Blade of Dream, page 26
His breath was warm in his lungs, and he fell into the long, deep rhythm of a hunter running down prey. He forgot the cold. As the murderer shifted, pretending to turn down an alley and then veering off at the last moment, it struck Garreth that he wouldn’t have been able to run like this a year ago. Months in the training yard had changed his body and his mind. The man before him was desperate and violent and armed, and Garreth was running at him instead of away. He plucked the whistle from his belt, put it between his teeth, and let his breath announce where he was to the other guards. The murderer looked back at him, teeth bared in anger and raw animal fear.
Garreth saw the shift in the man’s body, and knew that he’d given up flight for combat well before he turned. To his credit, it was a sudden break and well executed. The killer’s dull grey blade flicked out toward Garreth’s throat even before Garreth could haul back his own momentum. Garreth’s arm parried without him, and he spat out the whistle.
The man spread his arms, the blade out to the side and high, ready to swing down. In Garreth’s mind, Captain Senit said That’s the stance of a man who likes intimidating people more than he likes fighting. Looks like a fucking dancer.
“Last chance,” Garreth said, and before the murderer could reply, darted in low and hard. He felt his sword scrape deep against the man’s shinbone almost as he was jumping back. The murderer yelped and swung, but with the blade so far out from his midline, he might as well have been shooing flies. Blood ran down the man’s leg to the street. It steamed.
The rage in the killer’s eyes was turning to fear. Somewhere nearby, Marsen whooped like a boy playing at ball-and-whip. The murderer gathered himself for a last, desperate rush. Garreth waited. When the attack came, he ducked the killing blow, kicked the side of the man’s knee, and moved over him where he stumbled and fell to the filthy street. The grey blade went skittering away. Garreth had the point of his sword at the joint of the killer’s jaw, just under his ear, before the man—now the prisoner—could get his hands under him.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Keep fighting. Save us some time.”
The man’s mouth was a square gape of low, animal rage. “You think you win. I’ll see you dead. I’m going to piss on your mother’s corpse.”
“Nice work,” Marsen said, and kicked the murderer in the back. The man squealed and writhed. Maur trotted up, winded but not so much as he would have been before they’d joined the guard.
“Hellat?” Garreth asked.
“This one pinked him,” Marsen said.
“Oh. That was a mistake.”
“He’ll come to regret it. Briefly,” Marsen said, and dropped his weight on the prisoner, wrenching the man’s arm back and preparing to tie it. “What of it, brother? The magistrate’s gaol, or sew some rocks in your cloak and hack a hole in the ice?”
“Scriveners,” Maur said between gasps. “It was the scriveners. The guild that took the papermakers in.”
“Oh,” Garreth said. “That makes sense. They’ve still got their guild hall in Stonemarket?”
“Last I knew,” Maur said as he took a desultory kick at the murderer’s side. “But that may have changed when Thin Timmons died. He was the one who insisted on keeping it there.”
Marsen looked up at them with an indulgent kind of disgust. “Would my lords be so kind as to do their fucking jobs for a moment?”
“Sorry,” Maur said, and knelt to hold the killer’s shoulder back while Marsen bound his wrists and elbows. The blood on the ice and soaking the murderer’s leg seemed improbably bright, like the winter had turned it festive. Garreth kicked aside a turd and wondered what would happen if the killer’s wound went septic. Sometimes the magistrates insisted on keeping men like this alive until the city could execute them, and sometimes they just let the world take its course. Either way was fine with him.
In the days since Tenth Night, Garreth had become two men. His life had divided into aspects that were related, that touched like a man and his shadow, but they weren’t the same thing. He was a bluecloak serving under Captain Senit, friend to Kannish and Maur. Separately, he was something to a girl he’d met three times now and dreamed of more nights than not. Her danger and his hunger for her company—not only sex, though that was part of it, but the sound of her voice, the curl of her smile, the mordant bleakness that ran under her jokes like the river flowing under ice.
