by Patty Jansen
The hunters waited for him, but because they still had a guide, Carro couldn’t ask the hunters for their impression.
First call was the eagles to get their packs. Now that Carro’s eyes were better attuned to the dark, he guessed there were well over a hundred eagles in the chamber. The poor birds were chained up at very close quarters and some had already been biting at each other’s feathers. He was glad his own bird would not need to stay here for more than one night. With no air coming in, it stank of dead meat in here. His eagle was tied up with a couple of local birds which were all jostling and hissing at each other. Carro stroked the feathers on his bird’s neck to calm it. Then he noticed that one of the birds in the cluster next to his wore a harness. It was well-made, of the type that hunters often wore. His father would have used hunters as messengers.
He stared at the bird, contemplating the meaning of this. Did it mean that Rider Barton had lied about the messenger not having arrived? If so, then why and where was the man? And why would Rider Barton not want to obey Supreme command orders?
The answer seemed clear from what he had seen in the chamber: because they had been planning to return to the City of Glass.
Here, within hearing distance of the stable boys, he dare say nothing, but while another man led them to the dormitory, he held Farey back.
“We’d do well to make sure one of us stays awake at all times. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rider Barton is a traitor. I think the messenger arrived, but was killed.”
Farey said nothing, but nodded, his expression grave.
The dormitory was indeed crowded, and there was barely any room for extra sleeping mats. Carro’s mat ended up being next to an Apprentice with a face so young that he could not possibly have any violent intentions.
Carro remembered how he had joined the Knights, probably similarly fresh-faced an innocent. It seemed such a long time ago. He asked the young man how long they’d been here.
“Too long. The only time we get to go out is for hunting and the older Knights mostly do that.” And he added to it, “Sir.”
“I’m Carro.”
The young man blushed.
“Before we came, you were planning to return to the City of Glass?”
He shrugged. “That’s what the command said where they thought we’d go next. Many of the older Knights wanted to go, you know, because there’d be people there who might need our help. We heard of people burnt and all. Can’t just leave them to die, can we?”
Carro nodded, and saw his family—the family he had grown up with, bleeding and dying in the street of the Outer City, while he slept safely.
These were good men, and his message put them in a difficult position.
But Rider Barton was a true Knight, and he obeyed.
Chapter 18
* * *
“OVER THERE is my house.” The old lady pointed a crooked finger past Sady’s nose.
The truck turned the corner into another deserted street and stopped in front of a well-maintained house in the merchant district. Orsan got out and opened the door for Sady, who climbed out and assisted the old lady down to the pavement. He took her arm and helped her through the gate and up the path. A middle-aged man opened the door, watching this high-profile visitor to his house with an expression of great surprise. From his clothing, Sady judged him to be a merchant, already in the long trailing dust robes merchants wore in the warehouses, and he presumed he’d dug out this clothing for sonorics protection, because, failing protective gear, residents had been urged to cover their skin as much as possible if they needed to go outside.
“My son-in-law,” the old lady said. She shot the man a triumphant look that hinted at a disagreement about her visit to the Proctor’s office.
The man bowed. “Thank you, Proctor, for honouring us with a visit.”
“I apologise for the lack of warning and I wish it were in better circumstances,” Sady said. “Can you show me the scene?”
“Follow me.” The man turned and went down a corridor, his wide robes brushing the walls.
The house smelled of cooking. A couple of young children ran to a doorway, giggling. A woman’s voice scolded them to be quiet. They watched, wide-eyed, as Sady and his entourage passed. Sady could only imagine how bored they were. School had been closed since he ordered the bell to be rung twice.
Rooms on either side of the hallway were richly furnished with warm touches from loving family members. How empty and cold was his own house, how devoid of life. Although, without Merni’s crazy antics, this morning’s breakfast had been an improvement, if a linguistic muddle. Loriane was up to naming the items in the kitchen. That dumpy woman Dara turned out to be a pretty decent cook. He’d sent Farius on a shopping expedition while Ontane guarded the gate. It was a strange combination, but it worked, for now. As a bonus, Ontane didn’t need to cover up for sonorics protection.
They went through the laundry, and then the man preceded him into a courtyard and stopped. “This is where I found him.”
Amongst a bucket of spilled grain and uprooted hedges lay a blood-covered body, an old man, on his side. His clothes had been slashed to shreds, and the skin underneath torn open as if he was a fruit, showing ribs in the gaping cavity. Chunks of flesh lay on blood-soaked paving, and other chunks had been dragged off, as evidenced by trails of blood.
Feathers stuck in dark red puddles. There were at least two bloodied carcasses of ducks. The front of the duck house had been smashed in, and the remaining birds, about twenty or so, waddled around in a tight group, backwards and forwards along the courtyard’s back wall.
“I’m sorry that you have to see this, Proctor,” the man said. His voice wavered for a moment. “I don’t understand why anyone would harm him. He was frail enough. Wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“I know,” Sady said, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder. And he did know. He tried to push away memories of that night in the guest room. Finding Lana . . .
