Hal shook his head. ‘No, we need to leave at first light tomorrow and start for Ran.’
‘Ran, you certain?’
Hal nodded. ‘Yes. From there I can use my father’s rank to convince someone to sail us to Rillanon. We must get there as quickly and secretly as possible.’
‘Isn’t that going to be a little difficult if you’re bullying naval captains with your father’s rank?’
‘Not if I’m accompanied by my …’ he waved his hand, ‘companions. We’ll contrive a story, but this young beauty is no princess,’ he nodded at Stephane. ‘She is someone or other’s daughter whom I’m using badly as she hopes against hope to marry above her station.’
Stephane actually laughed. ‘Now you play the role of a young noble of my nation.’ She sighed. ‘Even my brothers.’ She leaned forward and touched him on the arm. ‘I will say, Lord Henry, if other men of the west are like you, the ladies of my nation would do well to visit the Far Coast.’
Hal actually blushed and Ty laughed. Gabrielle contented herself with a knowing smile, and they began to fashion a story that would pass muster once they reached Rillanon.
Assuming they reached Ran, which meant getting through these mountains without running into bandits, false Kingdom soldiers, or wild animals. Two swords, three belt knives, and a sling might gain them a meal, but against what lived in these mountains they were little defence.
Still, Hal turned his mind away from the dangers and considered what needed to be done to get the Princess to his king. He was determined to ensure she arrived safely and departed as she willed, or he would give his life in the attempt.
Hal awoke suddenly, and saw in the half-gloom of the cave both Gabriella and Ty on their feet with weapons in hand. Ty motioned for Hal to stay silent. He realized his arms were around the Princess, and that she was looking at him with questioning eyes. Untangling himself, he put a finger to his lips and drew his sword. The last he remembered was standing his watch at the cave mouth and returning to wake Ty, then snuggling in behind Stephane for warmth. Summer it might be, but in that cave in the mountains it was anything but warm. At sometime during the night she had either backed into him or he had reached out, but waking up in that intimate proximity was troubling.
He moved quietly until he stood on the other side of Lady Gabriella, who crouched with a wicked-looking dirk in her right hand, a shorter belt knife in her left. He remembered the belt knife, but couldn’t help but wonder where she had been hiding the dirk.
Voices from outside were now intelligible. ‘Bloody nuisance, checking every cave from here to Ran. They’re miles east of here, I’ll wager.’
‘You’re not paid to wager or think,’ said another voice. ‘If the captain wants you to dive into every stream, climb trees, and look under rocks, that’s what you’ll do.’
‘And who made you king of the day?’
A meaty smack followed, and the first voice cried, ‘No need for that, Neely! I was just saying …’
‘Say any more and you’ll be crawling back to the camp. Now, get in and check that cave!’
Hal glanced around. The cave was larger in the rear than at the mouth, with an ‘S’ curve coming in, so they might be able to hide. Hal indicated to the Princess that she should move into the farthest corner and she nodded and hurried over on silent feet.
He then motioned for Lady Gabriella to stand opposite the second curve of the entrance, where she would be seen as soon as the man stepped inside. She indicated she understood and moved to the indicated position. Hal tapped Ty on the shoulder and they moved until their backs were flat against the wall, just beyond the curve that hid them from anyone coming into the cave.
Hal put up his sword and pulled out his belt knife just as a man came into the cave, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Gabriella moved and the man’s eyes widened. ‘You!’ he began.
Hal stepped up behind him and clamped his hand over his mouth, quickly cutting his throat and with a yank, tossing him to one side. Ty was already moving to protect the entrance, sword at the ready.
After a moment, a shout from outside was heard. ‘Booker! You taking a piss in there or what?’
Ty glanced at Hal who shook his head, indicating that they both should stay silent.
‘Booker?’ came the inquiry as footsteps could be heard entering the cave.
‘Neely!’ shouted Hal, trying to disguise his voice.
‘What?’ came the reply. A beefy man stepped into view.
