The White Rose

  Not bloody likely. She had me under the Eye. Nevertheless …

  I debated for half a minute, not wanting to give up what might be a whisker of advantage. Then: “I had it from Goblin and One-Eye that he’s perfectly healthy. That he’s caught in the Barrowland. Like Raven, only body and all.”

  “How could that be?”

  Was it possible she had overlooked this while interrogating me? I guess if you do not ask the right questions, you will not get the right answers.

  I reflected on all we had done together. I had sketched Raven’s reports for her, but she had not read those letters. In fact … The originals, from which Raven drew his story, were in my quarters. Goblin and One-Eye lugged them all the way to the Plain only to see them hauled right back. Nobody had plumbed them because they repeated a story already told …

  “Sit,” I said, rising. “Back in two shakes.”

  Goblin fish-eyed me when I breezed in. “Be a few minutes more. Something came up.” I scrounged up the case in which Raven’s documents had traveled. Only the original Bomanz manuscript resided there now. I fluttered back out, ignored by the Taken.

  Nice feeling, I’ll tell you, being beneath their notice. Too bad it was just because they were fighting for their existence. Like the rest of us.

  “Here. This is the original manuscript. I went over it once, lightly, to check Raven’s translation. It looked good to me, though he did dramatize and invent dialog. But the facts and characterizations are pure Bomanz.”

  She read with incredible swiftness. “Get Raven’s version.”

  Out and back, under Goblin’s scowl and growl at my departing back: “How long is a few minutes these days. Croaker?”

  She went through those swiftly, too. And looked thoughtful when she finished.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “There may be something here. Actually, something that’s not here. Two questions. Who wrote this in the first place? And where is the stone in Oar that the son mentioned?”

  “I assume Bomanz did most of the original and his wife finished it.”

  “Wouldn’t he have used first person?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s possible the literary conventions of the time forbade it. Raven often chided me for interjecting too much of myself into the Annals. He came of a different tradition.”

  “We’ll accept that as a hypothesis. Next question. What became of the wife?”

  “She came of a family from Oar. I would expect her to go back.”

  “When she was known as the wife of the man responsible for loosing me?”

  “Was she? Bomanz was an assumed name.”

  She brushed my objection aside. “Whisper acquired those documents in Lords. As a lot. Nothing connects Bomanz with them except his story. My feeling is that they were accumulated at a later date. But his papers. What were they doing between the time they left here and the time Whisper found them? Have some ancillary items been lost? It’s time we consulted Whisper.”

  We, however, included me out.

  Whatever, a fire was ignited. Before long, Taken were roaring off to faraway places. Within two days Benefice delivered the stone mentioned by Bomanz’s son. It proved useless. Some Guards appropriated it and used it for a doorstep to their barracks.

  I caught occasional hints of a search progressing from Oar south along the route Jasmine had taken after fleeing from the Barrowland, widowed and shamed. Hard to find tracks that old, but the Taken have remarkable skills.

  Another search progressed from Lords.

  I had the dubious pleasure of hanging around with the Limper while he pointed out all the mistakes we made transliterating UchiTelle and KurreTelle names. Seems not only were spellings not uniform in those days, but neither were alphabets. And some of the folks mentioned were not of UchiTelle or KurreTelle stock, but outsiders who had adapted their names to local usage. Limper busied himself doing things backwards.

  One afternoon Silent gave me the high sign. He had been spying over the Limper’s shoulder, off and on, with more devotion than I.

  He had found a pattern.

  Chapter Fifty: GNOMEN?

  Darling has a self-discipline that amazes me. All that time she was over there at Blue Willy and not once did she surrender to her desire to see Raven. You could see the ache in her whenever his name came up, but she held off for a month.

  But she came, as inevitably we knew she must, with the Lady’s permission. I tried to ignore her visit entirely. And I made Silent, Goblin, and One-Eye stay away too, though with Silent it was a tight thing. Eventually he did agree; it was a private thing, for her alone, and his interests would not be served by sticking his nose in.

