The Crown Tower: Book 1 of The Riyria Chronicles

by Michael J. Sullivan

  “Why did you do it?” Arcadius asked.

  “He was trying to help me,” Hadrian said.

  Royce looked up from his crafting to smile at Arcadius. “He flatters himself. The little brats were planning to pound him with axe handles. Knowing how fragile he is, and how you’d make me wait until he recovered, and because winter is coming, I stepped in.”

  “I didn’t need your help,” Hadrian said.

  Royce smirked. “Of course you didn’t. You were on top of things as always. That’s why you made five enemies in four days. Why you were suckered in by such an obvious ploy. Why you let them follow you in and block your exit, and why you failed to carry any weapon at all. But no, you didn’t need my help, just like you didn’t on the boat. You’re a crafty one you are, lulling us all into a false sense of superiority by acting the perfect fool.”

  “I figured it out by the way.” Royce turned to Arcadius. “Why you want me to take him. Why you insist I get him to the top. You’ve made a bet. You’ve wagered against me I suspect. You got me out of Manzant to have a grand contest, a game for the pleasure of … whom? That’s the part I can’t figure out. Some other instructor? Some wealthy duke perhaps? Or someone I know personally?” Royce spoke this last bit with a clear tone of threat and glared at the professor with a look that caused Arcadius to take a step back. “I warn you, I’ve been challenged before. That’s how it all started, you know? Hoyte tried to kill me the same way. In case you haven’t heard, Hoyte is dead. I did him slow and left him displayed. So if you’re looking for entertainment, I can guarantee you’ll get it.”

  “This isn’t a game,” Arcadius assured him. “And none of this matters anymore. Angdon has been stabbed. Restitution will be sought, which means you two must leave.”

  Royce turned to Hadrian. “Get your things and saddle that horse. I’ll meet you in the stable.”

  “I don’t agree with what you did,” Hadrian told him. “But thanks just the same.”

  Royce shook his head. “You realize I’m just taking you to die.”

  “I hope to disappoint you.”

  “You won’t.”

  CHAPTER 12

  RAYNOR GRUE

  Grue sat at the rickety table near the only window in The Hideous Head clear enough to see out of. Someone had splashed a drink and wiped the glass, taking a circle of grit with it. Maybe they licked it off—he wouldn’t put it past some of the drunks who filled the Head each night. They wouldn’t be spending their evenings at that end of town if they had the sense Muriel gave a dog. Through the hand-sized circle of near-clarity, Grue stared across the street.

  Once upon a time, the place had been known as The Wayward Traveler, a handsome establishment he had been told. The road was named after it, and the joint did a fine business for years, passing between various owners before failing. Some said it had been a gruesome murder that kept business away. Others claimed that the wife of the proprietor had run off with another man, leaving the owner too devastated to carry on. All Grue knew for certain was that the Wayward’s roof had collapsed during the winter he turned twelve. No one had touched it since then, except to steal clapboards for their hearth fires. Over the years, the Wayward had developed the perfect shade of despair gray, which, along with the other shops and homes, gave the Lower Quarter its atmosphere. Yet in no time at all the whores had made a bright eyesore of it.

  The hammering had started a week ago. Intermittent drumming that came and went. A wall had gone up and then another. They had a bed in there too. He had seen the mattress carried in, just one as far as he knew. Occasionally someone walked by with a stack of planks and a satchel. Always faces Grue didn’t recognize, woodies from Artisan Row. Had to be. No one in the Lower Quarter would help them, not without his say-so.

  After the rain, Grue had heard the hammering every day and didn’t like it. All that noise across the street and all that silence where he sat irritated him. He had never realized before, but he’d grown used to the pitter-patter of little bare feet and the musical rhythms of bed frames. Grue never cared for the quiet—never trusted it. Silence was the result of someone getting strangled.

