The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Read online

  Each feather, as it was pulled, invoked a stab of exquisite pain; he squawked involuntarily as his tormenters extracted them. Finally they left him alone.

  They were only after feathers this time, not blood. Just as well, every talon ached where they had cut each one to the quick to collect blood. Now I know how human victims must feel; why they deem having nails pulled out to be such a torment. If he got free, he would not be able to walk comfortably for weeks. And I will not fly for months until the feathers grow again.

  “Shall we truss it back up again?” the first man asked when they finally left him alone for a moment, and he decided that they were done with him for the nonce. “We’ll be gone all evening, with no one here to watch him.”

  The second one prodded him with a toe, and all T’fyrr could do was groan. “I don’t think so,” he said. “He isn’t going anywhere. All those bindings were breaking feathers anyway; we need to get as many perfect feathers from him as we can. Only the perfect feathers are any good, magically. Now that makes me wonder, though—we need to do some research and see if the down and body feathers could be used for anything.”

  The sounds of their feet receded. “Considering what we’re getting for feathers and blood, can you imagine what the heart and bones will be worth?” the first one said, greed and awe in his voice. “Not to mention the skull and the talons?”

  “We will be able to purchase mansions and titles, at the very least,” the second chuckled over the sound of a door opening. “And as many—”

  The door closed, cutting off the end of the sentence.

  The heart. The skull. His people did not have much in the way of ceremony to mark one’s passing, but the idea that he would be parceled out in bits to the highest bidder made him so sick to his stomach that he started to gag.

  And that was when the despair he had been holding off finally swooped down on him and took him.

  I am going to die here, alone, in the dark, half-mad and utterly forgotten! Nightingale will never find me. I will never see her again—

  He couldn’t sit up, he was too weak and dizzy; he could only curl into a shivering ball and clutch his legs to his chest, shaking with despair. No one would ever find him. There was no rescue at hand. Probably no one had even bothered to make the attempt.

  No one cared.

  No, I can feel her out there; I know she hasn’t forgotten me! If no one else tries, she will! She will come to me by herself if she must!

  But it was hopeless. How could one woman, however resourceful, find him hidden away in this hive of a city? How could anyone find him, even with all the resources of the King? Lyonarie was too big, too impersonal, for anyone to search successfully.

  Even clever Nightingale. There were too many places even she could not go.

  He could not weep, but his beak gaped as much as the muzzle would permit, and he keened his despair into the uncaring darkness.

  ###

  Oh, I would rather that Tyladen were doing this.

  The moon shone down on rooftops encrusted with ornamental false towers and crenellations, on chimney pots shaped like toadstools, flowers, trees, tiny castles—anything but a chimney pot. Nightingale crouched in the lee of a chimney, bracing herself on the slanted slate roof, and took Harperus’ device off her belt, holding it before her like a hand-crossbow. She braced herself a little more, then cupped her hand around it to shield it, as she would have shielded a lantern, and felt for the little raised bump near where her thumb fell.

  Magical guards above and physical guards below.

  If this was not where T’fyrr was being held, then there was something very peculiar going on in the old mansion upon whose roof she now perched, less like the bird she was named for than a chimney swift.

  A square area lit up inside her shielding hand, giving off a dim, red light. It represented a square space, twenty feet on a side, with herself in the middle.

  The little bright dot that was supposed to represent T’fyrr was just a little to the left of center—a dot that had not appeared on this “screen” the other times she had used the device.

  She smiled tightly; he was here. Getting him out—well, she would save the rejoicing for the moment that happened. She pressed the thumb-point again, and a set of numbers appeared.

  Roughly fifteen feet below her; that would put him in the top floor, just below the attics. That made sense; they were probably thinking of him as a big bird. They wouldn’t want to put him in a basement where he might catch a chill and die of shock. In these town mansions, unlike those in the country, the master and mistress had their private rooms at the top of the house where you might get a breath of a breeze in the summer, and where all the heat rose in the winter. In a town mansion like this, the rooms at street level, next to the kitchens, were ovens themselves in the summer, and in winter, no amount of fuel kept them warm.

  Her heart had led her here; it had once been a wealthy district, with huge homes showcasing the wealth of their owners. Now the area was shabby-genteel at best, and whoever lived here was usually out of favor, the tag-end of a once-prosperous family now running out of money or the last of a long line dying out. As the homes were lost to their original owners, they were bought by other, less genteel folk. She knew of at least three brothels here, and more ominously, one of the houses was rumored to belong to a dealer in illegal goods—very illegal, because someone had to die in order for those particular goods to come on the market.

  She had hoped she had the right district when she realized that mages tended to need buildings with a great deal of space to practice their art. She knew she had the right district when her street-urchins traced the blood and feathers showing up on the mage-market to this very area. People really didn’t pay any attention to what children overheard.

  If we survive this, perhaps I shall set up an information service and live off the results of that.

