Quietly Rap laid down his bundle and waited, sending a restraining signal to Fleabag, who was eager to investigate the unfamiliar scents of the sickroom. Little Chicken also bore a bundle, but he continued to hold his, looking around bleakly at the shadows.
She was a surprisingly slick liar. Tactfully dismissed—and probably relieved that she need not listen to an hour’s hard prayingthe nurse rose and departed. Rap traced her progress as she descended the stairs within the far wall.
He could find no signs that the prowlers had been detected. Even the great hall at the bottom of the tower was deserted. The palace slept on, unaware that intruders had penetrated all the way to the royal bedchamber, unaware, as well, of the army poised to invade on the morrow.
Reassured, he tried to check overhead, also, and was seized at once by a strong desire not to pry. Inos had spoken of a spell protecting the long-dead sorcerer’s secrets. Sweat broke out on his face and his head started to throb, but he forced himself to look. There was another staircase in the wall—he established that at the cost of a thumping in his temples and sick twinges in his gut—but it ran up to . . .
Nothing! The flat wooden ceiling marked the roof of the world. He relaxed then, knowing that the effort was fruitless. He had noticed this same opaque blankness when he entered the castle half an hour ago. Indeed he had noticed it when he left with Andor at Winterfest, although his farsight then had not then been as acute as it was now. Now he could sense almost every move in the whole building—even some irregular activities in one of the maids’ dormitories of which Housekeeper Aganimi would certainly disapprove if she knew—but his knowledge stopped at the walls. Inisso had thrown an occult barrier around his bastion, cut it off from all the world.
And the chamber of puissance, if it existed—and Rap now felt strongly inclined to disbelieve in it—was outside that shield. Then the lights and shadows began to move again as Mother Unonini came waddling around the corner of the bed and headed toward the high dresser opposite the doorway. Rap moved to join her, and then they both halted, irresolute.
“It’s the spell,” Rap said. Moving furniture around when the king was dying—it seemed like a desecration. It felt wrong. There couldn’t be anything interesting behind it anyway.
The chaplain nodded uneasily. “You do it!”
“Little Chicken?”
The goblin shook his head vigorously, his angular eyes glinting wide in the light of the lantern.
“Scared?” Rap asked, although his own ribs were dribbling sweat.
The gibe brought the still-reluctant goblin, and the two of them lifted the heavy dresser away from the wall. The moment Rap saw the door, the strange reluctance released him. He grabbed up his bundle again as the chaplain produced a ring of massive keys and began trying them. In a moment the click of the lock rang like clashing blades through the silence. When she pushed the door, it uttered a groan that seemed loud enough to waken the whole city.
She paused and raised her lantern to see Rap’s face. “Anything?”
He scanned again, all the way down to the great hall. Two dogs had been snoring before the fireplaces. They lifted their heads as the departing nurse emerged from the stairwell. When nothing else happened, they went back to sleep.
“All right.”
Mother Unonini nodded and led the way up the narrow steps, her lantern showing matted white cobwebs and dusty treads curving up into darkness. It was as much as Rap could do to keep Fleabag from bounding ahead of her, for at the same time he was disconcerted by the eerie blankness awaiting him at the top. He felt like a fish being hauled upward to the water’s surface. Closer and closer came that sinister nothingness. He was so accustomed now to viewing the world with his occult talent that he felt he was being threatened with blindness; the conflict between his two senses dizzied him.
Then his head broke through. The uppermost chamber rose to a conical roof and of course it lacked an opposing door leading to a higher story, but otherwise it seemed identical to all the other great circular rooms of the tower. The fireplace was empty. The garderobe door was closed, but Rap could sense through that.
He could sense the city, also. It was the castle now that was barred to him, locked within its occult shield. Sheer height made his head spin, as he felt the streets and alleys, and the distant icepack piled on the rocks, far, far below. He staggered and almost tripped on the last few treads.
The door at the top stood open and the intruders walked through into Inisso’s chamber, the sorcerer’s place of power.
“Well!” breathed the chaplain, raising her lantern and then lowering it quickly, seeing that its rays on the windows might alert any watchers outside. She was a very nosy person, of course. She had first been shocked when Rap had suggested this place as a bolt hole, but then her own obvious curiosity and the unexpected opportunity to pry had overcome her scruples. She must be feeling disappointed—there was nothing to see except dusty foot prints showing vaguely on bare boards, where the king and Sagorn had walked on their visit in the summer. The air was cold and still and musty, but totally lacking in mystery. Just an empty room.
Being unfurnished, it seemed large. Fleabag began slinking around this vast circular emptiness, nose to the floor, pausing from time to time to analyze some detail of scent.
Little Chicken threw down his bundle and went to peer out of the nearest casement. Mother Unonini sniffed disapprovingly at the billow of dust he had raised.
Rap was still overwhelmed by his giddy sense of height. Combined with farsight, it was intoxicating, exhilarating, almost terrifying. Far, far below, a mother nursed her baby in a dark basement room, with the rest of her family asleep around her, bakers’ apprentices were already stoking their masters’ fires; a lover tiptoed past a bedroom door on his way home . . .
Was this what it was like to be a sorcerer? Did warlocks perch like brooding eagles, high on their towers in Hub, watching all Pandemia laid out below them, naked and defenseless? The wardens, being the strongest sorcerers of all, must have a range enormously greater than Rap’s—had Bright Water really sensed him all the way from Hub? Was she even now slumped naked on her ivory throne in her own chamber of puissance, scanning the north, waiting for those ripples she had mentioned, ready to strike down any evil use of magic? What would such power do to its owner? He shivered.
The chaplain noticed. “I warned you that you would freeze up here!” Satisfied that her prediction had come true, she pulled her cloak tight with her free hand. But Rap was wearing a fur parka over his doublet and he was not cold at all; in fact it was the first time he had been comfortable all day.
“It isn’t that. Mother?”
“Mmm?”
“If the Four guard us all against misuse of magic—”
“I do not wish to talk about the Four! Certainly not here.” Which is what Rap had been about to ask: Why had she been so reluctant to discuss the warlocks? Why was everyone, always? He had rarely heard them mentioned, ever.
“Look there!” The chaplain raised her lantern a fraction and pointed to the southern casement. “It’s different!”
Little Chicken, having failed to see anything much to the north, now moved around to peer out eastward. He found glass puzzling, because it did not melt when he breathed on it.
The southern casement was certainly larger than the others.
The dormer was higher and wider than the other three and held not only the main arched window, but also two smaller lights flanking it. Rap tried to remember if he had ever noticed that lack of symmetry from below, and concluded he had never really looked properly. The pattern of lead between the panes was more complex and less regular, and that was another minor difference, but the panes showed just as black against the night outside.
“I wonder why?” Puzzled, the chaplain walked over toward it.
The window began to glow.
She stopped with a hiss of surprise. The many tiny panes between the leads were of all shapes and all colors, decorated with pictures and symbols: stars and hands, eyes and flowers, and many others less comprehensible, all vaguely visible in a pale gleam as if the moon were out there. The colors were as faint and faded as a very old manuscript—sienna, malachite, ochre, and slate. Rap’s eyes saw them, but farsight told him there was only a window there with nothing unusual about it. Yet when he tried to make sense of the visual images, he felt as if they were changing. Each one was constant while he stared at it and altered as soon as his attention strayed. An umber bird’s head in the upper right comer was now much lower than it had been. A ram’s horn inexplicably seemed to curl to both right and left at the same time, and an image of a tawny flame writhing, a rose-and-lilac wheel turning . . . He shivered again.