Knowing this for the nonsense it was, I smiled at him in return, and dropped a coin in his bowl each time I went. On the fourth or fifth such occasion, I turned from leaving my gift to confront a bulky man in the livery of Von Goldereau’s house, obviously drunken and belligerent. “Yul bring bad down on us,” he growled, laying his hand on my shoulder, to push me back. “Y’ve no right smilin’ at the likes of that!”
“Oh, sir,” cried the Trajian. “She was only being amused at the juggling…”
“And y’filth, y’ve no right speakin’ to me at all,” said the ruffian, flinging out one huge arm that caught the juggler across the face.
I heard his neck snap. I felt the juggler die. Everything became very still and very hot. “You,” someone cried in a great voice that echoed down the street as though a cataract had shouted in a stony canyon, the reverberations continuing as in a monstrous bell. “You have brought down bad fortune upon yourself and your house. You will leave no child; you will gain no profit; you will taste no food. From this moment, your body will shrink into nothingness, for I, the Healer, take life from you to restore what you have unjustly taken!”
And I laid my hands upon him. For one instant he looked surprised, then horrified. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell, gurgling, his face turning white. The crowd drew away from me as I knelt beside the juggler, putting my hands on him. I felt the life flow into him, the life I had taken from that other. I felt the bone knit. I felt the heart beat beneath my hands, like that of a bird.
He opened his eyes. He said, “You look so like her, so like sweet Queen Wilvia…” And then he fell into sleep. He had healed completely; I knew it to be so.
A female of his kind, dressed like a princess, came from the wagon with several other of her kind. “I am the wife for whom Yarov, Juggler to the Queen of the Ghoss, paid a great price,” she said. I knew it was the way of Trajian women to introduce themselves so. I nodded respectfully to her, and her people picked the juggler up and took him away.
Only when I felt the pain in my throat did I realize that great voice had been my own. When I went through the marketplace on my way home, people stood aside and lowered their heads. One or two, I touched, for they were in pain, and the anger that had moved me was still strong enough in me to heal them. The Gardener had told me of this, this avenging fury, but I had not known I could feel it. I was not sure I ever wanted to feel it again, though I knew I would not be able to withstand it.
Gradually, the workmen at the mansion accomplished their tasks. Outbuildings filled up with leftover lumber, tools, ladders, and paint. One old stable held enough powdered charbic from Cantardene to mothproof ten mansions. In time each problem was solved, each bit of wreckage was removed or repaired, each group of workmen was paid and went away. The place became orderly, clean, and quiet, and for the first time, I thought we might have time to reflect upon why Sophia had returned to Bray, what we would do about the mansion, and what she might accomplish here. Sophia, however, had a remaining concern that she mentioned to me over breakfast:
“I’ve been considering this discomfort we feel. You know, we haven’t even looked in the cellars.”
I shuddered, thinking first of the effusive old man who had brought the keys. The cellars could not be in any better condition than the rest of the house and might be worse. Sophia ignored my shudder and went to get the keys, which were heavy and unnecessarily intricate. Or so we thought until we had penetrated past the second door, at which point we went back and quietly closed and locked the doors behind us in order to prevent inadvertent interruption.
“Where did he get these?” demanded Sophia, holding out a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg, the topmost from a keg of similar stones. “I’ve never seen jewels like these.”
“There’s a world’s ransom here,” I replied, wishing desperately that the Gardener were with us.
“Let’s just look quickly, then close it all up,” Sophia urged. “This isn’t something we can deal with now.”
Even our quick look disclosed endless stores of treasure, none of it in the least corrupted, not even the fabrics: cloth of gold embroidered with emeralds, cloth of silver dotted with sapphires, cloth of diamond in the original bolt, woven from crystalline thread as made only by the Pthas and never by any race since.
“An old city,” I mused, on recognizing this latter fabric from a sample the Gardener had once shown me. “Someone has found a great treasure-house of ancient times.”
Beyond the last door, triple-barred, triple-bolted, triple-locked, we came upon an unlit tunnel where a lantern was set upon a table next to a stoppered bottle of lamp oil and a cane with a protruding sword tip. This last, I picked up as I followed Sophia, who carried the newly filled and lit lantern. The tunnel had not been formed by men. It was part of a natural cave, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
“He found this place,” I said with certainty. “He had the rest of the cellars dug around it, but this one he found!”
“Yes,” I said sadly. “And he had the doors built, then closed in the men who built them.” I followed her pointing finger to the cluster of desiccated flesh and protruding bones against the wall. Four men, or what had been men. They wore the shackles of bondsmen, and they had written their fate in their own blood on the floor beside them. “He does not want
