I made my way back to that room with the long table and didn’t run into anyone. I walked in like it was no big deal, sat down, and waited. There was some of the emotional deadening I’d felt before, but not as intense—which is an odd word to use about something that removes intensity, but you know what I mean. I waited, and eventually even that passed, and then I said, “Hey, Tethia. It’s Vlad. Got a minute?”
I waited, and after a while my glib words didn’t seem so clever. I was in the middle of trying to come up with some other way to perhaps reach her when Loiosh said, “Boss!”
I turned around and there she was, sitting in a chair on the other side of the table. I looked closely, and from what I could see, the padding on the chair wasn’t compressed the way it would be if she were really there. But I could see her, and presumably we could hear each other, so who cared about the rest? Corporeality is overrated. Taltos. You remember the spelling.
“Hey there,” I said. “Remember me?”
“Vlad,” she said.
“Good. That means time isn’t—never mind. Can we talk?”
“We are talking now.”
“Yeah. You say you built this place. This ‘platform.’”
“No, I designed it. My father built it.”
“Right. But you figured out how to anchor it in the Halls of Judgment so it could cross worlds.”
“It isn’t anchored in the Halls, it only passes through them.”
“Okay. But tell me something: why is it you keep disappearing?”
“I don’t know. Is it important?”
“I want to understand how this platform works. And that’s part of it.”
“You’re a necromancer?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t think I can explain.”
“Try?”
She nodded. I thought that would be an appropriate, or at least an ironic, moment for her to vanish, but thank Verra, for once the world withheld its irony. “Let’s try it this way, then. You have a familiar. Do you understand the mechanism for how you communicate with him?”
“No, but I’m very curious.”
“Ah. Well. All right, then. Another way: You say I vanish. I don’t vanish, and I don’t even move, really. Not much, at any rate. I turn.”
“Turn. All right. You have my attention.”
“That’s why it happens so randomly. Right now, I’m working very hard to hold myself still, because the least shift in position”—she smiled—“I almost moved just now to demonstrate it, will bring me to another state.”
“I’m still listening.”
“Time and space seem like distinct things, but they’re not. They’re the same. This matters because, where I was born, places and times come together as—” She looked frustrated, then she vanished, but reappeared just as I was preparing a good curse. I didn’t tell her that at least some of that I’d figured out, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow. She said, “Do you understand what it means to be a god or a demon?”
“Yes. It means you can manifest in more than one place at the same time. Oh. Are you a god or a demon?”
“No. If I were, I would have control of this process, and I wouldn’t shift the way I do.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I know.” She frowned. “All right, I think I can explain it. To acquire powers of a god or a demon means to gain the awareness of the connections between different worlds, and to be able to move among them, and to control that movement. If you do not have these powers, but were born in a place where they meet, you can always see them, sometimes move among them, and only occasionally control the movement. Does that help?”
I nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, that helps.”
She was silent while I compared this with what I knew about Devera. Yeah, it made sense. But—
“Okay, here’s what I’m not getting. How is it you ended up being born in the Halls of Judgment?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I did.”
Me too. “Maybe I’ll find out,” I said.
She smiled a little. “Maybe you will.”
I wondered what all of this had to do with how I communicated with Loiosh. I wondered how Devera seemed able to move where she wanted to—except here. I wondered how—
“I have another question,” I said.
“I’m still here.”
“This room. The effect it has. How is that possible? It’s not sorcery, because I’m protected from sorcery. It feels like a psychic effect, but I’m protected from that too. Before you said it was the nature of the room itself, but I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“There is an art to it,” she said. “It has been studied by the Vallista for thousands of years. The windows, the color, the tilt of the chairs and their height: all work to produce the effect.”
“There’s more to it than that, I think.”
“Oh, yes. But you see, that’s the heart of it. Those feelings become part of the designer of the room, and part of every craftsman who works on it. You draw it into yourself, like inhaling, and then you exhale it in your craft.”
“Um. Sounds like witchcraft.”
“The Eastern art. I’ve heard of it, but know nothing about it.”
“I’m not saying that’s what it is, it’s just, it sounds like it. Or I guess feels like it would be more accurate.”
