"That was meant for me," Bertran said. His voice was like a scrape in the throat.
"Of course it was," Blaise said. Knowledge was in him, a cold certainty, the taste of it like ashes on his tongue.
"It was none of our doing, I will swear it by the goddess in her temple." Urté de Miraval's deep voice rang out. Blaise hadn't heard him approaching.
Bertran did not even look up. "Leave us," he said. "You will be dealt with later. You are a desecration wherever you walk."
"I do not use poison," de Miraval said.
"Arimondans do," said Bertran.
"He was on the launching pier with us the whole time."
Blaise, sick with knowing, opened his mouth to speak, but the priestess was before him.
"Leave off wrangling now," she said. "We must take him to a temple. Will someone find a way to carry him?"
Of course, Blaise thought. This was Arbonne. Valery of Talair, even though he was a coran, would not find his end in the sanctity of the god's house. He would pass to Corannos amid the dark rites of Rian. With a distaste that was akin to a fresh grief, Blaise turned away from the priestess; she had covered her head with a wide hood now. He saw that Valery's eyes were upon him again, and Blaise thought he understood the expression this time.
Ignoring the others, even Bertran, he knelt on the wet dock beside the dying man. "Be sheltered ever in the god," he said huskily, surprised by the difficulty he had in speaking. "I think I know who did this. I will deal with him for you."
Valery of Talair was pale as parchment beneath the moons and the torches. He nodded his head once, and then he closed his eyes.
Blaise rose. Without looking at anyone or staying for further words he strode from the dock. Someone made way for him; he realized only later that it had been Quzman, the Arimondan. Others also fell back before him but he was scarcely aware of any of them. There were those ashes in his throat and a queer blurring to his sight. Syvaren on the arrow. White feathers, white-and-black shaft. Blaise reached inward for the rage he needed, and it was there, but he could not ride it. There was too much grief, cold and clammy, coiled in tendrils as a mist in winter: half for Valery behind him and half for what he walked towards now, tall and grim as an image of the Ancients on a frieze, amid the flurrying torches and the smoke and noise and masks and, yes, in the distance, still the laughter of Carnival.
I will deal with him for you. Last words to a dying man, fellow coran of the god's long, hallowed brotherhood, a friend very nearly, here amid the goddess-shaped strangeness of Arbonne. And they were likely to have been a lie, those last words, the worst sort of lie.
CHAPTER 6
Lisseut, if asked in the midst of that swirling, suddenly horrific night, or even after, with time and a quiet place to think things through, would not have been able to say why she slipped free of Bertran de Talair's telltale blue cloak, ignored Alain's urgent cry behind her and followed the man named Blaise away from the torchlit pier and into the warren of dark, twisting lanes that led away from the river.
It might have been something about the way he had left the dock, the headlong ferocity, brushing past the Arimondan as if the man did not exist. Or something perhaps in the stricken expression she saw in his face as he went blindly past them all and plunged into the crowd. She had heard the word poison ripple back like a snake from where Valery lay. They were taking him to the largest temple of Rian. Men were hastily readying a sail canvas, slinging it between poles. They would move him on that. The crowd would make way in silence until they passed, bearing death, then it would be loud again, wilder than before, with flamboyant murder suddenly added to the intoxicating mixture of Carnival—something else by which to remember the night.
The troubadours and joglars would go to the temple, she knew, to wait and watch in a vigil outside the walls, many for Bertran's sake and some for Valery's. Lisseut had been part of death-watches before. She didn't want to join one tonight.
She followed the coran from Gorhaut.
She had to force her way against the press of the crowd. People were hurrying towards the river, drawn by rumours of some excitement or disaster, the coinage of festival time. Twisting past bodies, Lisseut smelled wine and cooked meats, roasted nuts, sweet perfumes, human sweat. She knew a brief, flurrying panic when she was trapped for a moment in a cluster of drunken merchant seamen from Gotzland, but she twisted free of the nearest of them and hurried on, looking for the man she was following.
