by Paul Kearney
“You were a sailor of sorts yourself once,” Gallico ventured.
“How do you know?”
“Something in the way you look up at the stars. Most men spare them a glance and no more, but you study them as if you knew them.”
“I have sailed by them, a little. Coastal sailing mostly.”
“So you know the sea.”
“I lived my life by it and on it once. Seems a long time ago now, but it is not so long.”
“Time goes slower when one is young. I have seen out a century, and am but half-grown.”
“What—forgive me—what are you?”
Gallico laughed, a great boom of good fellowship. “I am a relic, a piece of flotsam. Men call my kind halftrolls, but that is only a name. I have Old Blood in me.” Gallico stopped, considered. “As have you, my young friend.”
They stared at each other, Rol in dawning wonder, Gallico nodding.
“The Elder Race, of whom it is better not to speak. That ancient blood reveals itself in strange ways, odd forms. Demon or angel, it is in us all.”
“You know, then, how I was able to save your wages.”
“You preserved Woodrin, which means more to us. But yes, I am not so surprised. Men do not fear us for nothing.”
“Your shipmates do not seem to fear you.”
“That is because we are of the company, Seahawks one and all.”
“Seahawks?”
“The name of our brig, though to my mind she’s more of a pigeon. We are of a dozen different nations and races but our allegiance is to our ship, and each other.”
Once again that odd pain in Rol, the feeling that he was somehow missing something, lacking a quality Gallico and his shipmates possessed.
“I must go now,” he said.
“Are you truly a man of this city, Rol?”
“I’m not a man of anywhere.”
“Then you could do worse than seek a home on the sea. We’re short several hands. The company would welcome you, I know.”
Rol bowed his head, realizing how easy it would be. By this time tomorrow he would be at sea with men who seemed to esteem him. He would be clean.
“I cannot. I have things to do here in Ascari. Unfinished business.”
Gallico’s paw was surprisingly light on his shoulder. “I thought as much. But if the business becomes too bloody, make your way to Spokehaven on Osmer. Every year at the fall of the leaves, captains from all over the Wrywind put in for refitting there.”
Rol looked up, his face very young in the starlight. “The Seahawks also?”
“We also. Fare well, my friend.” And Gallico turned, bent, and re-entered the tavern at their backs, the door closing behind him on the lamplight, the laughter, the reek of beer and sweat of men.
Rol gathered his cloak about him, and began walking uphill, out of Eastside. Away from the sea.
Nine
THE FEAST OF HARVEST
TIME PASSED, THE SEASONS FOLLOWED ONE ANOTHER IN their particular order. Summer came and went, and the snows on the Ellidon Hills receded, and then began to creep seaward again toward the flushed fires of the turning woods. The coastal fishermen brought in their wherries and beached them beyond the reach of Ran’s Rages, and in the markets of Ascari apples and hazelnuts and half a hundred other foodstuffs were mounded in colorful profusion on the stalls. Another harvest had been brought in, another season on the sea survived. Men gave thanks in drunken feasts up and down the city, where city-dwellers who barely knew what it was to plant a thing and watch it grow and harvest it sat down with fishermen and farmers and gave thanks for the largesse. It was a tradition as old as mankind itself.
Psellos hosted a grand feast in the finest suites of the Tower as he did every year, and so lavish were the preparations that it seemed he must denude the stocks of provender for miles around. Convoys of wagons brought in load after load of food and drink so that the lower levels were piled high with barrels and crates and sacks and earthen jars. Whole vintages were unearthed from the cellars, dusted, and set forth like ranks of soldiers; an entire bakery was hired to turn out pies, pastries, and cakes of every description; and as the fishing season was over, half a hundred deer were culled from the inland estates, along with pheasant, partridge, hare, and piled wicker baskets of larks and starlings.