  The fresh-cut wood being nailed up, lacking the gray patina of time, looked naked—a pale ass grinning across the road at him. The woodies had started on the second floor that morning, and Grue had stabbed his eggs as they hoisted the lumber. He wasn’t the only one. Groups of fools had gathered to watch. Four over at the livery, two who stood in the muck of the street, and three on his own porch, as if it were a tournament viewing stand instead of the entrance to an alehouse. He had cut them some slack since it had been in the morning. Being a business owner, he never wanted to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of the Quarter. Grue himself never drank before the mist was off the fields. He was certain a priest of Novron had once told him doing otherwise was an affront to the gods, although it might just as easily have been the lyric to a song only partially remembered. Whatever the source, Grue took it to heart and refused to trust men who didn’t do likewise. Not that he would refuse to sell drinks to anyone. As Grue saw it, if Maribor didn’t prevent the sun from shining on the shoulders of the daft and the dubious, then who was he to deny them spirits? But he could never trust such vile sorts, and he respected the moral fortitude of those who lingered on his doorstep, but come midday they had better buy drinks or they could stand in the mud with the rest of the laggards.

  “Putting glass in the windows.” The sound of Willard’s voice was like rocks rubbing together. It wasn’t so much Willard’s fault; he was born with gravel in his throat. The real problem was with Grue, who had drunk too much the night before. Third night in a row he had fallen asleep at that table. He glanced at the pane with the clean hole. Maybe he had been the one who splashed the drink on the glass. He seemed to recall an argument he’d had with the window the night before. Something about it being dirty.

  He had expected the whores to be back by then.

  He figured they’d wander around for a day or two, getting footsore and hungry. Then, as the sun set and the winds blew cold, the lot of them would knock on his door with bowed heads, sullen faces, and every one of them shivering on his porch. He had planned to make them spend a cold night on the stoop. Lessons had to be learned. A horse you broke once, and as long as you rode it regular, the training stuck, but harlots needed constant education. He especially wanted to break them of their habit of following her.

  He watched Gwen from his filthy window. She was out on that broken cart pointing and shouting like some sea captain. He didn’t like it. With all this freedom, Gwen’s head was going to swell too big to fit through his door. She always had been too full of herself. The first day he laid eyes on her he knew he was looking at a headache. Even while she’d dressed in that patched and frayed skirt, there had been no doubt she was stunning. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and that long black hair like some she-demon from the south whose eyes spoke of wickedness—the sort men enjoyed. He offered her a job, and she had accepted. But then she tried to pretend she didn’t understand and acted as if all that was required was to just serve drinks. It took three rounds with the belt to set her straight.

  “Them’s nice windows,” Willard said.

  “Are all them kegs full?” The sound of Grue’s own voice hurt his head.

  “Just about.”

  “I don’t want no just about!” Willard was a big boy, with hands the size of barrel tops, but he was lazy as a fieldstone. Grue had found him asleep at the bar one night. The boy didn’t have any place to go. He’d been working as a road mender, drinking his pay and passing out at the tavern where his coworkers nudged him awake in the mornings. As it turned out, Willard had been drinking on credit, so Grue demanded he work his debt off. Two years later, Willard was still working on that debt.

  Grue looked back across the street. Willard was right—they were nice windows, thin glass and big. Must have cost a bag of silver.

  How’d she do it?

  Had to be skimmi
ng, doing extras without him knowing and pocketing the coin. He wasn’t sure how that was possible. He kept close watch, and her customers knew better than to sidestep him. Everyone who entered the Head understood how things worked.

  Raynor Grue ruled Wayward Street.

  No great accomplishment, but he took pride in it just the same. Most of the buildings were just storage sheds filled with the junk of those who lived and worked in better places. Wayward—sometimes called the Last Street in Medford—divided the have-nothings from the are-nothings. Ironically the only other successful business on the street was that of Kenyon the Clean. He made soap, the stench of which had forced him to the Last Street in Medford, where his smell was no worse than the rest. The other inhabitants were part-time workers and full-time drinkers, like Mason Grumon and the intermittent blacksmith shop that he opened whenever he was sober.

