Sutler's Road, page 2
As we descended the last of the cliff-backed road, I lost sight of the ships behind the many buildings and the crowd. The onlookers were eager as ever for a word with me, but I had no time that day. I stepped down the pier with my admiral, my reeve, and the Master and Madam O’Nropeel.
My first good look at the ship from Heneur and her crew was arresting. In a word, they were haggard. Her tall and thickly-bearded captain descended the gangway with a limp and did not entirely fill the clothes he wore. We met the captain upon the uncluttered pier beneath the gangway.
He set himself down before me and left his forehead on the fresh planks as he spoke. “My lord. My name is Etchpay O’Ngrocha, Captain of the Phalia and proud son of Heneur. I beg your pardon for the imposition of our arrival and do also, my lord, beg for mercy.”
“Rise, Captain, please,” I said without attempting the unfamiliar name.
He stood but kept his eyes down. His voice stayed very small. “Pardon, great lord. I have never had an audience with royalty.”
“Captain, the letter from your arilas explains your cause. Bring your crew ashore. Eat a meal with me.”
He looked to the men that lined the rail of his ship. They did not move.
I did not understand their hesitation until Madam O’Nropeel came forward with a bow and said to them, “Your families will need you strong for the voyage home. They will not suffer any more for your taking time enough to see to yourselves. The oars will be lighter. En’prom, ehh?”
I missed the meaning of the last entirely, but it made the sailors chuckle—some Heneuran slang, it seemed. I was grateful for it, whatever the meaning.
Madam O’Nropeel did me the further service then by ushering our guests to the inn, using on-again and off-again with mystifying ease the heavy-tongued Heneuran accent. She ruffled Captain Gern’s feathers when she waved him and his soldiers off, inviting in Mercanfur’s sailors from the crowd, instead. I was certain that Gern would have words for her after, but I must say that I agreed with her. Gern and his stone-faced Chaukai would make poor dinner companions compared to Mercanfur’s swaggering sailors. I felt that I was seeing her for the first time.
She was the only woman there—a mother of nine and a survivor of both Wilgmuth and Bessradi. She had a strong jaw, dark eyes, and a hard and steady face that bore the marks of a lifetime of work. There was a small dark mole beneath the corner of her left eye and a bit of gray in her long black hair. Her fine linen dress was dark blue and modest, and over it she wore a very sensible shoulder wrap—the only one of us from town who’d thought to wear something against the cool sea breeze.
She carried the event further for me then, starting a conversation in earnest about Etchpay’s ship, its port of call, and the voyage that had brought them to our shore. She had to translate great pieces of the captain’s tale once he got moving, but I was utterly captivated despite the interplay. They had made the trip to us by sailing blindly out to sea during the dark of night and navigating north beyond the sight of land by dead reckoning alone. My admiral wrung his hands throughout the tale and afterward asked Etchpay why he had done it. We heard the sad tale that the Phalia was the best Heneur had left—the rest taken or sunk by the corsairs that racked her coasts. His tale took the entire meal, and afterward the captain turned to me.
“Great prince, I must ask it. The supplies you carried here speak of your intentions. But please, my lord, I must say to you that without your aid, all of Heneur will become Aderanion slaves. I beg it of you, great prince, on behalf of my people, will you stand with us?”
The room looked to me. Help them, they urged despite our having just a few hundred men-at-arms, a single ready ship in harbor, and a bit of food to spare.
A Yentif would seize the ship, take the crew as slaves, and petition the Council of Lords to sanction Arilas Vlek for the trespass. It bothered me a great deal that this was my thought as I looked at them.
“Captain,” I replied, “you may take home with you all that you can carry. My finest ship will escort you, and I will send envoys to meet with your arilas.”
“Master Sevat and his family would be most welcome,” he said heartily.
I’d meant my reeve and Chairman Nace, but could tell already from the width of Etchpay’s smile that Master and Madam O’Nropeel would be much preferred. I shook his hand.
The prideful sailors refused all invitations to take rooms at the inn, preferring to retire to their ship. They had much to do to prepare her. We showed them to the pier, bid them a good afternoon, and started back toward Urnedi.
Selt approached me as we rode up, and I chuckled at the work he had to do to maneuver his pony through the maze of my tall guardians.
He got no closer.
A grinding sound drew our eyes up the sheer landward cliff face to an avalanche of stone that was already upon us. My guards flung themselves in the way, and an ox-sized boulder crushed a half-dozen before being deflected away from me.
A stinging blow upon my scalp knocked me from my horse.
2
Geart Goib
The library was quiet. Avin and I sat alone in the center of the large reading room beneath its marble dome. The aisles of tall shelves around us were cold and deserted. The shadow of Tanayon Cathedral had moved over the building, and the lone librarian had yet to start a fire.
