Lessek's Key

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  ‘Oh, lords, you aren’t going to make me do this with the candles lit, are you?’ She didn’t wait for a response from the bleary-eyed staff but steeled herself, pulled her tunic over her head and slipped into bed with the young waiter. As she settled beneath the covers, Brexan found him already stripped and waiting for her.

  ‘I thought you might be back,’ he said as seductively as the clumsy encounter permitted.

  ‘I would be so grateful if you help me make this look as convincing as possible,’ she said, smiling down at him.

  When the door crashed open a moment later, two Seron tried to press inside, but stuck in the doorway until the larger of the two pushed the other violently out of the way, clearing a path for himself. Behind them, a Malakasian officer dragged the elderly tavern owner by one arm. The innkeeper made eye contact with Brexan briefly, and then looked away.

  ‘See? I told you,’ he said to the soldier, ‘just these five.’

  ‘But only four beds?’ The Malakasian moved through the room, tugging down blankets, moving piles of clothing, and peering behind the crates the employees used for storage. ‘Does someone always share a bed in here? What kind of place is this, eh?’

  ‘These two …’ The old man stammered as he pointed at Brexan and her young waiter with a quivering finger. He was too nervous; Brexan held her breath. At least her bare shoulder was exposed outside the blanket – more convincing than finding her there in a tunic and boots. ‘These two came together from Strandson,’ the tavern owner said.

  The officer nodded, and Brexan exhaled slowly. He didn’t care about who she was or what she was doing in this filthy, malodorous chamber: he was upset at having been deployed on a pointless search by a spy who outranked him in the field and strutted around in a rich man’s wardrobe. The man and woman had obviously slipped through the barricade around the city – anyone could these days, with Prince Malagon gone and his generals bickering about it like elderly women.

  He glanced down at Brexan, hoping to see more than just her shoulder, then turned back to the tavern owner. ‘The one in the kitchen?’

  ‘My overnight worker,’ the old man said. ‘He comes in late and cleans until dawn. He’s addled, kicked in the head by his father’s horse. I let him clean the trenchers and keep the fire going. That’s about all he’s good for.’

  The officer whistled softly, then said, ‘Fine,’ and to the Seron, ‘You two, let’s go. Find the others and move on.’ A moment later, they were gone.

  Back in their room, Brexan rewrapped Sallax’s shoulder. She was tired, and desperately wanted to sleep another half-aven, but the dishevelled hillock of abandoned blankets thrown across the floor did not look very appealing. ‘You did well this morning,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they’ll be back now – they’ve been here three times. It’s Jacrys sending them.’

  Sallax growled threateningly under his breath. ‘He tried to fool. He tried to be nice. Sallax knew him from Rona.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Praga, too.’

  ‘Praga?’

  ‘Sallax is from Praga, not Rona. Brynne too.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘I thought you were from Rona.’

  He grimaced as she pulled the bandages close around his shoulder.

  ‘Does it still hurt?’

  ‘Not like before.’

  ‘What happened?’ Brexan felt that she was making progress with Sallax, building his trust and helping him face whatever nightmares had changed him from the proud, tough freedom fighter to the crippled, filthy dock scavenger she had met south of the city. This was more than he’d said in eight days.

  ‘The wraiths found Sallax.’ He stared at a point in the woodwork.

  ‘A wraith?’

  ‘Many wraiths. They were hunting for the old man.’ Since the night she helped him escape from Carpello’s warehouse, Brexan had not heard Sallax use Gilmour’s name. ‘There were many, and they came across the hills and up the river valley. Sallax was in the river.’

  ‘In the river? Why?’

  ‘This needed cold.’ He indicated his shoulder with a tilt of his head, but his eyes never left the opposite wall. ‘It was broken that day. Lahp, a Seron, broke it. Sallax tried to fix it on the rock, but it didn’t work, and he needed to make it cold.’

  ‘The wraiths found you in the river? In the cold water?’

  ‘Very cold. He was in there a long time. Everything was blue and white, even the old man. There was nothing but the blue and the white, and the cold did it. The river. This only felt better there.’ A tilt of his head again.

  ‘Why did the wraiths want to find Gilmour?’

