Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore Page B

it with firm fingers and made her soundless way around the wall until she had located the door.
    The sentry remembered, afterward, that he had heard the wildest shriek for help which had ever rung in his ears, and he remembered unbolting the door. Afterward, until they found him lying inside the locked cell with a cracked skull, he remembered nothing.
    Jirel crept up the dark stairs of the north turret, murder in her heart. Many little hatreds she had known in her life, but no such blaze as this. Before her eyes in the night she could see Guillaume’s scornful, scarred face laughing, the little jutting beard split with the whiteness of his mirth. Upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms. And such a blast of hot fury came over her that she reeled a little and clutched at the wall for support. She went on in a haze of red anger and something like madness burning in her brain as a resolve slowly took shape out of the chaos of her hate. When that thought came to her, she paused again, midstep upon the stairs, and was conscious of a little coldness blowing over her. Then it was gone, and she shivered a little, shook her shoulders and grinned wolfishly, and went on.
    By the stars she could see through the arrow-slits in the wall it must be near to midnight. She went softly on the stairs, and she encountered no one. Her little tower room at the top was empty. Even the straw pallet where the serving wench slept had not been used that night. Jirel got herself out of her armor alone, somehow, after much striving and twisting. Her doeskin shirt was stiff with sweat and stained with blood. She tossed it disdainfully into a corner. The fury in her eyes had cooled now to a contained and secret flame. She smiled to herself as she slipped a fresh shirt of doeskin over her tousled red head and donned a brief tunic of link mail. On her legs she buckled the greaves of some forgotten legionary, relic of the not long past days when Rome still ruled the world. She thrust a dagger through her belt and took her own long two-handed sword bare-bladed in her grip. Then she went down the stairs again.
    She knew there must have been revelry and feasting in the great hall that night, and by the silence hanging so heavily now she was sure that most of her enemies lay still in drunken slumber, and she experienced a swift regret for the gallons of her good French wine so wasted. And the thought flashed through her head that a determined woman with a sharp sword might work some little damage among the drunken sleepers before she was overpowered. But she put that idea by, for Guillaume would have posted sentries to spare, and she must not give up her secret freedom so fruitlessly.
     
    Down the dark stairs she went and crossed one corner of the vast central hall whose darkness she was sure hid wine-deadened sleepers, and so into the lesser dimness of the rough little chapel that Joiry boasted. She had been sure she would find Father Gervase there, and she was not mistaken. He rose from his knees before the altar, dark in his robe, the starlight through the narrow window shining upon his tonsure.
    “My daughter!” he whispered. “My daughter! How have you escaped? Shall I find you a mount? If you can pass the sentries, you should be in your cousin’s castle by daybreak.”
    “No,” she said. “It is not outside I go this night. I have a more perilous journey even than that to make. Shrive me, father.”
    He stared at her.
    “What is it?”
    She dropped to her knees before him and gripped the rough cloth of his habit with urgent fingers.
    “Shrive me, I say! I go down into hell tonight to pray the devil for a weapon, and it may be I shall not return.”
    Gervase bent and gripped her shoulders with hands that shook.
    “Look at me!” he demanded. “Do you know what you’re saying? You go—”
    “Down!” She said it firmly. “Only you and I know that passage, father—and not even we can be sure of