“I’m not interested in your ideas,” I said quickly.
“You can’t-” she began.
“Watch and learn. This is called ‘The Hawthorne Guide to Staying Alive.’ Step one: When five of your friends suggest that you fight a hundred and sixty trained killers, go home immediately.”
I walked out of the room and down the corridor, passing the count’s rooms and the long, straight wall with the tapestry, Renthrette running at my heels.
“Step two.,” I continued, descending the stairs and ignoring her spluttered attempts to interrupt, “spend the rest of your life sitting in a bar, drinking lots of beer, playing cards, and picking up women.”
On the ground floor she caught hold of me and thrust me against the wall in a move worthy of her brother.
“Now, you listen to me,” she began. “We saved your neck-”
I’d heard this all before and turned away with disinterest. The barrack doors were open and over her shoulder I could see in and across the bunks of resting cavalrymen to the windows on the other side.
Suddenly something hit me like a falling buffalo. I said the word aloud to Renthrette.
“What?” she asked.
“Windows, look.”
“So?”
“Come upstairs.”
I half dragged her up, past the second story, where we had been drinking, and on to the next, where a heavy oak door took us out onto the battlements. Still running, I led her to the front of the building, blinking against a light rain and what was probably a breeze on ground level, but felt like a gale up here.
“What?” she demanded irritably as we reached the forward-facing parapet. I spun her to look back across the top of the keep. The wind picked up suddenly and I had to shout. “Look at the shape of the building,” I said. “The foundation is cross-shaped. Each level is the same size and shape. On the ground floor the crosspiece is the cavalry quarters, one room on the west side and one on the east. On the top floor the crosspiece is more battlements. But where’s the crosspiece on the middle floor, the floor where our rooms are, the floor where the count lives?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Why are there windows on the middle story at the front and the back but none on the sides?” I said. “The cavalry barracks on the ground floor house two hundred men. There must be rooms of the same size directly above them that we’ve never even seen! There are probably doors behind those tapestries. God, Renthrette,” I exclaimed with sudden and heart-stopping fear, “we’ve found the raiders. They were here all the time.”
SCENE L Implications
No,” said Renthrette.
She had said that a lot in the last half hour.
“Yes,” I said. “It all makes sense.”
“It makes no sense at all,” she said. “Why would Arlest shelter the raiders here? It’s crazy, and we have no evidence except for some
I told her that investigation was too risky but, like her brother, she thought theories were for sissies. We walked along the long corridors that led to our rooms wondering if those moth-eaten tapestries concealed doors, but we were always under the casual watch of the guards. We thought, very briefly, about going to the chancellor or to the countess, or even to Arlest himself, but that was clearly hopeful to the point of stupidity. We had to presume they were all involved. That left us with a puzzle: How might we get a look in those rooms?
An hour later the puzzle had changed. How had Renthrette convinced me to stand guard while she climbed a rope from the battlements down the side of the keep? We were back on the roof, where the troops were few and not so much casual as dormant. One of them asked me where my “lady friend” had got to and went off chuckling, convinced that she’d dumped me for some burly soldier. Nothing so mundane; she was swinging at the end of a rope, trying to force the second-story shutters with a throwing dagger. Naturally.
But then she was calling me to climb down after her, and I had other things to worry about. I’m not fond of climbing; factor in a howling wind and a rain-slicked rope, and you might understand why it took me three hellish minutes to inch down to the shuttered window where Renthrette was waiting for me. Then she was muttering about my incompetence and pulling me in with the kind of rough, physical manhandling that always sounds like it should be exciting, but is usually just embarrassing.
Inside was exactly what we had expected: one of two large dormitories identical to the cavalry barracks below. The room was deserted, but there were footlockers full of red-flighted arrows and scarlet cloaks hanging from racks around the walls. At one end of the room was a heavy door. I felt we’d seen enough, but Renthrette tried it anyway.
Behind it was a stone staircase.
We inched down the stairs. They went not to the ground floor, but to a familiar round chamber in the basement, its floor glowing with the soft, white luminescence of the Ugokan caves and the Iruni stone circle. I stood on the steps and looked at it, as if I had seen it only in nightmares before. There was, thank God, no sign of the raiders, but the place alone gave me the creeps. Renthrette felt it too. She gazed wide-eyed at the room and then looked back to me. “It’s just as you described it,” she said.
“You didn’t believe me?” I asked, momentarily incredulous.
“Of course I did,” she said, “but, you know. You’re the storyteller, right? I thought perhaps you had embroidered it a little. Made it more dramatic.”
“You want drama?” I said petulantly. “Try filling the place with raiders. That part was true too.”
She gave me a slightly pained look. “Right,” she said. “Sorry.”
All I wanted to do right now was get out of this awful place: not just the room, or the secret barracks, but the castle itself. For once, she seemed to agree. We retraced our steps, climbed back up the rope to the roof, and returned to our rooms, badly rattled but apparently undetected.
It was difficult to decide where our discovery left us, other than with the sense that we should have thought of this weeks ago. There had been clues that we had managed to miss completely, like the fact that we’d been served conspicuously watered ale while the bar was piled high with beer barrels for its less public inhabitants. Or the prohibitively expensive horses at the huge ranch by the river, which was obviously just a big stable for the raiders who were on the ale over at Count Arlest’s House of Hell. What was more difficult to figure out was what we were supposed to do with our discovery.
One thing we did learn, for what it was worth, was that although the long corridors did have concealed doors into the raiders’ quarters, the raiders themselves almost certainly never used them. The raiders moved between their barracks and the great circular chamber in the basement, which could put them anywhere in the area. They could come and go without ever setting foot in a public area inside or outside the keep. It was tough to swallow the idea that the servants, the regular army, the count, his pale wife, and the rest of the castle were unaware of the presence of two hundred armed men, but it
“Well, now we know,” said Renthrette with a satisfied smile, as if she’d figured it all out for herself. This annoyed me, as it had been my flash of genius, but it was typical of Renthrette and Garnet. You only make progress by
But not everything was falling neatly into place. The attack on Arlest, which we’d witnessed when we first arrived, was a round peg for our square holes. I was tempted to see the count as innocent and the attack as genuine, while Renthrette thought they were all guilty as hell and the attack had been purely for our benefit. That men had died in the course of laying this false trail only convinced her of its spuriousness.
I considered the spectral army that had ravaged the region 250 years ago. After the dust had settled, three new capital cities had been built, and one of them had been Adsine. The keep was as old as the town. Someone