“It is as much art as it is sorcery, but the result is that the feelings become inseparable from the room. As I said before, the effect on you was more pronounced than it would have been on a human.” She was polite enough not to add, “because your brain is weaker,” or something.
“I think I kind of get it,” I said, though I didn’t really and I still don’t. But with any luck, I wouldn’t need to. I’d gotten the answer to the question I’d come for, and that by itself made this an occasion for celebrating if I’d had anything to celebrate with. I needed more of Verra’s wine.
“What do you know of your state?” I asked her.
“I don’t entirely understand it. I feel like I died. But I’m here.”
“What do you remember?”
“Running.”
“To something, or from something?”
“From something, I think.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right. You don’t seem exactly like a ghost.”
“How much experience with ghosts do you have?”
“A little. Tell me something. What do you want?”
She was silent for a long time, then she said, “If I am dead, then I’d like to be free so I can move on, or rest, or reincarnate, however fate should decide.”
“But what could hold you here?”
“I don’t know. It would have to be necromancy.”
“Discaru,” I said.
“Who?”
There’s a particular kind of annoyance that comes when you realize you’ve killed some bastard before you know all the stuff he’d done that would have given you even more satisfaction in killing him. I’d never had that happen before. Oh, well. “Never mind,” I said. “A demon. It’s gone now. The question is, why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do,” I said. “And I think I know why I’m here.”
“That’s something many of us never learn.”
I snorted. “I meant it in a slightly more practical sense. I think you did it.”
“Did what?”
“I think as you were dying, you reached out to the Halls, and got some help.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Yeah, you don’t remember dying. But I think you were asking for help from a god, and managed to reach Devera instead.”
“Who is Devera?”
“Not a god.”
“Oh. So it didn’t work.”
“I think it sort of did. And I think I’m on track for fixing the rest of it now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Good. We’re even. Tell me something else?”
“Anything I can.”
“What does the guide look like for your House?”
“Guide?”
“I don’t know what to call it. The Dragons memorize a book so they know how to navigate the Paths of the Dead. The Hawks have a signet ring that acts as a guide. The Jhereg wear a pendant that works like the ring, and the Tiassa get a tattoo that works like the book. What do the Vallista use?”
“Oh. Our key. It’s a piece of linen, usually dyed yellow, with purple threads that indicate the proper paths, usually made into a dress, or a toga, or a sarong.”
“Does it appear with you when you die, like the ring, or do you have to memorize it, like the book?”
“You’re dressed in it when you go over the Falls. You remove the thread as you progress, and it gradually falls apart, so that you arrive in the Halls naked.”
“That’s how you established the connection with the Halls, right?”
“Yes.”
“Was that the only one your family had?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I believe I do, however.”
She nodded.
“All right, I think I have what I need. Thank you for your help.”
“Good luck,” she told me.
This time, because I was looking for it, I caught the slight turn in her chair she made just before she vanished. I drummed my fingers on the table. I wanted to find Lord Zhayin and have it out with him, shake him until I’d squeezed the answers out, but no, there was something else I needed to do first.
I stood up and headed out.
* * *
I emerged from the cave, went up the path, through the bedroom, and out, then to the nursery. She was sitting in a rocking chair, her eyes closed. I watched her for a while, trying to interpret the expression on her face as she dreamed, then it started to feel creepy so I cleared my throat.
She opened her eyes, took me in, and stood up. “My lord?”
“Hello, Odelpho.”
“Hello, my lord.”
“May I trouble you with another question?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“My lord … I…”
“About the kitchen, and the cooks there. That’s nonsense. You knew that didn’t happen. It seems an odd thing to lie about. Why?”
“My lord, I—”
“Stop it. Answer my question.”
She was scared, but I figured that was because, well, I’m scary. The question was, was she also scared of someone else? If so, who and why and how much? “If you’re worried about Discaru,” I said, “he’s not going to be around anymore.”
She tilted her head. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I was pretty sure. And turned out I was right, so no harm.
“I … may I sit down?”
“Of course,” I said. Where were my manners? What would Lady Teldra say?
She folded her hands in her lap and said, “What happened to him?”
“He had an accident,” I said.
She studied my face as if expecting me to wink or smile or something. I didn’t, so she just nodded.
