“All right, all right, let me just . . .” Holding on to the windowsill, he leaned into the shadows.
They were thick, almost tangible. As though all the shadows of the outer city had taken refuge inside, allowing no light to enter. Eanrin took a deep breath. His sunny disposition disliked all that darkness, yet he transformed into a cat and hopped down inside.
For a split second, he felt as though he would fall forever. But he landed on all fours on a solid floor below the window. His cat’s eyes, skilled at seeing in the dark, took a moment to adjust. Then he saw that the room was empty. And it was, he realized the next moment, vast.
Not in circumference. In floor space it was no greater than his own modest bedchamber back in Rudiobus. But in height, he could not begin to guess its dimensions. The shadows concealed details, but he got an impression of . . . perches. Of landings and chambers without passages between, without stairs. This was a world intended for those with wings.
He sniffed and prowled the ground floor, finding nothing of interest. It should be safe enough for the mortal girl to hide here while he scaled the outer wall and took stock of their surroundings. With this conclusion in mind, the cat stood up into his man’s form again. It took several attempted leaps and a certain amount of ungraceful scrambling before he gained enough purchase on the windowsill to pull himself up out of the shadows. He recovered himself on the sill, smoothing back his hair, and smiled down at the girl.
Only she was gone.
14
WHEN THE BLACK DOGS HUNT, they never stop until their quarry is found, or so rumor would have it. Glomar saw no reason to doubt that rumor as he hobbled down the twisting streets of the firstborn’s city.
They were always just behind him, just one bend away. If he dared a glance back, he saw the looming Midnight that always followed in their wake and knew it as the shadow of his own doom.
But Glomar was a man of Rudiobus, and fear was unknown to him. So he staunchly limped on, groping the hot stone walls for support, swinging his bad leg and stretching his good one for all it was worth. Lights Above, what a jump that had been! He’d been right after all in thinking the little two-foot trickle was a deception. Trust your instincts . . . how often had he pounded that maxim into the heads of trainee guardsmen? Your instincts are a better guide than your reason nine times out of ten!
He took badger form. While not swift, this shape at least gave four legs to hobble on rather than two. Panting, he rounded yet another bend in that shadowless world. Perhaps he’d not escape the Dogs . . . not in the end. But he would find Lady Gleamdren and deliver her before they got him! He was Iubdan’s man, and failure was not part of his vocabulary.
He took the turn and met a Dog nose to nose.
The Midnight swarmed in to surround him.
The Dragonwitch smiled. The Black Dogs had done as she asked. She reached out to them across the distance, calling into the dark recesses of their minds.
“Find the poet,” she said. “And the maid.”
“Maid? Hmph!”
Gleamdren pressed her face against the iron bars of her cage, little caring how dizzy they made her. Her stomach churned with something much more potent than dizziness.
“How dare he bring a maiden on a rescue?” she muttered. “Eanrin. Of all people! What happened to those romantic verses of his?”
She was so angry, she thought she might split in two!
So the dragon watched the story play out in the streets, and her captive watched the dragon. And they were watched only by an empty, burning sky.
The moment he disappeared through the window, Imraldera knew the poet was not coming back. Whether he had vanished from the world entirely, she could not guess. This world was unlike her own. The rules of nature were different, if rules existed at all.
Imraldera stared up at the windowsill, where a cat had sat just the moment before. Not for the first time in her life, she wished for the ability to scream. Not, she rationalized, that it would do much good. But it might feel good.
As it was, she could only stand there and stare as the silence pressed in upon her, both inside and out. How, by the stone teeth, had she come to this?
Almost without her realizing it, her fingers made signs of grief, of passing. Perhaps they were useless. After all, she could not know if the poet-cat was alive or dead. She only knew he would not come back. So she made the signs traditional to her people, her hands moving fluidly through the hot air.
“May he walk safely through the void beyond the mountains,” she said. Then she added a sign she had been taught, not by the High Priest or the underpriests, but by her mother long ago, when she was a little girl. “And may the Songs sing him to life.”
Tears blurred her eyes. How many times had she made these signs in her lifetime? For her mother. For Sun Eagle. For her father . . .