The rest of the family remained in the doorway: a younger woman, presumably the merchant’s wife, and the old woman who had come to get him, his mother-in-law and the dead man’s wife.
Orsan walked around the courtyard, careful not to disturb anything that could be of use to the city guards. Each time he came close, the knot of ducks ran, quacking loudly, to the furthest corner behind their wrecked duckhouse.
“When did this happen?” Sady asked. It felt like a big hole had opened up inside him. He had been so confident they had caught the murderer.
“Early this morning. I saw pa when he went to feed the ducks, as he always does. We started breakfast and wondered where he was. I went into the garden to check and then we found him like this.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
The man shook his head. “Nothing unusual. That’s why no one worried earlier.”
“Nothing at all? No sounds?” Surely, somebody would have screamed. With the ripped bushes and spilled grain, the signs of a struggle were everywhere.
“If there was, none of us heard anything. The dining room is on the other side of the house. Pa always feeds the duck, and he usually comes in while we’re having breakfast.” He wiped away a tear. Sady had to fight to keep his own emotions in check. He knew exactly how the man felt.
His wife said, “There was a little girl in the front courtyard this morning when I went to pick up the fruit box from the gate. A scruffy little thing. I tried to talk to her, but she ran off.”
“A little girl? A toddler, about four years old?”
She shook her head. “Older than that. At least eight or nine.”
“What did she look like?”
“Dark hair, dirty. Dressed in a large shirt, probably stolen. No shoes.”
“Southern?”
>
The woman nodded. “Not that it has anything to do with this, but it was strange.”
It was. Did that mean there were two little girls running around, or had either of them mis-guessed her age? Then again, who would mistake a toddler for a child of eight?
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I have no idea what’s going on.” But he felt cold inside. Mercy, he thought they’d caught the killer.
There was nothing more he could do for the family, but the merchant said that they appreciated his visit and offered him tea. Sady declined, because the City Guards and other relatives arrived and it got busy at the house. Besides, he had something he wanted to do before going back to his office and Viki’s maps of continued wildly fluctuating levels of sonorics and his continued inability to raise responses from the southern districts. Or, failing that, his inability to find the missing financial records. Or if that was not enough work, Alius still hadn’t replied to Sady’s request for the pills, and in fact he hadn’t seen Alius at all for a number of days.
* * *
The courthouse was one of the places in Tiverius where Sady least liked to come. The pompous splendour of the building, with its large dome-capped hall, intricate mosaic floors and crystal chandeliers, belied the decisions of life and death, but mostly death, that were made inside. Since the sonorics alarm had suspended all court cases, there was little going on this morning, just a few guards milling about, two of them on either side of the courtroom door. Both of them dressed in heavy winter gear.
The doors were open, giving Sady a glimpse of the interior of the courtroom, an equally richly appointed room in which people with a lot of money decided over the lives of many with none.
Although he understood better than anyone about the tightrope that Chevakia walked—of having enough food or not having enough—he felt deeply uncomfortable with the ease with which the city guard condemned to death anyone who had committed a serious crime. And even more so that this was done in the name of giving the country’s scarce resources to those who deserved it most. In this way, the killing of prisoners tied back to meteorology—if he predicted more rain, the court would feel less pressured to cull the “undeserving” and criminal poor.
When he was twelve or thirteen, he had attended a court case as minor witness—he’d seen the accused run from the house where he was said to have tried to rape one of the daughters. He remembered the man’s cries, his scruffy hair and pleading eyes. The prisoner had admitted to breaking in and stealing—he lived on the street and had no money—but had sworn that he would never lay a hand on a girl. The counter-witness was the girl’s mother. She claimed to have seen what he did.
The girl herself had been quiet.
The audience had cheered when the judge pronounced the death sentence.
When the session had finished, Sady had asked his father how the judge could be certain that the girl’s mother was right, and his father had said that they couldn’t. And then Sady had asked what they would do when they discovered the man wasn’t guilty after all.
He still remembered his father’s uncomfortable look. They had been standing there, next to the pillar outside the court room.
Sady couldn’t remember what his father said next, only that he had never answered the question. The smell coming out of the darkness of the courtroom brought back those memories. This was a place of death.
A guard met Sady and Orsan on the other side of the hall. He was one of the designated courthouse guards, dressed in blue, with the courthouse symbol of the two crossed swords on his shirt. The man bowed several times, and Sady explained why he had come.
“But Proctor, do you need to go into the prison yourself?”
“I want to speak to this prisoner. I presume he’s not going to meet me anywhere else.”
“Uhm—no, but the man is out of his mind. What he says is complete nonsense.”
“I still want to hear what he has to say. I will decide if it’s nonsense or not.”
The guard gave him a blank look, and bowed. “Of course, Proctor.”
“Good then, let’s go.” Sady led the way into the corridor and off the side down a set of stairs, sliding his hand over the railing. The prison guard trailed behind him.
