Serpentine (The Beggar's Ride Book 1)

by Tim Stead

  Drammen shrugged. “I never could tell the difference,” he said.

  Durander. Narak was sure of it. It was the only thing that made sense. The false Wolf was a Durander mage, an Abadonist, a master of doors and roads. Such a one could retrieve the paper from where it lay, and none other, except for Pascha of course, but she would not be part of this.

  The question now was how to lay hands on the impostor. It would be difficult. The man would be careful, but Narak was a man for whom such things were an invitation. He was the master of the hunt, and he had at last caught the scent of his prey.

  28 Certainty

  Callista had spent two days with Rodric, but it was a few drops of oil on an ocean of storms. Laya had not awoken from the test. She had slipped into death like all the others and Callista’s only comfort was that there had been no pain, just a dream that faded into nothing.

  Rodric blamed himself. He had been party to his sister’s ambition. They had planned this trip to Col Boran together, and after Callista had revealed to him the likely consequences of the test he had invested his reluctant hope in Laya.

  “It’s not your fault,” Callista assured him, not for the first time, but Rodric refused to be comforted.

  “I could have stopped her.”

  “Perhaps this time, but she was always going to take the test. You know that.”

  “Do I?” He looked at her with red eyes.

  “It’s why you were still here,” she said. “If she wasn’t going to take the test you would have gone home.”

  “No. She was making up her mind.”

  “You’re wrong, Rodric. She never wavered. She was waiting for the right time. She was sure that she wouldn’t fail.” Callista knew that it was true. The door inside her had opened again, and she knew. It was a strange feeling to have no doubt, and Rodric heard it in her voice, and his own talent shared the certainty with him.

  “I could have stopped her somehow,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice. He stood up and went to the back of the room. She heard him pour himself another cup of wine. She didn’t like it when Rodric was drunk, but perhaps it would be good for him to deaden the pain this way. She didn’t know. At least if he got drunk he would sleep a while.

  Rodric came back and sat down awkwardly, spilling a little of his wine, though he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Damned test,” he said. “She’s just killing people. It’s no test at all. It’s murder. Assassination.”

  Callista knew that he was speaking out of pain and grief, but she couldn’t let it pass. She’d talked with Eran Pascha, and she knew that the deaths troubled the god mage greatly.

  “No,” she said. “Never that.”

  “What do you know of it?” Rodric demanded. “You’re afraid to take the test. You know it would kill you like it’s killed everybody else.”

  “It’s true that I am afraid,” she said. “Who would not be? But I do not think that the test is impossible. I do not think that the Eran is merely killing people.”

  “What else has she done?”

  It was a difficult question to answer. Callista knew only that thirteen people had taken Pascha’s test and thirteen had died. On the other side stood her unshakable certainty that this is not what the god mage had hoped for, but this was hardly an argument that she could advance to Rodric in his present state of mind.

  “Perhaps I will take the test,” she said.

  Rodric squinted at her, as though better to see inside her.

  “No,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”

  He really could see the truth. She wouldn’t, not knowing how it might turn out. Pascha had been right. She really did have a life now, and friends. They included Rodric.

  “You should go home,” she said. “There’s nothing for you here.”

  “My sister’s ashes are in that damned field,” he replied. “Her bones buried here. That’s all I have.”

  “It’s just memories, Rodric. Go home. They’ll travel with you.”

  He shook his head. “I have no home,” he said. “We had no home. How welcome do you think a truth teller is in a small town, even in a family? Nobody has any secrets. People like their secrets, so they didn’t like me. Only Laya. Laya liked me.”

  Rodric drained his cup again and stood up to fetch more, but he stumbled and went down on his knees. His cup broke on the floor. Callista tried to help him up, but he pushed her away.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “Not drunk enough.”

  “You can’t even get to the bottle.”

  Rodric levered himself up on the arm of a chair and slipped again, half catching himself. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe I’ve had enough.”

  “I’ll help you to the bed,” Callista offered. “You can sleep it off.”

  “I want to sleep forever,” he said. “Never wake up.”

  “You’ll wake up,” Callista assured him. “And I’ll be here with a jug of water and a cold cloth.”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course,” she said and he sighed, knowing that it was the truth.

  He began to snore almost as soon as his head touched the blankets. Callista pulled his boots off, but didn’t think it proper to do more. She would be here when he woke, but for now she had other things to do, other people to see.

  She walked to the door and opened it. Sheyani was standing on the other side.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” the Durander said.

  Callista closed the door carefully behind her and turned to face Sheyani. They hadn’t met, but the Durander mage was a significant person in Col Boran, and she had been pointed out, described and explained to Callista more times than she could recall.

  “Lady Sheyani, I’m honoured to meet you,” she said. “How may I serve?”

  “Sithmaree was right. You are polite to a fault,” Sheyani said. “How is the boy?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Sheyani frowned. It was quite early in the evening. “Drunk?”

  “And better for it, I think,” Callista said.

