Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1)

by Jordan MacLean

  But before the maid could bark out her caustic answer, Gikka reached up and gripped her arm. “What price,” she said in a low, masculine voice, “to silence your gabbling?”

  The maid tried to pull away, but Gikka’s grip got tighter. “I beg your...” She blinked at those eyes a moment, thinking she saw something familiar beyond that olive skin, beyond the patchy beard and the thick brow, something very familiar. Her eyes widened suddenly in fear and recognition.

  “Aye, Trina, well you know me,” whispered Gikka in her own voice. “What treason is this, to spread tales against your lord’s house thus?” She tightened her hand on the woman’s arm. “Stop your mouth now, or I’ll cut your tongue from your head.” She nodded toward the tavernman. “Yon barkeep’d pay me for the service, I wager.”

  “An I but speak your name,” the maid sneered under her breath, “they will tear you apart like wolves. Loyal to Chatka, them.”

  “Truly?” She nudged the point of her stiletto against the girl’s side. “Maybe I’m best served to kill you out of hand, then.”

  The girl gasped with pain and fear, and the assassin jerked her arm again. “Learn this deep in your bones: give no more lies and slanders against your lord’s house, or you will answer.”

  “Aye, I swear it!” She tried to pull away.

  “Hold ye still and listen once more! Give no word of me, not now, not ever, or your very life is forfeit. One inch at a time, aye?”

  “Aye,” she breathed when Gikka released her elbow. “Aye.”

  Then she backed away rubbing the marks from her arm and nearly knocked over a chair. She brought two pints of ale to their table without a word. Then, catching Gikka’s eye once more, she returned to the bar and refused to offer one more word of her tale to anyone.

  Gikka looked over the rest of the bar patrons, the two at the bar, the old man, two younger men who had come from the kitchens, another who was just coming in the door behind them. She was certain they’d seen no more than the girl bending down to talk to two customers, but in the meantime, they’d fallen to silence in their cups. She’d get no more from any of them today. Still, it was a good first outing for the boy.

  “Are you the one they call Beridien?”

  Beridien. Now that was a name she’d not heard in ages. Gikka glanced toward Chul, who had the good sense to watch and not speak.

  “Mayhap,” she growled deeply, letting the sound roll from her throat. She took another slow sip of the ale before she set down the mug. Then she turned her gaze up toward the man who addressed her.

  The messenger’s manner was neither furtive nor anxious, yet even so, she had a sense of duty and business from him. He did not seek a drinking companion. He was small and slender and very pale, at least part Hadrian, and surely too thin for the rich voice he bore.

  A Hadrian. And he was standing right next to Chul.

  Whether by design or because of sheer luck, the messenger had kept his hood up close about his face, thank the gods, or he would already be dead at Chul’s hands. Bloody Hadrians, always turning up in the wrong places. Whether it was bravery or ignorance or profound trust in Limigar’s distraction that had him standing a pace away from being torn to pieces by a Dhanani, she did not care.

  She looked at Chul, who was peering at the man, trying to see his face, and calmly gestured for him to give them privacy. The boy got up without a word and moved to the bar.

  “Mayhap I know where he might be found,” she replied to the messenger. “What seek you with Beridien? You’re no bounty hunter, sure.”

  “Bounty hunter, not I,” he laughed quietly, as if the idea were absurd. “I bear a message,” spoke the man quietly. “From one in the Hodrachaig.”

  The Hodrache Range. Dith. Her heart jumped, but she drew two long breaths before responding to him. Beridien was nothing if not patient, calculating. “I am the one you seek,” she said finally. She motioned for him to take Chul’s seat. “What news?”

  “Two sealed scrolls,” he said, taking the two bone cases from his cloak and sliding them into her hand under the table. “He would have you open this one first.”

  Gikka took them both and brought them into her sight below the edge of the table, but she did not open them. “I may give reply. Return you that way?”

  The man seemed amused at the notion. “Tell me, Beridien, would you return to, say, Durlindale?”

  The corner of her mouth twitched upward. Not as Beridien, I wouldn’t, not and keep my head. She pressed a golpind into his hand. “My thanks for your trouble.”

