Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  Smoke hung again in the air. The Aekoi had towed off whatever ships they could from the port, and burned the rest along with the looted warehouses. They had not left the Duisland coast, but moved most of their power to Cow Island while small squadrons of chebecs patrolled the coast in search of fresh prey.

  Kevin’s family concern had lost one pinnace set afire and another carried away, and Kevin fretted after a third ship that was expected soon to return from Varcellos, and might sail right amid the pirate fleet before they knew they were in danger. He paced in agitation, but I was too weary and sore to keep pace with him.

  While prowling the square, Kevin overheard Gribbins arguing for building a funeral pyre for the dead, an idea which the Cobbs, for the moment, declared premature.

  “They’re going to wait till carrion bursts the crows’ bellies,” Kevin said in disgust.

  “I am not going to burn my family on a common pyre,” I said. “Nor wait for the crows. Or that quarrelsome oriole Sir Towsley Cobb.”

  Kevin and I returned to Princess Street and confiscated a cocking cart from a neighbor who kept fighting birds—all the cocks eaten now, it seemed, and the neighbor carried away. I threw the cages off the cart, and made further space by removing the rear seat intended for the groom. The cart was pulled to where my family had been laid on the bricks. I saw that the bodies of the two apprentices had been carried away, I presumed by their families.

  Kevin mutely assisted as I lifted my family into the cart, and in the absence of a horse, we two set ourselves between the shafts and pulled the cart out the North Gate, and to the city of the dead that stretched north from Ethlebight toward the old, abandoned city upriver.

  The necropolis was deserted, and a fitful north wind sighed and muttered among the half-sunken tombs and tilted, lichen-crusted slabs that stood as the silent guardians of the worm-eaten dead. Cows and sheep grazed upon the grass, and had cropped away the underbrush to reveal old mounds, broken urns, and a few old bones that had worked their way to the surface. Here, in the shadow of the gray tomb of an extinct noble family, was a section of ground owned by the Quillifers, where Quillifers dating back to the foundation of new Ethlebight were buried. I had taken a pair of spades from a shop on Royall Street as I passed, intending to bury my family in a single grave atop my grandfather until more proper burial could be arranged. But on the sight of the old tomb, I paused for thought.

  The outlines of the tomb’s irregular blocks of gray stone were revealed by crumbling plaster. For some reason, there were geometrical objects standing on the four corners: a sphere, a cube, a tetrahedron, and a cone.

  I smashed the tomb’s rusted padlock with three swings of my spade. Because the tomb had partly sunk into the soft soil, there was some digging before I could wrench open the iron door. Ancient hinges shrieked, and birds took flight from nearby monuments.

  The tomb smelled of damp earth. Lying on their slabs, beneath moth-eaten shrouds, the sad remains of a noble house gazed blankly at the sun for the first time in generations. My spade cleared away skeletal rubbish from a pair of the slabs, and then Kevin and I carried my family into the darkness that was their new home. My father was laid to rest on one slab, with little Alice lying under his arm; and on the other slab, my mother, Cornelia, with Barbara. I draped the unbleached muslin over them for shrouds.

  “I will raise you a tomb of your own,” I told my family. “I swear it.”

  Kevin nodded. “I am witness to the oath,” he affirmed.

  And then I heard the sound of hoofbeats outside the tomb, and I froze, my mind alight with the absurd possibility that after all this I would be arrested for tomb-breaking. Cautiously I peered out the door.

  A carriage rolled past on its way to the North Gate, drawn by four weary horses. Burly footmen rode atop the vehicle, and I could see a heraldic badge on the door.

  “That would be Judge Travers,” I said, “come for the Assizes. A fine mess will he find, with the Cobbs and Gribbins at odds and the docks still smoldering.”

  “Ay,” said Kevin. “There’s more for him to do than to judge whether or not Sir Stanley Mattingly stole a river.”

  We left the tomb, and I closed the door and stopped it with turf and stones. My body ached, and I rolled my shoulders against the pain and looked at the silent tomb with its geometric figures. My eyes lifted from the rusted iron door to the name carved above the lintel, and I read, shaype.

