The Pariah

by Anthony Ryan

  Half-raising an eyebrow, Lord Eldurm pursed his lips in consideration. “Father always thought there might be more riches to be found here, should we ever dig deep enough.”

  “Clearly a man of keen foresight, my lord.”

  “No.” Lord Eldurm sighed and returned his attention to the note, reaching out a hand to trace a finger along the well-crafted signature. It was a small gesture but it told me clearly that, whatever the dispiriting contents of Lady Evadine’s reply, this remained a man snared by a hopeless longing.

  “My father,” he went on in a dull mutter, “was a brute who never once opened a book, took great pleasure in voicing the foulest blasphemies against the Covenant and found his principal joy in cruelty. The day he died my main regret was that my beloved mother wasn’t alive to relish the sight of his suffering. Perhaps…” His voice dwindled as his brows furrowed and eyes widened in a rush of realisation. Leaning forward, animation returned to his gaze as he took a firmer hold of the letter. “Perhaps that is why I am unworthy. She sees the sin in me, the sin of hating my own father.”

  You poor pitiable bastard, I thought, careful to keep any emotion from my face. I had by now developed a keen sense of when best to keep silent. Next to scribing, it was probably the most valuable lesson I learned during my time in the Pit.

  “I require an unburdening,” Lord Eldurm continued. His eyes scanned the letter in rapt realisation, reminding me of the rare occasions when Hostler convinced himself he had discerned some new and important insight into Covenant lore. The thought summoned another of Sihlda’s favourite quotations from the Scroll of Martyr Callin: Every man is a liar, but the worst lie is the one he tells himself. I also found it odd that it didn’t occur to this lovelorn fool that the pious Lady Evadine might see a greater sin in enslaving unfortunates in a mine rather than detesting the memory of a man who surely deserved it in full measure.

  “‘My path and yours are destined to follow different courses,’” Lord Eldurm read in a whisper, the single page trembling in his hand. “It’s clear to me now what must be done. My path must alter to meet hers.” He let out a short laugh, lowering the letter to address me. “Tomorrow, you will bring Ascendant Sihlda to me. If there is one soul who can unburden mine of sin, it is her.”

  I swallowed the reminder about the Ascendant’s failing knees before it reached my lips. His lordship’s delusion offered an opportunity, one I knew Sihlda would willingly suffer some pain to secure.

  “I shall, my lord,” I replied, bowing in grave obedience, adding as I straightened, “And… the timber?”

  “Yes, very well.” He waved a hand towards the door. “Tell Sergeant Lebas to give you whatever is required. And the Ascendant’s congregation will receive three more sacks this week in recognition of this find.”

  “For which the congregants offer the most heartfelt thanks, my lord.” I bowed again, but I had already slipped beneath his attention. As I left, he had taken up position at the window, gazing off into the distance with his hands clasped behind his back, clenching repeatedly in what I knew to be an expression of desperate hope. In later years I have often felt that my contempt for him would be greater but for the fact that in time I would, in many respects, become his mirror image.

  “It’s well this shaft doesn’t have to last for any length of time,” Carver said, smoothing a hand over the wet rock. “We’re far too close to the river for my liking.”

  Hooking an arm over a rung of the ladder, I looked up to see him casting a critical eye over the upper reaches of the shaft. As it narrowed and soil began to appear among the rocks, so did an increasing amount of water. Sometimes it formed mere trickles that dampened the stone; in other places energetic springs sent a constant glittering arc into the gloom. More worrying to me wasn’t the sight of the water but the scrapes and groans given off by the surrounding stone, sometimes accompanied by a tremor as unseen fissures collapsed or the water carved a new and possibly dangerous channel.

  “But it’ll hold, right?” I asked, blinking in irritation as a fat droplet of water exploded on my forehead.

  “For now.” The damp tendrils of Carver’s beard, normally a bushy thing of badgerlike dimensions, sent another spatter of drops onto my face as he shook his head. “But not for long. Rivers don’t end at the banks, see? Some can spread their waters underground for miles around, and water will always win against stone in the end.”