  That was when she sent Maddy to Tyladen for one of the devices she had asked for. She herself had not gone back to Freehold since the guards arrived. Freehold would be watched—but she had a secure hiding place in Father Ruthvere’s steeple, and others scattered elsewhere across the city. She had money sewn into the money belt she never took off except to sleep, and then kept beneath her pillow. She could look like whatever kind of woman she chose, and she was familiar with the “bad” parts of Lyonarie. No guard or militia from the Palace could find her here if she did not want to be found.

  The child returned with this, a set of closely written instructions, and the other child that Nightingale had asked her to find.

  That was all she had been waiting for. She had waited until dark, then began scaling the walls and getting onto the rooftops of every likely building in the area—with help. She was not a thief, and she could not have done this alone, but she had the help of someone who was more at home on the rooftops of Lyonarie than beneath them. It was safer to operate this thing from above than from below. There was less chance of being seen, for one, and she really didn’t want to be caught loitering out in the street with this bizarre-looking thing in her hands.

  I don’t believe I can claim it is a musical instrument.

  Thanks to the fact that even here there was very little space between the buildings, and to the fact that her accomplice had some quite remarkable climbing and bridging devices at his disposal, she had mostly been able to scramble from roof to roof. That further limited her time on the ground; a good thing, even if it was hair-raisingly risky to pick her way across strange rooftops in the middle of the night.

  She put the device away, and considered her options.

  He is in the middle of the building, probably in a closet, as far as possible from a window. Now, how do I tell what room that closet belongs to?

  A scrabbling of tiny hands and feet across the slates signaled the arrival of her partner in crime and guide across these heights. “ ’E ’ere?” whispered Tam, the chimney-sweep, a boy about thirteen years old, but as thin as one of his brushes and with the
stature of a nine-year-old.

  “Right below me, just about,” she whispered back. “I’m certain they’re keeping him in a closet, but how do I tell which room it’s in?”

  He chuckled. “Easy, mum. By chimbleys. This ’un like drops down inter th’ room ye want.” He patted it fondly, the way a driver would pat the neck of his horse. “These big ol’ ’ouses, they got fireplaces fer ever’ room. Wants I should go look?”

  Before she could stop him, he had clambered nimbly up the side of the chimney, and slid down inside it.

  She waited, numb with shock, expecting at any moment to hear the commotion from below that meant he’d been spotted and seized.

  Nothing.

  Then, off to the side, a faint whistle, the song of a nightingale.

  She eased her way over to the edge of the roof where the whistle had come from, and looked cautiously down.

  Tam’s sooty face looked up at her impudently, his teeth and the whites of his eyes startlingly bright in the moonlight. “Empty room, lots uv scratches on the floor. Got a locked closet ’ere, mum. Be a mort uv them scratches there, goes to ’tother side uv door. Mebbe some blood, too.”

  She didn’t hesitate a moment longer; she lowered herself down over the edge of the roof, feeling for the window ledge with her feet as her arms screamed with outraged pain. Tam caught her ankles deftly and guided her feet to secure places; she caught hold of decorative woodwork and eased herself down to the window itself. She wanted to fling herself inside, but she didn’t dare make that much noise—but she nearly wept with relief when she was safe on the floor inside.

  I am not a thief. I am not a hero. I am only a musician; I am not supposed to be crawling about on rooftops! And we are leaving this place by the stairs, and no other way. The room itself was completely empty; not even a single stick of furniture, just as Tam said. The moonlight coming in the windows revealed that there were traces of painted diagrams on the wooden floor, though, and she guessed that it was sometimes used for magical ceremonies.

  All the more reason to get him out of here!

  She went straight to the closet door that Tam pointed to, and saw that what he had mistaken for blood was nothing of the sort. It was only spilled paint. The scratches could have come from anything—dragging a heavy piece of furniture to the closet for storage.

  For a moment, her heart sank; then she heard the faint scraping of talons beyond the door, and the whimpering keen of a bird of prey, exhausted and near death.

  “I’m gone, mum,” Tam declared, and slipped back up the chimney. That was fine; she’d already paid him for his help, and she had told him that she didn’t want him around if things began to get dangerous. Since that had suited the boy just perfectly, the bargain had been easy to strike.

  It had been much harder to persuade Maddy and her little army of partisans to stay behind. The loyalty of children ran deep, and somehow she had earned it. Only promising them that they could stand guard over the Chapel when she and T’fyrr were safely inside had kept most of them from following her and Tam over the rooftops.

  She turned back toward the door, expecting a complicated lock—perhaps even a mage-made lock—and strained her senses for the music that Magic-touched things held within them.

  Silence.

  Nor was there any other sign of a lock, complicated or otherwise.

  In stunned surprise, she tried the doorknob automatically. It turned easily, and swung open without so much as a creak.

  There wasn’t much light, but there was enough for her to see the crumpled, feather-covered figure lying on the floor of the closet, head enveloped in a giant, scuffed hood.

  A surge of grief and rage enveloped her, and she flung herself down on her knees beside him, fearing she was too late.

  The head turned blindly toward her as she reached for him. “I-ale?” came a whisper, a mangled version of her name as spoken from around the cruel device they had clamped on his beak. “I—a—oo?”