  If I would not go to her, she would come to me. For a while, while everyone else was busy elsewhere. For a hug, to remind her there were those of us who cared. To have some moral support there while she worked out something in her mind.

  She signed, “I cannot deny it now, can I?” And a few minutes later: “I still have the soft place for him. But he will have to earn his way back in.” Which was her equivalent of our thinking aloud.

  I felt more for Silent at that moment than for Raven. Raven I’d always respected for his toughness and fearlessness, but I’d never really grown to like him. Silent I did like, and did wish well.

  I signed, “Do not be brokenhearted if you find he is too old to change.”

  Wan smile. “My heart was broken a long time ago. No. I have no expectations. This is not a fairy-tale world.”

  That was all she had to say. I did not take it to heart till it began to illuminate later events.

  She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

  In moments when his needs called him away, we copied everything the Limper left behind and compared it with our own charts. “Oh, hey,” I breathed once. “Oh, hey.”

  Here was a lord from a far western kingdom. A Baron Senjak who had four daughters said to vie with one another in their loveliness. One wore the name Ardath.

  “She lied,” Goblin whispered.

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “More likely, she didn’t know. In fact, she couldn’t have known. Nor could anyone else have, really. I still don’t see how Soulcatcher could have been convinced that the Dominator’s true name was in here.”

  “Wishful thinking, maybe,” One-Eye guessed.

  “No,” I said. “You could tell she knew what she had. She just didn’t know how to dig it out.”

  “Just like us.”

  “Ardath is dead,” I said. “That leaves three possibilities. But if push comes to shove, we only get one shot.”

  “Catalog what else we know.”

  “Soulcatcher was one sister. Name not yet known. Ardath may have been the Lady’s twin. I think she was older than Catcher, though they were children together and not separated by many years. Of the fourth sister we know nothing.”

  Silent signed, “You have four names, given and family. Consult the genealogies. Find who married whom.”

  I groaned. The genealogies were over at Blue Willy. Darling had had them loaded onto the cargo whale with everything else.

  Time was short. The work daunted me. You do not go into those genealogies with a woman’s name and find anything easily. You have to look for a man who married the woman you are seeking and hope the recorder thought enough of her to mention her name.

  “How are we going to manage all this?” I wondered. “With me the only one who can decipher these chicken tracks?” Then a brilliant idea. If I say so myself. “Tracker. We’ll put Tracker on it. He don’t have nothing to do but watch that sapling. He can do that over at Blue Willy and read old books at the same time.”

  Easier said than done. Tracker was far from his new master. Getting the message into his pea brain was a major undertaking. But once that had been accomplished there was no stopping him.

  One night, as I snuggled down under the covers, she appeared in my quarters. “Up, Croaker.”

  “Huh?”
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  “We’re going flying.”

  “Uh? No disrespect, but it’s the middle of the night. I had a hard day.”

  “Up.”

  So you don’t argue when the Lady commands.

  Chapter Fifty-One: THE SIGN

  A freezing rain was falling. Everything was glazed with crystal ice. “Looks like a warm snap,” I said.

  She was without a sense of humor that night. It took an effort to overlook my remark. She led me to a carpet. It had a crystal dome covering the forward seats. That was a feature recently added to Limper’s craft.

  The Lady used some small magic to melt the ice off. “Make sure it’s sealed tightly,” she told me.

  “Looks good to me.”

  We lifted off.

  Suddenly I was on my back. The nose of the fish pointed at unseen stars. We climbed at a dreadful rate. I expected momentarily to be so high I could not breathe.

  We got that high. And higher. We broke through the clouds. And I understood the significance of the dome.

  It kept in breathable air. Meaning the windwhales could no longer climb higher than the Taken. Always chipping away, the Lady and her gang.

  But what the hell was this all about?

  “There.” A sigh of disappointment. A confirmation that a shadow darkened hope. She pointed.

