19

"No," Nonnus said to the leader of the four horsemen escorting the car- riage Asera had sent back for her companions, "I'll ride on the step, not inside."

The guard scowled. Lantern light winked on his steel cap and breastplate. He wore a long curved sword that hung down by his left thigh and clanked when he moved.

"You'd best not slip, then," he said. "If you fall, you'd better hope it's your head and not your belly that goes under the wheels, that's all I can say."

The carriage was turning around in the inn yard. The box was a wooden framework covered with linen waterproofed with size which required only two horses to draw it. Inn servants waited to transfer the party's meager possessions from the cross-country coach to this lighter, handier city vehicle.

"Yes," said the hermit, "I'll have to remember that."

"Sarko!" the innkeeper cried, calling one of the stablehands who should have been helping him. He himself carried the rug Sharina used for a bedroll. "Brann! Where are you?"

The carriage completed its turn. The innkeeper and two maids handed the baggage to the coachman, who laid it within the low fence on top of the vehicle.

"Sarko!" the innkeeper called again. Sharina tried to remember the faces of the dead men, but all that remained was a moving blur. Even bad men deserved something better than gray oblivion.

"Come on, get aboard then!" the guard said. He twisted his horse in a tight circle and clopped out of the inn yard, shouting orders to his men.

Nonnus looked at Sharina, smiled faintly, and handed her into the vehicle. Meder followed, sitting on the bench opposite. The carriage started to move immediately.

The hermit's left arm reached in through the window to grip the frame. His hard face was in silhouette. The step was small, meant only for the toes of a passenger entering or leaving the box, but Sharina didn't worry that Nonnus might fall.

Her dread was formless. Perhaps the ghosts of the dead stablehands rode her shoulders.

The seats were dark plush. She supposed the carriage was bor-Dahliman's property, but there was no crest or other mark of ownership. The guards weren't in livery either.

Meder was staring at her, though only occasionally did enough light sweep the interior for the wizard's face to appear as more than a vague outline.

"You don't realize how much you need me, mistress," he said. The rumbling tires turned his voice into an iron whisper. "You will, though. Someday I'll save you when nobody else could, and then you'll appreciate me."

Sharina turned her head away. She touched her fingertips to Nonnus' forearm. His lips smiled but he didn't look into the coach. His muscles were like carved bone.

Sharina didn't know how far they drove. The carriage never slowed, but sometimes she heard the escort bellowing threats ahead of them. Once iron clashed.

The noise and vibration of the wheels on brick pavers made her sleepy, but every time her eyes started to close she thought of the killings in the alley. Not the victims' faces, only the horror in their eyes as they died. She jerked upright again, her head buzzing. Even bad men...

The carriage pulled up so abruptly that Sharina swayed forward in her seat; the driver must have set his brake while shouting to the horses. Nonnus dropped from the carriage step and opened the door with his free hand, his left hand. He held his javelin at the balance in his right.

Sharina got out. They were under a porte cochere, a roof supported on one side by freestanding pillars to protect guests arriving in the rain, in front of a mansion. The air was salt and humid; they were near the harbor or more likely a canal leading to it, since all the houses on this square were palatial rather than warehouses and tenements serving sailors.

There were no lanterns, but the rising moon was full. A tall woman in gray stood at the doorway; candlelight from the room behind her brushed long shadows across her cheek. "Get in quickly," she said. "Before someone sees you."

Sharina followed Meder into the entryway; Nonnus was a silent presence behind. The floor was laid in a geometric pattern of marble terrazzo; the ceiling was coffered with mythological paintings in the four sections. The single candle's light wasn't good enough for Sharina to see the details, but men rode dragons in one scene.

The woman closed the door and led them into the main hall. High windows let in wedges of chill, bright moonlight. Asera waited there with another servant, male this time but otherwise identical to the first.

The servants' faces were pale. Their hair lacked body or highlights; it lay on their scalps like carded flax.

Sharina heard the carriage and escort clatter away—down the street, not around to stables in the back. She looked about her. The hall was veneered in colored marbles; statuary looked out from wall niches, and the banisters supporting the rail around the mezzanine floor above were miniature statues as well.

Most of the corridors from the hall to other rooms were closed by tall doors of black wood, richly carved and mounted on hinges of gilded bronze. A double staircase faced the formal front door—not the side anteroom by which the trio had entered. Between the wings of the staircase a peaked passageway led straight back to a bronze grating like the portcullis of a castle. Sharina saw a marble dock gleaming in the moonlight beyond. The house had direct access to one of the city's canals.

