Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

“Trade.”

  Torr told his lies like a professional. The others listened silently. After endless questions about the origins and values of his lading, the Torna handed the paper over for a signature and said, “The landing tax is eight decamedes.”

  “That’s robbery!” Torr protested.

  “It’s the law.”

  Torr said, “My strongbox is in the aft cabin. I’ll go fetch it.”

  “Never mind, Torr, I have some money,” Harg spoke up. The others took the hint and searched their pockets to put together the required sum. The official was counting the coins when he suddenly stopped to scrutinize one.

  “A Rothur coin,” he said, holding it up. “Where did you get this?”

  Shrugging, Torr said, “They’re common in the South Chain.”

  “Have you been doing business with the South Chain?”

  “Of course. Everyone on Grora does.”

  “Know anything about the situation on Thimish?”

  “I don’t trade there. They’re a pack of pirates,” Torr said.

  “It’s that old outlaw, Holby Dorn, stirring things up again,” Tway piped up. “The isles would be well rid of him.”

  The Torna gathered his papers into a neat pile. “Captain, I can’t give you leave to dock until I have notified the military. They may want to interview you.” He turned briskly to the companion way.

  “A word with you, sir,” Jobin said quickly, and followed him up onto deck. Harg watched them go, but didn’t interfere; he thought he knew what Jobin was up to.

  “What do we do now?” Tway whispered.

  “Bluff it out,” Torr said. “We’re all from Grora, and we’ve been on a trading run to Lashnish. You four are here to purchase dry goods to take home. Answer only what they ask; don’t volunteer any information.”

  The hatchway darkened as Jobin leaned back in. “It’s all right,” he said. “We can land now.”

  “Thanks, Jobin,” said Harg. “How much do we owe you?”

  “What? Oh, never mind. I was glad to take care of it.”

  As they neared the dock, Jobin drew close to Harg. “Staying out of the Innings’ way is going to be harder than I thought. It will be best if you stay close to me. I can take you to a safe house.”

  “What’s wrong with a room at a tavern?” Harg said.

  “Tiarch’s spies are everywhere. You’re safer in a private place.”

  Harg would have declined if he had known of a better alternative. He didn’t assume Jobin’s motives coincided with his own, but he sensed that the man’s goal was more complex than simple treachery. Jobin wanted something from them. Playing along was the only way to find out what it was.

  Harg, Gill, Calpe, Tway, and Jobin debarked on a narrow wharf-side path. Jobin led the way down a twisted lane that issued into a clay-paved plaza. “Harbourmarket,” he said in terse explanation. Tall brick-and-beam buildings jostled each other around the open square, none of them quite vertical. In the upper stories, ornately carved shutters were closed against the throat-stinging fog. Below, awnings spread like aprons from the buildings’ waists, shading the street-level shops.

  “We have to get your money changed before it gives you away again,” Jobin said in an undertone. “Come with me.”

  He headed across the square. They passed windows crowded with ropes thick as a person’s wrist, blocks, charts, and gleaming sextants. At last Jobin ducked into a store where barrels of salt pork, hominy, and meal were stacked to the ceiling. Nodding at the proprietor, he made them all empty their pockets and headed for the stairs to the upper floor. “Wait here,” he said.

  “Look at all this!” Tway said, staring at the shelves and bins of crackers, sausages, and cereals.

  The shopkeeper was watching them. “Outlanders?” he asked.

  Harg said, “From Grora. Is there a harbourmaster who keeps track of the arrivals?”

  The shopkeeper said, “Try the customs office.”

  Tway’s attention was still on the goods. “You must be a very rich man,” she said to the shopkeeper.

  He laughed. “Tell that to my landlord.”

  “But if you own all this—”

  “Bless you, none of this is mine! Until I sell it, it’s my banker’s,” he grinned.

  Tway smiled politely back, but it was clear she didn’t understand what was funny. She shook her head as if there were no accounting for Torna humour.

