The Fifth Ward--First Watch

by Dale Lucas

  CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE

  A party arrived with torches. There was Ondego, along with the silver-haired healer that Rem did not know by name, and a few other Fifth Warders. Under the undulating glare of their torches, Rem could finally see that Torval’s face was ashen, that the pool of blood spreading beneath him was large and growing larger. Torval’s blood looked black in the torchlight. The sight of it made Rem feel ill and helpless, like a child.

  Ondego took charge of the scene instantly. He set three of the watchwardens on Masarda, to heave him to his feet, bind him, and see him quickly back to the dockside. Then, with the quick, sure hands and eyes of a surgeon, Ondego rolled Torval over to get a better look at his wound. It was deep, still seeping dark blood. Rem imagined the dwarf’s liver had probably been punctured. If that was the case …

  “Minniver?” Ondego asked, addressing the mage.

  The very same healer that had mended Sliviwit’s broken ankle that evening in the watchkeep slid forward. She had an air of assurance and confidence about her that set Rem at ease a little: her eyes were deep, dark pools of indigo and her mouth never betrayed emotion, be it fear or concern or even undue pride. Her young, smooth face and mane of silver hair were alien and incongruous, making it impossible for Rem to guess her age. As he watched, she examined Torval’s bleeding wound, then gave a curt nod.

  “I think I can save him,” Minniver said, then looked to Ondego again. “But I need someone to draw from.”

  Ondego looked to Rem.

  Rem blinked. “Draw …?”

  “His life force is dwindling as he bleeds out,” Minniver said, never taking her eyes off Torval’s wound. “I need to take life from elsewhere to give his body enough energy to close the wound and start replenishing his blood supply.”

  “Take life …?” Rem repeated dumbly.

  Minniver threw a cold glare at him. “Will you or won’t you? You’re young and strong, so you’re the best—”

  “I’ll do it,” Rem interrupted. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

  Minniver took one of Rem’s hands in one of hers, then placed her free hand on Torval’s bleeding wound. The dwarf groaned a little, but barely stirred. He was right at the edge of consciousness.

  “Hold him still,” Minniver told Ondego. “This will hurt.”

  Ondego held Torval’s shoulders. Another watchman held his legs. They were ready.

  Then it began.

  It was the strangest feeling that Rem had ever known. As if he could feel the heat and vitality of his body—its most latent energies, so easily taken for granted—flowing away through his palm and his fingers into Minniver … flowing away and leaving him weak, cold, tingling all over as though he had just awakened from a too-long nap under a snow-capped tree. Rem felt himself start to tremble, felt his skin begin to prickle with moisture and gooseflesh.

  Beneath Minniver’s hands, Torval groaned and suddenly stiffened. Ondego and the watchman on Torval’s legs both held him still. Clearly, something was happening, a pain that cut right through Torval’s deathly stupor and snatched him back toward the surface of consciousness. Likewise, Minniver kept her hand pressed against the wound, never losing contact. Rem realized she was muttering something—incantations in an ancient tongue, no doubt some component of the magical transfusion ritual she was enacting.

  Then Rem’s vision started to fill with a broad, black cloud. Upon that cloud there were whirling stars and fireflies. He heard a buzzing in his ears.

  “Prefect,” he said, his voice sounding far away.

  “He’s going white,” he heard Ondego say, also from far away.

  “Just a moment longer,” Minniver answered.

  Torval suddenly howled in pain. Rem blinked away the fireflies for a moment and saw the dwarf’s compact little body buck and arc. Then the darkness and the fireflies returned, and Rem felt himself drifting away again.

  Finally, Minniver let go of him. That vague feeling of having something sucked away from him, something that his body needed and could not live without, subsided almost instantly. Despite the relief he felt, Rem couldn’t help but collapse. He toppled backward onto the earthen floor of the alleyway and gulped air, desperate to regain his vision and his senses. Vaguely, he heard Ondego shouting at him from very far away, shouting his name and slapping something, again and again.

