Read Tanith Lee - Claidi Journals 01 for Free Online Page A

I was reckless. I didn’t feel it, just then. I wanted to creep back to the room in the Maids’
    Hall and say Jizania had only just sent me away. Dengwi and Pattoo had the night duty with Jade Leaf, so even she couldn’t complain. She couldn’t anyway. The Old Ladies were so powerful.
    Jizania had told me she would say she had kept me in her apartment to serve tea—she only ever had
    “teas,” never breakfasts or dinners. Then she’d dozed off—“Naturally, old women always doze off,” said Jizania with a tigers smile. I had then stolen all the keys and run away.
    She would have to say that. They would think her careless and a fool, but clear of the crime of setting Nemian Free.
    She had added, though, that the next day, tomorrow, if there was no uproar—that is, if he hadn’t escaped because I hadn’t let him out—she would say nothing at all.
    But I could picture what she’d think of me—Claidi the cowardly spineless creep.
    Looking back on this now—I mean now it’s too late, since I did do it and there’s no going back—my nerves seem pointless.
    Let me describe how the Garden looked though. I want to put it down, because I’ll never see it again, will I? And the joke is: it was partly mine if what Jizania said about my mother was true.
    The trees rested like soft, dark blue clouds and tapering, pale, dark towers, asleep. The lawns were like grey velvet. Black shadows tabled across. Here and there, a rim of silver, moon on water. One fountain I could see ceaselessly curving over and over, a stream of liquid spangles…
    Somewhere a bird sang a brief little silvery song. They often do on warm nights. And from the river a hippo grunted.
    Then a lion roared. They didn’t mean anything by it, roaring. Just exercising their lungs. But loud.
     
    Above, all the stars. Would they be different over the Waste?
    Perhaps it wasn’t really fear I felt. Perhaps leaving this place that I hated—which had been so boring and vicious and frankly dangerous for me—I was sad, after all.
    When I’d left Jizania, I’d hidden, as you know, and written in this book. I already had all the keys and the wine for the Guards at the Pavilion and some things Jizania had told me to get from the Maids’ Hall.
    These included my strongest shoes, which I put on. I’d put everything else in a little bread sack from the kitchens. (Another theft. Several actually. I was even stealing Nemian from them, in a way.) She’d said I should start at midnight. The clock high up on the House sang out its thin strokes, the only hour it sounds anymore.
    I came down to the Garden and went along toward the Pavilion of Black Marble, approaching from the Upper Shrubberies.
    (Jizania had said that it wouldn’t do for me to go straight down from her rooms, the way we had earlier. I thought she was sensibly not involving herself any further. But now I wonder if she gave me a last chance to look around, to feel my nerves and my strange regret, to be sure .) Then, as I was walking through the hibiscus shrubs, I met a lion.
    We both stopped and gaped at each other. It seemed as surprised as I was.
    I wasn’t sure what to do. It was a lion . Of course, I’d seen them out before, but on leashes. Anyway, this one was perfectly friendly, or should I say indifferent. It shook its head and padded by, creamy in moonlight, and smelling of the white hibiscus flowers.
    When I’d gone on a bit further, though, I looked over from a break in the bushes, and on the Vine Terraces that run down there, lamped by the moon, two other lions (lionesses) were playing together, rolling over and crushing the vines and the fat grapes, so the air reeked of juice.
    On the night Nemian was to escape, the lions had also escaped. If necessary, this would make a splendid diversion.
    A coincidence? No, I thought not. Jizania had sent someone else on another errand… Hadn’t she said she had keys to each lock in the House and Garden?—that would include the lions’