This time it was Lady Gabriella who stepped out of the shadows and had a blade across the man’s throat before he could react. Even before he had hit the ground, Ty was moving towards the cave mouth to see if any others waited outside.
A moment later he was back. ‘Just the two of them!’
Hal said, ‘We move now. If they’re out in pairs, it means their camp is close by.’
The four of them came out of the cave and saw two horses tied to low-hanging tree limbs. Ty kept his gaze moving and seeing nothing, he clambered up a pile of rocks until he was standing on top of the overhang above the cave entrance. Finally he pointed to the south. ‘Smoke. Campfire. Maybe a mile away, no more.’
He scrambled back down and jumped the last five feet to land beside the Princess. Looking at Hal he said, ‘We ride?’
‘Double,’ said Hal.
‘We won’t be moving fast that way,’ said Ty.
‘If they have patrols out in spokes of a wheel, we travel straight away from this cave and that campfire smoke, and no one will come back here for hours, after those two fail to report back. We may get until tomorrow morning.’ Hal looked around. ‘I know nothing of these mountains. Which way?’
Ty pointed. ‘We follow the water course. There will be a cut in the mountains, or we turn west when we run out of trail. Either way, we’d best be miles from here when they find those two inside the cave.’
Hal nodded agreement and the two women hurried towards the horses. Ty and Hal grabbed some loose brush and moved it around, masking the horse prints back to a patch of rocks, then hurried back up the slope. Hal mounted then extended an arm and the Princess swung up behind him, Ty doing the same with Gabriella.
Without further discussion, Ty took the lead, and they began the slow climb up into the mountains, farther away from civilization every step.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Treachery
Jim kept close to the wall.
The city watch moved down the street in noisy fashion, six men, two abreast, marching as if on parade. It would have looked comical, except that it was the dead of night, hours before dawn, and the city was now officially under martial law. That martial law had been declared mere hours after Jim had slipped out of the palace seemed more than a coincidence.
Jim waited. As he expected, a few minutes after the passing of the watch, a pair of keen-eyed men came peering into every shadow, doorway, and window, moving as quietly as cats. Sir William Alcorn was sparing no effort in locating the ailing Duke’s grandson, apparently.
After leaving Bill the Butcher’s establishment, James had intended to check on one of his safe houses, a small rented room over a dry goods store where he had secreted a fair amount of gold, several different documents and disguises, and a sufficient number of weapons to ensure his ability to defend himself.
He had almost walked into a trap.
His ‘bump of trouble’ had tripped when he started down the street where the shop lay, when he noticed a man lingering at the far corner. Had he approached from that direction he would certainly have been sighted. Depending on how many agents Sir William had nearby he might have been able to escape. Or he might have ended up in chains. Or dead.
He walked into a tavern at the corner, convinced he hadn’t been seen, and sat there nursing a pint of ale, spilling most of it on the floor when no one was looking. The straw covering the stones was changed almost every day, and this early it was relatively fresh. It could soak up a lot of ale.
He waited un
til to make sure he hadn’t been seen, then ducked out the back. He had wandered the docks, moving in a random fashion, until he was completely certain no one was following him, then headed for what he considered to be his safest safe house on the island. He was especially cautious approaching this one and was relieved to see no hint of anyone watching it.
It was a shack at the end of a long beach just to the east of the southernmost wharf in the city. It was called Old Wharf, for it was the oldest one left standing, and had the benefit of having been neglected to the point of being useless. Jim had seen a couple of recommendations it be torn down for one civil improvement or another, but had managed to misdirect those memoranda so that no one in authority could ever act on them.
There was no reason for keeping the wharf in place, save one: it provided a safe exit out of the city for Jim. There was an ancient culvert, used by fishermen in ages past, where refuse from catches had been dumped before being taken into market. Flotsam, kelp, thrown-away fish, and the occasional corpse had been dumped into the culvert for decades. The high tide would come in and wash it clean twice a day. As the small town became a big city, the wharf proved less and less effective until it had been entirely abandoned more than a century before.