  The man rose and gave a quick bow before he left the tavern. Gikka watched Chul’s gaze follow him, trying to peek up under the hood as he passed, but no, the boy saw nothing. She gestured to him, and he rejoined her at the table, shivering.

  “What was that,” he asked. “I just saw his mouth under that hood, and now I feel cold.”

  She nodded. “That was a Hadrian,” she said, “and I’ll thank you to keep your distance from them. You’ve Aidan’s cautions and mine, besides, as touch Hadrians.”

  He nodded, but she watched his gaze flick up toward the door. Damn the boy’s curiosity. She would have to mind him more carefully now.

  Gikka broke the seal on the first scroll and pocketed the wax pieces. It was written in the curious scrawls of High Hadric script, and as fluent as she was in High Hadric to hear it, her reading of it was far more work. It might be a tenday or more of study for her to make sense of it. Apparently the writ had seen some weather before it was so carefully bound and sent to her, and parts of the ink were blurred. It was an official posting, some sort of decree. She recognized only a few of the words and a single given name, but they were enough.

  It was a notice of bounty against Dith.

  Worried, she opened the second.

  Thirteen

  Hodrache Range

  The traveler smiled where he stood at the outskirts of the little town of Montor and raised his bottle of water in a silent toast to his Gikka before he drank. From here, the valley rose softly into glorious, gold-drenched foothills at the base of the Hodrache Range in a warmly rounded arrangement of terrain that raised randy thoughts in a man’s mind, especially one who had been away from his woman for so long. He slung the jug at his hip again and turned west from the main road, into the town. From the look of it, Montor—“Gateway to the Range,” as the freshly painted sign read—would be his last chance for a hot meal and a bed for some time.

  A single narrow road leading from the main wagon road on one side of Montor to the mines on the other seemed the town’s main thoroughfare, indeed its only thoroughfare, and from overlapping footprints that filled and flattened the ruts and the trampled grasses on either side, one well-traveled for all that it was empty just now.

  Shops and homes, some more auspicious than others, crowded up against the sides of this road. Tall fragile buildings made entirely of wood, with large elaborate signs hung out over their doors. But the stores were all closed, and with an hour yet before sunset, that was most peculiar.

  With the streets and outlying paths so empty, he wondered if the whole town might be abandoned, but when he looked above the shops, he saw several people peering out their windows at him, half-hidden behind their gauzy colorless draperies. He gave a wry smile and a bit of a wave, and he shrugged the rucksack up on his shoulder. Apparently someone had seen him coming.

  Hadrians are a breed apart, Dith told himself with a sigh—distrustful, superstitious, cowardly. He glanced up at one window to see a pale woman pointing at the beautiful seamless gold fabric of his robes. Greedy. He gazed up at her with his blue eyes—Limigar’s own eyes, as Gikka’s miners called them—and her hand froze mid-gesture. A moment later, she fell back from the window in a terrified faint.

  He fingered the strap of his rucksack thoughtfully and continued on his way, squinting at the signs as he passed. Batierich, Bulandriar, Flicherich. Butcher, baker, fletcher, but no tavern, no rooming house. And even if he found one, it was likel
y to be closed up like the rest of the town. At least to him. He was beginning to doubt his chances for a hot meal and a bed after all.

  He quickened his step, already putting Montor out of his thoughts and hoping to get in as many miles before dark as he could.

  Suddenly, from the road ahead, a long thin shadow stretched toward him like an accusing finger, and he slowed his step, shading his eyes against the sun to see what made it. Then he saw it move, just a casual shift toward his right, but it was enough. He stepped cautiously forward, freeing his hands from the strap of the rucksack and pushing back his sleeves. His blue eyes squinted into the sun.

  Then he found himself flying through a doorway.

  Dith’s brain had barely registered the image—dark green robes, wild, colorless hair flowing down the man’s back—before his reflexes took over and threw him out of harm’s way. He kicked himself for a fool. Had he not been paying attention he would have walked right into a priest of Rjeinar.

