To her dubious credit, she tried to work him in return. Her own questions grew hooks. He let them drag information from him—just enough for her to conclude that he was a secret trafficker in mages’ goods, trading triskeles and reckoners’ rings on a shadow market. She was appalled, good Strong Legger that she was, burner of crafts and carvings, suppressor of arts that harmed no one. He took some pleasure in appalling her, though she would run straight to the alderfolk she aspired to join, and he would have to complete his new task before he was run out of town. But better to have her spread that lie than spread something approaching the truth and flush the killers before he was ready.
At least they had drained their third tankards, and he suffered only a dousing in vitriol, not a dousing in ale, when she quit him.
When the tinker would not stay for a drink—a relief, since Louarn could not afford to offer one—the publicans decided to close up early. Swept from the Swift with stained rushes and pipe ash, Louarn stood for a time gating down the lane between the fronts of taverns and the backs of stalls, letting his eyes adjust to darkness after the porch lamp went out, listening to itinerants snore. He drew his cloak close and considered where to go next. There would be no finding the sweetsmonger until morning. The alderfolk would have folk looking for him then, too, but Mireille would be busy at her [170] trade, and with his battered hat angled low he would be difficult to identify based on her description alone. They might also watch Jiondor’s stall, but he would surmount that when he got there. Surely their peacekeepers had better things to do than chase a young woman’s whimsy.
Three lanterns flaring to life in front of a tavern down the row and heading up toward him through the mist told him the extent to which he had misjudged. He didn’t wait to see if it was he they sought, but eased down the porch and around the corner of the public house. Through the decaying balustrade he watched three bladed peacekeepers go up the steps. A soft knock on the door was answered by the publican. No, there was no one left inside. They’d closed early for lack of custom. Yes, there’d been a man drinking with Mireille, but they chucked him out so they could get some sleep, and if these good folk wouldn’t mind ...
One of the peacekeepers requested entry to search the premises. One of the others began rousing the sleepers in the lane, shining lanternlight on bewildered faces; the third moved off a ways and dimmed her light, watching for anyone rising to slip away. A pale blur of Mireille’s blunt features leaned into the searcher’s light. She peered at a man and shook her head. He could just make out her hooded form following the light to the next sleeper.
Arms slid around him from behind. He barely kept from gasping. They drew him deeper into the shadows. They were sinuous arms—caressing, not capturing. “Who are we hiding from?” said a sweet voice, and the publicans’ daughter nuzzled the back of his neck.
You can take me to Jiondor’s home, he thought, and turned so that she felt his smile on her cheek, and pressed her lightly against the wall, stifling her giggle with his lips just in time. It will be a game, he thought, and when she whispered, “If it’s Mireille, you’re well shut of that,” he silenced her with another kiss and thought, Or perhaps to spite a girl you don’t like. Whatever will sway you, we’ll do. Then she did giggle, and it was his own oath he had to stifle. River sounds and the protests of disturbed itinerants damped the peacekeepers’ hearing, but it was her keen-eared father who opened the side door and said, “Berilise? You’ve picked the wrong night to go lad-chasing.”
The outward-opened door blocked the light from inside. Louarn set the girl away from him and faded farther into the dark. Too far and he’d be tumbling down the river slope. Too near and the light of an outswung lantern would catch him.
“No lad, Father,” Berilise said, but another giggle betrayed her, and now a peacekeeper’s boots were descending the side stair within. In moments a lantern would be thrust out. Louarn quested with his [171] toe, and only managed to send a skitter of loose stones down into the river.
“No lad indeed,” said a deeper voice. As the peacekeeper’s lantern moved beyond the door, its light falling just short of where Louarn stood plastered to the siding, a plump man stepped into view from across the alley. His cheeks were flushed with drink, and his stance was chastened. “Only me. Afraid I startled the girl. Thought she might be someone else.”
