walked into it—including the one human being who had tried it—and a corner of what had been a chamber on third south where from time to time letters would appear on the wall, smudgily written in light as if traced with someone’s fingertip, spelling out words not even Ingold understood. The corner had been bricked off from the main cell in a subsequent renovation—the main cell itself was currently used as a store-room.
So why couldn’t the Guy with the Cats have guarded his bewitched potatoes with visions of little eyeless gremlins?
Rudy didn’t think so, however.
Arms folded, he probed at the sunless silence, listened deeply into the chambers all around him and down that empty hall, tracking the footfalls of the Guards as they carried their torches and glowstones from doorway to doorway. Grimy streaks of yellowish light marked flea-ridden curtains or shutters with broken slats. Skinny men and women, feral children with hungry eyes, came to the doors of cells, resentful at being waked and asked, “Any food missing? Anything disturbed, prints … Cats afraid? Any places the children have spoken of as wrong, or odd?”
“No, sir … No, sir. Why, my Jeddy, she been all over this level like it was her own warren. She’d have let me know soon enough if there was suthin’ amiss in the corners in the dark. You tell the man, Jeddy.”
The statue of an enormously plump saint in a chalky, yellowy-white robe smiled beneficently from a niche between two tallow candles, and Rudy felt uneasy, filled with a sense of looking at clues he did not understand.
* * *
Ingold sat for a long time after Rudy ceased speaking—after Gil presumed that Rudy had ceased speaking, for she could hear nothing of what Ingold heard when he used the scrying crystal—turning the two-inch shard of yellowish quartz over and over in scarred, thick-muscled fingers, firelight honeying the white hairs that dusted their backs. Outside the villa’s crumbling walls Gil could hear the far-off ululations of wolf-talk, and nearby, Yoshabel the mule stamped and laid back her ears, her eyes green-gold mirrors of brainless malice.
Waking to the sound of Ingold’s voice, Gil had for a time been so overwhelmed with rage at him, so filled with the conviction that the throbbing agony in her face and all the sorrows in her life were his doing, that she had had to close her hands around a broken projection of marble in the packed earth near her blankets and stare at the dim pattern of firelight among her knuckle bones until the anger went away.
For no particular reason, she thought of Sherry Reinhold, the beautiful blond, tanned, aerobics-perfect classmate who’d been one of the few to be friendly with her in high school. Sherry had become an airline stewardess and had married a dentist and acquired a house the size of one of the smaller campus buildings. Meanwhile, Gil herself was still struggling with the poverty and frustration of the UCLA graduate program in medieval history.
She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Café in Westwood, saying, “I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. I know getting drunk isn’t going to solve anything, or help anything, or do anything but screw me up worse. And then I’m sitting there with eleven empty glasses in front of me telling some man I’ve never seen before my telephone number and the directions to my house.” That had been after the divorce. “It’s like the words ‘
Oh, have another one’
come out of the empty air, not connected to anything—not the past or the future or anything real—and it’s the rightest and sanest and most sensible thing in the universe. I have to do it.”
Kill him. Kill Ingold
.
The rightest and most sensible thing in the universe.
She closed her eyes. Wondered what she had dreamed—about her mother and sister?—that had made her at once angry and convinced that nothing she would ever do would bring her
So why couldn’t the Guy with the Cats have guarded his bewitched potatoes with visions of little eyeless gremlins?
Rudy didn’t think so, however.
Arms folded, he probed at the sunless silence, listened deeply into the chambers all around him and down that empty hall, tracking the footfalls of the Guards as they carried their torches and glowstones from doorway to doorway. Grimy streaks of yellowish light marked flea-ridden curtains or shutters with broken slats. Skinny men and women, feral children with hungry eyes, came to the doors of cells, resentful at being waked and asked, “Any food missing? Anything disturbed, prints … Cats afraid? Any places the children have spoken of as wrong, or odd?”
“No, sir … No, sir. Why, my Jeddy, she been all over this level like it was her own warren. She’d have let me know soon enough if there was suthin’ amiss in the corners in the dark. You tell the man, Jeddy.”
The statue of an enormously plump saint in a chalky, yellowy-white robe smiled beneficently from a niche between two tallow candles, and Rudy felt uneasy, filled with a sense of looking at clues he did not understand.
* * *
Ingold sat for a long time after Rudy ceased speaking—after Gil presumed that Rudy had ceased speaking, for she could hear nothing of what Ingold heard when he used the scrying crystal—turning the two-inch shard of yellowish quartz over and over in scarred, thick-muscled fingers, firelight honeying the white hairs that dusted their backs. Outside the villa’s crumbling walls Gil could hear the far-off ululations of wolf-talk, and nearby, Yoshabel the mule stamped and laid back her ears, her eyes green-gold mirrors of brainless malice.
Waking to the sound of Ingold’s voice, Gil had for a time been so overwhelmed with rage at him, so filled with the conviction that the throbbing agony in her face and all the sorrows in her life were his doing, that she had had to close her hands around a broken projection of marble in the packed earth near her blankets and stare at the dim pattern of firelight among her knuckle bones until the anger went away.
For no particular reason, she thought of Sherry Reinhold, the beautiful blond, tanned, aerobics-perfect classmate who’d been one of the few to be friendly with her in high school. Sherry had become an airline stewardess and had married a dentist and acquired a house the size of one of the smaller campus buildings. Meanwhile, Gil herself was still struggling with the poverty and frustration of the UCLA graduate program in medieval history.
She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Café in Westwood, saying, “I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. I know getting drunk isn’t going to solve anything, or help anything, or do anything but screw me up worse. And then I’m sitting there with eleven empty glasses in front of me telling some man I’ve never seen before my telephone number and the directions to my house.” That had been after the divorce. “It’s like the words ‘
Oh, have another one’
come out of the empty air, not connected to anything—not the past or the future or anything real—and it’s the rightest and sanest and most sensible thing in the universe. I have to do it.”
Kill him. Kill Ingold
.
The rightest and most sensible thing in the universe.
She closed her eyes. Wondered what she had dreamed—about her mother and sister?—that had made her at once angry and convinced that nothing she would ever do would bring her
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