Labyrinth Gate by Kate Elliott Page A

and performing horrible rites on sick and injured people. Appalling things. Later I realized it was just to scare me that they told me such tales. And at my tender and innocent age, I was taken in.”
    Julian coughed.
    “Then the tales weren’t true?” asked Chryse.
    “Who knows. They probably were. Probably still are, from what I hear. But there are good and decent physicians, even surgeons. It shouldn’t have stopped me.” She lapsed into silence.
    “The Earl of Elen.” Chryse felt again that it was up to her to change the subject. “He’s one of the people you said might be able to help us, if we can’t find anything on our own today.”
    Julian shook his head. “Even if you could interest the Earl in your predicament, which I doubt, I can assure you that you would not want to pay the price he would demand.”
    “Which would be?”
    “I don’t know,” replied Julian, face somber, “but whatever it would be, you would not want to pay it.”
    “Is he so awful?”
    “Only,” said Kate out of her silence, “if you think slaughtering infants in bloody rituals in order to add the power of their innocent souls to his sorcery is awful. Or raising the dead. Or buying an entire brothel for his—ah—pleasures, and then personally dismembering everyone afterwards, while they were still alive, so they could never speak of his—ah—” she coughed, “—unnatural tastes. Although it is also said that one young girl escaped, almost dead from whipping and cuts, and that underneath the fresh scars were uncounted numbers of healed-over scars.”
    “Surely those stories aren’t true.” Chryse felt an impulse to laugh at the absurdity of such tales. “Surely there are laws protecting people from—” She halted. Now it was Kate and Julian’s turn to look perplexed. Chryse looked out the carriage windows. They had moved out of the more fashionable areas and into a neighborhood whose dilapidated housefronts and rag-tag of street loiterers betrayed slow decay and the first descent towards those slums where the simple struggle for survival might overwhelm any better and more abstract goals. “No, I don’t suppose there are,” she murmured.
    “Chryse!” Sanjay’s hissed exclamation and his hand gripping her arm startled her. “Look at that carriage!”
    Her gaze followed his. Kate and Julian turned as well Their carriage had slowed and now stopped, caught in some flux of traffic, and for a moment they had a full view of a black carriage drawn by four splendid bay horses that also sat at a standstill, impeded by a cart piled high with vegetables being pulled by an emaciated cart horse.
    Chryse looked at the carriage, black and blank, windows shuttered, not even a crest to mark it. The horses, true beauties, were more interesting. But Sanjay continued to stare in some combination of awe and horror at the vehicle, so rapt a stare that the two hard-faced, armored men seated in front both turned suddenly and began to look towards him.
    Julian jerked forward and slammed close the shutters.
    “Bloody hell,” swore Kate. “Holy Lady damn me to the pits of the underworld.”
    “Sanjay—” began Chryse.
    “What was it?” he asked, and it was not a rhetorical question. “It was a—” He examined Chryse as if she could provide the answer.
    She shrugged. The carriage jolted and started forward again. “It was a carriage and four beautiful horses.”
    “It was one of the Regent’s carriages,” snapped Julian, exchanging a sharp glance with Kate, “if I don’t miss my guess. I’ve seen those horses before. Let’s hope those two drivers didn’t recognize my crest.”
    “A griffin!” said Sanjay triumphantly. “That’s what it was.” There was a brief silence while the other three merely gazed at him. “On top of the carriage.” He hesitated. “That’s what the creature sitting on top of the carriage was.” Another pause. “A griffin.”
    No one replied.
    “But you must have—” He faltered.