The garrison sergeant waved Falion through with scarcely a pause. Clattering into the narrow passage, his tired horse flung her head and shied under him. Movement flicked through the murder hole overhead. The arrow slits on both sides lay darkened, but a pressured shift in the flux disclosed lurking archers poised in position.
Falion threaded his mount through the gap, as if that foreboding change did not spur his unease. Naught seemed amiss as he cleared the far side, met by the familiar taint of low tide, and the fragrant birch smoke from the bakeshops.
Here, the soaring grace of the Paravian architects wore the sedimentary layers of humanity’s teeming tenancy. The thoroughfares were crammed with an ant’s warren of dwellings, upper stories accessed by outside stairs, and loft galleries strung in mismatched levels across vaulted stone. Years had seen the massive block of the centaur artisans jigsawed with timber construction, the oversized dimensions refigured for Mankind’s smaller stature. Alleys arrowed off on both sides, the plaster and lathe jumble of family craftshops and tenements squeezed into limited space. The once-generous street sloped downhill toward the wharf, narrowed to a slot, and pleated by the steepled roofs of the guildhalls that housed the labyrinthine tangles of edict and infraction that managed the cogs of trade elsewhere.
Brown runoff splashed ankle-deep through the gutters, reason enough for scant traffic. But the sodden groups on the street corners and the passersby huddled under the jut of the eaves were not shopping. None carried baskets for goods. Many watched Falion pass with an interest too keen for workaday loiterers.
Something startled his horse. A movement, half seen, or a noise, that also spun an errant spark through the flux. Rattled himself, Falion steadied the animal. Arrived at the post house’s creaking sign, he turned through the entrance with firm seat and leg, and dismounted in the puddled yard.
A stable girl took the reins of his steaming, blown mount. She cast him a sullen look for bringing the creature in hot, though any hired rider might press his pace during such inclement weather. Falion made certain his townbred speech was overheard as he dickered his fee with the hostler. While reaching into his scrip for the token to assign the debt to the crown, he fumbled. The mourning band fluttered free in a gust. He snagged the black silk before the wind snatched it, but not fast enough to escape the stableman’s notice.
“Ah, so!” The man flipped Falion a shady wink. “One of us, are you? Don’t worry, lad. I’m for the rising, myself. Though, lest the wrong eyes should suspect what’s afoot, knot that death ribbon under your cuff. Be sure to show it quick among allies, else risk a knife in your ribs after sundown.”
Falion nodded, stunned speechless. If the murderous cabal used mourning bands to distinguish their fellows in covert conspiracy, he was over his head in the thick of their plot, with the upset mere hours away. He tied off the ribbon, forewarned to pay the post house in coin before showing the treasury token.
His pallor was ascribed to nervous excitement, since the hostler confided, “Mind your back. You’ve a rangy build to you, easy to be mistaken for an uppity free wilds clansman.”
Falion tugged down his hood, muttered thanks, and moved on, his pulse pounding under the man’s side-eyed stare as he slipped into the drumming rain. The cluster of idlers at the stable gate stifled their conversation at his approach, perhaps only innocuous travelers awaiting a hack. Rampant fear made everything suspect.
Falion brushed past the graybeard who seemed to be counting who came and went. The emptied streets felt suddenly ominous, the market at midmorning thinned to a few hustling stragglers. Falion caught his toe on a flagstone, blinded by the swell of disrupted flux shed by four furtive figures who splashed down a gloomy back alley. The movement as windows were hastily shuttered, and the gliding shadows half-glimpsed through the slat boards of the overhead galleries threw off tensioned flares of static.
Bone chilled by more than the raking, wet gusts, Falion hastened past the garrison barracks, then the banked heat of the armorer’s forge, shrouded in quiet. Afflicted by the taut atmosphere, he plowed into a burly apprentice burdened with firewood.
“Fiends break your neck, bucko! Watch your larking step.”
Falion throttled a spooked urge to bolt, while the ripple of pending violence pulverized courage and left him shaking. His maternal heritage gave him no moral choice but to carry on.