The bor-Dahliman town house was a mansion of great luxury. There probably wasn't a building in Carcosa to match it. It was empty or nearly so.

Even by moonlight, Sharina could see the film that settles inexorably over an unused room. The stickiness of salt air attracts dust, and there was no army of servants here to wipe it away. She wondered if the pale couple were the only people in residence.

"Where's the owner?" she demanded sharply. "Who is it we're meeting here?"

Asera's nose wrinkled with irritation at having her judgment questioned. "Regin bor-Dahliman is away. His servants will see to our needs until the morning, when I'll arrange our passage."

Sharina heard faint movement from the upstairs. Nonnus heard the sounds also. There was no obvious change in his behavior—he'd been as tense as a mongoose in a snake pit ever since they arrived at the house—but she could follow his eyes assessing their surroundings.

The front door was barred, pinned, and locked. It would withstand a mob with a battering ram and would take several minutes to open even from the inside. The windows at mezzanine level were grated; any openings in the walls of rooms behind the black doors would be equally well protected. The portcullis onto the canal would have to be cranked up, a lengthy process even if they found the windlass that worked it.

The only way out in a hurry was through the door by which they'd entered. If this was the trap it seemed, the party responsible would have been aware of that also.

The female servant bowed to Sharina. "Mistress," she said, "please come with me to the West Wing. There is a room prepared for you."

"West Wing?" Asera said in puzzlement. "You said all the open rooms were in..."

"Let's go," Nonnus said softly. His Pewle knife was in his left hand.

He and Sharina started for the anteroom. She drew her dagger and reached for the door latch with her free hand. The portcullis closing the canal entrance began to creak upward.

"Where are you going?" the procurator demanded. "Are you out of your minds!"

"Mistress," said one of the servants. Their voices were indistinguishable, pale and empty like their gray eyes. Sharina jerked the door back.

The outside door was already open. Liches trailing seaweed filled the anteroom. They shambled forward, raising their dripping weapons.

Nonnus kicked the door shut before Sharina could move. "That way!" he shouted, giving her a nudge toward the closed door directly across the main hall.

Asera shouted in fear and anger. Liches lined the mezzanine railing and were starting down the stairs; more of the creatures came up the corridor from the canal.

The female servant wrapped her arms around Sharina. She had the strength of an octopus. Sharina stabbed upward, a clumsy blow because she'd been thinking of the liches as her only enemies.

The dagger had a needle point and a good edge. It grated through the woman's ribs—if she was even a woman. She continued to grip Sharina. Sharina twisted her broad blade desperately. They fell together and Sharina's head smacked the terrazzo.

The woman suddenly went limp. Her head rolled to the side; a thick, brownish fluid, not blood, oozed from the stump of her severed neck.

Nonnus dragged Sharina to her feet by the back of her tunic. Her eyes focused, but not both on the same point: all objects were haloed by their double. The male servant lay on his side with the hermit's javelin so far through his breastbone that half the blade stuck out from the middle of his back.

Meder already had the door open. Moonlight streamed through the clerestory windows of the room within, illuminating a black throne. Meder ran to it with a cry and caressed the carven arms. Nonnus carried Sharina inside, shoving the procurator ahead of them.

Sharina tried to get her bearings. Brown ichor was already beginning to corrode her dagger's blade.

The large room held only the ornate throne and an ebony table against the opposite wall with a pair of silver candlesticks, oxidized black like the furniture. The windows were too narrow to pass a human and were barred besides.

The only door was the one onto the main hall, filling with liches.

Nonnus glanced at the latch, a complex apparatus that shot two bronze bars into slots in the doorjamb. The bars and the door itself were sturdy, but scores of undead monsters could hack through them in a matter of minutes.

"Lock the door," Nonnus said and stepped back into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.

"Nonnus!" Sharina said as she staggered to her feet. Asera threw the double bolt. "Nonnus, no!"

Steel clashed. Something hit the other side of the door and bounced away.

"Pray for those I kill this day, child," Nonnus called through the panel.

Because he wouldn't be alive to pray for them himself.

"No!" Sharina repeated as she grasped the locking wheel to open it. The procurator hit her from behind with a silver candlestick.

Sharina lost control over her limbs. She slumped bonelessly onto the floor, still able to see and hear. The dagger slipped from her fingers and clanked on the terrazzo.

Meder knelt on the floor before the great black throne. He was beginning an incantation, while outside the door the fight continued. Metal rang savagely but none of the combatants said a word.

Nonnus could buy only time, not safety, for the girl he'd promised to protect; but he was buying that time, with his Pewle knife and his life.