Age of Ash, page 30
Tregarro let his gaze move along the roadside. His gaze lingered for a breath or two on the retreating forms of the palace guard. If Byrn a Sal knew for certain the secrets and intentions of the brotherhood, he wouldn’t be seeing the redcloaks from the back. They’d either be facing him or they’d be as invisible as wind. He allowed himself a thin smile. Other than that, a servant girl who stumbled and was steadied by her mother. A merchant’s cart pulled by a beautiful grey mare worth more than everything she hauled. A flight of geese, high above the city, honking and calling in their ragged line. One of his guards swallowed uncomfortably.
“Well enough, then,” Tregarro said. “But stay sharp. You’re not a pair of taproom knives. You’re the face of the Daris Brotherhood.”
A flicker of shock passed through the young one’s eyes, as if Tregarro’s scars made even the mention of the word face a dangerous choice. He was sorry he hadn’t been harsher with them, but changing his course now would seem petty. Would be petty. Would seem petty because it was.
“Report in at the end of your guard,” he said. “I’ll want a full account.”
“Yes sir. Of what, sir?”
“Make it as full as you can,” he said. “I’ll tell you whether it was enough.”
He turned on his heel and walked back the way he’d come. Well, fine. Just a bit petty after all.
Sammish didn’t change her stride when the scarred man came around the corner, but her heart sped up. It was their third time around the brotherhood’s house, this time with Sammish dressed as a servant girl and Saffa as her mother. Before, Sammish had been blind and Saffa led her. Before that, they’d been hauling sacks of laundry. No one had taken notice of them as Sammish had made her study.
The change in the brotherhood’s compound was the difference between sleeping and wakefulness. Where she had walked into the Daris Brotherhood before, there were double sets of guards now. And worse, the guard had the too-sharp manner of men in the shadow of the whip. Any cutter worth salt would call off a pull when they saw the intended victim come alert. It was madness not to. And if the compound had been complacent before, it was sharp as a needle now. The side door that had stood open with servants gossiping through it was closed. The watch stations where men had played dice and traded jokes had no games in them. The brotherhood had even put mercenaries on the public street. If a house in Longhill had changed its demeanor so much, everyone from the southern gate to the Temple would have known there was trouble brewing, but Green Hill seemed to think that noticing such things was beneath its dignity. Or maybe they smelled trouble differently than Sammish did.
The scarred man—the one Alys had called Tregarro—made his soft way to the guards, and the swordsmen went stiff with fear. Sammish became very aware of how easy it would be for the captain of the enemy guard to glance over at them. She wondered if he’d ever seen Saffa before, or drawings of her.
A merchant’s cart clattered down the street, heading toward her, a great grey mare stepping proudly before it. The scarred man turned his gaze to the street just as Sammish’s foot caught a loose stone, her ankle rolling. She stumbled just when he was looking toward her, and for a few knife-bright heartbeats, she was sure he’d seen her for what she was. Saffa took her arm.
“What’s wrong?” the woman muttered, but as she did, the guard captain looked away. Sammish felt the fear in her throat like she was going to be ill. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak in case she did something else stupid that drew attention to them. Sammish tried to keep her body from trembling, but the shock added to her own hunger made her weakness hard to conceal. Saffa said nothing, but her face hardened.
“We should go around once more,” Sammish said.
“We should get food and a place to rest,” Saffa said, and this time Sammish didn’t fight. She only wanted to walk the compound’s perimeter again because she hadn’t seen the flaw in it that she needed. She’d had the chance to slip into the enemy’s rooms once, and she had wasted it. No matter how dearly she hoped to find a chance to do it again, it wasn’t there. She let Saffa turn her away from Green Hill and the palace and trudge south toward Stonemarket, where they would attract even less attention.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said as they turned into a slowly curving street that led toward the cistern. “I should eat. I’m not thinking straight.”
They stopped on a bench near the market square, but not in it. Saffa left her for a time and came back with little bowls of oats and egg. They weren’t seasoned, but Sammish ate it all down to the shine all the same. A girl with a handcart sold them fresh water with crushed mint to wash it down. Saffa paid with a bronze coin going green at the edge.