“He’s the one who wanted you to lie about the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“When did he tell you to do that?”
“Just before we spoke, my lord. Perhaps an hour?”
“So, it was me in particular he didn’t want to know about it.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say, my lord.”
Yeah, he didn’t have to. He’d have known when he saw me that I shouldn’t be there. He couldn’t have known about Devera, but he must have realized that Tethia had done something that resulted in me being there, which meant that I had to be prevented from learning about the manor until I could be disposed of, because—
Tethia. It all came back to her, and to what she knew and what she could tell, and what had happened to her, and why. I studied Odelpho and considered.
She looked uncomfortable with me staring at her. She shifted and said, “Will that be all, my lord?”
“Not quite. I’m curious about something. It isn’t terribly important, but do you go outside at all?”
“Sometimes.”
“And pick apples?”
She nodded, then frowned. “Is there something—”
“No, no. You just set me a little mystery, is all.”
“I like apples.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You had one?”
“I had two. They were good.”
“I’ll be tending the trees myself from now on.”
“There’s no gardener?”
“At the old castle, not here.”
“Of course. There were lots of things Discaru didn’t want known, weren’t there?”
She nodded.
“Such as Lady Zhayin’s visit to the Halls of Judgment.”
She looked down.
“Were you with her?”
She nodded.
“You took care of Tethia, there, in the Halls.”
She nodded again.
“Odelpho, how did Tethia die?”
“Her mother died during the Interregnum.”
“Odelpho!”
She jumped a little, then looked down again.
“Tell me what happened. It can’t hurt you now.”
She remained still, eyes fixed on the floor. I was getting tired of people staring at the floor or over my shoulder.
“Odelpho, tell me how Tethia died.”
“It was the monster,” she said.
“The monster? That, ah, I mean, Lord Zhayin’s son?”
She nodded. “It chased her. I don’t know why. She couldn’t get out, so she tried to escape to the roof. In the end, she threw herself off it into the ocean-sea. She had only returned that day. I hadn’t seen her since she was a child, when she went off to, well, I don’t know. But I hadn’t seen her in so long, and an hour after she was back, she was dead.”
She looked like was about to cry. I said, “How?”
“My lord?”
“How could she get off the roof?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever been up there?”
“Only that one time. I saw her jump. Lord Discaru came up behind me, and he was able to control the beast. He said I must never speak of it. Is he really gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she said, like she meant it.
“How did it get loose?”
“My lord?”
“You said it was chasing Tethia. How did it get out of its cell?”
“I don’t know. It was just after the completion of the construction, when we first appeared here, so perhaps something went wrong.”
“Or something went right.”
“My lord?”
I shook my head.
“Thanks for your help, Odelpho. What did you say your name means?”
“Delpho means ‘home of the bear’ in the ancient language of the Lyorn, my lord.”
“Nice name,” I said. “Take good care of it.”
I bowed to her because I felt like it, and went on my way.
Time to end things.
* * *
Zhayin put his book down as I came in. “Well, what do you—”
“Shut up or I’ll kill you. Is that clear enough? I hate killing people for free, but I’m already inclined to make an exception for you, so don’t give me any more reasons.”
“I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Discaru is gone. That monster of yours is dead. Who—”
“Dead?”
“—is going to protect you? The dry-nurse or the butler?”
He glared at me. The news that his son was dead seemed to affect him not at all. Maybe I shouldn’t let that bother me, especially with what else he’d done, and the fact that his son had become an inhuman monster hundreds of years before. As I said, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I thought about my own son, and I liked him even less.
He reached for a pull-rope next to him. I said, “You don’t want to do that. Your guards are in the past, and in the old castle, and they have to go through the mirror room and down stairs to get here. By the time they’ve done that, I will have sliced open your belly to see how many times I can wrap your entrails around your neck.” Hey, look: if you’re going to threaten someone, making it graphic is always better. I wouldn’t really have done that, but it was effective, all right? Don’t judge me.