The protracted preparations grated on Rol’s nerves, as did Psellos’s air of supercilious bonhomie. Rowen had taught him how to ride over the past few months, and he used every excuse he could find to saddle up the aged bay gelding that was his teaching mount, and trot up the hillside, beyond the sprawl of the city, into the green growing light of the hills and the clamor of the dying leaves. Once there, he would rein in and be able to see the whole shallow arc of Ascari bay, the headland beyond, and a world in which even Ascari’s teeming streets seemed a small and untidy blot on the hugeness of the earth and the mantling sea.
The sea, the sea. He had read stories of how the Weren had become enamored of the young world they had been born into, and how some had taken to the gray stone of the mountains, others to the deep fastnesses of the woods, and some to the shifting, ever-changing oceans of the world. Many of the creatures that roamed this diminished earth owed their existence to the early works of the Elder Race. Dolphins, it was said, had their origins in a dream of Ran. Horses were the puissant valor of the earth made flesh. And peregrines had been sired by the spirit of the west wind.
Legends only, but there was a rightness about them that made Rol hope they were true.
Another rider making their way up through the woods toward him, passing from light into shadow and back into light again, all dappled with the pattern of the sleeping trees. It was Rowen on her black mare. He mouthed the gelding backwards behind a wide gray beech and watched her as she gentled her mount up the root-strewn slope, kicking up saffron leaves as though they were flakes of autumn sparked by her horse’s hooves. She thought no one watched, and her face was open and alive—she loved her horse, all horses—and Rol heard her speaking to the young mare, cajoling, soothing, praising in tones warmer than she ever used with any human being. A small, helpless sense of mourning rose in him, and unwillingly he kicked the gelding forward again, out of the shelter of the tree.
Her head snapped round in a quarter-second and a long throwing knife appeared naked in one fist. The mare half reared and laid her ears back, alarmed by the change in her rider’s mood. But then Rowen saw who it was, and sheathed her knife, and clicked her mount onward.
“You are missed down in the Tower,” she said coldly. “I was sent to fetch you.”
“What use am I down there?”
“Perhaps they need another wine-pourer. How would I know? Come. The Master is waiting. The guests will arrive soon.”
“The guests? And who are they, I wonder? The great and the good of lovely Ascari, come to enjoy the largesse of the Monster of the Tower.”
Rowen looked at him. “Come, Fisheye. Time to go.”
He set his hand on Fleam’s hilt at the sound of the old nickname. Something white and cold and ugly seemed to rise up in his voice.
“And you, Rowen, what is your role in the festivities of the night? Will you take them two at a time in the Master’s bed? Or are the flags of the kitchen good enough for you? How many will you service tonight, Rowen? Will you let them beat you, or will they be more old-fashioned than that?”
Her pale face went paper-gray.
“When you are ready, get you back down. There is a change of clothes waiting in your room. No arms to be carried tonight, not even by you and me. The guests will begin to arrive at dusk.”
She turned her mare and with nudges of her heels set it trotting back down the slope to the city. Rol watched her go, black desolation burning a hole in the walls of his heart.
There was a bottle of Cavaillis, the fragrant brandy of Cavaillon, in his room. A gift from Psellos, it was older than half of Ascari. He broke off the seal of the bottle and slugged the potent liquor straight from its nec
k, feeling it burn a bright path down his gullet, warming the chill of his insides. He stank of horse, for he had pushed the old gelding hard at the last to get back to the Tower in time. A splash in the silver basin some maid had filled for him put paid to that, or so he hoped. He drank deeply of the brandy again, then turned his attention to the clothes lying neatly upon his bed.
A silk shirt, dark as a raven’s back, woolen breeches, and a sleeveless tunic. There was embroidery about the tunic’s neck, black on sable, silk thread. Two horses entangled in a repeated but variegated pattern, their necks entwining, side by side sometimes, in other places running headlong at each other. He admired it, drank from the brandy bottle, admired it some more. He must buy Arexa some frippery for this; it was exquisite.
He dressed hurriedly, set Fleam in her place by the head of his bed, and took a deep breath.
Your time approaches.
It was the sword, speaking to him.
