by Sam Hawke
“Hello?” I called out. The gardens I passed by were sad things, overgrown with weeds and strewn with the hollow shells of rotten vegetables. I could no longer hear the women I’d originally followed. I walked down the alleyways, my footfalls intrusive in the silence. The buildings all looked much the same, with a single door on the ground floor, a window barred and oil-papered, and a frighteningly narrow stone staircase leading up the outside of the building to the upper floors. Clothing, laid out to dry in the sun, draped the iron balustrade of the equally narrow second-story landing of the nearest house.
And opposite, in a tiny alcove, a Darfri shrine.
They were common enough, especially around festival times: usually a small stack of rocks, clusters of herbs and flowers, artfully arranged, to which believers sometimes brought their young ones for blessings, or to wish someone good tidings. They were harmless little things, decorative and unobtrusive.
This one had been smashed, the rocks scattered and faded greenery flattened. The intense smell of old urine assaulted my nose. Uneasy, I backed away. “Is anyone here?” I called out again and bumped into the gate of the garden behind me. I tried knocking on the door of the house, but it swung open on its rickety hinges at my touch. “Hello?” Something felt wrong about the house; the silence, the stillness.… It was too intense. I stepped inside.
“Hello?”
Poorly lit though the room was, it was obvious no one would answer.
Cupboards lining the walls gaped like sad, empty mouths, and a blanket of dust and grit covered most of the surfaces, broken only by scattered foot tracks. On the back wall, someone had painted a single word: traitor.
The house was abandoned. More than that; abandoned and ransacked. I stepped through, queasy. By Silastians. Our own citizens did this. Stepping over smashed crockery and discarded clothing, I ran my hands over the stripped pallets in the corner, bending to pick up a toy wedged beneath an overturned stew pot. It was a child’s moppet, dressed in traditional country-style clothing with bright layered skirts and a scarf over its head. It was crudely stitched but its clothes were worn from hugs and the ink markings of its face had been loved off. Its hair stuffing poked out in places where the stitching had failed. Around its neck hung a miniature charm necklace like the one Tain’s Darfri servant had worn. I could almost picture the child who must have owned it. That a beloved toy had been abandoned left me almost as disquieted as the sacking.
Even as I knocked at the door of the neighboring building, which shared the yard with the first, I suspected the result would be the same, and it was. Any valuables that had ever been in these poor homes were long gone, just like their residents. The same layer of dirt and dust covered the remnants of the life the family had left here. It was the same thing in the stories above, and in every house on the small block.
I held the doll, transferring it between my hands. Where had the people gone, after their shrines were desecrated and their homes vandalized? Had they been driven out by fear of their fellow citizens, or forced to leave?
I climbed down one of the thin, stone staircases, pressing the side of my body and both hands close against the wall for balance. I felt like I’d just visited a different city from the Silasta we knew, a city within a city. I needed to talk to Tain.
Lendulos
DESCRIPTION: Decorative, flowering, warm-climate perennial, with plentiful bright orange flowers. Leaves used to treat headaches and joint pain, flower extract combined with alcohol used to treat bleeding wounds.
SYMPTOMS: Injection of flower tincture causes blood clotting, manifesting in localized pain and swelling, tenderness, muscle cramps, red or blue skin discoloration and heat, organ damage, death.
PROOFING CUES: Strong, citruslike taste with a rancid edge, extremely unpleasant and difficult to disguise (unlikely to be used as an ingested poison).
7
Jovan
I dreamed too much.
First it was fragments: lessons with Etan, tomfoolery with Tain. Then detailed, vibrant dreams, rich in memories, as though I were living those times again. One took me through my first poisoning and then my worst, and I woke clutching my throat and coughing, the caustic feeling still burning in my lungs as if I had freshly inhaled the deadly powder. I turned over in my bed, skin slick and muscles clenching. I tried breathing exercises to calm my mind, but the cough kept erupting and destroying my concentration. Sleep, you need to sleep.
