A straight path graveled in white pebbles led from the stables to the back of the house. On a modest portico lined with four slender stone columns, glass-paned doors, shuttered and locked, faced the garden. Bee pulled a pin from her hair and coaxed one to open. We entered a paneled sitting room, its furniture shrouded in muffling covers, the air bone cold and the fireplace so dead I could not taste any memory of fire and ash. The room had two doors.
“I can’t see,” Bee murmured.
I guided her through the maze of furniture to the door opposite the portico and leaned against it. In the chamber beyond, no fire burned, but I felt a shallow breathing presence so faint that if both rooms had not been so quiet, I would have missed its tremor.
I tapped her shoulder, and she crept with me along a carpeted runner to the other door. As I set my hand on the latch, it turned. The door caved open, and we faced a woman holding in her right hand a five-branched candelabra with all five candles alight and, in her left, a small book, pages open. She had the most interesting features, Avarian in the length and fold of her eyes but with a round, moonlike face and eyes so dark they seemed black. Indeed, she looked something like the scarred foreign woman I had seen in the County Members inn in Lemanis, only she had age on her shoulders, a grim set to her mouth, and wore spectacles with one lens of clear glass and another that looked so frosted as with the crackle of ice that she could not possibly see through it.
u can’t go back, you have to go forward.
She braced herself across the wall, and using her arms as leverage, I lowered myself into the adjacent garden; she dropped, and I caught her. Within shrouding trees, a dog barked twice; a pair of mastiffs came whining out of the blur of night and sniffed at our hands.
“Which way?” I asked as she rubbed them behind the ears, and they whimpered in ecstasy.
“Out through this stable, across the mews, into the stable, and through the house opposite. They won’t expect that.” She touched her blessing bracelet to her lips. “Blessed Tanit, protector of women, be merciful to your humble and devoted daughters, and open all doors in our favor.”
“Selah,” I echoed. One of the big dogs turned its head to smell my outstretched hand, then dismissed me as a person of no interest because Bee was there to slobber over. “It’s fortunate that dogs love you.”
A musket went off, and then a second; each report made me flinch, but it was too late to help Rory now. Barking wildly, the dogs raced away down the wall. We trampled through fallow beds and fetched up against a tall and impenetrably thick hedge.
“Call those dogs in before the lady calls for them to be slaughtered!” a man called from the other side of the hedge.
“Yes, Maresciallo,” said a lighter, younger male voice.
Not ten paces from us, a gate opened and a figure strode through, whistling sharply toward the barking dogs, by now lost in the shadows at the end of the garden near the house. Bee and I grabbed the gate before it could swing shut. I peered across the open space on the other side of the hedge, where a single lamp had been lit and hung by the stable entrance. No one was in sight. We dashed to the stable.
The pleasant smell of horse manure, hay, and warmth wafted out to us through an open door. Two men were talking, but not close by. I slid into a dark space warmed by a pair of hearths and lined with stalls and the big breathing presence of horses. Bee followed me. We kept to the shadows and moved fast. The men were talking on the narrow stairs that led to the loft, only their trouser-clad legs visible. One called to someone above who was, evidently, trying to see into the house next door to discover what had caused the commotion and musket fire. The massive double-gated doors leading into the mews were closed but unbarred, and I pressed Bee back before she could grab the latch. Someone was on the other side. The latch moved, and we shrank back into the corner, Bee behind me and me nothing more than the shadows and the unswept straw and the plaster of the wall as a young man dressed in servant’s livery charged in from outside, yelling.
“Nothing in the mews, Maresciallo. But a fierce lot of noise!” He trotted past us to the stairs.
We slipped through and out into the dark mews and straight across without pause to the stables on the other side. They were shut tight, and when I pressed my cheek against the latch, I could feel they were chained. There was no way in.
Bee was already moving toward the dead end of the mews, and just as she reached the next stable entrance, one of its doors was flung open. She flattened herself against the wall as a man strode into the mews and crossed to the stable entrance of Amadou Barry’s aunt’s house. It was all the chance we needed.
We slid inside and sped through the musty stables, where we felt the presence of not a single living thing, not even a rat. Just as we coursed out the door that led into the garden, a voice from the loft spoke, inquiringly, in a lilting and somewhat nasal language I had never before heard. Emerging into the garden, we heard shouts, but they were not close by. They weren’t on our trail yet. I heard no more musket shot.
A straight path graveled in white pebbles led from the stables to the back of the house. On a modest portico lined with four slender stone columns, glass-paned doors, shuttered and locked, faced the garden. Bee pulled a pin from her hair and coaxed one to open. We entered a paneled sitting room, its furniture shrouded in muffling covers, the air bone cold and the fireplace so dead I could not taste any memory of fire and ash. The room had two doors.
“I can’t see,” Bee murmured.
I guided her through the maze of furniture to the door opposite the portico and leaned against it. In the chamber beyond, no fire burned, but I felt a shallow breathing presence so faint that if both rooms had not been so quiet, I would have missed its tremor.
I tapped her shoulder, and she crept with me along a carpeted runner to the other door. As I set my hand on the latch, it turned. The door caved open, and we faced a woman holding in her right hand a five-branched candelabra with all five candles alight and, in her left, a small book, pages open. She had the most interesting features, Avarian in the length and fold of her eyes but with a round, moonlike face and eyes so dark they seemed black. Indeed, she looked something like the scarred foreign woman I had seen in the County Members inn in Lemanis, only she had age on her shoulders, a grim set to her mouth, and wore spectacles with one lens of clear glass and another that looked so frosted as with the crackle of ice that she could not possibly see through it.
“Oh!” said Bee, clapping a hand to the top of the sketchbook as if she had meant to theatrically pound fist to bosom. “You frightened me, la! I came to see the maester. He invited me, you know.” She tittered inanely. “We met at Surety Gardens, for you know they say a man is sure to meet an obliging woman—”
The woman closed the book with such a snap that both Bee and I jumped. She gestured imperatively, imperiously, and as if ensorceled, Bee and I meekly followed her to the next door, which was already open and leading into the chamber I had just avoided.
The walls, lined with shelves, were insulated with books.
There was no fire in the hearth, but despite this, the chamber was perfectly warm, its heat the splendid calm of sun-warmed rock. Three dogs lay on a rug, alert but eerily silent as they watched us enter. A pair of lamps set on side tables burned sweet oil, their glow illuminating an upholstered chair in which sat an ancient and very frail man. He wore a light red and gold silk jacket over loose trousers and a pair of black house slippers. His white hair was bound in a braid that trailed over his shoulder. His face was thin, and his hands were as bony as claws. Indeed, he looked far too weak to rise, but when he looked up at the pair of us trembling on the threshold, his gaze stunned us into immobility.
With a sharp inhalation, Bee stiffened, her fingers tensing on mine. “I recognize you,” she said in a low, almost pained tone. “I saw you—I saw this library—in a dream.”
“Of course you did,” he said in a labored hiss, as if gruel had filled his lungs and made it hard to breathe. “I have waited, all these years, as all creatures wait for death to approach them.”
As he spoke these words, he looked away from Bee to me. His blue eyes had the blaze of fire, like echoes of the lamps but far more penetrating, able to pierce the stygian depths. Then he blinked, and I staggered and caught myself as from a fall.
He said to Bee, “I knew you would come.” His words were like a spell. She walked as in a trance across the carpet to his chair.