My eyes lost focus again and drifted to the tall windows and the gardens beyond. It was snowing again, and the priests who hurried along the avenues carried parasols to keep it off their black robes. It was the second time it had snowed since General Leger Mertone had led our company into the Kaaryon. It was going to be a cold spring.
I read one more sentence on the sicknesses of the liver but could not manage another. The long ride south and the quiet time in the reading room had not cleared my head as I’d hoped. My failure after the Battle of Urnedi hung upon me as it had each of the hundred days since.
“This was a mistake,” I whispered. “We will not learn any new words here.”
Avin said to me, “Patience, Geart. We didn’t come all the way to the capital for just a few words.”
“Leger is not getting what he needs from our visit to this library, either. The Conservancy is not watching this place.”
He nodded reluctantly, and we started to gather up the volumes we had collected. When Avin had been a law priest, he’d defended a man who’d fallen into a trap laid by conservancy priests in that very room. We had already wasted three of our five days trying to draw attention to ourselves. We would have to try something else.
“We should have stayed in Enhedu,” I said. “I should be sitting with the Mother Yew, and you should be teaching the Chaukai how to make the healing magic. A few were just starting to catch on.”
“Hush,” Avin replied. “Here he comes again.”
The librarian was a perfect servant of the church—formal, elegant, humble, and happy. He wore the typical cream-colored tunica of a prelature functionary and a white wool robe against the cold. Both garments were spotless, and they made our simple gray robes seem very drab. His manners made it clear that he was from Bessradi and we were not—in case his clean chin, trim hair, and manicured fingernails failed to do so. Each of his visits had been exhausting.
But he came this time without so much as a bow, dropped himself into a chair, and said, “You won’t find what you are looking for here—not in the books anyway. They can’t be written down.”
He meant the magic words—the nouns and verbs that aimed the magic of the Earth and the Shadow.
“How many do you know?” I asked abruptly. This was not what I was supposed to say. Avin did not look happy.
The librarian shrugged and said, “I know enough that the hunger does not keep me awake and angry. You?”
“Fewer than that,” I replied. Hunger was the right word. Come the spring I was to sing the nouns I’d learned to a tree as old as the earth itself. I had not learned a single word the entire season.
Avin said to him, “I am sorry. I think there is some confusion here. We came to study the teachings of the prophet Khrim—as we mentioned when we arrived.”
“By reading the diaries of healers? Come now, tell me what you are really here to find.”
Avin’s reply was sharp. “You are the worst kind of fool. The Conservancy would burn us all alive for discussing this. What do you take us for?”
Avin shot me a glance that I understood quite well, and I focused upon our enemies. There were 126 Hessier in Bessradi, each as plain to me as a spot of rust upon a sword. None of the Hessier had moved any closer. I signaled that all was well.
The librarian’s demeanor did not change. He traced the wood grains upon the table with his finger and asked, “Have you ever tried to write them down?”
“Writing them is forbidden,” Avin replied.
“It’s a stupid law,” the librarian said as though he had no fear of the Conservancy—which could only mean that he worked for them. We had a plan for what to do once we found such a man, but I did not care just then. My hunger spoke for me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They are not really words,” he replied. “The vocalization from one singer to the next is different. If we tried to write down a song, we’d each write it differently.” He took the brush, ink stone, and vellum that Avin had been using. “Here, let me show you.”
He scribbled a few words upon a page and flipped it over. Then he said to us, “Try to write down the healing song. Go ahead.”
Avin did so and passed the brush to me. It took me a moment to make the attempt. The healing song was the first that Avin had taught me: heal the flesh of man. I sounded out the words one by one. “Horrend swenda seh ahsan.”
They turned over theirs. What I read made no sense. “Puth etch id sastillie? Egat sop us senvat engal?”
“What a bunch of gibberish,” Avin said. “What trick is this?”
The librarian shrugged. “Like I said, they are not really words.”
Avin sat back in his chair. “Go on.”
“It is the will of Bayen. When we make the magic, we are channeling His will and allowing Him to express it through us. We sing the thoughts of Bayen. What comes out of our mouths is nonsense. ‘The language of dreams,’ is how Khrim Zovi described it. The songs cannot be written down or read. They must be heard.”
I very nearly corrected him. Bayen was a fiction of the Church that took credit for the magic of the Spirit of the Earth and the Spirit of the Shadow. But the rest of what he said rang very true.
“What talent allows us to hear it?” Avin asked.
“It is not a talent. It is a measure of righteousness. If you are righteous, Bayen’s will may be done through you. It is exactly as the Bayen’s Creed promises. ‘We believe our God, the giver and taker of all life, speaks through the prophets.’” He let this sink in for a moment before saying, “We three are not like other priests who struggle to hold onto a single song. We can hear and speak the will of Bayen above. We are prophets, my friends, learning the divine language of our Lord.”
“Share one,” I said. “Tell me a word that you know.”
“Not here, not now. We would be overheard. But if I might suggest it, there are others like ourselves that gather from time to time. You should join us—exchange words.”
