The Ropemaker Page 16

  “I’ll do, thank you kindly,” said Meena. “And it’s a pleasure to see you again, sir.”

  “Take my arm then, and tell me what’s happening at home. You left my wife well?”

  He took Meena’s arm and led them through a couple of lamplit courtyards, up a few steps and in through a door. The room beyond glowed with colors and had a strange but pleasing smell. On one side piles of cushions ringed a low table. On the other was a work table covered with ledgers and documents. A large caged bird squawked at their entry.

  Their guide closed the door and let out a sigh of relief. He shook his head as he studied his visitors. He had, Tilja thought, a guarded look in his eyes. He had stopped smiling.

  “And your true names?” he asked in a voice just above a whisper.

  Alnor answered just as quietly.

  “We are Alnor Ortahlson and Meena Urlasdaughter, and these are our grandchildren, Tahl and Tilja. We came to your house, where your wife questioned us and gave us food. We needed to come to Talagh, for our own purposes. She needed four people, two old, two young, to come to Talagh and buy death-leaves for the two whose names we assumed. She could not get word to you sooner than we could come, but she said you would understand, since you and she had talked of this possibility. Now we are here. If you have no use for us after all, we will go and do the thing we came for, and trouble you no further.”

  The man stood for a long while, drumming his fingertips on the table.

  “She has taken you under my roof and fed you,” he said. “She and I are one. You can safely tell me more. Where, for instance, do you come from?”

  “Beyond the forest.”

  “Ah . . . you gave my name at the gate?”

  “Yes. Your wife told us . . .”

  “Of course.”

  He stood there for a while, aimlessly tidying stacks of papers, then nodded.

  “Sit,” he said. “When they bring food they will consider it strange to find you still standing. I must think.”

  While he paced the room Tilja settled Meena down and made her comfortable, then sat beside her. They waited in silence until he joined them.

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, “you offer me a way out of one great danger, but into a far worse one. Now not only I and mine, but my Lord Kzuva and all his household stand in peril. Still, I can see no other way than to continue to help you. You have come through the gate, so the names of Qualif and Qualifa are in the registers, recorded as visiting me. Therefore you must be recorded as leaving Talagh, or dying before you could do so. If you had not eaten under my roof, it would have been best for me to poison you two and sell the children for slaves, as the law demands, but that path is now closed. Well, then, I am Ellion, Steward to the Lord Kzuva, and despite all this I welcome you for your own sakes.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Meena, sharply. “Even if we’d have been more use to you dead than alive.”

  “Would you really have poisoned them and sold us two?” said Tahl, sounding more interested than horrified. Ellion smiled thinly.

  “I am glad to be spared the decision,” he said. “And the fact remains that you may indeed be useful to me alive. I find I can no longer do as I intended, and arrange for false death-leaves to be issued, with false entries in the registers, as would have been possible in the previous reign. The man now in charge of the census and registry of subjects is able and vigorous, and many laxities are being swept away.

  “Now the main danger lies in your being who you are, and where you come from. My wife has explained to you about this? Good. And of course you are in just as great danger as I am, so it is in all our interests that you should leave as soon as possible. Your gate permit in any case lasts only five days. Can you do what you have come for in that time?”

  “We are looking for a man,” said Alnor. “Our account of him says that we will find him if he wants us to, and fail if he does not.”

  Ellion sat very still, staring at the back of his hand.

  “That kind of a man?” he whispered. “No, tell me nothing.”

  “If you say so,” said Meena. “Then all I want is somewhere for Tilja and me to go on our own, out in the open would be best, sometime when there’s no one else around. I know it’s not going to be easy in Talagh, but—”

  There was a movement at the door, and a discreet tap. All five froze, but it was only servants with a tray of food. Ellion at once became smiling and easy, fussing over Meena and Alnor and seeing that they were comfortable, just as he might have done over two old friends, but as soon as the servants had left he let out a deep sigh. Tilja could feel his fear. He looked at Meena.

