I dared raise a questioning eyebrow.
“All the exits are closed. Croaker. I’m headed down a tunnel. My choices grow ever more narrow, and each is worse than the other.”
I settled on the chair Case used while watching over Raven, began playing doctor. Needlessly, but I liked to see for myself. Half-distracted, I said, “I expect it’s lonely, being queen of the world.”
Slight gasp. “You grow too bold.”
Didn’t I? “I’m sorry. Thinking out loud. An unhealthy habit known to be the cause of bruises and major hemorrhaging. He does look sound. You think Limper or Whisper will help?”
“No. But every angle has to be tried.”
“What about Bomanz?”
“Bomanz?”
I looked at her. She seemed honestly puzzled. “The wizard who sprung you.”
“Oh. What about him? What could a dead man contribute? I disposed of my necromancer... You know something I don’t?”
Not bloody likely. She had me under the Eye. Nevertheless...
I debated for half a minute, not wanting to give up what might be a whisker of advantage. Then: “I had it from Goblin and One-Eye that he’s perfectly healthy. That he’s caught in the Barrowland. Like Raven, only body and all.”
“How could that be?”
Was it possible she had overlooked this while interrogating me? I guess if you do not ask the right questions, you will not get the right answers.
I reflected on all we had done together. I had sketched Raven’s reports for her, but she had not read those letters. In fact... The originals, from which Raven drew his story, were in my quarters. Goblin and One-Eye lugged them all the way to the Plain only to see them hauled right back. Nobody had plumbed them because they repeated a story already told...
“Sit,” I said, rising. “Back in two shakes.”
Goblin fish-eyed me when I breezed in. “Be a few minutes more. Something came up.” I scrounged up the case in which Raven’s documents had traveled. Only the original Bomanz manuscript resided there now. I fluttered back out, ignored by the Taken.
Nice feeling, I’ll tell you, being beneath their notice. Too bad it was just because they were fighting for their existence. Like the rest of us.
“Here. This is the original manuscript. I went over it once, lightly, to check Raven’s translation. It looked good to me, though he did dramatize and invent dialog. But the facts and characterizations are pure Bomanz.”
She read with incredible swiftness. “Get Raven’s version.”
Out and back, under Goblin’s scowl and growl at my departing back: “How long is a few minutes these days. Croaker?”
She went through those swiftly, too. And looked thoughtful when she finished.
“Well?” I asked.
“There may be something here. Actually, something that’s not here. Two questions. Who wrote this in the first place? And where is the stone in Oar that the son mentioned?”
“I assume Bomanz did most of the original and his wife finished it.”
“Wouldn’t he have used first person?”
“Not necessarily. It’s possible the literary conventions of the time forbade it. Raven often chided me for interjecting too much of myself into the Annals. He came of a different tradition.”
“We’ll accept that as a hypothesis. Next question. What became of the wife?”
“She came of a family from Oar. I would expect her to go back.”
“When she was known as the wife of the man responsible for loosing me?”
“Was she? Bomanz was an assumed name.”
She brushed my objection aside. “Whisper acquired those documents in Lords. As a lot. Nothing connects Bomanz with them except his story. My feeling is that they were accumulated at a later date. But his papers. What were they doing between the time they left here and the time Whisper found them? Have some ancillary items been lost? It’s time we consulted Whisper.”
We, however, included me out.
Whatever, a fire was ignited. Before long, Taken were roaring off to faraway places. Within two days Benefice delivered the stone mentioned by Bomanz’s son. It proved useless. Some Guards appropriated it and used it for a doorstep to their barracks.
I caught occasional hints of a search progressing from Oar south along the route Jasmine had taken after fleeing from the Barrowland, widowed and shamed. Hard to find tracks that old, but the Taken have remarkable skills.
Another search progressed from Lords.
I had the dubious pleasure of hanging around with the Limper while he pointed out all the mistakes we made transliterating UchiTelle and KurreTelle names. Seems not only were spellings not uniform in those days, but neither were alphabets. And some of the folks mentioned were not of UchiTelle or KurreTelle stock, but outsiders who had adapted their names to local usage. Limper busied himself doing things backwards.
One afternoon Silent gave me the high sign. He had been spying over the Limper’s shoulder, off and on, with more devotion than I.
He had found a pattern.
Fifty
Gnomen?
Darling has a self-discipline that amazes me. All that time she was over there at Blue Willy and not once did she surrender to her desire to see Raven. You could see the ache in her whenever his name came up, but she held off for a month.
But she came, as inevitably we knew she must, with the Lady’s permission. I tried to ignore her visit entirely. And I made Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye stay away too, though with Silent it was a tight thing. Eventually he did agree; it was a private thing, for her alone, and his interests would not be served by sticking his nose in.
If I would not go to her, she would come to me. For a while, while everyone else was busy elsewhere. For a hug, to remind her there were those of us who cared. To have some moral support there while she worked out something in her mind.
She signed, “I cannot deny it now, can I?” And a few minutes later: “I still have the soft place for him. But he will have to earn his way back in.” Which was her equivalent of our thinking aloud.
I felt more for Silent at that moment than for Raven. Raven I’d always respected for his toughness and fearlessness, but I’d never really grown to like him. Silent I did like, and did wish well.
I signed, “Do not be brokenhearted if you find he is too old to change.”
Wan smile. “My heart was broken a long time ago. No. I have no expectations. This is not a fairy-tale world.”
That was all she had to say. I did not take it to heart till it began to illuminate later events.
She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.
In moments when his needs called him away, we copied everything the Limper left behind and compared it with our own charts. “Oh, hey,” I breathed once. “Oh, hey.”
Here was a lord from a far western kingdom. A Baron Senjak who had four daughters said to vie with one another in their loveliness. One wore the name Ardath.
“She lied,” Goblin whispered.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “More likely, she didn’t know. In fact, she couldn’t have known. Nor could anyone else have, really. I still don’t see how Soulcatcher could have been convinced that the Dominator’s true name was in here.”
“Wishful thinking, maybe,” One-Eye guessed.
“No,” I said. “You could tell she knew what she had. She just didn’t know how to dig it out.”
“Just like us.”
“Ardath is dead,” I said. “That leaves three possibilities. But if push comes to shove, we only get one shot.”
“Catalog what else we know.”
“Soulcatcher was one sister. Name not yet known. Ardath may have been the Lady’s twin. I think she was older than Catcher, though they were children together and not separated by many years. Of the fourth sister we know nothing.”