by Glenda Larke
“No thanks needed. Now that you’re a company factor, I can’t have you dying of the pestilence, can I? Give it back to me tomorrow when you come to embark. There were cases of the Death today on wharf number eight, which is perilously close by. I sent my wife and children out to the country several days back and I intend to follow them as soon as the fleet sails.”
Saker raised the pomander to his nose and inhaled the glorious concoction. “Was that what all the bells were about earlier? Warning of the Horned Death?”
“No, indeed. In fact the Basalt Throne is wisely trying to underplay the situation to keep the commerce of the city running as long as possible. The bells were to announce the birth of a male heir to the Basalt Throne. Now off you go, and do what you have to. Be on board two hours before sundown tomorrow. We leave before sunset.”
Ardhi was waiting for him in the street when he left the office. “Well?” he asked. “Did you get a berth?” He didn’t look at all anxious.
“Yes, I’m sailing with you.” He grabbed Ardhi by the arm and turned him to walk at his side down the wooden boardwalk. “As if you ever doubted it,” he added sourly. “Your sodding Chenderawasi magic – was there ever a chance Kesleer would say no?”
Ardhi grinned.
“Wipe that weasel smile off your face. I have a problem. It’s about Sorrel. She had to run away from the castle and she’ll have gone to the seminary – but it’s under quarantine. She won’t get the help I arranged. I have to look for her.”
Ardhi glanced at him curiously. “I think there is a something, a very long story, you have not told me.”
“And I don’t have the time or the inclination to tell you right now. I should be with her; I would have been with her if it hadn’t been for you and your damned Chenderawasi sakti. I must find her.”
Ardhi’s smile changed to a frown. “We’re sailing with the tide tomorrow evening.”
“I know!” His rage almost overwhelmed him. “Do you think I’d have committed myself to that if you hadn’t twisted me into the fobbing service of your Chenderawasi magic? You left me no choice but to follow you!” He took a calming breath, pushed down the horror of his thoughts. “Sorrel has a child with her. They’re both in danger and won’t know where to go for help.”
“Ah, so it’s the babe, not the mother, eh?”
Saker winced. Hang the scut, and his way of putting his finger on matters he didn’t want to think about. “I don’t have time to get the things I’ll need to take with me on this Va-forsaken voyage. You have a better idea of what to buy. A hammock? Clothing?” He pressed a generous handful of guildeens into Ardhi’s palm, then added, after glancing at the lascar’s feet, “Don’t bother about shoes for me. And remember I’m a good hand-span taller than you are.”
Ardhi nodded. “All right. I’ll take them on board today. I have to sleep on the ship tonight.”
“Hey, you two, wait right there!”
They had been so intent on their conversation that they almost bumped into the man standing with his underlings to block the way off the quayside boardwalk. Saker looked up and his heart turned over, leaving a sick feeling behind. The man, dressed all in black, with a black velvet hat and the lower part of his face muffled, could have been one of the same Dire Sweepers he’d met in Dortgren.
“Yes?” he asked, trying to still the thudding of his heart. He kept his tone carefully neutral, but his hand lingered near his sword hilt and he stood a little straighter.
“Who are you and where are you going?”
“By whose authority do you ask?”
“The Regal’s, you wharf-rat!”
“I’m a factor for the Lowmeer Spicerie Trading Company. This man is a sailor on the Spice Winds. He’s off to the market to make some purchases for me. I am returning to my lodging to pack my kit. The ship sails tomorrow. If you have a problem with any of that, may I suggest you take it up with Mynster Kesleer?” He waved his letter of appointment under the man’s nose.
The man glanced at it, then waved him on. “Not necessary,” he said.
As they walked on, Ardhi sent a sidelong glance at Saker. “What was all that about?”
“If I’m not mistaken, those fellows are part of a grim bunch of aristocratic assassins called the Dire Sweepers. They work for the Regal. If they’re the least bit suspicious of a fellow, they’d rather kill him than talk. I’m not sure, but I have a nasty idea this might have something to do with some missing feathers. Cankers and curs, Ardhi, my gut is curdling with worry about Sorrel.”