  Being the man with the choke hold on the neighborhood’s lifeblood made Raynor Grue the King of Wayward, the tyrant of the taps. Not only did he rule the only alehouse on the street, ale that he and Willard brewed in the cellar, but he also offered gambling and, until a week ago, women.

  Somehow Gwen had put money aside and a lot of it. She would have needed at least a gold tenent or two to afford the paper on that building. Of course, it wasn’t hers yet, and Grue, like any monarch, was stingy about losing even a corner of his kingdom. He wasn’t an evil dictator, merely pragmatic, and as he watched her through the window, he decided to prove that.

  “Make sure those kegs are set by the time I return, and don’t forget to get the wedges under them. I’m tired of pulling barrels that still have a gallon left. Wrenched my back last night on one.”

  “Where you going?” Willard asked with a sudden interest that reminded Grue of a dog chasing him to the door.

  “Nowhere. Get back to work.”

  Outside, the sun was hotter than expected. The rain had suggested an early winter, but the gods were erratic. Grue wasn’t an ardent follower of the Nyphron Church, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t religious. On the contrary, he considered himself more pious than everyone else because he believed in ten times as many gods. He prayed to the god of ale daily and was perhaps the only one who knew him to be of a very different mind from his brother, the god of beer, and their wicked sister the goddess of wine. Recently he had the notion that the god of gambling, who he called Walter, was the very same deity that controlled the weather and was fickle to an extreme. Walter was in a warm sunny mood today, which just proved how out of step Grue and Walter often were.

  Grue plodded through the mostly dried ruts of the thoroughfare, coming up on Gwen who was still on the cart, her back turned. The dress she wore looked clean, and he was wondering how she managed that when Gwen turned and started at the sight of him.

  “Grue!” she gasped like she had never expected to see him ten feet from the front of his own home and business.

  “Did you think I died?”

  “Ah … no, of course not.” She settled back until her butt pressed against the far rail of the cart. She bought the place directly across from him, but now she couldn’t get far enough away.

  “Whatcha building, girl?”

  “A … brothel.” She said the word quietly, as if ashamed, like a child caught holding his father’s lucky silver piece in front of Braxton’s Gambling House and Spirits Emporium.

  “Where’d you get all the money?”

  “Making it as we go.”

  “I see.” He nodded and walked halfway around her, pausing to look at the construction as if he were noticing it all for the first time. “Looks like it might be a real nice place.”

  “Thank you.” The words sounded like they had to claw their way out of her throat.

  “How come you never asked me if you could do this?”

  “Didn’t think I had to.”

  “No? Figured you could just build a whorehouse across the street from my establishment but didn’t think I would care, huh?”

  “Thought maybe you might like it.” She was lying; he could hear it in the weak and hopeful tone she used. The same he had once used in front of Braxton’s just before his father removed his front tooth with a ceramic mug. “A nicer place will draw more customers, and we’ll make sure they’re thirsty. Your business will double.”

  Staring up at her on that cart irritated him. He resented the very idea of having to look up at her, but more than that, Walter had put the blazing sun right behind her head, making him squint and hurting his eyes, which had grown accustomed to dark rooms with dirty windows. “You got big ideas. I can see that. But you’re still a whore—my whore—and this is my street. Nothing happens here without my say-so. And I didn’t say so. Now you and the others have had a nice vacation, a chance to see the world and breathe the air. Honestly, I think you were right to walk out. That unfortunate business with Avon … well, that was a stink that needed airing. Everyone benefited from a break, but now this foolishness is going to stop. I’m a patient man, but you girls are costing me money. You’re spending good coin on this foolishness and I won’t have it. Now, I want you to send these woodies back to their own quarter and herd the girls to the Head. I’m feeling tired today, so if you’re quick about it, I’ll likely forget the whole thing—might even let you keep whatever you made bouncing on that new bed. Keep me waiting, and I’ll introduce you to the new belt I bought.”