“Jiondor?” said the publican, herding his daughter inside. “Bit far from the Swan, aren’t you? My daughter’s a third your age, man.” Louarn’s breath caught, but whether it was at the name of the man he sought or the kiss the girl blew him on her way in, he couldn’t have said. Neither father nor peacekeeper saw the kiss.
“I was in the Mute Swan,” Jiondor said agreeably, and then told the peacekeeper, “I overheard the goings-on with Mireille and the alderfolk. Thought I’d lend an eye searching, since it had somewhat to do with me. I’ve no lantern, though.”
“Well, it’s for nothing,” said the peacekeeper. “Unless they’ve got the fellow out front, that’s an end on searching tonight. If he’s not found by now, he’s slipped off. Go on home, Jiondor. But keep an eye peeled tomorrow all the same.”
“I will, so,” Jiondor said, and bid the publican goodnight, let the peacekeeper go on ahead, let the side door close and the bolt slide home within. Then he was on Louarn before Louarn had taken two steps toward him, hustling him down uneven stone stairs and swinging him around against a tumble of weed-choked rock on the steep riverbank. A hand closed on Louarn’s throat; thumb and middle finger pressed on points just below the jawbone’s hinges. “Go for a blade,” the man said, his low voice blending nearly into the river’s song, “and I’ll crush this.”
Louarn raised his hands out to the sides. The pressure eased, but the hand remained.
“Where’s the woman?” Jiondor said.
Louarn was too long in answering, unable to work out what the man meant. As the hand on this throat squeezed in warning, he said all he could think to say, afraid it was too much: “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Lose her, did you?”
“I never had her.”
They stood frozen that way for long breaths, with the river twining and untwining its invisible currents beside them.
Any itinerant out in that lane was more likely to be one of the killers than was this ordinary foodmonger, protecting little girls he [172] had offered to foster. What were his motives? He must believe Louarn was some threat to them. Or was Louarn a competitor? Could there be some trade in children, for labor perhaps, or was that a dark thought unfair to decent folk doing their best in hard times? Trailing darkness so closely, he feared his own spirit had darkened, so that it was more difficult to recognize what was good and genuine. A market in child labor would be untenable—they’d consume as much as they earned. Assume the man wanted to shield them, then. But if his motives were protective, why not let the peacekeepers take the threat away?
He was hiding something. He had some connection to this that he did not want the alderfolk to discern.
“You’re wondering why I saved you from the keepers,” the man said.
“It would betray a trust. But you won’t tell me whose.”
He could feel through the man’s hand that he had guessed rightly, but the man said, “Keepers won’t take a life. But I will if I have to. Now you’ll tell me why I shouldn’t.”
He thinks I am one of the killers. He knows that they have killed, but he thinks there may have been reason for it. Jiondor knew that there was more than one. A man and a woman, both Highlands Girdlers from the look of them, the woman in Dindry Leng had said. Louarn did not look a Highlands Girdler; he hadn’t the height or the coloring. A plains Girdler, perhaps, though his hair was too dark even for that, but hair could be dyed. Had Jiondor gotten a good look at him, while he stood in lamplight on the Chimney Swift’s porch?
“How long were you watching?” He tried to calculate how long Mireille had been gone, how much Jiondor would have had to overhear of her appeal t
o the alderfolk before he slipped off to his own ends. If he’d sought and seen a man of Louarn’s description, the man Mireille described, and thought him one of the killers, there could be three killers. He’d been so sure he was following two. More than three and their stealth would be compromised ... but three was a number of power, they might well be working as three, a dark inversion of an old-time triad ...
“Answer me,” Jiondor said.
Louarn had to wade upstream through leagues of thoughts before he retrieved the demand still hanging there.
“You won’t kill me,” he said quietly, making his decision, “because I have not yet become what I hunt.” Because taking a life is the worst abomination to the spirit, and I would not put that stain on your soul. “You shouldn’t kill me, because the children you protect are in grave danger.”
[173] Jiondor’s fingers dug hard, then eased, as if the reaction was involuntary. “The only danger those girls were in was being prenticed to that so-called healer, and she won’t find them now.”