His height made it easier. Even in the thronged laneways she could make him out ahead of her, moving against the crowd, his hair a bright red when he passed under the torches set in the walls of the dilapidated old warehouses. This was not the choicest part of Tavernel. Blaise of Gorhaut plunged onwards, taking turnings seemingly at random, moving more quickly as the crowds thinned out away from the water. Lisseut found she was almost running in order to keep him in sight.
Incongruous in one dim, crooked laneway, she saw a woman, gowned magnificently in green silk, furred and bejewelled, with an elaborate fox mask, reach out for Blaise; he didn't even break stride to acknowledge her presence. Lisseut, hurrying along behind him, was made suddenly aware of her own damp, straggling hair and ruined shirt. Trivialities, she told herself sternly; a white-feathered arrow had been launched tonight with poison on its head, and it had been meant—it took no brilliance of insight to know—for the duke of Talair and not the cousin who had quietly taken his place in that small boat on the river.
Blaise of Gorhaut stopped abruptly at a crossing of lanes and looked around him for the first time. Lisseut quickly ducked into a recessed doorway. She almost fell over a man and a woman leaning back against the wall in the darkness beside the door, locked in an embrace. The lower part of the woman's gown was pushed up about her waist.
"Oh, good," the woman drawled sensuously, glancing languorously at Lisseut, a ripple of amusement in her voice. Her mask had slipped back from her eyes and hair, dangling loosely down her back. The man laughed softly, mouth at her throat. Both of them reached out in the same instant, slender fingers and strong ones, to draw Lisseut into their embrace. "Good," the woman said again, a whisper, half-closing her eyes. There was a scent of wildflowers about her.
"Um, not really," Lisseut said awkwardly, stirred against her will. She spun free of both of them.
"Then farewell love, ah, farewell ever, love." The woman sang the old refrain with an unexpected plaintiveness marred by a giggle at the end as the man whispered something in her ear.
Back in the street, in the wavering, uneasy shadows between wall torches, Lisseut quickly donned the woman's mask. It was a cat, most of the women chose cat masks tonight. Ahead, she saw Blaise throw out a hand to stop a trio of apprentices. He asked a question. Laughing, they answered and pointed; one of them offered a flask. Lisseut saw Blaise hesitate and then accept. He squeezed a jet of dark wine down his throat. For some reason, watching, that made her uneasy.
He took the lane forking right, where they had pointed. She followed, passing the apprentices with quick sidelong steps, prepared to run; it was too dark here, not enough people. She reached the fork and looked along the lane to the right. It was even quieter there, running up and away from the river and the market square. The houses became steadily more impressive, more evidently prosperous, the roadway better lit than before with lanterns burning in ornate sconces on outside walls—one of the surest signs of wealth. Two girls, evidently servants, called cheerfully down to her from where they leaned out over a carved stone balustrade. Lisseut kept moving. Blaise, walking swiftly with his long strides, had already turned a corner up ahead. She began to run.
By the time she reached that next crossing of streets and turned right again as he had done, Lisseut realized where they were, even before she saw, in the square at the top of the street, the off-centred tower loom grimly above the largest red-stoned building.
This was the merchants' quarter, where the banking houses and mercantile operations of several countries had thei
r headquarters in Tavernel, Arbonne's deep-harboured gateway to the world. That tower at the top of the road was a deliberate, intimidating echo of the great tower of Mignano, largest of the Portezzan city-states, and the massively formidable palaces on either side of the street leading to the square sheltered the Arbonne contingents of the lucid, careful merchants of those wealthy cities.
The noises of Carnival were distant now. Lisseut slipped into an archway, peering out carefully as Blaise of Gorhaut went past one massive doorway and then another. She saw him stop finally, gazing up at the coat of arms above a pair of iron doors. There were lights on in that house, on the upper levels where the sleeping quarters would be. There was no one else in the street.
Blaise stood motionless for what seemed to her a long time, as if deliberating something difficult, then he looked carefully around him and slipped down a narrow alley that ran between that house and the one north of it. Lisseut gave him a moment, then stepped out from her archway and followed. At the entrance to the alley she had to hold her breath for a moment, almost choking in the midden smell that came from it. Kneeling for concealment, her eyes keen in the darkness, she saw the coran from Gorhaut hoist himself smoothly to scale the rough stone wall running behind the house where he had stopped. There were more lights glowing softly from beyond that wall. She saw him silhouetted for a second against them before he let himself down on the other side.