  Jobin appeared again, and distributed shiny Inning coins among them. His mood seemed changed for the better, but he gave no explanation. “Follow me,” he said.

  As they climbed uphill away from the harbour, the lanes narrowed and grew crooked as old men. Flickering street lamps gleamed dully onto the pavement. The buildings’ soot-blackened faces seemed patched and bandaged by the blankets in the broken windows and the grey laundry hanging from row upon row of rusty iron balconies. Lean-to hovels narrowed the street.

  Soon the street ran into another open square, this one littered with handcarts and wagons selling vegetables, cloth, tinware, trinkets, boots and firewood. Few buyers were about. As the Yorans passed, vendors called out to them plaintively.

  “Draymarket,” Jobin said. “Don’t come here unless you want to get cheated.”

  They left Draymarket by a broad avenue called Castlepath. Now the city changed around them again, like an actor donning yet another costume. The ramshackle brick buildings gave way to cut stone. The windows were high overhead, and grated with iron.

  “Are these prisons?” Tway asked.

  “No,” Jobin answered impatiently. “These are the homes of the great folk of Tornabay. Those bars are not to keep them in. They’re to keep you out.”

  While they had been walking, Harg had been aware of Tiarch’s palace looming ahead on its spur of rock. Now the Castlepath carried them into a market that lay just under the shoulder of the palace walls. Here stood ponderous buildings whose doorways were framed with grim pillars and pediments.

  “Gallowmarket,” Jobin said. “Wait here while I fetch a key from a friend.”

  Harg stared at the forbidding wall of the palace. Somewhere beyond that wall was Goth. He longed for a troop of commandos to storm Tiarch’s gate and batter down the doors. He wanted to see the Grey Man realize who his liberator was. All the years of mutual ambivalence and abandonment would be cancelled out by one desperate, heroic act.

  The reality would have to be more devious and silent.

  “Look over there,” Calpe said tensely.

  On a wooden platform across the square, two men were impaled on stakes. One was dead, his lips and eyes black with flies. The other still lived. His arms and legs gave little jerking motions, like a dying bug. His head was thrown back, and his face was frozen in a mask of agony.

  The sight made Harg’s legs feel weak. He had seen it before, in the Rothur city of Drumlin, when the Innings had held a public execution for some deserters. They had made the islanders line up and witness as the executioners had thrust the stakes through the men’s bodies, then raised them, screaming, upright. They had stayed there in the town square, baking in the hot sun, till the smell had permeated everything. Harg had smelled it for weeks. He could still smell it.

  He realized his hand was clutching Tway’s shoulder hard, and she was looking at him. He forced himself to let go. “Sorry,” he muttered, and turned away so he couldn’t see the spectacle, and she couldn’t see his face.

  When Jobin appeared again from the shop where he had gone to fetch the key, he noticed where they were looking, and glanced at the sight. He seemed unmoved. “Insurgents,” he explained. “Inspired by the news from Thimish. They threw a grenade into a barracks.”

  Harg had a crazy thought that Jobin had led them here deliberately, so they would see this sight. It was irrational; Jobin couldn’t have kn
own of the execution. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  The Torna led them down one of the side streets that radiated off the Gallowmarket. He stopped before a towering wooden door studded with iron, and fitted a key into the lock. When he pushed, the great door swung inward without a sound. They entered a stone tunnel leading into a courtyard. Harg was aware of the trap doors above them and the dark arrow-slits on either side. When they reached the other end, he looked for an inner gate, and saw it, rusted open against the wall. Apparently the residents had not feared attack for a long time.

  Their steps on the paved courtyard echoed up five stories of empty balconies. Jobin led the way up a switchback stair to the fourth floor, where he unlocked another door and showed them in.

  It had once been a luxurious apartment, but had a look of long disuse. When Tway sat on the indigo brocade couch a little cloud of dust went up. Harg checked the window. They were too high for escape.

  Jobin was locking the door. “I’ll arrange to have some food sent up,” he said. “It would be best if you ate up here. There are eyes everywhere; you should all stay out of sight. You especially, Harg.”

