Sutler's Road, page 6
“Every bluecoat was a trainee at one point, and laugher is good for the soul,” I said and motioned for Grano to get us back to business. “Come. Lead on, Captain. Have your men checked the woods for survivors? We need someone who saw what happened.”
“The only tracks leading away belong to the attackers,” his lieutenant said and started us east. “They scaled a section of the wall hidden by a small stand of trees and approached behind the well house. Dagoda has a cellar entrance in the rear they used to gain entry. They had the building surrounded, and no one got more than a few paces past them. When they were done they left the way they came in. Beyond the wall the only tracks are from their horses heading out to the southwest.”
“No tracks in?”
“No. They must have arrived yesterday before it started snowing.”
“Show me,” I ordered, and we rode around to a harrowed path that led from Dagoda to the well house.
“Whose prints are those?” I asked and pointed at a smaller set moving north from the well house.
“She didn’t make it far.” he said and pointed at the prone body of a young woman who had tumbled partway down the snow-covered hill. Much of her hair and clothing was burned away.
I started to ask why no one had checked on her when I noticed a small circle of blood against the well house where a great many foot prints were clustered. “Someone was injured.”
This detail was clearly new to the lieutenant, and my estimation of the man diminished. It eroded still further when the girl rolled over and screamed in pain.
I dismounted and rushed to her side. Her burns wrapped from her left cheek and ear, onto her neck, and all the way down to the small of her back. What was left of her long auburn hair, simple linen dress, and heavy robe was soaked from her tumble down the snowy hill. One of her thin shoes was missing.
I touched her shoulder, and she slapped my hand away and glared with such venom I stumbled backward. Her beauty was stunning, despite the bruises, burns, and the smell of burnt hair and skin. Her dark, fiery eyes stole the words from my mouth, and the countless light-colored freckles that dotted her entire face drew me in, despite the burns. She looked thirty but could be no more than twenty—a Khrimish girl judging by the freckles, but was undoubtedly a mix of northern and eastern blood.
She squinted up at me against the glare of the sun upon the snow.
“I am Evand Yentif, Crown Prince of Zoviya and a colonel of the Hemari 5th. What is your name?”
“Tanner,” she said and managed somehow to hide her pain and ease herself up onto one elbow. Tanner was not the name she was born with, but Dagoda wasn’t known for cultivating heritage.
“Why did you strike me?” I asked and expected an apology. She offered none, nor did she answer my questions. “Who is your patron?” I asked instead.
Behind us came the sound of my brigade riding in.
She looked toward them. “Do you have a healer?”
“Are we bargaining?”
“For what?” she asked and tried to cover herself with her robe. A modest whore? How odd.
“I need good information about those responsible for this—the truth of it.”
She started shaking—did everything she could to suppress it. I told Okel to fetch her a blanket and some water. The pain overtook her before he returned. She folded forward and began to whimper. Whore or not, I desired to see her pain end. The burns would not kill her, but losing her beauty and her patron would cast her down to a place where death was a release.
Okel returned, and I draped the blanket over what of her was not tortured with burns. I knelt down with the waterskin.
“You will heal me?” she asked and waited for me to nod before she accepted it. She drank, thanked me, and said, “Ask your questions.”
“Why did you strike me?”
“The men who did this dressed as bluecoats. I thought you were one of them.”
“What? Hemari would not do such a thing.”
“Not Hemari—dressed like Hemari,” she said through the pain. “They put on a good show, but none of them were men of the Kaaryon. They were provincials, all of them.”
“Well enough. Thank you,” I said. I caught a faint whiff of her perfume through the rest of the many terrible smells. My eyes wandered. I lost my train of thought. “Tell me everything that happened.”
She blinked free two exquisite tears, and after a long breath, she began her tale.
“I woke to the sound of a struggle in the hallway. We were supposed to stay in our rooms, but I decided to take a look. I am glad that I did. The guard was missing, so I went down, only to find the main corridor empty as well. I followed the sound of the commotion down to the cellar behind the kitchens and was snatched by one of the fake bluecoats. There were twenty of them there, standing over all the dead guards. They had another one of the girls there too, so I thought at first that they were here to kidnap a bunch of us, but she was not struggling.”
“Who was the second girl?”
“A new arrival from Havish named Liv. She’d refused every order she was given from the moment she arrived. She killed a man trying to escape. They gave her to the guards as punishment. I don’t know how she survived it.”
“What were they doing in the cellar?”
“Liv directed them to a wall hanging in the corner. They found a vault hidden behind it and used a pair of long bars to force the hinges. They had the gold, silver, and trays of gems dumped into satchels and were moving out with it in no time.”
“Did you catch any of their names?”
“One. Their captain. A tall, thin man named Sahin with a gray beard and cold eyes. His men were lesser versions of himself.”
“What happened after they emptied the vault?”
“Screaming,” she said and went very still. “It happened so fast. Someone made a mistake, I think. I remember the strong smell of lamp oil and then the flames were everywhere. I got free of the man who had hold of me, but I lost my way and had to run through the fire to get to the back stairs. I rolled in the snow and did everything I could to hold still.”