But that culvert still was washed clean of debris every time the high tide went out, and Jim had more than once used it as a way out of the walled city of Rillanon. He reached the shack after sundown, while there was enough twilight to see anyone within a half-mile, and he knew no one had followed him.
The shack was one of a half-dozen or so abandoned buildings from times long past when net mending and other fishing-related activities had taken place on the beach. Fishermen had graduated from the shallow-draught, two- or three-man craft used still on other parts of the island, to larger, deeper-draught boats that now required anchorage in the harbour. So the shacks went unused.
Except by Jim.
The third one from the end, unguarded even by a door, presented a gaping maw of an opening and one empty window. Jim stepped inside and fell to his knees, scooping sand up and throwing it to the side. It took ten minutes of digging but at the end he had a mound of sand in one corner of the shack and a trap door revealed in the other.
He opened it and dropped in. Feeling around in the darkness he found a small table upon which was placed a torch dipped in dried resin and a flint-and-steel igniter. He tripped the igniter and soon the torch illuminated the room.
All was as he had left it and he placed the torch in a iron holder on the wall, went to a rack of clothing and began picking out what he needed.
An hour later a scruffy-looking sailor with a large duffle-bag emerged from the shack and hurried towards the old wharf, knowing that he would get through it only minutes before the tide filled it. He didn’t mind swimming through the channel surge, but did not wish to explain how he was drenched when he reached his next meeting place.
He got back into the city proper with only soaking trousers below the calf and they would quickly dry out as he walked. He resisted the urge to scratch at the false beard he now sported and the theatre paint that had been applied to his face to make him look swarthier than usual. The accent he adopted was that of a Kingdom sailor from Pointer’s Head, most of whom had ancient Keshian ancestry and thus a tendency to be darker than most in the Kingdom. Unless Sir William’s agents could anticipate his disguise, they would still be searching for a man younger, fairer of skin, and without facial hair.
Jim entered a dock side tavern and glanced around the room. In the corner sat a young man, waiting patently. Jim sat and if the young man was surprised at his appearance, he masked it well.
‘Karrick,’ said Jim.
The young man nodded and didn’t use his name. ‘Quite the … look you have there.’
‘I’m outbound on a ship in an hour.’
‘I won’t ask where.’
‘Good,’ said Jim. They both knew that Karrick couldn’t be forced to reveal what he didn’t know.
Karrick was young, no more than twenty-one years of age, but he was perhaps Jim’s most trusted agent in Rillanon. He was also the man Jim had got closest to Bill the Butcher. The organization of the thieves in Rillanon was different to that in Krondor, but there was still a need for communication between Bill’s Council and various gang leaders throughout the island.
Karrick had been working for Bill since he was a boy of ten. But he had been working for Jim since he was a boy of nine.
He looked enough like Jim to have been his son, and to be honest Jim had a little trouble remembering exactly where he had been nine months before Karrick’s birth, yet he doubted it. As Jim Dasher he had bedded his share of whores in Krondor, but James Jamison rarely frequented the ale-houses and brothels in Rillanon. Still rarely was not never and there was a resemblance. Karrick wore his hair down to his shoulders, but he was clean shaven, and had blue eyes rather than Jim’s brown. Yet there was a smile and tilt of head that looked very familiar, so occasionally Jim wondered.
Most of those in the thieves’ trade had little memory of their childhood. Either they had been orphans or they chose not to remember fathers who beat them, mothers who were drinking or taking drugs to endure being touched by loathsome men. Urchin gangs roamed the streets here as they did in every other big city, for despite being the Jewelled City of the Kingdom, at heart it was grimy, dark, and dangerous, including all the unpleasant realities of a city: sewers, slaughterhouses, rendering shacks, fish wharfs, and as assorted a collection of seedy taverns and filthy brothels as you’d find north of Kesh. So despite the magnificent splendour of the palace and every other building on the hills being faced with brilliant stonework, it was still just a city. And whatever Karrick remembered from his childhood he never shared with JIm.