They’d spent the better part of that night talking—just talking. All the oddities of life in the palace, but how she’d come to lose her other home, how she’d lost her mother and nearly lost her friend Theddan. They’d ended the night almost too tired to speak, just leaning against each other. It had been the best night he’d spent since the last time he’d been with her.
That she was in danger was like sand in his bedsheets. He couldn’t rest, and even when he was doing something else, he was also thinking of her and of anything that he could do to bring her back to him and keep her safe. Where to see her, how to breathe a little more of her air, was a puzzle he chewed at, and there was no one he could share the problem with. He found himself turning to the details of the problem: How books were bound. How handwriting could be matched to the scribe. What the guilds knew about Ausai and Palace Hill. What people were saying about Byrn a Sal. Anything. Everything. It was all his alone to carry, except if it was hers too.
His other life—son of a merchant house, brother now to a married man and his Inlisc wife—barely intruded on him. It was only months ago, and felt too distant to have any effect on his present circumstances.
They passed through a wider street. The Temple loomed up to the right, strong and solid as a mountain. Garreth’s footsteps slowed. He caught Marsen’s eye. “Do you need me for this bit?”
The older guard shrugged. “Marching the scum into gaol is the glory bit. If you don’t want it, more for me and this one.”
“You take mine, then,” Garreth said, and turned to the east. “You can hand me some glory back another time.”
“Where are you going?” Maur called after him, but he only waved.
The sun moved more slowly through the sky than it had just weeks before. The days were already stretching toward a springtime that wasn’t here, but the cold of winter was at its worst. There’d be bodies of more than foxes and dogs to pry up off the ice and stone. Some of the people doomed to die of cold were waiting in the charity line at the Temple. They huddled against the wall in their rags and misery. The half-mad or wholly so, the men and women wasted and rheumy from their need for wine or something stronger, the simply unlucky: they all came to the Temple for a bit of food once a day. Not enough to live on, but enough to die more slowly. The mercy of a merciless god. They shied away from Garreth as he walked past them. He tried not to meet their gaze in case seeing him eye to eye would scare them away from the thin charity that was waiting for them.
The line ended at an open door. The smell of boiled wheat and barley carried to the street on a cloud of steam. Garreth pushed through and no one in the line objected. Inside, the desperate packed three thin tables shoulder to shoulder, eating mush from little tin bowls. When one finished, the priest-itinerant would take the bowl, usher the man or woman or child out into the cold, and bring whoever was at the head of the line in to take the empty spot. Garreth didn’t think they’d get them all fed before the sun went down.
One of the priest-itinerants was a wide-faced man with unkempt hair and a soft chin. His priestly robes were plainspun brown, but he had a wool shirt on underneath them.
“You’re Haral,” Garreth said.
“Bless, my cousin,” the soft-chinned man said. “Is there some way we can help the guard?”
Garreth stepped closer and lowered his voice. “You’re Theddan’s Haral?”
The shock in his expression was more than enough. Garreth had seen the same eyes on a dozen prisoners when he’d come through their doors. Guilt had a language all its own.
“I just need you to pass on a message, yeah?”
“Yes, of course,” Haral said.
“Her friend. The one who visits?”
“I know the one you mean,” the priest said carefully.
“Can you get a message to her?”
“I will try. I will do everything I can.” Haral nodded like he was agreeing with himself. “It may take some time. I don’t want there to be any trouble, sir.”
Garreth put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not ‘sir.’ I’m Garreth Left of the city guard, and we’re on the same side.”
Haral’s smile was slow, but real. Even with everything he’d heard about Theddan Abbasann, Garreth hadn’t quite put it together that Haral was in love with her. It was clear as fresh water to him now, though. Two idiots in over their heads, the pair of them, and the women besides.