They left the wharf area and headed towards the market stalls. There they were accosted by several members of the Castle Watch, accompanied by a cleric. The guard in charge held up his hand to stop them.
“State your names and your business here,” he ordered.
Saker repeated the information he’d given before.
“Witan here says you got a witchery. That right?”
“Yes,” Saker said, with a smile in the direction of the cleric. Interesting. I wonder why he doesn’t see that Ardhi has one too? “And so has the witan.” His heart sped up as he realised why the cleric was with the guards. Sweet heavens, they’d realised the thief of the feathers had a witchery. And that meant Sorrel, who must be out on the streets by now, would be in danger if she used her glamour.
“What’s your witchery skill?” the guard asked.
Saker’s mind raced. He certainly didn’t want to admit that he had power over birds, not after what he’d done inside the castle. “Keeping vermin out of warehouses, sir,” he said. “Rats and roaches.” There, disprove that if you can. “What’s all this about? If you’re looking for someone in particular, perhaps I can be of assistance. Do you have a description? If I see them, I can inform you.”
“A woman. Black hair, dark blue eyes,” the head of the guards said. “Wearing a white snood and widow’s weeds. By all reports, a pretty squeeze. Your age or thereabouts. Probably in the company of a young man who possibly has a witchery as well.”
“I’ll keep a lookout for them,” Saker replied. It was an effort to maintain his bland expression.
“She might be using a glamour,” said the cleric.
“And she used it to steal from the castle,” the guard said grimly. “A hanging offence.”
Sweet Va-less hell.
When they were alone again, Saker said, “He didn’t notice you had a witchery.”
Ardhi laughed. “He didn’t look at me! I’m only a dark-skinned lascar to him. A Va-forsaken nobody. Certainly no one who would have a witchery, or the audacity to steal from the Regal.”
“Does that sort of thing happen often?”
“What?”
“People not – not seeing you.”
“All the time. Do they think Sorrel stole the feathers? Why would they think that?”
“She’s in trouble and it’s all the fault of your Va-damned Chenderawasi magic,” he said, his anger bubbling. “It’s trying to take the danger away from us and push it on to her. Leak on its manipulative mongrel sorcery!”
“Why should that matter to you?”
“Of course it matters! She doesn’t deserve to be hanged for our theft.”
“If she’d stayed in the castle, they would never have suspected her. And it wasn’t theft.”
“Stop being so blithering pedantic! They’ll hang whoever they blame, and at the moment that’s Sorrel. Worse, they’ll have every cleric who possesses a witchery talent looking for her because they can see right through a glamour. And she doesn’t know the danger she’s in.”
“You’d better tell me exactly why you’re itching to plant your fist into my face,” Ardhi said quietly. “I thought you knew how important my mission is, for your land, as well as mine.”
He reined in his urge to slam Ardhi up against the nearest wall. “You tell me it’s for the good of us all,” he muttered, his fury barely contained as he clutched the lascar’s shoulder, “but when I see something like this – a blameless woman heading f
or castle dungeons, to be tortured and killed for a theft she didn’t commit – then I’m guessing that whoreson dagger of yours is manipulating it. Protecting us at her expense!”
“We don’t know that.”
“Your slubbering Chenderawasi magic is a botch of nature! It’s self-serving, and its master is your island nation, not our Va-cherished lands! Every time I help you, I’m being a traitor to my country, to my faith, to the Pontifect and to my king. I cannot stand by and see Sorrel blamed for my complicity in your schemes.” Panting, he let go of the lascar and his rage drained away. “This is killing me,” he whispered. To his mortification, he felt tears collect in the corners of his eyes as his frustration and grief sought an outlet.
Ardhi appeared unmoved. “Tomorrow you’ll board the ship and sail with me, Saker. And you won’t kill me either, however much you want to.”
“Blister your tongue, you bilge rat!”
“And just to be sure we understand each other, if I seem a cheerful sort of fellow, often smiling, it’s not because life amuses me. I smile because the alternative is to weep.” The look he gave Saker contained no hint of amusement. “I’ll buy what you need.” With that, he turned on his heel and walked away.
