Darrow reached for the handle, and turned. “They will see you enter with us, so you will be safe. Come through here on your own, and you would be dead before you had a chance to cry out.” Opening the door, he added, “Welcome to the real warehouse district.” They all stepped through, and exclaimed astonished gasps at what faced them. If it could be called a room, then it was an understatement. A cavern was closer to the mark, a great dark maw that seemed to stretch out to infinity, shadows endlessly chasing the smoky lights used to keep the place lit. Every so often pillars buttressed the ceiling, and stacked everywhere were crates. Some were so large that they themselves held crates, like a great wooden anthill the place stretched out, making a maze of pathways.
“You will not be able to see far, for we are still at ground level. Climb these stairs for a better look.” Darrow led them up a staircase onto a gantry that crisscrossed the room, and from this point they could see that everything was organised. Off to the east, daylight spilled in, and two huge gates could be seen. Just in front of them a couple of ships were moored. The ships looked more like merchantmen than anything a pirate would use.
“You have an underground marina?” Said Tarim in an astonished voice.
“That is not all,” said Darrow, proud as a father of everything that he surveyed. “We have another room almost the same size on the far shore.”
“And all this.” Lorn waved his hand around, indicating the countless crates. “This is your plunder, gathered and collected over the years?”
“No.” Darrow said this with a lot of emphasis, but it appeared to Zya he was bordering on the insulted. “I will admit that a small portion of this has been claimed and stored as a result of piracy, but most of what you see here has come from honest traders, both within the city, and from inland. It goes from here by night to places all over the Nine Duchies, from as close as villages down the coast to Caighgard and as far away as coastal Pahrain, away down south. This is where the real trading goes on, not up there in the city. The real rulers of Bay's Point are down here, amongst the crates, sitting on a throne of wood. Come, let me take you amongst them.”
They made their way back down the stairs, and wound gradually through the enormous cavern. Water, and the God's only knew what else dripped down from the ceiling, but most of the crates were proofed with tar, so that their contents would not be spoiled. As they walked, various people called out to Darrow and Yneris, introducing themselves with friendly handshakes and back slaps to all.
Lorn dropped back beside Zya as they followed this strange path.
“I was afraid of what I would see in your eyes when I entered the room.”
“That why you held back?”
“I have seen it before, too many times. If what I have guessed is correct, then you will inevitably be taken away from me one way or another.”
“Lorn, the wise women will not arrive. I won't seek to join them.”
So strong was her destiny, she knew this would never happen.
“I will just have to make the best of the time that we do have.” He was not listening. Zya ignored his moping and watched the scenery unfold. This was a side of the city that Zya would never have known about, and the closeness of the community only served to remind her that she should never judge a book by its cover, or indeed a city by its inhabitants. From the tales she had been told about the history of the city, it seemed that Bay's Point was still in some ways a decoy. The rough and tumble surface hid well the thriving community beneath. Eventually they reached an office that had been built near the centre, a 'throne-room' of wood and tar, where the Lords of the underworld could look out on their empire of goods. Here they entered, Darrow providing refreshment by grabbing a cask of ale on the way up, and broaching it with his fist. This time, Ju managed to get himself a full tankard of proper ale, a fact that caused him no end of joy.
After they had settled, Tarim started talking. “So you are in effect merchants.”
Darrow made a conciliatory gesture with his ale tankard. “More or less.”
“And you obviously make a profit from your endeavours.”
“Always, though not as much as you might think, not recently.”
Tarim raised an eyebrow. “How so?” He asked this cautiously. Zya felt that they were reaching a sensitive subject.
“Okay, so you would realise that we do not follow the Old Law here in the city, yes? Things are different in this world, names we give things, opinions we have. A moon to you is a month to us for example.”
“There is never a problem with having an opinion.” Tarim conceded, leaning forward with interest, his chin resting on his fist as he tried to guess where this was going.
“Right,” Darrow replied. “See the thing is, there are some amongst this population, those living above, that will not demean themselves by coming down here and working 'honestly' with the rest of us. They seek to change things. They seek to make everybody pay their prices, for a protection, or so they call it.”
