She was so angry, she almost leaped to her feet, but Jared's light touch kept her sitting.
They watched Caspar stride away across the inn-yard, avoiding the puddles and dung heaps in his expensive boots.
Finally Lord Evian took out his snuffbox. "Dear me," he said quietly. "Now that was a threat if ever I heard one."
Claudia met Jared's eyes. They were dark and troubled. "Fax?" he said.
She shrugged, exasperated with herself. "He saw me coming out of your room last night."
His dismay showed. "Claudia ..."
"I know. I know. It's all my fault."
Evian sniffed the snuff delicately. "If I may be allowed to comment, that was a very unfortunate thing to happen."
"It's not what you think." I'm sure.
"No. Really. And you can drop the act. I've told Jared about... the Steel Wolves."
He glanced around quickly. "Claudia, not aloud, please." His voice lost its affectations. "I appreciate you trust your tutor, but--"
"Of course she should have told me." Jared tapped the table-top with his long fingers.
"Because the whole plot is foolish, utterly criminal, and almost certain to be betrayed.
How could you even think about bringing her into it!"
"Because we can't do it without her." The fat man was calm, but a film of sweat glistened on his forehead. "You above all, Master Sapient, understand what the iron decrees of the Havaarna have done to us. We are rich, some of us, and live well, but we are not free. We are chained hand and foot by Protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can't read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworkings of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden."
He leaned forward. Claudia had never seen him so grave, so stripped of his effete disguise, and it chilled her, as if he were someone else entirely, an older, exhausted, desperate man.
"We are dying, Claudia. We must break open this cell we have bricked ourselves into, escape from this endless wheel we tread like rats. I have dedicated myself to freeing us. If it means my death, I don't care, because even death will be a sort of freedom."
In the stillness the rooks cawed around the trees overhead. Horses in the stable yard were being harnessed, their feet stamping the cobbles.
Claudia licked dry lips. "Don't do anything yet," she whispered. "I may have ... some information for you. But not yet." She stood quickly, not wanting to say any more, not wanting to feel the raw anguish he had opened in her like a stab wound.
"The horses are ready. Let's go."
THE STREETS were full of people, all silent. Their silence terrified Finn; it was so intense, and the hungry way they looked at him made him stumble, the women and the scruffy children, the maimed, the old, the soldiers; cold, curious stares that he dared not meet, so that he looked down, at his feet, at the dirt on the road, anywhere but at them.
The only sound that rang in the steep streets was the steady tramp of the six guards around him, the crack of their iron-soled boots on the cobbles, and far above, circling like an omen, a single large bird screeching mournful cries among the clouds and echoing winds of Incarceron's vault.
Then someone sang back, a single note of lament, and as if it was a signal, all the crowd picked it up and crooned it softly, their sorrow and their fear in one strange soft song. He tried to make out the words, but only fragments came to him ... the silver thread that broke
... all down the endless halls of guilt and dreams ... and like a chorus the haunting, repeated phrase: his fingerbone the key, his blood the oil that smoothes the lock.
Turning a corner, Finn glanced back.
Gildas walked behind, alone. The guards ignored him, but he walked firmly, his head high, and the peoples eyes moved wonderingly over the green of his Sapient coat.
The old man looked grim and purposeful; he gave Finn a brief nod of encouragement.
There was no sign of Keiro or Attia. Desperately Finn stared into the crowds. Had they found out what was happening to him? Would they wait outside the Cave?
Had they spoken to Claudia? Anxiety tormented him, and he would not let himself think the thing that he dreaded, that lurked in the dark of his mind like a spider, like Incarceron's mocking whisper.
That Keiro might have taken the Key and gone.
He shook his head. In the three years of the Comitatus, Keiro had never betrayed him.
Taunted him, yes, laughed at him, stolen from him, fought with him, argued with him. But he'd always been there. And yet now Finn realized with a sudden coldness how little he knew about his oathbrother, about where he had come from. Keiro just said his parents were dead. Finn had never asked any questions. He'd always been too absorbed in his own agonizing loss, in the memory flashes and the fits.
He should have asked.
He should have cared.
A rain of tiny black petals began to fall on him. Looking up he saw that the people were throwing them, tossing out handfuls that fell on the cobbles and made a fragrant dark carpet on the road. And he saw that the petals had a peculiar quality, that as they touched each other they melted, and that the gutters and streets ran with a sticky, clotted mass that exuded the sweetest of scents.
It made him feel strange. And as if it broke into a dream, it made him remember the voice he had heard in the night.
I am everywhere. As if the Prison had answered him. He looked up now, as they marched under the gaping maw of the gate, and saw a single red Eye in the portcullis, its unblinking gaze fixed on him, "Can you see me?" he breathed. "Did you speak to me?"
But the gate was behind him and they were out of the City.
The road led straight and it was deserted. The sticky oil trickled along it; behind he heard the gates and doors slam, the wooden bolts drawn across, the iron grilles crash down.
Out here under the vault the world seemed empty, the plain swept by icy winds.
The soldiers hastily unshouldered the heavy axes they carried; the one in front also had some sort of device with a canister attached, a Same-throwing machine, Finn guessed.
He said, "Let the Sapient catch up."
They slowed, as if now he was not their prisoner but their leader, and Gildas strode breathlessly up and said, "Your brother hasn't shown himself"
"He'll turn up." Saying it helped.
They walked swiftly, closed into a tight group. On either side the ground was seamed with pits and traps; Finn saw the steel teeth gleam in their depths. Glancing back, he was surprised at how the City was already far behind, its walls lined with people, watching, shouting, holding their children up to see.
The guard captain said, "We turn off the road here. Be careful; step only where we step and don't think of running off. The ground is sewn with fireglobes."
Finn had no idea what fireglobes were, but Gildas frowned. "This Beast must be fearsome indeed."
The man glanced at him. "I have never seen it, Master, and don't intend to."
Once off the smooth road the going was rough. The coppery earth seemed to have been scored and clawed into vast furrows; in several places it was burned, carbonized to a charcoal crispness that rose in clouds of dust as they trod on it, or vitrified almost to glass. Enormous heat would have been needed to do that, Finn thought. It stank too, an acrid cindery smell. He followed the men closely, watching their steps with nervous attention; when they paused and he raised his head, he saw that they were far out on the plain, the Prison lights so high above they were brilliant suns, casting his and Gildas's shadows behind them.