  I smiled. From somewhere a warbler called.

  I cleared my throat. “Ta-sa-ran-geh,” I chanted. “Ta-sa-ran-geh-ko.”

  Kevin was surprised, but then quickly joined in the chant of the Warriors of the Sea. We circled the tomb as the chant rose in the air, the chant so old that no one knew what it meant. But well I knew the words had meaning for my father, and so with the chant I sent my father on to his blue-skinned Pastas, the god he had served all his life, and with whom he had shared food on the last day of his life. Nor did I forget my father’s correction, “Ren-far-el-den-sa-fa-yu.”

  Five slow revolutions of the tomb brought the chant to an end. Here the Warriors of the Sea, at the festival, would have started over, but I felt a single repetition was enough, and fell silent. The necropolis was still. I felt my spirits rise, and a strange stirring in my soul, as if I had in some way been touched by the divine, perhaps a blue-skinned god who whispered some half-heard affirmation, and now welcomed my family to their new home.

  I wiped the stinging tears from my eyes, blew out my breath, and turned toward the town.

  “Shall we bring the cart back?” Kevin asked.

  “It may be useful still,” I said. “Our lives are full of ruins that yet need to be shifted.” So, Kevin and I stood in the traces again, and brought the cart back to Ethlebight.

  I limped as I walked, a hamstring protesting with every step. Pain wracked my arms and shoulders, and my back was a torment.

  There was nothing, I thought, to keep me here. My family was dead, my house destroyed, my master taken prisoner. Kevin had offered a chance of employment, but that was before his own family trade had been brought to the edge of ruin.

  I would take the money I had found in the strongbox and go to the capital at Selford. What I had in my box was enough to live on for two or three years, if I were careful, and surely I would find employment in that time, and be on my way to becoming an advocate at the court, or a member of the House of Burgesses, or a judge renowned for my wisdom . . . or all three, as Kevin had said.

  Though what I most wanted now was to be the admiral of a fleet, to bring fury and destruction upon the Aekoi.

  On the way we passed by Crook’s bookshop. The place had been broken into, and books hurled from their shelves by reivers in search of money, but nothing had been destroyed or burnt.

  Without a word exchanged, Kevin and I began to move the books to the cocking cart. I had browsed the shop regularly, and knew the contents well. I chose only the best—tomes on law, rhetoric, and history, the epics of Bello, the entire cycle of the Teazel romances, the love poems of Tarantua, the comic verse of Rudland, the tales of Erpingham. We piled the cart so high that it could hardly be moved.

  If Crook were ever ransomed, the books would be returned. And if Crook were never released, the books would form the core of a fine library.

  After unloading, we put the cocking cart in the courtyard behind the Spellman house. I had seen Judge Travers’s heavy coach standing in Scarcroft Square, and it occurred to me that my storied legal career might as well begin now as later. I left Kevin with his lists of debtors, and returned to the square to find the judge in conference with Gribbins and various Cobbs. I did not approach, but went to the narrow house where my master Dacket had lived, and climbed the stair to the office. There, amid a riot of destruction, I found my master’s fisher fur–trimmed robe with the reivers’ footprints still on it, and cleaned the robe as well as I could. I cleaned myself as well, and my apprentice cap, and then found some wax tablets in a cupboard and put them in the pockets of th
e robe. I donned the robe—very narrow in the shoulders, but it must do—took a stylus, and then returned to the square again to approach the judge with as much gravity as I could manage.

  Travers was a tall, solidly built man in a judge’s robe of black watered silk trimmed with glossy otter fur. His posture was military, and he took immense care of his own dignity, which was enhanced by his white pointed beard, a curling halo of white hair, and his commanding blue eyes.

  “There should be an informal census as soon as possible.” His trained rhetorician’s voice spoke with the accent of Bonille. “Those bringing relief must know how many souls are in need of help.”

  Gribbins and the various Cobbs seemed impressed by this argument. Their own thoughts had not reached so far as a census.

