23
Ilna saw the crowd in the street in front of the Red Ox. Something was wrong and it involved Garric. She stumbled for the first time since she'd left the Captain's Rest at a near run.
She'd finished the duties she'd bargained against her room and board: all the chickens killed, plucked, and cleaned for the next day's dinners. The cook had been delighted with the neat dispatch with which she worked, though Ilna herself was scornful of the number of usable feathers she'd wasted in her hurry.
Nobody else faulted her for sloppy workmanship, but Ilna os-Kenset had never cared what others thought. She knew the true facts.
If Ilna had been able to, she'd have returned to the Red Ox with Garric. He and Tenoctris left not long before Ilna finished her duties; they'd had no idea she wanted to come with them or they'd have waited for her. It wasn't Ilna's style to feel beholden to anyone: she'd hastened along after, without guide or lantern. The twisting streets that were to others a maze were a childishly simple pattern for a mind trained to weave complex perfection on a loom.
Ilna had used her own bone-handled knife to clean and joint the chickens, good steel worn thin with years of service. The last thing she'd done before leaving the kitchen of the Captain's Rest was to touch up the blade on the smooth limestone lintel.
She pushed her way into the crowd. Folk were looking toward the graveyard across the street from the inn, talking excitedly among themselves. A few even sat on the wall, though they leaned instinctively back toward the street, tempering bravado with caution. It needn't have anything to do with Garric—
But Ilna knew it did. She could feel the pattern forming.
Benlo's guards stood together beside the wall, looking into the graveyard and talking through scowls of concern. Icy with purpose, Ilna joined them and said, "Master Rald? Where's Garric?"
Rald reached for hilt of the sword he wasn't wearing as his head jerked around to see who had spoken. It was her tone rather than her words, she knew, but she was no mood for mincing delicacy, not now or ever.
"Sorry, mistress," the chief guard muttered in embarrassment. The men had gotten to know and respect, if not exactly like, Ilna during the drive from Barca's Hamlet. He bobbed his helmet toward the moonlit tombs. "He's in there and the old lady with him. And Master Benlo and his daughter, I suppose."
"Then why are you here?" she said. "What else happened?"
She wanted to climb over the wall immediately but there was more to learn before she acted. Ilna determined the pattern even before she strung the warp. Those who wove freehand were fools and worse: they were bad craftsmen.
"There was a light from there not long after your friend went over the wall," Rald said. "A flash, like; and it wasn't lightning, it was red as . . . it was bright red."
Red as blood.
The guard's voice was neutral but the expression on his grizzled face was uncomfortable. Even without the girl's cold disapproval he must have felt that a better man would ignore orders and go look for his employer. But when you knew your employer was a wizard, some things took a different sort of courage than that of a man who thought he'd been hired to face swords. . . .
"Somebody screamed," another guard said without looking in Ilna's direction. "Could've been any of them. And I guess somebody shouted too."
"Has anybody gone to see what happened?" Ilna said. "Since Garric went in, I mean."
The second guard turned and glared into her cold eyes. "No," he said, "nobody's been that great a fool. Maybe by daylight somebody'll go but it won't be me. And nobody's come out, either!"
"Then it's time for someone to play the man, isn't it?" Ilna said disdainfully. She gripped the wall coping with both hands and set her right toes between the second and third course of masonry from the ground.
A guard, probably Rald, tried to brace her heel. She kicked back in anger, then found the toehold again and lifted herself onto and over the wall unaided. Conversation picked up excitedly behind her; those near where she'd climbed the wall called fanciful explanations to friends farther away. She didn't hear anyone following her, though; and thirty paces from the wall the sound of the spectators was no louder than the buzz of insects and nightbirds.
Ilna had an invisible thread to follow; she couldn't have described or explained her feeling, but she trusted it implicitly nonetheless. That thread didn't light a path for her, however, and the open stone boxes littering the ground among the larger tombs tripped her again and again. Stone had never been a friend; but it wouldn't stop her, either.
She thought she heard something ahead, but she wasn't sure the seeming sound reached her through her ears. It was a rhythmic pulse like that of waves being swallowed in a cavern. Not voices, she thought; or at any rate not human voices.
Ilna stepped beneath a thick-trunked cedar; birds exploded into flight above her head. She ducked in reflex, ashamed of her weakness even before the rattle of wing feathers identified the roosting pigeons that her presence had disturbed.
The kitchen knife was in its case of sheep femur thrust under her belt; she'd tucked it there when she joined the crowd outside the graveyard. Rather than draw the knife, Ilna uncoiled the length of rope she carried around her waist. It was the halter she'd picked up at Stroma River; of no particular use to her now except that holding it between her hands calmed her.
She'd reached a pair of tombs in contrasting stone. The pale one to the right was wreathed in flowers redolent of recent death. The entrance of its black basalt companion was ajar; candlelight shone from within and Ilna heard voices.
Ilna started toward the door. Light that throbbed like a volcano's heart filled the tomb. She stepped inside and saw silhouetted the figures of Garric and old Tenoctris hand in hand.
Benlo lay dead and Liane had vanished.
Garric and Tenoctris stepped together into a portal of hellfire. It began to shrink.
They had to be going after Liane. Garric was going after Liane.
"She won't have him," Ilna said; and leaped into the light in which the others had vanished.