Upon waking yet again, my heart raced and my brain swam with stress and fear. I couldn’t remember details—just a sense of threat. Tain and Kalina had been in danger, and I had been unable to get to them, but somehow knew they were going to die, and it would be my fault. I had to protect them both, and I was failing.
It had just been a dream. Not a premonition, or even a memory. Just my mind tormenting me. Nothing new there. But it had left me with a shameful desire to flee the city, forget risking our lives defending it, forget about poisons, assassination attempts, political machinations, and everything else. Kalina and Tain and I together somewhere else, somewhere safe.…
Unable to tolerate stewing in bed anymore, I dressed and went outside into our grounds. We had buried Etan here on our own property, but visiting the spot gave me no peace; I felt my failure of our duty too intensely, as though he reproached me from the earth. Still, I could imagine I felt his presence and try to speculate about what he would do if he were here.
It had been a frustrating evening, going over supply lists and sewage management with several Councilors and then preparing the next day’s food for Tain in the Manor kitchen after everyone else had left. I’d found Kalina deeply and troublingly asleep when I finally returned. Carrying her to her bed had not even woken her, and the heavy lines around her eyes and forehead had not eased even in her supposed rest. I felt helpless in my worry for her.
Something had bothered me at the meeting, and if it had taken anxious dreams to rouse me then so be it.
There had been no attack on Tain, and I had kept my word that I would not bring up my suspicions about his Council. Either he did not truly believe there was a conspiracy or he did not want to be burdened with the doubt and suspicion that haunted me. I understood the desire to believe those in power could be trusted. Sniping and self-interested though they were, and while they still jostled to influence or manipulate their new Chancellor, it would make all of our lives easier if we at least knew they were not working with an enemy of the city. Yet while Tain had ever been capable of abandoning grudges and hurts and ill thoughts of any kind, I did not share that skill. Every instinct I had told me one of the Councilors, or more, was working against at least Tain’s family, if not the entire city.
Tonight it was Javesto who had troubled me, even if it had taken some time to process why. His keen interest in the food store levels could simply have been the same interest and concern we all shared. But his gaze had lingered too long, and too often, on the roster pages and distribution lists Marco had been sharing with Eliska, whose sector included the warehouses. Perhaps it was paranoid to worry, but perhaps not. As if the silence from my uncle’s grave were an endorsement, I decided I would go. At worst, visiting the warehouses would be a good stretch of my legs and a chance to think.
The darkened streets, empty except for the hollow, distant sounds of the night patrols on the walls, were gray ghosts without merry revelers, acrobats, or poets. The teahouses and kori bars were silent shells, the theaters empty of crowds that should have spilled from their doorways. Now, the late summer air close around me, I passed under archways absent lanterns and shop doorways locked tight. Those few people who were around scurried past without raising their faces in greeting. The smooth, silver-veined azikta of the elegant buildings glowed softly in the moonlight, lighting my way as I walked down the streets past the great theater, the old academies, the original Guildhalls … three hundred years of history speaking to me through the architecture.
As I worked my way down toward the lake, my anxiety slowly calmed
. I walked faster, steps punctuating my breathing. Sound carried oddly across the lake as I crossed Trickster’s Bridge, so the crunch of pacing footsteps echoed down from the wall and muffled activity sounded from the lower city. The Builders’ Guildhall and some of the surrounding buildings rang with the distant song of industry.
I traced the path of the lake, past the harbor, by the great warehouses. This close to the deep, still waters, the air temperature had dropped. Rubbing the raised hairs on my arms, I steered between one of the granaries and a warehouse, heading toward the center of town. During the day this area was bustling; now, only a few people trailed between the warehouses and the road, delivering supplies to the stations in each segment. Soon, wandering through the maze of alleys between the buildings, I lost sight of any other life.