  “And there should be a fire watch set,” Travers said. “New conflagrations may yet be brought to life by smoldering embers.”

  “We have no lack of volunteers,” said Gribbins. “We can set watches—and should, to prevent looting.”

  I waited patiently at Travers’s elbow, my stylus poised above a wax tablet, until the judge became aware of me.

  I donned my learnèd-advocate face. “My lord,” I said. “I wonder if your lordship is in need of anyone to keep a record of these decisions.”

  Travers’s blue eyes surveyed me from cap to shoe, and back again. “Who, sir,” he said, “are you?”

  “The Butcher’s son!” called Sir Towsley Cobb in mockery. “The Butcher’s son dressed up like a lawyer!”

  I ignored the baronet. “My name is Quillifer, my lord. I’m apprentice to the advocate Dacket.”

  “And where is your master?”

  “Taken by the reivers, my lord, and his family with him.”

  “I already have a secretary,” Travers said, and frowned across the square at a young man—dressed in satins, bejeweled—who was amusing himself by brandishing a pollaxe borrowed from members of a militia company. Laughter trickled from the group.

  “Well,” Travers said, and turned back to me. “You may prove of use.”

  I made notes of the day’s actions: watches posted, surveys made of all granaries, of all available weapons, of cannon and gunpowder. Plans made for an informal census. Scouts set to keep a watch on the Aekoi. A search made for all surviving doctors and surgeons. Clothing and blankets to be distributed to those without homes. Bakeries to be operated through the night. And bodies to be brought out of the city early the next day, and burned. Gangs were set to work taking apart the temporary stage set up in the square, to be used in the pyre.

  I learned much from Travers as I trailed the judge through the afternoon. Not so much about the proper response to a catastrophe, but about how to make oneself heard and, having been heard, obeyed. Outside the boundaries of his courtroom, Travers had no authority in Ethlebight—he wasn’t an alderman, or the Lord Warden or the Lord Lieutenant of the County, or an important noble. But he carried himself with a quiet, erect air of authority, and he spoke quietly and with finality, and what he spoke made sense. His success was aided by the accent of Bonille, which carried with it a suggestion of urbanity and sophistication and the air of the royal court, with its subtle, unspoken promise of patronage and power. By the end of the afternoon, even the Cobbs were eager to run Judge Travers’s errands.

  This in contrast with the apothecary Gribbins, who shared a great deal with Travers—the white beard, the blue eyes, the distinguished profession—but who despite his status as alderman seemed unable to get anyone to listen to him. He made some good arguments, but more bad ones, and he tended to wander from one to the other. His ideas clattered with each other and sometimes collapsed in hapless confusion. By contrast, Travers raised his ideas one at a time, reached a decision, and then offered the next.

  More people arrived over the course of the day, nobles and gentry with their personal following, among them a pair of aldermen who had been at their houses in the country during the attack. So, a rump town council was able to convene, and once they assembled in the city hall and declared themselves in session, Travers told them what to do.

  Apparently, not every pantry had been looted. The day ended with a dinner of spit-roasted meats, bread, and beer, which my famished stomach accepted with gratitude.

  Afterward, I made my way back to my groom’s straw bed at the Spellman home, and paused in the square for a moment to sniff the fresh, cool wind hunting down from the north. For a moment, I felt a sensation of soaring delight; and then I thought of the wind muttering around the Shaype tomb, and the scent of ash as I laid my family to rest, and for a moment the wind seemed to blow bitter through the empty hollow of my chest, and to freeze to my eyelids the tears that rose unbidden to my eyes.

  I had always known that I would leave Ethlebight, but I had been in no hurry to do so—I had been content to live with my family, amuse myself as an apprentice lawyer, and spend my free time in pursuit of women and love.

  But now my boyhood had gone in a single blazing night, and with it the security and support of my family and city. The catastrophe had thrown me into premature independence, reliant in the war-ravaged world entirely on my own gifts. To my former self, my talents had been toys, baubles for my own amusement; but now the game had turned grim, and the stakes were life and death.

