She was awakened by a knock on a door, and the soft, polite rhythm of the taps made her think of home. Claudja usually awoke early in the castle at Chengdea, but if she did sleep late a servant would always rouse her with just that sort of innocuous knocking, for there were always duties to which the Duchess must attend. She had a duty now, though of course she was not at home, nor in her own bed. But she was in a bed.
Claudja jerked awake with a gasp, and as she opened her eyes a soft light rose in the room. It came from an ornate metal brazier suspended from the ceiling, in which a warm glow arose from four round stones rather than candles or lamps. Claudja had seen such lavish things before, for she had been within the Royal apartments at the Daul King’s palace in Bouree.
She saw that she was in a bedroom fit for a royal now as well, lying on top of a heavy coverlet in a four-post bed with soft white curtains tied up on the cross beams. Claudja was clothed save for her coat and shoes, and as she sat up she saw them, the coat hanging from a hook on the back of a heavy door with an arching top. Her boots were on the floor next to an embroidered circular rug beneath a small round table and a matching set of light, graceful chairs with padded seats. The walls of the room were paneled in richly-stained wood of a faint orange hue, and tapestries hung on two of them, geometric designs rather than images.
The knocking came from the door again, so polite that Claudja had to resist saying “ Antre,” purely from habit. She realized she was holding herself up on her arms and blinked in surprise as that meant her hands were not tied. She held her hands up in front of her face, though that made her flop onto her back again.
Her wrists were untied, but now each was wrapped individually with soft cotton bandages, damp from some sort of ointment and with flecks of blood showing through. The sight of them made Claudja aware that her wrists stung, which led to the awareness that her chin and knees felt bruised, her back and ribs ached, and she was tremendously thirsty and hungry.
More knocking, then voices.
Claudja got unsteadily off the bed, leaving a dusty gray outline on the covers. She looked around the room for a weapon but there was only an empty wardrobe with open doors, a curtained window, and a rather lovely paper screen with bright honeybees painted on it, trundling among flowers. The screen separated the rest of the room from a stone tub and a commode, both made of the same familiar black stone as was the rest of Vod’Adia.
The Duchess scurried to her boots and picked one up in either hand, then backed into the corner behind the tub, almost knocking over a rack of soft towels.
When the tapping came again, she called “Who is it?” at the door, and wondered what the point of that had been. She was sure she would not have liked the answer had she gotten one.
Three hard knocks shook the door in its frame, making Claudia jerk three times. There was a pause, and when another hard strike echoed around the room the Duchess shouted “Come in, then!” She crouched behind the tub, peeking around the screen with a boot raised to throw though it felt absolutely ridiculous.
The door opened and Claudja cringed as two little diabolic figures with sharp spikes on their backs floated in on bat wings, carrying a silver tray as big as they were between them. Their red eyes fastened on Claudja and she hauled back her arm to pitch her boot if they came closer, but they stopped above the table. They set down the tray, bowed in unison while hovering in the air, then beat wings out the door. A long arm in a white sleeve pulled it shut from the hall, and a lock clicked loudly.
Claudja stared, and only slowly crept to the table. There was a glass carafe of water and one of red wine, and a silver lid with a handle that fit into a round slot in the middle of the tray. Claudja reached out slowly and lifted the lid, raising her boot again in case something sprang at her from underneath it.
It was food, and it stayed where it was. Not great food, but a variety of the sort of preserved rations that adventurers undoubtedly brought into the city. Salted pork, dried figs, hard-tack biscuits. It had been heated and it looked and smelled far better than the garbage the dead legionnaires had been able to buy near the gate with their meager funds.
Claudja was near starving, and she justified herself by deciding that if her devilish captors wanted her dead, poisoning her would be about the least efficient way for them to go about it. She sat at the table and ate and drank, more like a gobbling duck than a well-bred Duchess, ignoring the silver cutlery and darting her eyes all the while toward the door.
The Duchess decided the wine was certainly a bad idea, but then tasted it and found it good. She drank all that as well, certainly too fast. The moment Claudja set down her empty glass, the polite tapping sounded again from the door, startling her into falling off her chair.
She scrambled up and grabbed the knife off the tray, then less certainly took the fork as well. She held both as weapons though they seemed even more ridiculous than had the boots, and backed into her corner behind the tub before calling for entry.
The door opened and this time a whole line of little spiny devils floated in, each pair with a steaming wooden bucket between them. The dozen devils looked at her and paused in the air, then slowly moved closer to the tub, all of them in unison.
Claudja squeaked and ran out from behind the tub, tried to vault the bed but did not fully clear its width and tumbled off the far side. Water splashed and she peeked over the dusty coverlet to watch wide-eyed as the two lines of devils filled the tub with steaming, clear water, passing full buckets forward and empty buckets back. They all bowed again in the air, hovering on wings that were moving nowhere near enough to actually be keeping them aloft, and then they began to withdraw.
“Wait,” Claudja stood up before the last had gone. “Where is the man I was brought here with?”
Her only answer was the closing door, and the snap of the lock.
Claudja moved over near the tub, which she had to admit looked wonderful. There was a brick of soap on the towel rack, and suddenly the dust and grime covering every inch of her seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. Every muscle was sore and aching. She supposed it was entirely possible the devils just wanted her clean before they cooked and ate her, but a lady of the Duchess’s standing should not after all appear at dinner in her present state.
Claudja undressed, left the silverware within reach on the towel rack, and slipped into the warm water with a groan she could not conceal. She was still just lying there a few minutes later, head thrown back and eyes closed, when the door opened and two of the little devils darted into the room. One snatched the dusty cover off the bed while the other grabbed Claudja’s pile of clothes, and the two were gone so fast that the door was shut and locked before Claudja shouted and threw the fork after them.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The party did not find a barracks building of a familiar kind in which to spend their third night in Vod’Adia, for by then they were in a very different place within the Sable City.
They had followed the route through the streets that Deskata and the Westerners had plotted from the roof of tower, heading to the right for one long block at the next intersection, then left until they were beyond the wall around the noble district. They then zigzagged several blocks south and west until emerging shortly before dark on the edge of the vast open area surrounding the great palace with its nine towers, standing on a leveled hill in the middle of the sprawling city.