Mad House Read online

  “Suppose I have said yes,” I said, trying to make it sound pleasant.

  “Very well then, back to business. You see I have been thorough. In addition to my other precautions, I have set a watchdog on you. You have met him. He is the ogre, Gian Galeazzo. He is utterly devoted to this Chapterhouse, so there’s no point in trying to subvert him, though I have no doubt you will try. Know, however, that he is bound to the Chapter. I believe you know the significance of an ogre’s condotte?”

  I did, and Bernat knew damn well I did, so I didn’t bother answering.

  “Very well, then. I need only to hear your acknowledgment. Do you understand the conditions of your employment? You don’t need to agree, as you have no choice in the matter.”

  I understood, but I wasn’t quite done being stupid yet.

  “You want the Library open,” I said. “Why don’t you just use the key?”

  “We would never entrust the Library to anything so fragile as a key. They do get lost so easily.”

  “Which means,” I said, “someone has put a spell on the lock, one you’ve been unable to counter despite all your great learning.”

  He put away his smile.

  “I do not need to justify myself to you. No one cast a spell. The lock is … defective.”

  That was a lie, I could tell that much.

  “Defective how? I need to know all I can, if I’m going to open those doors for you.”

  He waved a flipper dismissively.

  “It is unimportant. You will see the doors for yourself and then you will understand.”

  I did my best to look grudgingly defeated.

  “You have me hemmed in on every side, Bernat. Show me your Library and I’ll open your wretched lock.” I gave him my best smile. “Because, you see, I really am the best.”

  He laughed as if this were wit, which set his wide belly into a rocking motion. With one hand he refilled his goblet from a crystal jug. With the other he dabbed at the sweat on the folds of his neck with a large cloth that may once have been white. He sighed, a long, whooshing sound like some giant bird gliding into land.

  “It can wait until morning. I want you rested. Besides, I want to watch you work, and I have, ah, other concerns this evening.” He gestured vaguely at the room. I wanted to wonder about that, but I wanted still more to get out of there.

  “Very well, then,” he said. He was starting to repeat himself. He tried on another smile, but it didn’t take. “We understand each other.”

  He didn’t understand me at all, but I was as done with him as he was with me, so I nodded. He called in his elf, who led me from the room and promptly handed me off to John Golly as if he were getting rid of a leper. I followed the ogre back down the long hallway, which seemed shorter on the return, down stairs, through rooms, along halls. Even though from the outside the Chapterhouse looked like an agglomeration of separate buildings, we never once went out of doors.

  I began to wish we had gone outside, for the inside was unnerving. One hall turned into stairs even as we walked; they went up, then they went down. In another hall, a tray full of food sailed out from a room, passed us, then went into another room, shutting the door behind it. We entered a room that had no other doors. When I turned around, there was no longer a door behind me. We sat in chairs for a few minutes until a new door appeared.

  I tried to ask the ogre about all this, but he put me off with shrugs and head shakes.

  I tried to keep my mind on the problem at hand. I was under the thumb of the Chapterhouse and its Grandmaster. The lock must be all kinds of broken or he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to grab me. I did not doubt his threat to deliver me back to the executioner. And he was right—there was no way for me to escape the island.

  I did have some consolation, however. The lock had to be more than just magic, or his magicians would have opened it. Which meant I at least had a chance. I also had an opportunity.

  This island was a treasure chest three miles wide and I was set in the middle of it. Not to come away with something would be an insult, both to me and to Fortune. All around me were enough potions, amalgams and extracts to sell in a thousand markets, more scrolls and books than were held by my entire people. A score of ships could not carry it all away.

  But I could carry away one. A single treasure. It was all my kit bag could carry, for that bag had the unique ability to make any one item placed inside it look like some other object. Handy for smuggling though ill-suited for wholesale looting. That one treasure could not be just any book or scroll. It must be rare. It must be potent.

  It must be in the Library.

