Expressionless, D’Natheil gazed down at the fallen sheriff. Slowly he pressed the tip of his sword into Rowan’s neck, first dimpling, then pricking the tanned skin, blood quickly outlining the steel. I remembered the way he had pressed the dagger into the attacker at Kellea’s shop— smoothly, inexorably, relishing his own lethal prowess. My stomach and spirit rebelled, and I laid my hand on his arm.
The startled Prince jerked his head around. After a long, defiant glare, he withdrew his blade and slammed it into its sheath.
I dropped to my knees and rolled the flaccid Rowan onto his back. Blood and dirt covered his left temple. Truth glared up at me from his blue coat. Third from the bottom was a wider space than between the other brass buttons and a dark thread broken off. The remaining buttons were identical to the one I drew from my pocket.
“Someone’s coming.” The Prince pulled me to my feet and gestured me deeper into the alley, glancing over his shoulder at the street. Rowan’s “friend” was after us again, no doubt.
Shudders crept up and down my spine as we hurried through the shadowy maze of alleys, past stomach-curdling heaps of refuse, dodging a ragged, toothless woman tending a smoky fire, kicking aside chickens and feral dogs. D’Natheil halted abruptly where the lane opened into a small, weedy courtyard surrounded on all sides by tall warehouses. Beyond a clutter of stained dye vats, splintered crates of empty spools, and a skeletal apparatus that I realized was a broken loom standing on end, was a wooden stair, clinging precariously to one of the buildings. After a moment’s watching, the Prince led me through the courtyard and up the stairs. He tapped three times on the dark-painted door at the top of the stair. A bolt slid, and the Dulcé let us in.
Mountains of mouse-chewed scraps of yarn and cloth lay about the huge, dim attic, layered thickly with gray dust and a century’s worth of dead flies, moths, and beetles. An entire civilization of spiders had abandoned their webs under the rafters, especially in the low space where the steeply pitched roof met the front and back walls. This was not the same room where I’d left my friends that morning.
D’Natheil, crouching so as not to knock his head on the downsloping roof, positioned himself by a window with a broken shutter that looked out over the street below. Before I could say a word, he burst out, “You were gone a very long time. Very long.”
“Well, it’s been quite a day,” I snapped. “But I would have eliminated a few of the more unpleasant encounters, if I’d known they would annoy you.” I was too tired, too hot, and too disturbed to put up with a rude prince, however talented at rescuing he might be.
He glanced at me briefly, his expression cold, then turned his attention back to the street. “But you’re well.” He wasn’t asking. He was telling me.
“Your arrival was timely. How did you happen to be there?”
“You were in need.” He offered no more, and I looked at Baglos for further explanation.
The Dulcé had rebolted the door and was shoving a pile of broken crates up against it. “Earlier today, as we were returning from the market, we heard men making inquiries up and down the streets of this district, asking after a woman and two men, one man short and dark, one tall and strongly made. So we did not return to the other room, but found this place instead. I waited for you all morning by the palace gates, but you didn’t come, so we met here to think how to find you. After only a short time, D’Natheil ran out the door, saying, ”She calls. She is taken!“ ”
“I was careless. Jacopo is in the city on business. He wants to help us, and, like an oaf, I stood in the middle of the street talking to him. The sheriff was watching. When he saw me with Jaco, he pounced.” What game was Rowan playing? Why induce me to mistrust Jacopo? I thought they were friends. I rolled the brass button over in my palm, shock and anger tainted by profound unease. “Rowan wasn’t dead?” I hadn’t even checked.
“No.” It was winter in the corner where the Prince sat peering out of the window. Was he angry that I’d kept him from killing the sheriff?
I chided myself for lack of resolution. Rowan had been a part of the horror at Ferrante’s. In his blind adherence to the law he had allowed himself to be seduced and corrupted by the very thing he claimed to hate. He was our enemy and deserved to die. But for a moment, he had been very convincing…
“Now that you are safely with us again, was fortune kind?” said Baglos. “Did you acquire the object of your search?”
I had almost forgotten the journal. “Yes, I found it.” I pulled the bundle from my pocket and peeled away its threadbare covering. Even the Prince was drawn to see. The three of us gathered around an old crate, the only thing in the room that would serve for a table. All my irritation, all my fears, and all my questions fled in anticipation of revelation.
“My husband worked for over a year translating this. He got through most of it, though there were some entries he was never certain of, where the meaning of a few words could change the whole sense. We had to destroy his translation, but I suppose the two of you can read this easily.”
D’Natheil ran his fingers down one page, but yanked his hand away as if it had burned him. “I cannot read the ancient tongue,” he said, curtly, and stood up again.
Baglos turned a page, examining it closely. “If you command me so, my lord prince, I could translate the entire work.”
D’Natheil looked at me. “Is that what you want?”
“The critical part is the map.” Trying not to let anxiety make me heavy-handed, I thumbed through the fragile pages until I found the one where the Writer had sketched the elusive puzzle. D’Natheil returned to the makeshift table and crouched down beside Baglos. As the two of them examined the page, I studied their faces, eager to see the first sign of understanding. It did not come. First one and then the other shook his head.
“These symbols have no meaning for me,” said D’Natheil.
“Nor for me,” said Baglos, scratching his beard.
D’Natheil wandered back to the window. “Detan detu Dulcé,” he said. “Translate the symbols in the diagram.”
“Detan eto, Gire D’Arnath.” Baglos ducked his head in D’Natheil’s direction and proceeded to study the crude drawing further.
As the sky over Montevial blazed orange, then cooled into evening blue, the clamor from the street quieted, and the odors of supper—frying fish, boiling cabbage, baking bread—hung on the air. D’Natheil sat with his back against the wall, his arms resting on his drawn-up knees as he stared through the irregular hole left by the broken shutter. I fidgeted. The Dulcé pored over the page, turning it this way and that, covering parts of it with his hand, scratching symbols and lines on the splintered crate with a rusted nail, until I thought that the only activity left for him was to stand on his head. Then he began to leaf through the journal, reading, it appeared, but at a pace ten times the ordinary. But at the last he carefully closed the journal, placed it in my hands, and bent his head to D’Natheil. “It is not in me, my lord.”
“What conclusion do you draw from it?” The Prince spoke from his corner.
“Only this, my lord. It is not a map. Or better to say, it is not a map as we understand maps. The symbols do not match any set of landmarks or roads in the area of the Dorian Wall. There is some other meaning here to which I have not been given the key.”
“Well done, Dulcé.”
Baglos bent his head again.
“What do you mean, it’s not a map?” I grumbled, staring at the dilapidated little volume. “The Writer says it on the page just previous. He was upset at how the local J’Ettanni lord had used Av’Kenat to terrorize his subjects, and so he’s gotten the map to the stronghold. He didn’t trust his memory, so he wrote it down. He wrote everything down.”
“I cannot say what he did with what he learned, my lady,” said Baglos. “But he did not draw a map.”