The street song dimmed to a somnolent murmur as the residents of Halarahh sought shelter from the midday heat. Sunsleep hours were both custom and necessity in this sultry land.
The king and his counselor, however, did not take time to rest. Matteo followed Zalathorm through a maze of corridors and up winding stairs, past armed guards and magical wards guarding the high tower where Queen Beatrix was imprisoned.
Her small chamber was comfortably appointed but as starkly white as a greenmage's infirmary. The walls were freshly whitewashed and the carpet quilted from thick pelts of lambskin. White satin cushions heaped the bed, and a long settee had been covered in white-embroidered silk. Here sat Beatrix in profound stillness, immobile as the metal constructs that had been her passion and her downfall.
Despite her captivity, the queen was gorgeously gowned in white satin and cloth-of-silver. An elaborate wig of white and silver curls framed a face as pale as porcelain. Her dark eyes were kohl-rimmed and enormous, startling against the unnatural pallor.
Zalathorm stooped to kiss the snowy cheek. "You are well, my lady?"
After a moment, she responded with a faint nod.
The king sat down beside her and took one of her small, still hands in his. "You are here by my command. In this I had no choice. But I believe nothing that has been said of you."
The queen lifted her eyes, not quite meeting Zalathorm's gaze. Though she stared blankly past his shoulder, she lifted her free hand and gently touched his cheek. Overcome, Zalathorm captured the small hand and pressed it to his lips.
Though loath to intrude, Matteo stepped forward. "My lady, do you remember Kiva visiting you, taking away the clockwork creatures?"
"Kiva," Beatrix repeated. Matteo might have taken this response for a simple echo but for the uncharacteristically grim note that had entered the queen's voice.
Matteo crouched down so his eyes were level with hers. "You are accused of conspiring with Kiva, and building the clockwork creatures on her command. Were you enchanted?"
"Not by Kiva."
Matteo and Zalathorm exchanged puzzled glances. The queen seemed unusually lucid, but this pronouncement was unexpected. "By whom, then?"
"Not who." A cloud passed over Beatrix's face, dulling the faint light in her eyes. She withdrew her hands from the king's grasp and folded them in her pristine lap.
"If not whom," Matteo persisted, "then what?"
A hint of animation returned to her painted face, and she glanced toward him. "Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes. What?"
Matteo puzzled this over. The light broke suddenly. "You were not enchanted by a person but by a thing?"
After a moment, Beatrix nodded.
Finally, progress! Matteo sent a triumphant glance toward the king. The expression on Zalathorm's face sent him rocking back onto his heels.
The king stared at his wife, his countenance deadly pale and stamped with horror. He slipped onto his knees and buried his face in the queen's lap. His words were faint and choked with emotion, but Matteo caught something that sounded like, "Gods above, what have I done to you?"
After a moment, Matteo went to the door and tapped softly. The guard let him out, and he stood quietly in the hall until the king rejoined him.
"Sire, disturbing though this interview was, we made progress. We should continue."
Zalathorm shook his head. "You will get nothing more. The moment has passed."
"Before it did, you learned something important."
"Yes." Zalathorm cleared his throat then spun away and stalked toward the tower stairs.
Matteo fell into step and waited, but the king did not elaborate. After several moments, the jordain gave up any pretense of patience. Stepping into the king's path, he rounded to face him and affixed him with a challenging stare.
"With respect, my lord, you command me to defend the queen but tell me nothing that might aid in her defense!"
To Matteo's surprise, the king dropped his gaze first. "Magic is not the solution to every problem. Sometimes it creates as many problems as it solves. I was not aware of one of these problems until just now. There is nothing more to tell you." He held up a hand to forestall Matteo's ready protest. "Nothing, at least that is not held in silence by powerful enchantments and wizard-word oaths."
The jordain stood his ground for a few moments more, then fell back with a sigh. A wizard-word oath was sacred, unbreakable. This was not a matter of choice. As a consequence of swearing "by wind and word," the lips of a Halruaan wizard were magically sealed.
So there it was, then. Matteo's difficult task had taken a downturn into the realms of impossibility! He had twenty days to uncover a secret the king could not speak, a secret a nation of wizard-lords had not uncovered.
Twenty days, and each passing day left Tzigone alone, abandoned in a place of horrors beyond Matteo's imagining.
After a moment, he realized the king was studying him. "You are thinking of your friend," Zalathorm stated gently.
Matteo managed a faint smile. "I did not think any but a magehound could plumb a jordain's heart"
"She is her mother's daughter. Such women are capable of inspiring joy and pain in great and equal measure. I do not know a way to release your friend," he said, shrewdly anticipating Matteo's next question, "but may I make a suggestion?"
"Please!"
"Follow your heart where it takes you. Perhaps the daughter's secrets will shed light upon the mother's."
Matteo seized the king's arm, bringing them both to a stop. "Do you foresee this?" he said eagerly.
The king pulled away and fixed him with a searching gaze. "Can you conceive of any circumstance, jordain, in which you would willingly, even gladly violate an oath? Regardless of the cost to you, or the gain to another?"
Matteo hesitated, then shook his head.
"Then you are the better man. Once before, I paid love's price in honor's coin. I would do so again if I could free Beatrix. Since I cannot help the queen, I will bless the man who can and bear any cost to myself as a bargain."
Before the jordain could respond, Zalathorm simply disappeared.
With a deeply troubled heart, Matteo accepted the truth of his task. Zalathorm was as much a prisoner as either Beatrix or Tzigone, and the jordain's task was to free Halruaa's king.
Even if that meant destroying him.
Chapter Three
Deep, silvery mist-mist so thick it came just short of rain, so pale and chill it resembled shape-shifting ghosts-swirled a slow dance through the dismal landscape.