“Captain Sahin let you live?”
“He must have thought me dead—same as your men.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“One of his scouts came running—told them that you and your Hemari were camped just up the road and were being stirred up by the fire.”
“That must have upset him.”
“No. It did not. They were not in the least bit concerned with the news of you. And I do not think they were here for the gold or to kill your brother.”
“How so? What else could he have possibly come for?”
“For the girl. For Liv. He used healing magic on her, right there by the well house. He is a mage of the wilds, that one, and when he sang he put his fingers deep inside her—a lover’s touch—a caress like none I’ve ever seen.”
She said this last with a long look into my eyes. I cleared my throat.
She whispered to me, “Do you know what I mean, Prince Evand? Have you ever touched a woman like that? In a loving way?”
I caught myself staring again at her many curves. “Thank you, Tanner,” was all I could manage.
I told a nearby lieutenant to fetch the battalion’s healer. Tanner quietly cried while she waited for the blue light that would take away her pain.
“Captain Grano, did you catch all of that?” I asked.
“All but the last part, sir.”
“Well enough. Draft a report of the day to my father.”
He rushed to it, and I stepped away with Okel. “What is your thinking?”
“A lot of trouble to go to if all you want to do is rescue someone.”
“I don’t know. Easterners are crazy like that about their women.”
He shrugged, which was a sure sign that Tanner’s notion of Sahin was well and truly possible.
I ordered the brigade made ready for the chase. This man and his tale could not be allowed to escape into the wilds. It was the sort that could stir up the East for a generation.
The battalion’s healer arrived. I gave him two weights of gold and asked that he get Tanner fit to ride. He was not pleased by the request, but I’d guessed his price. I left a troop behind to ensure that my witness made it south.
As we were getting moving, Captain Bellion reported that his cousin was missing. I encouraged him to edit his account of his cousin’s whereabouts—quietly discharge him from service due to declining health and let him go home, as it were. The captain thanked me for this, but his sentiment sounded very hollow.
8
Geart Goib
Greencoats made poor slaves.
“Get moving there,” I growled at a sergeant and thumped him hard across the shoulder with my heavy iron rod. He made eye contact, and I took him by the hair and raised my bar high overhead. “You have something to say, you wretched churl? You want to be leech bait?”
The man folded meekly forward at last, and the rest of the slaves upon the pier withered. The harbormasters bowed to me. I straightened my prelature robes and ignored them.
I got the rest up out of the barges and marched them toward the safety of Bessradi’s busy streets. There wasn’t a place in the capital that did not see groups of slaves carrying something somewhere.
Leger whispered to me, “Hessier where we expect?”
I reached out across the tortured carpet of the city. The Hessier were gathered at the treasury, the cathedral, and the tithe towers. “Yes,” I whispered back.
We reached the streets, and the men divided by troop. I discarded my heavy iron rod, and Avin led me to the Priests’ Quarter. I was glad for his pace. I could not stand the waiting, either. The long days of preparation were at an end—days spent needing, dreading, and hoping to hear the words the librarian had promised.
Avin turned the two of us, though, up the steps of an administrative building attached to the Tanayon. I was confused by the destination.
“You cannot hope to restore your lawyer’s credentials now,” I said to him. “We have only moments left before the meeting.”
“They are all busy with the tithe. Come. There is time.” He tugged me in and along a deserted, vestibule-lined hallway toward its single lit counter. The air of the place was heavy with the smell of old vellum and the linseed oil used to polish the cavern of dark wood.
Avin was so frantic when we arrived at the vestibule that he neither bowed nor introduced himself to the priest behind the counter as he withdrew sheets of vellum from his satchel. I balked at the distinction in our dress. Avin and I wore the simplest robes of prelature functionaries, cream-colored and unembroidered. The red hat priest behind the counter wore a trim black dalmatic with red silk embroidery upon its collar and cuffs. The round black hat that fit snuggly upon his head had only the thinnest red band upon it, but with it came power. His beard was more striking still. The long black spike reached all the way to his sternum and swung like the blade of a heavy dirk as he looked up at us.
“I’m in terrible trouble unless I can get them dated correctly,” Avin said to this bored-looking priest before he set the sheets and then a gold quarter on the counter.
“What are they?” the priest asked, eyeing the small coin.
“A few tithe receipts … reinstatement authorization. The nolumari I work for forgot he had these in a drawer all winter. Tells me, ‘just handle it.’”
“Do you have the approvals for the reinstatement?”
“What? No. That’s way above me—was all handled last session. This is just the document that authorizes him to wear a vest again—a formality, but you know what would happen to him if he tried to practice law without it. See, right there …”
But the man wasn’t looking at the documents anymore. He was quietly tapping upon the coin. “There is also the matter of getting the duplicates delivered to the archives in Alsonelm.”
Avin set a second coin next to the first.
“These look in good order to me,” the priest said, pulled an ink pad and a stone signature seal from a drawer, and put his mark upon each page. Avin took his copy and thanked the man by name for taking care of the filing—a sound tactic for ensuring that a task would be completed. The man did not seem very pleased by this but did smile a touch when he slid the coins into a pocket.