  I would unlock Bernat’s door. Somehow, I would find a way to grab that one object that would make me rich. And the magicians would never even know it.

  Meanwhile, I pondered the weird, chaotic behavior of the Chapterhouse. It wasn’t difficult to imagine it as a great beast on whom some curse had been placed. It was not a house of madmen, but a house which was itself mad. It was a little absurd to imagine this patchwork being alive—it was barely even a structure—but this seemed to be the most natural way to think about it.

  We entered an oval room of moderate size in which nothing at all strange happened, except that a fire sprang up in the hearth as we entered. By local standards that was scarcely worth noting. Two doors led out, but there was a third that opened onto stairs that led downward into an inky blackness.

  That’s the way we went.

  I followed the ogre into the darkness, picking my way carefully. John Golly struck a torch and I saw the stairwell had been carved into the basalt and was obviously made for ogres—the steps were huge, the ceiling was high, and the door at the bottom was easily ten feet high. He opened it and motioned me inside.

  It was his room. Everything in it was huge, as you might expect. It was also carefully neat. The stone floor was covered with old rugs with complex but faded patterns in them. His enormous bed was clean, the bedding neatly tucked. A small table against one wall held a single book and a large candle. Near the opposite wall stood a bench and table on which dishes were arranged. Faded tapestries hung from the black walls.

  He closed the heavy door, then pointed at a corner where stood a narrow wooden bed, about three feet long, with folded blankets. He had been expecting me.

  “Fat Bernat doesn’t know I’m down here, does he?”

  “No,” John Golly said.

  “That’s why you wouldn’t talk upstairs, isn’t it? The walls have ears and all that?”

  “Some of the walls are ears,” he said. I glanced over. He wasn’t joking.

  “Of course they are,” I said.

  “You sit, Quinn-the-Sprite. I have some food. We will eat and then we will talk, as comrades.”

  That made me raise an eyebrow. We were both ex-mercenaries, but the word ‘comrade’ was normally reserved for someone in your own company. He was extending a hand of friendship, but why?

  Protocol dictated we eat first, though. First break bread, then talk. He’d been friendly in warning me, and now he was willing to call me comrade, so the least I could do was to hear him out.

  The food was simple—cheese that was moldy, bread that wasn’t, and some truly excellent wine. I complimented him on it and he said it was Falernian, which made me smile again. Fat Bernat clearly did not know all that went on in his own house.

  We ate in silence, like old soldiers, paying attention to the business at hand. We signaled we were done by leaning against opposite walls. I sat on my bed; John Golly sat on the floor with his knees drawn up.

  “Thanks for the food,” I said. “Sailor grub is horrible and mage food was completely absent. Since I’m in your house, you should speak first.”

  He nodded and took a moment to gather his thoughts. Then he spoke, looking at me over the top of his knees.

  “You were arrested as a thief,” he said without reproach, “how did a tunneler end as that?”

  “Same as you, I’d guess,” I replied. “Dame For
tune had a fit of the giggles.”

  He stared at me for a moment, puzzled, then broke into a laugh. It was an ogre laugh, so it went like this.

  “Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh.” Like an ox cart going over ruts.

  “After Captain Jaeger was killed,” I said, “the Company split. I could see the whole thing was falling apart, so I got out. Went through my money faster than I meant to, then discovered I had a talent for relieving people of their excess wealth.” That last was not quite true. I had known I had this talent since I was young.

  “It’s not a bad life,” I added.

  “Until you get caught.”

  “Bernat was behind that. He set me up, or I’d still be free.” I smiled thinly. “I intend to thank him for that, somehow.”

  “The Wolves, too, are broken,” John Golly said. “The princes are strong and no longer need us as once they did. I stayed, for the Company had my condotte. My contract, you see.”

  I did. Contracts are contracts, pieces of paper worth little enough to most mercenaries—with pen and ink, one can say anything. But to an ogre it is much more. The condotte binds an ogre and he cannot break it. Only the other party can break the binding, and only via a complete loss of honor. Ogrish notions of honor are complex and only dimly understood by other peoples, myself included. But everyone knows this: nothing is more solid than a bonded ogre.

