‘Lord Rayner,’ he said with unquestioning certainty. ‘Lord Rayner is behind it all.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A FINAL ENDEAVOUR
LORD Rayner’s name had barely left Joss’s lips when, with a clattering of armour, the fortress guards burst into the room. Joss was so taken aback by their arrival that for a split second he almost thought he’d summoned them somehow, as if they’d been drawn there by his charge of treachery. But that worry was quickly allayed as Captain Kardos pushed forward to address them.
‘We’ve had report of a body?’ he said.
The prentices looked at each other, then at Rowan’s prone form in the chair behind them.
The captain’s battering ram of a chin jutted forward. ‘The groundskeeper, I see. Is that the note that the woman mentioned?’ He pointed to the paper crumpled in Hero’s fist.
‘She told you about that?’ she asked.
‘She was quick to explain the circumstances of the death, yes. Right before she fled the fortress grounds.’ Kardos made the last point with a satisfied sneer, then added, ‘Curious how it’s you three who happened to find the body.’
‘Curious how you and your men got here so fast,’ Hero shot back, wiping the smug look from Kardos’s face. Inhaling loudly as if readying to charge, he stuck his hand out for the sheet of paper.
‘The note,’ he demanded. With great reluctance, Hero handed it over. The prentices kept a close watch on Kardos’s face as he read it, his eyes narrowing with every word. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, handing the paper to the lean young man beside him. ‘Clear the room.’
The young man gave a quick salute, then barked at the prentices, ‘All right, you heard the captain; we need the room, so you need to go.’ Bustling forward, he all but pushed them from the parlour.
‘We’re going, we’re going!’ Hero said, the heels of her boots skidding on the floorboards. The lieutenant stopped long enough for her to straighten her hat, which gave her the chance to share a quick glance with Drake and Joss. The plea was silent but clear: distract them.
Drake’s head snapped to the right. ‘Is that the murder weapon?!’ he shouted, and pointed towards the window on the opposite side of the room. The guards all looked, with Captain Kardos swivelling around inside his heavy armour like a cog in a siege engine.
Their eyes rooted on the same spot as the guards’, Joss and Drake could only sense Hero’s disappearance as she vanished around the corner into the adjoining room.
‘You mean that trowel?’
‘It’s covered in blood!’ Joss said, and strode over to inspect the trowel more closely.
‘That’s mud.’
‘Mud? Are you sure? Oh. You’re right. It’s mud. Silly me.’ He looked back to where Drake and Hero were standing beside each other once more.
‘So … just a trowel, then?’ asked Drake.
‘Just a trowel,’ the captain replied, his patience growing thin. ‘Lieutenant?’
The young man rushed forward again, hustling the prentices out the door and slamming it shut behind them. Turning to each other, they dropped the hapless facade.
‘Care to tell us what that was about?’ Joss asked. Hero produced a key from her pocket.
‘I checked Rowan’s lock-up,’ she said, reminding Joss of the cabinet where Rowan had kept the ingredients for Tempest’s poultice.
‘And you held onto the key?’ said Drake.
‘Force of habit,’ Hero shrugged, then spun around to lead the way up the garden path. ‘He had a jar of blackglove in there. And it was completely full. How likely do you think it is that he would brew himself a lethal batch of blackglove tea, then pop the jar back in the lock-up?’
‘About as likely as it would be for the jar to be completely full after he’d taken enough from it to …’ Joss stopped, unable to put the word to the deed. From the look on Hero’s face, perhaps it was better that it was left unsaid. ‘To do what his killer would have us believe he did.’
‘So that proves it to us. But how do we prove it to everyone else?’ asked Drake.
‘We don’t need to prove it to anyone,’ Hero replied. ‘Anyone but Sur Blaek.’
Word of Rowan’s death and the note had already spread across all of Blade’s Edge Acres by the time Sur Blaek returned. Being both his friend and the discoverer of his body seemed to make Hero guilty by association in the eyes of her fellow order members. The whispers, stolen glances and judgemental looks wore away at her, leaving her increasingly agitated. With Drake and Joss at her side, she had all but cornered Sur Blaek after spotting him outside the rookery.