  My gaze slipped to the iron bracket securing the ladder to the shaft wall. A crude thing of part-melted nails and scrap, one of many hammered into the rock with brute force alone over the course of the past four weeks. Without mortar to secure the brackets in place they were certain to slip free sooner or later. The congregants’ normally fulsome production of iron ore had dwindled as we focused all our efforts on the shaft. Lord Eldurm accepted the shortfall as a price worth paying for our excavation of the mythical copper seam. But his forbearance wouldn’t last for ever, regardless of how many days he spent unburdening his soul to Ascendant Sihlda.

  “We’ll break ground in three days, give or take,” Carver said. “When we do, we can’t wait. You need to tell her that.”

  He looked down, meeting my gaze. Although he was perhaps the most placid soul among the congregants, as the day of our escape loomed ever closer, I could see the desperation in him. Sihlda’s followers remained devout but witnessing their growing hunger for release from the Pit made me wonder how long such devotion would last.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, clambering down into the shadows and trying to deafen myself to the protesting squeals of the brackets.

  I found Sihlda poring over the latest copy of Martyr Callin’s scroll. Pride forbids me from describing it as the finest ever rendition of his tale, but other scribes have called it so and those that haven’t can be counted as just a gaggle of jealous scratchers unworthy of their title.

  The redeemed thief’s story had been the principal means by which Sihlda had taught me letters and my first attempt at setting it down resembles the work of the clumsiest child. I kept at it, nevertheless. Other works of perhaps greater import I have lost or discarded over the years but not that first faltering step on the scribe’s path. It was not just the learning of letters, you see; it was the understanding behind all those malformed words, for in guiding my hand Sihlda had also guided my mind. The history of this benighted realm. The familial ties of blood and kinship that bound it together. The compact between Covenant and Crown that she dubbed ‘the dire necessity’. All this I had learned via the martyrdom of Callin, the thief who had stolen her heart three centuries after his death.

  “Found a flaw?” I asked, pausing in the doorway to her chamber. “Another inelegant flourish perhaps?”

  “No.” She smiled, glancing up from the scroll. “It is, as much as any marriage of ink and parchment can be, as fine and perfect a document as I have ever seen. Your skills may not be complete, Alwyn, but they are considerable.”

  I resisted the impulse to indulge in smug acknowledgement, instead replying with a humble “My thanks, Ascendant.”

  Gifted as ever in seeing through my facade, she snorted. “Pride and conceit will undo you in the end,” she chided with a sigh. “Out with it, then. You’re only so respectful when you have something to say you know I won’t like.”

  “The shaft will be finished in three days,” I said. “Carver says it won’t last beyond that.”

  “I see.” Setting the scroll aside she sat back and gestured for me to take my usual seat. “It occurs to me that we haven’t discussed your calculations for some time. What conclusions have you arrived at recently?”

  I frowned in consternation, hesitating in the doorway. “The shaft…”

  “I heard you, Alwyn.” She pointed insistently at the folded desk until I consented to take my customary seat. “Now,” she said with an expectant smile, “calculations.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about Erchel’s kin,” I began. “Trying to remember as many names as I can. I made a li
st – cousins, uncles, aunties and such. Erchel had a lot of kin but they weren’t memorable folk, beyond the odd tale of well-executed thievery or unusually vicious murder. His uncle was the only notable among them and, while he may have had a hand in it, I can’t see him as possessing enough brain to conceive a trap. At least, not a trap that Deckin wouldn’t have seen through in a trice.”

  I couldn’t recall how many times we had engaged in this curious ritual. I would relate whatever I had managed to dredge from my memory and she would guide me in an attempt to arrive at previously hidden meanings. It was a frustrating but sometimes fruitful exercise, revealing much that had evaded my notice before. For instance, I now understood that Todman’s accent was all artifice and he in fact hailed from one of the southern duchies. It was also apparent that Gerthe had been as practised a thief as she had been a linguist and whore. Thanks to some deft sleight of hand, she was the principal reason why my purse was always too light to pay for her services. Then there was Deckin himself.