  ‘They thought he had the stone. He didn’t. They wanted to find him and the others. Sallax doesn’t know if they did or not. They found Sallax and hurt him.’

  ‘Your shoulder? They hurt your shoulder again?’

  ‘No, here.’ He tapped at his forehead. ‘They wanted to kill the others, but when they found Sallax, they didn’t kill him. It was more—’ He stopped.

  ‘Entertaining.’ Brexan completed his thought, ‘more entertaining to make you think—’

  ‘About the old man,’ he reciprocated.

  ‘Gilmour.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Sallax helped to kill him. The wraiths thought that Sallax’s pain was funny. They wanted to kill the others, but they let Sallax live.’

  ‘They were ghosts?’

  ‘Lost souls. People once. They were trapped, and it made them angry. They wanted to get free but couldn’t. They wanted to find their friends and children, their families. When they realised what Sallax had done, they went wild. It was mad, a raving spirit dance there at the river. They had been trapped a long time. Sallax was not as good as they were, but he was free. They didn’t like that.’

  ‘So they trapped you in here.’ She tapped two fingers on his forehead as well. ‘We have to find you in there, Sallax. You have too much strength, you’re too valuable to be wandering lost and alone like this. People need you.’

  ‘People needed the old man.’

  That tack backfired, so Brexan decided to change the subject. ‘Tell me about Brynne.’

  A hint of a smile graced the big man’s face. ‘She was just a baby when her parents died. She needed lots of nappies.’

  ‘Babies do.’

  ‘She had a lunatic’s hair. It was curly and all over. Nothing could tame it.’ He twirled one finger above his head, sketching a crop of unruly locks badly in need of a trim.

  ‘Did she follow you that day along the river?’

  ‘She was older then, but yes. She came with Mark, the one from the portal who left the stone. Sallax hid. They didn’t find him.’

  ‘Did the wraiths find Brynne?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She was coming here to Orindale. Do you remember that?’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Versen told me.’

  Sallax smiled again. ‘He could eat more shellfish than Sallax could carry.’

  Now Brexan laughed. ‘I’m not at all surprised to hear it.’

  ‘He’s dead, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The almor killed him at Seer’s Peak.’ Sallax seemed certain he knew what had happened.

  Brexan was about to correct him and then decided against it: there was nothing to be gained by confusing his memories. She felt a chill thinking of Versen, though, and was embarrassed that she had been diving into bed with a stranger for the past several days. She knew he would have laughed, but she was still embarrassed that he might be watching her, checking in from the Northern Forest.

  ‘He talked about you all the time,’ Brexan said.

  ‘He and Sallax are good friends.’

  ‘He said you emptied out his house when he turned two hundred Twinmoons.’

  ‘We set everything up outside, exactly as it had been inside, everything but one boot. That we left in the middle of the floor. Then we hid
in the woods to watch. Versen was very angry.’

  ‘You said we.’ She didn’t want to push him, but this was the slip she had been hoping to hear. ‘Sallax?’

  ‘Yes. Garec, Brynne, Mika, Jerond, Sallax, and the old man,’ he said. ‘We emptied out his house.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sallax.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Brexan sighed. It wasn’t much, but it felt like progress. She didn’t know how to treat him. His physical health was returning, and when his shoulder healed, he would be nearly as fit and as strong as before the initial fracture, but his mental health was not much better than when she first saw him, when he had dragged her into the sunlit ferns.

  ‘He’s dead now, like the others?’

  ‘Versen is dead, yes.’

  ‘The almor killed him at Seer’s Peak.’

  ‘Sallax,’ Brexan decided to take another risk, ‘do you remember the fat man from the warehouse?’

  At that, the big Ronan’s countenance changed. His body tensed and his mouth split into a wicked grin. ‘Yes, he almost killed Brynne, a long time ago. She was sick for many Twinmoons. Ren was the boy who led her to him.’

  ‘Ren?’

  ‘I killed him.’

  There it was again. ‘You did?’

  ‘Sallax did, yes. I used a dirk, slipped it right in. He died in the street in Estrad, but I never found the fat man. He will be alive when Brynne gets here. Brynne will kill him slowly.’

