The Fall of Ventaris

by Neil McGarry

  “Order.”

  Duchess turned the third card: a group of women, arrayed in the form of a figure eight. Then Duchess realized it was the same woman in different poses. The woman at the center looked behind her at a fallen rock. Then she turned and crossed her own path, looking ahead towards the same rock. Then her path took her back around again, only to be caught beneath the rock, which had fallen atop her. Then she stepped out from under, and back to where she had started, looking behind.

  “Wisdom.” Jana supplied, a frown creasing her forehead. Duchess shook her head. Jana had said these cards were what surrounded her, but she could not see any sense in it. Worse, they seemed to be nothing like the names the girl had given for them. She was reaching for the last card when Jana grasped her hand. “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “This is...strange. I have never seen anything like this.” She gestured to the cards about the Fool. “There are many cards. Many symbols.” She took up the rest of the deck and fanned it, showing Duchess the painted carvings upon them. They were much brighter than the ones before her — a simple scene of lovers greeting, a man on horseback looking over an endless expanse, a woman stepping into the sea. “There are the Greater and the Lesser. The Greater very rarely appear.” She gestured to the cards between them.

  “Why? Why are they different?”

  Jana struggled to find the words. “They are...too large. A symbol encompasses an idea. Some ideas are so great as to fill all the world. The Greater are these: secrets, hope, dreams, fear.”

  “Justice. Order. Wisdom.”

  Jana nodded. “I did not think much when it was only the Fool. To read the cards is to tell a story — and every story has at least one of the greater within it — but four...”

  “Four is too many.”

  Jana shrugged. “It is just...strange.” She glanced at the last card. The one she had called what you stand upon. “Perhaps we should not go on?”

  Duchess laughed nervously, hoping to make a joke of it, but Jana did not join in. She pressed on regardless. They were drunk and silly and they’d let the ominous nature of Jana’s cards get to them.

  She held on to that thought until the moment she saw what lay on the final card’s reverse.

  A figure in gray tatters, its head hooded, its arms raised, caught in a void of black. Its hands grasped two ends of the snake which circled it, the swallowed tail directly above its head. Its gray and tattered feet tread upon the snake below. And one thing she had never seen before in all her dreams — the figure’s face was a mask, two eyes, a nose, a flat line of a mouth, unpainted, revealing the pallid yellow of the horn.

  Her heart seemed to stop, looking upon the dread figure which had so often loomed above her bed and pushed the very breath from her body. The P mark she had received in that long-ago letter was in her pocket, but she did not have to pull it out to know that it bore the same snake. She felt a touch of cold like evening fog, piercing the haze of wine, and suddenly she was back on the Godswalk, with the old woman and her makeshift altar.

  “Ouroboros,” Jana muttered, seeming equally discomfited. Duchess looked at her. “Eternity.”

  Duchess eyed the card as if it were poison. “There is another name, though, isn’t there? He Who Devours.”

  Jana’s eyes met hers. “I am surprised you have heard that name.”

  “What does He devour?” Duchess was not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Everything. It is the cycle. All decaying to be recreated. All falling to be raised again.” She looked away as she said it.

  Duchess reached out and touched her hand. The girl looked back to her. “But there is another meaning,” Duchess said, certain she was right.

  Jana picked at the fringed edge of her cushion and sighed. “When first we met, I told you edunae meant soulless. It is said that edunae have no souls because He Who Devours has consumed them. It is why my people will not come to this place.” They sat in silence for a moment, and then Jana reached out and turned over the card with a click. “The wine has gone to our heads, I think, and we are being very silly.” She gathered up the cards and shuffled them back into the deck. “Tonight is for fun, so next we will...we will ask a simple question. You ask.”

  Duchess smiled. Jana was trying so hard, and in any case she had enough to concern her without worrying about some Domae card game. She cast about for a question, and for some reason she flashed on the image of Dorian Eusbius, smiling at her in the light of her candle in the Halls of Dawn. “Do I have a secret admirer?” she asked.

