I wondered when Jarat would retire. Or Kircher, come to that. In the case of Jarat, probably never, I decided.
My first act was to open the stronghold oubliette in the basement. I shut down the shields and deactivated the locks, and then spent a long time obliterating all traces of what the oubliette had been used for. I used a flamer to scour the walls and burn away the runic inscriptions. The grisly remains of Cherubael's previous host form, now an empty husk, lay amid the slack chains, and I cremated that too. The host form had been a vat-grown organic vessel I had privately commissioned for use in the original summoning. At the time, it had been a hard enough decision just to use a synthetic body.
I thought of Verveuk and shivered. I burned everything.
Then I bathed, and stayed a long time in the hot water.
* * *
Two weeks I spent, recuperating at Spaeton. I had tried to rest, or at least recover, during the voyage home, but there is a tension in travel itself and my concerns about the daemonhost's rudimentary confinement had prevented me from relaxing.
Now, I could rest at last.
I took long walks around the headland's paths, or stood on the point watching the waves crash into the rocks at the fringe of the inlet. I sat reading in the gardens during the warm evenings. I helped junior staff members collect early windfalls into wicker drowsies in the orchards.
I went nowhere near the library, the maze or my office. Alizebeth was never far from my thoughts.
Aemos served as secretary during that period, a job that Bequin would previously have undertaken. Around breakfast time every morning, he would inform me of the number of communiques received overnight, and I would tell him to handle them. He responded to general letters, filed private ones for my later attention, and stalled anything official. He knew there were only a few kinds of communique that I would permit myself to be troubled with if they arrived: word of Bequin, a direct communication from the Ordos, or anything from Fis-chig.
On a bright morning early in my third week there, with dawn mist fuming off the lawns where the early sun caught it, I was sparring with Jubal Kircher in the pugnaseum.
It was the third morning we had done so. Realising how out of condition I felt, I had commenced a regime of light combat work to tone myself up. We were dressed in bodygloves with quilted shield-sleeves, and circled each other on the mat with scorae, basket-hiked practice weapons from Carthae.
Jubal was a weapons master but he was getting a little old, and on peak form I had no trouble besting him. Where he truly excelled me was in combat-lore and the techniques of military science, which he had studied all his life. He used those that morning, preying on my softness and slowness, overwhelming my superior strength and speed with patient expertise.