‘You don’t believe what they’re saying, do you?’ she asked him. ‘About Rowan?’
Sur Blaek chewed on the question as if it were a particularly bitter fruit. ‘The note doesn’t make it look good,’ he admitted as he unbuckled his pterosaur’s saddle, with Fulger burbling all the while.
‘That note was planted!’ Hero practically shouted. ‘The handwriting doesn’t even look like Rowan’s.’
‘If we had it at hand, we might be able to prove that,’ said Sur Blaek patiently. ‘But Kardos gave the note to Lord Rayner.’
‘He did?’ Joss asked, then kicked himself for being surprised. Of course he did. Who else would he have given it to? And how likely was it that it would ever be seen again now that it was in Rayner’s possession?
‘About Lord Rayner,’ said Hero, and stopped.
‘Yes?’ Sur Blaek prompted her. Hero turned to her brethren, who offered her the most reassuring look they could. Still, she hesitated.
‘I don’t know how much is safe to say here. But …’ she drew a short, sharp breath.
‘We think Rayner’s into something bigger than just the lordship,’ Joss said. ‘Something darker and far more disastrous.’
Sur Blaek stopped unsaddling Fulger long enough to run a hand over his own smooth scalp, furrowing the flesh. ‘If you’re referring to what I believe you are,’ he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, ‘then you need say no more. I’ve been following my own lines of investigation on the matter …’
‘And?’ asked Hero, just as quietly.
‘And – I know I keep saying it – but you’re going to have to be patient. To make a move too soon would be just as calamitous as making no move at all.’
Hero clenched her fists.
Placing his hand on hers, Drake asked, ‘So what do we do in the meantime?’
‘In the meantime, we bury our dead,’ Sur Blaek said, and started brushing Fulger down. ‘Tradition dictates that Rowan’s body be cremated at the top of the nearest mountain –’
‘Does it?’ asked Joss. ‘But wasn’t Lord Rayner cremated here, at the fortress?’
‘He’s talking about sylph tradition,’ Hero said, as if she were speaking to an unruly child.
‘Rowan was a sylph?’
‘His ancestors were. Why do you think his family name was “Cloudshadow”?’
‘I guess I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘Regardless,’ Sur Blaek interjected. ‘There was a time when there would have been a hundred volunteers to carry Rowan’s body to the mountaintop and observe the rites. But now, with these rumours …’
Hero grimaced. ‘Nobody wants to do it.’
Sur Blaek shook his head slowly. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I knew Rowan a long time. So I’m confident when I say that if he’d had to choose anyone to serve on his honour guard, I know he would have picked you in a heartbeat, Hero. I can’t do it myself, but would you and your brethren be willing to serve him in this final endeavour?’
Hero stared Sur Blaek straight in the eye. ‘The honour would be all mine.’
The vaulted stone cell of the physician’s undercroft was so cold it could have been carved from black ice. The physician himself was absent, having not bothered to rouse himself to help the prentices with the body. Not at this Kingforsaken pre-dawn hour. He left that undesirable task to his assistant.
‘Just through there,’ the yo
ung man said, pointing past the antechamber doors into the adjoining room. Here, among the cabinets full of medicine jars and steel instruments, they found Rowan’s body stretched out on the examination table, wrapped from head to toe in a simple canvas tarp. Together, they loaded him onto the stretcher they had brought with them and carried him outside.
The few people they encountered stopped to stare at them, their faces showing disgust or anger and little else in between. The prentices gave no response to these accusatory looks, carrying out their task with unbending dignity. They were dressed in all-black riding gear that Sur Blaek had managed to provide them with, knowing they were unlikely to be able to borrow anyone else’s ceremonial leathers.