Avin bid him farewell and led us back along the corridor and down a broad flight of stairs to a well kept and warmly-lit clothier’s shop.
“Avin, what is this?” I asked. “We need to be to the meeting.”
“This is every bit as important to Prince Barok. Sit.” He pointed me at a long bench in the thin waiting area in front of the shop before he disappeared inside. This left me with nothing to do but stare at the foundation wall and dwell again upon my failure. I’d not learned any new words since the Battle of Urnedi, and the last was a verb: forgive. I made fists in my lap and stared at the gray wall.
“Reinstatement, huh,” someone inside said. “Haven’t seen one of these in a long while. Senior nolumari, too. Not sure I have any that are the right size.”
I heard the soft thunk of another coin but stopped listening. Avin clearly knew what he was doing, and the gray stone before me was proving oddly familiar.
“You don’t belong here,” I said to the stone. It was from Enhedu. Zoviya’s pillage of Edonia had included the very stone of its cities. My heart began to pound, and I felt like kicking something or someone. The stone did not belong there.
You fool, Geart. You should not be here either!
I needed to be back to Enhedu learning the names of trees and becoming the singer of a sacred song, not warming a bench in a cathedral.
Avin emerged with a small package that he jammed into his satchel, and we found our way out into the cold evening air. The sun was already down. We were going to be late. Avin cursed softly and all but ran as he led us away. The route he chose across the Priests’ Quarter kept the Tanayon Cathedral on our left as we followed the sculpture-littered maze of hedges and lawns around the tall spire.
“Avin,” I said urgently and pointed at a nearby tithe tower. “They are lighting the sconces. We will be late.”
“Rot,” he cursed, took a look around, and without another word, tugged me across one of the lawns and through a gap in a hedge. On the far side, a thin path made its way due north to a tree-shrouded plaza. It was surrounded by the adjoined buildings of the library, College of Healers, and the healers’ dormitory.
I wondered how many times Avin had snuck through there when he was a student at the college, but I had no time to ask.
A man stood alone at the center of the plaza. It was the librarian. We started toward him just as the criers began to call the city to prayer. To our right was the rear entrance to the library, and to our left was the College of Healers. The dormitories were straight ahead. All three buildings were shut up tight, though smoke rose through the sunset from every chimney atop the wide residences of Bessradi’s healers.
The only other people about were a number of slaves making their way toward the dormitories with a fresh load of firewood. I almost did not recognize them.
I closed my eyes for a moment. A number of Hessier had exited the cathedral and were moving toward us. It seemed a small group.
The criers atop the tithe towers began the first recitation of the Bayen’s Creed. The sound of the city’s millions rumbled around the building and streets. The bass drone of it had always made me feel that it was Bayen himself who was speaking.
We believe in Bayen above, Maker of all things,
who to cleanse us came, begotten from fire, perfect
We believe our God, the giver and taker of all life,
speaks through the laws, prophets, and the holy Sten …
We did not join in and neither did the librarian. He said to us. “I am glad you came. Where are the rest of your people?”
“It is just us. Yours?”
“They will arrive presently.”
I could not wait any longer. “Tell me a word,” I said, “or we’re leaving.”
Avin frowned at me, but the librarian smiled. “Very well,” he replied, and without further preamble he spoke a word of magic. It was odd and ugly, its syllables nearly escaping me. When I caught it, I flinched and nearly vomited.
warm
“What was it?” Avin asked and grabbed my sleeve, “I did not catch it.”
“A verb,” I said bitterly and tried to fight off the desire to use the word. To the librarian I said, “What is this treachery? We came to hear nouns not verbs.”
“Nouns?” the librarian replied and stepped toward me, even as I was reaching to get ahold of him. I got my hands upon his arm and throat. He whispered, “Why didn’t you say you knew nouns? Do as I say, and I can save you. Don’t struggle.”
The man’s sudden desperation smacked of the same hunger that dug at my soul. “Why do you want them?” I demanded and pressed my thumb onto his collarbone.
He winced but did not struggle. He said, “Knowing too many verbs will drive you mad, unless you know at least as many nouns. Now please, hurry, lay yourselves down and do not struggle. They will kill you otherwise.”
The city started its second recitation, and as if on cue, a number of Hessier and priests appeared with a score of pikemen at the entrance to the plaza and started toward us.
“Only four Hessier? You do not think very much of us do you?” I said to the librarian and shoved him to the ground.
“Wait,” he said but did not get a chance to say anything more as the Hessier reached out with their magic. It struck us like an icy black wave.
“Geart!” Avin gasped and fell. I could do nothing to help him as the cold touch pressed me down. The Shadow filled me. I was bludgeoned by despair and the desire to obey. They were so strong! Much stronger than the ones we had fought and killed at Urnedi. I could scarcely keep myself from falling to my knees. My eyes and ears screamed with pain.
You idiot, Geart. Did you learn nothing the last time? Push up, not through. Get under it.
