The Throne of Amenkor

by Joshua Palmatier

  Chapter 9

  “Well, that’s certainly not true at the rest of the warehouses.” Avrell paced back and forth on the garden path as he fumed, his hands tucked in the sleeves of his dark blue robes, his head bowed forward.

  I glanced toward Eryn, seated on the stone bench beside me. I’d never seen Avrell so agitated, so angry; not even when he’d thought Eryn had tricked him somehow by smuggling in the Capthian wine without his knowledge. I seethed with anger myself, but unlike Avrell, I found myself retreating into myself, reverting to old habits: I’d become deceptively calm, my hand itching for my dagger. But Avrell and Eryn weren’t the ones responsible for the missing food, and so I waited, the anger held tight and controlled inside me.

  “How bad is it?” Eryn asked.

  Avrell paused in his pacing, looked up at her, at me, then spat in irritation and waved the question toward me before continuing.

  I straightened, thought about the reports from the individual warehouses that had come in throughout the evening and night yesterday, then began.

  “It’s bad,” I said grimly. “The worst warehouse hit was the one on Havel Street, near the wharf. Twenty casks of wine and almost forty crates and barrels of assorted food—pickles, beans, and dried meats—were missing. The Priem warehouse had thirty barrels missing, including the salted fish we knew about earlier. Both warehouses on Lirion Street and Tempest Row were missing foodstocks as well. In fact, all of the warehouses established after the fire in the warehouse district have something missing, except the warehouse we set up on the Dredge.”

  Avrell snorted. “The one warehouse you would have thought would have been robbed blind by now.”

  I shot him a glare of mixed anger and irritation. He grimaced and had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “That is rather curious,” Eryn said.

  I turned the glare on her.

  She shrugged. “Why is it that the warehouse on the Dredge isn’t missing anything? Whoever is taking the food is obviously not afraid, nor stupid. And they must be well organized. Look at how much has gone missing already, and we’ve just now noticed. Why is it that they’ve left the Dredge stores alone?”

  “Probably because they would have been seen,” I said bitterly.

  Avrell frowned. “They should have been seen no matter what warehouse they chose. We have guardsmen posted at all of them. And Darryn is watching the warehouse on the Dredge with his militia.”

  Eryn shook her head. “But not all the time. And besides, guardsmen can be paid to look the other way, bribed with money or perhaps even some of the food that’s being taken. The guardsmen aren’t all reliable.”

  “I didn’t mean they’d be seen by the guardsmen,” I said, annoyed that they didn’t understand. “I meant that nothing goes unnoticed in the slums. There’s always someone watching, whether you can see them or not. The streets are never empty, even when Darryn and his militia aren’t there. If someone had tried to take something from the warehouse, they wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes. Someone else would have seen them and reported it, or killed them and run off with the food themselves. We’d have found bodies. And someone would have seen that as well. And eventually someone would have told Darryn.” I shook my head. “No, whoever is taking the food knows that they’d never get away with stealing from the Dredge. They’d find themselves with their throat slit, their body dumped in a back alley somewhere, probably with Darryn’s permission.” I sighed. “Besides, the people of the slums have too much invested in that food. It’s the only chance they have of surviving the winter. Most of them won’t be willing to risk that, and they won’t be willing to let anyone else steal it from them either. The warehouse on the Dredge is probably the safest warehouse in the city.”

  Avrell and Eryn mulled this over quietly. Finally, Avrell sighed and settled down beside Eryn on the stone bench. He picked at invisible dirt on his robe.

  “So how are they getting the food out?” he asked. “It’s not like they’re lifting a few loaves of bread or an apple. They’re taking entire crates. That requires wagons, and men to do the work.”

  “Some of the guardsmen must be involved,” Eryn added. “More than a few, since more than one warehouse has been hit.”