“She will,” Louarn said, and told him how.
Jiondor swore. “That wee one always had a way with beasts. Thought the worst it would bring her was heartache, in these ill times.” He released Louarn and straightened. Louarn could just make him out now in the dim glow of a nail-paring moon filtered through the sky’s haze. Mist coiled around their feet, but clung to the river, refusing to rise. “What are you?” the man said.
“A journeyman crafter,” Louarn said, “no more than that. But I am hunting a pair of killers. Possibly three, I thought a moment ago, but now I don’t know what I think.”
“I thought they were ...” Jiondor swore again, eloquently, a talent of these Strong Leggers. “This gets us nowhere. Two men with secrets. I won’t tell you mine, you won’t tell me yours, and meanwhile those girls could be in it up to their necks. I’ll have to go.”
“Go?” Louarn said, prompting more than asking.
“Fetch them, rescue them, whatever it amounts to. I can’t involve keepers. I won’t involve my pledge, she’s put up her blade for good. But you can come; you will anyway, whatever I do, I couldn’t borrow or beg a ride and you’ll trail me on foot.”
“It’s hard to get rides Kneeward,” Louarn agreed, and watched.
Jiondor nodded. “Yes, they’re Kneeward. That’s not enough for you to find them. But if I bring you I can keep an eye on you. We leave now. No stops, no messages except mine to my pledge.”
“I am hunting these people, Jiondor, not working with them.”
“That’s as may be. I’ve had enough lies and secrets to last me a good long while. Right now it’s all a lie until I find otherwise. But I’ll risk being wrong about some of it, on the chance of keeping those girls from harm.”
“Then we must go now,” Louarn said, and rose stiffly, rubbing the hard memory of rocks from his tailbone. “There’ll be a ride for us on the Knee Road, if we’re in time, and if those publicans will give you a light for the driver to see us by.”
While they awaited the sound of wagon wheels on the side of the road by a slumbering shanty town, the sweetsmonger holding the borrowed candle lantern ready, Louarn mused on the tight weave this tradertown turned out to be—a box puzzle, a twistleaf puzzle, a braid of mists and currents.
The Fist
Kazhe’s cheekbone cracked against the table. No pain in the back of her head—a shove from behind, not a blow. She was on her feet in the time it took an eye to open, with an instant field awareness of the posture and position of every form in the room.
No threat from front or sides. The stool her rising knocked backward scraped and tottered but did not hit flesh. Whoever had smashed her head down was not directly behind her. He was likely right-handed. There was no blade in her. He was either reaching his bare hand for a weapon or drawing his fist back.
She spun left, blade hand sweeping a knife from her belt. Her off elbow whipped through air. She jerked her blade arm back hard to halt the rotation even as the carry knife came fluidly into a thrusting grip.
No one there. No one diving through door or window. Just a side wall of chinked gray stone, hung with horse shoes, mule shoes, ill-matched halves of steer shoes.
Though she had pulled up, the low, smoky room continued to rotate. The floor tilted. She came full around and braced herself on the table. The flamewood’s grain ran in queasy waves.
“All right there?” A man set a tankard of dark beer down on a cluster of rings in the old waxseed polish. Publican? Innkeeper? Taverner—place was too small for an inn, and in a public house she would have smelled stew.
[175] “Your furniture’s making me seasick.”
“That’d be the stout,” the man said cheerfully. “Chuck bucket’s in the corner there.”
She fingered her cheekbone and found it numb but not bloody. Low rafters, smoke-filled air, tables stained and scarred. The drink spill smelled rich and bitter, the pipe smoke piquant. The Fist, then. She was still in the Fist, where they drank stout and crumbled dry crampbark into their briar pipes. Hobblebush, they called it. She wasn’t anywhere near numb enough if she could remember a thing like that.
A set of ninestones strewed the table. A winning configuration, possibly arranged by the impact of her face. Beside her was a modest pile of old clenched nails. Beside a larger pile, across from her, sat another tankard, empty. Who’d finish his drink but leave his stones?