I had taken two steps into the next passage when a sharp sound startled me. Tile fragments shattered on the floor a few paces away. I looked up. There, on the roof of the warehouse, silhouetted against the night sky, a figure froze, half-crouched. For a moment neither of us moved. Then the figure sprang to its feet and ran.
Without thinking, I followed.
The moon gave enough light for me to track the figure as it scrambled across the roof and then leaped to the next. I sprinted down the alley, my eyes fixed on the rooftops, and skidded around the side of the next building in time to see the person nimbly dropping from the eave. The jump slowed him enough to close the gap and by the time we rounded the next corner I caught him. My first thought on grabbing his shoulder and spinning my quarry around was that the shoulder was quite a bit higher than mine.
The second was, Oh shit.
He struck me in the stomach before I could react, and the blow sent me flying backward with a grunt. Luck more than instinct helped me duck under the follow-up punch to my head, though it came close enough that his forearm scraped my hair as it hooked past. I’d no hope in a fistfight with this man, so I stayed low and launched myself at him instead.
I hit his midsection with my shoulder and scooped up his legs with both my arms, driving in and up. We both hit the ground, me on top. But my opponent was a far superior fighter, and bucked and twisted, so suddenly it was me on my back. I tried to protect my head as the blow came down, but instead his mallet hands struck either side of my ribs with force enough to knock the wind from my lungs. He grabbed me by the hair and pounded my head back. In that one moment before my head made contact with ground, I saw the charm necklace dangling from his neck.
It seemed like only moments later my eyes opened, but even as my shaking hands checked the damage to my head I knew time must have passed. The sky above me had turned the rich indigo of predawn. I tried to sit up, but the attempt sent waves of nausea and pain down my body. Breathing in, my chest exploded with fiery splinters as though my ribs had been shattered. I lay still, trying not to move any part of my body, and looked around me as best I could. At least my eyeballs didn’t hurt.
The low branches of a tree hung over me from one side, the broad flat leaves forming patterns over about a quarter of my vision. At the other side I recognized the edge of the tiled warehouse roof. Grass tickled the sides of my cheeks and the greasy scent in the air suggested proximity to the docks.
Moving slowly, I tried again to sit, and made it about halfway to vertical before the nausea hit again. There was just time to turn my face before throwing up, to avoid ending up covered in vomit. Minor victories.
After a while, I managed to get to my feet with help from the overhanging tree. It looked as if my attacker had dragged me to the grassy embankment on the lake side of the road, near the food storage warehouses, and left me there. Why beat me unconscious then take me somewhere to recover safely?
My gaze rested on the storeroom roof I’d first seen him on. The door was locked. Obviously the first load of deliveries hadn’t started for the morning yet. Clutching my head as a wave of dizziness made my legs wobble, I walked toward the nearest ration station, where a thin man regarded me warily with bulging eyes. I must have looked a sight, battered and dizzy, but once his fishy gaze took in the tattoos on my arms he agreed to follow me back with the key to the warehouse.
“It’s not meant to be opened yet, Credo,” he told me for the third time, as we approached the door.
“I know,” I muttered.
I had been here only yesterday and saw the difference immediately. The sacks of grain stacked by the door for delivery to the bakers’ district were diminished; so too were the casks of beans. I circled the room, stepping among the vats, casks and cloth sacks of grains, vegetables, and fruit, the small precious bags of salt and other spices, my eyes constantly scanning. Toward the back of the warehouse the loose tiling and scuff marks in the beams showed where my attacker had broken in and cleared out a portion of our precious food.
“Does this door need a key from the inside?” I asked the man.
“No, Credo, you can lift the latch from here.” He indicated the mechanism.
“This is the Stone-Guilder’s sector, isn’t it? Please tell her to arrange a check against the inventory.” One man to enter the warehouse and let others in. He’d had help. We would need guards on here at all times now—day and night.
I started the long trek back the Manor, considering the theft. We were weeks into a siege and citizens might be driven to panicked hoarding. Businesses could try to exploit the shortages and run a black market in supplies. And Silasta had thieves, like everywhere else. But I’d recognized the charm necklace that had fallen out of the thief’s clothes as he bent over me; he’d been Darfri, I’d have staked my honor on it.