  Avrell shifted in his seat. “We can’t compare the lists of which guardsmen were working which warehouses, because we don’t know when the food was taken. And at least one of each of the merchants’ warehouses was hit, so we can’t narrow it down that way. None of their personal estates reported anything missing either, probably because most of the merchants have manses behind enclosed walls.”

  I stared across the gardens, through the few denuded branches of the trees and shrubs, to where Keven stood watching us from a discreet distance. “Erick said I could trust Keven and the guardsmen he chose for my personal guard before he left,” I said. “I’ll ask them to question some of the other guardsmen quietly—both palace and city guardsmen—and see what they can find out. Maybe some of the other guardsmen have seen something suspicious.”

  Avrell nodded. “That may give us somewhere to start looking.”

  I felt my tightly controlled anger slip a little. “So who did it? I don’t care how they did it, I just want to know who it was. And where the food is now. I want that food back.”

  Avrell looked up at the sharpness in my tone. “My guess would be one of the merchants. Regin, Yvan, Borund, and the lesser merchants all have unquestioned access to the warehouses. All they have to do is show up with a cart and tell the guardsmen they’re there to move some of the food to a different warehouse. They could even have papers. It wouldn’t matter. Most of the guardsmen can’t read, and there’s no reason for them to doubt the merchants in the first place. We’ve moved hundreds of supplies that way already, almost on a daily basis. So even if we find some guardsman who thinks he saw something suspicious, we can’t prove anything.”

  “But she doesn’t need to prove anything,” Eryn said, one eyebrow rising slightly. “She’s the Mistress.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m not going to raid every merchant’s estate looking for the missing food. Especially since we don’t even know it was a merchant in the first place.”

  Eryn’s eyes darkened. “You may have to,” she said. “Not everything you’ll be forced to do as Mistress will be fair, Varis.”

  I stiffened in defiance, then realized Eryn wasn’t trying to force me to change my mind. She was simply offering advice.

  And she was deadly serious.

  I forced the tension in my shoulders to relax. “I’d rather have some type of reason before I act right now,” I said. “But I will act when I have to.” It wasn’t a concession, but it let her know I’d heard what she meant.

  Eryn held my gaze a moment more, then nodded.

  All three of us lapsed into thoughtful silence, a cloud drifting over the sun high above.

  Eryn’s shoulders tightened. “What if you used the throne?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She straightened up even more, her eyes alight. “I mean use the throne. It’s connected to the city. You can use it to see individual streets, the people on those streets, get a feel for their emotions. Why not use it to search out each of the merchant’s estates individually? They’d never know.”

  “Then what?” Avrell asked.

  Eryn snorted as if the answer were obvious.

  “You raid that merchant’s estate,” she said.

  The anger I’d been holding in check leaped forward at the idea. I stood up abruptly, the weight of my dagger pressing into my back where it was tucked into my belt. Energy seemed to bleed off me, the same sensation I’d felt working in the warehouse the day before. I’d been trapped in the palace and in politics too long, inactive. I needed to move, to hunt, and here was my opportunity.

  “Where are you going?” Avrell called
from behind me. I was already halfway across the garden.

  Without slowing, I said, “To the throne room.”

  * * *

  The city’s life pulsed around me and for a long moment I let myself simply float in it, the eddies and currents soothing. The black despair I’d felt in the slums immediately after assuming the role of Mistress had lifted with the stationing of a warehouse and kitchen in that area, with the creation of the Dredge militia, and with the work force that traveled daily from the slums to the burned-out warehouse district. Construction there had slowed since the readily available stone had run out, but now teams of carts and workers streamed from the city to the northern quarry and the Dredge, so the building continued. The roiling fear that had hovered over the city since the coming of the White Fire had abated.

  I gathered myself and pushed higher above the city, turned south to where the flickering Fires that I’d placed inside Erick and Laurren could be seen. At this distance, they appeared as a single flame, with no way to distinguish between them. I thought about taking a moment to check up on the ship, but my anger over the missing stores pulled me back down to the city.