  Harg tossed his duffel bag on the daybed. “We didn’t come here to hide,” he said. “We need to locate Spaeth.”

  A momentary flash of irritation crossed Jobin’s face. “I’ll alert some people to look for her. But I also need to set up a meeting for you with Mr. Sorrell. You do still want to hear his proposal, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Harg said.

  “Then don’t go roaming off looking for lost waifs from Thimish. I don’t know what time Mr. Sorrell will be free. I’ll come back as soon as I know.”

  His authoritative tone struck memories in Harg’s mind. He decided to let it pass. “All right, we’ll stay here. Order us some beer while you’re at it.”

  When Jobin turned to the door, Harg stopped him. “The key,” he said. “Give it to me.”

  For a moment Jobin looked reluctant, but then gave him the key. When the Torna had disappeared into the twilight outside, Calpe turned to Harg and said, “Let’s get out of here. We can slip away, find an inn, and he’ll never know where we went.”

  “He just had half a dozen chances to betray us, if he was going to,” Harg said.

  “Maybe someone else is paying better than Tiarch,” Calpe said darkly.

  Harg shook his head. It wasn’t that he trusted Jobin; he wanted more than ever to know who Jobin was working for. Here in the Tornas’ native place there was no direct route from one spot to another—everything was indirection, implication, nuance. Looking at his companions, Harg felt how out of place they were. They had a fresh-breeze openness that didn’t fit in this city of crooked ways.

  “He’s the best contact we’ve got. The only contact. It would be crazy to give that up before we find if it’s useful.” Harg didn’t add what he suspected, that it would be harder than Calpe thought to give Jobin the slip. “Still, as soon as it’s light tomorrow, we’ll split up. Gill, Tway—you go out and see what news you can gather about Spaeth. Start at the docks. Someone must have noticed the Fairweather Friend come in. Calpe, I want you with me. We’ll find out what Jobin’s friends really have to offer us.”

  “Besides a sharp stick in the back?” Calpe said.

  Harg said, “If we don’t take a risk, we’ll never know anything.”

  *

  The Fairweather Friend had stopped to take on cargo in Torbert, and so it came into Tornabay a few hours after Ripplewill. Spaeth Dobrin stepped off onto a dock only yards from the one where Harg and his companions had landed.

  The captain’s pint of blood had proved to be a larger quantity than she had supposed, and its absence left her feeling lightheaded and odd. As soon as her foot touched ground she knew that Embo did not welcome her. There was a deep red anger in the ground, as if the island nursed an ancient grudge. Its hostility swirled around her ankles as she threaded uphill through the darkening streets.

  The brick buildings leaned over, dark conspirators whispering to each other across the street. Passing boarded-up doorways, she felt an oppressive sense of pain—others’ pain, not her own. The few people she met walked fast and kept to the other side of the street. She avoided them as well, afraid of seeing too much in their eyes.

  She had set out toward the palace that brooded over the city from its rocky spur of mountain. But as she walked, the streets twisted under her feet, and buildings shoved forward to block her view. The sky was dark by the time she realized she was hopelessly lost. She stood on a corner, looking down littered streets that disappeared into night and sulphurous fog on every side. Under a nearby heap of old packing crates, something rustled. Spaeth whispered Ridwit’s name, but there was no answer. She was alone. For the first time in her life there was no one in a hundred leagues who knew her name or wished her well. The thought made her eyes sting. She would have given anything to hear the voice of Mother Tish saying her name. But no, that was another Spaeth, someone she had left far behind.

  Instead she heard booted footsteps approaching through the mist to her right. Quickly she dodged down another street clogged with refuse, past gap-walled tenements. Shattered windows gaped on either side. She saw light ahead, turned toward it, and burst into a broad square.

  It was a tawdry market, lit by bonfires and iron cressets that made the mist glow yellow. There were people all around, selling cheap wares from tents and makeshift booths. Spaeth walked forward, her senses battling the unfamiliar confusion of noises, sights, and smells.

