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by a thousand cobwebs, and sweat dripped from his forehead down his nose and
beaded on his upper lip. An instant before, he d seen the reflection of pale
red light from beyond the point where the passageway twisted; in the instant
that his eyes had registered it, it had vanished.
Something waited down there. Something bad, that knew he existed, and that now
hid in the darkness, waiting for him to move into reach.
Why go on? Ry s woman wasn t in the House anymore Trev would almost have
staked his life on it.
After Ry had that seizure, he d volunteered to stay behind to look for her,
but the longer and harder he looked, the more certain he became that she was
nowhere in reach. Why keep looking? He couldn t say.
Maybe secretly he wanted to earn more of Ry s admiration, or to take Yanth s
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place as his closest confidant. Maybe underneath everything, he hoped for
advancement as Ry advanced in the Family.
Though he despised such base motives in others, he had to admit they compelled
him as much as friendship for Ry. Maybe more.
The darkness ahead of him seemed to deepen, to gain weight and presence, and
Trev swallowed hard.
He wouldn t live in Galweigh House if the Sabirs made him paraglese of it. The
damned place felt alive to him, as if it were watching every step he took.
You can t take her home with you even if you do find her, he told himself. You
try, and she ll Shift and slaughter you.
The darkness began to whisper.
Sibilant almost-formed words caught at the edge of Trev s hearing. Pattering
in the blackness, and dry squeaks, as if rats, pressed to dust by the weight
of the thick dark, came at him to protest their fate. A
draft of dank air brushed his cheek, and he stepped back, away from the door,
caught off guard by the faint, unpleasant carrion reek it carried.
Wait, the darkness whispered, and he didn t know if he heard the word or only
imagined it.
She wouldn t be in there.
He closed the door and slowly backed away, keeping his back to the wall so
that no one would surprise him. His lamp cast long and dancing shadows, and he
wished that dawn would come and chase them away. Whispering began behind him.
He spun and squinted into the dark. Saw nothing. Heard the door he had closed
open behind him. Jerked around, sword raised, lantern lifted so that he could
make out the outline of his enemy.
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Diplomacy of Wolves
Saw nothing.
But the carrion smell bore down on him, a moving wall. Nothing in front of
him. Nothing behind him.
The cold, damp hands of nothing reached through his clothes to his skin,
stroked him, prodded him. The long-dead voice of that nothing murmured, You
belong to me, and this time he could not doubt that what he heard, he heard
with his ears and not with his imagination. What he felt, he felt for real. He
flailed out with his sword, but his blade found no resistance in its arc to
the floor, and steel rang hard on stone, and the shock of the blade striking
ran through the palm of his hand and up his wrist, and he cried out. Lost his
balance. Dropped the lamp.
It smashed to the floor, and for a moment the oil burned brightly in its
puddle on the stone, and he leaped back to escape its spread. Carrion arms
caught him. Held him, while the flames guttered down to blackness, and the
darkness that was more than the absence of light descended with full fury. A
carrion body that he could not touch, could not hurt, though it could touch
him, pressed flesh to his flesh, and the corpse chill of it and the stench of
it flowed through him. He believed he would die. Too frightened to make a
sound, or even to move, he wished that he could faint and find that the sun
would wake him in the morning, in his own bed, the victim of nothing more than
too much wine and a too-vivid dream.
Mine.
Lips moldy and rotting brushed against the nape of his neck, and fingertips
that alternated putrefaction with bony fleshlessness caressed his chest, his
belly, his cheek, his back.
I ve waited for you for so long . . . for so long . . . for so long . . .
She wasn t there. Nothing was there. But he could not break free, could not
flee, and could not fight, and his sword dropped from nerveless fingers and
clattered to the stone. His feet left the ground as she lifted him into the
air and bore him off blinded by the impenetrable blackness that surrounded
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her, by the fact that the only noise she made as she moved was a soft rustle
that might almost have been the sound of a long-vanished silk skirt brushing
the floor. He lost any sense of direction, of place. He did not know if she
traveled up with him, or down, or for that matter which of those two things
would be more frightening. He was the captive of death itself, and he could
not think or reason or plan beyond that fact.
From the floors below him he heard screams and the echoes of screams. They got
closer, became louder;
did he move toward them, or they toward him?
The all-enveloping blinding blanket of darkness, the fetor, the fear, the
screams of countless unseen others they were the walls and floor and ceiling
of his world, the perimeters of his existence beyond which nothing else was.
Then they were gone.
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Diplomacy of Wolves
He lay on a bed of stones, breathing cool, clean air scented with morning dew
and loam, and the sounds that surrounded him were the moans and sobs of
others, but also the sounds of a city moving to life in the time before the
break of day. Human shouts, good-natured or angry, and carts and beasts of
burden in the streets, and farmers bringing livestock into market someplace
below. In the valley. In the world beyond Galweigh House.
His eyes cleared, the unnatural darkness erased in an instant. He rolled to
his side; sat up; looked around.
He sat in the middle of a graveled road, surrounded on all sides by the Sabir
troops who had taken
Galweigh House, and by the officers who had led them, and by the Family who
had come to direct the taking of the spoils. The road and the grassy berm to
either side could have been a body-strewn battlefield, except that none of
those who lay stunned and in shock seemed to be harmed. Before him, the road
twisted into moonlit jungle. Behind him . . .
He turned, and saw through the frame of palms and many-trunked strangler figs
the edge of the wall of
Galweigh House, and a part of the gate the Sabirs had paid so much to get
opened. It slid shut as he watched. Leaving him and the rest of the conquerors
once again locked beyond the impenetrable wall, and the House in the hands of
the dead.
Chapter
18
T
he woman who walked into the tavern where Ian Draclas sat sipping bitter mango
beer with three outrageous liars caught his attention more for what was wrong
about her than what was right. She strode to the bartender without bothering
to acknowledge the interested glances she got from the men at the tables,
which was odd enough; most of the women in the tavern at that time of night
wanted the glances, and the money they could make from the men who gave them.
Additionally, this woman looked like she d been dunked in a well, then dipped
in dirt; but nothing about her said poor or in hard times.
Her clothes, entirely wrong for the area and the time of night, were outdoor
garb made for protection from the elements and for durability. He studied them
with a practiced eye; they were well made.
Absolutely top quality. As were the sword she wore at one hip and the dagger
at the other.
Her bones were delicate, her hands slender and long-fingered but
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