The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper

Author:Sheri S. Tepper [Tepper, Sheri S.]
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Old Dark House

The archers returned to the Old Dark House by the same route they had taken earlier, arriving early in the morning. The duchess had been watching the road from the tower, and she met them in the forecourt of the castle. Their leader dismounted and bowed deeply.

“We didn’t find him, ma’am. He wasn’t in the tower, and we didn’t find him anywhere near it. His horse was gone. The birds were gone, except for the ones that home there—”

“The prisoner?” she demanded.

“We didn’t see a prisoner, ma’am. We didn’t see any sign there’d been a prisoner. No sign of food or blood or . . . anything in the cell, ma’am. Usually, if there’s a prisoner, shackled, there’ll be . . . like . . .”

“Piss,” she said. “And stink.”

“Nothing there, ma’am.”

She glared. “Did you search the area, look for a body?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. First thing we did. We didn’t have the manpower to make a search over all the forest, but we took a good look everywhere nearby. We found some old bones on a little shelf below the tower where he maybe gutted and butchered a deer, but the bones were just bits, brown, chewed. Nothing that looked human.”

“You brought back everything?” she asked in a razor-edged voice.

He said placatingly, “Everything but the furniture and the birds, ma’am. We didn’t have cages for the birds or a wagon for the furniture, but we can go back and get them at once if you want us to.”

“No,” she snapped, thinking that someone else would have to occupy the tower and the birds could be fetched then. It did not occur to her, as it had not to the archers, that caged birds would have no one to feed or water them in the meantime.

“Just carry the sacks downstairs for me.”

So they did, down the crooked flight of stones into a kind of anteroom where there was nothing to see, though the archers pointedly looked only straight ahead. No one worked for the duchess without quickly learning that curiosity killed in the Old Dark House. When they were gone, she emptied the sacks onto a workbench. A few items of clothing. Supplies for messages: papers, pens, ink, the little tubes the messages went in. A sack of food: dried meat, cheese, a few bottles, some stale bread. His personal things. A comb, a brush with several of his hairs caught in the bristles. Well. Upstairs in her bedroom she had several of Jenger’s hairs. He had left them on her pillow, and she had saved them carefully. These were fresher. She would use these.

She unlocked the door to the room with the machines and went to the fatal-cloud maker. The angled receptacle went in with a tiny click, and she noticed once again how much the receptacle resembled a skull, rounded on one side, angled like a jaw on the other, with a row of little protrusions that looked like teeth. This always amused her. When the device had finished and extruded its cylindrical capsule, she stroked it for a few moments.

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