  “If anyone has a right to it he does, I suppose. They were very close, I hear.”

  Callista nodded, but didn’t reply. Sheyani indicated the path and they walked together in the general direction of Sithmaree’s house.

  “Will you dine with me tonight?” Sheyani asked. Callista hesitated. She wanted to apologise to Sithmaree. She had almost accused the Snake of taking her away so that Laya could take the test, and she knew that wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. The Snake was not so devious. She simply didn’t know enough about people to play such a subtle game.

  “I should go home,” she said.

  Sheyani smiled. “She’s not expecting you. Pascha said I should get to know you. Sithmaree was there.”

  It was the only reason that she had not to go, so Callista nodded again. “Yes,” she said. She had no choice really. You couldn’t refuse someone like Sheyani, and besides, she did find the Durander interesting. There were so many tales about her, and here she was, over a century old and looking the same age as Callista, and half a head shorter.

  “I’ll play for the boy later,” Sheyani said. “It’ll help.”

  It was a generous offer, and kind. Callista had heard that Sheyani was kind, but not to be trifled with, and those things seemed contradictory, but now she could see how they might coexist.

  It was all right in the end. Sheyani was one of the easiest people to talk to that Callista had ever known. She seemed interested in everything Callista said, smiled indulgently at her stories, and generally drew her out of herself more than she could remember.

  She’d dared to hope that she might meet Cain as well, but Sheyani’s husband didn’t make an appearance, and they sat together by a fire, after they had eaten, talking for hours.

  Later they grew quiet, staring into the flames, but it was not a strained silence. Each was alone with their thoughts, Callista believed, and those
thoughts ran along parallel lines, travelling the road of their previous discourse.

  “Tell me one thing,” Sheyani said. “You came here with the intention of being tested, despite the danger. Perhaps you wished to die, or part of you did. But that is not my question. If you took the test today do you think that you would succeed?”

  Callista was startled by the question. It was a kingdom away from their previous talk. The subject of the test had not been raised all night.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Sheyani smiled and looked into the fire. “Think about it,” she said. “Imagine taking the test, what it might be, what Pascha is looking for. Dream yourself into it.”

  Callista did as she was told. She thought of the test, of Pascha’s need and what it would mean to pass. She tried to imagine the test, and in her mind she saw a road, a road that she could walk.

  Inside her she had the familiar sensation of a door opening, and it opened on a sunny summer’s day. She filled with warmth and light, and she knew.

  If she took the test, she would pass it.

  Callista closed her eyes. She took a deep breath.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  29 Safe House

  The place smelled stale. There was bread on the table that had turned green with mould. It would need cleaning out, but at least it was somewhere not associated with Francis.

  It made him sad to be here in Johan’s rooms, but he was glad that he’d taken the trouble to pay his friend’s rent for a month. Now that Johan was dead it was one of the few places in the city he had a key to that even his friends didn’t know about.

  Francis had meant to come here and deal with his friend’s things, but he’d never got round to it. The rooms were a shambles, the bed unmade and now unusable, dust thick over everything. Johan had not been a tidy man.

  Prince Rubel Casraes stopped in the doorway and sniffed the air, a bit like a dog in a new home, Francis thought. It was clear that he didn’t like it much. Who could blame him for that? A week ago he’d been the heir to the throne of Afael, surrounded by luxury and expectation, and now he was a hunted boy, a fugitive, desperate for the help that even one as low as Francis Gayne could offer.

  “It’s bigger than I expected,” Rubel said.

  Francis was impressed again. He wouldn’t have thought the prince could have found anything positive to say.

  “I’ll clean it up,” he said. “Falini’s men killed the man who lived here, and it’s been a while.”

  “I’ll help,” Rubel said. He promptly rolled up his sleeves and started looking for a sack to put the rubbish in. It took them an hour to scrub the place out, and Francis gathered up all the linen to get it cleaned, while Rubel threw open every window in the place to banish the odour of decay.

  “Stay here,” Francis told him. “I’ll be back in a few hours with food and clean things.”

  He went down to the street, passing Chay Calitanto at the door. The old soldier had mellowed a lot since last night. They’d started using each other’s given names.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Fine. We’ve cleaned it out. I’m going to get food. Anything you want?”

  Calitanto shook his head. “I’ll make do with whatever there is.”

  Typical soldier, Francis thought. He walked up to the end of the street and turned into Battle Lane. He stopped by at the house of a woman who took in washing and left the linen with her, along with a handful of pennies for the job. The prince would have to make do for tonight because it would take a day to wash it and get it dry enough to use, and that was if the weather held.

  He walked on, stopping here and there, at a bakers, at a butcher where he picked up a pair of preserved sausages almost the size of his forearm. He bought fruit from a street stall, apples and pears that were grown north of the city and some exotic dried fruit from the Green Isles. He also bought butter and wine. It would all have to last a few days.

  Francis didn’t stop to talk to anyone, and he saw nobody that he knew. He hurried back, and found Calitanto still on the door.

