“Seriously, Karris. Don’t demean us both. At the very least, I’m an enemy of your enemy. You’re here for information. I’ll give it, but not if you lie to me. If you go unprepared against these people, you’ll die.”
He could have killed her in the church, Karris realized. Or he could have left her and let the fire do it. Corvan did have a sterling reputation, even among his enemies, and she needed to know what he knew. She surrendered, lifting her open hands. She winced. Ow, her left arm was killing her. “Why can’t I be here?” she asked.
“Do you have any idea what happened to all the men and women who fought for Dazen?” Corvan asked.
“They went home.”
“It’s always harder for the losers to go home. Dazen’s armies were a motley bunch. A lot of bad men, and some good ones who’d been wronged.”
“Like you,” Karris interjected sarcastically.
“This isn’t about me. Point is, a lot of us couldn’t go home. Some went to Green Haven; the Aborneans accepted a few small communities, and the Ilytians claimed to be willing to take anyone, but the only thing anyone got from them was a clipped ear.”
Karris shuddered. It was how the Ilytians marked slaves. They heated shears red-hot and cut the slave’s left ear nearly in half. The scar tissue kept the ear from ever fusing back together and made it easy to identify who was a slave.
“Some of us were more fortunate,” Corvan said. “Our armies raged back and forth across this land for a few months, and the people here had no reason to love either side. We wiped out whole villages. Those that survived had nothing but young children, old men, and a few women. Most of the towns reviled the soldiers, and where former soldiers tried to stay by force, Rask’s father, Satrap Perses Garadul, wiped them out. But a few towns realized that if they were ever going to rebuild, they needed men. The alcaldesa of Rekton was one of those. She chose two hundred soldiers and let us stay, and she chose well. A few nearby towns did the same. Other men, of course, became bandits, and even Perses Garadul couldn’t hunt all of those down.”
“How did you get to stay?” Karris asked. “As a general, you were more responsible for what happened to this country than most.”
“My wife was Tyrean. We’d married a few years before the war. She was in Garriston when… when it burned. One of her retainers survived and saved our daughter and brought her to me. So I had a year-old little girl, and the alcaldesa took pity on me. The point is, people around here remember the war a little differently than Gavin’s people do.”
Not terribly surprising, considering they got the ass-end of the deal.
“They remember it as a fight over a woman,” Corvan said blandly.
“That’s—that’s ridiculous!” Karris spluttered. Orholam have mercy.
“You’re a great favorite of artists here. Not that we have many talented ones, but the fair-skinned, exotic beauty with fiery hair still inspires artists good and bad to raptures. Even if most men wouldn’t dare believe you were the same woman—you’re usually portrayed in a wedding dress, sometimes torn—Rask doubtless owns paintings by talented artists who’d actually seen you.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Karris said.
“But it makes a good story.”
“A good story?”
“Good tragic. Good interesting. Not good happy.” Corvan cleared his throat. “I can’t believe you don’t know this.”
“There are almost no Tyreans on the Jaspers now. And no one speaks to me of those days.”
Corvan looked on the edge of saying something, but he held his tongue. Finally, he said, “So the question is, who would send you to our new King Garadul, knowing that he would surely recognize you, and what did they hope to achieve by delivering you into his hands?”
The White. The White betrayed me? Why?
Chapter 34
It had been a long morning already. Gavin had woken painfully early to reach the coast by the dawn, and then had skimmed as soon as he’d been able to draft the sun’s first rays. Then he’d sculled to Cannon Island and made an unpleasant, claustrophobic trip through the escape tunnel, leaving him dirty, sweaty, sore, and deprived of sleep. But there was no other option than to push; not after what the color wight had told him.
The tunnel met the Chromeria at a disused storage room in the basement, three levels underground. There was a plain closet set in the back of one of the rooms, and a hidden door in the back of that closet. Gavin grabbed a lantern from a hook, twisted the flint, and was gratified to see it light instantly. He released the luxin he’d been holding into two puddles on the floor that quickly dissolved—no need to terrify anyone he ran into—and slipped into the closet.
The hidden door closed smoothly behind him. He opened the closet door. A hand’s breadth, then it stopped, blocked. With the light of the lantern only cutting through the little crack, he couldn’t see what the problem was. He reached through the crack into the darkness. Polished wood greeted his fingertips, smooth and straight, then more, right on top of it. Chairs.
Well, that was the problem of a super-secret door hidden in a disused storage room, wasn’t it? Sometimes people saw a disused storage room and thought it should be used to store things.
Sighing, Gavin set down the lamp and braced his shoulder against the door. He pushed, hard, harder. The door slid another hand’s breadth or two as the stacked chairs shifted, then stuck fast. He glanced at the lantern, drafted a green wand, and stuck a blob of red luxin to the end. He lit the red with sub-red and poked his narrow torch through the gap, holding it high. He poked his head through the gap after it.
The entire room was packed with furniture, as if half a dozen lecture halls and dining areas had been cleared out and everything put in here. Dear Orholam. Gavin swore quietly. The only clearance was down at floor level. The only way out was to crawl between the legs of the chairs and tables.
There was nothing for it. Unless Gavin wanted to start a fire, draft huge amounts, and obliterate everything in the room so he could simply walk out—not terribly discreet—he was going to be mopping the floor with his body. Great. He let the luxin torch disintegrate and started crawling.
Ten minutes later, he stood. He didn’t try to brush the dust from his clothing. There wasn’t much point. He was muddy with dust, that’s how much dust there was, along with damp floors and sweat and dust he knocked off of the chairs and tables above him. He listened at the door for a full minute, heard nothing.
Stepping into the hall lightly, he closed the door behind himself. He extinguished his lantern with a puff; the halls were brightly lit. Even three floors below the sea, the cherry glims (the red-drafting second- to fourth-year students) were expected to keep the lamps fueled with red luxin. The storeroom, wisely, was set almost at the end of one of the long hallways. Gavin ducked down to the lift at the end, mere paces away.
The lifts had to serve the entire Chromeria, which meant they had to be serviceable by slaves or the dims, the newest students. So it was entirely mechanical. As anyone stepped into the lift, a scale would indicate how many counterweights were needed. If a drafter chose to use less counterweight, she would have to pull herself up the rope, albeit only lifting a fraction of her own weight. If she used more counterweight than her own weight, it could be difficult to stop at the correct floor. A central lift handled all the heavier loads and moved entire classes, while these side lifts took smaller loads. Additionally, each lift bay had numerous slots and ropes so that ambassadors wouldn’t have to wait while dozens of dims made their way to class.