Sapphique Read online

  “What in hell is going on in there?”

  As if his words had triggered it, the sound snapped on, a burst of roaring and applause and howls of joy that made them wince.

  CLAUDIA REACHED out and took the Gloved hand. “Master,” she said. “How have you come here? What have you done?”

  He smiled his calm smile. “I think I have undertaken a new experiment, Claudia. My most ambitious research project yet.”

  “Don’t tease me.” She clenched her fist on his scaled fingers.

  “I never betrayed you,” he said. “The Queen offered me forbidden knowledge. I don’t think this was what she meant.”

  “I never once thought you would betray me.” She stared at the Glove. “These people all think you’re Sapphique. Tell them it’s not true.”

  “I am Sapphique.” The noise that greeted his words was tremendous but he didn’t take his eyes off her. “He’s what they want, Claudia. And Incarceron and I will give them their safety.” The dragon fingers curled around hers. “I feel so strange, Claudia. It’s as if you are all inside me, as if I’ve shed my skin and underneath is a new being, and I can see so much and I hear so many sounds and touch so many minds. I am dreaming the dreams of the Prison, and they are so sad.”

  “But can you come back? Do you have to stay here forever?” Her dismay sounded weak, but she didn’t care, not even if her selfishness stood in the way of all Incarceron’s Prisoners. “I can’t do without you, Jared. I need you.”

  He shook his head. “You will be Queen, and queens don’t have tutors.” He reached out and put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. “But I’m not going anywhere. You’ll carry me on your watchchain.” He looked beyond her, at the Warden. “And from now on there will be freedom for us all.”

  The Warden’s smile was narrow. “So, my old friend, you have found yourself a body after all.”

  “Despite all your efforts, John Arlex.”

  “But you haven’t Escaped.”

  Jared shrugged, an odd, slightly alien movement. “Ah, but I have. I’ve Escaped myself, but I won’t be leaving. That is the paradox that is Sapphique.”

  He made a small movement with his hand, and all the people gasped. Behind them, all around them, the walls lit and they saw the gray room of the Portal, its door crowded with watchers, and Finn and Keiro jerking back in surprise.

  Jared turned. “Now we’re all together. Inside and Outside.” “Do you mean the Prisoners can Escape?” Keiro snapped, and Claudia realized they had heard everything.

  Jared smiled. “Escape to what? To the ruin of the Realm? We will make this their paradise, Keiro, just as it was supposed to be, just as the Sapienti always planned it. No one will need to Escape; I promise you that. But the door will be open, for those who wish to come and go.”

  Claudia stepped back from him. She knew him so well, and yet he was different. As if his personality and another had intersected, two different voices fragmenting into one, like the black and white tiles on the floor of the hall, forming a new pattern, and that pattern was Sapphique.

  She glanced around, saw Rix transfixed, edging closer, Attia still and pale, staring up at Finn.

  People murmured, echoing his words, passing them from one to another. She heard the promise reverberate through the Prison’s landscapes. But she felt desolate and sick, because once she had been the Warden’s daughter, and now she would be the Queen, and without Jared it would be another role to play, another part of the game.

  Jared edged past her and walked down to meet the crowd. They held out their hands and touched him, grasped the dragonglove, fell at his feet. One, a woman, sobbed, and he touched her gently, his hands around hers.

  “Don’t worry,” the Warden said softly in Claudia’s ear.

  “I can’t help it. He’s not strong.”

  “Oh, I think he is stronger than all of us.”

  “The Prison will corrupt him.” Attia said it, and Claudia turned on her angrily. “No!”

  “It will. Incarceron is cruel, and your tutor is too gentle to control it. It will all go wrong just like it did before.” Attia was cold; she knew her words hurt, but she still said them, and a bitter misery made her add, “And you and Finn won’t have much of a kingdom either, by the looks of things.”

  She looked up at Finn and he gazed back. “Come Out,” he said. “Both of you.”

  Behind her Rix said, “Shall I open you a magic door, Attia? And will I get my Apprentice back?”

  “No chance.” Keiro flickered a blue glance at Finn. “The pay’s better out here.”

  At the edge of the steps, Jared turned. “Well, Rix,” he said. “Shall we see more of the Art Magicke? Make us a door, Rix.”

  The sorcerer laughed. He took a small piece of chalk from his pocket and held it up, and the crowd stared. Then he bent over and drew with it on the marble floor where the statue had once stood. Carefully he drew the door of a dungeon, ancient and wooden, with a barred grille and a great keyhole and chains looped across it. On it he wrote SAPPHIQUE.

  “They all think you’re Sapphique,” he said to Jared, straightening. “But of course you’re not. I won’t tell them, you can trust me.” He came close to Attia and winked at her. “It’s all an illusion. There’s a patchbook like it. A man steals fire from the gods and saves the people with its warmth. They punish him by binding him with a great chain forever. But he struggles and squirms, and at the world’s end he will come back. In a ship made of fingernails.” Then he smiled at her sadly. “I’ll miss you, Attia.”

  Jared reached out and touched the chalked door with the tip of a dragonclaw. Instantly it became real, and opened, the door falling inward with a great clang, leaving a rectangular darkness in the floor.

  Finn stepped back, bewildered. At his feet too the floor had swung down. The pit was black and empty.

  Jared led Claudia gently to its edge. “Go on, Claudia. You’ll be there, and I here. We’ll work together, just as we always have.”

  She nodded, and looked at her father. The Warden said, “Master Jared, may I have a word with my daughter?”

  Jared bowed and moved away.

  “Do as he says,” the Warden said.

  “What about you?”