  I wanted to know who had stolen that food.

  I started with Borund’s estates. Not because I didn’t trust him—I didn’t think he’d taken anything—but because I was more familiar with them. As his bodyguard, I’d escorted him everywhere, to all of his warehouses, all of his buildings in the city. He’d lost a significant portion of his warehouses near the wharf in the fire, but there were still a few left. I started with those.

  Skimming over the wharf, over the flow of the people on the docks and working on the ships, I slid down and down and slowed until I’d settled into the currents on the main thoroughfare. Weaving in and out among the people, I came swiftly to the first warehouse, slipped through the half-open doorway and inside.

  A few men and women were moving among the boxes and crates, but I soon decided they were doing nothing suspicious and so I drifted down among the stacks of supplies, the crates closing in overhead, muting the sounds of the other workers. After a few feet, weaving in and out amongst the crates, the stacks reaching almost to the ceiling, I felt totally isolated and a little claustrophobic. The scent of straw struck me, and I shuddered, felt sweat break out on my forehead and in my armpits. Unconsciously, I gripped my dagger tighter. Then I realized why.

  I’d chased Cristoph into a warehouse exactly like this after his ambush had failed, had killed him among the warren of paths among the crates. In his attempt to stop me, he’d flung his oil lantern at me and started the fire that consumed over half of the warehouse district. All to keep me from killing his father, Alendor; and to avenge his friend, who I’d killed earlier on the wharf when Cristoph tried to rape me.

  I halted in the middle of the crates at the memory, but shook myself and shoved the memory aside. It was useless to dwell on it. Alendor was gone, had fled the city according to Avrell’s network of spies; and Cristoph was dead. Pushing forward, I continued my scouting of the warehouse, ignoring the pungent scent of straw and oil.

  When I’d completed a circuit of the warehouse, I’d found nothing out of place. I scanned it again once, watched the workers a moment more, then shrugged and pushed up out of the building and down the street to the next warehouse.

  It was the same as the first. When I finished with Borund’s warehouses near the wharf, I moved to his personal estate.

  The manse was just as I remembered it. Gerrold manned the estate with the help of Lizbeth and Gart, the stableboy. I paused to watch Gerrold let Borund in at the gates, Borund dismounting and handing the reins of his horse off to Gart. Then I went inside, scanned the rooms downstairs, ducked into the kitchens and down the back staircase to the cellar where rough-woven sacks of the essentials—rice and barley—and strings of vegetables hung from the rafters. I scanned through all of the food stores, but found nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. No hidden crates of wine, no stacked barrels of salted fish.

  I moved back upstairs, then to the second floor. I paused in my old room, stared at the bed, the dresser, the table and chair. Nothing much had changed. I found Lizbeth in Borund’s room, fussing with the bedcovers, folding them over just so before moving on to pull the curtains back from the windows to let in the midmorning sunlight.

  I stayed the longest in William’s rooms. Lizbeth had already been there, the bed already made, the curtains pulled back so that sunlight lit the entire space. I edged up to the desk, stared down at the sheets of paper scattered over its surface. Lists of goods and prices, with sources written in tight, legible script in neat columns. I smiled as I remember Borund telling me how much William had hated keeping track of everything when he’d first arrived as the merchant’s apprentice. Now, he kept everything more organized than Borund himself.

  A piece of paper that seemed out of place caught my eye and I shifted to the back corner of the desk. It was a sketch of some sort, a drawing.

  I frowned, leaned forward for a closer look—

  Then jerked back with a gasp of surprise, my heart thudding in my chest.

  It was a sketch of me, of my face.

  Guilt surged through me, and I quickly scanned the room to see if anyone had noticed, unconsciously sinking into a defensive stance. But of course no one was there, and they couldn’t have seen me even if they were. I wasn’t actually in William’s room, I was back in the palace, sitting on the throne, Avrell, Eryn, and Keven watching over me.