  Jana’s smile widened. “Yes!” She laughed. “Very good!” She flipped a card before her. It showed the sun, shining brightly over the plains. “Yes! This is good — this means a yes,” she said, though Duchess noticed a slight flicker in her smile. It must be another of the Greater — even though the girl was probably right in its meaning.

  “So,” Duchess said, trying to get into the game. “Who is it?”

  Jana took another card from the deck. “Who watches our Duchess from afar? Whose dreams does she fill?”

  The tattered figure again, and the snake.

  Neither of them said a word, and then Jana coughed nervously. “I am doing it wrong again.” She picked up the card and tucked it away under one of the floor cushions. “Now...who watches our Duchess from afar?” she said, louder this time. She dealt out another card, and even as she clicked it down Duchess knew what it would be. She had half expected it, really.

  Jana dropped the cards, scattering them over the floor. “But there is only one in the deck!” she whispered, as if someone might be eavesdropping. Perhaps someone was. Duchess reached out to where Jana had hidden the card and folded the pillow carefully back, revealing only the pitted wooden floor.

  His time is coming, the old woman whispered again. And soon this city will shake.

  * * *

  Sleep would not come to Duchess that night. The pillows arranged on Jana’s floor were comfortable enough, but every time she closed her eyes she felt the push of spectral hands on her chest and tasted smoke in her mouth, and then she’d gasp for air and snap back to wakefulness. Jana slept silently, but then of course she had never felt the cold touch of fog beneath the city, nor felt the dread call of He Who Devours. The unknown force behind the P coin that she had received so long ago, her invitation to the Grey, had made itself known once more.

  She sat up, running her hands through her hair. Sleep would not find her this night, she knew, so she slipped back into her clothes in the dark, then crept down to the first floor and the main shop area. She was careful not to wake Jana; at least one of them should get some rest.

  She lit a lantern and looked around at the room, with its looms and stacks of cloth and the other tools of Jana’s craft. Darkness pressed against the windows. The warped glass was as clean as they could make it, as was floor, walls and ceiling. Duchess was no stranger to such work — Noam’s wife had seen to that — and Jana herself was scrupulously clean. The place could really use some paint, but after paying the rent and purchasing supplies of wool, she was running a bit low on cash. Those improvements would have to wait until the business took off, assuming it ever did. If not, she was going to have to dip her hands into a few more pockets. Without thinking about it she moved about the room, straightening piles of cloth and wiping up what little dust had collected. She let the looms be, however, unwilling to tempt Jana’s ire. The Domae woman wasn’t all soft-spoken courtesy, she thought with a smile. She wondered what the aunt who had raised her had been like.

  Something caught at her memory, and she paused in the act of wiping down a windowsill. That day she had been trying to learn the art of weaving, Jana had said that her aunt — Adelpha — had died a few years previously. And yet just last night she had said her aunt had told her of the fool of the gods. One of the last things my aunt told me before I left home, Jana had said. She must be mistaken, but the more Duchess thought about it the more she realized she wasn’t. Jana had
said she had come to Rodaas years after her aunt had died.

  Perhaps it had been a simple mistake brought on by wine, but Jana had not been so drunk she would become confused on something so important. Was she lying? Duchess could simply ask, of course, but that somehow seemed wrong. Lysander had, after all, let Duchess have her own lies, so perhaps she should allow Jana the same courtesy. Still, she couldn’t imagine why her normally honest new friend would want to conceal something so seemingly unimportant. The discrepancy was disquieting.

  Faint light trickling in through the windows alerted her that her woolgathering — both literal and figurative — had brought her through the night. Dawn was upon the city, and the fog would soon follow. She moved to the glass and saw a few early-risers already up and about their daily errands. Duchess watched the flow of traffic on Dock Street increase with the light. Many of those that lived in the Foreign Quarter worked in the upper districts, and some Rodaasi from the Shallows worked upon the wharves, so there was movement both up the hill and down. That morning, Duchess noticed that the flow was much greater than one would expect at this time of day, and it was mostly heading downhill towards the harbor.