  “It’s me; I’ve come to get you out of here.” The fastenings on the gag and the hood weren’t even complicated; she had the former off and flung into a corner. The hood followed it, and she gathered him into her arms, her throat constricted with tears. He was so weak! He had no primaries at all, and few secondaries; he wouldn’t have been able to fly out of here even if he’d had the strength.

  I’ll worry about how to get him out of here after I get him under protection. And to do that, she needed his permission. “T’fyrr,” she said urgently, “I need to put barriers against any more magical attacks on you. May I?”

  He wrapped his own arms weakly around her and nodded, too spent to even ask her what in the world she thought she was doing. She reached both arms around behind his back and clasped her silver bracelet with her free hand under cover of the embrace, and concentrated hard for a moment.

  With a silvery glissando, the Elven protections she wore slithered over him as well, wrapping him in a cocoon of power, identical to hers.

  Now, just let the mages try something! They’d waste their time trying to crack this shell, and if she knew Elves, that mage would take malicious pleasure in tracking the attack to its source and—dealing—with it.

  Hopefully those same mages hadn’t sensed the power she’d brought here. That was supposed to be one of the protections, but who knew? It was Elven-work, and chancy at best, constrained only by what this particular mage felt like doing at the time.

  “Can you stand?” she asked in an urgent whisper, glad that she could not clearly see all the damage that had been done to him. “We have to get out of here, before—”

  “The mages—are gone,” he interrupted her, breathing as hard as if he had been flying for miles at top speed. “I heard them say—they were leaving—for the night.”

  Well! That put another complexion on it entirely! They were as secure here as they would be anywhere, and as likely to remain undisturbed. With only the guards below—who, with the absence of their masters, would be slackening their vigilance at the least, and with luck would be getting drunk on the masters’ wine—there was no one to disturb them.

  “I can heal you again, T’fyrr, enough to get us both out, over the rooftops. You can still climb, can’t you?”

  A feeble chuckle. “Only if you can heal my talon-tips, beloved. I would not be very silent, otherwise.”

  “I can do that,” she replied, her heart swelling. He said it! He called me “beloved”! There had been times in the dark of the lonely nights, waiting for word of him, that she had been certain when he came to his senses, he would be revolted by her love for him. She could have misinterpreted what he’d said about the Spirit Brothers; he could have mistranslated. But—

  But he would not use those words so casually unless—

  Unless they were so real to him that he could use them casually, as casually as flying.

  “Then let me work the magic on you, beloved,” she said, with a joy so great it eclipsed fear. “And this time—don’t try and help me!”

  He only chuckled again, a mere wheeze in the darkness, and let her work her will on him.

  ###

  The trip back over the rooftops had been nightmarish, but not such a nightmare as trying to get out past the guards would have been. She had been able to give him strength enough to climb, and had been able to heal the tips of his talons so that they didn’t bleed every time he moved a hand or a foot, but there hadn’t been enough time to do more than that. Every time she thought she heard a door slam below, or footsteps in the hall, she had been jolted out of the trance.

  The return trip was easier than it might have been—she didn’t have to make side trips over every roof in the district to check her device for his presence. Some of those charming, ornamental rooftops had been the purest hell to get across the first time.

  Why do people pitch their roofs that steeply? Doesn’t it ever occur to them that someday, someone is going to have to climb all over it, replacing slates and cleaning chimneys?

&nb
sp; Evidently not. Perhaps that was why this district had deteriorated; the charming manses were impossible to keep in repair.

  She was able to pick out a path that, while not precisely easy or gentle, at least avoided the worst of the obstacles. But it was a long time before they came to one particular abandoned house at the edge of the district and were able to slip down through the holes in the roof that had let her and her accomplice have access to the roof-highway in the first place.

  They felt their way along staircases that shook and groaned alarmingly with every step they took, and down halls that must have been ankle-deep in dust by the amount they kicked up. But they reached the street level without mishap, and just inside the front door, Nightingale stooped in the darkness and felt for the bundle she had left there.

  It wasn’t anything anyone would be likely to steal; this neighborhood hadn’t deteriorated so far that a bundle of rags was worth anything: a tattered skirt for her to go over her black trews and black shirt, a bedraggled cloak, and an equally tattered great-cloak for him, big enough to completely envelop him. It was as threadbare as the skirt and wouldn’t have done a thing to protect him from the wind or weather, but that wasn’t the point.

  “Here,” she said, and sneezed, handing him the cloak. She pulled the skirt on over her head and wiped the roof-soot from her face and hands with the tail of it. He fumbled the cloak on after a moment of hesitation.

  “Won’t I look just as odd in this?” he asked as he tied the two strings that held it closed at the throat.

  “Yes and no,” she told him. “There are plenty of people who go cloaked at night, even in the worst heat of summer—and anyone who does is probably so dangerous that most people deliberately avoid him. Someone who doesn’t want you to notice him is someone you likely don’t want to notice you.”

  She picked up the second, equally tattered cloak, flinging it on and pulling up the hood. Better to broil in this thing than to have her face seen—and she could not rely on her own Magic to work properly inside this Elven protection.

  And two people, together, cloaked in this heat—they are twice as unlikely to be bothered.