It was time to go back to the river. She now knew where he had gone. She could find out who owned this house in the morning, report the incident to whoever seemed appropriate. Duke Bertran was the obvious person, or perhaps the countess's seneschal in Tavernel. Perhaps even Ariane de Carenzu, who had bound the men of Talair and Miraval to keep the peace this night. Morning would tell her what to do; she could consult with friends, with Remy, Aurelian. It was time to go back.
Discarding her mask, gritting her teeth, Lisseut went down the fetid alley, past the point where the Gorhautian had scaled the wall and, further along, she found an overturned wooden crate. There were always crates in alleyways. Rats scattered in several directions as she stepped carefully up onto it. From there it was just possible to lift herself to the top of the wide wall. She lay flat on the stone, motionless for a long time. Then, when she was sure she'd not been seen or heard, she cautiously lifted her head and looked down.
It was an intricate, formal garden, carefully tended. A plane tree grew just inside the wall and its branches offered some concealment for her, which mattered, for Riannon, the blue moon of the goddess, rode free just then of what seemed the last of the cloud cover for a time. Above, through the screen of leaves, Lisseut could see the stars, brilliant in the summer sky. A bird was singing in the branches of the tree.
Below her, on a close-cropped grassy expanse, Blaise of Gorhaut stood quietly beside a small, round pool into which a sculpted fountain was splashing water. There were flowers planted around the border of the fountain and more of them laid out in patterns through the ordered space of the garden. Lisseut smelled oranges and lemons, and there was lavender near the southern wall. Behind her rats scrambled in the dank alley.
On a small patio near the house a stone table had been laid with meats and cheeses and wine. There were tall white candles burning.
A man slouched in a chair by that table, hands laced behind his head, long legs extended, his features obscured by shadow. Blaise was looking at him. He had not spoken or moved since she'd arrived at her place of concealment on the wall. His back was to her. He seemed carved of stone himself. Lisseut's heart was beating rapidly.
"I will confess that I wondered," said the man by the table lazily, speaking Portezzan with elegant, aristocratic precision. "I wondered if you were in a clever vein tonight and would come. But see, I did give you the benefit of the doubt—there is food and wine for two, Blaise. I'm glad you're here. It has been a long time. Do come and dine with me. It is a Carnival night in Arbonne, after all."
He stood then, leaning across the table into the light as he reached for the wine. By the shining of the two moons and the candles and the glowing, graceful lanterns swinging from tripods among the trees, Lisseut saw that he was slender and bright-haired and young and smiling, that his loose silk tunic was night-black with wide, full sleeves, and his leggings were black and white, like Arsenault the Swordsman in the puppet shows she remembered from childhood—and like the arrows she saw lying in plain sight in their quiver by the table.
"You still use syvaren, I see," said Blaise of Gorhaut calmly. He didn't move any nearer to the table. He spoke Portezzan as well.
The fair-haired man made a face as he poured from a long-necked decanter. "An ugly thing, isn't it?" he said with distaste. "And amazingly expensive these days, you have no idea. But useful, useful at times. Be fair, Blaise, it was a very long shot in a breeze and uncertain light. I didn't plan anything in advance, obviously, it was sheerest good fortune I happened to be in the tavern when that river challenge was made. And then I had to count on Duke Bertran being skillful enough to make it as far as the rope. Which I did, and which he was, Corannos shelter his soul. Come now, you might have congratulated me by now on hitting him from so far. The right shoulder, I take it?" He turned, smiling, a glass of wine in each hand, one extended towards the other man.
Blaise hesitated, and Lisseut, all her senses alert, knew with certainty that he was wrestling with whether to tell the assassin of his error.
"It was a long shot," was all he said. "I don't like poison though, you know that. They don't use it in Arbonne. Had you not done so they might have thought the killing was by one of Urté de Miraval's men. It wasn't, I take it?"
