Darkborn Part 20

"I think we should have something to eat," he said.

"I'm not sure I could," she said.

"Then you should, because that is exactly how I feel, which tells me I need it to keep going."

He rang the bell for the steward, who came promptly, suggesting that the carriage was not overly busy. They discussed the menu, and he pressed Telmaine to expand her choices beyond the insubstantial soup she first requested. The steward joined him in solicitude; Telmaine yielded. Once the steward had gone, she frowned. "Are you going to help me eat all that?"

"I am. Merely discussing it makes me hungrier. You do good work, my love."

She s.h.i.+fted a little, unhappily, in her seat. He drew breath, but it seemed not the time to press her, much as his impulse was to explore her unease.

"We're moving," she observed. "I've never taken one of these trains before. I'm not sure anyone I know has."

"I've traveled this route a half a dozen times at least, as a student, though never before in such style."

Over their meal, he gave her an account of one particular journey spent in the company of a traveling theater troupe whose writer-manager was clearly suffering from the kind of mania that was almost indistinguishable from genius-or vice versa. They had barely pulled out of the station before he had the entire troupe and most of the other pa.s.sengers improvising a melodrama in the grand style under his direction. By the end of the journey, one respectable matron and her spinster daughter had vowed to join the troupe, two students were planning a duel over the ingenue, who had obvious designs on a third, and the railway's public agent-not a flexible character-had threatened to impose a daylight travel ban on the whole pack of them. When Telmaine choked on her soup and set to coughing and laughing at the same time, he was satisfied. He did not even have to persuade her to eat an eclair, while she intercepted his reach for his fourth with a crisp tap of gloved fingers on his wrist. "Some protector you'll be if you're too sick to move." a flexible character-had threatened to impose a daylight travel ban on the whole pack of them. When Telmaine choked on her soup and set to coughing and laughing at the same time, he was satisfied. He did not even have to persuade her to eat an eclair, while she intercepted his reach for his fourth with a crisp tap of gloved fingers on his wrist. "Some protector you'll be if you're too sick to move."

When the steward returned to clear away the dishes, Bal remarked that the train seemed not to be particularly busy. This proved so: There was only one other pair of gentlemen in upper cla.s.s, a gentleman traveling to the coast for his health, and his personal physician. The steward had put them at the far end, so that his coughing would not disturb the other pa.s.sengers.

"That wasn't a casual inquiry, was it?" Telmaine said softly, when the steward had left.

"No," Bal said. "Though I'm not sure what I could have learned by it. I'm somewhat rea.s.sured that he seems to find them quite ordinary."

"I didn't have that sense of chill and horror when I came on board," Telmaine said.

Her little frown made him say quickly, "No, don't try. I thought about making a call-one physician to another-but if we were to provoke a confrontation, we risk being stranded until nightfall." Or not getting there at all Or not getting there at all, he thought. "It's to our advantage to wait. And it's most likely that they are what they seem to be." He shook his head a little ruefully. "Three nights ago, all I'd have been worried about would have been the risk of infection."

"Mm," she said. "Three nights ago I was on my way back to Minhorne with Florilinde and Amerdale, with Ishmael as escort."

The silence was heavy with grief and unsaid words.

"Why don't you put your head down," Bal said at last. "You'll need your vitality."

She nodded wearily and got up, steadying herself against the rocking of the train. "And you? Will you join me?"

"I'm going to write those letters I said I would, and then I'll join you. I'm feeling much better for those eclairs."

She made a small sound in her throat that might have been a laugh. "Don't you dare dare give the children the idea it's possible to eat three eclairs at one sitting." give the children the idea it's possible to eat three eclairs at one sitting."

"n.o.body needs to give a child that idea," Bal said. His sonn followed her as she made her way into their stateroom and lay down.