  Ondego was slapping him. Once, twice, three times the prefect’s rough hand whacked Rem’s face. Rem felt a heat rising in his cheeks in response to the hard strikes, and found himself vaguely delighted that he could feel something again. When Ondego moved to strike him a fourth time, Rem raised one hand weakly.

  “Please,” he managed. “I’m here. I’m awake.”

  Ondego did something then that both encouraged and unnerved Rem: the hard-faced prefect smiled. It was a warm smile, a genuine smile, but seemed strangely out of place on Ondego’s face. “Good lad,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t desert us.”

  He helped Rem to sit upright. Rem’s vision was finally clearing. In the torchlight, he saw Minniver bending over Torval. The dwarf lay on his side, his wound clearly visible.

  Or rather, the place where his wound had been was clearly visible. There was still a great deal of blood smeared all about the lower part of Torval’s flank and back, but if Rem’s eyes did not deceive him, the dwarf’s wound was now fully closed, marked only by a rough drawn-in patch of scar tissue. It looked like a wound that had been closed for weeks, not just moments. Minniver, for her part, was exhausted and haggard. Nonetheless, she attended Torval kindly, whispering to him, asking him how he felt and whether or not he thought he could sit up. Rem saw Torval nod, and then Minniver helped him sit. The dwarf was deathly pale, but there was something like the rose of life blooming in his cheeks once more, the light of life seeping back into his small blue eyes.

  Rem lay there, held up by Ondego, staring at Torval, who was held up by Minniver. The young man and the dwarf smiled at each other.

  “You look like the sundry hells warmed over,” Torval croaked.

  “You’re welcome,” Rem countered, and the two managed a round of weak, relieved laughter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  After a time, the watchwardens present helped Rem and Torval back onto their feet and led them—providing support along the way—back to the dock where Masarda’s ship lay berthed. It felt like they had been here hours ago—days ago—but, in fact, they had only left the ship and taken chase after Masarda less than a half hour earlier. In that short span, Rem felt as if he had lived three or four lifetimes, and turned into someone he barely recognized any longer. Were such things truly possible?

  The surviving members of the caravel’s crew, now in custody, were being sorted by country of origin, so that their local ethnarchs could be contacted and, presumably, offered the option of arguing on their behalf. Rem guessed there would be no pardons for them—pirates and smugglers all—the sort of men who were often left to fend for themselves and find their own way through a cruel world, a harsh fact that only made them crueler. Meanwhile, Masarda himself was perched on an assemblage of barrels near where the pier met the quay. The harpoon had had to be delicately removed from his torso by a field surgeon while he’d been held by six watchmen whose job it was to keep him from floundering around in pain and at the same time prevent him from trying to make a run for it. Rem overheard someone say that an oxcart was on the way to collect the prisoners and take them back to the watchkeep. He suspected that he and the rest of his fellow watchwardens would feel safer when that finally occurred and this lot were all locked away in the same dungeon that Rem had inhabited just a few days ago.

  Up on the deck of Masarda’s caravel, Rem saw freed prisoners drifting among the watchwardens milling about on deck. The new arrivals were mostly young women, but there were young men among them as well. All were pale, haggard, and wandering about in a fog of confusion, but otherwise of generally attractive countenance.

  “How many are there?” Rem asked. “Ho
w many survived?”

  Ondego sighed. “Dozens,” he said. “So far, we’ve extracted them all from their shipping barrels alive. Bless the Panoply for small favors, eh?”

  Freed would-be slaves, all alive. Knowing that gave Rem a feeling of satisfaction he could not give words to. He had not simply helped his partner, and rendered honorable service to his ward, he had saved lives. Real, young, hopeful lives, forever altered because he and his fellow watchwardens did their duty and brought them out of peril safely.

  It was a good feeling, better than any he had ever known.

  Then Rem caught a glimpse of someone on the deck. A familiar face. Large brown eyes under disheveled auburn hair. Her high, pale cheekbones and fair, freckled skin were burnished gold by the light of the torches and lamps burning along the gunwales of the caravel. Could it be? Was he dreaming?