Edgar was waiting for them in the training yard, their pterosaurs ready for flight. ‘I’ve secured the towrope to Nor’Wester’s harness,’ he said as they placed Rowan’s stretcher onto a wooden cradle that had been tied with a long cord to the largest of the three mounts.
‘Thank you, Edgar,’ Hero muttered, low and respectful.
‘No thanks necessary,’ the lad replied. ‘Though I do wish I could come with you.’
‘So do I,’ Joss told him with a squeeze of the arm. ‘But if anyone has to hold down the fort in the meantime, I’m glad it’s you.’
Saddling up, the prentices spurred their mounts into action and quickly pulled free of the earth. The cord connecting Nor’Wester’s harness to Rowan’s cradle grew taut, stalling the pterosaur in mid-air. But with a screech of exertion he pulled the cradle up, the stretcher swinging around as the three prentices flew over the fortress walls and on towards nearby Mount Swordpoint.
The wind was cold and cruel. It lashed the riders without mercy, tried its best to snatch them from their saddles, to carry them away on a quick trip to nothing. They held firm, however, maintaining their formation with their training swords resounding in harmony. And soon, the mountain peak that had felt more like a distant mirage was within spitting distance. Tempest squawked as they drew closer to it, anticipating the landing.
‘Steady, boy,’ Joss told the pterosaur. ‘Let’s get this right.’
Hero pointed to a clearing at the mountain’s summit, and together they circled downward. Drake had to maintain his distance as Joss and Hero, now on the ground, rushed to secure the swinging cradle and its precious cargo. Only then could he land, with Nor’Wester shaking off the effort of carrying such a heavy load.
They worked quickly and quietly, finding a suitable tree in a nearby thicket, then felling it and chopping it into firewood using the axes they had brought with them. All day they laboured, the last few hours spent building the stack of wood that would serve as the bonfire. Rowan’s corpse lay patiently in the shade, dusted with snow that had been shaken loose from the overhead branches. Each of the prentices kept an uncomfortable eye on the canvas bundle as they worked, knowing that the hardest task was yet to come.
And when that moment finally did arrive, it proved just as challenging as Joss had imagined it would be. Even with the three of them putting all their muscle into moving it, Rowan’s body was still so heavy that they could only shuffle along an inch at a time, struggling not to drop him. With great effort, they hoisted him up onto the woodpile and settled him into place. Then they took a moment to catch their breath and quietly reflect, watching the sun burn down to a smouldering red spot far away on the horizon.
‘It’s time,’ said Drake, and removed a pack of matches from his pocket, while Joss retrieved a torch from their supply pack. They worked together to get it lit, the flame casting golden light across their faces as Hero carried it to the pyre.
‘Farewell, Rowan,’ she said, touching the fire to the dry wood piled beneath her old friend’s body. It caught quickly, snapping up the kindling and setting it all alight. ‘You were a good man. One of the best I’ve ever known. And you deserved so much better than this. May the four winds carry you to Mother Mab’s tender mercy.’
The fire spread, consuming the canvas tarpaulin and the body wrapped up in it, and Joss considered all the death he’d witnessed on his path to becoming a paladero. Already there had been too much. And yet there was more to come, if he and his brethren were right in what they believed.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Hero said as she watched the pyre burn. ‘We’ve been waiting and waiting for Sur Blaek to act and nothing has happened. And while we wait, people die.’
‘You want to do something about it,’ Joss replied.
‘Damn right I do,’ she said, jaw clenched. ‘I refuse to watch anyone else I love burn.’ She turned her steely gaze on Drake.
He returned it without hint of compromise. ‘I’m with you,’ he said. ‘Through sudden squall or snowstorm. Right to the end.’
She nodded, took his hand. Then she turned her attention to Joss.
‘To the end.’ He placed his hand atop both of theirs.