  Much of the conclusions Sihlda guided me to were small things, like the now-obvious fact that Deckin had no more understanding of letters than I’d once had. Other revelations required a greater depth of reasoning. With Sihlda’s aid I began to see clearly the obsession that had led Deckin and his followers to their doom, an obsession that had blossomed into madness by the end. The man you describe wanted only one thing in life, she told me, to finally gain the notice of his father, either through fame as an outlaw or outright assassination. When the King’s Champion took his head, Deckin was forever deprived of the goal he had lusted for since boyhood. People have been known to lose their minds over lesser things.

  Victim of betrayal he was, but I knew now that Deckin had placed his own head on the spike long before we ever took the first step towards Moss Mill.

  “We’ve discussed Erchel’s kin before,” Sihlda said. “With similar conclusions. Which leads us where?”

  “To pondering who did have the brain to orchestrate such a trap.” Impatient as I was to return to the subject of our hopefully imminent escape, ruminating on this conundrum never failed to capture my full attention. “And that’s a short list we’ve covered before.”

  “Cover it again, short or not.”

  “Todman, a brute to be sure but not short of guile, though I always felt him too much a follower to act against Deckin, not alone anyway. Hostler could have done it if he hadn’t been so mired… so preoccupied with his devotion to the Covenant. Raith was smart enough, but didn’t seem to care a whit for ambition. And…” I trailed off with a shrug. “The only other head clever and wilful enough to do it was probably sitting on a spike on the wall of Castle Duhbos, last I saw.”

  “Yes, the lovely Lorine. Tell me, Alwyn, what exactly did you see when you looked upon those heads on the wall? How close did you look?”

  In truth it was a memory I had scoured with less attention than the others, it being so ugly. Also, Sihlda’s guiding hand tended to lead me down other avenues, until now. “Dead folk,” I said, grimacing at the memory. “Too far away and rotted to recognise, but I’m sure one was a woman…”

  I fell silent as my mind’s eye lingered on the long hair that had trailed from that head like a ragged pennant. I often felt that it held a coppery sheen, but that could have just been a trick of the morning sun. “It had to be her,” I said, though my voice was coloured by a new uncertainty, stoked to a greater pitch by Sihlda’s next words.

  “Why?” she asked. “Because you assumed it? Have you not learned by now that the world does not always conform to our assumptions? You have told me a good deal about Lorine over the years, though I suspect your regard for her went deeper than you admit. Such is the way with the lusts and follies of youth: they shame us to self-deceit in later life. Remember what I taught you: cut through the deceit and see the truth.”

  My eyes lost focus as I followed the lessons she had imparted regarding purposeful cogitation. Summon the oldest memory first. Follow the trail it sets. My first sight of Lorine had been of her face drawn in an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace as she beheld the ragged, sniffling boy in the woods. You’re in luck, young fellow, she had said when we got to camp, leading me to the shelter she shared with Deckin. We encountered a very generous cloth merchant only the other day. Best get you properly clothed, hadn’t we? You can’t go about looking like that. All the others would talk.

  This had drawn a laugh from the rest of the band, and it occurred to me just how skilled Lorine had been at stoking their humour, often as a counter to Deckin’s less than jovial moods. Other memories stirred, following the same track, recollections of how much the others liked her, how adept she had been at winning the friendship of newcomers. The women became like sisters, the men brothers or fond but eternally disappointed suitors, for none dare let a hand stray towards Deckin’s woman. They feared him, some even loved him the way heathens love a vengeful god, but they liked Lorine, they listened to her and accepted her counsel. The band, I knew now, had been as much hers as his.

  Eventually the trail of memory led me to Deckin’s mad plan to seize the duchy by means of bloody massacre. Skilled actress though she was, it was clear Lorine had wanted no part of it. Hence the sovereigns she had dropped into my palm, sovereigns I had refused, but there had been other palms, like Todman’s.

  “Perhaps some sovereigns dropped into hers before they dropped into mine,” I muttered aloud as thoughts proceeded along roads yet unexplored.