  “Food,” he said. “You should go up. Come and eat.”

  “I’ll stay here,” the soldier said.

  Francis shook his head. “People are starting to notice you. Nobody has guards in this part of town.”

  Calitanto grunted. “I grew up in this part of town,” he said. “You’d think I’d remember.” He followed Francis up the stairs and inspected the rooms with a disapproving air. “Small,” he said.

  “Discreet,” Francis replied.

  “Aye, it is that,” Calitanto conceded. “How do you find it, Prince Rubel?”

  “It will do nicely,” the prince said.

  “And you’ll have to stop that,” Francis said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t call him Prince Rubel, or even Rubel. People will hear. They’ll guess.”

  “Jackan,” the prince said. “I’ve always liked the name. Call me Jackan.”

  Francis and Calitanto looked at each other. Rubel had already thought about this, it seemed. He was ahead of both of them.

  “Very well, Jackan,” Francis said. “Shall we eat?”

  *

  An hour later Francis was back at his place in the forge. He was working on a new sword, enjoying the long slow process of folding and hammering. But he had another project in mind. He’d taken a detour, a mile out of his way, on his walk back to work. He’d passed the Falini estate and seen how it had changed since his last visit.

  There were half a dozen men at each gate now. A curtain of chains had been hung over each entrance, and every wagon that passed through was thoroughly prodded with spears. It was going to be much harder to get in a second time. He would have to go over the wall.

  It would be easy enough to get over the wall, but not so easy to do so undetected. Francis had carried out tests. Anything that he carried close to himself, his clothes, a sword, a bucket – they would all answer to his gift. They would not be seen. Anything much larger than that would break through. He had startled a trader in the market the previous night by picking up a large basket. It had not vanished, but from the trader’s face he had seen that the thing seemed to float through the air on its own.

  Francis wanted to make a grappling iron, but it had to be one that he could carry close to his body when he wasn’t using it. That meant it had to be thin, like a single hook, but a single hook would never do the job.

  When the working day finished he put the new blade aside and began work. He made three single hooks. That was easy enough – it was just three bent rods with the ends hammered flat.

  Next he took a triangular blank a little shorter than the hooks and filed a groove down each face, leaving a stop at the bottom so that the hooks, when they rested in the grooves, would not slip past it. The bottom of the blank he hammered out into a loop so that he could tie a rope there.

  He drilled each hook twice, at the top and at the bottom, and put matching holes in the centre piece, and then fashioned pins that he could fit snugly into the holes. Each pin was drilled at its end, too, so that it could be locked in place by another pin.

  He assembled the thing and looked at it. It was heavy, ugly, and already he could see a dozen ways to improve it, but the grapple was serviceable. He knotted a fifteen foot rope and threaded it through the eye, throwing the grapple over one of the beams above him. He hung on it, bounced on it, climbed up to the beam – only ten feet – unhooked the grapple and jumped down. It worked.

  Now it was well past midnight. He would not use the device tonight, but tomorrow – well, he would go and see what might be possible.

  *

  The next day he was at the general’s house early. He was sure that the general would be impressed by his news of Rubel Casraes’ pragmatic defection to their cause. He did not use his gift, but walked jauntily up the street to the gate.

  “To see the general,” he told the guard.

  “And who are yo
u?” the guard demanded.

  Francis handed over a small piece of paper roughly sealed with wax. “Show this to the general and he’ll see me,” he said. The paper contained nothing but the single letter J, but he didn’t want the guards to see it.

  The man hurried off, and the second guard eyed him silently while they waited. It didn’t take long. The first guard came back without the paper.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Francis followed. They crossed the courtyard and entered the main house, turned right, and Francis found himself once more in the general’s reading room. The old man was sitting in a chair facing away from the door. He had a book open on his lap, but it didn’t seem to Francis that he was reading it. It was just a show of nonchalance. Francis walked around so that he faced him.

  “News from the gutter?” the general asked.

  Francis was wise enough in the ways of men to know that the general was playing mind games, trying to reinforce his position as superior to Francis – his commander, if you like. Francis found it irritating and amusing in equal measure.

  “From the royal family,” he replied.

  The general sat forwards, his eyes suddenly keen. “What? Who?”

  “We have Prince Rubel,” Francis said. “He will support us.”

  “Rubel is dead,” the general said.

  “He escaped.”

  “And you found him. How?”

  Francis was surprised by the general’s reaction. He had expected the old man to be pleased. Rubel was an asset, a powerful talisman to be wielded to their benefit, but General Delarsi seemed angry. Something wasn’t right. He decided to be careful.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “All that does matter is that we have him, and he has agreed to support us.”

  “Has he indeed?” The general stroked his chin. Francis could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “Is he safe? Where are you keeping him?”

  “He’s safe,” Francis said, deliberately ignoring the latter question. He didn’t think it would be wise to let the general know. “What should we do?”

  The general examined him for a moment, as though reassessing him. “Keep him under wraps,” he replied. “Tell no-one.”