Now Zya's interest was piqued. “Who are these people?”
“The current Duke, and his cronies. They believe that because they are descended from the original pirates, that they have every right to call the shots around here. We do not see it that way, but they are making moves in the city to try and force not just us, but the farmers and villagers inland to accede to their wishes, and it looks like they are using force.”
“O'Bellah.” Zya said out loud.
“What? Here?” Her father turned to her. “How do you know?”
“It all ties in, father.”
Tarim held up his hands, begging the pace of the conversation to slow. “What do you mean, it all ties in. We seem to have leaped to a conclusion without any meaning.”
Zya smiled. She loved to confuse her father. “When I passed out, we were looking at a building, a huge, grey building like a monster built out of rock. I felt something there, and the sensation was exactly the same as the feeling that I got when we were in Hoebridge, of the wrongness that we connected with this man and his doings. The very same feeling that I could sense spreading, and crossing the countryside behind us.”
“That is right.” Darrow agreed. “The building that your daughter collapsed beside, aside from being the worst possible place for her to cause an outcry, is the mercenary guild. But who is this O'Bellah? Zya you screamed his name once before, care to enlighten us?”
Zya sighed, remembering the ill feeling she got from even hearing the man's name. “He is somebody we have heard of, but never met. He had all but enslaved a town back in the foothills of Ciaharr, by the headwaters of one of the tributaries to your great river. He might be a wizard; we are not sure on that one. He does have some kind of power, and a lot of influence, for I have seen evidence. There is a great wrongness associated with anything that he does, and even now I can feel it permeating the land, stretching forth like mystical fingers through the mud and stone.” Zya had lapsed into a dreamy state, almost whispering as she spread her consciousness further afield. She was not even aware that she was doing this, and nothing was obvious to anyone else in the room, except that Zya was acting strangely. “The wrongness has followed us, sometimes at a distance, sometimes closer. The closest that I have been to his machinations was when we stood outside that great stone building, that monolith of dark stone, your mercenary guild.”
Darrow snorted at the mention of them. “Man they are like a private army in there, and it is nigh on impossible to get anybody inside to find out what they are up to. But that does not mean that they are without resource. Any other place than where we brought Zya would have resulted in certain death. They are very wary of outsiders.”
“Outsiders? But I thought that everybody in your city knew each other?”
“For the most part we do, but more recently there have been those coming in that nobody knows, and nobody has had a chance to talk to,” Darrow admitted, looking at his wife for reassurance.
She gave it. “Mercenaries. The building that Zy
a collapsed beside is the mercenary guild, and nobody gets in there unless they are trusted completely by the guild heads. They are up to something though, and while we may not follow your Old Law of the countryside, we know that it is conducive to business that we appreciate those that do. Which brings us to the heart of the matter.”
“You want us to help you.” Said Zya, cutting through the preamble. “You want us to defend your ships with arrow and sword, and the same for the villages inland. But you don't want anybody to know about it. Why?”
The pirate couple looked at each other, knocked by the fact that Zya had seen straight to the heart of it, bypassing any subtle words they could have possibly used to make it sound more ambiguous than they had already.
Yneris raised her hands briefly in defeat. “Your perception does you credit, young woman. We are trying to keep this quiet because we don't know whom to trust. For generations the entire population of the city was trustworthy; we knew all of the merchants, and all of their families. But as trade routes improve, there are merchants coming in that we have never encountered before, charging outrageous prices, and demanding that we match them. They are trying to bleed the Duchy dry. Any merchant with sense knows that there is a fine line between making a profit, and reducing a person to poverty. We are merchants, not thieves. These merchants hire the mercenaries to bully the countryfolk, but that is only the half of it. There are too many in the mercenary halls now. Something is up and we are looking to protect our interests. You are the best hope of doing that. Anything that might give us an advantage should be grabbed with both hands, and held on to for dear life. Do you not agree?”
