She tilted her head, making a pretty face as she considered this. “The woman I cursed took her own sweet time dying, Jenger. She should have been dead years ago, the day after I put the cloud on her. Oh, I know, I forgot two of the steps in the process and got another two out of order, but it still should have been lethal enough. At least I had sense enough to have the machine make copies, many, many copies. She fought me. How many times have we camped near Woldsgard, you and I, or ridden by, so I could release a new copy of the cloud? And before you joined me, I went, season after season. I don’t know how she did it, I don’t know who her confederates may have been, but however and whoever, no one opposes me. No person, no child, no creature! I repay opposition with defeat. I repay delay with death. She thwarted me; now I will thwart her. You’ve said she really wanted her soul carried to Tingawa; I will repay her by seeing it does not happen. It will amuse me.”
“And anything that amuses you, you find worthwhile?” he murmured.
“Believe it, Jenger, always.” And she smiled again, so sweetly that he felt an instant’s deadly fear. He had been her follower for some time. Sometimes, she had given him a strange, addictive sort of ecstasy. On certain occasions she had given him power. Sometimes, briefly, he had thought she considered him a friend. Occasionally, he had considered himself her friend. Briefly. Yet, most often he had been merely utilized, and sometimes, as today, he found himself playing a game with rules he did not know against a viper he could not see. He knew it was there, somewhere, its fangs exposed, its venom ready, behind her face, behind her eyes—her eyes that sometimes went empty, so that looking into them was like looking into a tunnel that had no end yet became no smaller the farther it went, a tunnel with a red light at the far end of it. There were things living in that light: ugly, sinuous movements; hard, dreadful words; a hideous, tingling laughter. Each time he felt them, his skin tightened and erupted in gooseflesh, as though he had been caught in an avalanche and was dying of cold.
It had happened half a dozen times since he had been with her. Each time, he told himself it was only imagination. Each time he was not reassured, for he knew it was real. That other place or that other person or . . . those other creatures were there, at the bottom of her eyes. Or, if not at the bottom of her eyes, then somewhere else that she saw from within herself. Wherever, whatever it was, she knew the way to it or them. Perhaps she went there sometimes, to amuse herself. Perhaps that was really where she lived in those hours and days when no one knew where she was.
He should not have mentioned the queen. Alicia hated Queen Mirami. Her own mother, and she hated her. A time or two he had thought he understood it, but at other times he did not. She had loved her father. He was sure of that. Alicia had loved Duke Falyrion with all the love she was capable of, and when she spoke of him it was with adoration, with grief and loss in her face and manner. She had said once that her mother had taken her father away from her. He had not dared ask her how.
He feigned a loose saddle girth and dismounted to tighten it, allowing her to put a little distance between them while he breathed deeply, trying to swallow the burning that filled his throat. When he mounted again, he stayed behind. The terror would pass. It always had before. It would again, he thought. He hoped. When they arrived at the Old Dark House, Jenger took the reins of the duchess’s horse and led it away, forcing himself to move in a matter-of-fact way, showing no fear, watching from the corners of his eyes as she ran, actually ran, through the great doorway. He did not want to know where she was going.
She went where he had never gone: down a long flight of stairs, through an anteroom, then into a room to which only she had the key. As always, when she entered, she checked her machines before she did anything else. First, the fatal-cloud machine. She had confessed to Jenger that she had made mistakes when she used it on the Tingawan woman, years ago, forgetting some of the details her instructor had given her, but she had reviewed the procedure afterward, and she would not make that mistake again. Second, the seeker-mirror machine. It would find anyone, or it would reflect anyone, depending upon how it was set. Third, the sending machine she had used last night. It was very old. It had buttons on it to control “the visuals,” “the sonics,” “the settings,” “the maps.” Her instructor had told her it sometimes malfunctioned. She would not use it again except to send a haunting. It still worked well enough for that! Fourth was the machine that watched and protected her. That’s all it did, its great bulk standing in a far corner, red eyes alert, just watching. There were other devices in the room, one that opened and shut the door, one that kept the room warm and circulated the air, one that showed her where her servants were, but the first four—no, three now—were the important ones.
Now that she had met the Tingawans, it was time to see what might be done about them—or at least one of them. From the cubicle in which she kept her precious things, she retrieved a very old package, stained by the spray of the sea, the tar of oiled ropes, the sweat of many different hands. It had been lying there