  Under an awning hung with lanterns, a bangled woman vending brass was staring at her. Quickly Spaeth raised her hood to hide her hair, but the woman was already calling out to her in a strange, wordless moan. She stretched out her hands in supplication and pointed to her mouth. With a rush of mixed horror and desire, Spaeth realized the woman’s tongue was only a black stump. Spaeth turned her back and the woman’s voice blended with the sound of a wheezing old accordion. The music came from ahead, where a ragged blanket was spread on the pavement. As Spaeth came up she shied away again, for the old accordionist was blind.

  They were everywhere, the uncured. Spaeth felt trapped, surrounded. Of course they had had no dhotamars for ages here; what Lashnura could survive the ills of a whole city?

  Ahead, where a booth was selling nog, a crowd of men laughed noisily. She turned away from them toward the middle of the square, where a stone fountain stood, now dry. Its broad basin had become a dumping-ground for fruit rinds, soiled hay, and old shoe soles. She sat on its stone base.

  She was in a symphony of suffering, tantalizing one moment, repulsive the next. She hugged herself, feeling a hollow sense of strangeness, of not being fully herself. Around her, people moved and shifted in the yellow cloud of pain; but they were without the currents of consonant purpose created whenever people gather to some end. All these people were moving, not going.

  So this was the fate of the isles, when Inning had finished with them. Once, people had cared enough to raise this great forest of buildings; once, life-giving water had flowed from the stone fountain. Now the city was stained and trashy; disfigured, but not through any purpose or any need. It was only that people had ceased to care. The city was not their place any more. No one here had a place.

  “Outland girl,” someone said at her shoulder. She spun around to find a Torna man looking at her. He seemed out of place, for he was well dressed in a blue wool coat with an Inning cut. His shoes were polished. “You look like you need a friend,” he said.

  “I have friends,” she answered, rising and turning away. He caught her arm in a gloved hand. She pulled away, and her hood fell back.

  “By the rock, a Grey Lady!” he exclaimed, staring. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am free to go where I like,” Spaeth said.

  “Free, yes; but not wise,” he said. “Don’t yo
u know the risk you run here? This is not a place for the likes of you.”

  Spaeth did not answer. She knew it was true, but she had no other place to go.

  “Put up your hood again,” the man said, glancing around. When Spaeth obeyed, he held out his hand. “My name is Tolliby.”

  Hesitantly, Spaeth touched his hand, glove against glove.

  Tolliby’s eyes searched her face. He was middle-aged; he had receding black hair, and his left earlobe had once been pierced. “Let me give you some advice, child. You are in the city now. It’s not like the outlands. You must follow the rules of this place. I know. I was once new in the city, too.”

  Spaeth knew how true his words were. Whatever she had been in the South Chain, she was no longer. She was not even an individual any more, only part of the drifting cloud of humanity under the angry mountain.

  “I can show you to a safe place,” Tolliby said.

  “All right,” she answered.

  Putting an arm around her shoulders, he led the way across the square to the west, where the buildings backed up against a cliff of rock. Stairs had been cut into the cliff face, each flight becoming narrower and more step-worn than the one before. At last they emerged onto a cliff-side street that looked down on the market over the tops of the buildings below. Ramshackle wooden shops clung precariously to the steep hillside. To one of these shops, where a hand-lettered sign in the dusty window advertised food and drink, Tolliby headed. A dead cat lay nearly in the door; he kicked it aside and entered.

  Inside the shop, men sat on stools before a wooden counter running length-wise down the room. In a back room more men sat talking in booths lit only by dim oil lamps. And in the middle, behind the counter, was a figure that dominated the room like a glowering Mount Embo of flesh.

  “That is Romble,” Tolliby whispered. He approached the place where she sat enthroned—for it did not seem possible for her to move—watching over the shop like a cat gorged on vermin. She was swathed in yards upon yards of cotton frock, and her greasy hair fell in every direction; but her eyes took in every movement.