* * *
The physics were more concerned with my shoulder wound reopening than the new injuries. “Nothing broken,” one woman told me briskly. “But your head’s had a bit of a bump. If you can keep off physical duties for a few days, that’d be best.” We exchanged a look. “Well, as much as possible, anyway.”
The lump was like a small fruit sprouting out of the back of my head. I rubbed it gingerly as I returned slowly to the Manor, the walk up the hill far more taxing than usual. Several times I thought someone was following me, but no matter how suddenly I glanced around, or paused to adjust the cording on my paluma, there was never anyone there. Probably just leftover fear from my nightmares, but it was unsettling enough that I was unusually grateful to see Bradomir as I passed the Leka apartments, smoothing his moustache and giving me his usual charming, empty smile. “Has the Honored Chancellor summoned you too, Credo? I seem seldom to see him without you.”
“Our families have always been close, as you know, Credo,” I said, tone neutral as I could make it.
“Indeed, indeed.” He looked me over in a calculating fashion. “But you and the Chancellor, why, you practically grew up as brothers. Two motherless boys, drawn together.…”
I stiffened, and he patted my shoulder like a concerned Tashi. “Oh, my boy, my boy, I mean no offense. Of course you both have mothers. I just meant perhaps the fact that your mothers were so unavailable during those crucial early years strengthened your bond. And now, why, now you’re terribly fortunate to have his ear and his trust. Who could have known that he would become Chancellor so young, with so little time to prepare?”
This time I masked the stiffening and nodded blandly, though I longed to study his face the way he was studying mine. Was this meant to be intimidation, or an accusation? Did Bradomir suspect me of something?
Before I could think of how to phrase a reply, a litter approached from behind. Credo Lazar struggled out of it and dismissed his two manservants as he hastened to join us.
“Credo Jovan!” he said, patting my shoulders with sweaty hands. “Glad to see you! I had hoped to speak to you.”
“Yes?” I said, my interest picking up. “Have you learned something about Lord Ectar? Or someone else?”
He shook his head, regretful. “I fear not, Credo. I’m sure you have seen Lord Ectar working in your own sector. But when he is not there, I have observed th
e Talafan lord frequently at the training grounds, assisting the instructors there. Talafan are fine archers and I believe he has quickly become rather well regarded there. Oh, he is enjoying what pleasures Silasta still offers, of course, as well. He has become acquainted with the bathhouses and the last of the gaming establishments that are still open. But honestly, Credo, he appears no more than a tourist at worst.”
I nodded, continuing to walk toward the Manor entrance. I had not really suspected Lord Ectar in any case, but it was good to see that Lazar had put no insubstantial amount of effort into helping me. I could certainly believe that the spoiled Credo might have inadvertently contributed to the rebellion, perhaps by letting conditions on his land deteriorate, or by the common worker resenting his obvious and extravagant wealth. But actively assisting the rebels, or murdering the Chancellor, would be beyond him. Perhaps we could use him further to assist.
“I’ve also been sending runners with messages to Credo Javesto on and off the past few days,” he continued, huffing and puffing as he trotted beside me even at my substantially reduced pace. Unlike Bradomir, he hadn’t seemed to notice anything unusual about my disheveled appearance. “And always they found our fellow Councilor in his correct sector, instructing his people and taking reports. My runners said he was always easy to find, and had been prominent around his sector through the day.” He clicked his tongue, frowning, as though his target’s diligence were itself some character flaw.
Bradomir coughed. “I spoke to the Order Guard assigned to Credo Javesto’s sector personally,” he said. “She reported the same, that the Credo has been helpful and active in his sector each day, and takes no unusual meetings.” He waved a hand lazily at me. “Don’t worry, young Credo, I concocted plausible excuses to be asking. The Guard didn’t think it suspicious.”