  “So you are another of that kind?” he said slowly.

  “No, I’m not, sir, I promise you. We don’t have anything like that in the Valley, just—what did your wife call it—little bits of country magic. I’ll need Tilja here along with me. It’ll only take us a moment, and then we’ll clear out.”

  Perhaps if Ellion had known her better he would have refused. As it was, after another long pause and sigh, followed by that anxious smile, he said, “I know an obstinate woman when I meet one. You will do what you plan whether I help you or not. Well, I will need to talk to . . . a friend. Eat now, and then I will send for somebody to show you where you can sleep. When all is quiet let the girl come back here and find me.”

  A big moon cast dense shadows. Keeping to the darkest places beneath the walls, Ellion led Tilja back the way she had come, round a small courtyard, through an archway and round a larger courtyard, to where Meena was waiting at the foot of the stairway that led up to their rooms.

  “I shall not stay for you once we are there,” he whispered. “You will need to remember your own way back. Now, come.”

  He led them on through many windings to what seemed to be the back of the house, and out into yet another courtyard surrounded by large, shapeless buildings which looked more like storehouses than places where anyone lived. Here he unlocked a door and gave Tilja the key. Inside was a musty-smelling space into which the moonlight shone through three small windows high in one wall. Between the bars of silver light everything else was impenetrably dark.

  “I will leave you here,” said Ellion. “When I am gone, lock the door and hide the key. In the further corner to your right you will find a stair. Climb it until you reach a locked door. Here is that key. Go through, lock the door and again hide the key. Hide it well. You will find yourselves on the inner-city wall. It is not guarded along its length, only at the main gates. But you will see flashes of light here and there, where fragments of loose magic strike against the wards that ring it round. My friend says that the bit of country magic you propose to do should have much the same effect, and so pass unnoticed by any Watcher. Go to your left, until you are well away from this house, before you attempt anything, be as quick as you can, and when you have done leave instantly.”

  “Well, thank you kindly,” said Meena as if she were talking to a neighbor who’d brought her a basket of pears. “I can see you’re doing the best you can by us, and we’ll do the same for you. Come along then, girl. No point in hanging around.”

  Tilja closed the door behind Ellion and tucked the key under some sacking that she found by touch down against the wall. She took Meena’s hand and with her free hand groping before her and feeling her way with each footstep she worked across into one of the shafts of moonlight and down it to the right-hand wall. There were piles of barrels stacked against it. She felt her way from barrel to barrel to the corner, where she found another door, not locked. She opened it and found the first step with her foot.

  “He didn’t say how far up it was,” she whispered. “Are you going to be able to manage? Wait—there’s a hand rope.”

  “You take my cane, then. Where’s your shoulder? Right. One at a time.”

  Very slowly they climbed eight winding flights. The ones against the two outer walls had slit windows through which Tilja could see the stars, and moonlit roofs, but it was still pitch
black inside the stairwell and she had to make sure of every tread by feel. Meena muttered under her breath from time to time, but never groaned nor asked to rest. The ninth flight ended in a door.

  Tilja found the keyhole with her fingers, turned the grinding lock and pushed the door open. Beyond it was a battlemented parapet and a wide moonlit sky. She stepped outside and found herself in a kind of alley stretching left and right between the parapet and the much higher wall of the building they had just left. She couldn’t quite see over the parapet.

  She locked the door as soon as Meena was through and followed her along to the left, looking for somewhere to hide the key. She fully understood the need. If they were caught doing whatever it was Meena was planning, they mustn’t be carrying any clues about where they’d come from. There was a small tree growing out of the parapet. Its roots had broken some of the brickwork away, so that Tilja could look over. Below her the wall dropped dizzyingly down to the cleared space that circled the old city, and beyond that the moonlit roofs of the outer city reached away.

