Law of the Wolf Tower: The Claidi Journals Book 1, Tanith Lee [pocket ebook reader .TXT] 📗

swaggering, and this man, sort of swaggering too. He wore a longish grey quite-military-looking coat, and the sun was gold, pure utter gold, all over his long, rough-cut hair. It didn’t look possible, this hair. Powdered, perhaps? Didn’t seem to be. It looked … real, in a way reality seldom manages.

Just then JL threw something at me – it was a paper-weight, I saw later – and it caught me sharp and cold with pain in my back. My breath went in a silly oof, and below, the prisoner, the invader, turned up his head to see, in the midst of capture, what creature it was that made such idiotic noises.

‘Come here you filthy filthyword!’ screeched dear Lady J.

I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain. Perhaps you can, perhaps it may, or something similar, have happened to you sometime.

Spinning round, I pelted straight at Jade Leaf. And as I reached her, I slapped her a huge stinging slap across half her disgusting pointy pink face.

Although the House was bursting with noise, this one room became completely silent. As if we had all been turned to stone.

I gazed at Jade Leaf, and had the thrilling joy of seeing the place I’d slapped turn from pink to boiling magenta.

Her mouth was wide open.

‘You … hit me.’

‘Lady,’ I cried, very concerned, ‘I had to. There was this awful insect on your cheek – you hadn’t noticed. It might have stung you.’

But Jade Leaf only plumped down on the rug abruptly, like a child, and said, ‘Hit me.’

‘Yes,’ said Pattoo, surprising me by her invention, ‘look, madam.’ And she showed JL a piece of squished fruit Pattoo must have got hold of just that moment to help me. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘A good thing,’ said Dengwi, ‘Claidi acted so quickly.’

Jade Leaf’s mouth opened more and her eyes were screwed away. ‘Mummy!’ she warbled. ‘I want mummy!’

Magically on this cue, through the open doors stepped Princess Shimra in a cloud of attendants.

‘Get up, Jade Leaf. What are you thinking of? The enemy balloonist has been taken to the Debating Hall. Change your clothes at once. Everyone will be there. Even Princess Jizania Tiger,’ added Shimra, with wondering scorn.

To go to the Debating Hall everyone has to wear blue. I don’t know why. It’s yet another rule of the House.

Changing that hurriedly wasn’t easy, although JL was abnormally docile.

We powdered her hair on top of the green and it looked fairly awful. Pattoo powdered the red slap-side of JL’s face with white. Shimra hadn’t even noticed.

We didn’t have time for our own hair so we had to tie it in hasty untidy blue turbans.

My hands were shaking anyway.

The Debating Hall is huge, a high ceiling decorated with silver medallions, upheld by marble pillars, and below, a slippery polished floor. I know about the floor, because when I was nine or ten, I used to be one of the kids who polished it once every five days. And it took all day to do.

The ladies and princesses sat on their blue plush seats on the raised area, and the maids and servants and slaves gathered round to fan them and offer little tobacco pipes and calming drinks.

On the other side were the lords and princes, who, almost alone, make a decision at the end of every debate. However, at the head of the room was a long draped table, and behind that seven gilded chairs under a canopy. These are for the Old Ladies, the most ancient princesses. They too have an important vote.

Only three of the OL chairs were filled. There was Princess Corris, who’s eighty, and Princess Armingat, who’s eighty-five. They attend every debate, and argue wildly at the end, always disagreeing with each other.

Today a third chair had been filled.

Princess Jizania Tiger is said to be one hundred and thirty years old. She does look it. But she’s absolutely beautiful. She seems made of the thinnest, finest pale paper. And her large hooded eyes are like pale amber pearls. She’s bald, and wore today a headdress that was a net of almost colourless silvery beads, set occasionally with a bud of emerald. (She alone hadn’t bothered with blue. Her grown was ash-coloured.)

I can’t imagine ever being old, let alone old like this. But if I had to be, she would be my model.

She has a fine voice, too. Soft and smoky, musical. She only sounds about sixty.

As a rule though, she never bothers with debates. Only the most unavoidable dinners and Rituals.

It must be nice to get out of so many boring and unimportant things.

Now she sat there, leaning her slender old face on her slender crooked graceful hand, that had one colossal topaz burning on it in a ring.

The big space at the Hall’s centre was fenced on two sides by weapon-bristling Guards, standing three deep.

I’d looked for him – I mean the prisoner, the enemy-invader – the moment we’d arrived. But the Guards are often dramatic. Only now did they march him in.

He seemed quite good-humoured, and certainly not upset. I wondered if he’d been hurt when the balloon fell, and was bravely hiding it.

The Guards left him alone in the middle of the Hall, and we all now glared down at him, and some of the royalty held up magnifying glasses.

Under the lighted lamps which are always lit in the hall, his hair looked like golden flames itself. The dark grey coat was swinging loose. He wore white under it, and boots that were a darker white. But mainly, he was young. Older than me, (did I say I’m about halfway through sixteen?) Eighteen maybe, nineteen. In what some of them call my Age-Group.

Despite that, the thing which is making this so hard to describe is that he had a gleam to him, a polish to him. I used to polish this floor, but life had polished this man. Being alive. Living. And he glowed.

He came from the unknown outside places, the Hell known as the Waste.

And I’d never thought