I said to him, “Give me a word right now, or you will never see us again.”
“Hold on,” Avin said. “We don’t want one word. We want them all. Meet us in the plaza behind the healers’ dormitories three nights hence during evening prayer.”
“At tithe time? Good idea. Good location, too.”
“Is it agreed?”
“It is. My name is—”
“I am not interested in your name,” Avin said. “You will not ask us any questions, and we will not ask you any either. You bring your group, and we will bring ours. We trade the ‘thoughts of Bayen’ as you call them, one for one, and then we part ways. Take it or leave it.”
The librarian bowed and started gathering up the books as though we were not there. We collected our things, hurried out into the snow, and made for the barge we’d hired.
“I needed a word,” I said to Avin. It was nearly a growl.
“Do not be angry with me because your plan has worked. Come, Leger and Sahin await our return.
3
Minister Sikhek
The 93rd of Winter, 1195
“You are fond of Bessradi’s river, Minister Sikhek,” Minhost said as he and I made our way up from the private boat landing beneath the Treasury Keep.
I considered killing him as I had on so many recent occasions. I counseled him, instead. “Hessier show passion for nothing.”
His tone did not change. “Yet it seems you are fond of this dirty water. You are never far from it.”
“You are forgetting your age,” I told him.
“I am not,” he said defensively. “You made me 186 years ago.”
“Men would laugh at the things you say and the ways that you say them.”
“If I desire them to, men will laugh at everything I say.”
We reached my private chamber, and I stopped us there. “Who were you before I made you Hessier?” I asked.
“I was Amon Pormes, Arilas of Trace, and your loyal servant.”
“And what do you remember about being alive?”
“I … don’t remember anything.”
“But you used to.”
“Did I?” he asked with a small voice and something resembling a frown.
I said to him, “As Hessier grow older they forget what it was to be alive.”
“Do we become closer to the Shadow, more powerful?”
“No. Those who forget begin to mimic the living. Disobedience follows—”
“I would never disobey you.”
I could not recall being interrupted by one of my Hessier before. Not in all my 1,300 years. Minhost looked at me then like a child who’d been caught with a mouthful of cake. He realized his expression, forced it away, and gathered in a thick cloud of magic like a boy showing off his muscles. But Minhost was no boy. The darkness he gathered onto his dead flesh was a near perfect expression of the power that the Shadow granted us. I bathed in the black fog, and for a moment, I had hold of a memory of my own.
The small blonde head cradled upon my shoulder.
“Daddy, stay. I’m cold,” she said, and I hugged her close. Her blood poured through her dress and along my arms and chest. It began to drip from my fingers. I tried to hold it in, but her life slipped away. Large hands took hold of me, and her small body fell.
I chased the moment—the last I knew to be mine—but was left with nothing but a pale remnant of sorrow and a reminder of why I was made and for whom.
The Shadow, the Spirit of Darkness, the Destroyer—He cries for His freedom. It was His Vesteal priests that made me Hessier and taught me how to kill the Spirit of the Earth. A great many things happened in the thirteen centuries that followed, but all that mattered was that the Vesteal had escaped the Shadow’s control and so had I.
But none of this was for Minhost or the rest of my sheepdogs to know. The shepherd does not discuss his goals with the domesticated.
I refocused upon my most valuable and disobedient dog. I asked him, “And what of your prisoner? Was this power of yours sufficient to compel him to answer my questions about Parsatayn?”
“No,” he replied and abandoned his display.
“Why?”
“He must be a thrall of our rivals in the Bunda-Hith.”
This was the same conclusion I had come to, but with facts Minhost could not know. His logic relied upon the arrogant assumption that no man could resist him. Hessier who were under my control were not capable of arrogance, either.
I did not respond to him, but continued on into the wide theater-like chamber. Minhost’s fate needed an audience. The twenty metal-clad Hessier that waited for me there turned and bowed. The attending collection of conservancy priests scurried for the exit and closed the doors while I stepped onto the riser.
“The Council of Lords convenes in two days time,” I said to them. “What news of my city?”
They reported in turn what they’d heard from their networks of thralls and informants. Most had nothing to report. This was a satisfactory circumstance after the long seasons of chaos that followed the disastrous use of fire by lesser Yentifs in a coup attempt against Lord Vall. In that one day, a plurality of Lord Vall’s sons and a third of the capital had been consumed. The coup failed before it started, and I’d strained both my Hessier and the Ministry to preserve the city and reassert my mandate. I would have described the year 1195 as successful if Minhost had not failed to quash the one nexus of power that remained beyond my control—Parsatayn and his Chancellery. No man had survived our attention so long. I would have killed him if he had not proven to be the most effective chancellor in Bessradi’s 600-year history. Taxes were collected on time, the slave pens were full all year round, and the inefficiencies of graft and larceny were under control.