“I’m sorry,” Sammish said. “You shouldn’t have to do that. It’s my city. I can feed myself.”
The Bronze Coast woman didn’t answer. In the afternoon light, she looked old. The creases by her mouth were like bloodless cuts in her flesh, and her eyes were thick with fatigue. Sammish guessed that her own were too. It had been a hard year.
Around them, the traffic of Stonemarket flowed—carts and sacks and wagons. A yellow cat dashed by with something in its mouth, and Sammish noticed how much her city had grown in the months since Byrn a Sal had taken the throne. Her life had been Seepwater and Longhill and Riverport. The Temple had been outside of her private Kithamar, and Oldgate practically a foreign land. Now she was planning a pull in Green Hill and sitting on a Stonemarket bench among the Hansch without so much as feeling odd about it. Strange how things turned.
She thought of Alys, and sighed. Strange how things turned.
Without preamble, she said, “That was disappointing.”
“Yes,” Saffa agreed. And then, “What are your eyes seeing?”
Sammish leaned back and the springtime sunlight pressed itself against her eyelids as she spoke. “They’re watching. It makes things hard.”
“Possible, though,” Saffa said. “It has been done before.”
“That’s not what makes it possible. Someone put hands on the blade before, yes. But they’re like me.”
“How?”
“They did it and they got caught. Have you ever seen a street player doing false magic? Hiding a stone in his fingers or making birds come out of a girl’s skirts? Once you find the trick of it, that’s all you see. So it has to be something new every time. What the other ones did before, even if we knew it, it wouldn’t help because those fuckers know it too. If I’d slipped in and out before without them catching wise, I could get in that way again. But since they know, I have to find something else. If it were a normal pull, we could switch target. But these are the only bastards who have what I want.”
Saffa let the silence between them stretch, and Sammish felt her mind starting to come together. Whether it was the food or the rest, she couldn’t say, but she felt clear and solid.
“What we have against us is that they know to watch for us. More guards, more discipline. And they have power. Coin alone would be bad enough, but they’re like you. They know mysteries we likely don’t, and if there’s something sacred in that space, it’s sacred to them, not me.” She opened her eyes and turned to Saffa. “You don’t have anything you can do? Like with Orrel, or the plague street?”
“Ausai and Drau Chaalat knew me. This is the heart of their power, not mine.”
“Figured as much,” Sammish said. “That’s all right.”
“Is it?” Saffa said. “It sounds like doom.”
“That’s just what’s against us,” Sammish said. “There’s for us as well. There are house mice in Longhill we can go to if we need to. Calm Biran and Adric Stone. The compound’s large. Something that big is hard to watch. That means there’s more people.”
“That’s bad.”
“It’s good. We only need one hole to flow through. Each of those guards is a chance for the enemy to slip. And…” Sammish rubbed her fingertips together, feeling the grips of her fingers catch against each other. There was something else. Something at the edge of her mind that she hadn’t put words to before. Now the words came. “And they’re scared. Frightened. It puts them on guard, but it tempts them to make mistakes.”
“What mistakes?” Saffa asked, but Sammish didn’t hear her. Not really. Her mind was running ahead. If they couldn’t pull away, push in. They were on alert. How could she control that? They were afraid. How could she frighten them?
“The captain. Tregarro,” she said. “Do his scars look to you like they came from fire?”
Where is she?” Alys asked.
“Sammish?” Little Coop said. “Should I know? Sammish is more your friend than mine.”
It was still too cold for the shutters of the Pit’s common room to be open, but open they were. The keep’s hunger for the coming season drove him to pretend the warmth that had come was enough, and the drinkers and thugs and street rats of Longhill played along, throwing a little more wood into the grate and keeping their jackets around them. Some took their cider and beer out to the street to stand in the sunlight, where the spring had more nearly come. Finches no bigger than Alys’s thumb buzzed through the open windows and out again, chirping to one another. Lanna’s Hoel had returned from a winter’s contract clearing ditches for a farmstead east of the city, and was spending his bronze like he’d never run out.