For a moment Saker stood still in the middle of the street, shaking as he tried in vain to break free of the compulsion. He knew in his heart he would be on board that vessel. And he would sail for the Summer Seas. He could no more have resisted the magic than he could have sprouted wings and flown.
Slave.
Saker hired a hack and rode out to the seminary. He was refused entry by more of the Dire Sweepers. Fortunately, none of them were men from the group in Dortgren, but he was wary of them anyway. And puzzled, too; they seemed to be obvious in their presence, rather than the secretive assassins he’d been led to believe they were.
One of them told him that both Shanny Ide and Murram Loach had died the day before. His knowledge of the long, slow process of the disease made him think they were lying. If they’d contracted the Horned Plague and they were already dead, it was the Sweepers who had killed them, and it would have been a mercy. He didn’t dare ask them if anyone with a baby had been there asking for Shanny.
Sick with worry, he returned to the city. Sorrel’s most immediate problem would have been to find a wet nurse, any wet nurse, so he set off on the same quest. By nightfall, he had spoken to a number of wet nurses and nursing mothers, but he’d not found Sorrel, nor any trace of her. She’d vanished.
He returned to his rented lodging after dark, flung himself on to his cot, hands behind his head, and stared at the sagging ceiling. I’m to blame for this, he thought. I should have told her how to contact me other than through the seminary. He had to work out where she’d go.
And the babies: oh, dear Va.
Part of him wished the world would open up and swallow him whole. They had been born three weeks early. Which made it perfectly possible that the next Regal to sit on the Basalt Throne would be his own son, bastard-born without a drop of Lowmian blood, a fact that would break Bengorth’s Law. Which ought to be impossible.
44
On the Run
Sorrel was walking across a cobbled street following a lead to a wet nurse, confident that her glamour made her look nothing like Sorrel Redwing, when she came face to face with three guards and a shrine-keeper. The latter pointed at her, crying, “She has a glamour witchery!”
For a split second Sorrel stared at her as thoughts jostled and sorted themselves. She had no idea how they knew to look for someone with a witchery, but they did.
The guards leapt towards her at the same moment as she turned and fled. She was burdened by the child and the bundle of things she carried. They’d have her in their clutches within twenty paces, and she knew it.
Desperation made her act without thought: she changed her appearance into something inhuman and sprang at a group of schoolboys about to pass her by as they poured out of a chapel school with their slates and chalks. A raging boar, complete with tusks, raced into their midst on its hind legs with a bundle on its back and a snarl on its ugly face. The glamour was ill-contrived, tending to break up and re-form as she lost her hold on what it was supposed to look like, but it served its purpose. The boys scattered in twenty different directions, screaming in terror and shock. The baby started to wail, her thin cry adding to the bedlam. The panic spread to others in the street.
She banished the glamour of the boar and switched to join the boys, becoming one of them. She pounded after them, the baby clutched to her chest, the bundle bouncing on her back.
The shrine-keeper wasn’t deceived. She pointed, yelling, “That’s her, that’s her!”
The guards, however, had no idea which boy she was singling out. They dithered, shouted contradictory orders at one another, then split up. None of them followed Sorrel, who swung around the nearest corner and didn’t stop until she was well away from the area. When she could run no more, she sank to her heels in a quiet corner of a side street and calmed herself with shuddering breaths. The panicked baby fell silent, gasping for air. Sorrel rocked her and crooned until she fell into an exhausted sleep.
Oak-and-acorn, she couldn’t walk the streets as herself, and yet she was probably almost as much at risk if she used a glamour.
In the next hour or so, she was left aghast by the number of people apparently mobilised just to look for her. Not only men of the watch, but Castle Wardens, strange men dressed in black with muffled faces, men in the Regal’s livery and even men from the Lowmian Spicerie Trading Company. She maintained a glamour, though, thinking that there couldn’t be nearly as many witchery-alert folk as there were guards.