  My heart settling a little, I turned back to the sketch, reached out to touch it, but then withdrew my hand.

  I hadn’t known William could draw, even after living in the same house with him for almost two years. All I’d ever seen him do was work on lists for Borund—inventories and sales records.

  I looked more closely at the face. It was definitely me. Straight dark hair cropped about shoulder length on either side of a narrow face. A few tendrils fell over my eyes even though my bangs were trimmed short, and I felt an urge to reach forward and brush them out of the way, as Erick always did to me. My head was tilted a little to one side, my eyes questioning, a few creases between my eyebrows. I had the faintest hint of a smile, the entire expression on my face making it seem as if I was uncertain whether I was supposed to be laughing or not.

  I leaned back. Was this what William saw when he looked at me? It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t hard, or cold, or angry. I didn’t see the edges I saw in Erick’s face, the edges I associated with being a Seeker. I didn’t see the calculated deadliness of a Seeker either.

  I withdrew from the manse, paused on the street outside, watched the people walking by without really seeing them.

  Perhaps Marielle was right. Perhaps William didn’t look at me and see a disgusting, cold-blooded killer, someone who’d hunted for marks as a Seeker on the Dredge, someone who’d killed on command for Borund and Avrell later on.

  On the street, a man almost walked into me, but before I could react he stepped to one side for no apparent reason, the flows on the river forcing him around me. I watched him as he continued on, his sudden deviation not even registering on his face. But he’d interrupted my thoughts on William, and I suddenly remembered what I was here for.

  Borund was cleared as far as I was concerned. Time to move on to the other merchants.

  I spent the next few hours scouring warehouses and buildings that had been converted into warehouses after the fire, as well as the personal estates of each of the merchants. Most of the warehouses were uninteresting, workers shifting goods or handing them off to the kitchens. At one warehouse, goods were being loaded onto a cart. I waited until all of the sacks of grain were loaded, then followed the cart, hoping that it would lead me to the thief, but it halted at the mill, the grain they unloaded to be ground into flour for use at the communal ovens.

  I sighed and continued searching.

  The estates were mo
re interesting, servants moving out and about at various tasks, the merchants in meetings. I saw stableboys snoring, shovels dropped forgotten at their feet; maids giggling as they worked, passing along gossip; cooks bellowing out orders in stifling kitchens. Once, I intruded on a guardsman and a maid in a tryst on the second floor of a manse, the guardsman hissing for quiet when the woman squealed and giggled in delight.

  Toward dusk, the sun beginning to set on the mountains far to the east, exhaustion lying heavy on my shoulders, I slid down the back stairs of the last manse and pushed through the door at the bottom.

  I blinked into the darkness of the cellar, noticed the sharp scent of freshly turned dirt before my eyes adjusted. As soon as I could see, I stepped into the earthen room, past a sack of walnuts, a bushel of dried apples, a string of garlic.

  Nothing out of the ordinary. Except I could still smell the scent of fresh earth.

  All of the other cellars had smelled of old earth, dry and packed down with use.

  I scanned the room, breathing in deeply, then moved to the right, where the scent seemed strongest.

  I halted before a stack of barrels and glanced down at the earthen floor.

  The barrels had recently been shifted. There was a gouge in the floor, and a pile of loose dirt on the hard-packed earth of the cellar floor.

  I stepped toward the barrels, slid along one side and behind—

  And entered a narrow tunnel.

  The scent of new earth was dense here, almost overpowering.

  Crouching down instinctively, even though the roof was high enough for me to walk upright, I moved down the tunnel, emerging into another room after only ten paces.

  A room packed with crates and sacks stacked to head-height in the narrow space.

  The anger I’d felt since I’d learned that someone was stealing from the warehouses—an anger that had died down during the course of the day and the long hours of fruitless searching—resurfaced with a rush of heat to my chest. My jaw tightened; my nostrils flared.