Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “Really?” The man rubbed his narrow chin. “It’s rare, surely, but it’s not gold.”

  “So ... what are you asking?”

  “Six silver ounces.”

  Graegor shook his head, but he was still gripping the staff with both hands. The more he looked at it, the more he held it, the more he wanted it. A saber was for a cavalryman, and he wasn’t one yet. He might not ever be one. He might not ever be anything but the most unremarkable person from the most provincial village in Telgardia. But even a nobody from nowhere should have a good staff.

  “What do you think would be fair?” the shopkeeper asked him.

  The trouble was he had no idea what would be fair. One of the first rules of haggling was knowing what the object was really worth, and by that rule he should walk away now and come back once he had asked his father about purpleheart, but he didn’t want to wait. “One silver ounce would hardly be fair for the staff, but it’d be more fair to me,” he finally answered.

  “One silver ounce isn’t fair, you’re right. But I think five would be fair.”

  Graegor hesitated, his eyes on the staff instead of the shopkeeper, who played this game a lot better than he did. He had four ounces and some extra; he had been thinking about spending it all on a sword, so what was the difference in spending it all on a staff instead? “Five is high,” he finally replied. “Two and a half.”

  “Four.”

  “Three.”

  “No, I’m sorry. It is purpleheart, after all. Four is the lowest I can go.”

  Graegor opened his mouth, hesitated, then said firmly, “Deal.”

  The shopkeeper smiled. “Very good. Let me polish it up for you.” Now he reached for the staff, and reluctantly Graegor let him take it. He felt the coins in his pouch. He didn’t have to buy anything. He could keep saving, return the coins to the pile under his bed, wait until he could buy the saber, or better yet, a horse.

  He slowly drew out the coins and placed the four largest on the counter. He still didn’t know why it was important that he have this staff—but it was important. He really wanted it. The shopkeeper glanced at the coins, did Graegor the courtesy of not weighing them, and started to rub the staff with oil and a white cloth. Then he frowned as he looked over Graegor’s shoulder.

  Graegor turned and saw a group of about twenty men coming through the market square, carrying shovels. They all wore blue four-cornered hats. “Are those shovel-men?” he asked quietly. He’d heard of them, but no one back home had much idea who they were.

  “Heretics,” the shopkeeper all but hissed, dabbing more oil on the white cloth. “His Grace should banish them all.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  The shopkeeper shook his head. The men marched by. When Graegor turned back, the shopkeeper passed the staff to him and said, “Here you are. Thank you.”

  “Thank you.” As his hand closed over the purpleheart, he found he did not regret buying it at all. This was good. It felt right. He knew that he had talked himself into it, that it hadn’t been the smartest thing he’d ever done, but he didn’t care. His sword would come later. This staff would last him his whole life.

  He didn’t know how to ride a horse while carrying a quarterstaff—which gave him an anxious moment, because by buying the staff was he admitting that he’d never be a horseman?—and his thighs were still a little sore from the morning in the saddle, so he decided to walk. The rain had stopped, and curiosity turned him the same direction the shovel-men had gone. He led the horse through the archway that marked the end of the marketplace and up to the next broad intersection, where a small crowd milled in front of a grey chapel with a blue wooden dome. The shovel-men were there. Graegor stopped among some onlookers and leaned toward an older woman in an orange scarf. “What’s happening?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I think someone’s hiding in the chapel and the shovel-men are trying to get him to come out.”

  “It’s not just one, it’s a bunch of them,” someone else said.

  “A bunch of who?” Graegor asked, but no one knew.

  The shovel-men started taking up positions around the chapel, with a tall man that Graegor supposed was their leader pointing this way and that to direct the others. Some pushed through the gate to the small graveyard. They all held their shovels on their shoulders, and one stood close enough for Graegor to see that he wasn’t a Telgard like everyone else, but a Thendal, with blonde hair and very dark brown eyes. His shovel was not spade-shaped, but square like his hat, and the corners and edge were sharpened.