It is right and fitting that you be here. You can follow any path in life you wish, but in the end it is inevitable that you come into your full self. You can be master in a place such as this. Only command me.
It was the brandy. He grinned at the blank walls, drank again of the Cavaillis, patted Fleam affectionately, and left the room, his shoulder striking the doorframe as he exited.
They came two by two, in coaches, in hired barouches, on horseback, with liveried servants behind them and armed retainers shadowing them up the tortuous Cartsway. The great and the good, trooping obediently to Psellos’s door. They avoided his laughing eyes and were reluctant to shake his hand, but they came anyway, drawn by the glitter of their fellows, like moths to a flame irresistible. And perhaps Psellos’s reputation only made the occasion more delectable. There were Feathermen lurking in every side street, producing a delicious shudder in the passing carriages. The occupants did not know that the King of Thieves had been paid to make this evening inviolate. Not so much as a beggar stirred in Ascari without his leave, and he had been bribed to ensure that there would be no hitches on the road to the Tower.
Rowen was dressed in a tight-laced bodice that emphasized her slim form and lent sex to its strength and athleticism. Her raven hair was piled up upon her head with silver clasps and her arms and shoulders were bare. The scars upon those shoulders had been powdered out of existence and the black velvet of her skirt hid all but the toes of her iron-buckled boots. She and Rol did not look at each other as they stood with Psellos in the massive atrium of the Tower and welcomed the entering guests.
Ascari, and by extension Gascar, was an oligarchy of sorts, ruled by the heads of half a dozen noble families who had been powerful in the city for time out of mind. These tolerated Psellos much as they tolerated the King of Thieves; because he was useful, in his own way, and because his eradication would take far too much blood and treasure for it to be contemplated. The Tower in which these worthies stood was older by far than the foundation of the city that men knew. Rol had learned that it was a place of the Elder Race, a hollow stronghold constructed by them in the lost millennia of the current world’s shaping. Psellos had found it derelict and forgotten half a century before, and had taken it as his own—even then he had possessed the funds to make a capital city turn a blind eye. Now only graybeards remembered it as anything other than Psellos’s Tower. Rol could not help but wonder whether Psellos had found more than he claimed in the rubble-choked lower levels of the place’s foundations. The Tower had had a name once, he was sure of that, but no surviving record revealed it.
That was by the by. This night the ancient structure was nothing more than a grand place to hold a party, holding a frisson of half-remembered fear for the assembled guests, but not much more. Psellos had told Rol that even the most privileged of life’s travelers must feel fear, or what they think is fear, every now and again. No man is content with ease and leisure and plenty, even the most indulged libertine. Especially the most indulged libertine. Which was why some of them had paid a fool’s ransom to bed Rowen. Because she made them afraid.
I have come to understand many things since eating dried fish on board Gannet, Rol thought. But the knowledge of these things I would sooner do without.
He smiled and bobbed his head and shook hands with limp-wristed rich men, brushed his lips across the knuckles of their preening wives (many of whom eyed him with open lasciviousness) and wondered at the display of delighted interest that Psellos maintained in front of this endless stream of cattle.
The splendid windowed chamber Rol had only seen once before had been cleared of all its more grisly contents and now a massive U-shaped table had been assembled within, the closed end backing onto the windowed wall. It seated sixscore with ease, with room left over for extravagant table displays of flowers and silver and marching lines of silver candlesticks. Hearths were uncovered and lit along the straight wall and ornate hangings bright with gold leaf hung between them. Servants scurried hither and thither like dispatch riders on a battlefield, marshaled by the increasingly shrill cries of Quare. Dozens, scores of people milled around accepting dainties from proffered trays, savoring the most mellow of Psellos’s wines, running their eyes along the riches on display with some wonder and not a little envy. Rol found himself wondering how many of those present had bought and tasted his blood, or Rowen’s. Partaking of the monster. A small, bleak smile curled upon his face like a cat in a warm place. Then he caught Rowen’s eye, and her utter indifference wiped his face clean again.