  He did not take the time to stand but scrambled back to the doorway on his knees to see if the Rjeinarian was coming after him.

  No. Somehow, impossibly, it seemed that the old priest had neither seen nor heard Dith crashing through the door. Dith stood and brushed the ash and dust from his robes, increasingly aware of the tense silence behind him. Outside the destroyed door, the plain sign still swung back and forth from the force of his entrance: Bavrichna Cliare’k. Cliare’s Pub.

  When he turned, he saw a dozen Hadrian men in various attitudes of surprise behind their tables. Some had spilled their mugs. Others had stood with their napkins stuffed under their chins, their mouths hanging open or stopped in mid-chew. No one moved. Finally, after each had glanced up and down his form once and at the charred doorframe behind him, they all took their seats again and kept their glassy colorless eyes carefully averted.

  None would so much as meet his eye, much less address him, no matter that he looked right at them. So, with another careful glance out toward where he had seen the Rjeinarian, he drew himself up at the bar and called for a pint.

  The barkeep, no doubt Cliare himself, dropped a mug before him without a word and crept away, not bothering to ask for his coin, not looking up at him.

  He shrugged, raised his mug and drank. While his back was turned to the men of the town, he could feel the colorless eyes peering and probing at him with a sort of furtive anxiety or perhaps calculation. They would see the seamless robes and mark him as a mage. And then they would see his blue eyes and nothing else—not his long white-blond hair, not the fact that he towered a head taller than any man in the room—no, it was always his eyes that held them. The eyes and the mischievous twinkle in them.

  They would never be caught looking directly at him. Whenever he glanced up, he found the men all about their own drinks and showing no interest in him whatsoever.

  Nearly half an hour later, with the sun down and no sign of the priest, he emptied the mug and set it back on the counter. Then he looked up at the bartender. At last, and with a discontented sigh, the man came nearer.

  “Another for you, then, is it?” The barkeep addressed him in Hadric, but in a vulgar, familiar sense that would have insulted any other man in the tavern.

  He stared into the barkeep’s eye until the man looked away, all the while listening to the tense Hadrians behind him. The barkeep had a right to be angry—his door was burned off its hinges—but what of the rest? Finally, Dith shook his head.

  “Perhaps later,” he spoke in perfect accents, and felt the tension behind him heighten. He rose then and hefted up his rucksack to leave.

  “Say, you there,” cried one of the men in fearful, belligerent tones. He was obviously distrustful, but he seemed intent on engaging the traveler any way he could. Detaining him, perhaps. “Are you truly so strong, or just daft, walking the open street so?”

  He only smiled and settled his seamless cap upon his head. So it began.

  Behind him, he heard a chair scrape across the floor, and he heard heavy steps approaching him. When he turned he saw a portly man with a weak chin reaching up to touch his shoulder.

  “Did you not hear—?” But then the man screamed in pain and backed away, cradling his burnt hand.

  Meanwhile, he continued toward the doorway until another man, this one tall for a Hadrian and quiet with deep care worn into his brow, called out, “Stop!” The man’s voice seemed about to break, and when Dith turned to him, he smiled gently. “Please.”

  At this, he did stop, surprised by the man’s tone. These Hadrians had watched him the better part of an hour muttering between themselves that he was far too young, far too fair. To wait until he was ready to continue on his way before they could raise voice enough to speak to him, and then to stay him from his path with such insistence—the scorn and disrespect in his voice was only partly affected. “What do you want?”

  The careworn man stood forward and glanced a bit self-consciously toward the rest of the men who had by now gathered behind him. “Please, forgive our manners, friend.”

  Friend? He chuckled darkly.

  “We are not much used to seeing one of your...vocation here. Not since well before the war,” he added. The laugh and the embarrassed shrug were meant to put Dith at ease, off his guard. They did not. “Not since well before the war,” he repeated earnestly, as if it should mean something. It did not. “I suppose you might think us a bit provincial, to gawk and stare so.”

  Dith shifted his feet impatiently, vexed that they could neither leave him alone nor come directly to the point. “‘Rude’ is the word that comes to mind.”

