House of Shadows(81)

CHAPTER 11




The pipes Taudde had made were finally brought to life a few days after the keiso engagement, very early in the morning, before the sky had yet begun to lighten toward dawn. Taudde, lying sleepless in his bed, had been listening to the rhythm of the waves that sometimes seemed to permeate Lonne in the long hours that preceded the dawn. He could not quite tell whether he actually heard the music of the sea—his townhouse, set well back from the shore, should have been too far from the sea to hear its voice. But if the music of the sea did reach him even here, the voice of the pipes drowned it.

He had been waiting for the sound of that music—dreading it, but fearing even more that he would never hear it. But Miennes must have decided at last that the time had come to destroy the Dragon’s heir.

The inexpert playing set Taudde’s teeth on edge, but he was so glad to have the waiting resolved that he welcomed even that. He lay awake and motionless while the delicate web of sound drew tight and then faded slowly, drawing its victims, he knew, along the path that led from the world of ephemeral life into the country of eternal death.

Only when the music had entirely passed beyond hearing did he rise. He went to the window of his room, putting back the shutters so he could gaze out at the chill night. The streetlamps below glowed like pale sea jewels, drowning the light of the stars and the early dawn. In the mountainous heights of Kalches, the stars would be brilliant. On crisp, cold nights, they would seem so close one might reach out and brush them from the sky. Tonight, both Kalches and the stars seemed very far away.

With the fading of the piping came, perhaps, other possibilities. The time for timidity was surely past. Taudde went to his writing desk. There he took out the note Miennes had so recently written to invite him to that fraught dinner. He studied the graceful, slanting letters. Then he sat down and penned a letter of his own in that same graceful hand, with ink the azure of the sunlit sea, on the finest pale-cream parchment. If I am dead, know that it was sorcery struck the blow, he wrote. But it was not a Kalchesene made this spell: There is treachery ’twixt mountain and sea. Look to the mages of Lonne for this crafting; one of them has betrayed the Dragon and made it seem as though I were false myself. Would Miennes have used that phrase? Taudde decided that he would, and continued. Look to the prince; if I am dead, he must be the next target of Lirionne’s enemy. If you read this, let my death prove my faithfulness and warn of betrayal from one who has been trusted. When Taudde wrote the name Ankennes, he wrote it in blood-red ink. And when he signed Miennes’s name, he signed it in gold ink and with a practiced flourish so like the original that he hoped Miennes himself would have been unable to tell it from his own true signature.

Then he stood waiting for the last words to dry so that he could roll up the parchment and bind it with a black ribbon. And at last he took out his flute once more, and the ring he had stolen from little Moonflower. He let his awareness sink into this ring and found himself playing a low circular melody that wound around and around, smooth and hard and filled with the name of a cautious, dour man, but not, Taudde found to his surprise, a man entirely without humor… He spun out a line between himself and this man, and dropped the letter, he hoped, straight into the private room of the prince’s bodyguard, Jeres Geliadde. In the early predawn hours, he had every hope no one would see it fall out of the air into that chamber. Though if someone did… that would certainly guarantee the letter would be read immediately.

This was an attack he hoped Mage Ankennes had not anticipated: an attack that hardly used sorcery at all. Taudde did not necessarily expect it to be decisive, but he hoped it would at least prove distracting. Thus he might find his next opportunity—to strike a sharper blow against the mage, or if he could not find a way to do that, at least to get out of Lonne. As soon as the prince’s people found him dead, Taudde’s letter would be taken very seriously, and once suspicion fell on Mage Ankennes, the mage would undoubtedly find himself answering close questions in the Laodd. Taudde meant to act the moment word of the prince’s death made its way down from the Laodd into the city.

After a moment of hesitation, he walked again to the window of his chamber. It was just past dawn, now: the hour of pearl and mist in which the city was most hushed. When would the death of the Dragon’s heir be discovered? Not long, probably. News of it should rush down from the heights as fast as the Nijiadde Falls and smash into the city as forcefully as the falls smashed into the lake below the mountains. But until the Seriantes Dragon moved against Ankennes, Taudde must expect his own peril to be considerably heightened.