Zya nodded. She could not argue with their logic, followers of the Old Law or not. “So was I right? Is that what you want of us?”
Darrow nodded cautiously. “Yes, that is what we want.”
“You know that the Old Law forbids violence of this sort.”
“We are not in Old Law country any more, my dear Zya. Different rules apply in the city, and you should follow the local customs should you not?”
This brought a frown to her face. “No, I do not believe that we should. The Law that we follow is more than a set of rules, ready to be cast aside at the first convenient time. It is a way of life, living in harmony with those around you, and respecting the laws of nature. Violence in this form is prohibited.”
“Ah, but is it not also true that you can use violence to defend yourselves when attacked?” Darrow replied, showing evidence of his insight into the very tenets that she defended. “Are we not protecting our ships and wagons in the very same way that you would protect your own?” He had her there, and she knew it. Her face flushed as she thought of a response, but none was forthcoming. “So what do you say?” Darrow's question was aimed at Tarim, identified by the pirate as the leader of their unusual little group, and to a lesser extent Lorn, who obviously would have the archers' skills of his tribe to call upon, or so Darrow supposed. To their surprise, Tarim deferred to his daughter.
“No, not at this time. Something tells me that we cannot do this, for it will alter our path, and the road that we tread is very precarious.” A funny feeling passed over Zya. She shook her head to clear it and found Ju to be speaking. He had spoken as if possessed, but his words came out as if they were her own. Pausing for a second, he jumped visibly, and then his eyes focussed and he came back to himself. He looked around at them. “What?”
“What did you just say, lad?”
“I didn't say anything. I fell asleep listening to you lot arguing over archers and wagons. Why? What did I miss?”
“You just told us that you could not help us.”
“And he was right, we can't,” interjected Zya,. “at least not for now. There is something that we need to do, and we need to be topside in the city to do it. I do not know what it is, but I have to trust my feelings on this.”
“Here, in the middle of our kingdom, you would deny us?” He bellowed.
Zya remained resolute in response. “You cannot decide what has already been decided. You cannot force a nomadic tribe that follows the Old Law to wage war on mercenaries with no cause but protecting goods for profit. The same stands with us. There is something that I need to do here, and I do not know what it is. All that I do know is I will not be able to do it acting as a guard on a caravan. If I had wanted that I would have remained with Venla.”
“You may yet, Zya. They are in the region.”
“What?” Zya, her father and Ju said the same word almost together. “How do you know?”
“I received word from acquaintances in the quarter.”
Zya spared a thought for the motherly matriarch of the caravan her father; Ju and herself had rode away from back in earliest autumn, hoping that she fared well. “Chances are that things may yet change, and we will be able to ride one of your great ships, using our skills to make it safely to the end of its journey, but that time is not now. You must let us continue with our lives until that has passed.” Zya glared at Darrow, and let her gaze fall on Yneris, dripping with sincerity. Every fibre of her being cried out to fulfil tasks that she had no idea about. Something needed releasing, something was chasing them, something awaited them, nothing was clear.
“What makes you so sure that we could help you anyway?” Piped up Ju, who had been content until now to absorb the surroundings, evidently much more at home in the shadows below than the street-gloom above.
“Lad, you are the four most unique and interesting characters to enter this city in years. Pirates, merchants, guildsmen. That is all anybody seems to be. And here you lot come, with your archery, nomad tracking, psychic abilities and magic, and I have already told you that people will sit up and take notice.”
Zya met her father's eyes as Darrow mentioned the word 'psychic', and he returned a glance that spoke volumes. His face read like a book. He does not know what he means, but attempts to impress with grand words and flowery descriptions. He had always said that their family had a broad streak of cynicism, and it had saved their skin on many occasions. Zya was sure that her father's description of the gaudily dressed mate and his unassuming and exquisitely polite pirate captain wife were the same as hers: They were honest for their part, but as with most people, they had a hidden agenda. Mayhap the unmasking of that agenda was what they were here for, she just did not know.