  It sounded like the fat man had raped Brynne when she was just a child. Brexan shuddered. ‘I have my own account with the fat man as well. His name is Carpello Jax, and I know where he lives. I know which ships are his and which warehouses he uses to store his cargoes. He runs ships up and down the Ravenian Sea, from Strandson across to Pellia. I’m not sure what he’s shipping or why, but he serves Prince Malagon. He often moors here in Orindale – maybe he has some arrangement with the customs officers down on that southern wharf. I’ve watched him while you’ve been asleep. He has cut his hair, grown a beard, lost some weight, and sliced the mole off his nose, but it’s still him, the bloated whoreson.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’ Sallax was obviously agitated at the possibility that Brynne wouldn’t be the one to torture and kill the man.

  ‘No, just watching. It’s easy to move through this city unseen; you learned that.’

  Sallax nodded, recalling a huge overturned wine cask outside a rowdy tavern.

  ‘I wasn’t very good in the beginning,’ Brexan told him. ‘I would be dead if you hadn’t been watching that first night, but I’ve learned a lot. Unless Carpello ships out again – which I doubt, he’s not much of a seaman – he’ll be here when we find Brynne. But Sallax, I need you to think about Gilmour and Brynne, and Garec and the two foreigners. Where were they going after they lost Versen? Welstar Palace?’

  ‘Brynne will kill Carpello.’

  ‘Yes, we can all do it together, but we have to find them first.’ Brexan had found no sign of them in Orindale, but she knew Jacrys hadn’t either; maybe they’d moved further north – or if they survived the wraith attack in the Blackstones, perhaps they went back down south, to Strandson or one of the port villages in western Rona. The longer she spent in Orindale, the more she thought the odds of finding them were slimming to nothing. ‘Sallax, can you remember anything about where they were going?’

  ‘Orindale,’ he said simply. If he did know anything else, it was lost in his damaged mind.

  ‘You rest now,’ Brexan said. ‘We’ll get some food after the midday aven. I’m going to check on Carpello now – I want to know what he’s doing today.’

  ‘Don’t kill him.’

  ‘I won’t. We’ll wait for Brynne.’

  That night, while Sallax slept Brexan sat staring into the glass, watching her reflection through tired eyes. By the flicker of the bedside candle she strained to make out her shorn hair and drawn features. Perhaps it was better that there was little light.

  It had been a productive day: Brexan was encouraged that Sallax had spoken of himself in the first person for the first time: saying I was a huge step forward. She knew nothing about mental health, but she was all he had. She wouldn’t press him to remember anything painful – rushing his recovery wouldn’t help.

  She had made friends with some of the stevedores working the southern docks; though none of them had seen anyone resembling the partisans, a few copper Mareks had elicited a lot of information about Carpello’s business dealings, routines and schedules.

  Once she’d followed the fat merchant to a brothel in a nice part of the city – at first she thought he had been calling on friends, or business associates, but the parade of well-dressed men going in and out at regular intervals gave the game away. As she stood watching the windows, she thought of Brynne, a child taken against her will, and nausea hit her hard. She was very much looking forward to killing Carpello. It was taking all her willpower to keep from breaking into the whorehouse, kicking down the fat man’s door and chopping him up right there on top of whatever trollop had been coerced into servicing him.

  When he left, his frilly tunic askew, she followed him back to his apartments. She could have finished him quickly and quietly, right there in the stairwell of his own home, but instead, she let him live another day.

  As the unbearable need for revenge washed over Brexan again, she turned from the glass and began undressing. She nearly leaped out of her skin when she saw Sallax materialise out of the darkness behind her.

  ‘Good rutting Pragans!’ she shrieked, grabbing her tunic to cover herself, somewhat inadequately. ‘You aren’t supposed to see me like this!’

  Sallax loomed over her, a look of pensive concentration on his face.

  Brexan backed away. ‘Get back to bed, Sallax – just because I’m out of my clothes you can’t—’

  He reached out to grip her wrist.

  ‘Ow!’ She tried to twist out of his grasp. ‘Sallax, please, don’t do this.’ All of a sudden she was a little scared, but Sallax didn’t do anything more, he simply stared at her muscular, outstretched arm.

