House War - The Hidden City Part 51

"Right. Anything I should-"

"Don't scare them."

Carver shrugged. "One of them-"

"Carver."

He nodded, gave her an odd look.

Duster caught it as well. "I don't aim to start a fight I can't win. You can take your hand off the knife."

Jewel frowned and saw that Carver's hand was, in fact, curved casually around the hilt of his dagger. His expression was serious; he meant to wait.

She couldn't bring herself to tell him Duster meant no harm. She even tried, but the words wouldn't work their way out.

"She's not bad," Finch said, to no one in particular. "She helped-"

"Don't remind her," Jewel replied.

But the words broke Duster's mood, some. The way ice broke over water that was cold enough to kill you anyway if you were walking on it.

Duster walked past Carver slowly, measuring him. He didn't take his hand off the knife, but he made no move toward her; he simply held the door until she pa.s.sed through its frame.

"Jay," he said quietly. Just her name. But it was all he needed to say.

She looked at the ground by Carver's feet. Saw what lay there, in a heap. "Leave them," she told him quietly. "We're going to get food."

He hesitated, and she added, "There won't be any trouble you can't handle."

Chapter Sixteen.

FOUR HOURS LATER, two candles down, Rath heard the click of the door at his back. Although he had gathered his papers in a more or less orderly pile to his left, and the inkstand, with quill to grace it, stood to his right, the only thing that occupied the focus of his attention were two dull blades. Flat ornate daggers, golden-handled, with runes that were so stylized it was almost impossible to recognize the language; they seemed to be so ceremonial no one had thought to sharpen them.

He knew; he'd tried cutting paper and cloth, and while the paper eventually gave, the cloth hadn't budged. He had studied those words, attempting to glean what information he could from their letter forms; he knew them as Old Weston, but they were a style of Old Weston that his scholarship had seldom encountered.

But there were other engravings, on hilt and handle, that gave clues. Old, old blades, these; they bore the marks of something that resembled either fire or sun, and given the shape and curve, worn in places, he chose to see them as sun's light. As, in fact, light.

"Where did you get them?" Jewel asked.

She had opened the door, of course, and she had padded in near silence across floors that shouldn't have allowed it. He felt a momentary pride in this accomplishment, and if he knew that the attempt at silence had been made because she feared his censure for this long, long day's work, it didn't lessen the pride. He wondered, briefly, if anything would, and turned in his chair to look at her.

Her arms were full.

The work that she had done, to walk into the room so quietly, was made more impressive by the fact that she was overburdened. She carried these rolled objects as if they were an offering, and he allowed it.

But when she approached the table upon which he was working, he let that go. "Jewel," he told her quietly, his voice skirting the edge of frustration, "the decision to go was, in its entirety, mine. Two men died."

"More than two."

"Two of any worth."

She nodded quietly. If there was a day to argue about the value and sanct.i.ty of life-and Jewel Markess, odd urchin that she was, might be the only child present in his home who would even think the attempt worth making-it was not this one.

"These," Jewel told him, surprising him as she so often did, "are mine." Her arms tightened. "I found them. I brought them back."

He raised a brow. She seldom played games of any note, and although the daggers lay there, demanding both questions and answers, he found himself interested in this one. "Granted," he said quietly, waiting.

"But this," she added, rolling her head to take in the whole of his room, and by implication, the ones beyond the door as well, "is yours. You paid for it. You found it."

Ah. He now understood the opening gambit of a clumsy negotiation. He gazed at the light that came in from the window well above, broken by bars, and landing like spokes across the surface of the desk; it was the reason he had chosen to work instead at this table. The odd breaks in light, the bars of shadow, discomfited him.

"I can't send them away," she continued, and this-this came as no surprise at all. "You've seen them, Rath."

"I'm not sure you'll be able to keep at least one of them. And no, Jewel, I don't mean Duster."

She closed her eyes; her dark lashes, in the magelight's glow, made her face seem pale in comparison. Too much shadow, here. Too much odd light. She seemed to have carried it with her, and he wondered how it was that he hadn't seen it the first time they'd met.

"You want information," she told him. "And you pay for it. I want them, and I'm willing to trade what I have. Let them stay with us."

"Jewel-"

"I know we can't stay here forever," she added. She seemed oddly deflated; her words had a peculiar flatness to them that he a.s.sociated with-with vision. "You'll make us leave," she added. "I don't know why. I don't know what we'll have done wrong. But you'll make us go."

Although it was a future he had contemplated, and in earnest, he himself could not see the manner of its arrival. He said nothing. Instead he rose, and moved both paper and ink, setting them on the desk. They were there, after all, more as companions than as useful tools. He had not touched them at all, save to place them where they might be touched should he need them.

He took the daggers last, and set them on the bed.

"What information do you think you have that's worth another four people?"

She put the bundles down, and lifted only one; its edges were darkened. "These," she told him, and she laid the one she held flat against the table, where it draped on all sides like a thick cloth meant for no other purpose. He would have spoken, but she continued.