  I saw it. I knew it, for I had seen it before, in the days of the long retreat that ended in the battle before the Tower. The Great Comet. Small, but no denying its unique silver scimitar shape. “It can’t be. It isn’t due for twenty years. Celestial bodies don’t change their cycles.”

  “They don’t. That’s axiomatic. So maybe the axiom makers are wrong.”

  She-tilted the carpet down. “Note it in your writings, but don’t mention it otherwise. Our peoples are troubled enough.”

  “Right.” That comet has a hold on men’s minds.

  Back down into the yuck of a Barrowland night. We came in over the Great Barrow itself, only forty feet up. The damned river was close. The ghosts were dancing in the rain.

  I sloshed into the barracks in a numb state, checked the calendar.

  Twelve days to go.

  The old bastard was probably out there laughing it up with his favorite hound, Toadkiller Dog.

  Chapter Fifty-Two: NO SURPRISE

  Something that lies down in that mind below the mind would not let me be. I tossed and turned, wakened, fell asleep, and finally, in the wee hours, it surfaced. I got up and shuffled through papers.

  I found that piece that made the Lady gasp once, ploughed through that interminable guest list till I found a Lord Senjak and his daughters Ardath, Credence, and Sylith. The youngest, one Dorotea, the scribbler noted, could not attend.

  “Ha!” I crowed. “The search narrows.”

  There was no more information, but that was a triumph. Assuming the Lady was indeed a twin and Dorotea was the youngest and Ardath dead, the odds were now fifty-fifty. A woman named Sylith or a woman named Credence. Credence? That is how it translated.

  I was so excited I got no more sleep. Even that damned off-schedule comet fled my thoughts.

  But excitement perished between the grinding stones of time. Nothing came from those Taken tracing Bomanz’s wife and papers. I suggested the Lady go to the source himself. She was not prepared for the risk. Not yet.

  Our old and stupid friend Tracker produced another gem four days after I eliminated sister Dorotea. The big goof had been reading genealogies day and night.

  Silent came back from Blue Willy wearing such a look I knew something good had happened. He dragged me outside, toward town, into the null. He gave me a slip of damp paper. In Tracker’s simple style, it said:

  Three sisters were married. Ardath married twice, first a Baron Kaden ofDartstone, who died in battle. Six years later she married Erin NoFather, an unlanded priest of the god Vancer, from a town called Slinger, in the kingdom of Vye. Credence married Barthelme of Jaunt, a renowned sorcerer. It is in my memory that Barthelme of Jaunt became one of the Taken, but my memory is not trustworthy.

  No lie.

  Dorotea married Raft, Prince-in-Waiting, of Start. Sylith never married.

  Tracker then proved that, slow though he might be, an occasional idea did perk through his murk of a mind.

  The death rolls reveal that Ardath and her husband, Erin NoFather, an unlanded priest of the god Vancer, from a town called Slinger, in the kingdom of Vye, were slain by bandits while traveling between Lathe and Ova. My untrustworthy memory recalls that this took place just months before the Dominator proclaimed himself.

  Sylith drowned in a flood of the River Dream some years earlier, swept away before countless witnesses. But no body was found.

  We had an eyewitness. It never occurred to me to think of Tracker that way, though the knowledge had been there for the recognition. Maybe we could figure some way to get at his memories.

  Credence perished in the fighting when the Dominator and Lady took Jaunt in the early days of their conquests. There is no record of Dorotea’s death.

  “Damn,” I said. “Old Tracker is worth something after all.”

  Silent signed, “It sounds confused, but reason should provide something.”

  More than something. Without drawing charts, connecting all those women, I felt confident enough to say, “We knew Dorotea as Soulcatcher. We know Ardath wasn’t the Lady. Odds are, the sister who engineered the ambush that killed her …” There was something missing still. If I just knew which were twins …

  In response to my question, Silent signed, “Tracker is looking for birth records.” But he was unlikely to score again. Lord Senjak was not KurreTelle.