“And you don’t even want to, do you? You want as few people from the past here as possible, because the more who know about it, the more chance someone will figure out what you did, and find a way to get the message out, even from two hundred years ago. But I still want to see how much your entrails will stretch. Or maybe I won’t even bother. Maybe I’ll just stick you. With this.” I drew Lady Teldra. She appeared as I’d first seen her, a very long, thin knife, slight teardrop shaping along the blade. She was beautiful.
I once had someone explain to me that we don’t have real interactions with people, we have interactions with the image of those people we carry in our heads. I don’t know. Maybe. But I figure if I stick a Great Weapon into a guy’s eye, it’s close enough to a real interaction for most purposes.
“What do you want?” he said. His voice was hoarse.
“Take your clothes off,” I said.
His eyes widened.
“What do you think—”
I walked toward him until the point was inches from his face. “Take. Your. Clothes. Off.”
He was shaking. He had every right to. He stood up, undid the belt of his robe, and let it fall off his shoulder. He wore thin yellow pants under it. I let him keep those.
“Hand me the robe,” I said.
He stared down the length of Lady Teldra, then picked up the robe and handed it over.
“Sit down,” I said.
He did.
I sheathed Lady Teldra, and he visibly relaxed. “What are you—”
“Shut your mouth or I will cut out your tongue,” I suggested.
I drew a small throwing knife from inside of my cloak, found a piece of purple thread on the robe, and cut it. Then I looked Zhayin in the eyes, and started pulling on the thread. He swallowed. It all came out in one long tear; it took maybe a minute. When I was done, there were pieces of yellow silk on the floor, and a length of purple thread in my hand. I dropped the thread, and as I did so I heard, as if from far away, a deep metallic “click.”
“There,” I said. “Now the door is open.”
He started to speak, but someone else did first. “Uncle Vlad!”
“Hello, Devera. This is Lord Zhayin, who murdered his own daughter and trapped you here.”
She turned and looked at him, then turned back to me. “I don’t like him very much,” she announced.
“Yeah, that’s two of us. But you’re free now.”
“I know.”
“And so is the woman who brought you here.”
She nodded.
“I should get going now, Uncle Vlad. I need to go back to yesterday and find you.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
“Are you, are you going to hurt him?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Well, thank you, Uncle Vlad.”
“You’re welcome, Devera.”
She vanished, like she does. I moved a chair so it was facing him and a little too close. Then I leaned forward. I said, “I know what you did, I just want to know why you did it. I have a suspicion, but I hope I’m wrong, because I don’t want there to exist anyone who—never mind. Start talking.”
He didn’t speak.
I said, “Tethia solved the problem, didn’t she? She figured it all out, how to cut through the Halls of Judgment to permit travel to other worlds.”
He grunted, which I took as a yes.
“But you’re not there yet. You just put the touches on the basics of it, and now you’re ready to extend the platform to wherever you can find access points. And you had a friendly demon lined up to help with that, except now you’ll have to find another, because he accidentally fell on my Morganti knife when he was trying to kill me. I feel bad.”
He went back to glaring.
“Or maybe I’ll kill you, in which case you won’t have to worry about it. But, here’s my question: Why is Tethia dead? And not only dead, but trapped here, locked into this place? Oh, I know how you did it. You bound her to the Paths of the Dead with your key, that robe. I get that part. But why? Did you need a soul in order to make it work? No, you didn’t. Was it a tragic accident that the monster you accidentally created happened to get loose just at the point when her work was done? No, it wasn’t. Was it some fluke of her having designed the place that, after she died, she was unable to leave? No, it wasn’t.
“You control the door to the thing’s lair, don’t you? You released it first when I showed up, but—and here’s the part that took me the longest to figure out—you failed to tell Discaru, so he thought it escaped and recaptured it. That’s pretty funny, when you think about it. You’re really bad at this stuff. Then you released it again when I started messing with the mirrors, only this time there was no Discaru, so I put it out of its misery. If that makes you sad you’re the worst hypocrite this sad Empire has ever produced. You used your son—what remained of him—to kill your daughter, didn’t you? Only this time your friend the demon was in on it with you. You’d sealed the entire structure so no one could leave, but he opened it up just enough for her to jump off it, didn’t he? That way she’d be dead and you wouldn’t even have a mess to clean up. He was a good friend to you, always ready to do your dirty work. I’d say I’m sorry I dispatched him, but I’d be lying.
