"Look at them!" Violante picked up the nearest book and held it out to him, tears in her eyes. "They’re all like that!"
Mo took the book from her hand and tried to open it, but the pages had stuck together in a single blackened, musty-smelling lump. Mold covered the cut edges of the pages like foam. The covers were eaten away. What he was holding wasn’t a book anymore
— it was the corpse of a book, and for a moment Mo felt nausea as he thought that he had condemned the Book he had bound for the Adderhead to the same fate. Did it look as bad as this one by now? Hardly, or it would have killed the Adderhead long ago, and the White Women wouldn’t be reaching out their hands to Meggie.
"I’ve looked at so many of them. Hardly any of them are in a better state! How can it have happened?"
Mo put the ruined book back with the others.
"Well, wherever the library originally was, I’m afraid there’s no safe place for books in this castle. Even if your grandfather tried to forget the lake outside, it’s still there.
The air is so damp that the books started rotting, and since no one knew how to save them I suppose they were put in this room, in the hope that they’d dry out more quickly here than in the library. A bad mistake. They must have been worth a fortune."
Violante pressed her lips together and passed her hand over the crumbling covers, as if stroking a dead pet’s coat for the last time. "My mother described them to me even more vividly than the rest of this castle! Luckily, she took some to the Castle of Night with her, and then I took most of those to Ombra. As soon as I arrived I asked my father-in-law to send for the other books, too. After all, this castle had been empty for years. But who listens to an eight-year-old girl? ‘Forget the books, and the castle where they stand,’ that’s what he said whenever I asked him. ‘I’m not sending my men to a place like the Castle in the Lake, not for the finest books in the world.
Haven’t you heard of the fish your grandfather bred in the lake, and the eternal mists? Not to mention the giants.’ As if giants hadn’t disappeared from these mountains years ago! He was such a fool! A greedy, gluttonous fool!" Anger took the sadness from her voice.
Mo looked around. The idea of the treasures that had once been hidden between all these wrecked covers nauseated him more than the stench of mold.
"You can’t do anything for the books now, can you?"
He shook his head. "No. There’s no remedy for mold. Although you say that the Adderhead has found one. I don’t suppose you know what it is?"
"Oh yes. But you won’t like it." Violante picked up one of the spoiled books. This one would still open, but the pages fell apart in her fingers. "He’s had the White Book dipped in fairy blood. They say that if that hadn’t worked he’d have tried human blood."
Mo felt as if he could see the blank pages he had cut in the Castle of Night soaking up the blood. "That’s appalling!" he said.
It obviously amused Violante that such a ridiculous piece of cruelty could shake him.
"Apparently, my father mixed the fairy blood with the blood of fire-elves so that it would dry more quickly," she went on, unmoved. "Their blood is very hot, did you know that? Hot as liquid fire."
"Indeed?" Mo’s voice was hoarse with disgust. "I hope you aren’t planning to try the same remedy with these books. Believe me, it wouldn’t help them now."
"If you say so."
Was he just imagining the disappointment in her voice?
He turned around. He didn’t want to see the dead books anymore. Nor did he want to think of those pages drenched in blood.
As he came through the doorway, Dustfinger moved away from the painted wall of the corridor. It was almost as if he were stepping out of a book again. "We have a visitor, Silvertongue," he said. "Although not the one we were expecting."
"Silvertongue?" Violante appeared in the open doorway. "Why do you call him that?"
"Oh, it’s a long story." Dustfinger gave her a smile which she did not return. "I assure you the name fits him at least as well as the one you give him. And he’s had it very much longer."
"Has he?" Violante looked at Dustfinger with barely concealed dislike. "Is that what they call him among the dead, too?"
Dustfinger turned and ran his finger over the gold-mocker sitting among the painted branches of a rosebush. "No. Noone goes by any name among the dead. We’re all alike there. Mountebanks and princes. You’ll find that out yourself someday."
Violante’s face froze, and once again it looked like her father’s. "My husband once came back from the dead, too. But he didn’t tell me mountebanks were so highly honored there."
"Did he tell you anything about it at all?" Dustfinger replied, looking so directly at Violante that she turned pale. "I could tell you a long tale about your husband. I could tell you I’ve seen him twice among the dead. But I think you should greet your visitor now. He’s not in a very good way.
"Who is this visitor?"
Dustfinger plucked a fiery paintbrush out of the air.
"Balbulus?" Violante looked at him in disbelief.
"Yes," said Dustfinger. "And the Piper has left the mark of your father’s anger on him."
CHAPTER 49
MASTERS NEW AND OLD
How his behind hurt! As if he’d never be able to sit on it again. Damn all this riding about the place. It was one thing to go through the streets of Ombra on horseback, his head held high, attracting envious glances. But it was no fun following the Adderhead’s coach for hours in the dark, along rough paths where you were liable to break your neck the whole time.
For Orpheus’s new master traveled only by night. As soon as dawn came he had his black tent pitched to hide there from the light of day, and only when the sun set did he heave his rotting body back into the coach standing ready for him. It was drawn by two horses as black as the velvet that lined the coach. Orpheus had cast a surreptitious glance inside it the first time they stopped to rest. The Adder’s crest was embroidered on the cushions in silver thread, and they looked much softer than the saddle he’d been sitting in for days. He wouldn’t have minded a coach like that himself, but he had to ride behind it with Jacopo, Violante’s horrible brat, who kept demanding something to eat or drink, and showed such doglike devotion to the Piper that he wore a tin nose over his own. It still surprised Orpheus that the Piper wasn’t traveling with them. Well, of course — he’d let the Bluejay escape. Presumably the Adderhead had sent him back to the Castle of Night to punish him. But why, for heaven’s sake, didn’t his master have more than four dozen men-at-arms to escort them? Orpheus had counted them twice, but that was all. Did the Adderhead think this handful of men was enough against Violante’s child-soldiers, or did he still trust his daughter? If so, then the Silver Prince was either considerably more stupid than he was reputed to be, or the rot had attacked his brain, which might well mean that Mortimer would be playing the hero again and he, Orpheus, had backed the wrong side. A terrible idea, so he was very careful not to think of it too often.
They made such painfully slow progress in the heavy coach that Oss could keep up with the horses on foot. Cerberus had been left behind in Ombra. The Adderhead, too, thought keeping dogs was a privilege of the nobility. .. . It really was high time the rules of this world were rewritten.