Elaine a Sal had her coachman wear plain clothes and borrow a carriage that didn’t speak of Green Hill, much less the palace. She had him stop in a narrow street to the north and east of House Left as if by coming from the direction opposite the palace, she would be better disguised. She’d taken a cloak from the supply that the palace servant used. It was green with old, worn embroidery at the hem and a hood deep enough that she could hide in it. She’d thought when she chose it that it wouldn’t stand out in a Riverport street. Now that she was walking there, she wasn’t sure.
The cold was sharp, but it didn’t empty the street. The bitter chill of winter didn’t stop the errands and chores and daily business of Riverport. From what she could see past the dim tunnel of her hood, it didn’t even slow them down. Carts piled high with grey wooden crates rumbled down the street beside her. Two men in thick leather coats crossed in front of her, their voices raised and talking over each other about compensation rates for a lost toe. An older Inlisc woman with a wicker basket in her arms passed her, and Elaine hadn’t known she was there until she brushed past close enough to cast a shadow on her.
Elaine turned into a stonework niche where a statue had been once but wasn’t anymore. She pulled her hood back a little and glanced up and down the street, more than half expecting to hear voices call her name. That was her nerves, though. The truth was no one in the street noticed her. She was another body in a city filled with them. No one expected to see the daughter of the prince here, and so no one did. For them, she was just some Hansch girl in an old-fashioned cloak. She pushed the hood back and let the cold nip at her earlobes as she walked. She only made it a few doors farther before she plucked the cloth back up into place.
It was only another two streets to House Left and the wall she’d climbed over in the night a lifetime ago. It pulled at her like the earth pulling a stone as it fell.
“Don’t hurry,” she said under her breath. “You’ll only stand out more if you hurry.” But she hurried.
The days after Tenth Night had been strange for her. Talking with Garreth, telling him all the ominous things that had happened since her father had opened Prince Ausai’s private study, had been a relief she hadn’t known she needed. She’d said all the same things to Theddan, but the way Garreth listened and the way her cousin did weren’t at all the same. Theddan cared deeply, but keeping her attention could feel like work. Garreth drank her words in like they were water and he was dying of thirst. He’d asked questions that Theddan never would have thought to: Who built the iron door? Had it been cast in a single piece, or made in bits and assembled? Had the shelves the eerie books had rested on been new or ancient? Someone had made them, and if they knew who and when, it might tell her something. They were a merchant’s questions, sifting through small signs for the implications she might have overlooked.
He’d given her another way of seeing. Even if it hadn’t opened the mystery to her yet, she had reason to hope that it would.
They’d talked through all the rest of that night, the celebrations and feasting and intrigue rolling along without them. When the sky outside the little room had begun to shift from blackness to the deepest grey, Garreth had to leave or risk missing his end-of-duty call. She’d walked with him as far as they could go without risking being seen, and then a little bit farther. He’d taken her hand before he turned away, and she’d watched until he vanished down the corridor that led to the courtyard.
Afterward, she had gone back to her rooms, let the bedroom girl prepare her for bed as briefly as she could, and fallen into as deep a sleep as she could remember since she’d first come to the palace. The days since had been no easier, Halev and her father no more forthcoming, and the mystery of the books and the dead prince no less ominous, but she’d been able to bear them more easily. Each day she found herself wondering what Garreth was doing, what he might have found, and how she might see him again. Then a message came from the Temple, and she’d spent every day since planning for this walk, this moment. She told herself it was in service of her investigation, and sometimes—not always—she even believed it.
She passed by the door of House Left, her throat tight with the certainty that Garreth’s irate uncle would storm out as she did. She could practically feel his hand on her shoulder, turning her toward the stables and another ignominious cart ride back across the river. In her imagination, she took offense, announcing who she was and watching the proud-chested man wilt. An idiotic fantasy that would bring more trouble than it saved, and anyway by the time she’d entertained it, she was at the corner, turning down the side street, and it hadn’t happened after all.