He left the grand chamber, bowing to those who seemed self-important enough to justify it, and made his way down the Tower stairs to the kitchens. The brandy was singing in his veins, and the wine he had drunk on top of that had not helped the bright detachment of his mind. They would not be sitting down to eat for a long while yet, and he felt the need of some ballast in his belly.
The activity in the kitchen resembled that within a command post at the height of a major battle. Gibble—this would be his last Harvest Feast—was bellowing orders, consulting lists, clipping the kitchen scullions’ ears, and dipping his grubby finger into various bubbling pots, whilst all around him his subordinates were plucking, gutting, slicing, dicing, and mashing as though their lives depended upon it. There was one small island of calm, however. In the corner farthest from the fire a ragged man with a threadbare cap pushed back on his head sat eating and drinking nonchalantly at a small table. From the cap a single bedraggled feather dangled. Every so often one of the many extra serving-men and -women Psellos had hired for the night would come up to him and speak quietly in his ear. The ragged man would nod thoughtfully, as though filing away information for future use. He looked up as if he had felt the weight of Rol’s appraisal and his face split in a yellow smile. He waved Rol over.
“Well, if it’s not the apprentice. Sit, lad, take the weight off your boot-soles. You look as though you had seen a spirit. Have some wine—one glass will do us both, I’m sure.”
Rol did as he was bidden. He needed the wine. The King of Thieves tore the flesh from a drumstick and leaned back in his chair. His eyes were black with no discernible iris and his unshaven chin was shiny with grease. He looked Rol up and down casually, but Rol had the feeling that the black eyes noted every fold and thread of his clothing.
“I am called Canker. You know me, I think.”
“I know you.”
“Fine work, that little job you pulled off in our guildhouse. Even had Psellos not bought your life from us, I’d have been inclined to let you live out of sheer curiosity.”
“I—I never thought—” Rol stammered. “If I had known—”
“Yes, yes. That is all water down a drain now, though”—and here his avuncular manner wore thin—“it would not be wise to try such a stunt again. I have a reputation to think of, after all.”
Rol nodded and drank from the grease-rimmed glass.
“But you have made a very personal reparation, so we will let bygones be bygones, eh?” He saw Rol’s puzzled look, and chuckled. “Your
blood, my boy. We’ve had quite a taste of it. It’s fitting enough—life for life, you might say.”
Rol’s stomach turned, and the wine seemed to curdle within it.
“We miss Rowen, though—that is a thoroughbred filly if ever there was one. Psellos has done his best over the past while, of course—he has promised a dark-haired little seamstress for tonight. I dare say she’s on her way to the waterfront already.”
Something in Rol’s eyes made the King of Thieves flinch and push back his chair. One dirt-blackened hand reached under his rags.
“Yes, Psellos is right. There’s a lot to be done with you yet. Hood those eyes, my lad, or someone will have them out.”
Rol rose slowly, hands clear of his sides. “Enjoy your meal,” he said to Canker, and backed away, the black stare fixed on him like that of a snake. Finally he turned and left the kitchen, ignoring Gibble’s wave, the maids and scullions making way for him as though his touch would burn them. In a way, he thought, it might.
Psellos had sat Rol on his left, Rowen on his right. The clothing of all three, though rich and beautifully worked, was an exercise in sable, a deliberate contrast to the plumaged finery of the guests. Before them the long arms of the U-shaped table ran out into a haze of candlelight and the gleam of silver and gold. A small army of waiters danced attendance on those present, making sure no glass was empty for long, and a succession of courses arrived with smooth efficiency. Venison, rare and red, wild boar, wildfowl of every description, and a cornucopia of fruit and root vegetables and sauceboats.
Rol’s left-hand neighbor was one of the council elders, and he kept leaning across him to talk to Psellos. Finally the Master introduced them. “Councillor Pachydon, allow me to present my—ah—protégé, Rol of Dennifrey.”
“So this is him! He’s a trifle young, Psellos. Is he up to the job?” The councillor was a portly man with protuberant, bloodshot eyes which looked as though they were about to pop out of his head.