The boot knife plunged point-first into the table beside the stones gave partial answer. She worked it out and slid it home. “Sorry about that,” she said to the taverner.
“The cut’ll wax in, like all the others,” he said. “And nice work, by the way. I was in the cellar, but my boy saw it. Will the fellow come back for his stones, do you think?”
Kazhe gauged the time of day from the shuttered windows and oily lampglow and said, “Not tonight. Why don’t you keep them safe for him?” She scooped the nails into their box but left the stones for the taverner, not trusting herself to cope with the drawbag.
“It’s more than nails I’m rolling for,” he’d said, with a tense, expectant glance as he rattled the stones in his cupped hands, and she’d snorted and told him to yank a younger pair of breeches.
She remembered now—the offer of a friendly game, the way he demanded the strongest stout. Called himself Arron, a Heartlands name but in a Highlands accent. She’d let him stand her the drinks, although the taverner gave her all she asked. For keeping the peace. She remembered now. The Blue Dunnock had thrown her out for starting more brawls than she stopped. She’d packed the blasted Fist in, set off for home. But now she was here.
She remembered. It was a partner Arron wanted, but the bladed kind. “A rousing workout once a nineday, when the caravans come through,” he’d said, “and you’ll never have to wipe up another tavern.”
She hadn’t heard of roadside attacks in the Fist, though merchants traveled in caravans for fear of just that, with hired blades to protect them. The folk they hired wouldn’t know a point from a buttcap—she’d said as much when they tried to hire her—but this lout didn’t know that, or didn’t want to find out the hard way that he was wrong.
[176] At least they fear me enough to want me, she’d thought. The merchants, and the lout.
She’d turned him down. He’d turned nasty. Said she was selling herself cheap, working protection for crossroads fleatraps.
“Aren’t you tired of being a washed-up legend? Kazhe n’Zhevra, bodyguard to the Lightbreaker. Can’t make choices for yourself, without some darkmage pulling your strings?”
“His name was Torrin,” she’d growled.
“His name was traitor,” Arron had said, his burred accent thickening, and that was when her knife went into the wood and he stumbled up and away. He’d mistaken her for someone else, she said, and if she saw him again she wouldn’t be aiming for the table.
“I only made one mistake,” he’d said as he backed to the door. “I didn’t wait for you to get through the next b
arrel of stout.”
Bleeding spirits, she hated Highlanders.
She retrieved her stool and gripped the seat to guide herself onto it. She picked up her tankard with two hands. It seemed like years since the last draught, as if in the moment of keeling face-first into the table she had journeyed to a far time and place. The shakes eased as the bitter, creamy liquid went down. A meal in a mug, that’s what this stuff was. Forget your ales and shandies. You could live on this. Forget careering brigandage you could have prevented with a maiming blow. Forget the insults you shouldn’t have let pass.
Forget the past. That was the point. Somewhere was the memory of drinking with shielders—the looks of disgust, even pity, as they went on their way. Today? The day before? It didn’t matter. Lift the tankard, take a swallow, there went the memory. Somewhere below that,, the memory of driving Benkana off; lift, swallow, drown that memory a little deeper. Worse hurts lay wrecked in the depths. The draughts of stout blended into draughts of ale and beer and wine, a stream running backward through the years and disappearing into a swallowhole, down and down into the darks of the earth.
Yet somehow the bottom of even the dullest tankards showed the same clear moment. Only when they were filled would the vision of Torrin Wordsmith’s fall ripple and grow dark.
“I see you’re still keeping your back to the wall.”
The familiar voice made her blink, though she was too well greased to startle. She’d taken no interest in the woman who came through the door. Folk came, folk went; it was a tavern. Now she absorbed the watchful demeanor, the grip of a longblade peeping over the shoulder, the extra belt sheaths. She should have noticed this one. Shielder or brigand, someone that bladed deserved her attention. How many tankards had she downed since kissing the table?
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 22