  “One of the purported dead didn’t die. I’d put my money on Sylith. Assuming Credence was killed because she recognized a sister who was supposed to be dead when the Dominator and Lady took Jaunt.”

  “Bomanz mentions a legend about the Lady killing her twin. Is that this ambush? Or something more public?”

  “Who knows?” I said. It really did get confusing. For a moment I wondered if it mattered.

  The Lady called an assembly. Our original estimate of time available now appeared overly optimistic. She told us, “We appear to have been misled. There is nothing in Catcher’s documents to betray my husband’s name. How she reached that assumption is beyond us now. If documents are missing, we cannot be sure. Unless news comes from Lords or Oar soon, we can forget that avenue. It’s time to consider alternatives.”

  I scribbled a note, asked Whisper to pass it to the Lady. The Lady read it, then looked at me with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. “Erin NoFather,” she read aloud. “An unlanded priest of the god Vancer, from Slinger, in the kingdom of Vye. This, from our amateur historian. What you found is less interesting than the fact that you found it. Croaker. That news is five hundred years old. It was worthless then. Whoever Erin NoFather was before he left Vye, he did an absolute job of eliminating traces. By the time he became interesting enough to have his antecedents investigated, he had obliterated not only Slinger but every person to have lived in that village during his lifetime. In later years he went even farther, wasting all Vye. Which is why the notion that those papers might contain his true name constituted such a surprise.”

  I felt about half-size, and stupid. I should have known they would have tried to unmask the Dominator before. I had surrendered some small advantage for nothing. So much for the spirit of cooperation.

  One of the new Taken-I cannot keep them straight, for they all dress the same-arrived soon afterward. He or she gave the Lady a small carved chest. The Lady smiled when she opened it. “There were no papers that survived. But there were these.” She dumped some odd bracelets. “Tomorrow we go after Bomanz.”

  Everyone else knew. I had to ask. “What are they?”

  “The amulets made for the Eternal Guard in the time of the White Rose. So they could enter the Barrowland without hazard.”

  The resulting excitement surpassed my understanding.

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nbsp; “The wife must have carried them away. Though how she laid hands on them is a mystery. Break this up now. I need time to think.” She shooed us like a farm wife shooes chickens.

  I returned to my room. The Limper floated in behind me. He said nary a word, but ducked into the documents again. Puzzled, I looked over his shoulder. He had lists of all the names we had unearthed, written in the alphabets of the languages whence they sprang. He seemed to be playing with both substitution codes and numerology. Baffled, I went to my bed, turned my back on him, faked sleep.

  As long as he was there, I knew, sleep would evade me.

  Chapter Fifty-Three: THE RECOVERY

  It resumed snowing that night. Real snow, half a foot an hour and no letup. The racket raised by the Guards as they strove to clear it from doorways and the carpets wakened me.

  I had slept despite the Limper.

  An instant of terror. I sat bolt upright. He remained at his task.

  The barracks was overly warm, holding the heat because it was all but buried.

  There was a bustle despite the weather. Taken had arrived while I slept. Guards not only dug but hurried about other tasks.

  One-Eye joined me for a rude breakfast. I said, “So she’s going ahead. Despite the weather.”

  “It won’t get any better, Croaker. That guy out there knows what’s going on.” He looked grim.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I can count. Croaker. What do you expect from a guy with a week to live?”

  My stomach tightened. Yes. I had been able to avoid thoughts of the sort so far, but … “We’ve been in tight places before. Stair of Tear. Juniper. Beryl. We made it.”

  “I keep telling myself.”

  “How’s Darling?”

  “Worried. What do you think? She’s a bug between hammer and anvil.”

  “The Lady has forgotten her.”

  He snorted. “Don’t let your special dispensation erode your common sense, Croaker.”

  “Sound advice,” I admitted. “But unnecessary. A hawk couldn’t watch her more closely.”

  “You going out?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it. Know where I can get some snow-shoes?”