The wind grew in strength. It whipped the fire into a blaze, carrying the smoke and ashes up into the heavens as the first of the stars glimmered into life. Joss wondered if that was a symphony of chimes he could hear, accompanied by a tuneless humming. But it was just the wind, and nothing more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A LOST EMPIRE
THEY met in the one place in all of Blade’s Edge Acres they were sure was safe, gathering beneath the thicket of plants in Rowan’s garden. It had been almost a week since the funeral atop Mount Swordpoint, and in that time Joss had managed to secure the builder’s plans for the fortress from the library, which Drake had studied in fine detail while Hero had been as inconspicuous as she could in casing the Lord’s Keep, making note of every point of egress and where each of the guards was positioned.
‘I count a dozen strong at any one time,’ Hero said as she pointed to several different spots on the builder’s plans. ‘With stations located here, here and here. Those are just the ones I can identify from outside the tower.’
‘I’ve been looking at the tunnels that run beneath the fortress,’ said Drake. His additions to the plans had been made in green, with lines traced from one end of the grounds to the other. ‘There’s a large waste pipe that runs from the watch house right below the Lord’s Keep …’
‘You’re not seriously suggesting what I think you are,’ Joss asked, scrunching his nose. ‘Are you?’
‘It could be a stormwater drain,’ Drake shrugged.
Joss raised an eyebrow. ‘Could be?’
Drake shook his head. ‘Probably not.’
‘None of this matters if we can’t get our hands on as many hexbreakers as we can find,’ Hero said.
‘We need more than one?’ asked Joss.
‘A single hexbreaker only has enough charge to break up to five hexlocks, maximum, depending on the strength of the hex. And I guarantee there are more than five from the bottom of that tower to the top. I may be a fine lockpick, but even I can’t get around the magical incantations on those infernal devices.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you,’ a familiar voice rang out, and the prentices looked up to see Zeke peering at them through the bushes.
‘What in Shoda’s Pits are you doing here?’ Hero snapped at him, quickly rolling up the plans as Zeke pushed through the brambles to join their circle.
‘I was asked to tend the gardens now that Rowan’s … well, in Rowan’s absence,’ he said, brushing a few leaves from his hair. ‘Actually, that’s not exactly true.’
‘So you were spying on us,’ Joss said, folding his arms across his chest.
‘No. I just meant that nobody asked me to do it. I volunteered.’
‘Why?’ asked Hero. Joss noted that her hand was on her humming knife. A fact that seemed to have so far escaped Zeke’s attention.
‘Because you’re not the only one to have counted themselves as a friend of Rowan’s,’ he said. ‘And because I have suspicions of my own.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Joss, while Drake lingered quietly beside him.
‘Ro
wan wouldn’t have done what they’re saying he did. I don’t care about that note; anybody could have written it. And when you consider all the strange happenings lately – Lord Haven’s death, the missing and mutilated animals, the mercenaries that have taken up residence …’
‘You know about Kardos and his men?’ Hero said.
‘I was curious why a paladero order would need guards to secure it …’ Zeke started to say.
‘We thought the exact same thing!’ Joss exclaimed, earning a reproachful glance from Hero for his tone. He quickly affected a mask of indifference as Zeke continued.
‘So I did some digging. I even reached out to an old friend who’s a captain in the Royal Army. Turns out Kardos was dishonourably discharged.’
‘What for?’ asked Drake.
‘Classified,’ Zeke shrugged. ‘Though there are rumours about corruption and excessive force in dealing with the public, which would fit with everything I know about him. But he comes from a well-respected military family, so chances are they called in some favours to ensure his disgrace wasn’t a public one.’
Hero’s mouth was a thin little line as she stared Zeke down. ‘Funny how having the right family connections can save even the worst offenders from the full consequences of their actions.’
Joss watched for Zeke’s reaction, wondering if he might hit back at Hero with a similarly barbed comment. After all, that would have been exactly what he would have done during their time together on the Way, especially with a subject as sore to Hero as family.
Zeke just bowed his head. ‘Very true,’ he said. ‘But it’s one more piece of a puzzle that forms a sinister picture. Of what exactly, I’m not sure. But that’s why I knew I had to investigate.’
The Edge of the World Page 20