  “We Wolves were crushed near Riva del Garda, up against the mountain. We were only a handful by then, and Duke Sirmione had the Pavians with them.” Here the ogre favored the soldiers of Pavia with a spit. “Of eighteen, only the Captain and myself were left alive, for ransom.”

  He sighed like a bellows.

  “The Captain died in the cells at Castle Sirmione. I rotted there for two years, watching the lake seep through the stones. Then Grandmaster Bernat himself stood outside my cell and offered me a choice. I could be bound to the Chapterhouse or I could stay and die. It appears to be a choice he is fond of.”

  I was liking the big guy more and more. I liked his humor, how it sprang up unexpectedly. I liked his stoic courage. I could see the whole of those two years in his strange gray eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The mages have used your bond to enslave you.”

  “It is not slavery,” he said.

  “Perhaps not quite, but they treat you badly—I see that much—and you would never have given your bond were you not in that prison.”

  “Truth.”

  I shook my head. Ogres take pride in their bond. It’s a strange thing, at least to a sprite, but they say an unbound ogre is a danger, a kind of rogue, without the opportunity to be honorable. Even with the mercenaries, John Golly was doing a task he regarded as honorable.

  “Don’t you wish to be free of them?”

  “Certe,” he said, “but I have learned to accept this bond, even to value it.”

  “Truly? Fat Bernat and his sneering elf?”

  “Huh. Huh. Grandmaster Bernat believes I am bound to him, to the Order, but he made a mistake when he spoke the words. It is why I agreed. I am bound to the Chapterhouse, not to the mages.”

  He grinned sharply.

  “To this House.”

  He patted the floor with one immense hand.

  I grinned back. I appreciated the distinction even though I didn’t understand it. So I asked.

  “How can you be bound to an object? Doesn’t the oath have to be given to a living being?”

  He nodded to this, but frowned at the same time.

  “This is the difficult thing to explain,” he said. “When I gave my bond, I did think the Chapterhouse meant the mages. For a long time that is what I believed. But then the House began to talk to me.”

  “Over dinner? Or only on long walks?”

  Ogres can’t really pull off a withering look, but they do a pretty good glare. He aimed one at me now.

  “All right,” I said, “no need to get angry. I thought you were joking.”

  “I am not. I told you it is difficult to explain, but I will try.”

  “And I will try to believe you.”

  “It is not talking as you and I do,” he said. He looked at me with cautious skepticism. I could hardly blame him for that.

  “It is,” he went on, “almost like dreaming. Sometimes when we dream we can remember words, phrases, even parts of conversations. Other times, we remember an emotion only, some feeling of joy or dread. Is it not the same with you?”

  I said it was.

  “In the first days, the House tried to tell me how it became aware it was alive. I still do not understand well, the explanations were more like sketches or half-heard tunes, but I have the general idea. When the House was built, the magicians used magic in the construction.”

  “Sure,” I said, “Why pay a carpenter when you can cast a spell? Lazy and cheap, that’s a wizard for you.”

  “Perhaps that is unfair, but magic is in the very foundations of this place. Over the years, new buildings went up, and new spells were laid down. More years passed, and repairs were needed, and now magic was woven even in places that were not previously enchanted.

  “The buildings became so old, even the spells themselves grew old and needed mending, and new wizards cast new magic to patch the old. Being as they are, they cast spells to repair spells at need, and then more magic to watch over those. The House was tending itself, although it was all a patchwork.

  “Gradually, who knows when for the House has no sense of time, something emerged that was greater than any one spell, greater than all the spells together. The House began to study itself, reading itself, reaching for understanding. It reached out for another intelligence and it found me.”

  His story was unlikely enough, but that last part was the most astonishing.

  “John Golly, it is well known ogres have no magic. How is it a talking house spoke to you?”