  Tilja managed to wedge the key in among the roots, then hurried after Meena. Buildings lined the inner side of the walkway, screening the central city, but anyone outside the walls must surely have seen Meena’s head and shoulders as she hobbled along through the moonlight. Some distance ahead of them a wisp of pale light flickered above the wall and vanished. Then another, further on. Loose magic striking the wards, Ellion had said. Every hundred paces or so they came to a small watchtower, with a doorless opening onto the walkway. A little beyond the third of these there was a gap in the screen of buildings on their left, with only a waist-high wall to prevent them falling. The gap was wide enough to show them most of the inner city.

  “This’ll have to do,” Meena whispered. “I’ll stay back here. Keep yourself down. First thing, we’ve got to get our bearings. Moon must’ve come up over there, so that’ll be eastish. North’s somewhere behind there, then. Drat this moon—can’t see a thing this side. You go on ahead, girl, and see if you can spot the Fisherman—he’ll be low down this time of night, so he should show up spite of the moon—and that should give you the Axle-pin. Once you’ve got that you take old Axtrig out and put her down on her cloth—here—and stand a bit beyond, facing this way so you can see me as well as her. Put your hand up when you’re ready.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “I’ll tell you. You remember what happened in Ellion’s house when I said the man’s name out loud—how Axtrig twisted round and pointed herself toward Talagh, showing us that was the way we’d got to go. Only thing it could mean, far as I can see. What I’m hoping is she’ll do it again now, but this time I’ll keep myself well clear and just whisper his name. That way maybe it won’t hit me as hard as it did back then, but it’ll still be enough for Axtrig to move. Soon as you see her twist, you run in and check the line, and then you pick her up and put her away and we’ll be out of here as fast as we can go. And if nothing happens, I’ll come a bit closer and try again.”

  “It’s still a lot more than country magic, isn’t it, Meena, whatever you said to Ellion?”

  “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but if you was in my shoes you’d give it a try, wouldn’t you, girl?”

  “I expect so. But one line’s not going to be enough, is it? We’re going to have to do it somewhere else, and see where the lines cross.”

  “Well, maybe. But what I’m thinking is this. There’s got to be a reason why he gave Dirna the peach in the first place, and why we’ve kept Axtrig in the family all this time, and why I brought her along without rhyme or reason, just feeling it was important. It’s so we could find him when the time came. So maybe when I say his name he’ll feel it himself, and he’ll know we’re here and looking for him, and then either he’ll help us, or he won’t. Now, don’t hang around arguing. Off you go, and let’s get it done with.”

  From the sharpness of her whispered voice Tilja could tell that Meena was as scared as she was herself. Crouching low and keeping in the strip of shadow beneath the parapet, she scuttled along the walkway to the center of the gap. There she turned and gazed out across the dark and jagged roofscape of the inner city, rising in a gentle swell from east and west to the palace at the summit. Each of the twenty fantastic towers that ringed it had one or two lit windows near the top, and everything below was dark and still. Were the Watchers still awake, even at this hour? Awake enough, in spite of what Ellion had said, to notice something different about a flicker of country magic striking the city’s wards? A sense of steadily increasing danger filled the night air.

  She turned her eyes upward and searched among the familiar stars. Yes, there, faint, because of the moon pallor, and lying on his side, was the good old Fisherman, his rod bowed from the weight of the Fish. She followed the line of the last section of rod, and found the Axle-pin, fainter still, directly over the third tower from the left. So that was due north.

  She rolled up her sleeve and with trembling fingers untied the ribbon that for the last sixteen days had kept Axtrig safely against her forearm. She had grown so used to the spoon being there that she seldom noticed her, but now as she took her in her hand, that curious slight numbness seeped across her palm and the pads of her fingers.

  Something moved in the darkness beside her.

  She froze.

