light.
His clothing was a mess, spattered and crusty with mud and foul-smelling sludge. Partially dried clods of night soil had fractured and fallen away from his pant cuffs, leaving a trail as he walked down the center of the carpeted hall.
Sena saw an opportunity. She could dart out, slip up behind him, plunge her knife into his kidney, pull it out before he fell, draw it deeply across his throat. She had been trained for this. She had practiced the movements like a dancer in the gymnasium at Skellum.
But something sat on her instinct to kill. Intuition perhaps.
She waited.
A second man emerged from the High King’s bedroom. Equally filthy, equally gaunt and horrifying. His eyes were more orange; more amber, like little nuggets of petrified sap. He too was speckled with blood and sewage. A third and fourth man exited the bedroom. They were shorter and carried weapons. They wore gas masks around their necks like bulky chokers.
Sena consoled herself on the fact that she had waited. None of them carried bags or packs. None of them carried anything besides the two with broadswords. They looked ridiculous, like people that had been at work and suddenly gone insane, leaving customers at the counter to embark on some blood-soaked impracticality. They looked thoroughly psychotic. Thoroughly deranged.
None of them carried the Csrym T. Nor could they have hidden it, as big as it was, in their vests or suit coats or tucked it discreetly under an arm.
If not the book then what? Why would men like those that attacked them at the opera ransack Caliph’s bedroom within the hour?
Sena drew blood from her palm. She whispered an equation to stanch the wound and used the remaining holojoules to throw a glamour down the hall.
From the far end, a light glimmered. Her own voice laughed lightly. Echoing. Two indistinct figures passed south around the door frame, shimmery and fumbling. Like inebriated lovers stumbling off to fuck.
The pack of four men set off at once, headed for the illusion.
Sena crept around the door and vanished into the bedroom. Despite the jungled darkness, she could tell the entire chamber had been destroyed.
The mattress was ripped open. Feathery guts disemboweled and scattered over the corpses of what she estimated to be half a dozen castle guards. Formerly magnificent wardrobes were virtually torn apart, broken into as though they had been searched for secret parts.