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you reading, Captain, that has apparently been so revealing?"
"Nothing in particular. A dispatch from Portier." His rapier stood against the
wall near the hearth perhaps four steps away. He started to stand.
"I don't think so."
The gentle contradiction held no anger, but Thomas stopped. He had betrayed
himself somehow, but Dubell had always shown a talent for guessing at others'
thoughts. / can't Jet him kill me now. If he burns these papers and walks out
of
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205
here no one witt ever know until it's far too late. It may already be too
late.
The old sorcerer said, "Perhaps the time for the masquerade is over anyway.
But I think I've been found out."
"It's a priest's report of Grandier's . . . of your confession during your
trial." Thomas slid the document across the table toward him, but the sorcerer
didn't take the bait and reach for it. Thomas kept expecting the mask to drop
but it didn't. It was still DubelTs face, Dubell's eyes. Dubell's look of
regret.
"Indeed," Urbain Grandier said softly. "I didn't expect to have anyone take it
seriously. Not in Bisra, at least. They all believed I was hand in glove with
the Prince of Hell, you know. As to how the incriminating document followed me
here, I suppose I can credit the Church's league of brotherly spies."
The fire popped loudly in the silence. Thomas felt the extreme danger that lay
in carrying on this conversation but was unable to stop. Knowing and believing
were two different things. If a weapon had been in reach, there was a good
chance he would have hesitated with it, and that would have been fatal. And he
looked up at me over TreviUe's dead body and said, "I'm sorry." He said, "Did
you do it when you kidnapped him from Lodun?"
Grandier looked mildly surprised. "Oh, no. It was long before that. I
kidnapped myself, you see."
It would have had to be that way. Dr. Surete's death, and Milam's. It was
simplicity itself, he told us, if one had the stomach for it. Grandier watched
him with a dead man's eyes. Thomas said, "Why haven't you let the Host in yet?
That's part of your bargain, isn't it' Your payment to them."
"The Unseelie Court did me a great service," the old man agreed. "I owe them
much. The first shape I took was that of the man who served as the secular
judge at that farce the Inquisition deemed my trial. He was so cold, so
forbidding even to his own family that aping his manner presented no
challenge. He was powerful, and I took my revenge as I liked. I lived as him
for nearly half a year, before I tired of it. Then
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MARTHA WELLS
it was a young servant in his house, for I needed to move about without
drawing attention to myself . . ." Grandier gestured the memory away, his
expression wry in the firelight. "But my plans do not always coincide with
those of my associates, a feet of life they fail to understand."
A log shifted in the fire and as Grandier reflexively glanced toward it Thomas
rolled backward off the bench, grabbed his sword from where it stood against
the wall, and whipped off the scabbard. Grandier leapt out of the chair, his
hand moving as if he were gathering something out of the air and tossing it.
Thomas saw the sorcerer's quick motion and scrambled sideways, coming to his
feet as a blue blaze of light struck the wall where he had been. It splashed
on the bricks, sizzling and smoking like acid. Thomas threw himself at
Grandier with a suicidal lack of caution that the sorcerer could not
anticipate. But Grandier dodged backward with surprising agility and the tip
of the rapier only slashed a yard-long hole in the hanging fold of his sleeve.
They both saw Kade standing in the doorway at the same time.
Thomas's first thought was that faced with the situation the only reasonable
conclusion she could come to was that he was attacking Galen Dubell. But it
was Grandier she was staring at.
She looked at Grandier with a kind of growing incredulous fury, a combination
of wounded pride at being fooled and all-too-human betrayal. The sorcerer
looked back at her, and his eyes held all of Dubell's intelligence and wit and
the gentle humor he employed on those who pleased him, and he said, "No, it
wasn't your fault."
The fury flared and ignited and she took a step toward him. But Grandier's
hand came out of his robes and he tossed something at her, but it wasn't a
deadly flash of sorcerous light. It was a handful of iron filings.
Iron wouldn't harm Kade as much as it did other fay, but it would interfere
with her ability to do magic. Even as Thomas started forward Kade leapt back
to avoid the
THE ELEMENT OF FIRE
207
filings and Grandier pushed past her and out the door. As he crossed the
threshold, the candles and the fire were extinguished with a hiss as if all
had been doused with water, plunging the room into shadow.
Thomas banged into the heavy table that had somehow moved into his way, shoved
it aside, and ran out into the hall.
Grandier was halfway to the outside door, Kade running after him. The few
lamps dial were lit extinguished as the sorcerer passed them. Thomas shouted
for the guards in the hall to follow him, but in the confusion and darkness he
couldn't tell if any heard.
Thomas caught up with Kade in the entry hall and together diey slammed out the
door and into the frozen mud and cold of the court. The clouds had opened up
again and the moonlight was stark white, the wind a tearing force, and
Grandier was nowhere to be seen.
Kade spun around, trying to look in every direction at once, and Thomas did a
quick circuit of the court, but found nothing.
"Damn it, where is he?" he muttered. Grandier, loose in the confusion of the
palace . . .
As he reached Kade's side again, she looked up and said, "Oh, no."
Thomas followed her gaze. A shadow had appeared and now grew on the moon's
narrow face, becoming larger and larger. It was a blot of greater darkness
dropping toward them out of the night.
She said, "He's opened the wards."
Without having to discuss it they both went for the nearest shelter, the lee
side of the wellhouse. They were too far from the Guard House, from the
entrance of any building. The winged fay plunged toward the ground, then
seemed to hover above the courtyard, as insubstantial as a shadow.
The wellhouse's door was on the far side, Thomas knew. They could edge around
to it if they were lucky, if the fay beast was half-blind.
Thomas started to slide along the wall and Kade grabbed
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MARTHA WELLS
his arm and whispered, "Don't move." He hesitated, thinking, Does she know
what she's doing? Then he noticed the quality of the Ught change as the moon's
sparkle on the ground around them became almost palpable, and remembered
Kade's ability to eavesdrop without being seen, and that one of her fay powers
was supposed to be illusion.
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