All Jim knew is that while Karrick had lived his entire life within sight of those magnificent edifices atop the hill, he barely noticed them. He was too concerned with staying alive. He said, ‘It’s been, what? Five years?’
‘Six.’
‘I was surprised when Anne from the palace contacted me and told me to be here.’ Karrick leaned back, one well-muscled arm draped over the back of his chair. A serving man came over and took an order for two jacks of ale.
When he was gone, Jim said, ‘I have always tried to give you what I could, to supplement what you’ve had to learn on your own, but contact between us was never a good idea.’
‘It was a good year,’ said Karrick, and Jim knew exactly what he was talking about. In their first year together, Karrick had been a promising nine-year-old with a toughness, resiliency, and deep rooted sense of survival far beyond his years. He had been running a gang near the docks, and boys four, five, even six years older than him had taken his orders.
Unbeknownst to the boy, two men had taken notice of the enterprising boy: Jim Dasher of Krondor and Bill Cutter of Rillanon. Jim had got to him first.
For that first year, Jim had spent time with Karrick ensuring that he was better trained in hand-to-hand fighting than the other boys, teaching him the sword, when no other lad had that skill. Locks, how to set up a lookout, a thousand subtle but critical knacks that set apart a thief like Jim or his great-grandfather Jimmy the Hand from any common street thug.
From Jim’s point of view, Karrick was as close to Jimmy the Hand as any man living. He was faster than Jim was, even if only by a little. He was better at climbing the walls and roofs of the city, though Jim reserved the thought that had he been Karrick’s age, he would have kept pace with him. He knew everything Jim could teach him about locks and traps, and to pick one and avoid the other. And also he had taught him to read and write, skills sorely lacking in the other urchins of Rillanon.
In the end, that year had cemented a bond that Jim had continued even after Bill the Butcher took Karrick in. Jim never came to Rillanon without spending time with him, and always ensured Karrick had gold beyond what he could steal for himself, and the means to hide from Bill and flee the island safely should th
e need arise.
Then, six years before, Karrick had been promoted to a position with the Council itself. Their last meeting had been the night Karrick told Jim of that elevation. Jim had said, with some true sadness, that there could be no further contact between them unless the situation was dire. As Bill’s chosen agent, Karrick would be under close scrutiny and it was too risky for them to remain in touch. So, a code word and a venue was selected for any future meeting, and each went their separate way.
Karrick said, ‘So, I imagine this means that grave crisis you always spoke about has arrived?’
Jim smiled. ‘You mean beyond the war with Kesh and the attempt to incapacitate the Duke of Rillanon, and Sir William Alcorn’s apparent attempt to seize control of the Kingdom?’
Karrick smiled, and again to Jim it was like looking in a mirror. ‘Well, there is that.’
Jim nodded. ‘It’s time for you to take over the Council.’
Karrick said nothing for a while. Then he said, ‘That will be difficult.’
‘If it was easy, I wouldn’t need you.’
Karrick’s eyebrow lifted slightly, and he smiled again. ‘Need me?’ He leaned forward, ‘All these years … since we met, I’ve wondered at what point you would finally decide that I was ready to serve.’
‘You’ve been ready to serve for at least six years, Karrick.’ Jim fell silent as the ale appeared and the server walked away. ‘I just didn’t need your particular gifts until now. More to the point, the Kingdom didn’t need them.’
Karrick nodded, and there was a strange hint of sadness in his expression. ‘Have you ever lived a lie so long that it became true?’
Jim looked around the room, not liking where this conversation might lead. Seeing no one but the barman and one other customer, a elderly drunk, he felt his anxiety lessen.
Karrick chuckled. ‘No, Jim, I’m not betraying you to Bill.’ He looked at the disguised noble. ‘You’re the closest thing to a father I ever had, even though I barely saw you for more than a week for the first five years after we met. As I said, that first year, that was a good year.’
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