  Everyone stood around for a while, and Graegor had almost decided that nothing was going to happen, when the chapel’s heavy door swung open and a priest appeared, in brown and grey robes that matched his brown and grey hair. “What’s going on?” he demanded nervously. His eyes darted around until they settled on the shovel-men’s leader, and his voice grew higher and louder as the crowd of onlookers quieted their mutterings. “What are you doing here?”

  “Expel the heretics, elder one!” The tall man took his shovel off his shoulder and clanged it to the ground.

  The priest straightened a little. “The only heretics I see here are you!” But he still looked worried.

  “We know you harbor ringless ones! They have no right to sanctuary in Farre!”

  The woman in the orange scarf pulled in a sharp breath. Graegor had heard of the “ringless ones” too, disciples of an imprisoned madman. Both the shovel-men and the ringless ones were heretics, according to what little anyone in Graegor’s village knew about them. But the shovel-men were tolerated in Farre, and the ringless ones weren’t. It was confusing.

  “All men have right to sanctuary,” the priest said, but not quite as if he meant it. The tall shovel-man started to speak again, but the sudden sound of many trotting hooves intruded. Six of the duke’s horsemen rode up, their blue cloaks damp from the recent rain. The small crowd stepped back, and Graegor eased his horse to one side to make room for them to pass.

  The tall shovel-man hurried right up to a knight leading the horsemen, who wore a tall helm and had a white stripe down the side of his cloak. “They’re inside, m’lord, just as we told you,” he said proudly.

  The knight’s gaze on the shovel-man was disdainful, but he called out, “Elder one!” When the priest looked at him, with eyes like a frightened rabbit, he said, “Bring them out.”

  The priest hesitated. “Who?”

  “Elder, you have two choices. Cooperate, and you only need worry about what the Lord Archpriest will do to you. But if you make me come inside and look for them, you’ll go before our lord duke as a traitor.”

  Defeated, the priest seemed to shrink. “Yes, m’lord.” He went back inside.

  The moment stretched long, and Graegor started to wonder if he was going to come out again. The side-to-side shifting of some of the shovel-men, and the low murmurs exchanged among the horsemen, may have meant they were starting to wonder too. But then the priest reappeared at the head of a line of about a dozen men. The only thing they seemed to have in common were identical lofty expressions as they passed the shovel-men.

  Then the horsemen pulled wrist shackles from their belts. The priest and the men following him stopped. “Please, m’lord, I promised them that they would be allowed to leave the city,” the priest protested. “None have been arrested before ...”

  “Then you promised what you couldn’t deliver, Elder one,” said the knight.

  The priest’s courage deserted him and he slunk away, but the ringless ones stood defiantly. Graegor noticed that each one had a shortsword or a knife or both, and that pairs of them were turning back-to-back. “We will leave the city,” one shouted, “but we go nowhere in chains!”

  Beside Graegor, the older woman held her orange scarf tightly to her head, ducked around Graegor’s horse, and was gone. A few other people were also slipping away. “That is not a choice you have,” the knight was saying. “His G
race’s patience has worn thin.”

  “We are white heralds, and we go nowhere in chains!” the ringless one insisted, and the others all agreed with him: “Never in chains!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the knight warned.

  No one moved. Everyone eyed everyone else, the horsemen, the ringless ones, the shovel-men, the crowd. Graegor suddenly felt that someone was looking right at him, and he jerked his head around to see one of the ringless ones staring directly into his face. The man—the ringless one—was young, his beard thin and light, and as he looked at Graegor he paled. He urgently whispered something to another ringless one, who turned to look at Graegor and bumped into one of the shovel-men.

  The shovel-man shouted and prodded the ringless one with the butt of his shovel. The ringless one spun around, brandishing his long knife, and shouting erupted across the square. One of the horsemen, who had a bushy black beard, edged his mount to where the two men stood frozen, their eyes locked in loathing. “Drop your weapons,” he snapped.