The question was ignored. "Had I not done so there wouldn't have been a killing. Only a duke with a wounded shoulder and a quadrupled guard, and I'd be out a rather spectacular fee."
"How spectacular?"
"You don't want to know. You'll be jealous. Come, Blaise, take your wine, I feel silly standing with my hand out like an almsman. Are you angry with me?"
Slowly, Blaise of Gorhaut walked forward over the grass and took the offered goblet. The Portezzan laughed and returned to his seat. Blaise remained standing beside the table.
"In the tavern," he said slowly, "you would have seen that I was with the duke, one of his men."
"Of course I did, and I must say it surprised me. I'd heard a rumour at the Aulensburg tourney—you were missed in Gotzland, by the way, you were talked about—that you were in Arbonne this spring, but I doubted it, I really didn't know you liked singing so much."
"I don't, believe me. But it isn't important. I'm employed by the duke of Talair, and you saw as much in the tavern. Didn't that mean anything to you?"
"A few things, yes, but you won't like them and you won't want to hear them from me. You are angry with me, obviously. Really, Blaise, what was I supposed to do, abandon a contract and payment because you happened to be on the scene trading insults with an Arimondan catamite? I gather you killed his brother."
"How much money were you paid?" Blaise asked again, ignoring that last. "Tell me."
The fair, handsome head was in shadow again. There was a silence. "Two hundred and fifty thousand," the Portezzan said quietly.
Lisseut suppressed a gasp. She saw Blaise stiffen in disbelief.
"No one has that much money for an assassination," he said harshly.
The other man laughed, cheerfully. "Someone does, someone did. Deposited in advance with our Gotzland branch, in trust for me on conditions. When word comes of the musical duke of Talair's so sad demise the conditions are removed. Gotzland," he said musingly, "is a usefully discreet place sometimes, though I suppose it does help to have a family bank."
The man still seemed amused, eerily so, as if there was some private jest he was savouring at Blaise's expense. Lisseut was still reeling inwardly, unable to even comprehend the size of the sum he had named.
"Payment in Portezzan coinage?"
Laughter again, on the edge of hilarity now, the s
ound startling in the quiet formality of the garden. A slow sip of wine. "Ah, well now, you are fishing for information, my dear. You were never good at that, were you Blaise? You don't like poison, you don't like deceptions. You aren't at all happy with me. I've clearly gone to the bad since we parted. You haven't even asked for news of Lucianna."
"Who paid you, Rudel?"
The question was blunt, hard as a hammer. Blaise's wine glass was set down on the table, untouched; Lisseut saw that it shook a little. The other man—who had a name now—would have seen that too.
"Don't be stupid and tiresome," the Portezzan said. "When have you ever revealed who hired you? When has anyone you respected done so? You of all men know I've never done this for the money in any case." A sudden, sweeping gesture encompassed the house and the garden. "I was born to this and all it represents in the six countries, and I'll die with it unless I'm more stupid than I plan to be, because my father happens to like me." He paused. "Drink your wine, Blaise, and sit down like a civilized person so we can talk about where we're going next."
"We aren't very civilized in Gorhaut," said Blaise. "Remember?" There was a new note in his voice.
The man in the chair cleared his throat but did not speak. Blaise did not move from where he stood.
"I see it now, though," he said softly. Lisseut could barely hear him. "You've had too much wine too quickly, haven't you? You didn't mean to say all of that did you, Rudel?" He spoke Portezzan extremely well, much better than Lisseut did herself.
"How do you know? Perhaps I did," the other man replied, an edge to his tone now. "Lucianna always said that good wine at night made her—"
Blaise shook his head. "No. No, we aren't talking about Lucianna, Rudel." He drew a breath and, surprisingly, reclaimed his own goblet and drank. He set it down again, carefully. "You told me too much. I understand now why you find all of this so diverting. You were paid in Gorhaut coinage. You were hired for that insane amount of money to assassinate the duke of Talair in the name of Ademar, king of Gorhaut. But on the orders and doubtless the instigation of Galbert, High Elder of Corannos in Gorhaut."
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