He called for the steward again, to bring him a writing case, stylus, and paper. How to write a letter to a six-year-old that could contain the sum of everything he had hoped to say to her over an entire lifetime? That would explain his, or his and Telmaine's, sudden and catastrophic desertion? He held his stylus poised, struggling with the density of his burden and his recognition that what he wanted to do could not be done. In the end he wrote each of his daughters a letter much like the ones he had written them the past two summers, while they were on the coast and he in the city, missing them, keeping it simple and fond for their present understanding. Then he wrote a third letter, one he hoped they would read in fifteen or twenty years. He asked for their forgiveness, rea.s.sured them of his and Telmaine's love, and wished them joy. The words did not say a fraction of what he wanted them to say, but he knew he could do no more.

After that, he fitted another page to his frame and addressed it to Olivede. He had been negligent in not telling her about Lysander's reappearance, and he must repair that. Of the leavetaking-well, she was a mage, and he her loving younger brother. Love needed but to be reaffirmed, not averred. He folded and addressed the letter and set it atop the others.

The fifth letter . . . He weighed his options for a long spell, while the train clattered on, whistling shrilly. He steadied his pen until the train had finished dancing through a complicated series of switches, smiling wryly at the memory of the discussions that had taken place over training and employing Lightborn switchmen, when the Lightborn's idea of nonmagical fast transport was still post-coaches. He decided to stick to Darkborn text, since Floria had the advantage of being able to see the punches, but ciphered. She'd never forgive him otherwise. But he could say good-bye, and write what he felt. If it came into her hands, he'd be dead, and past caring if she dismissed it as Darkborn mawkishness.

And last . . . Telmaine. If she outlived him, as she might well do-as he intended intended her to do, if it came to that-then he wanted her to know that what he felt for her was unchanged by the brief transit of Ishmael di Studier, and by her long deception. He admitted to himself that there was something appealing in knowing he would be represented by his written words alone, and that her touch on paper would never tell her what ambivalence or dissimulation lay behind them. her to do, if it came to that-then he wanted her to know that what he felt for her was unchanged by the brief transit of Ishmael di Studier, and by her long deception. He admitted to himself that there was something appealing in knowing he would be represented by his written words alone, and that her touch on paper would never tell her what ambivalence or dissimulation lay behind them.

Over an hour remained once his letter to Telmaine was done. He started to fold up the frame, and then had the thought that if he and Telmaine both died, Vladimer would not know who held each accurate piece of the story they had so carefully scattered around, and would lose valuable time resolving the inconsistencies. With a cramping hand, he carefully began another sheet, addressed to Lord Vladimer, and summarizing events as he knew them. He hardly needed encryption, he thought, lifting his stylus for the last time; his punching seemed little more than random.

He felt the train slowing, and remembered the tunnel it pa.s.sed through before beginning its final descent to the coast. Since the Lightborn could not comfortably enter its darkness, and the Darkborn could maintain it only by night, the train crept through at barely more than a walking pace. The addition of doors was one of the recurrent questions before the Intercalatory Council.

Sonn washed over him. "I thought," said his wife, "you were going to lie down."

He carefully folded that last letter, addressed the envelope, and tucked it into his jacket. "I was. But one letter led to another. I wrote the children . . ."

He held out the single letter for their daughters of the future; this one she consented to read, and handed it back with a subdued, "It's perfect, Bal. I'd not change a word of it."

He sensed her curiosity as he gathered up the other letters and slipped them into their folder in his writing case, but she did not ask to whom he had written. He would leave the case in the custody of the steward; if he lived, he would retrieve it later, and if not, the letters would find their way to their destinations.

He wrote a quick note of instruction and tucked it into the case, then set it on the table before him, and reached over it to take her small, gloved hand firmly in his. At their reduced speed, even inside a tunnel, the pulse and rattle of wheels on tracks was muted.

As the sound changed as they approached the end of the tunnel, they heard a heavy thud from overhead, as though a body had landed on a hollow box, feet first. Telmaine's breath whistled in; her grip on his hand was suddenly crus.h.i.+ng. Bal reached across with his left hand to grope for the pistol in his pocket, though the reflex was irrationality itself-a pistol ball through the wall would kill them as surely as any a.s.sault from without.

Telmaine said a single, imperative, "No," and there was a second, sliding thump, and a falling-away screech. Telmaine's mouth and blind eyes went wide in a silent scream of anguish.