  “You heard him,” the shovel-man snarled at the ringless one.

  “Both of you!” the horseman bellowed.

  “But, m’lord,” the leader of the shovel-men started to appeal to the knight.

  But the knight glared down at him. “His Grace’s patience is wearing thin with your kind too. Tell your man to keep the peace.”

  “I will when he does!” the shovel-man faced off against the ringless one shouted.

  The black-bearded horseman’s saber still hung at his side, but he was crowding his horse closer to the two antagonists. “Drop them now—” —and he ended with a word Graegor had never heard before. It must have been unusually vile, because the shovel-man’s head whipped around as if he had been stung and he bared his teeth at the horseman, both hands still gripped tight around the handle of his shovel.

  The horseman was not impressed. He leaned over his saddlehorn and slowly, distinctly spoke each word, all of which Graegor had heard before: “Drop—your—shovel—you—stupid—cock—sucker.”

  At that, the shovel-man yelled in incoherent rage and rammed the edged end of his shovel into the horseman’s face, and the horseman’s black beard vanished under a fountain of blood.

  Chaos erupted in screams and panic, the crowd of onlookers shoving each other to get away, the ringless ones pushing and stabbing to clear a path to escape, the shovel-men grabbing at them, and four of the remaining horsemen laying about them with their sabers while the fifth blew a clanging call on a brass horn. Graegor tried to keep his feet as people surged past him, and his horse screeched and tossed its head so wildly he lost his grip on its bridle. He dropped the quarterstaff and swiped at the dangling reins, but two women fell against him—he caught one around the shoulder before she could slide under the horse’s scrambling hooves, but the other rolled away and someone else fell over her. His hand found part of the saddle and he heaved himself and the woman up, and she was gone as soon as he steadied her on the cobblestones. Something hit his back hard, and he yelled, and then his quarterstaff was in one hand and the reins in the other. He grabbed the saddlehorn and braced the quarterstaff against the ground and vaulted across the horse’s back.

  He moved to shake out the reins, but then his eye caught the flash of light on metal. Without even thinking, he whipped up the quarterstaff in both hands and braced it at the gleaming saber leveled not a foot away from his neck.

  The horseman’s arm was rock-still as he held out his sword, his mount standing as if oblivious to the half-dozen bleeding bodies that littered the street in front of the blue-domed chapel. He’d only meant to halt Graegor, not attack him, and once Graegor realized that, he found he could breathe again. The fighting was over—everyone who could scatter, had. “Did you see what happened?” the horseman demanded, his eyes cobalt beneath his steel helm.

  Graegor nodded very slightly, easing back the quarterstaff an inch and praying that his horse didn’t decide to move.

  “We’re rounding up the heretics. Would you know their faces if you saw them?”

  Again Graegor nodded, and swallowed enough to say, “Yes, sir.”

  “And could you say which were ringless ones and which were shovel-men?”

  “Yes, sir. S-some of them.” Which was probably the wrong thing to say, because he had really lost his curiosity about this entire thing and only wanted to get back to Johanns’ house, but he had never been good at telling lies under pressure—he needed too much time to plan.

  The saber withdrew. “Come with me.”

  Graegor followed the horseman away from the now nearly empty intersection, back toward the marketplace. He pressed his forehead to the shaft of his quarterstaff, taking deep breaths and willing his heartbeat to slow. He was sweating as if he had been sawing in the shop all day.

  After a long moment he glanced back over his shoulder and saw one of the bodies moving, dragging itself away. He shuddered. Was anyone going to help the wounded? Or at least clean up the blood?

  He heard horns from different directions. At the next street they met more horsemen. One reported that some of their number were sealing off the streets to the north, while other men were sealing off the marketplace and the streets to the south. Graegor was passed into the keeping of a pair of them, one lean and tall, the other broad and bearded, who took him back to the chapel.

