The Element of Fire by Martha Wells (top novels TXT) 📕

were now roughly backtracking the route they had taken away from the cellar the night of the attack, but heading toward the lower passageways they had been unable to reach because of the collapsed corridor. The strain of the fight had exacerbated the pain in Thomas’s bad leg and it was protesting this treatment, but he managed not to limp too obviously.

The stairs led to an unblocked passage below the storerooms, and the stale air carried the fetid smell of death. Thomas’ thoughts kept turning back to Grandier’s shape-shifting ability. Not that way. I don’t want to die that way. He had given up everything else—his honor, his right to say he had never killed a helpless opponent, his claim on his ancestral lands. Voluntarily or pushed to it by circumstance, bit by bit everything had gone to win a few years or a few months or a few days of political stability in a world where so few others seemed to care, and most of them were dead now. He was willing to die for duty’s sake but the thought of giving up his identity turned his heart to ice.

There was light up ahead, from a place where there should be stygian darkness. Abruptly raucous noise, growling, and a high-pitched keening echoed off the stone walls. A few more uneasy troopers drew their swords.

The corridor turned, and the first thing Thomas saw was that a large chunk of the stone wall had been knocked out, allowing a view down into the cellar. Grandier moved to the edge, and after a moment Thomas followed him.

The Unseelie Court had found a home here. Fay with long emaciated bodies and huge leathery wings flew in lazy circles over the foul revelry below. There were hundreds of them, bogles, spriggans, formless creatures like the boneless that had attacked them in the street. The mockery and distortion of human and animal forms was endless and infinitely varied. Thomas could see them much more clearly this time, perhaps because they were not troubling to conceal themselves anymore. The light came from a mist that crept up the walls and wreathed around the giant columns supporting the ceiling.

This opening had been made at about the second level of the cellar, and the wide pillars met the ceiling another two levels above them. Below were the remains of two flights of stairs and the narrow well that had enclosed them, now a mound of broken stone and shattered wood. Corpse-lights flitted around the stairs and the tops of the columns.

The unnatural light was bright enough to let Thomas see the dark openings in the ceiling for the air shafts and the doors through which the larger siege engines had been lowered. Chains and frayed ropes hung down from some of those doors, the old system of block and tackle. Thomas said, “They fly up those shafts.”

“Yes.” Grandier’s gaze was on the unholy revelry below. “It protects them from daylight, but gives them access to the surface.” He turned back to the others and said, “Dontane, they seem disturbed. Go down and ask them what’s wrong.”

Dontane moved forward, threw an unreadable look at Grandier, then started the awkward climb to the bottom of the cellar.

“So he is a sorcerer,” Thomas said.

Grandier glanced at him. “He’s learning. He had been refused admittance to Lodun, and in anger he came across the border to Bisra, and to me for teaching before my arrest. I refused him, because I felt he lacked moral character.” He smiled, amused, apparently, by this earlier self who had had the leisure to make such judgments. “Trust was a very important issue, among those of us who practiced sorcery in Bisra. The merest suspicion of necromancy, or anything else the Church could interpret as traffic with demons, was death. But after I escaped from the Inquisition, I sought him out. I had discovered I needed a man who lacked moral character. He was at Lodun with me after I was Galen Dubell, but one of the masters learned he had been across the border, and became suspicious of him. The rumors that I had come to Ile-Rien had already started, you see. So I sent him on to contact the Duke of Alsene for me, which he did through our unfortunate and foolish Lord Lestrac.”

Dr. Braun had visited Lodun frequently, Thomas remembered. “You killed Braun because he recognized Dontane.”

“I would have had to eventually, anyway.”

Thomas watched Dontane pick his way down the remains of the steps and said, “Are you sure he’s not the one who turned you in to the Inquisition?”

“Oh, good try.” Grandier smiled. “No, that man is dead.”

Dontane had climbed halfway to the bottom, and now one of the winged sidhe flew to meet him, cupping its wings to hold itself in midair, gesturing and shouting at him in a high-pitched shriek. Dontane turned and waved at Grandier, his posture betraying irritation. Grandier said, “It appears this needs my attention.” He nodded to the Alsene sergeant, then looked back at Thomas. “I’ll see you shortly, Captain.”

Without Grandier’s presence, the troopers muttered nervously as they made their way back, but Thomas was too preoccupied to notice. Why did he want me to see that? What did it accomplish? A will-o’-the-wisp followed them part of the way, playing in the unlit wall lanterns and taunting them silently.

Thomas felt each step of the various stairways as a short stabbing pain. By the time they reached the upper floors of the Old Palace he was limping badly. They entered one of the smaller halls that had been set up as temporary barracks, now occupied by a few sullen troopers gathered around the hearth fire, and they passed through it into an attached suite. The last room had been stripped of furniture and wall coverings, and it was dark except for what light flickered uncertainly in from the lamps in the anteroom.

