Page 24 of Queen Demon
Albre swayed toward Kai, started to speak. Tenes took a step toward her. She had been challenged, and she wasn’t willing to let it go. After what Aclines had done to her, it wasn’t unexpected. She was just as wary and damaged as Sanja, though better at hiding it. Tenes signed,Leave.
Albre glanced at Kai to see if he would countermand the order;he didn’t. She tilted her head again and went toward the door. She didn’t give Tenes a wide berth, but she didn’t make any effort to encroach on her space, either.
Tenes followed at a distance, out through the anterooms. When she returned, Kai said, “She won’t come back, the others know who she is now. She just wanted to poke at us and see if we’d tell her anything.” Tenes still looked worried and he added, “The eastern Witches were important to the war, but they were never liked in this region. Not like in the borderlands.” The Cloister Witches had settled back on the floor. Even veiled, he could tell they were watching all this with interest. The Cloisters probably hadn’t had this much excitement in a long time. “The dustwitches keep their eyes on the Rising World, because it protects them.” He pushed to his feet. “I have to get something before we leave the city. I’ll be back before morning.”
Tenes accepted that with a nod.Should I keep watch?
He remembered that she had slept most of the day away in the raft. “Only if you want.” He nodded to the other Witches. “You can trust them.”
One signed to Tenes,Sister, you are still among friends. Tenes didn’t look so sure, but that was something they would have to work out among them.
Kai went to the nearest window, picking up the grass silk hat on the way. He had fixed a dark gauze veil to it earlier, when he had changed out of his battered traveler’s clothes. Most of the clothing in the chests was meant for Rising World assemblies or events, with finer, heavier silk and embroidery, which was why it had been left behind here. But he had found a blue cotton shift and an overcoat with spilt skirts in front and back, with only a little floral decoration along the hems. He wore it with his somewhat water-stained belt and sash. The veil would draw some attention, but that was unavoidable. They weren’t as common in Benais-arik as they had been in the past, but people would assume he was either a Witch or a traveler from the west.
He stepped to the stone sill of the window and dropped down to the grass at the base of the foundation, and walked toward the dim shape of the earthwork wall.
Kai had wandered Benais-arik in the dark too often to get lost, even if things had changed. He didn’t want to make it obvious he was coming from the Cloisters so he went out the other side of the broken earthwork and wove his way through a clump of large squat grain silos until he came to a westward canal dock. A long canopied market boat was taking on passengers and he tossed a small coin in the pot to ride on the stern. The boat shoved off and cut across the city, passing dark streets and then lamplit ones, neighborhoods noisy and awake now that the day’s heat had broken. People clustered around open air communal kitchens and laundries, loud talk and music carried on the breeze.
Kai leapt off the boat when it bumped up against a lamplit dock for a cluster of workshops. All had shut for the evening and it was too dark to see any guild affiliation marks painted on the walls, but they were probably for pottery and weaving, judging from the smell of dye vats and the shards swept up into piles on the edge of the footpath. Kai found his way through the little maze of alleys and courtyards, then out into the street that circled the wide terrace around the City Archive. The building had closed at sunset and was quiet now, all the scholars and librarians and students headed for home or the markets. Kai passed the low wall around Gral House, then hit the edge of the market where the next two streets crossed.
The crowd was as eclectic as Benais-arik itself now, in looks, dress, speech. Between the fire-catcher performing in the center of a scatter of stalls and all the people buying evening meals or treats from food venders cooking on smoky charcoal braziers, Kai didn’t get much attention, even with the veil. Two city ministrants in the all-white clothing of their calling stood on the edgeof the crowd around the fire-catcher, waiting to provide medicine and aid if there was an accident. The air smelled of burnt sugar and a heady mix of spices; Kai wasn’t hungry but it was still a mouth-watering scent.
He turned at the corner of Bardes House, and avoided the more brightly lit street of permanent stalls that sold paper and ink and books. He cut past the little pavilion in the center of the forum with its bored honor guards; it was where the Hierarchs’ preserved heads were kept for public view. The guards faced the pavilion, their backs to the plaza, symbolically alert for the Hierarchs’ return.
Once Kai was past them, he entered the Old Palace grounds.
It served as another public park now, the tall trees with spreading canopies making it a good spot for passersby or frustrated city officials and Rising World Assembly speakers to cool off during the heat of the day. There were stone benches and a fountain with basins at waist-height for drinking and set into the ground for foot-washing or watering animals. During the afternoon, there were sellers of salted or sugared nuts and fried cakes. At night it was quiet and as dark as a cave.
On the far side, the Old Palace wall was visible, the gray stone furred with crawling vines. About fifty paces down, the little plaza in front of its open gateway was bright with lamplight, and a scattered crowd of people were chatting, clearly having just left some dinner or other gathering. There would be a lot of events like that, with the Rising World council in session.
There was nothing stopping Kai from walking in the front gate during the day, when the palace archives were open. Except that after seeing Tahren and Saadrin today, Bashat would know Kai and Ziede were here somewhere. He would have people watching for anyone concealing their face, and be braced for some sort of confrontation. That was one of the reasons why Kai didn’t want that confrontation; like Tahren had said, he wanted Bashat to stew in uncertainty for the rest of his life, if possible.
