Speak to the Devil by Dave Duncan Read Free Book Online Page B

winter robes. She kept her mother’s sable for herself—she was in mourning, after all—and tossed a dark brown fox fur one to Giedre.
    A glance at the mirror called for a sigh. Black was definitely not her color; it made her pale face look like a skull. And the fur was not quite the same shade of black as her hat. She lowered her veil, so no one could see her at all. “Quickly, then!” she said.
    Bishop Ugne had already opened the door and beckoned for the countess’s nurse, who had been sent out to wait in the dressing room.
    Madlenka, Giedre, and Bishop Ugne left the keep by the upper door, and were saluted by the sentries. They crossed a drawbridge high above a street and then climbed some steps to the top of the curtain wall, where they were brutally assaulted by the torrent of wind that always blew there. The reverent bishop muttered something in the vulgar tongue and grabbed his miter just before it disappeared. His vestments billowed and flapped. Madlenka wondered if she dared offer to carry his crozier for him.
    Heads bent into the gale, they hurried along the wide parapet with the black slate roofs of the town below them to their right. On their left, outside the battlements, the wall dropped sheer for thirty feet to a cliff about ten times as high, and below that lay the rocky bed of the foaming Ruzena River.
    Had their eyes not been watering so hard, they would have seen the great valley ahead of them, widening southward until the embracing hills fell away and it merged with the forests of the Jorgary Plain, clad that day in fall gold. Fields and vineyards, villages both large and small, lay well concealed, for even high church spires failed to overtop the trees.
    According to tradition, on his way to the Third Crusade the Emperor Barbarossa had acclaimed the shelf on which Castle Gallant stood as “designed by God to hold a fortress.” The great rocky slab blocking the western half of the valley had held a castle even in Barbarossa’s day, but in the three centuries since then, many successive rulers had worked hard to take advantage of the Lord’s generosity. The entire top of the little plateau had been fortified, and its sides chiseled and shaped. With steep cliffs rising above it on the west and the foaming waters of Ruzena flanking its other three sides, Cardice was renowned as one of the most secure castles in Europe. It had fallen to treachery twice, but it had never been stormed or starved into submission.
    The valley ended abruptly about a mile north of the castle, under the ramparts of the Vysoky Range, which straddled the boundary between Jorgary and lands that had recently become part of Pomerania. Northboundtravelers, whether pilgrims, merchants, or fighting men, had no choice of route. They embarked on the Silver Road at High Meadows. From there the trail climbed steeply up the western side of the valley, crossing gullies on log bridges, negotiating hairpins, edging around steep spurs on cuts barely wide enough for a single oxcart. Very few places on the whole ascent would allow two carts to pass. Eventually the road arrived at Castle Gallant’s southern barbican, with a sheer drop on one side and a vertical cliff on the other. There the count’s men collected the tolls.
    Anxious to reach a point where she could see what was happening at the gate, Madlenka set a very fast pace into the wind. Bishop Ugne would have had to trot just to stay level. He had to shout after her. “I doubt if your haste is wise, Madlenka. Ladies should arrive with dignity, not steaming like a horse.”
    Annoyed, she slowed to a walk. Giedre was staying back. The bishop took this brief privacy as a chance to do some more holy nagging.
    “You say you ‘sent for’ Sir Karolis last night? Whose man is he?”
    She blinked away wind tears to look at him. “Well, he was my father’s man, of course.”
    “But now? God in His almighty wisdom has seen fit to gather your father and your brother to Him. Whom does the