Thomas watched tiredly as one of them pounded an iron spike with a set of manacles attached to it into the wall. With respect for his unpredictability, one held a pistol to his head when they untied him to put the manacles on.

The chains were short but he was able to sit down against the wall. The troopers withdrew into the anteroom to huddle in a nervous knot near the hearth.

He tested the set of the spike in the wall to see if it could be worked loose, but it held firm. Well and truly caught this time. He rested his pounding head back against the cold wood, and tried not to think.

“I didn’t believe they would let you live.” It was Aviler’s voice. Between the dim light and the distraction of various injuries, Thomas hadn’t seen the other man chained to the opposite wall. The High Minister’s dark-colored doublet was torn and bloodied, and from the livid bruises on his temple it seemed he had not been taken easily.

Thomas closed his eyes a moment, damning the fate that had consigned him to be imprisoned with Aviler. Then he said, “Grandier wanted me alive, and if you imply I’m in league with him, I’ll kill you.”

At the moment it was a supremely empty threat, but Aviler answered, “Don’t take me for a fool, Captain.”

“I don’t know what else to take you for.” Thomas sat up and gingerly felt the back of his head. His hair was matted with blood, and there was a sizable lump composed of pure pain.

“You can take me for a man who did not acquire my power in a Queen’s bed.”

“Yes,” Thomas agreed. “In her bed, on the daybed in the anteroom, on a couch in the west solar of the Summer Palace, and other locations too numerous to mention, and if you had the slightest understanding of Ravenna at all, you would know it never made one damn bit of difference as to whether she took my advice or not. And no, your father handed you your power wrapped in ribbon on his deathbed.”

The High Minister looked away. After a long moment of silence, he said, “I expect it doesn’t matter now.”

Already feeling the bite of the manacles on his wrists, Thomas expected it didn’t matter either.

Aviler rubbed his eyes, making his own chains jingle slightly. “Galen Dubell really is the sorcerer Grandier, then. Denzil told me something of it when he brought the Queen to me, but under the circumstances I don’t place much confidence in his word.”

“Dubell really is Grandier. He got a shape-changing magic from the fay, and he killedDubell and took his place.” The stab wound in Thomas’s left arm was still bleeding sluggishly, though the pain of it hardly competed with that in his head. The thinner sleeve leather of his buff coat had absorbed some of the force but the blade had still penetrated a couple of inches at least. He tore a strip of material from the tail of his shirt to use as a crude bandage. “Why are you alive?”

“I don’t know. No one’s bothered to say. What’s your opinion on the subject?”

“He wants to keep his options open. He can’t stay Dubell forever.”

As Aviler considered the unpleasant implication, Thomas tightened the rag around his arm, taking malicious satisfaction in letting the other man in on his private terror. He knew he had more to worry about on that score than the High Minister did. Grandier hardly knew Aviler.

With Lucas dead—he hesitated in tying off the makeshift bandage, wondering who had done it, Dontane or some nameless hireling trooper—there was no one but Ravenna who knew him well enough to realize the deception immediately. He didn’t think anyone could find a way through the complexities of his relationship with Ravenna, but that would only mean Grandier would have to kill her, the way he had coldly eliminated anyone who might have noticed that Galen Dubell had changed more than time could account for.

Then there was Kade.

Kade had done well enough leading her own erratic and dangerous life before Thomas had dragged her into this, talked her into staying with them past the point at which she could have left safely. And made her vulnerable. The little idiot trusts me. Lucas had been right. And he remembered that the last conversation he had had with his friend had been an argument; stupid thing to do in a war, and he would regret it the rest of his no doubt short life.

Kade was her own woman, and he was too old to bother lying to himself anymore and too young not to want her. But any chance of anything between them was wasted, as pointlessly wasted as Lucas, Vivan, and ail the other lives lost and destroyed by Denzil and Grandier.

There was a stirring among the men in the anteroom, and after a moment Urbain Grandier appeared in the doorway, carrying a candlelamp and a short stool.

He set the lamp down on the scuffed floorboards, and glanced once, thoughtfully, at Aviler. Then he looked back to Thomas and said, “I felt I owed you more of an explanation.”

Thomas had a sudden impulse to delay whatever the sorcerer had come to say. He said, “You have Dontane fooled. He thinks you’re mad.”

Grandier shook his head, put the stool he had brought just inside the doorway, and sat down. “I give him what he expects.” He sighed, and looked like a tired old man. “He imagines himself to be subtle and dangerous, and I suppose he is, but there are things he fails to understand. Denzil, on the other hand, is rather like an incompetent copyist’s version of you.”

As the clear gray eyes met his Thomas felt a stab of pure fear. Worry about it later, he thought. Grandier had probably