"It's all right," Bal said, not knowing whether he spoke truth or falsehood, but responding by reflex to that expression. He returned her grip as firmly as he could without returning the discomfort. "It's all right. Slow, deep breaths. Breathe in, breathe out. You know how." If his own heart were not beating like an overwound clock, he would be far more authoritative. As the train gained speed he strained to hear any extraneous sound over the pounding pistons and rattling undercarriage.

Telmaine gave a stifled sob, pulling his crushed hand to her lips. "I had to," she whispered against it. "I had to. He wanted us dead. I felt . . . He had something with him that would . . . Oh, by the Sole G.o.d, Bal, I killed him."

He slid from his seat, handling himself around the table to kneel beside her and gather her to him, burying her forehead in the crook of his shoulder. She was shuddering, fighting hysterics. He tried hard not to give way to his impulse to offer pure comfort to his wife, the lady he had sworn to love and protect for a lifetime. She was no longer just his wife. He said quietly, "Do you sense anyone or anything else?"

She gasped, swallowed, and said, "No. Just one."

"Was it Shadowborn?"

"Lightborn, he felt Lightborn."

Bal swallowed and kept his voice steady with an effort. "And what did he have with him?"

"It might . . . have been explosive. It was going to . . . going to break open the carriage. Oh, Bal."

"Shh," he said. "You did what you needed to." He tried-since her forehead was resting against his neck-to contain his curiosity as to how. She answered his unvoiced question in a m.u.f.fled voice: "I made ice under his feet, the same way I cooled the handle down in the warehouse."

He could not spare her his quixotic but profound relief that she had not corrupted her healing talents, and remembered his own jagged thoughts as he crouched beside the sleeping babies, holding the letter opener and rehearsing its placement in a human body.

She trembled. "What's this doing to us?" she whispered. "Is it going to end if we save Lord Vladimer?"

"I don't think so," he whispered, because he could not lie, touching her.

He held her until he felt the train begin to slow. By then she had relaxed a little. "We need to collect ourselves," he said softly. "I'd still like not to draw attention, but we need to be prepared to run. I want you to promise me that if you have to leave me, you will leave me."

"No," she said, lifting her head, showing a face shaken and fierce. "I offered you the chance to stay behind and you did not take it. Now we're going together, or not at all."

Telmaine

The thud of the post-bags striking the platform behind her made Telmaine jump and blurt sonn in that direction. The station doors penned in the engine smoke, and the murk was dizzying. She started unthinkingly toward the gate that, for the archducal guests, led directly toward the main guest entrance of the archducal summer estate. Bal caught her and steered her toward the gate into the main concourse. "If anyone's expecting us, they're expecting us via that entrance."

As upper-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers they were allowed to disembark first, so they were first through the main entrance into the station concourse. It was a huge, domed building that lay adjacent to the tracks and offered refreshments, seating, and entrance to hotel accommodation for early-arriving and late-departing pa.s.sengers, as well as more extensive entertainments to those traveling at more usual hours. The younger visitors to the archducal summer house amused themselves here, in the fas.h.i.+onable afternoon.

From behind them came a harsh cough. She swung, barely restraining sonn. By Bal's casual cast, she caught an impression of two figures nearby, one heavily m.u.f.fled, leaning on the other. Bal murmured, "Our fellow first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. I hate to think what that smoke is doing to a bad chest. Very carefully now, do you sense anything from the rest of the train?"

She extended her awareness into the mill of people now disembarking from the lower-cla.s.s coach. For an instant she thought she had a sense of a presence like spent embers, but when she groped for it, it was gone. She drew back, afraid to attract attention to herself, and reminding herself that in the months after her father died, she had sonned him at the oddest times, and in the oddest faces. "No," she breathed. "Not among them."

Bal took her arm, leaning toward her like a wooer. "If I can get us in through the courier's entrance, and account for us to the guard, it'll be up to you to get us into Vladimer's rooms. I realize that if I had been planning ahead, I should have married an adventuress who'd know these things as a matter of course."