"I think this is magicked, somehow."

"You can see that?"

Her frown added lines to her face. "No. Not-not like the doors."

"The doors, Jewel?"

"The ones that were barred. You didn't get out through the doors," she added.

"Arann seemed to think it unwise."

She smiled briefly at that, some echo of his own sense of pride, given the quiet giant was nowhere in sight. But brief was the correct word; the smile vanished. "They were . . . orange. They glowed orange."

Not to his vision. Not, certainly, to Arann's. He said nothing, however.

"It's a map," she added.

He looked at the parchment, the hide upon which so much had been drawn. He did not touch it, however; he was aware that he had not yet finished the negotiations she had begun, and he was willing to let her continue, although the presence of the lines and the words beneath them, the large ovals, the squares, and the odd, small circles, made it difficult.

"I thought it would burn. When I threw it over the mage, I thought it would burn."

He nodded.

"But it didn't. I think these were important," she added, "to the mage. Or the mages. I think they were willing to burn the house down because they knew these wouldn't burn with it."

"And you took them."

She nodded quietly. "I wouldn't have, if it weren't for-" She shook her head. "They looked like maps to me. But I've seen the maps of the city, and this isn't them."

He knew; they were his maps. "You didn't seem so eager to study my maps," he said, with a hint of wry humor. "I wouldn't have guessed you would choose to take maps from the manor; there were other things of value there."

"I took everything of value there," she replied quietly. "And these, as well."

It wasn't subtle, but then again, Jewel never was.

"It would cost much to magic something of this size," he said, his eyes on the lines that denoted streets. She was, of course, correct; this was not Averalaan. "Minor magics, some scrambling, perhaps keying the maps to individual eyes-those would be less expensive. But to protect such things against destruction?"

"You said people do it. For paintings. And other stuff."

He nodded. He had. But these were not the same. He stared at the map that lay there, following a line that plummeted off the table's edge. "What do you think these are, Jewel?"

Her hesitation was awkward; silence was as close as she came to a lie. But she wouldn't lie to him in his own house; he had set that ground rule early, and she abided by it. "The undercity," she said at last. "I think these are maps of the undercity."

"What makes you say that?"

She wanted to shrug; he saw it, and knew why: she wanted to appear to be in control of this exchange. And she so seldom wanted that control. But in her mind, lives depended on it, and he let it pa.s.s without comment, curious to see how it would play out.

But her answer was not the answer he wanted. She bent at the knees and retrieved another of the three maps; this she laid over the first. He could see where they'd cut it down, and wondered what type of magic had been placed upon them; certainly, the ability to be impervious to edged weapons had been demonstrated clearly by the man who had almost killed them all with his flame.

And by the others.

But that enchantment was absent, had to be absent; he could see where daggers had done their sloppy, quick work.

When she had flattened the map, and centered it, she touched its surface.

The lines beneath her finger began to glow. Jewel frowned; it was clear that she was uncertain as to whether or not Rath could see the effect. But it didn't matter; the line took pale blue light and spread it in a thin wedge. Her fingers ran along it, and stopped at a large rectangle that receded for some distance, bound on the other side by another line that sloped in a gentle curve. The map continued its odd glow, and Rath realized that the lines touch invoked did not conform entirely to the lines drawn on the parchment itself. Magic indeed.

"I think," she told him quietly, "that this is the stone garden."

He nodded; he could almost see it. A rough series of calculations might tell him the scale the cartographers had used. He bent over the map, and she stopped him; she rolled them both up, lifted them, and waited. Solemn child.

"They're ours," she told him quietly.

"Ours, now?"

"I didn't take them down on my own; I couldn't have carried them out on my own. Carver helped. Finch helped."

"You could sell these," he began.

But she shook her head, her expression wary. "You wouldn't let me sell them," she told him. "And because you won't, it means they have value, but only to you."

He nodded, and then he graced her with a rare smile. "You've done well," he told her quietly. "And yes, Jewel Markess. In exchange for these, I will allow you the use of two rooms."

"Rath?"

"Yes?"

"Will you let me look at them, sometimes?"

He started to say something clever, but her expression stopped the words. "Yes," he told her quietly. "While it is safe, I will let you look at them."

Her shoulders seemed to collapse a fraction, and he realized, with surprise, that the act had been no act; she did value the maps in and of themselves. Under other circ.u.mstances, she would have kept them.

And she would have accepted his refusal to allow her access in return for the rooms that would house far too many of her wayward children. Her den.

He smiled.

"What's funny?" she said sharply.

"Your den," he replied.

"My what?"

"They're yours, Jewel. To heal or to lose."

She shook her head.

But this, he would not allow. "Whether you accept it or not, you've already become their leader. Arann would follow you anywhere now. And I think young Carver as well, although I'm less certain why. Finch wouldn't follow you into a fight-but that's not her gift.

"And the others? They'll come to you, sooner or later. They'll learn to trust you. And you, little Jewel, will understand how much of a burden that trust can be."

"Trust is a gift," she began.