  “I do not know. It tried to talk to others, but only a little. I think the House regards them as dead in some way. Unimportant, at least. Perhaps it speaks to me because I have no magic.”

  Sure, why not? The whole business was absurd. Unbelievable, except ogres are not fools, despite what some humans think. If John Golly said something spoke to him, then it did.

  “But there was a sickness from the start. You saw. Things are broken around here, and when too many parts broke or came loose, it affected the House’s ability to think, and this only made things worse. You saw.”

  “I did.”

  “The mages did as well, but they decided—Grandmaster Bernat decided—that the Order was under some sort of attack. It is true there have been injuries.”

  “Falling through floors can result in that,” I said. He ignored me.

  “Then Grandmaster Bernat tried to lock the Library, our most precious possession, to protect it from attack, he said.” Here John Golly uttered something ferocious in his native tongue. “When he did that, he locked away the heart from the head. After that, all I heard were cries for help—screams, in a way. I cannot describe it, but the sensations haunt me, like hearing a wounded animal, or a child crying for its mother.”

  He stopped abruptly as if to catch his breath, though he had been speaking slowly enough. I was no longer skeptical. This man had heard something awful and tragic. That he was bonded to it by ogrish oath made it all the more terrible.

  “Before the House fell sick,” he said after a moment, “it said a word I do not know. Perhaps you do. Ungor.”

  “It’s not a word I know, sorry.”

  He tried again, pronouncing carefully.

  “Ungor.”

  He leaned forward as if expecting me to know it. His eyebrows raised. I said the word to myself, but I could come up with no meaning, though the word did seem distantly familiar. I shook my head.

  His face fell, which on John Golly was an entire production in itself.

  “This is a disappointment. It is something of great importance. It will help the House, but I do not know what it is or where it is. I was h
oping you would know the word, being a man of great learning.”

  “I am a man of great appetites,” I said, “which is not at all the same thing. I have traveled far, done much, but my learning has been somewhat … informal. But try again. The word?” He was so crestfallen, I thought there was no harm in humoring him.

  “Ungor,” he repeated, but he had already given up. He tossed the word without expectations, like a rock into a pond.

  Something rippled in me, but nothing surfaced. I tried to catch at the ghost of something, but it was gone.

  “Sorry, friend” I said. “Nothing.”

  He sighed. The sound made me sad.

  “Never mind. Maybe something will come to me. Let’s talk about the job. You said Bernat locked the Library, but something went wrong there, didn’t it?”

  He shook himself out of his reverie.

  “You will like this, comrade.”

  I took another drink of the Falernian wine.

  “Tell on,” I said.

  “Grandmaster Bernat gave orders to lock the Library doors. Those doors have stood open since … a long time. No one can remember when they were last locked. He gave his order to someone. That one regarded the closing of doors as beneath him, so he ordered an underling. Who ordered his underling. The order was passed from one to another to another until it fell on two poor apprentices so newly arrived they had no one whom they could command.

  “So they went to the Library and closed the doors. What happened next is a matter of much discussion, for the apprentices themselves seem to have disappeared. Whatever happened, the lock was triggered. When someone came looking for the apprentices, they tried the doors and could not open them. This was reported to their superior, who reported to his superior … you see.”

  I chuckled. Wizards.

  “Some of our mages tried, without success. Experts were called from afar. But each one who tried, only made things worse.

  “That is when Grandmaster Bernat called for a cincinnator. Oh yes, he knows what sort of sprite you are. I admit I put forward your name—you are famous, Quinn-the-Sprite, though you may not know it. Then I heard no more about it until I saw you come off that boat.”

  I stood and stretched my legs. That is, I made a show of stretching while I was trying to figure what to make of all this. I could understand what Bernat wanted out of it. He was on the verge of losing his Library. If the loss were discovered, he would be infamously shamed and the Black Isle would without doubt come under attack from a dozen different directions. Everyone would believe they could break in. Someone probably would. So he had to get his Library open again, quick and quiet. Which explained me.