He was a madman – that much was unmistakable. Unfortunately, the knowledge wasn’t much help. So he was crazy. So what was she going to do about it? She had no idea. Studying him warily, she retreated a step or two to give herself more space. Then she said, “There are two guards outside my door. They’re both big, and they’ve got longswords. If I shout”—she faltered and almost panicked when she remembered that the door was bolted—“they’ll be here before you can touch me.”
Palms toward her, his hands continued to make placating movements. Parts of his face expressed a fear of which other parts were ignorant: his eyes rolled, and his lower lip drooped, exposing crooked, yellow teeth; but his nose and cheekbones looked too determined to admit fear.
“This winter chills my bones,” he told her as if it were a high secret. “No one understands hop-board.”
Though they were speaking softly, he put a finger to his lips. Then he turned back toward the wardrobe and beckoned for her to follow.
“You want me to go in there?” Tension made her voice jump like his. The darkness behind the clothes was too deep to be measured. “Why?”
As persuasively as possible, he replied, “The King tries to protect his pieces. Individuals. What good are they? Worthless. Wor-r-r-r-rthless. It’s all strategy. Sacrifice the right men to trap your opponent.”
While he spoke, he kept beckoning, urging her toward him.
“No, I’m sorry.” The idea of entering the unknown place behind the wardrobe was even more frightening than the Adept’s unexpected appearance. “I can’t go in there.” She was familiar with dark, closed spaces. Despite her best efforts to forget them, she remembered every detail of the times her parents had punished her by locking her into a lightless closet. She had learned a great deal about her own unreality during those times. In that closet she had first started feeling herself fade, drifting out of existence into the effacing black. “It’s too dark.”
“Ho ho ha,” he responded in a tone of supplication. He could only look at her with one eye at a time, and the lines of his face twisted into a plea. “Dark and lust. We snuff the light so no one will see how we revel. You don’t need light to see flesh.”
Reaching into a pocket of his surcoat, he pulled out an irregular piece of glass about the size of his palm. He held it so that she couldn’t look into it; but she had the impression it was a small mirror.
He murmured something, passed his hand over the glass, and a beam of warm, yellow light as bright as sunshine shot straight out of the surface.
He shone it around the wardrobe. It showed her that the darkness was a stone passage angling downward inside the wall of the room.
Havelock flashed his light down the passage to demonstrate that it was safe. Then he beckoned to her again vehemently, at once asking and demanding that she go with him.
“No,” she repeated. “I can’t. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me.” Groping for some response which might penetrate his demented intentions, she asked, “Does King Joyse know you’re here?”
That was evidently the wrong thing to say. At once, Havelock became the furious old man who had thrown his checkers at the ceiling and stormed around the King’s chamber. “Bother Joyse and all his scruples!” the Adept raged, so angry that he was barely able to keep his voice down. His face turned an apoplectic red. And yet he did keep his voice down: he retained that much self-awareness. “He plays as badly as his daughters! Women and foolishness.”
Flailing his arms, he made gestures that practically shouted, Come with me!
To defend herself, she replied, “Geraden warned me that the King has enemies. Are you trying to betray him?”
At once, Havelock stopped. He stared at her as though he had been stung. For a second, his whole face expressed nothing but astonishment and dismay.
Then a look of cunning came into his eyes.
She seemed to feel danger pouncing toward her. But it was imprecise: she didn’t know how to react. So she stood where she was, helpless as a post, while he raised his glass and shone it directly into her face.
It was as bright as the sun; it made her throw up her hands and reel backward to protect her eyes.
She stumbled against the bed, nearly lost her balance. But before she could either fall or jump aside, Havelock clamped one bony hand around her wrist and jerked her toward the wardrobe.
He wasn’t as strong as he seemed. If she could have planted her feet, found some leverage, she would have been able to break his grip. He was too quick for that, however. Keeping her off balance, he impelled her across the floor, into the wardrobe and the opening of the passage.
SIX: A FEW LESSONS
With her free hand, she clutched for something to hold her back. But suns of blindness exploded back and forth across her vision: she couldn’t see anything to grasp. Then she hit the stone of the passage, and cool air breathed up at her out of the unseen depths. Havelock slowed, giving her feet time to fumble for the downward stairs.
Argus and Ribuld would probably have been willing to rescue her from this madman. Unfortunately, her door was locked, and she didn’t have time to shout for help.
Her sight cleared quickly, however. Havelock’s glass hadn’t done her any real damage. In a moment, she stopped bumping against the walls, stopped lurching on the stairs. The Adept pulled her after him as firmly as he could, but now she was able to exert some control over her rate of descent.
His glass revealed all there was to see of where they were and where they were going. The passage was narrow and low: if she had been any taller, she would have been forced to stoop. There were sharp turns and branchings whenever the stair had gone down another ten or fifteen feet. At a guess, the branchings led to other hidden entrances in other suites and chambers. But the main passage continued downward.
The absence of cobwebs and accumulated dust implied that these stone tunnels were used with some frequency.
The air became slowly cooler as Adept Havelock dragged her after him.
Unaccustomed to such exercise, her knees began to tremble. She felt she had been laboring down the stairs for a long time when the Adept arrived at a heavy, ironbound wooden door that blocked his way. It had been left unbolted, but he didn’t open it immediately. Instead, he tugged her close to him. Then he released her wrist.
Shining on the door and the stone blocks of the wall, his light cast comic shadows across his face. “Remember hop-board,” he whispered intensely. “Nothing else signifies.”
A gesture and a murmur snuffed his glass. In the sudden dark, she heard his surcoat rustle as he returned the small mirror to his pocket. Then he pushed open the door and walked into the lamplight beyond it as if he didn’t care whether she followed him or not.
From the doorway, she looked out at a large, square room.
It was furnished – and cluttered – like a study of some sort. A heavy pillar thrust down through the center of the floor, the flagstones of which weren’t softened or warmed by any rugs or coverings. Around the pillar, however, stood a number of tables, some of them tilted like an artist’s worktable, others flat and piled with papers and rolls of parchment. Stools waited at all the tables, although most of them were being used to hold stacks of old books or layer after layer of loose documents. Under the tables, the floor was furred with dust. Opposite Terisa, an entryway without a door led, apparently, to other rooms. Near the entryway was a rumpled bed, with several blankets tossed haphazardly over the stained gray sheets, and no pillow.
The light came from oil lamps around the walls and the pillar. Their glow showed clearly the two features of the room that most caught Terisa’s attention.
Off to one side was a small table with two chairs and a checkerboard. All were at least as richly made as the ones King Joyse used. But there weren’t any pieces on the board.