  The Hadrian’s smile faded. “Fair enough,” breathed the man with a bow of his head. “But I do not want to let such provincialism—” he met Dith’s icy blue eyes, a profound act of courage “—or rudeness, as you say, drive you away. You see, son, we were told—”

  Dith narrowed his eyes, letting his impatience show more clearly to them.

  “—to expect you. Now, it’s clear to me, clear to all of us, that you have power that we desp—” The calculating smile again. “That could help us. For a price. I am called Dalthaz,” he said, bravely extending his hand. “I serve as mayor of Montor.”

  “Dith,” answered the sorcerer, and he shook the man’s hand quickly. From the even look in the mayor’s eye, it seemed he had not heard Dith’s name before. That was probably just as well.

  “Yes, yes.” The mayor’s voice still seemed a bit worried, and he approached Dith as he might a wild animal. His eye flickered over the burned door for a moment. “Plenty of power. Tell me, would you like to earn your way onward, say, five gold crowns—ah, golpinds, as you call them?”

  Five crowns was a fortune to these people. It must be quite a favor. “For what?”

  Dalthaz smiled. “Services to be rendered, nothing more.”

  Dith sneered. The last thing he needed was to be stayed from his path for coin. Besides, they were Hadrians. He was sure they were planning something at his expense. “I have no need of your money.” He bowed his head and turned toward the door. “I’ll be on my way.”

  “Come, now,” chided the mayor. “So you have money, granted, one could hardly hope to travel the Range without it. But you must need something—everybody needs something.” By now, he was practically shouting in desperation. “Come, name something you need.”

  He sighed, looking at the destroyed door, knowing the Rjeinarian was outside. They would not let him leave now, not easily. Either he would have to play their game or destroy them. On the other hand, he could think of something he needed. Maybe he could strike a bargain after all. “Do you know the Keep of Galorin, in the Range?”

  Several of the men gasped, but the mayor’s smile did not waver. “Ah!” he breathed. “You follow the legend.” He stroked his chin, and Dith could see the calculations happening in the mayor’s mind. “Very well. So you have need of guides into the Range, then.”

  “But Dalthaz,” whispered one of the men, and the note of fear in
his voice drew Dith’s gaze to him. “Galorin is—”

  The mayor raised a hand to silence him. “Guides and provisions, yes?”

  The exchange was not lost on Dith, and his eyebrow twitched upward. What the man wanted to say, he could guess; he had heard it often enough. Galorin was a myth, an icon, nothing more. Almost four millennia after the Liberation, most of Syon was more comfortable believing that Galorin had never lived. But he had to know. He had to try.

  “Go,” the mayor said, patting one of his men on the back, “fetch Tawn Baybric.”

  “No,” answered Dith, watching them carefully. “I need only a nod toward a good road that leads to the keep; one that passes near a river.” When he heard quiet, nervous laughs from some of the men, he scowled. “I need no mouths to feed.”

  “No, of course not,” Dalthaz said agreeably. The rest of the men fell silent. “And for this,” the mayor chuckled, “this nod, you will help us.” He smiled again. We have him, that smile seemed to say, and the townsmen relaxed.

  “Depends.” Dith’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Help you with what?”

  Minutes later he and the mayor stood at the gates of a large structure near the edge of the town. In the half light of the moon, the crumbling stones of the great red building looked to be held up just by their vines, and the grounds were ill kept. Inside, moving past some windows on the second story, he saw shadowy forms bearing candles who paused and seemed to peer out at him through the darkness. He immediately moved himself out of the gate to stand behind the stone fence with Dalthaz. The rest of the selectmen had elected to wait at the pub.

  “Some forty or so bandits, so I understand,” whispered the mayor. The man huddled under his cape against the cold night air and gestured back toward the temple. “They hold captive some ten or fifteen clerics inside.” The mayor glanced at Dith. “Priests of Rjeinar.”

  Rjeinar. A bitter smile tugged at the corner of Dith’s mouth, but he turned away to look at the building again. “These bandits have not harmed a hair of the clerics’ heads,” he mused aloud. “Otherwise Rjeinar should have already taken His own revenge.”