  Several priests—though not the one who had led the ringless ones out—were moving among the bodies now, and the wind kept blowing back the hoods they tried to keep over their sacred heads as they tended to their duty. Each heretic’s face was turned to show to Graegor, and the two horsemen watched him closely as he told them who was a shovel-man, who was a ringless one, and who was an innocent bystander. It wasn’t hard to remember, but his knuckles were white with his grip on the reins and the quarterstaff.

  He tried to keep his answers flat and unemotional even as his stomach moved closer to rebellion. The smell was strong. One man looked like a gutted deer, and most of the others had suffered terrible head wounds. He didn’t see the horseman who had been hit by the shovel-man, or that ringless one who had been staring so hard at him.

  The two horsemen led him to the next intersection to the north, spoke together in low voices, and approached the first townhouse in the row. This was a good neighborhood, where people kept houses but not shops. Johanns, in fact, had once lived just a few streets over from here, until he’d bought the larger house in a similar neighborhood in the city’s northwest quarter. Graegor was certain that none of the heretics would have found refuge here.

  Still, the two horsemen led him down the street, knocking on doors and asking everyone inside to briefly step outside so that Graegor could see them. The two horsemen—the taller one was Selbey, the bearded one was Hask—were in their mid-twenties, and were fawningly courteous and apologetic to the merchants and courtiers and their wives, especially to any of the foreign dignitaries to the ducal court, like the dark-skinned Aedselis and the colorfully dressed Medeans. Graegor pretend not to listen to the social chatter, which was easy enough to do when none of them bothered to ask his name. The handsome horse he led got more attention than he did.

  All the rich folks cooperated with the duke’s horsemen, lining up their servants for inspection and chattering about how shocking the whole thing was. Selbey and Hask agreed that it was indeed shocking, and they didn’t know what the duke or the Archpriest would do about it. Graegor found this odd, since it would seem obvious that the Archpriest would condemn and exile heretics of all stripes, but apparently things were more complicated. Hask told one worried merchant that they wouldn’t stop their search until they found all the heretics—a comment which made Graegor glance anxiously at the cloud-raced sky. His father had to be wondering where he was by now. But the horsemen had been telling everyone that the city gates had been closed and that a curfew had been ordered, so all his father could do was wait.

  Well, at least this gave the engineers at the bridge time to fix everything without lon
g lines of people breathing down their necks. Nothing like a hostile audience to make sure you do your worst work. It was one of the many reasons he hated spending any time in his father’s workshop.

  As he and the horsemen kept going, he thought about what he would tell Jolie. She would listen solemnly, and then tell him how lucky he was that he hadn’t been hurt in the fight, and how he had done the right thing in helping the duke’s men catch the heretics. As he thought over what had happened, assembling the tale he would tell her—keeping his own part in it appropriately modest—he again wondered why that ringless one had been staring at him so hard. He knew that the ringless ones sought out magi, for some reason, but as Magus Paul had told him years ago, he wasn’t a magus. He wondered if the ringless ones knew about the bridge engineers.

  “That’s the one he’s doing?” Selbey was saying to Hask as they led their horses across an intersection to the next street and the people from the last house hurried back inside to get out of the wind.

  Hask snorted. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” He tugged at the high collar of the dark blue vest he wore over his light chain mail.

  “Breon’s blood, she’s six feet tall!” Selbey exclaimed. “Her legs would wrap around him twice! He’s got to be making it up.”

  “He’s not,” Hask assured him. “A couple other people know about it.” Then he cursed and stooped to scan the square paving stones.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re lying down!”

  Graegor realized that they were talking about the wife of the merchant at the house they had just left, a coolly elegant woman older than his own mother. It was uncomfortable to hear them laughing about her when she was barely out of earshot. He saw Hask’s popped button on the ground, and he guided his horse to walk on it.