“You have brains, mi’lad,” he remembered his uncle saying. “Emperor or not. Use them.”
So it was that as darkness fell in his rooms and the flames in the fireplace died to bare glowing embers, Phoran was alone again when the Memory came.
It stood taller than a man and stopped some few feet away. Doubtless, Phoran thought with humor that barely masked his terror, it was taken aback that he was not in a drunken stupor or crying in the corner as he had been on more than one occasion.
It looked like nothing at all, as if a human eye couldn’t quite focus on what it was—though tonight it looked, somehow, more real than it had been before.
Its hesitation, if it had hesitated at all, was only momentary. For the first time, Phoran stood quietly as it enfolded him in its blackness, taking away his ability to move or cry out. He’d hoped that it would be better if he held still, but the burning pain of fangs piercing the inner skin of his elbow was as terrible as he remembered. Cold entered Phoran from the place where the Memory fed, as if it was replacing what it drank with ice. When it was done it said the words that had become too familiar.
“By the taking of your blood, I owe you. One answer. Choose your question.”
“Are you afraid of other people?” Phoran asked. “Is that why you don’t come if someone’s in the room with me?”
“No,” it said and vanished.
Shivering as if he’d been hunting in winter, Phoran the Twenty-Seventh curled up on the rug on the floor of his room.
CHAPTER 8
This time it wasn’t the grating that opened, but thedoor. Tier shot to his feet and had to stop there because the sudden light blinded him.
“If it please you, my lord,” said a soft tenor voice that could have belonged equally well to a young man or a woman, “Would you come with me? We have arranged for your comfort. I am to offer you also an apology for how you have been treated. We have not been ready to receive you until now.”
Tier wiped his eyes and squinted against the glare of what was, after all, a fairly dim lantern to see the backlit form of a woman.
The sight, he could tell, was staged. She held the light carefully to exhibit certain aspects of her form. The slight tremor in the hand that held the lantern might be faked as well—but he’d have been worried about facing a man who’d been caged for as long as Tier had, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt.
“I’m no lord,” he said at last. “Tell me just who it is I have to thank for my recent stay here?”
“If it please you, sir,” she said. “I’ll take you to where all of your questions can be answered.”
Tier could have overpowered her, and would have if she had been a man. But if they, whoever they were, sent a woman to get him, it could only be because overpowering her would get him nowhere.
“You’ll have to give me a moment,” he said, “until I can see again.”
As his vision cleared, he saw that the woman was arrayed in flowing garments that hinted broadly at the body beneath.
A whore’s costume, but this woman was no common whore. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even to a man who preferred his woman to be less soft and breakable. Even if the net of gems and gold that confined quite a bit of equally golden hair was paste and brass—and he wasn’t at all sure it was—the cloth of her dress was worth a fair penny.
“Can you see, yet, sir?” she asked.
“Oh aye,” he said congenially. He’d bide his time until he had enough information to act. “Lead on, fair lady.”
She laughed gently at his address as she led him out into a winding corridor. Behaving, he thought, as if he were a customer, rather than a man who’d been imprisoned for weeks.
The hall ceiling was so low he could have easily touched it with a hand. On either side of his cell there were doors that opened to his hand and revealed rooms that looked much like his. The woman was patient with him, waiting without murmuring and pausing with him when he stopped by an iron door twice as wide as the one that led into his cell. The door stuck fast when he tried it.
The woman said nothing. When he took the lantern from her and adjusted it brighter so he could look more closely at the doors, she merely folded her arms under her full breasts.
He ignored her until he was certain that the door was hinged on the other side, with two iron bars (barely visible in the narrow space between door and frame) in place to keep the door shut. If he’d access to a forge he could fashion something to unbar the door—but they were unlikely to allow him such.
He handed the lantern back to his hostess and allowed her to lead him.
The hall continued around a sharp bend and ended in double doors. Just before the walls ended, there was a door on either side. It was the left-hand door the woman opened, stepping back for him to precede her.
The smell of steam and the sound of running water emerged from the opened door, so he was unsurprised to enter a bathing room. He knew what one looked like because the Sept of Gerant had held war conferences in his—saying that the sound of the water kept people from overhearing anything useful. But that austere chamber had as much to do with this one as a donkey had with a warhorse. A golden tub of a size to accommodate five or six was brim full of hot, steaming water with a tall table near it holding a variety of soaps and pots of lotion. But by far the most impressive part of the room was the cold pool.
Water cascaded from an opening in the ceiling high above and poured onto a ledge of fitted rock where it was spread to fall in a wide sheet to the waist-deep pool below. He could tell the pool was waist-deep because there were two naked, frightened, and obviously cold women standing in it.
“Sssst,” hissed his guide in sudden irritation. “You look as if you are about to lose your virtue again. Does this look like a man who’d hurt women?”
She softened her voice to velvet and turned back to Tier. “You’ll forgive them, my… sir. Our last guest was none to happy with his captivity and took it out on those who had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed with honest amusement. “After that speech I would certainly feel like a stupid lout to try any such thing,” he said.
In the brighter light of the bathing chamber he could see that she was more than beautiful—she was fascinating, a woman who’d draw men’s eyes when she was eighty. He mentally upped her probable price again. So why was he being offered such service? The thought pulled the smile from his face.
“So I’m to clean myself before being presented, eh?” he said neutrally.
“We will perform that service, sir, if you will allow us,” she said, bowing her head in submission. “When you are finished bathing, there are clean clothes to replace the ones you wear now. This is for your comfort entirely. If you choose, you may stay as you are and I’ll take you in now. I thought you would prefer not to appear at a disadvantage.”
“Disadvantage, eh?” He glanced at his clothes. “If they kidnap a man at the tail end of a three-month hunt, they get as they deserve. I’ll wash, but you ladies get yourselves out of here or my wife will have my head.”
The women in the pool giggled as if he’d been witty, but they waited for a gesture from the woman he’d followed before they left the pool. They wrapped themselves in a couple of the bathing sheets folded in piles on a bench and exited the room through the same door he’d entered.
“You too, lass,” he told his guide. “The high-born you serve may be comfortable with help, but we Rederni are competent to wash ourselves.”
Smilingly she bowed and left, shutting the door behind her. He hadn’t noticed a latch, but he heard a click that could be nothing else so he didn’t bother to try the door. The waterfall was more intriguing.
Four leaps gave him a fingerhold on the lowest ledge and he climbed the rest with relative ease. When he found the opening the water fell through in the corner of the ceiling, it was grated with iron bars set in mortar.