Shadowplay

At last Chaven straightened up and nodded, then slipped through the open doorway. Chert hurried down the stone corridor after him holding the fading coral lantern. The physician paused in front of a hanging so bleached by age and dotted with mildew that the scene embroidered on it had become invisible, a thing weirdly out of place in such a damp, windowless, almost unvisited spot. For a moment Chaven hesitated, his burned fingers hovering in midair as though he would once again ask Chert to turn around, but then impatience got the best of him and he pulled back the hanging and ducked beneath it, making a lump under the ancient fabric. A moment later the lump disappeared as if the physician had simply vanished.

Despite a superstitious chill at the back of his neck, Chert was about to investigate, but something else caught his attention. He made his way as silently as he could down the corridor and past the hanging to the base of the stairs. He muffled his lantern, dropping the passageway into neardarkness as he stood, listening.

Voices, coming from somewhere upstairs—were Chaven’s servants keeping the up house in his absence? Somehow Chaven did not think so.

A disembodied moan, quiet but still piercing, made Chert jump. He looked around wildly but the corridor was still empty. He hurried back to the hanging and pulled it aside to discover a hidden door, ajar. The noise came again, louder, the muffled wail of a lost soul, and Chert summoned up his courage and pushed the door open.

Chaven lay in the middle of the floor, writhing as though he had been stabbed, surrounded by rumpled lengths of cloth. Chert ran to him, turned him over, but could find no wound.

“Ruined...!” the physician groaned. Though his voice was quiet, it seemed loud as a shout to Chert. “Ruined! They have taken it...!”

“Quiet,” the Funderling hissed at him. “There is someone upstairs!”

“They have it!” Chaven sat up, wild-eyed, and began to struggle in Chert’s grasp like a man who had seen his only child stolen from his arms. “We must stop them!”

“Shut your mouth or you will get us killed,” Chert whispered harshly clinging on to the much larger man as tightly as he could. “It might be the entire royal guard, looking for you.”

“But they have stolen it...I am destroyed...!” Chaven was actually weeping. Chert could not believe what he saw, the change that had turned this man he had long known and respected into a mad child.

“Stole what? What are you saying?”

“We must listen.... We must hear them.” Chaven managed to throw the Funderling off, but his look had changed from sheer madness to something more sly. He crawled across the room before Chert could get his legs under himself; a moment later he had snaked out under the faded hanging and into the corridor. Chert hurried after him.

The physician had stopped at the stairwell. He touched his lips to enjoin the Funderling to silence—an unnecessary gesture to someone as frightened as Chert was, both by the danger itself and Chaven’s seeming madness. The physician was shaking, but it seemed a tremble of rage, not anything more sensible like a fear of being caught, imprisoned, and almost inevitably executed.

And me? Chert could not help thinking. If they kill Chaven, the royal physician, what will they do with a mere Funderling who is his accomplice? The only question will be whether anyone ever learns of my death. Ah, my dear old Opal, you were right after all—I should have learned to stay at home and tend my own fungus.

He took a deep breath to try to slow his beating heart. Perhaps it was only Chaven’s own servants after all. Perhaps... “I promise you, Lord Tolly, there is nothing else here of value at all.” The reedy voice wafted down the stairwell, close enough to keep Chert stock-still, holding the last breath he took as if it must last him forever. To his horror, he saw Chaven’s eyes go wide with that mindless, inexplicable rage he had shown earlier, even saw the physician make a twitching move toward the staircase itself. Chert shot out his hand and clung as if his fingers were curled on scaffolding while he dangled over a deadly drop.

The other’s voice was lazy, but with a suggestion somehow that it could turn cruel as quick as an adder’s strike. “Is that true, brother, or are there things here that you think might not be of value to me, but which you might quite like for yourself?”

Confused, Chert guessed that Hendon Tolly and his brother, the new Duke of Summerfield, stood in the hallway above them. He could not understand the expression of heedless fury on Chaven’s face. Earth Elders, didn’t he realize that the Tollys owned not just the castle now but had become the unquestioned rulers of all Southmarch? That with a word these men could have Chaven and Chert skinned in Market Square in front of a whooping, applauding crowd?

“I tell you, Lord, you already have the one piece of true value. I promise that eventually I will winkle out its secrets, but at the moment there is something missing, some element I have not discovered, and it is not in this house...” The man’s thin voice suddenly grew sharp, highpitched. “Ah, keep that away from me!”

“It is only a cat,” said the one he had called Lord Tolly.

“I hate the things. They are tools of Zmeos. There, it runs away. Good.” When he spoke again his voice had regained its earlier calm. “As I said, there is nothing in this house that will solve the puzzle—I swear that to you, my lord.”

“But you will solve it,” the other said. “You will.”

Fear was in the first one’s voice again, not well hidden. “Of course, Lord. Have I not served you well and faithfully for years?”

“I suppose you have. Come, let us lock this place up and you can go back to your necromancy.”

“I think it would be more accurate to call it captromancy, my lord.” The speaker had recovered his nerve a bit. Chert was beginning to think he had guessed wrong—that one of these was a Tolly, but not both. “Necromancers raise the dead. It is captromancers who use mirrors in their art.”

“Perhaps a little of both, then, eh?” said his master jauntily as their voices dwindled. “Ah, what a fascinating world we are making...!”

When the two were gone and the house was silent Chert could finally breathe freely, and found he was trembling all over, as if he had narrowly avoided a fatal tumble. “Who were those two men?”

“Hendon Tolly, to give one of the dogs a name,” the physician snarled. “The other is the vilest traitor who ever lived—an even filthier cur than Hendon—a man who I thought was my friend, but who has been the Tollys’ lapdog all along, it seems. If I had his throat in my hands...”

“What are you talking about?”

“Talking about? He has stolen my dearest possession!” Chaven’s eyes were still wide, and it occurred to Chert it was not too late for the royal physician to go dashing out into Southmarch Keep and get them both killed. He grabbed Chaven’s robe again.

“What? What did he steal? Who was that?” Chaven shook his head, tears welling in his eyes again. “No. I cannot tell you. I am shamed by my weakness.” He turned to stare at Chert, desperate, imploring. “Tolly called him brother because the man who helped him pillage my secrets is one of the brothers of the EastmarchAcademy. Okros, Brother Okros—a man who I have trusted as if he were my own family.”

Chert had never seen the physician so helpless, so defeated, so...empty.

Chaven put his head on his arms, sagged as if he would never rise again. “Oh, by all the gods, I should have known! Growing to manhood in a family like mine, I should have known that trust is for fools and weaklings.”

“Are you mad?” Teloni could not have been more astonished if her younger sister had suggested jumping off the harbor wall into the ocean. “He is a prisoner! And he is a man!”

“But look at him—he is always here and he seems so sad.” Pelaya Akuanis had seen the prisoner a half- dozen times, and always the older man sat on the stone bench as quietly as if he listened to music, but of course there was no music, only the noises of birds and the distant boom and shush of the sea. “I am going to talk to him.”

“The guards won’t let you,” one of the other girls warned, but Pelaya ignored her. She got up and smoothed her dress before walking across the garden toward the bench. Two of the guards stood, but after looking at her carefully one guard leaned back against the wall again; the other moved exactly one step closer to the bearded man they were guarding, which was apparently the solution to some odd little inner mechanics of responsibility. Then the two guards resumed their whispered conversation. Pelaya wished she looked more like the dangerous type who