Behind her the great concourse doors ground closed, shutting with a final reverberating slam. Through the solid walls, they felt the vibrations of the engine as it built up steam. More faintly came the feel and sound of the outer door opening. Bal's head twitched toward the sound and she sonned the fine flicker of his pulse in his throat. She lifted her gloved hand and laid the beaded back of it along his cheek briefly. "You're trying too hard, my love. But I appreciate the effort."

She let him set the pace as he led her along the concourse, trying not to be obtrusive, but ever wary and starting at sounds. They drew away from their fellow pa.s.sengers, who chose to linger amongst the early-opening shops and cafes. She realized he had his hand in his pocket, where the pistol rested. "Here it is . . ." he breathed, as they drew level with a huge bas-relief mural depicting a bucolic midsummer's night on the beach. It was a style of art that had been highly fas.h.i.+onable when the concourse was built, that had been inspired by Lightborn descriptions of their visual art. Balthasar traced a finger along the ridge depicting the horizon, something, she thought, he no doubt had little difficulty imagining, for all it lay far outside the reach of sonn.

Bal's hand spanned a flock of seagulls, fingers coming to rest on three of them. He pressed, dropped his hand and slipped his fingers underneath a ridge of rock, and pulled. Found a depression in the sand. Leaned. Tapped a quick pattern on the cards held by a quartet of players in the right foreground. There was a muted hiss, and to the right of the mural, a panel opened. He caught her hand and pulled her inside, and the wall swallowed them up.

The s.p.a.ce was meant for only one, or two who knew each other as intimately as husband and wife. "What now?" she whispered.

"Shh," he said, "I have to get this right." She felt him grope along the wall, touch something there, press. Nothing happened. He drew a cramped breath; she could feel his heart beating hard against her chest. "What is it?" she said.

"I have three tries to get the sequence correct," Bal said.

"Or else?"

"Or else we'll be trapped here until the guards come to let us out."

She didn't need to touch him to know the implication of that; she could hear it in his voice. Already she could feel the air becoming close.

"And if they've changed the sequence since you carried messages?" she said.

"That is not a helpful suggestion," he muttered.

She quelled her sense of claustrophobia and panic, trying to find rea.s.surance in the thought of her magic. She could smell her own perfume overlying her sweat, and his. He drew a breath like the one he had drawn before he asked her to marry him, his hand moved again, and the inner wall swung open, spilling them into a larger room. Her coldness resolved abruptly into the familiar chill and terror. "It's here."

"I know," he said, in a very different voice.

Her impression of a large room had been through his sonn; now she cast her own, and perceived the three men sprawled in and around a card table: the guards to this couriers' entrance. Bal moved toward them, his impulse a physician's; she caught his arm, remembering explosions of flame. "Don't . . . don't touch them."

He heard the panic in her voice. "Can you go on?"

"I must," she said breathlessly, but she could not move.

He took her by the shoulders. "Let me hypnotize you."

"Now?" she half gasped.

"You've always been a good subject," he said. "You know it can be effective."

"For childbirth, yes," she said. "But this . . ."

"Listen to my voice," he said in a measured tone.

"It helps if I touch you."

"Does it? Do what you have to, though I'm not . . . as calm as I would like to be."

"Hypnotize yourself as well," she said, a little tartly.

"It's a thought . . ." He began to speak the familiar phrases, the ones he'd taught her as Flori's birth loomed and he could not change her vehement rejection of magical or chemical relief of pain. Now, as then-he had read far too many medical textbooks to be a calm expectant father-the words calmed him as much as they calmed her.

"That's better," she breathed. "You're good good at this." She felt his pleasure. "Whatever happens now," she said, softly, taking his hands in hers, "you are the finest man I have ever known, and I have had great joy and pride in being your wife." at this." She felt his pleasure. "Whatever happens now," she said, softly, taking his hands in hers, "you are the finest man I have ever known, and I have had great joy and pride in being your wife."

"Telmaine," he said, very low, "you are brave, beautiful, and versatile, and a constant surprise and delight, and I am . . . I am amazed to have been your husband."

As a compliment, Telmaine thought, it wasn't like any she had ever received, but then there were fine liqueurs she had never tasted, either.

If she lived, she thought, she would make it her business to.