Alys leaned forward, elbows on the scarred wood of the table. She scowled the way she would have around Ullin’s friends in Stonemarket to show that she was a woman to be feared, but Little Coop had known her on and off since they’d both been digging the edge of the Silt with Grey Linnet, and he only shrugged.
“Last I heard she was talking about some kind of pull with Adric Stone,” he said.
“She’s captaining her own pulls now?”
“Maybe. It’s just something I heard. Might be a lie.”
“What kind of pull?”
“Am I Adric? How would I know? She didn’t talk with me about it,” Little Coop said. “She’s no blood to me, any more than you are. She’s a good walk-away when you need one, and otherwise, she’s just another turd on the float, same as any of us. If I needed to find her in a hurry, I’d be asking you.”
Alys shifted on the bench. The keep made his ponderous way over to the fire and threw on another log. A little cloud of embers flared and went grey. Just past the shutters, a pack of street dogs was barking at a prison cart. The wind shifted, carrying the smell from the cart through the Pit, but only for a moment.
“There’s money in it if I can find her quickly,” Alys said.
“Well, aren’t you the prince of all things,” Little Coop said, but he said it with a smile. “Look, I don’t have anything worth paying for, but the last time I worked with her, it was a crew Nimal put together. Just a day of cut-and-run. Was months ago, but he could find her then. Maybe he’ll know how to find her now.”
Alys took a bronze from her belt and put it on the table with a click. “You run into her, you let me know, yeah? There’ll be more once I find her if you’re the finger that points the way.”
Little Coop looked at the coin, then up at her. When he picked up the coin, it was with a shrug that meant Who am I to turn down free coin? and it didn’t give her much hope he’d reach out to her if Sammish lifted her head above water.
“What about Nimal?” she said. She should have asked before she gave him the coin. But Little Coop didn’t seem to expect payment for every word he said.
“Last I saw, he was in Seepwater. Down by the stage. They’re putting up a show, and he’s good at building crews for show times. For all I know, Sammish is with him.”
Alys nodded, rose, and walked away, swinging her stick a little too wide, even if she didn’t hit anything with it. She felt the eyes of the others on her as she headed out for the street, but when she looked back, she caught no one’s gaze. She turned south and west, walking the thin, curving streets with her chin high and her chest out, making a show of filling the road from side to side in part because she didn’t actually feel right.
There was an uncomfortable buzzing feeling in her mind—distress without any clear idea what she was distressed about—like a beehive sounding its alarm. She did her best to ignore it, but it wouldn’t fade, and whatever it meant was wrapped up with Ullin’s bloody face being sluiced clean on the street and the girl she didn’t kill and Andomaka saying Hunt her down and bring her here. And with Darro whispering Why won’t you look at my face? in her dreams. She didn’t like the confusion, and she didn’t know how to clear it away.
A street-corner magician produced a pigeon from a burst of green flame, holding it out to the people and horses as if he’d done something special. Alys kept walking without tossing a coin in the old man’s box, and then felt an unexpected stab of guilt. As full as her wallet was, maybe she should have.
The stage stood in the middle of a wide square near the university, its boards ribs-high from the ground so that no one had their view blocked by the head of someone standing before them. And, Alys guessed, because it gave the impression that the women among the players might risk someone peeking up their skirts. The performance at the moment was a tumbling act: large men tossing small girls high enough that they were in more danger of crashing into the roof above them than falling to the ground. She didn’t pay them attention. Her eyes were on the crowd. If Nimal was working a pull, they’d likely be near the back, and dipping into the little pond of audience like birds diving for fish.
She saw Dammen first. Last spring he’d been too young and small to work pulls, but now he was old enough. A mop of dark, curly hair over a round face. She thought at first that he’d seen her and was coming to talk, but a movement to her left caught her. He wasn’t the only one walking her direction. Disbelief, outrage, and amusement leapt through her like the tumblers on the stage. When Dammen was three steps away, she turned, meeting Nimal with her full attention.
