“Come,” she snapped back, as she turned and strode away.
She wondered if this was the way other fathers and daughters got along. She would have been surprised to learn, that her relationship with her father, wasn’t that much different than many others. Most young women were traded like chattel to other men, not for money, but for position and favor.
“If you will show me how to use your lift, I will have repairs properly made to the tower walls, so that we don’t have this problem again.”
She spoke over her shoulder, as she led him through the castle. The people, and Zard, that they passed, parted for them, as if they were contagious, but every last one of them gave a bow or curtsy of fealty.
“You’ll have to kill the masons when they’re done,” Pael said conversationally.
He suddenly stepped around Shaella, and led them from the semi-crowded corridor, down a narrow servant way. She followed him through a maze of stairways, corridors, and even through a hidden passage, which was cleverly disguised as a stray run of wall. It was all she could do to take in the route as they went.
When they finally arrived, at what looked like a storage pantry set into the wall, not too far from the entrance to the upper dungeons, Pael spoke a word that released his wizard lock, and the false door vanished. He spoke the word to make the door reappear, and raised a querying eyebrow at Shaella. She repeated the release word for the magical door, and it went away again.
Pael smiled at her approvingly, giving her a good look at his crooked, almond colored teeth. Then he called down the lift.
As they rode it up, he went through a series of command words, and showed her what they all did. After she had repeated them all correctly, he had her take them the rest of the way up. She only cared about the commands for up, down, and stop. Since she had no need to sneak around the castle, because a King’s wandering eye was on her, or nosy servants might report her movements, she didn’t think the lock, or several of the other commands, would be necessary for her. She learned and repeated them anyway. When the lift was moving upward by the command of her voice alone, Pael gave her another nod. A look of fatherly satisfaction was in his eyes. Seeing this, gave her the courage to ask him about the Spectral Orb. Pael didn’t hesitate to tell her a lot more about it than she really wanted to know.
“This human you’re so concerned with, this Gerard, has absorbed part of what is empowering me,” he told her. “Through some ethereal bond, I can feel him in my mind sometimes, like a pesky mosquito. He buzzes around in a daze of confusion, and occasionally stops to suck off bits of information from Shokin’s – no, from my mind, as if it were a drop of blood.”
He met Shaella’s gaze then, his expression as dire as ever.
“You must never even so much as attempt to release what he has become from the Seal. He is no longer human. He consumed the yolk of the dragon’s egg. At the moment, his power is infinitesimal. It’s doubtful that he will be able to survive amongst the evil he’s bound with, but if he does find a way to survive the Nethers he has the potential to become a power beyond imagining.”
“I just want to communicate with him,” she lied.
“If you’ll make a Binding of Blood with me, that you’ll not attempt to set him free as long as I live, then I’ll show you how to use the orb, but I want a future favor in return.”
A Binding of Blood is a magical binding, which forfeits the life of one who breaks the oath the instant that the oath is broken. The ancient spell was specifically created to keep powerful wizards from cheating each other. Still, Shaella thought, Pael should know better than to try to make an oath that a woman couldn’t find a way around. Even the least clever woman could work her way around such a promise, be it binding or not, and Shaella was as clever, and deceitful, as they came. Without hesitation, she agreed to Pael’s terms.
She wanted desperately to reach out to Gerard. She was confident that eventually she would find a way to set Gerard free from the Nethers. Especially since Pael seem so worried that it might happen. If it wasn’t a possibility, then the mighty Pael wouldn’t be concerned about it.