“Long ago, we found some ancient machines in Tingawa . . .”
“I knew about that, but no more than that.”
“In the Before Time they had a disease called cancer. Parts of one’s own body began to grow and attack other parts. It took them generations to learn how to fight it. Among the machines, we found one that we think might have originally been used to fight that disease. It could reproduce the code for individual people, or animals, or anything living. Our people experimented with the patterns of simple plants. To the pattern of the plant, they added part of the pattern of bacteria that killed those plants. The combined pattern sought out the plants and killed them. In the Before Time, if the pattern had been of the cancerous cells, they could have added something to kill them and only them. We saw the danger, the temptation. We put the machines where they could not be used. We never have used them.
“I believe that there, in the Old Dark House, some old machines had survived. I think the duchess first took your code, then added something that would feed upon it. She carried it with her. She probably drove by here in her carriage—she often did that—and she set it free outside the castle.”
“How did she get my pattern?”
“She obtained something of yours somewhere, somehow, perhaps at court: a few hairs from your brush, perhaps. A napkin you had used to wipe your mouth at dinner. That’s all it would have taken.”
“But you helped me defeat it!”
“I can’t explain that. Perhaps the machine she used is faulty. It must be very old. The ones we found in Tingawa were very old. Or perhaps she did not understand how to use it correctly.”
They had not known then that the machine had made copies. They had not known then that defeating the duchess once meant nothing—they would have to defeat her hundreds of times.
When they learned this, Precious Wind had cried, “We can defeat it again. You can go back to Tingawa! Far enough she can’t follow you.”
“Xulai has to be here! Everything says she has to be born here and live here. I stay here for Xulai. She is too important to us to do anything else.”
Still, they had fought. They found things to disrupt the vortices. If the princess mixed her saliva with the blood of a chicken or the foam from the back of a horse, then applied this mixture to the back of a mirror, then bits of that mirror set in windows attracted the vortices and the varying patterns in those mirrors trapped them, weakened them. When the mirrors were melted, the energies were dissipated, that copy was defeated. Even different genetic patterns could distract them. A sprig of yew the princess had breathed on, a line of chalk she had held. The patterns could be weakened by those who had some understanding of what was happening, but they could not be stopped without the machines. They could not stop the duchess without risking Xulai. They could never risk Xulai.
Nor could they learn anything about the duchess except what everyone knew: The duchess was Mirami’s daughter, Falyrion’s daughter. She had been given the duchy by the king. They could learn nothing about the Old Dark House except what everyone knew: The Old Dark House had been owned by the Old Dark Man. He was not there anymore. He had been there when Mirami was a child, but he had gone away or died. He had been called a wizard, a monster, a vampire. People had feared him and still feared him even though the Old Dark Man must have died long, long before Alicia was born.
In Tingawa it was said that the Old Dark House must be totally destroyed, burned to the ground with every device that could be found within it. That would certainly be done, some way, some time. But not today.
Here at the Vulture Tower, Precious Wind had learned nothing new; she had only verified assumptions she and the princess and Justinian and Lok-i-xan had made long ago. There were still riddles piled upon riddles, and it was not a conundrum Precious Wind could solve now. Her story to the abbot and the prior required that she spend at least two days more away from the abbey, and it would be wise to stay somewhere other than the Vulture Tower. If she could get archers here in such a short time, she might send them with the thing, the vortices, to go looking for Jenger. If they searched for cells of his body, there would be plenty of them where the mirror was now. Her own hair was, as usual when she was on a mission, tightly braided, smoothed down with oil, and covered. Long hair was a disadvantage in combat and a disadvantage if any hair, long or short, fell into Alicia’s hands. Precious Wind had worn gloves and used her handkerchief to hold things. She had not put her mouth to anything. She had not used the privy. She carried a little folding shovel among her supplies and was neat and hidden as a cat about her own droppings. She remembered her surprise at Xulai hiding the privy, that morning when they left Altamont lands. Who had taught her that? Well, it didn’t matter. The only cells anyone had left in the Vulture Tower had been Jenger’s, and possibly the bowmen’s. Jenger, so far as Precious Wind could see, was nowhere to be found.
In the wagon inside the dilapidated house hidden in the forest south of the abbey, Abasio was tending to Xulai. She had worn the library helmet almost constantly for the last several days, and he had to take it away from her from time to time to be sure that she ate