And the irony appeared to be that it wasn’t a twin they were after, but missing feathers. Sweet Va, they’ve organised the whole city to look for me because of the plumes from a fan? If ever I meet Saker again, I’ll wring his neck for involving me! He risked my life and Mathilda’s life and the babies’ for something plucked from a bird on the other side of the world?
The thought was beyond terrifying. By the Oak, why? Her life had spun out of control into a nightmare. She couldn’t even seek out a shrine for help because a shrine-keeper might betray her. Damn you to a Lowmian bog, Saker! This is all your fault.
By nightfall, she felt as if she’d been stretched to breaking point. Every unusual sound made her jump, every loud voice filled her with fear, and every time the baby whimpered she felt like crying. The lead she’d followed had led to nothing. The poor nameless babe hadn’t been fed since Odlenda had suckled her that morning and she wouldn’t stop fretting.
As the sun set, Sorrel headed towards the house of a wet nurse she’d spoken to earlier. The woman had a family and she certainly hadn’t wanted to journey to Vavala, but perhaps she could be persuaded to feed the baby. She knew it was a risk; the woman had probably heard about the search by now. But her choices had vanished. The child needed to be fed and her mewls were more and more frequent and anguished.
She was still ten minutes away from where the woman lived when she noticed an alley, narrow and dark, on her left. And somewhere deep down that shadowed lane, another child was crying. Turning her head to look, she halted and stared. The sound was reedy and unhappy; an older baby, she guessed. She took a few hesitant steps into the dimness of the alley.
A faint flickering danced in the shadows on the brick wall at the end of the lane; somewhere a fire had been lit, but the flames were hidden from sight around a corner. She hesitated, telling herself it was none of her business. She already had a child to look after and she certainly didn’t need another. Yet the cry was haunting, not so much from the quality of the sound, but from the idea that any child should be crying in an alley in the dark at this time of night.
She was still dithering, wondering what to do, when a voice a few paces away on her right, said, “In a pickle, sister?”
Startled, ready to run, she turned to face the speaker. A raggedly dressed man, middle-aged, stood in
a recessed doorway. The door had long since been bricked up, but the recess offered a good lookout post for someone not wanting to be noticed. He’s on guard, she thought.
There was nothing threatening about him. He didn’t move towards her and his words were more enquiry than menace.
“You could say that,” she said.
He stepped out of the doorway then, with the aid of a crutch, but came no closer. He smelled of dirt, sweat and unwashed clothing, and he was missing a leg, now replaced by a wooden peg. “You got a hungry littl’un there, methinks.”
She turned, intending to leave, but he halted her with his next words. “You’re the thief they’re hunting, right? The Ardronese spy who robbed the castle using a glamour. The talk’s all o’er the town ’bout you.”
It was a moment before she could gather her wits enough to face him once more, choked by her despair.
He said gently, “We’re all bleeding poor here. Gutter scum. Varmints, living on the streets of Ustgrind, stealing to eat ’cause we had hard luck. Look at me, a bosun on a Regal’s ship, laid off after an accident, got no leg and no future. We stick together to ’elp one ’nother. There’s one thing we don’t do, not our lot, anyways. We don’t betray our own. Heard you got a Shenat name fer a start.”
“Sorrel Redwing.”
“An’ you got a witchery, an’ we respect them gifted with witcheries. We don’t turn away no child, neither. With a babe in arms you’re safe here.”
Desperate, weary and afraid, she whispered, “She’s newborn. Her mother died and I was looking for a wet nurse.”
“Then Va got yer to the right place.” Pointing to the end of the alley, he said, “Go on down to the end of the lane. There’s folk there who’ll look after yer.” He coughed then, the chronic cough of a sick man. “Tell ’em Salamander sent yer.”
Had she been less desperate or more frightened, she would have walked away. Instead, she did as he suggested. When she reached the end of the alley, she saw that it turned sharply to the left into a dead end. The blank-eyed windows of gutted buildings stared sightlessly on a huddle of people warming their hands at a small fire on the cobbles. A motley group of people, she thought. Some fifteen or so adults and a number of ragged children with besmirched faces. The crying baby had been hushed.