And he preferred to keep what he had to say behind his teeth.
Dahin, I hope you appreciate this,he thought. He went the other way, down along the wall until it changed from the weathered brown stone of the old fortifications to a stretch that was barely half again as tall as Kai and constructed of much smaller blocks, so new the lines of mortar were still sharp and clear. He found fingerholds in those lines and climbed to the top. On the other side was the kitchen garden, clumps of lush growth with a few trees to shade the more delicate planting. He dropped to the soft dirt and found the paths by feel in the dark. He brushed through some of the fragrant herb beds and his clothes started to smell like dinner.
The archway that led through into the fire-lit kitchen court was the only way out of the walled garden, but from the talk and laughter the cooks and scullery workers were having their own dinner inside the long building on the far side. Kai drew the barest wisp of a chimera around him, weaving it out of the ground mist and the scent of the garden. He stepped into the court as a shadow. It wouldn’t work if someone was actively alert for intruders, but there were too many people whose business took them through this court.
Under the large lighted windows, a scatter of young children played a game with wicker balls and wooden cups. Three soldiers congregated in the doorway, talking idly, waiting on their own meals. Kai walked silently and unnoticed past stacked pots waiting to be washed, still-warm clay ovens. The conversation and clatter of dishes continued unabated as Kai went out through the door into the open service gallery. He followed the brick path past the big cisterns and wash tubs and the web of drying racks and through another archway into the central atrium.
The Old Palace wasn’t large; long ago Bashasa had told Kai that it had started as a fortified family home, been turned into a fortress, eventually became an administrative center for the ruling Prince-heir, selected by acclaim in a complicated negotiationbetween the artisan guilds, merchants, the noble families, and the garrison. When the city assembly had moved to its own purpose-built structure, it had been demoted to family home again, but the bar Calis family archives were still kept here along with those of all the other past Prince-heirs.
This open stone-paved court let air flow through the wide windows and doorways in the three stories of rooms, and was lined with tall pots of flowering jasmine. Lamps hung from various balconies or flanking archways and doors, but the shadows were deep; the awnings that protected the atrium from the heat of the day were still stretched from the rooftops. The little lamps around the long rectangular pools in the center had already been extinguished, hiding the cushioned benches and the water lilies. With the guests leaving, the place was already deeply quiet. Kai knew how private it could be here, with the extended bar Calis family scattered to duties in different parts of the Rising World.
On the first floor were old assembly chambers that had been turned into spaces for gatherings and meetings. The big windows into those chambers glowed with light and through the lattices he caught sight of figures in bright fabrics. A steady but low buzz of conversation and no music told Kai the gathering was winding down.
Above it were two floors of guest suites and to the east the household rooms and the Prince-heir’s offices and the archives. Kai kept the chimera around him like a cloak and went through an archway on the family side. He passed a couple of strolling servers, released from their duties for the evening, and started up the stairs.
Two soldiers of Bashat’s cadre were stationed in the first landing, behind a latticework screen. They were talking quietly and so technically awake and alert, but didn’t notice Kai as he ghosted past wreathed in the chimera. Nobody tried to kill Prince-heirs anymore and the soldiers chosen for their cadres were picked for diplomatic astuteness or family connections now. Not likethe cadres in the bad old days, who would have been alert to deception and strewn gravel or salt on the stair landings to hear the crunch of footsteps.
Kai had chosen this stairwell because from this direction, the entrance to the archive chambers was twenty good steps before the turn into the first receiving room in the family’s private suite.
The latticed door was fortunately set into an archway, so he was able to open it without the two soldiers in the stairwell seeing it move apparently by itself, which would have broken the illusion. As he slipped through, the chimera started to fade. It was built of mist and the life of the kitchen garden, and this far from the ground, it lost its vitality. Kai let it dissipate and made his way through a shadowy workroom with benches against the walls and writing desks scattered around. It opened into a foyer and the heavy bronze doors to the archive itself.
The lock was a cylinder set with a code based on the Arike poemThe Clash of Hearts; Water Against Rock,which was actually not a romance but something about duty to the people and the land. Kai had never understood any of the metaphors, but he knew it well enough to open the lock, not that it had really been designed as a serious deterrent. Coded locks like this had once been meant to bar entry to anyone not a “true” scholar but now they were basic exercises for teaching.
The room on the other side of the door was dark, the air warm and still now that the outside vents were closed for the evening. Kai called an imp from the underearth, its tiny body no bigger than a dragonfly, and set it to light the way.
The tall room was filled with metal shelves that came up to Kai’s shoulder, all decorated with scrollwork. They held books and ornate metal boxes, each containing papers owned by previous Prince-heirs. He found the shelves where Bashasa’s notes and journals were stored. The metal was painted black and chased with gold, something accorded to only a few of the much older,revered founders of Benais-arik. He read the Arike characters inscribed on the labels and quickly found the right box.