She’d worried whether she would recognize the place where she’d crossed this wall before. She’d seen it months ago, and in darkness. But as she plucked back the hood again, the stretch of stone and stucco was so familiar that she thought she must have been dreaming of it. She put her hand on it the way Garreth had shown her, then hesitated and glanced back. There were a few people in the main street. A couple more farther down the side street who didn’t seem to be paying her any attention. Waiting for them to leave would be more suspicious than climbing the wall, but she still had to overcome the sense of danger. Danger of what? Embarrassment? Shame? Of being caught out and losing the chance to see Garreth? She was Elaine a Sal, daughter of the prince. What, after all, was the worst that could happen to her here?
She put her boot to the little toehold and hauled herself up and over. The courtyard looked more open and bare in the daylight than she remembered it. The door leading into the house was shut, and Garreth stood where he couldn’t be seen if it opened. His cloak was grey and plain. Not the blue of the city guard or the red of Palace Hill. He grinned, and she felt herself mirroring him. He gestured toward the door and motioned her for silence. She crossed the courtyard in fast, low strides as he opened the door, slipped into the warmth of the house, and paused, listening. Somewhere not far away, someone was moving. Garreth seemed to judge the sound, then crept down the hall, heading the opposite direction from her previous visit. There was nothing to do but follow.
The stairway he brought her to was so narrow that her shoulders brushed the walls on both sides at the same time and so steep it was almost a ladder. The wood was old and black with use, but it was solid enough that it barely creaked. She followed him up, first in silence and then struggling to hold back a mad, bubbling laughter.
“What are we doing?” she whispered as they came to a thin pair of boards that required an act of charity to be called a landing.
“It’s a guild meeting. My parents and Vasch will be there, and the servants don’t use these stairs when they don’t have to.”
“Why would they ever? These are terrible.”
“It’s just a little farther. Come on.”
They rose, him first and her just after, until he pushed open a trap door, turned back, and helped her up into a dim storage room. Crates and trunks and old furniture wrapped against dust filled the awkward space. What light there was peeked around the edges of old shutters. The air was surprisingly warm, though, and the sounds from the street were audible, but softer here. Carts and voices and the cooing of pigeons. She thought of the little room where they’d spent Tenth Night, and this seemed like its echo. Another hidden place in another stolen hour. Seen that way, there was a melancholy about it. But maybe a beauty too.
“We used to hide up here when we were young,” Garreth said. “Me and Kannish and Maur. When we were trying to avoid our brothers and sisters, we’d sneak up here and tell stories and play.” He shrugged away some memory she couldn’t share. “Are you well?”
“Frustrated,” she said. “Confused. Thwarted at every turn. No worse than I was the last time.”
“That’s something. Not worse isn’t worse, anyway. I don’t know if I have anything to help, but I’ve been talking to people. Here, look at these.”
He folded himself down to the floor, sitting with his legs tucked under him, and for a moment, she could see the boy he’d once been in the same place. As she sat beside him, he drew a handful of pages from his cloak and smoothed them out on the floorboards. They were covered in patterns and sketches of book spines and bindings with notes scrawled beside them in smudged ink. Garreth glanced over at her, half proud and half sheepish.
“It turns out there’s a lot of history about how books get made,” he said. “The three big questions are whether the pages are just stacked or if they got folded in bunches and the bunches sewn together, if the sewing was in straight lines or crossed like this one, and whether the threads were silk or not. If it’s all lined up right… well, then it might be old or it might be faked. If they don’t, though, you can be pretty sure that they were made recently and someone just wanted them looking old.”
“And you found all this out?”
“I asked,” he said. “Told the guild master there was a tax issue about whether an old book was real. Once I had her started, everyone in the hall weighed in.”
“I’m not sure I can get into the study again.”
“If you do, you’ll be ready.” He said it with a simple confidence that made her think it might be true. If she found her way back there, maybe she really would be ready. She wanted to think so.