In the poisoned hush before the storm broke, few grasped the true scope of the stakes if the crown’s irreplaceable lineage should come to founder. Beyond the affront to Paravian survival, nearly none realized the embattled defenses that contained the Mistwraith tipped toward collapse. While sunlight yet shone, the staring eye of a pending apocalypse was disastrously taken for granted. The compact that balanced humanity’s coexistence with the free wilds’ mysteries made little sense to the townsfolk, born deaf to extended perception. The eddied disharmony that tripped Falion’s step on the wet cobbles escaped their awareness entirely. His ungainly spill before the spired gatehouse raised laughter from the posted guards.
Limping to the gate arch, head down to rub a banged elbow, Falion spit in the eye of dame fortune and displayed the carved token. “Scheduled courier, bearing the West End supply lists.”
He stood while the armsmen ran a cursory glance over his nondescript cloak. Falion endured their cynical smirk, this once grateful they thought him incompetent. If the watchmen who granted him admittance recognized his s’Ilessid kinship, he might not survive the night. A storm crow flown into the gyre of treachery, he ducked under the slivered curtain of runoff spilled off the gold fringe of the royal banner, the gold star on blue hanging dingy and limp in the downpour.
Unchallenged, Falion grasped the antique brass latchkey, cracked the heavy, split panel, and strode through.
A surly official acknowledged his entry, but without the liveried clerk who headed the gauntlet that led to the seneschal. Told to make his own way, Falion shoved back his soaked hood, struck by the quiet. The wide hallway ahead loomed empty, the great tapestries unstirred by movement. The oppressive stillness also repressed the pearly gleam of the flux current. Encouraged, that perhaps a Fellowship Sorcerer might be formally closeted with the queen-regent, Falion hooked his drenched cloak in the magistrate’s foyer, by the chamber reserved for crown justice.
Turned toward the main staircase, he did not expect to be ambushed by courtiers at the wardroom landing. But Jaegan’s overbred superiority and Leylie’s charming fecklessness never had bowed to anyone’s inconvenience. Adult now, surely too sophisticated for pranks, they closed on each side, Jaegan in his foppishly embroidered doublet, whose ruffles and braid hid a bladesmith’s collection of knives, and Leylie in skirts sewn with pearls and brass bells that spilled a shower of frivolous sound.
“Not now!” Falion stumbled, brought to one knee as Leylie snatched him up short. High clan lineage, and delicate as a flower, she still had a grip like steel wire. Jaegan latched onto his opposite arm, with novel disregard for the horse sweat and mud that smirched his elaborate clothing.
“I’ve urgent news for the queen-regent,” snapped Falion. “Let me go.”
He tried to wrest free, hampered further as Jaegan bundled what felt like a tablecloth over his head.
“Stop fighting! You’ll thank us!” Jaegan cranked the muffling fabric tight over Falion’s protests.
“Hit him, quick!” Leylie gasped.
An unseen third party behind delivered a blow to the nape. Tiorren, for certain, the slinking weasel, his manic exploits above all reproach in the storied aura of s’Gannley prowess. Falion buckled. The stinging clash of Leylie’s bells filled his ears, the last sound before consciousness fled.
Falion woke to darkness, a throbbing headache, a dry mouth, and pervasive chill, his misery couched on the dank, fusty stone located in the palace cellar. The re-echoed plink of dripping water told him he lay in the siege cistern’s vault. Before the divide between townborn and clan had ruptured childhood innocence, his more privileged peers
had mingled with him when his father delivered fine glassware. The underground stores, centered by the cistern, made a favorite place to steal torches and float wood chip boats.
If the grown fools had entangled themselves in the sinister threads of conspiracy, or worse, had been led afoul by a nefarious dare, Falion’s sense of the lane tide’s ebb found the noon crest already past.
“Interference with a crown message is treason.”
No wisecrack voice answered. Not a whisper of movement. No affected shimmer of Leylie’s bells, or Tiorren’s self-assured laughter.
“Fiends plague and Dharkaron Avenge!” Battered enough he wished never to move, Falion gathered his rubbery legs, attempted to rise, and curled, retching. Tiorren’s blow had been no playful cuff. He hurt worse than the spill when a galloping horse had ruptured a tendon beneath him.