  Her father smiled his cold smile. “My plan was for you to be Queen, Claudia. That was what I worked for. Perhaps it is time I did some work here, in my own realm. This new regime will need a Warden. Jared is far too lenient, and Incarceron too harsh.”

  She nodded. Then she said, “Tell me the truth. What happened to Prince Giles?”

  He was silent a while. He stroked his narrow beard with his thumb. “Claudia …”

  “Tell me.”

  “Does it matter?” He looked at Finn. “The Realm has its king.”

  “But is he?”

  His gray eyes held her. “If you are my daughter, you will not ask me.”

  She was silent too. For a long moment they looked at each other. Then, formally, he lifted her hand and kissed it, and she gave him a low curtsy.

  “Good-bye, Father,” she whispered.

  “Rebuild the Realm,” he said. “And I will come home at intervals, as I used to do. Perhaps from now on you will not dread my coming so much.”

  “I won’t dread it at all.” She walked to the edge of the trapdoor and glanced back at him. “You must come to Finn’s coronation.”

  “And yours.”

  She shrugged. Then, with one last look at Jared, she walked down the steps of darkness inside the door, and they saw her climb up into the room of the Portal, Finn catching her hand and helping her Out.

  “Go on, girl,” Rix said to Attia.

  “No.” She was watching the screen. “You can’t lose both your Apprentices, Rix.”

  “Ah, but my powers have grown. Now I can conjure a winged being into life, Attia. I can bring a man from the stars. What a show I’ll take on the road! I’m made, forever. However, it’s true I can always use an assistant …”

  “I could
stay …”

  Keiro said, “So you’re scared then?”

  “Scared?” Attia glared up at him. “Of what?”

  “Of seeing Outside.”

  “What do you care?”

  He shrugged, his eyes blue and cold. “I don’t.”

  “Right.”

  “But Finn needs all the help he can get. If you were in any way grateful …”

  “For what? I was the one who got the Glove. Who saved your life.”

  Finn said, “Come Out, Attia. Please. I want you to see the stars. Gildas would have wanted that.”

  She stared up at him, silent, and made no move, and whatever she was thinking, there was no trace of it on her face. But Jared, with the eyes of Incarceron, must have seen something, because he came over and held her hand, and she turned and stalked down the steps of darkness, and into a strange shiver of space that twisted so that suddenly the steps were leading upward, and as Jared’s hand left hers another came down and hauled her up, a scarred, muscular hand with a scorched palm and a steel fingernail.

  Keiro said, “Not so difficult, was it?”

  She stared around. The room was gray and calm; it hummed with a faint power. Outside the door in a ruined corridor a few bruised men watched, sitting slumped against the wall. They looked at her as if she were a ghost.

  In the screen on the desk the Warden’s face was fading. “Not only will I come to the coronation, Claudia,” he said. “But I will expect an invitation to the wedding.”

  And then the screen was dark, and it whispered in Jared’s voice, So will I.

  THERE WAS no way down, so they climbed up the remains of the stairs to the roof.

  Finn took out the watch; he looked at the cube a long moment, then he gave it to Claudia. “You keep this.”

  She let the silver cube lie on her palm. “Are they really there? Or have we never known where Incarceron is?”

  But Finn had no answer, and holding the watch tight, she could only climb after him.

  The damage to the house horrified her; she fingered hangings that fell to pieces and touched the holes in walls and windows uncomprehendingly. “It can’t be possible. How can we ever put all this together again?”

  “We can’t,” Keiro said brutally. He led them up the stone steps, his voice echoing back. “If Incarceron is cruel, Finn, so are you. You show me a glimpse of paradise and then it’s gone.”

  Finn glanced at Attia. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “To both of you.”

  She shrugged. “As long as the stars haven’t gone.”

  He stood aside for her on the final step. “No,” he said. “They haven’t.”

  She stepped out onto the stone battlements and stopped, and he saw it come into her face, the shock and the wonder he remembered for himself, and she gasped as she stared upward. The storm had swept the sky clear. Brilliant and fiery, the stars hung in their splendor, in their secret patterns, their distant nebulae, and Attia’s breath frosted as she gazed at them. Behind her Keiro’s eyes were wide; he stood still, transfixed by magic.

  “They exist. They really exist!”

  The Realm was dark. The distant army of refugees huddled around campfires, flickers of flame. Beyond them the land rose in dim hills and the black fringes of forest, a realm without power, exposed to the night, all its finery as shriveled and battered as the silk flag with its black swan that fluttered, shredded, over their heads.

  “We’ll never survive.” Claudia shook her head. “We don’t know how to anymore.”

  “Yes we do,” Attia said.

  Keiro pointed. “So do they.”

  And she saw, faint and far, the candlepoints of flame in the cottages of the poor, the hovels where the Prison’s wrath and fury had brought no change.

  “Those are the stars too,” Finn said quietly.

  COMING IN SUMMER 2011

  A new series from the master fantasy writer CATHERINE FISHER

  WELCOME to Anara, a world mysteriously crumbling to devastation, where nothing is what it seems: Ancient relics emit technologically advanced powers, members of the old Order are revered by the people but hunted by the governing Watch, and the great energy that connects all seems to also be destroying all.

  The only hope for the world lies in Galen, a man of the old Order

  and a keeper of relics, and his sixteen-year-old apprentice, Raffi.

  They know of a secret relic with great power that has been hidden

  for centuries. As they search for it, they will be hunted, spied on,

  and tested beyond their limits. For there are monsters—

  some human, some not—that also want the relic’s power and

  will stop at nothing to get it.

  Enter the world of the