  “Whose sovereigns?” Sihlda asked, voice soft and intent as it always was when we performed this ritual. “When and where?”

  “There were times she could have slipped away,” I said. “She must have had some inkling of what Deckin planned even before the sword cleaved his father’s neck. We first got word that the duke had turned his coat in the autumn. It was always a busy time. She would have had ample opportunity to seek out a sheriff’s man or a forest warden, pay a bribe to pass a note, a promise of betrayal in return for a reward or guarantee of release once Deckin’s scheme had led us all to disaster. But still, she would have had to receive a reply and send another message to ensure the ambush was laid at Moss Mill.”

  I felt my features take on a familiar blankness as the churn in my brain began to spit out conclusions. “Erchel,” I said. “When Deckin sent him off to gather his kin at Leffold Glade, Lorine must have given the message to him, and a promise for his uncle if he played along. With Deckin gone, the eastern gangs would surely get richer and soon perhaps there would be a new king in the forest. But—” my becalmed features twitched in frustration “—the head on the wall…”

  Thoughts of Castle Duhbos dragged my mind towards the tavern and the soldiers. From there it was only a few ugly steps to the pillory.

  “No,” Sihlda said, reading the reluctance on my face, the instinctive shying away from suffering and the unreasoning rage it provoked. “Your thoughts led you there for a reason. Follow them.”

  They led, of course, to pain, humiliation, the sting of shit in a freshly opened wound, the chafing of wrists bound by iron as I itched to claw at my tormentors, and Lord Althus… The torrent of thoughts slowed as he loomed into view, the tone of jocular disdain with which he told his tale, a tale that contained a brief morsel of great import, the words seeping up from the morass of fatigue and agony that had drowned them, but not completely. Neither will I drag you before the new duke for judgement, he had told me. That bitch he’s taken a liking to will surely confirm your membership of Deckin’s band…

  “That bitch he’s taken a liking to,” I murmured. “That bitch… It wasn’t Lorine on the wall.”

  “No,” Sihlda said. “I don’t believe it was.”

  The calm surety of her voice caused me to blink at her in realisation. “You knew.”

  She replied with a small shrug that put a spark to a familiar anger. “All this time,” I said, unable to keep the resentment from my voice.

  “Not quite. Certainly from the first time y
ou related your tale in its entirety.”

  “Then why not just tell me?”

  “You accepted me as your teacher. What lesson would there have been in telling you the answer before you knew how to properly ask the question?”

  I bit down a retort and looked away, trying to redirect my anger to more deserving targets. Lorine. Todman. Erchel and all his filthy kin. Lord Althus. An ever-growing list. And I’ll strike off every fucking name. The burgeoning rage must have shown on my face for Sihlda reached out to press a hand to my cheek, her touch cool and calming.

  “Understanding should bring wisdom,” she told me. “But it will be drowned if you surrender to the indulgence of wrath.”

  “She sold him out,” I grated. “The man she loved…”

  “The man who, you told me yourself, would surely have led you all to ruin.”

  “We were ruined anyway. They killed dozens at Moss Mill. If she wanted to survive Deckin’s scheme she could simply have disappeared. Taken Todman and whichever other easily led prick she was teasing and pissed off one dark night. Deckin might have searched for her, but not for long. Not when he had a massacre to plan.”

  “Then why?” Sihlda asked, smoothing her hand over my forehead. “What did she gain through betrayal.”

  My anger lingered but this additional rush of insight brought it to a low simmer. “Money, for a start. Deckin used to say his head was worth ten times its weight in gold given the price on it, and he wasn’t wrong. But I doubt it was just that. Lorine was ever an ambitious soul. Seems to me she swapped an outlaw for a duke. Quite a bargain if you’re able to strike it.”

  For some reason my voice caught on the last word and found myself once again averting my gaze, Sihlda’s hand slipping from my forehead as I turned from her, swallowing hard.

  “I often wonder,” she said, “if I have damned you or saved you. In honing your mind have I crafted a better man or just a better outlaw? You know I have a mission beyond these walls, Alwyn. Can you tell me truly that you wish to be part of it?”