  Rem stepped away from the two watchwardens who supported him. They protested, and he nearly stumbled, but then he caught himself and pressed on right toward the gangplank, climbing on shaky legs toward the deck. He was winded before he reached it, but nonetheless, he called out a name, hoping against hope that the apparition before him answered to it.

  “Indilen!” he called.

  The girl in his sights blinked and slowly turned toward the sound of her name. Rem said it again, louder. Her foggy eyes finally focused on him as he approached. For just a moment, the young lady looked confused, as though she were struggling to summon up a memory. Then, like dawn breaking over a darkened horizon, the light of understanding filled her bleary eyes. Her mouth spread in a wide, delighted grin and her eyes shown with a new unfettered light: life, hope, relief, understanding.

  “Rem?” Indilen said. “Is that really—”

  She did not finish because Rem did not let her. He swept the girl into his arms, held her tightly, then planted a series of heavy, relieved kisses on her pale freckled cheeks. To his great relief, Indilen did not pull away from him. In fact, she seemed just as happy to see him as he was to see her.

  Indilen studied the deck of the ship, the many bodies milling about, the gathering of ne’er-do-wells on the dock, all bound and ready for incarceration. She looked to Rem for answers.

  “What’s happening here?” she asked. “One moment, I was in a tavern—Cupp sent me, told me a fellow there might have a job for me transcribing a contract. I had a cup of wine, then … nothing.”

  Rem held her close. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe now. Soon I think we’ll be able to explain everything.”

  “So strange,” Indilen said against him. “I dreamed of you. I thought you would think I stood you up. Knowing that grieved me … I don’t even know why it grieved me so.”

  “Would you believe,” Rem asked, “that I’ve been looking for you all this time?”

  She looked puzzled. “All this time? How long has it been?”

  Rem almost answered but then thought better of it. Finally, he shook his head. “Let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Follow me. We’ll get you some water and food. You must be famished.”

  Fetching an old wool blanket from a pile of sailors’ bedding on deck, Rem wrapped it around Indilen’s shoulders and led her back to the gangplank. As they slowly descended to the dock, Rem saw Torval approaching. The dwarf had also left his assistants behind, hobbling slowly, warily, like a drunk feigning sobriety. No doubt, his wound still pained him, healed or no, while blood loss left him half-delirious.

  “And who is this?” Torval asked, as Rem led Indilen toward him.

  “This is her, Torval,” Rem said. “This is Indilen.”

  The look of surprise and delight on the dwarf’s face was priceless. He seemed to study the girl and accept her as a long-lost member of his own family.

  “The cause of all your troubles,” Torval said with a grin. “It’s good to meet you at last, milady. This young sod’s done nothing but moon about you since I met him.”

  “Troubles?” Indilen asked, genuinely baffled.

  Rem held her close. “Later.”

  Rem and Torval were present for most of the interrogations, and worked tirelessly with Ondego to try to tie all the loose threads together. It took two days of questioning, the work of a half dozen translators, and several hours of well-applied torture, but in the end, the watchwardens got a more-or-less complete picture of Mykaas Masarda’s vile plans, and how both Freygaf and the unfortunate Telura Dall were woven into them.

  Masarda was a flesh peddler, plain and simple. His primary innovation was the acquisition of chattel through the use of poppy-laced liquor and powerful witchweed—evidenced by those chambers in the Moon Under Water where Rem had seen that young woman smoked into waking oblivion, then carried away through the passages in the walls. Masarda had had a number of “talent scouts” always scouring the city for pretty young things, male and female. Freygaf, desperate for coin to pay gambling debts, was one of them. These accomplices were issued medallions—the strange little bauble that Ginger Joss had tried to filch from Freygaf’s effects—and those medallions were their entry passes to the upper rooms of the Moon Under Water. These men would bring their prospective “talent” to the tavern under false pretenses, get their victims to drink a cup of wine or enjoy a puff of witchweed, then, when they were good and blinkered, they’d be spirited away to the packing house in the caves below. There the drugged victims were shoved into those barrels for transit. Eventually, they were loaded onto ships and spirited overseas, their destination always the same: the elven isle of Aadendrath, in the west.