“Is this a joke?” she spat.
Nimal’s eyes went wide, and then he laughed. One of his teeth was missing.
“Alys! I didn’t recognize you. By all the gods, I mean it. From the back you looked like a Riverport girl come down for the show.”
“Did I?”
Dammen looked from one to the other, panic in his eyes. Nimal waved him off, then put his hand in his sleeve. The cutter’s blade flashed as it disappeared. “No harm, no harm. Honest error. And you can’t tell me this is how you wore your cloaks before. You stand out in this bunch like you owned the place, yeah? Moved up in the world.”
His smile seemed genuine, but it still felt like a dig. Alys crossed her arms. “Need a word with you. Not here.”
Nimal scratched his arm, and there were words in it meant for the others in his crew. His pull would wait. She nodded him toward one of the stands at the edge of the square where a brewer had set up for the day. Alys bought, and Nimal drank.
“I’m looking for Sammish. Have you seen her? You know where I can find her?”
“She still has the room by the baker’s, but I know she’s been straying outside Longhill. I thought she was following after you.” His voice was friendly enough it almost hid the edge. The buzzing in Alys’s mind seemed to grow louder. She was supposed to press on Sammish, but what came out of her mouth was different.
“I go where the work is, that’s all. You aren’t running your crew in the quarter either. You’re coming here.”
“No insult,” Nimal said, lifting a palm like he was ready to deflect a blow. “Didn’t know the plan was yours. Looked from outside like maybe you were hiring on with someone else.”
“What’s the difference? The coin spends the same.”
“One of them’s a Longhill pull, and one’s not. But you do what you do. It looks to be working out, and I don’t judge.”
Alys scowled hard enough that her cheeks ached. “Sammish, though. When was the last time you saw her? Little Coop said you’d had her on a crew.”
Nimal shook his head. “That was forever ago. Between harvest and Longest Night. I brought her on as a walk-away, paid her with how to find Orrel, and haven’t seen her since. She might have taken some offense that I didn’t give her the full cut.”
“Orrel?”
“Yeah, there was a time she was sniffing around about a fortune-teller’s prop knife, and asking where Orrel had got to. I didn’t know anything about the one, but I did the other. Offered it to her instead of her coin. We haggled, but you know how it is. Sometimes you regret the things you agree to.” He shrugged elaborately.
“Where is Orrel?”
“The earth and the air, now. They burned his corpse just after Longest Night. Sammish saw him before that. I don’t think she got what he owed her, though.”
“When did she know?” Alys said, and the man behind Nimal turned to look at her. “When did you tell her?”
“Like I said. After harvest. Just before your brother’s nameday.”
If he’d slapped her, it would have stung less. She and Sammish had hunted for Orrel together, but Sammish had found him and kept it secret. She found herself touching her wallet like she was making sure it was still there. Like she was seeing whether she’d lost something.
Nimal drank the last of his beer, handed the cup back to the boy at the brewer’s stand, and looked at her, tilting his head. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Look, it’s none of mine. Your work’s yours. But is this about what happened to Darro?”
It was. It had been. It had all been about Darro, about losing him and the pain of his being gone. About making it right. Why won’t you look at my face? The buzzing was louder than the crowd that cheered the tumblers. The spring sun was too bright and too hot. She turned her back and stalked away, not caring what Nimal thought. Not caring about anything but the tightness in her chest and the trembling in the world. She bumped into someone as she passed through the crowd, and didn’t look back to see who it was.
She walked toward Longhill. The afternoon sun shifted toward the palace. The streets reeked. Her hands ached, and she forced herself to unball her fists. She had been angry for weeks, it felt like. She couldn’t remember not being angry; even if there had been stretches when she’d forgotten it, the rage had always been there at the back, hadn’t it? It didn’t seem possible that she could be so consumed by it now if it hadn’t always been there, waiting in the dark of her soul and growing.