“Only that wasn’t the end of it. After she died, Discaru bound her to the manor, so you could keep her here. He used the front room to contain her soul, to keep her trapped. I know he did it, and I know he did it for you, but why? That’s my question. Why did you kill your own daughter, and then prevent her soul from moving on? What did you get out of it?”
“If you’re going to kill me, just—”
I pulled the dagger from my boot. Not Lady Teldra, not this time, but a nasty stiletto. “Answer the question.”
“I don’t like answering people who are threatening me.”
“Okay, fair enough. I won’t threaten.” I transferred the blade to my other hand, then slapped him across the face. His head rocked, and when it came back, I transferred the dagger again and slapped him with the other hand. He put his arm up and slid forward and I gut-punched him. He doubled over on his knees on the floor and started retching.
I sat down again and waited. After a minute, I said, “There. You see? No threat. Would you like me to not threaten you again?”
After a minute he looked like he could maybe form words. I got up and assisted him back into his chair; he flinched when I moved, but sat down.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“Why did you have your own daughter killed?”
He raised his head and looked at me. “I’d been working on it all my life.”
“It? You mean—”
“Creating a crossplanar platform. A place to live through which one could walk the halls and visit worlds as if they were rooms.”
“Well, at any rate, you’ve managed a place where you walk into rooms and end up in places that make no sense.”
He shook his head. “That is nothing, trivial. A matter of adjusting the mirrors. The principle is there, it works; that is how you can reach the Halls of Judgment, and the Housetown castle. It works.”
“Okay, I believe you. It works. And?”
“All my life. More than three thousand five hundred years I devoted to this. That is a hundred times as long as your kind lives.”
I didn’t correct his arithmetic, or comment that it explained why he was having trouble adjusting the mirrors. I said, “Okay, whatever. That doesn’t explain—”
“Three thousand, five hundred years. And after all of that, she, my own daughter, would get all the credit.”
“But she solved the problem, didn’t she?”
“No! I did! I solved it by bringing her to the Halls to be born! That was my idea! I arranged for her to have the power, to be able to walk from world to world, bringing reality with her as if it were a length of string, tied in one place, carried to another. The House gives an award, you know. An award for superlative design, for building something no one else has been able to build. For all time, that award—”
“Which you’d cheated to get?”
He snuffled like a puppy. “Cheated,” he said. “I didn’t cheat. I restored things to the way they should have been.”
“Fine, you did all that amazing stuff,” I said, “I’m sure if I were an Athyra I’d understand that, and if I were a Vallista I’d care. But I’m just a humble, simple Easterner. So I just say, so what?”
“So what? So what? Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yeah, I heard you. You had the bright idea to forge your daughter as if she were a tool, and it worked, and all you care about is whose name gets in which history books. I heard it, I just don’t believe it. What sort of worthless waste of skin and bones cares more about that than his own daughter? Not to mention your wife; you got her killed too, didn’t you. Because of reasons that are none of your business, I get to see my son every month. Maybe every week if I’m lucky. Those are the best days I have. And, hey, maybe family isn’t the most important thing to everyone. Fine. But you had your own daughter killed, and are now trying to erase the memory of the thing she … you know, you just might be the most disgusting, worthless specimen of a Dragaeran I’ve ever seen, and I’ve killed dozens of you guys, all of whom deserved it. I’m impressed.”
I might as well have saved my breath for all the effect it had on him. “There’s no point in trying to make you understand,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “There isn’t.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to go home, find someplace where they let Easterners stay, and take a long bath and try to scrub your filth out of my soul.”
He couldn’t come up with an answer to that, so he just looked disgusted.
“And that isn’t all, is it? You sealed the place. No one can get in or out? You kept all of your servants in the past, where there was no one to tell, except three, and your pet dancer who is too good for you. And you sealed the doors to make sure they couldn’t leave. Only I got in, and you never could figure out how that happened.”
“Tethia—”
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “As for you, I’m not so sure.”
“Do what you will,” he said. “The manor still stands. I accomplished what no one else has before.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And if that had been enough for you, I wouldn’t be standing here deciding whether to kill you before I leave.”