"I . . . don't think I'd need to know the way," she said. Hand held tightly in hand, they moved quietly through the stunned halls of the ducal estate. She had at times to lift her skirts and step carefully over the sprawled body of a maid or secretary. If she could prevent Balthasar from touching them, she could not prevent his lingering over one-a young housemaid-probing her fragile chest deeply with his sonn. She visualized a flicker of motion within the girl, and realized that Bal had imaged her beating heart, confirming that she was alive.

"How long?" she breathed. "How long could they have been like this?"

"I would think . . . shortly after sunrise," Bal said, stopping again beside the body of a young man who lay beneath a ladder in the main hall. He must have been climbing it when stricken; from the angle of his head, the fall had broken his neck. Bal's expression was distraught and resolute. "There are too many people about for it to have happened during the day, but if it came on during the night, people outside would surely have noticed that the coming and going had stopped."

She gripped Balthasar's hand more tightly thereafter, pulling him along with her, deeply disturbed by the evidence of her adversary's-and it had to be her her adversary's-power. adversary's-power.

I beat him once, she thought. I was not meant to rescue Florilinde, with those traps laid around her. I was not meant to rescue Florilinde, with those traps laid around her. Ishmael di Studier had thought her a powerhouse, had Ishmael di Studier had thought her a powerhouse, had envied envied her power. She warmed herself with the memory of his banked-ember presence in her mind, his smoky desire for her, his admiration and concern. It was not infidelity, she thought, to use all his gifts to her, even the one of understanding of his magic and, through it, something of hers. her power. She warmed herself with the memory of his banked-ember presence in her mind, his smoky desire for her, his admiration and concern. It was not infidelity, she thought, to use all his gifts to her, even the one of understanding of his magic and, through it, something of hers.

Lord Vladimer's apartments were in a secluded corridor far from all public entrances, behind a minimally ornamented door. She and Bal groped their way slowly along the corridor, feeling with their toes for fallen bodies or sculptures or ornaments, using their hands on the wall to guide them. She caught Bal's arm as she judged him to be nearby, and they listened hard, hearing nothing. He eased himself out of her grip, and, an instant before she reestablished it, he stepped clear of the wall. His first cast showed the door slightly ajar. Committed now, he leaned around the doorjamb and cast into the room. She heard him draw a sharp breath-and then that alien magical aura surged around her, like polluted ice water. She crushed her lips with her fist so as to make no sound.

"Do come in, brother," said the half-familiar voice.

She sensed no sonn, smelled only a strange scent like melted wax. Bal's outstretched hand found her near shoulder and pressed her back. She caught at him, horrified at his recklessness, but he had already moved forward.

"Lysander," he said steadily. "I did not expect to find you here." He sounded almost detached, with his scholar's mind engaged to purpose. "Is this all your doing?"

"Crude, little brother," Lysander remarked. "I don't need to ask you if you are alone. I can sense her. I've been waiting for-"

Telmaine grappled for the mind and magic in the center of that chill, found it, as alien and hating and foul as Ishmael's had been familiar and loving and brave. She bore down on that mind with all her untrained power, and all the force of her rage over Ishmael's disgrace and death, Florilinde's suffering, Balthasar's torments of body and mind, the many unknowns slaughtered in the Rivermarch, and the intolerable shattering of her own innocence. Lysander Hearne's arrogant a.s.sertion ended in a groan that gladdened her; she wanted him to suffer before he yielded.

Then she felt that mind slither from beneath the pressure of hers, a repellent sensation that made her, fatally, flinch. Like cold, foul mud, his magic rose around her, folded over her, and began to bear down on her in its turn.

the voice in her mind mocked. She felt him-it-forcing into her mind, her magic, his own vile seed. A pistol sounded, with shattering concussion. She felt from him-it-searing pain-a wound, though not a serious one-outrage at the effrontery. For an instant his mind was unguarded, the impression of it, and of its power, open to hers. She was too clumsy and off balance to thrust at it. Then his magic lashed back at her, and the next she knew she was sliding down the wall, vaguely aware of the sounds of physical struggle from within the room. She struggled onto her knees, battling her full skirts, and half dragged herself, half crawled into the doorway.