The deep moss shrouding the conical fairy mounds was as sodden as sponge, and moisture dripped from blighted trees in maddening, oddly syncopated rhythms.
A small, battered figure huddled in the dubious shelter of a small stone cave, her thin arms wrapped around her knees. The cave, dank and cold though it was, offered at least the illusion of protection, and as Tzigone was finding out, in this place, illusion was a very powerful thing indeed.
One figment of Tzigone's imagination snuffled at a small, dark carcass. The griffin, though nearly as insubstantial as the mist, had fought at her command, and with beak and talons like those of an enormous eagle it had sent the Unseelie folk into retreat.
Her tormenters had left behind the body of a fallen comrade. Tzigone forced herself to study the torn and broken thing, hoping to find some vulnerability in her strange captors. The dark fairies were so quick that her eyes could not fully perceive them.
The dead fairy was closer to four feet than to Tzigone's five. Though Tzigone's form was waiflike, barely recognizable as female, she felt positively robust next to the delicate creature. Its skin was raven-black, its features even more narrow and angular than an elf's. Small, oddly shaped wings-crumpled but still beautiful-draped from narrow shoulders. They were of a strange, translucent black under which a rainbow of colors seethed and shimmered. The fairy's long, oval head had no hair and needed none. The eerie beauty of the creature discouraged any comparison to humans. The Unseelie were what they were, and they were terrible beyond imagining.
Tzigone allowed her gaze to slide away, hoping the creature nosing at the dark fairy's corpse would be gone by the time she glanced back.
It was not. In this place, nightmares refused banishment.
The monstrous illusion was like no living creature she knew. Matteo had told her when she accidentally conjured it that first time that no one had seen such a beast for nearly three hundred years. The long-extinct griffin had a monstrous draconian body, leathery, scantily feathered wings, and a primitive avian head. A thick mane surrounded its neck, and it crouched on powerful leonine haunches.
The monster plunged its wicked beak into the carcass and shook its head sharply. Flesh came free with a sickening, wet sound, followed by the snap of fragile bone.
Tzigone shoved her fist against her mouth and tried to replace horror with gratitude. After all, the misty griffin had given her a brief respite from the dark fairies and their relentless torment-torment that was mostly illusion but no less painful for that.
Somehow the Unseelie folk managed to get into her mind and heart. They tormented her with all the things they found in the dark corners and all the things her busy imagination could conjure. The monstrous griffin proved that sword could cut two ways.
Her nimble mind danced ahead to thoughts of escape. There had to be a way out of this gray world. She and Matteo had fought the dark fairies before, and it was apparent that Matteo knew little about their foe. That was a bad sign. In Tzigone's opinion, Matteo knew more than the gods had forgotten. If he couldn't deal with the Unseelie folk, what chance had she?
On the other hand, Dhamari Exchelsor had known how to open the veil between the Worlds. Obviously there was a spell, and Matteo would find it.
"Dhamari," she murmured, suddenly remembering that he shared her exile. She rose painfully to her feet, gingerly testing her chilled limbs. After a few tentative steps, she set out to find the treacherous wizard.
She walked for a long time through the swirling mists. Finally, disgusted and weary, she kicked at a giant toadstool and watched the spores rise in an indignant cloud. At this rate, she'd never find Dhamari. If she could conjure illusionary creatures, why not a pack of hunting hounds?
That notion didn't appeal. During her street days, Tzigone had been chased by canine guardians too often to hold much affection for them. Besides, summoned creatures could be dangerous and unpredictable, even in the world she knew. She remembered the owlbear that had savaged her fellow travelers-and she fiercely banished this line of thought. Such memories could be deadly here. Instead she conjured an image of Dhamari's panicked face as she dragged him with her beyond the veil.
A faint, inchoate whimper nudged her from her reverie. She opened her eyes just in time to keep from tripping over the wizard.
Dhamari Exchelsor lay curled up like a newborn mouse. His sparse hair was soaked with perspiration, and his wide, glazed, staring eyes spoke of unending nightmares. The wizard was trapped in his own mind, tortured by his own misdeeds. Tzigone couldn't think of more fitting justice.
Justice or not, in this state Dhamari was of no use whatsoever.
With a sigh, Tzigone sank down beside the comatose wizard and placed one hand on his shoulder. He was nearly as cold as the mist. She chaffed his hands and noted the chain threaded through his fingers. Curious, she tugged at the chain. A small medallion slipped out of his clenched fist, a simple, familiar-looking ornament fashioned from mist-dull metal.
Frowning, she felt around in her boot, where she'd last put her mother's medallion. It wasn't there. Somehow, Dhamari had taken it from her.
She yanked the precious trinket out of the wizard's hand. Dhamari's body jerked convulsively, and his mouth stretched into a rictus of anguish.
"This protected my mother against you and your agents," she murmured, understanding what ailed the wizard. "When you've got it, it protects you from yourself, which is probably the only reason you've survived this long."
On the other hand, the medallion also offered Tzigone a key to the past and the answers that might be hidden there. Surely anything she learned through her emerging powers would be more honest than anything Dhamari might tell her.
Just a little while, she decided. She closed her hand around her mother's talisman. Using the memory exercises Matteo had taught her, she sank deep into the past.
The city of Halarahh lay sleeping beneath a coverlet of mist, oblivious to the young woman who ran the walkways atop the city's thick, stone walls. Swift she was, with slim, tawny limbs and an effortless gait that brought to mind a young doe. The watchwizards who kept the predawn guard nodded a respectful greeting as she passed, for Keturah's name was known in this city of wizards. She was small of stature, lithe and quick as a dancer, with an abundance of glossy brown hair and large dark eyes full of laughter and secrets and magic....
Tzigone jolted back to consciousness.