"My home," the velduke said, pointing. At a large, spartan-looking stone keep up on a hill, crowning the highest point of the hill covered by the city, right at the back, beyond all the crowded roofs.
"Jesus," Rod hissed again, as the knights started the long trot down the avenue. It was one thing to blithely write about tall buildings and crowded cities and reeking dung-wagons, but quite another to ride through the heart of it all gawking around, seeing and smelling and…
He saw washing hanging from balcony rails, and stout women with weathered faces securing it with wooden pegs bristling from their mouths. He saw scores of men and children trudging or even struggling under the weight of laden caskets and coffers and sacks; the trade in every shop seemed to involve carrying lots of things. And everywhere Rod saw folk pause in what they were doing to glance down at the procession of riding knights, recognize the bareheaded velduke, and straighten to smartly bring their hands to their chests in salute. Jeez, that was impressive.
He glanced over at Deldragon; as before, the velduke was nodding back to everyone he saw saluting him.
Flies were everywhere, and horse dung underfoot, though children with scoops or using just their hands and stained old sacks were darting out between horses and hurrying folk to scoop up the steaming droppings. Rod turned in his saddle to see where one of them-a dirty-faced girl in a rag of a dress-went, and saw her hasten down an alley and in at a door.
Then they were past, and he could see that alley no more, and the streets were rising and growing broader and less crowded. The houses were grander, now, some of them having little stone walls and arched metal gates enclosing tiny garden-yards, rather than opening directly onto the street. He'd seen nothing that could be called a sidewalk, nor…
A sudden, strident war-horn fanfare jolted him upright, blinking.
He was in time to see the knights in front of them parting, turning aside and bringing their horses to head-tossing halts, to let the velduke and his honored guests enter Deldragon's castle first.
They rode through an arch wide enough for six riders abreast, in a crenelated wall perhaps thirty feet high, into a wide cobbled area in front of a grand door at the top of wide stone steps, with another archway into the gloom of some sort of interior coachyard, beyond.
Uniformed servants were waiting for them on those steps, and grooms to take the reins of their horses, crimson dragons bright on many steel-gray breasts. It was impressive; Rod sat uncertainly in his saddle until Taeauna and the velduke both started to dismount. Then he promptly discovered how stiff and sore his legs were as he tried to do the same and ended up half dismounting and half falling out of his saddle, wincing.
The horse was led away while he was still limping over to Taeauna, and in a sort of daze Rod found more smartly uniformed servants than he could count bowing low to him in unison and then whisking him up the steps with the Aumrarr at his side. To his confused, wonderstruck look she replied with a wink and a grin, and Rod found himself being smoothly conducted along dark, grandly paneled passages where countless servants averted their stares to bow low, up a grand-bannistered flight of stone stairs to ornate double doors that waiting servants in daggercoats flung wide, and into a suite of brightly lit rooms where the grand procession suddenly ended, leaving him blinking in the sudden stillness.
"Your rooms, gentles," a grandly liveried servant murmured from behind Rod and Taeauna, as he withdrew, softly drawing the double doors closed again as he bowed and departed behind them.
More servants stood waiting in the doorways of five-no, six-inner rooms, and now smoothly bowed in unison, and… and…
Taeauna stepped forward, and then saw something (what, Rod could not tell) and stopped dead.
She whirled to face Rod, eyes flashing a "be still" warning, and as swiftly spun right back the way she'd been facing, turning her head to look intently around at all the servants. She clapped her hands briskly, and announced, "We thank you very much for your kind attendance, but now most urgently require you all to depart and leave us."
No one moved.
The Aumrarr drew herself up and said curtly, "Go. Now. All of you."
Rod saw heads turning, junior servants looking to those ranked above them. Taeauna saw who they were looking to, and leveled her own cold gaze on those four senior servants.
They coughed, nodded, and kept their reddening faces carefully expressionless. One by one, they bowed again to Taeauna and then to Rod, and slipped away, the other servants melting away with them.
Rod tried as hard to keep from looking puzzled, as all of them obviously were; try as he might, he couldn't see anything in all the luxury surrounding him that should spur Taeauna to suddenly act as she was.
He could see nothing at all alarming or unusual.
"I dismissed all of you," the Aumrarr said firmly, her voice colder than ever. She raised it a trifle to add, "Including you who watch and listen in the walls. Just go, and tell your master that I ordered your withdrawal. For your own protection."
Rod shook his head, bewildered. "What-?"
Taeauna's hand closed on his, quellingly, as she said to the walls around them, "I jest not. Now go."
Rod heard the slightest of sounds off to his left, and a faint stirring, clear across the room. Then silence.
"Staying, still?" Taeauna asked, her gaze fixed on just one wall now. "Well, I warned you. Your doom is of your own choosing."
She turned then and embraced Rod Everlar like a lover, her body melting against his, her lips nuzzling his ear.
"Is this your 'right place?'" she breathed.
Rod kissed her jaw just above the chin, and let his lips trail along it to her ear, heart pounding. (Hey! I'm like a suave secret agent, kissing the girl! Not that he could recall many stories where the beautiful Russian lady spy was sporting the stumps of recently clipped wings.) "No," he whispered, as quietly as he knew how. "What's up?"
Taeauna's arms went up and around his neck, as if in quickening lust, so she could bury her lips in his ear and whisper, "Stay away from yon table for now, and don't look at it with any interest at all. Those are enchanted things, laid out to show Deldragon's spies by your reactions if you're a wizard or not. Whatever you do, don't pick any up, handle them, or take them. Just leave them be; overlook them. They bore you and mean nothing to you. Except that veldukes put some odd decorations in their guest chambers."
Rod had vaguely noticed a glossy-polished table ahead with a row of small objects on it. He firmly quelled his impulse to turn his head and look at it properly, and settled for moving his mouth to a shapely Aumrarr ear and breathing into it, as softly as possible, "Deldragon's spies? Is he a foe, then?"
"He's… careful. As all Galathan nobles must be. The careless lords are already dead."
Any velduke's castle has many rooms, not all of them grand or well used, and the personal keep of Darendarr Deldragon was no exception. There were dozens of dark stone rooms on the damp southern side of its cellars that had been left to the rats and dust for years, and in one of them now, the air suddenly started to glow.
The glow grew, becoming many small points of light that silently spiraled around each other. They whirled ever-faster, rising up from the floor into a tall, thin column, spinning and… suddenly coalescing into a young, alert-looking man in robes who clutched a large and bulging sack.
Taerith Saeredarr peered all around, turning quickly to look in all directions for signs that anyone else was about. Seeing nothing but darkness, now that the glow that had delivered him had faded, and hearing nothing but his own breathing, he put the sack on the floor, held it there with one hand, and pivoted again, more slowly, listening very carefully this time.