We walked around the oval enclosure, to lend authenticity to our presence there. The sentry’s eyes flickered over Asren as we passed, surprised, amused, totally unsympathetic, a man watching a half-wit capering at a fair. Vazkor had picked his creatures well-narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.
We returned through the little door into the stone gut of the tower.
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“I’ll bring her tonight, the old one,” Mazlek said, “when her work’s done.”
I nodded.
The mouse, darting on Asren’s shoulder, looked up at us from blood-drop eyes.
The day dragged its heels as I waited for her to come. The light in the windows thickened, blue as stained glass. A slender moon watered the peaks with highlights and shadows.
I sat on my bed, the curtains thrust well back, Asren beside me. Something had made him afraid; he cried and clung to me, and now I held him in my arms, and could not move because he would begin to cry again.
A soft knock came on the door. Mazlek entered, and the old woman followed, and stood gazing at me. She had taken off her mask, presumably at Mazlek’s instruction, but her face was like a half-formed dough, pale, expressionless, and without depth. Round watery eyes blinked and blinked at me, and then at the man I held.
“I am to come for him?” she said. “The girl not to your liking?”
“No,” I said, “it has nothing to do with that. I want to ask you something.”
She blink-blinked at me.
“The cellars,” I said, “and under the cellars-are there any other passages?”
“Passages,” she said. She blinked. “Passages,”
“Passages which lead out of the tower. A way out.”
“The moat-bridge,” she said.
“Apart from the moat-bridge.”
She blinked.
“Under the tower,” I said, “a passage under the tower which leads out into the mountains.”
Asren stirred against me, and her eyes slipped from my masked face to him.
“Pretty one,” she said, and clucked as if to a pet animal.
Mazlek seized her shoulders, and spun her to face him.
“A passage out of the tower,” he hissed at her, and shook her. She squeaked and struggled.
“No way-no way!”
“Let her go, Mazlek,” I said wearily. He took her and thrust her outside, shutting the door 00 her round staring.
“This is useless,” I said. “We are in a trap.”
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“I’ll search the cellars,” he said, “and below. There has to be some way, goddess.”
“Yes, there has to be, Mazlek. And soon.”
I turned to Asren, and saw he had fallen asleep against me. I reached to touch his hair, and, in that moment, I felt something thrust inside me, sharp, insistent, and very real. It was the first movement I had felt, the first proof I had had that the thing which swelled under my belly was animate, and I shuddered at the feel of it, as if I carried death, not life.
Mazlek searched, then. The cellars, the foul dungeon ways, the vaults and underground places of Tower-Eshkorek. And there was no exit to freedom, at least, none that he could find.
Four days had passed in that search. And on the fifth, about noon, a bell began to clang from the head of the fortress, a terrible sound, the most ancient noise of panic and expected violence.
Asren screamed, and the startled mouse leaped from his wrist, and up the curtains of the bed. I hurried to him, trying to shut the clamor out of his ears with soft words. Incredibly, my instincts of protection had dwarfed him, so that he seemed small enough for me to lift up and cradle in my arms.
Soon Mazlek came, to tell me what I did not need to be told. Vazkor’s sentry had made out the marching column a few miles away: the soldiers of the new overlord would reach us before nightfall.
It is easy to judge afterward, when all decisions are theoretic, in the quiet, when the outcome no longer matters. Perhaps I should have left the game to Vazkor, should have given up Asren to be his instrument for the short time it was necessary. There were other days ahead, beyond that time, when I could have fled with him, out of the shadow’s reach. And he would have understood, after all, nothing of the use to which he had been put.
And yet I could not let it happen, this final degradation, this final eclipse of his being. Asren, who had seemed to me in the Temple at Ezlann at once too innocent and too aware to have been drawn in….
There were many men, more than two hundred, all in all, I think. They settled about the tower, and lit their night fires to shine on the mixed liveries of the five Cities of White Desert, and of Eshkorek Arnor, for she too had sent her
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quota of power in the end. They did nothing, simply sat around us in a ring, letting us see what was possible to them.
Vazkor’s man rode out to them when the moon rose, nervous, for all his supposed immunity as a messenger; he knew very well they had half a mind to shoot him on sight. Still, the archers held their hands, and he got to their commander and delivered Vazkor’s words: that he held Asren alive, had protected him here, as his lord, since the night of the mob in Ezlann, that Asren would speak for him. There was some confusion in the camp. The commander-a prince of Za, who had known Asren well-demanded he be shown an hour after dawn at a low window in the tower. If the appearance did not take place, or he was unconvinced, their cannon would open fire on the fortress, and not cease until they had razed it. This arranged, he let the messenger go.
Mazlek told me all this, swiftly, in my room.
I pulled Asren gently to his feet.
“Take him,” I said to Mazlek. “Go now, quickly. You have searched the lower reaches of the tower, you must know a hundred hiding places there; perhaps they will not find you. And if the tower falls it should be far safer.”
“And you?” he said to me.
“You know I cannot die, Mazlek,” I said. “There is no need to fear for me. Only take him now, before they come for him. I will delay Vazkor as best I can.”
Mazlek did as I told him, only Asren hung back, staring at me, but I found the mouse among the curtains and gave it to him, and at last Mazlek got him away and down the stairs.
It was a confused plan, a stupid plan. But there was so little I could do, so few ways open to me.
Vazkor did not come for a long while, he was so sure of me.
He knocked courteously at the bolted door, and when I did not answer, and the door did not give, two of his men set their shoulders to it and, after a time, they and it fell into my room. At another hour, such a sight might have been very funny. Vazkor walked into the room while they were stifl picking themselves up and cursing.
“Where?” he said to me. Only this one word.
I had always been afraid of him in a way, though an almost willing and sexual way, perhaps. But now I was terrified, truly and utterly.
“Where?” he said again.
“If you assume I have hidden something, why should I tell
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you where it is hidden? That rather destroys the point, does it not?”
He came across to me, and pulled me from the chair. He was unmasked and his face was white, his eyes extraordinarily black. The heat of anger can be brutal, but his cold anger was horrible; there seemed no limit to what it would do, and no act, however crucial, seemed likely to appease it
“Tell me,” he said, “where he is.”
His eyes appeared to expand, to draw me helplessly downward. I felt weightless, floating … useless to resist, simple to tell him what I had done … Yet I, too, knew this art of Power, and I pulled free of him, a sensation so physical I seemed bruised after it.
“No, Vazkor.”
“An hour to dawn,” he said, “and then an hour after it. After that, their cannon, and the roof down over our heads.”
“It does not matter to me,” I said.
He pushed up my mask and hit me across the face, again and again. I lost count of the times he hit me. There was no pain. One of the black rings on his fingers had cut my cheek, and warm salt blood ran in at the corner of my mouth. After a while, I realized he had stopped. I sat masked in my chair, looking at him. The two men had gone and the door was closed.