  “We’re never coming back, Grue.” This she said louder and the tone was new. It didn’t even sound like her voice.

  “Don’t test me, Gwen. I like you. I really do, but I can’t afford to have one of my whores acting all high and mighty. You’ll do as you’re told, or even Etta will be feeling sorry for you. Now, get down off that bleeding cart.”

  Gwen stood firm, which just made him mad. He was trying to be nice—forgiving her for running out and being stupid. She ought to be grateful, but she was defying him right in the middle of the street—in front of the blasted woodies. She had her chance and Grue had had enough of being humiliated. Being nice never worked; it just dug a deeper hole to climb out of. He didn’t actually own a new belt, but after he was done with Gwen, he’d likely need one.

  Grue set one foot on the cart and was in the process of climbing up when a rough hand grabbed him around the throat and threw him backward. He landed on the dirt, banging his hungover head against a wheel rut.

  “That’s my cart, Raynor. Touch it again and I’ll break your bloody neck.”

  Walter was in his eyes again, but Grue could just make out Dixon the Carter standing over him.

  “And that goes for the cargo as well.”

  Grue crawled to his feet and dusted himself off, feeling the wet from where his back had hit a puddle. “That was a mistake, carter.”

  Dixon took a step closer, and Grue took a step back.

  “I just want ya to know that I offered to settle this proper. I was willing to let it all be forgotten, and it was you who turned me down,” Grue said to Gwen. “I just want you to remember that.”

  All the construction had stopped and the woodies were staring. The rest of the whores were out too.

  “I want all of you to remember that … when the time comes.”

  Nine hours later Grue was still feeling the sting of his fall and finding more places where the mud stubbornly stuck to his skin. He was back in his tavern, the bear returned to his cave to lick his wounds and sharpen his teeth. He’d been there all day and much of the night, sitting, waiting, and thinking.

  He sat at the table near the bar, trying not to look at the front door, thinking it must be like watched pots. It hurt to move. Grue wasn’t a young man and falls were chancy things. Nothing was broken, though perhaps his reputation had been bruised.

  The story would have run like urine down a drainpipe. Grue has lost control of Wayward. Women push him around. His own whores shove him in the mud and laugh. He didn’t recall anyone laughing; no one had so much as smiled. If anything, Gwen had looked terrified when he hit the street,
but that didn’t matter. They likely laughed afterward, and even if they didn’t, the stories would say they did, which made it so. He could have rallied his troops. Willard knew a couple of dockworkers he called Gritty and Brock—big fellas with big fists. The three of them would make a mess of Dixon. And if he was really serious, he’d call Stane—that man was crazy and would do anything for a bottle, a girl, and a blind eye. Dixon would pay, that was a promise he had already made to himself, but that was a present he could wait on.

  Grue had other plans.

  The candle on the table flickered and he noticed the tin candle plate—the only one left. He had it set out special.

  Remembering not to glance at the door, he turned toward the bar and focused on the painting there. He had been looking at it a lot that day; it helped to calm him. The whole of The Hideous Head had been built from the scavenged wood and cannibalized parts of other nearby buildings. In that sense the Head was a genuine product of the Lower Quarter—a child of all that had come before—the bastard son of a dozen parents, disowned by all. The front door, which he refused to look at for fear it would never open, originally came from the Wayward and was still the best door on the street. The windows—the two larger ones that faced the front—came from a failed tailor shop. The smaller window, legend held, was ripped from the hull of a ship that ran aground off the Riverside docks. In these artifacts the tavern was a storehouse that preserved the history of the Lower Quarter.

  That’s how Raynor Grue liked to see it. He had a tendency to decide what the facts were—made life easier that way. He could be a miserable old rotter who lived in squalor, preying on people’s vices, or he could be a reputable businessman living in a treasure house of artifacts and providing amusement to hardworking men. Both were true in their own way. Grue preferred the latter. Partly because he really believed he provided a needed service and partly because he knew this was as good as his life would get.