  Finally he said, ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘What? Get what?’ Brexan’s heart was still pounding nineteen to the dozen. ‘This.’ He turned her wrist back, exposing the strange bit of jewellery she had taken from the corpse on the salt flats. It had cleaned up nicely and she’d worn it buckled about her wrist ever since. Sallax must have seen it hundreds of times over the past few days; she didn’t understand why it caught his attention now.

  ‘I found it.’ She hesitated, not really wanting to admit that she had purloined it from a dead body.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the marsh, north of the harbour. I was out there looking for you one day last Twinmoon when I found it – it was so beautiful, and so unusual. I thought I’d find a jeweller in the city to tell me what it was, but I never had the chance to show it to anyone.’ Brexan was embarrassed: she had been caught, a thief flaunting her stolen goods. She had not imagined for a moment that Sallax would recognise the small circular bracelet.

  He let her go and sat dejectedly on the side of the bed, his face buried in his hands while she pulled on her tunic properly. ‘It’s called a watch,’ he said at last.

  ‘A watch? Am I supposed to watch it?’

  ‘It tells the time of day and night.’

  ‘Really?’ Fascinated now, she picked up the candle to study the trinket more closely. ‘I don’t understand. How does it work?’

  ‘It doesn’t tell the time here.’

  ‘Well, what good—?’ She stopped. ‘Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods, Sallax, how do you know of this watch?’

  The big man started to cry, the sobs shaking his body. Brexan sat beside him, rubbing his shoulders and crooning comfortingly to the distraught man for an aven or more, until he drifted off into uneasy slumber. She washed the tears from her own face, and unclasped the watch from her wrist and lef
t it beside the candle. She lay awake and listened for sounds of raiding parties outside.

  Later, still awake, Brexan watched the sun come up over the city.

  Captain Thadrake eyed the pastries; one had been bitten nearly in half, but the other two were untouched. Beside the plate was a flagon of wine, Falkan red, he guessed, the best wine in Eldarn, and a half-empty goblet. He didn’t understand how anyone could get so blasé as to ignore such delicacies, but he forced his attention from the bedside table.

  The captain was standing in a lavishly appointed apartment in the one-time imperial palace in Orindale, formerly occupied by one of Prince Malagon’s generals. The general and several members of his staff had been killed in an unexplained explosion during the last Twinmoon and several days ago the apartment had become an impromptu hospital, with one bed in the centre of the room for the patient. The bedding was the finest Orindale could offer: down-filled pillows, thick, soft blankets and a firm mattress softened with several layers of goose-down. A fire crackled day and night in the fireplace.

  He noticed a leather-bound book, tucked beneath the pillow as if in a hasty effort to hide it from visitors. He shuffled his feet nervously.

  ‘Who is he?’ Not much of the patient was visible – his head was bandaged and only one eye, part of his nose and a corner of his mouth showed outside the gauze wrap – but it was obvious he was irritated.

  ‘My assistant, sir, Hendrick.’

  ‘Well, get him out of here, you rutting fool! Why don’t you just parade me in front of the entire army? Let’s make certain everyone can see me: oh, yes, there goes the prince’s spymaster; everyone knows him. Great whoring monks …

  ‘What is your name, Captain?’

  ‘Thadrake, sir.’ He tried not to cringe.

  ‘Captain Thadrake, do you want to be responsible for everyone knowing what I look like?’

  It was obvious a crunching blow to the back of the head had left the spy near death, but Thadrake had no idea why Jacrys Marseth had come here, to a public Malakasian facility, to recuperate. Most spies found ways to deal with their injuries without jeopardising their cover. Maybe it was because no one had seen Prince Malagon in the past Moon, or perhaps the spy was to be assigned to another Eldarni territory under a new identity. Whatever the reason, Jacrys was obviously in no mood to discuss his decision to come in from the field, and Thadrake wasn’t about to ask why. He loathed Jacrys, and everything the man represented. They were an occupation army, the most powerful military force in Eldarn; they didn’t need spies scurrying about, eating pastries and drinking good Falkan wines.