Tenderly careful, he reached his feet, swaying, and groped to the cistern. He caught the marble lip and leaned, splashing his face. He rinsed his mouth only, afraid he would heave in the throes of disturbed equilibrium. When he did not faint outright, he pushed off again. The trickle of the overflow drain guided him to the squat arch that accessed the stores.
The grille proved to be shut. His featherhead captors had locked him in, behind welded steel forged stout enough to withstand mass hysteria in siege time. Falion slid down the masonry jamb, forehead rested upon his crossed arms. Suspicion gnawed him frantic with dread, that his current straits might not be innocent. He fumed in helpless misery, while the seeped patter of droplets and the trickling gush of the overflow fretted the hours away.
The flux tide’s ebb reached neap and turned before voices and the treble tinkle of bells echoed from the outer corridor. Snapped alert, Falion uncoiled his seized muscles and shoved to his feet. Through the spiked retort of his headache, he realized this was no belated rescue. The note of Leylie’s terrified protests unraveled the pretext of horseplay.
Tearful as never before, she insisted, “No one’s in here!”
Her clipped shriek entangled with Jaegan’s response, all the smug insouciance shaken out of him, “Look all you like. Tiorren lied. We never saw any messenger.” Risen to cracked fury, he persisted. “Stop! Leylie can’t tell you what she doesn’t know! A search will prove no one’s in here!”
Falion edged back from the grille. “You’ll thank me!” Jaegan had snarled, followed by this moment’s desperate warning, delivered under duress.
For there was a place to take cover and hide, if Falion moved quickly enough . . .
They had shown him, years ago, when Tiorren’s reckless flourish with his uncle’s sword had broken the delicate urn commissioned to placate an insulted guildsman. Given Falion’s incompetence in the glass forge, his father’s roaring rage knew where to fasten the blame. “You’re a donkey in a flower shop, boy, and your inattention’s a trial to everyone.”
Falion had said nothing, banished as he was from the trade since the day he had upset a crucible and set the craft shed afire. Demoted to muscling the crated deliveries, he took the brunt, while Tiorren’s boastful foolery called even that usefulness into question. Falion stifled the innate drive for justice bred into his s’Ilessid heritage. He dared not tell the truth. The s’Gannley princeling’s palace-bred peers would seek their revenge if he ratted out one of their own.
Leylie’s ethic had rescued him, backed by Jaegan, and finally, reluctantly, by Tiorren’s belated guilt. While servants descended to pick the shards out of the antique carpet, the trio had whisked him into concealment until his father’s temper cooled, which perhaps had spared him a beating . . .
Falion scrambled, aware Jaegan’s obstructive shouts once again bought him vital time. Leylie never flinched under threat, and her panic rang in deadly earnest.
Their ongoing clamor covered his retreat to the cistern. Teeth gritted, he slid over the rim. Immersion dashed the breath from his lungs and brutalized his pounding headache. Falion eased under the icy water. He kicked off, and resurfaced under the sluice, where runoff from the outside storm gutters seeped through the sand and charcoal filters for purification. A recessed iron baffle covered the chute, meant to thwart besiegers from mining an access by way of the roof. Falion grasped the rough bars, where old rust had rotted one side of the grating. Clinging against the slosh of the pool, he begged luck his noise stayed unnoticed, and that the child-sized gap had widened enough to let him evade his pursuit.
Falion hoisted himself, hampered by filled boots and snagged cloth, while the scuffling tussle drew nearer, to the blistering courage of Jaegan’s invective. Falion fought his way up through the grate and wedged into the tight, noisome cranny. The spill splattered over his hackled nape, while the chilling ring of drawn steel resounded from the outer corridor: not one of Jaegan’s wicked little knives, but the deeper pitch of a long sword.
Leylie’s scream tangled with Jaegan’s bellow, cut off by the thrust of the blade into flesh. A dull thump bespoke someone’s collapse. Jaegan’s, given Leylie’s anguished cry, and the next barrage of ruthless threats.
“Tweet quick, little bird. No more wailing! We know the gate guard admitted a courier. You were on the stair, and the cellar’s the likely place to have stashed him.”