“But seriously, Proctor, don’t take him at his word. The man is an idiot. Sometimes he seems to make sense, and other times he is clearly out of it. You don’t know when he speaks the truth even when he seems sane. Maybe he’s killed in his insanity but I’m not even sure about that—”
Sady whirled. “Enough. I want to talk to him, and I’ll draw my own conclusion. I’ll not be accused of ignoring things I should have been told.”
“But we have no information from our questioning. The man keeps telling us how we’re all going to die from some invasion of creatures of damnation. If we bothered you every time someone predicted the end of the world, you’d have no time to do anything. He’s as mad as a ground squirrel in heat. The man is a waste of space.”
“That may well be, but do you want to go and talk to the family of the old grandfather who was murdered this morning? I suggest you go and look at the body. It’s not pretty.”
The man’s eyes went wide. “You mean—there are still people being killed?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.” That was right, Sady never liked how these guards made up their minds about guilt and motives before the court decided. They were known to coerce confessions from beggars, only because the Tiverians liked their streets clean of anyone who did not look up to their standard.
When all this was over, he should really do something about the court system and the prisons.
Mercy, now he was angry.
At the bottom of the stairs, he turned right, past the entrance that led to the gallows room, and past the little cells that held criminals awaiting trial. The air here was breathless and stank of damp and sweat. As he passed, there were stirrings and curses in the dark cells behind the barred metal doors. Sady guessed many of the inmates had still been asleep.
The prisoner in question was in a solitary cell at the end of that corridor. Sady grabbed the bars of the door and rattled it. “Open it.”
Metal chinked against stone as the prisoner moved his arms.
“But we need—”
“Open it.” Need to have another guard present, sure. This man was shackled and wouldn’t go anywhere. Moreover, he might be mad, but most likely wasn’t a murderer.
“Sure, Proctor. Immediately.” The man inserted the key in the lock, his hands trembling. The door creaked open, and Sady charged in, bracing himself against the smell of excrement and dank rot.
The prisoner sat bound and shackled against a crate that stood in the middle of the cell, a room normally used to house several prisoners. His skin was grey with filth and shiny with sweat. The only thing on him that looked clean was the golden metal of his claw hand. It was a beautiful thing that was clearly of Chevakian origin. In the light of the oil lamp the jailer carried in, his burned and scarred head looked like a skull. His eyes met Sady’s, furious. Brown eyes.
Sady was taken aback. When he saw him last, the man had blue eyes. Had he remembered wrong?
He made a show of sitting down on the bench next to the door to give himself time to think, but nothing came to him that could have explained this strange phenomenon. Brown eyes, blue eyes, there was no way he would have seen wrongly. Blue eyes were southern. He remembered very clearly judging that the man was southern. He remembered the skull-like appearance of his head, the tightly stretched and scarred skin, the patch of hair around one ear. This was the same man, and his eyes had changed from blue to brown.
The prisoner’s gaze followed his every move.
Sady said, “We caught you with a knife and blood on your hands near the pl
ace where four people were gruesomely killed. When we caught you, you did not speak to us and led us to believe that you didn’t speak Chevakian. If you want to walk free, or indeed if you want to live, we will need an explanation.”
“I am a citizen of Tiverius.” His words were clear and measured, and without accent. “I was defending the country.”
The guard at the door snorted. “I’m touched by that patriotic statement. Excuse me if I don’t believe it.”
Sady glanced over his shoulder. That guard was most irritating. Did all courthouse guards have such a high opinion of themselves? Had Destran really exercised so little control over the courts, and for that matter, the city guard and the army?
Sady leant forward, his elbows on his knees, and fixed the prisoner’s gaze.
“I will need to know who you are, your name, your home, whatever you can tell me to prove that you’re telling the truth.”
“You don’t remember me?”
“No,” Sady said, staring, puzzled, at the man’s scarred scalp.
“I remember you.” He gave a chilling chuckle that turned into a phlegmy cough.
The guard moved to hit the man, but Sady held up a hand to stop him.
“But you do remember me, although I may look a bit unconventional. The unassuming Chief Meteorologist has made a promotion from watching the bully beat up a defenceless boy.”
Bully? Defenceless boy? When had he ever been involved in beating up—
Mercy, this was Lady Armaine’s son. The southern spy. “What was your name again?”
“Tandor.”
Yes, Sady remembered. But now he was certain: the boy had, or he was certain he used to have, blue eyes. He remembered the boy standing against a wall in a back alley in the merchant district, crying, unable to move backwards or forwards because older and bigger boys surrounded him on all sides. They pushed and kicked him and called him names. Even though he was older, Sady had been too small and skinny to do anything, if he had wanted to, which he hadn’t, just in case the bullies would turn on him instead. Most of the tormentors were now influential men and had probably long since forgotten the incident. And if he was a good and strong leader, he should forget the incident, too. Except he couldn’t.