  Her curiosity piqued, and with nothing better to do, she stepped out of the shop, locking the door behind her and slipping out into the fog. As she followed the crowd down the hill, a strange tension took hold of her. The people around her spoke to each other in hushed voices that were yet alive with excitement, but as none of the talk was in Rodaasi she did not understand a word. Both her curiosity and her tension increased, and she quickened her pace.

  At the very bottom of the hill a crowd had gathered on one of the piers. This was no gaggle of rambunctious sailors, but fishwives, stevedores, laundrywomen, children and other assorted Wharves folk. They stood muttering to each other, craning their necks to look off the pier at something she could not see. As she moved amongst the crowd, she had a strange sense of remembrance. She had been here before, and it took her long moments to remember. Although the Halls of Dawn were far away up the hill, the scene had the same sense of hushed anticipation. Her stomach tightened painfully inside her.

  She wove her way through the throng, and lucked out when two burly men abandoned their spots and pushed away, their faces grim. She slipped into their place and looked off the edge of the boardwalk to the sand below.

  A body had washed up on the shore, which was not itself unusual. There was violence aplenty in the city — wars amongst Deeps gangs, gambling quarrels that got out of hand, the retribution of the Red — and most of the casualties were disposed of in the harbor. What brought her heart into her mouth was that she recognized this casualty.

  The waters in the bay had turned Adam Whitehall’s skin gray, although the freckles that dusted his nose and cheeks were still visible. His red hair, snarled against the sand, was the only color left to him, for even his eyes had rolled back into his skull, and he stared blindly at the sky. His radiant’s whites had been replaced with a simple shirt and breeches, his shoes lost to the waters. The shirt flapped open to reveal what had most likely killed him long before he hit the water: a dozen or more stab wounds across his stomach and chest, some so deep that she could see the white of bone beneath tattered flesh. Ropes of entrails straggled out through several of the holes, crawling with tiny crabs, and she turned away, her gorge rising. She was glad she had not yet eaten today.

  A group of blackarms had arrived and was dispersing the crowd, sending stevedores back to their cargo and fishwives to their carts to continue the day’s sales. She made way, moving from the water and heading back towards Dock Street, her mind whirling. Adam Whitehall gutted and left to the waters...it had only been matter of time, she supposed. He’d taken so many lives, and so violently, that donning a radiant’s whites would not necessarily assuage the families of the victims, particularly since some had been killed after Whitehall joined the Halls of Dawn. He may have worn the colors of Ventaris, but in the end, he’d found Mayu’s justice.

  She plodded back up Dock Street towards the shop, moving more slowly than the gossip, which was no doubt already making its way into the shops and the winesinks. By that night half the city would be talking about the end of Lord Whitehall’s heir, just as they had once told the tale of the fall of House Kell. The Grey would be responsible for much of the talk. The Highway, which ran up and down the hill, with every man, woman and child merely a milepost along the way. It was almost as if someone had long ago taken this basic part of human nature — to see and know and feel part of something greater than yourself — and smoothed it into a road just as real as Beggar’s Way, winding around the great hill.

  Duchess should feel satisfaction, she supposed, that Manly Pete’s murderer was dead and gone, yet she felt only disquiet. She could not banish from her mind the red of his hair against the sand, the folds of his skin around his sightless eyes, and the mob of watchers before the waves, standing and whispering.

  She shook her head to banish the image and turned her thoughts back to practical matters. Whoever was responsible for Whitehall’s murder had closed off the path Tyford had pointed out to her before she’d even taken her first step. Whatever he’d been doing with that dagger was a tale he’d tell only to Mayu. She could approach Amabilis with what Tyford had told her and hope to shock him into giving himself away, but a man who’d been Grey as long as the preceptor would be unlikely to fall for a simple bluff. She needed to know more about what Whitehall had been up to, but how?