Leylie howled. “Butchers! First Tiorren, now you’ve killed Jaegan.” Her tirade broke off to a slap hard enough to snap her elegant neck.
Leylie sobbed, distraught, or else, determined, if she faked hysteria as Falion’s staunch ally.
“Sing for us, girl.”
“Or else, what?” Leylie ranted. “You scum have butchered everyone else with even a drop of blood heritage—”
Through her choked grunt, the questioner resumed. “We are bargaining, sweetness! Not for your life, but for how much you can be made to hurt before this business is finished.”
She must have struggled. Whether for primal survival, or for the snatched breath to blurt more information, her captors put an end to her runaway tongue.
Quiet fell, sliced by the whine of steel run into a sheathe. Then, “You and you, sweep the stores and the dungeon. We’ll check out the cistern.”
Booted footsteps echoed. Falion huddled, skin wet, his shaking hands jammed over his mouth while revulsion shuddered his back against the stone conduit. Tiorren s’Gannley had sold him out, and Leylie and Jaegan had paid. Whatever insane act of insurrection had prompted them to spirit him off, he was on his own to evade their red-handed murderers.
A flicker of torchlight speared into the chamber, accompanied by irritation. “Fiends plague, the siege gate’s shut! No courier’s in here.”
“We’ll be sure,” a stickling henchman insisted. “Go on! Fetch the watchman’s keys from the wardroom. Overlook one clanborn survivor, and our effort’s wasted.”
The forestalled party fumed through the delay, while their underdog chased the errand. Such callous certainty the wardroom was unguarded tightened Falion’s gut. Trapped in place, he cowered, while the cistern was methodically invaded and death lurked, a knife’s thrust away. Torchlight glanced back and forth over the pool, flaring off the ring-rippled plink of the moisture that splashed off his clothes and cropped hair.
“We’re wasting time,” a searcher complained.
Disgruntled, the underling jangled the key ring. “Told you the blighted cistern was locked.”
The ringleader’s adamancy appeared to relent, for the footsteps and the torches presently receded, again shrouding the cistern in darkness. Wretched and shivering, Falion endured, while further distempered remarks erupted in reverberation. “Dharkaron Avenge! Your slacker’s stroke didn’t drop the whelp clean.”
The subsequent grumbling suggested that Jaegan had dragged his stricken bulk across the threshold and jammed the swing of the siege grille.
“Sithaer’s black bollocks! You want the vault shut? Then bend your own back. I’m not sweating over your leavings.”
“Come away!” snapped the disgusted authority. “Get on with our assignment! There’s more clan blood
rats lurking in corners we haven’t scoured.”
Seized wretched with chills, Falion listened through the trickling fall of outflow. His urgent need to move warred with caution, until a man’s bored scuffling disclosed a hostile observer left in ambush. Falion froze in tormented suspension, while the cold induced treacherous drowsiness, and the curse of his flawed perception unstrung his vital focus.
Time blurred, until the metallic scratch of a striker jerked Falion alert. The watchful killer ignited a torch, and the sudden, blinding influx of light paced his heavy footsteps around the siege cistern. The whicker of flame and the oily smoke made Falion queasy. He held out, while the vault was exhaustively swept, and sustained the unbearable strain of discomfort through the course of the watcher’s unhurried retreat. Darkness returned, absolute. The cold became his morbid companion, until dizziness drove him from safety.
He tumbled into the cistern. Freezing water closed over his head. Surfaced, teeth chattering, he paddled to the rim, where numb hands and sapped strength were barely sufficient to haul his sodden weight from the pool. Crouched on the puddled stone, fingers like wood, he wrung out his jerkin and dumped his filled boots. Then, uncontrollably shaking, he scrabbled to the grille, propped ajar by the carcass sprawled over the threshold.
Leylie, beyond, had already cooled, her porcelain hand rigid with rigor. But Jaegan breathed still.
Falion knelt, overcome. By touch, he explored the gaping wound slashed through the sad rags of the dandy’s doublet. Naught could be done. Kindness would let Jaegan bleed out in peace, and never resurface to the agony.
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 18