“Well what is past will be left there,” Tarim answered. “We don't want to disappoint you, and you have my eternal thanks for all you have done, but we need to find the answers in our own way, in our own time. However, if there is anything that we can do for you in the meanwhile you have but to name it.”
Darrow sighed, as if defeated, though Yneris looked as stolid as always she did. “Never mind. We can but try. Well if you are offering, my friend, then I would ask that you keep a line of communication open between yourself and me via the lad here. He has the quickest set of feet I have ever seen.”
“And getting quicker every day, now I know of your massive warehouse.” Ju answered with a knowing grin. “I bet there are many other exits from this place, all of which would make transversing the city a hell of a lot easier than running twisted streets.”
“Damn the boy is good.” Darrow exclaimed. “This was not an entirely wasted effort. I am sure that we can find someone to show you the ways around the underground.”
Ju jumped up at this. “How soon? There's no time like the present.”
This caused Zya to laugh out loud. When she had gathered a breath she spoke. “You are becoming more like my father every day, my foster brother. Now you are even talking like him.”
Ju looked around at Tarim, finding a rare smile on the man's face. So stern in demeanour, it was a rare thing that broke that façade. At this time, he looked less like the warrior Zya suspected that he was, and more like a proud father.
Darrow's answer to Ju's request was much more direct. At an approving nod from his wife, he stepped to the door of the office and opened it. “JENNI!” Zya was
sure that the doorframe rattled as he bellowed. Shortly, soft feet were heard on the steps up to the room, and a slight girl with red hair in curls entered. She had a face like a little mouse; shy and yet inquisitive with brown eyes that were framed by her hair like a portrait. She wore a dark brown dress with green patches, all earthy colours that made her seem to fit in just fine under the city. She was older than Ju, but not by much. It was her height that gave her away, as it was common that girls sprouted before the boys, especially in the North. She had that fresh-faced look of youth, but there was no naive gaze of a cozened girl about her. She radiated an aura of self-confidence. Zya knew that nobody else would be able to pick up on the characteristics of the girl, but Ju had already taken to her. They had struck up a conversation almost as soon as she had entered the room, and had to be interrupted by Yneris.
“Jenni, would you please be so kind as to show Ju the hidden entrances to the underground, as he will be doing a little work for us.”
“A little work, eh,” Jenni spoke, and instantly revealed maturity beyond her years, and a strength that belied her slender frame. Zya was amazed that she could deduce all of that from just a few words, but she was sure of it, just as she was sure that she could read the character of every person in that room. The fact that she could actually do that at all dawned much more slowly on her, and she had to grip the window ledge to steady herself. Nobody seemed to notice, their attention taken by Jenni, but Ju glanced across at her, a look of concern in his eyes. He knew. How did he know? Zya returned a barely perceptible shake of the head, and he turned his attention to the red-haired girl by his side.
“Is that all?” Jenni clearly expected something else, but nothing was forthcoming. Jenni glanced around the room, her eyes lingering on Zya for a moment longer than anybody else, or rather on the dagger at her side. As the girl exited with a wave and a 'come on then' noise to Ju, Zya's hand went protectively to her hip. The dagger felt reassuring, despite the fact that it carried a curse of addiction. Zya had been trained to see though the illusion of addiction, but the dagger was still a gift from her father and therefore immensely precious to her. The fact that somebody so young could covet something that belonged to her was unnerving. Then Zya came to her senses. She gave herself a mental slap as she reminded herself of who she was. Not a city-dweller with possessions, but a traveller at heart, a nomad whose only worldly goods were the clothes on her back and the shoes on her feet. As Ju exited the room behind the girl, he gave the bow on his back a touch, and this simple act reminded Zya that although she had been given the opportunity to see through the curse that masked her weapon, the boy had not. Soon she would find time to try and make him see this, and to question her father on where he had gotten the weapons. It may be that there were more of them, and others shared this compulsion too. There was only one thing that she wanted right now though, and that was fresh air. “Can we go back above ground?” She asked, desperation creeping into her voice.
The Path of Dreams (The Tome of Law Book 2) Page 19