  By the time she had gotten back to the shop she’d come up with nothing except a headache, which was only partly due to the previous evening’s wine. Lysander said the cure for too much wine was another cup, but she had too much to think about to get drunk again. Some food was what she needed, she decided, climbing the stairs to the second floor. She could wake Jana and they’d get some breakfast. There was a woman on the docks who sold grilled fish, fresh from the harbor...

  She found Jana awake and sitting cross-legged on a pillow, eyes closed and hands lying palm-up on her lap, one upon the other. Her lips were moving, and Duchess could make out words in another tongue, whispered faintly as a breeze. She spoke for a while, then sat quietly. A moment passed, and she spoke again. Uncertain what to do, Duchess slipped into the room and sat down against the wall, waiting. Jana spoke and was silent, spoke and was silent, in a strange but soothing rhythm, and Duchess felt herself relaxing, almost against her will. Finally Jana opened her eyes and smiled, evidently unsurprised to find Duchess there.

  “Are you all right?” Duchess asked.

  “Quite,” said Jana, standing and stretching as if nothing untoward had happened.

  “What was that?”

  “It is a tradition of my people.”

  “But what is it?”

  Jana paused, considering. “It is a litany. A listing.”

  “Of what?”

  The smile vanished from Jana’s face. “Of what I know.” She sighed and looked away. “And what I should fear.” She turned back to Duchess with sadness in her eyes, then opened the door and stepped lightly down the stairs.

  Duchess turned to follow her, then halted in her tracks. What I know. Perhaps Tyford’s trail was not entirely cold. Wasn’t there at least one other person who had seen the dagger since it had been stolen from Ivan Eusbius a second time?

  She sighed and followed in Jana’s wake, certain that, between her knowledge and her fear, the latter far outstripped the former.

  Chapter Nineteen: Caught between colors

  “Finn is more than he appears, so stay sharp,” Duchess said as she and Castor moved along Dock Street. “He can often be found at the Harsh Mistress at this time of day, if I fruned it right.” Castor shook his head slightly, and Duchess guessed he was still bemused about fruning. She’d tried to explain the concept to him on several occasions, but the former White was a bit too straightforward to appreciate the subtlety.

  “And you’ve been to this Harsh Mistress before?” he asked, stepping aroun
d a broken wagon wheel lying on the cobbles.

  She grimaced. The first and only time she’d been near the Wharves’ most famous ale house had been after her escape from the Eusbius estate. She remembered all too vividly her run-in with Sheriff Galleon, and how he’d nearly found her with the baron’s prize dagger. “Not exactly,” she evaded, deciding that Castor did not need to know all that. “But by all reports it’s a rough place. A regular hang-out for guild stevedores, when they’ve no ships to unload.”

  “And Finn is one of them?”

  She nodded. “Well, at least for show. Since a half-Ulari can’t get any guild seniority, he gets work less than most, which leaves him plenty of time for his other activities. Like wandering the undercity with Darley.” Castor only nodded as they arrived before the Mistress. No writing announced the ale-house, but on the painted sign a raven-haired woman with a thunderous expression frowned down at them. She glanced at Castor; he wore no sword but she was confident that he was nearly as deadly with the knife at his belt or even his bare hands. She pushed through the door.

  Inside, the place was much the same as any tavern in the Shallows: splintery tables and chairs, burning lanterns that seemed to shed no light, the smell of sweat, piss and vomit, and shouts for ale or wine. The patrons, however, were noisier and more varied than one saw elsewhere. Here Ahé were bent over mugs of ale, and there two Domae men arm-wrestled for a small pile of half-pennies, watched by a crowd of Ulari, Rodaasi and even a few Nerrish. Most were men, large and brawny, with the look of the sea about them, and she received more than one appraising look. She normally never drew this kind of attention, but now that she had she was not sure she wanted it. She was suddenly glad Castor was by her side.