  If I did not seek my fortune, fortune would abandon me in the ruins of my past.

  * * *

  The Warriors of the Sea did not dance on the first day of the Autumn Festival, and the Mermaids did not sing. The actors didn’t perform their plays, and the guilds did not parade. Instead, a small crowd watched as a pair of priests prayed outside the great old temple north of the city, and sheep were sacrificed along with a white heifer. The rump council and the members of the Embassy Royal, followed by me, came into the temple for a personal interview with the god.

  The temple was built in the old annular style of the Empire: round, with a double row of columns, a dome, and a peaked portico. Embedded in the white limestone were remains of the god’s own creatures: skeletal fish, sea lilies, sharks’ teeth, the spiral shells of nautili. The dome was covered in bronze scales that had corroded to shades of sea green, and looked as if a piece of the ocean had been captured under a glass bowl.

  The azure-skinned god stood atop a plinth in his sanctuary, five yards tall, pieced together of ivory, bronze, and a glittering array of blue stones: lapis, kyanite, turquoise, blue sunstone, chalcedony, iolite, and aquamarine, with eyes of blue opal that shifted subtly in the light, at times bright, at times somber, at times pensive and withdrawn. A net of copper wire dangled from one hand, filled with jeweled fishes; and the other held a gold-tipped trident.

  The light of sacrificial fires glimmered in the eyes of the god as I entered on the heels of the Embassy. Standing quietly behind the others, dressed in my robe and cap, I bowed to Pastas on his plinth, and politely voiced to the deity my hopes for a journey to the capital.

  The grandly named Embassy Royal would travel to the capital of Selford, and petition the throne for aid for survivors, protection against the reivers, and ransom for the captives. If, that is, they were able to catch King Stilwell before he departed for the winter capital of Howel.

  The embassy consisted of the alderman Gribbins, who had somehow dithered himself onto the delegation, and Richard Hawtrey, who because his father was the Count of Wenlock, bore the courtesy title Lord Utterback. Utterback was a saturnine young man of twenty-four years, dark-browed, scant of speech, and careless of manner. He had ridden into Ethlebight two days after the sack, leading a company of thirty men, all well equipped out of his father’s armory. And though his martial bearing had won a degree of popular regard, he hadn’t been nominated to the delegation on account of his ability to command men, but rather the letters patent that ennobled his father, which would guarantee him a hearing in the capital.

  If, that is, Utterback could be persuaded to speak at all. So far, he showed little inclination.

  Judge Travers, alas, would n
ot make the journey. He had assizes to conduct, not just in Ethlebight but elsewhere in the southwest, and he held no real authority in the city. He did, however, provide me with a letter of introduction to an advocate in Selford, from whom I might be able to find employment.

  There was certainly none to be had in Ethlebight. Even if I were willing to act on behalf of Lawyer Dacket’s clients, none were left. Mr. Trew, whose river had been stolen by Sir Stanley Mattingly, was now a captive on Cow Island. So was Alec Royce, who had cut a fern tree in the King’s forest, and had been freed from his jail cell not by the judge but by the reivers who had come to enslave him.

  The council and the delegates bowed their heads before the statue of Pastas, and the priests asked for the god’s blessing on the journey. Their voices echoed beneath the dome. Sacrificial firelight ran up the golden trident as the Embassy Royal promised to conduct their business for the benefit of all, without partiality or favor. After which the formal part of the ceremony was over, and the group broke up. I saw Utterback and Gribbins together, and approached.

  “I have arranged for us to travel in a carriage of some magnificence,” Gribbins said. “We shall not be out of place in the capital, I assure you.”

  “Didn’t bring a carriage myself,” Utterback murmured.

  “I hope your lordship will approve of my choice. It is the carriage used by the Court of the Teazel Bird to carry their King, and is ornamented with allegorical carvings and the armorial bearings of the court’s members.” Gribbins smiled with the pleasure of his own self-regard. “We will have no reason to be ashamed of our equipage, my lord, not in the capital or anywhere else.”