When the Saints by Dave Duncan Page A

witchery, if you prefer.”
    Justina just shrugged and waited.
    “And that really hurt!” he said. “The trip to Cardice—why did it hurt me?”
    “That I won’t tell you. Can’t. Mustn’t. I will say that not all Speakers have to climb the same ladder. A handler could have eased your path. Go on.”
    “Fifth is refusing the pain and getting the miracles without having to pay that price.” This time he earned a nod. “And the sixth step seems to be the nimbus.”
    “Harken to him! He’ll be bragging he can read and write next. That’s good. Excellent! Of course, you had Marek to help and you were dropped into very deep waters, where the secrets lie, but you’ve done very well, even so.”
    Vlad was bellowing at the carpenters and porters rushing to complete the first trebuchet. Archers were taking their posts at the merlons on the roof. Otto was down in the machine room, organizing more archers at the loopholes. Neither happened to be looking at the Wends, so the undetected spy could not. Anton was still heading in the opposite direction. It would make sense for the traitor Havel to attack the south gate at the same time as his Pomeranian allies attacked the north. Or perhaps they were in a race to see who could take Castle Gallant first. And Madlenka … Madlenka was dressing in frantic haste, with Giedre and the maids all trying to help and all getting in one another’s way. Whatever the news was, it had reached the keep also.
    Wulf discovered that he was starting to twitch, staying on his bench Con eep also.only with great effort. Yet he could not deny what Justina said, that he was doing more good here—learning how to use his talent, as she called it—than anything he could achieve at Gallant as a novice warrior with sword or bow. She was waiting for him, eyebrows raised. Even if the Scarlet Spider had sent her, how trustworthy was she?
    “So what comes next?” she asked impatiently. “Seven stages, you said.”
    “Last night, after five years, my Voices deserted me. Today they still do not answer.” He waited for a comment, but she just sipped her wine, watching him over the glass. “But I found that I could travel through limbo without having to ask them. Until then I had always had to Speak aloud, and now I just … just decide what I need and they seem to know. I discovered, too, that I could see things at a distance, Looking out of other people’s eyes.”
    “Only people you have met,” she said, volunteering information for the first time. “Just as you can only go to people or places you know. Is that all? Just seven stages?”
    “I ask you that. And I ask why my Voices no longer speak to me.”
    She tossed her head, much as the girl had done. “I answer only that there is one higher stage, but I won’t be saying what it is or what it brings; all I tell you is that your Voices do not answer now because you don’t need them now. How long since that hunt where you first used your talent?”
    “Friday. Exactly one week ago.” It felt like years, a different life.
    “Lord be praised! I never did hear of a haggard climbing so high so fast.”
    Unable to resist his sense of urgency any longer, Wulf drained his goblet. It was time to return to Gallant and join the battle. “Was Joan of Arc a Speaker?”
    Justina showed surprise, and perhaps approval. “Indeed she was. For fourteen years the French lost every battle with the English. After she appeared, they never lost. You think any workaday chit of a girl could have managed that?”
    Wulf wondered why she had not thereby broken the first commandment that Justina had described, but he had more urgent questions to ask about Joan.
    “Then how were the English able to catch her and put her to death? Did they do to her what you said you would do to Leonas: ‘trim his talons’?”
    “I won’t tell you that.”
    Annoyed, he tried another ploy. “My brother Otto says that the Church fears Speakers.”
    “Of course it does! A miracle