  “So, it’s true, then,” Torval had interrupted, as the captain of the pirate caravel informed them of this one and only destination. “This pointy-eared bastard has been selling humans to elves as house slaves?”

  The pirate captain shrugged. His arrest and eventual fate seemed to worry him little. “Not simply house slaves,” he said. “His customers were often more particular in their requirements. Looking for playthings. Slaves of a far more intimate sort.”

  He smirked lasciviously. Torval sprang across the interrogation table, thick hands grasping for the captain’s throat. It took four watchwardens to drag the dwarf off the smirking whoreson and out into the hall to cool down.

  Rem understood well how Torval felt, but he also knew that this single boat captain was not primarily to blame in this. He was just a merchant of sorts, hiring out his ship for the transportation of illicit cargo. Masarda was the real mastermind—the real villain. And if there were truly elves on Aadendrath keeping human slaves for who-knew-what horrible purposes—well, that was a blatant violation of the ancient treaties between human and elf-kind, treaties signed in the age when even Yenara was a young city, and not half so deadly or jaded. Violation of those treaties was not simply a broken law or breached trust: it could be taken as an act of war. Now the Lady Ynevena, elven ethnarch of Yenara, would have to be involved in Masarda’s prosecution and punishment, as would the Council of Patriarchs. If they could keep the bitter business quiet and avoid its relay to the countryside or neighboring cities—avoid stoking the fires of fear and fury that always burned in the bellies of the general populace—then there was a slim chance that human-elven relations could remain intact. If they could not, the whole world as they knew it might shatter like an overturned cartload of eggs.

  Yet, even as the how was gradually illuminated for them, Rem found himself continually returning to the why. Why risk so much—centuries of peaceful coexistence and trade, the honor of an entire race, the stability of an always-precarious social system—simply to line one’s pockets? Could Masarda really be so base, so selfish, that he would risk a human uprising against his own people just to fill his already-fat coffers with silver and gold? Ondego and the rest of the wardwatch seemed unconcerned with that question—why?—but Rem could not ignore it, no matter how deeply he tried to bury it in his own psyche.

  And so, when Rem suddenly found himself alone in the interrogation room with Masarda while waiting for Ondego and Hirk to con
fer with some officials from the Council of Patriarchs in the hall, he decided that he would ask that very question. He had not been forbidden to speak with the prisoner, after all. And he was a watchwarden, wasn’t he? Surely, trying to glean his own answers from their prisoner could not undermine the progress already made?

  Rem studied the elf in the lamplight. His downcast eyes. His implacable face, narrow and chiseled, like the work of an ancient sculptor. Masarda looked no more troubled over his present state than a tavern patron might waiting a little too long for a mug of ale. There was no anxiety in him, no sense of loss or defeat, only mild impatience and boredom.

  “Do you care to tell me why you did it?” Rem asked.

  Masarda raised his eyes. The look of contempt he summoned for Rem was unnerving. “Are you speaking to me?”

  Rem forced himself to meet the elf’s gaze. “I just asked a question. I wondered why you did it.”

  Masarda seemed quite puzzled by the question itself, let alone that Rem would be forward enough to ask it. Finally, he lowered his eyes, as though he could forget Rem were even there simply by not looking at him.

  “I have a theory,” Rem continued, “but I should like to know how close to the truth I came in formulating it.”

  “And what is your theory, good watchwarden?” Masarda asked, still not looking at him.

  “I’d like to hear it from you first,” Rem said.

  Masarda finally raised his eyes again. There was a malevolent light in them and a strange, almost exultant smile on his finely sculpted pale face. The star-shaped thorning scar on his forehead caught shadows from the undulating lamplight. It almost looked like a crater.

  “You humans,” he said. “You always want to understand. As if knowing why a single creature in this world turned cruel somehow explained all the cruelty in all of creation.”