  Again, in the utter stillness, the same faint pad. A cat meowed softly. She stared and saw the green of its eyes. As her heart resumed its proper beat, the cat moved into the moonlight and meowed again. It was a large, bony creature, neither starved nor cared for. The moonlight sparkled faintly off its shaggy fur. Automatically her hand moved to stroke it, but it backed away and sat down.

  “Off you go,” she whispered. “Shoo!”

  The cat answered with another meow, but didn’t stir. There’d always been cats at Woodbourne, and Tilja felt comforted by its homely presence. She knelt and spread out the cloth Meena had given her, then laid Axtrig down with her shaft pointing east along the wall, so that she would need to make an obvious movement to point to anywhere in the city. Still keeping low, she stepped back, squatted down facing toward Meena and signaled that she was ready. Meena raised her hand in answer. Tilja stared at the spoon.

  The world changed.

  Light blazed all along the wall, glaring, shadowless. A whirl of movement—the cat streaking away along the wall, leaping past Meena’s body where it lay on the walkway . . .

  Tilja jumped to her feet and ran, snatched Axtrig and the cloth as she passed, crammed them into her blouse and raced on. Meena was lying on her back, her head facing the way they had come, and her cane beside her. Tilja poked it into her waistband, knelt, worked her arms under Meena’s shoulders, heaved her up and started to drag her along the walkway. All this without thought. She only knew that they had to get clear of the place, now, at once. But Meena was far too heavy for her. She was gasping already, her heart pounding. She knew she couldn’t go much further. Where . . . ?

  Something she’d seen. The fleeing cat vanishing into the darkness of the little tower. It was only a few paces away now. With a last, wrenching effort she dragged Meena in through the opening and collapsed on top of her.

  As soon as she could, she mastered her gasping lungs and breathed more quietly, but the thud of her heart seemed still to fill the night. The glaring light was gone. She knelt up and looked toward the tower entrance. Through it she could see only the blank, moonlit wall of the building on the opposite side of the walkway, so bright that the reflected light shone straight into the center of the little tower, leaving a patch of deep shadow either side. Anyone standing there was sure to see her, and Meena too. Carefully she lifted Meena’s shoulders again and dragged her into the shadow, close to the curving wall, then rose and stood, knowing it was still useless, hopeless. The tower itself was a trap. Her breathing had eased but her heart wouldn’t stop thumping, as it did in nightmares until the terror itself woke her with every muscle locked rigid.

 
This was just such a nightmare, with the unknown enemy hunting outside, herself hiding, knowing it was going to find her. Except that she was already awake.

  Forcing herself out of the paralysis of terror, she edged toward the door until she could see along the walkway almost as far as the next tower. She stared at it. There. It was there that the world had changed, and the nightmare had begun.

  An image formed itself in her mind—the spoon, Axtrig, lying on her cloth under that astounding light, with her bowl toward the heart of the city and her shaft pointing the other way. There had been a world in which the spoon had been pointing east along the old city wall. Then there was one in which she was pointing . . . no, not in toward the heart of Talagh, but out, away from it, waking the wards that ringed it, south.

  She had no time to think about this, to be amazed or puzzled, because now the nightmare became real. Two figures appeared, moving toward her. One was human, a woman she thought, but couldn’t be sure because it was wrapped in a wide cloak that reached to the ground. The other . . . she didn’t know what it was. It was the height of a large dog, and the human held it by a leash, but it was twice as broad as any dog Tilja had ever seen, with massive shoulders on long forelegs, and a body that then sloped away to squat hind legs. It moved with an awkward waddle and was jet black, blacker than jet. Its blackness drank the moonlight.

  As she stared, rigid, holding her breath, trying to silence the betraying thud of her heart, the cat came out of the patch of shadow on the opposite side of the tower and walked to the entrance. It saw the approaching pair, stiffened and arched its back. All its fur stood on end, flecked by the moonlight with pale golden sparks that flickered and changed as it paced rapidly to and fro across the opening, weaving a figure-eight pattern. That done, it came back almost to where Tilja was standing and sat down to watch with her.