corner. The pipes in the wall hammered at him as air worked itself out.
Light from the west was creeping in, a great golden blaze that seared the cold gray skies above the Greencap Mountains and ignited the cherry wood moldings and furnishings with exquisite luster. The white floor turned to gold.
Caliph’s bedroom was situated so that it looked west and north over the cliffs and walls of the Hold and down on the farmlands and hills and rocky moors. Despite the warming season, mornings in Stonehold remained chilly and damp.
Caliph dawdled. Finally, Gadriel returned.
“Mr. Vhortghast is here, your majesty. He’s waiting in the royal study.”
“Oh good . . . uh—”
“I’ll show you the way,” Gadriel said in a warm tone that indicated Caliph’s fumbling ignorance would not be faulted. “We will, of course, have it redone to suit your tastes. If you have any particular requests simply mention them to me and I will ensure they are taken care of. Your book buyer is already combing the shops for—”
“I have my own book buyer?”
“Of course.”
“All he does is buy books?”
“She, your majesty. And yes. She summers in the Duchy but travels the rest of the year to Pandragor and Yorba, returning with the newest publications in the spring.”
“I take it she doesn’t like the cold.”
They had left the bedroom, gone through several up and down staircases and were now walking briskly under ribbed vaults, heading in a southerly direction. Suddenly they stopped at an ogive fitted with a heavy oak door.
As Gadriel opened the portal a slender man immediately rose to his feet.
Caliph was mildly disappointed. He had been harboring a suspicion that the man from the train platform, who’d called himself Alani, would turn out to be Zane Vhortghast. He had asked the zeppelin crew how they had found him, whether there had been a spy, but no one would give him a straight answer.
As it was, the spymaster looked nothing like the pock-faced man he’d seen under the streetlamp in Crow’s Eye.
Caliph did not have time to examine the room before Mr. Vhortghast was at the doorway, shaking hands, smiling and bidding the High King to please follow him for there was much to see and much to do.
As they hurried down the hall, Caliph saw Gadriel look after him with an expression of fleeting paternal concern.
The spymaster was a wiry creature several inches taller than Caliph. He moved with profound grace and was dressed no doubt for the occasion, sporting a luxuriant herringbone suit of dark material. His face moved like malformed clay and two dark eyes had been thrust like chunks of pewter into the sockets. Overall, Caliph thought it was a visage that could easily have been hacked from a block of lard.
“It’s good to meet you,” Caliph was saying. “I hadn’t heard of you until this morning.”
He had noticed the spymaster’s teeth. They were ungodly: strange brutal slabs of gray ivory that had been worked with ghastly results by some dentist on Bloodsump Lane. There were faint glitters in his mouth that hinted at metal pins and makeshift attachments.
“I’m fairly insidious.”
Caliph smiled affably. “Really? How insidious are you?”
Mr. Vhortghast grinned. A sight capable of cracking glass. “Sometimes when you’re sitting under the chain and you let one drop you get a splash that comes up and snaps you right in the hole. It’s alarming but you tend to forget about it almost immediately after it happens. I’m like that. I’m the cold water that makes your ass pucker.”
“I see.”
Together, they reached the south courtyard where a carriage was already waiting. A Pandragonian man with long lemon-colored hair and skin as brown as chestnuts stood by, wearing an open shirt and roomy pantaloons. He carried a chemiostatic sword on his hip. The green light of the cell in its pommel turned his hand a ghastly undying color.
“This is Ngyumuh,” said Vhortghast. Ngyumuh bowed slightly at the waist. “We’ll have additional security as we make our tour but you won’t see them.”
Ngyumuh opened the carriage door for both men and once they were inside shut it again.
Caliph watched the Pandragonian man climb up alongside the driver as the carriage lurched forward.
Vhortghast sat across from him, noticing where Caliph looked and what caught his eye.
“You’re a watcher of people,” Caliph surmised.
Vhortghast said nothing but looked out the window as they trundled across the drawbridge, over the moat and into the the Hold: Isca’s only independently walled borough.
“Bit of a mess in the Herald, eh?” The spymaster looked