Standing in the mouth of a pitch-black alley, the tower looming above them at its far end, Chelson’s guards consider where the barrowman might have gone. The lamplit street has a dozen shops that service the tower, all closed, as are the offices of petty merchants above them. The city gates don’t open for another two hours, so the shops won’t open until then at the earliest.
“Not a bad place to dump a body,” Skite says. “Quiet.”
“I’d carry her off in the canvas,” Derc says. “Like the rug that time.”
“He could have put her in another barrow,” Skite says, “or a carriage. She could be out of the city.”
“We can’t be sure she’s dead,” Holestar says.
“She’s dead,” Skite says. “No ransom note.” They’d stopped at Chelson’s house on the way uphill to check. “Why keep her alive? And if a company took her, would they really bring her to the tower?”
Derc says, “Maybe they want Chelson to worry all night, then speak with him right before Council when he’s exhausted.”
“They should be the ones worrying,” Holestar says. He surveys the street and alley. “How far could he have carried her body?”
Two tower guards in their blue leather caps come around the end of the block, footfalls echoing, their shadows splattered by the streetlamps. “You three,” one says. “Step out of the alley.” Holestar slaps Derc’s arm, which has been catching the light.
Chelson’s men oblige. “What’s your business?” the other guard says.
“None of yours,” Holestar says. He produces a Shield badge.
The first guard says, “Not the best badge to have come morning.”
“Why’s that?” Holestar asks.
“Word’s spreading that a war would be paid for by all our monthlies.”
“Owners excluded, of course,” the second says, “on account of all they do for us already with their owning.”
“Who’s spreading this word? Besides yourselves?”
“Talk to the people in front of the tower,” the first guard says. “Give you a place to move along to.”
“We’ll move when we move,” Holestar says.
“You’ll move along now,” the first guard says. He sits his hand on his pommel.
“The army could use two stalwart boys like yourself,” Holestar says. “Shall I spread the word you’re interested? Or would you like to keep patrolling empty streets far from any front?
“You have a nice night,” the second guard says. They move along.
“Let’s check this alley,” Holestar says. “Give me a candle.”
With flint and steel Skite sparks a piece of char cloth, with which he lights a spunk and, in turn, three candles. He passes them around and repacks his battered little tinderbox.
The alley is wagon-wide and separates two buildings whose side doors are locked. One, the dormitory for tower staff, has a fenced-in yard with a locked gate. It’s shut too tightly for someone to squeeze himself or a body through, and the fence is too high to pitch a body over.
The alley opens onto a yard that wraps around a back quarter of the tower. Its windows are dark too. The crew doesn’t need to be told to keep quiet as they approach the tower’s service door: broad, double, made of thick wood, and standing atop a brick loading dock. It’s locked. Holestar gently rattles the latch in frustration. “Who is this guy?” he says. “What’s his game? Where did he go?”
Derc, seeing a glint in the candlelight, taps the side of the loading dock with his dirk. Metal. Holestar holds his candle down. Set into the side of the stoop is an iron grate painted black. A fresh scrape on the cobbles indicates it’s been opened recently. Derc tests the rivets holding it in place. One falls off in his hand.
“Must be an old way to move stuff straight into the basement,” Derc says. “Big enough for a man.”
“A little man,” Skite says.
“You have the honors, Derc,” Holestar says.
Derc grumbles. He’s hardly little compared to most men.
“Go,” Holestar says. “We have maybe an hour and a half until dawn, two until we have to escort Herse to Council. Be nice to grab some sleep first.” He wishes Chelson would let them use powder.
4
* * *
An hour before dawn and riding a double high tide, a Shield galley called Blue Belong approaches Hanosh at double-time and under full sail. A dinghy with a customs official named Mags, a scrivener, and three sea guards is rowed out to meet them just beyond the gibbets. The galley lowers her sail and draws in her oars. The official declares himself and requests permission to come aboard. The captain, Sivarts, grants it, the dinghy ties on, and the party climbs aboard. The two rowers, employed in one of the last positions available to guild members, stay with the dinghy.
Sivarts has never given Mags problems before, and his paperwork is always neat and accurate, so Mags’s little visits are usually quick and uncomplicated. In the cant of his profession, they are enjoyable.
Sivarts presents his manifest. As he examines it, the scrivener looks over his arm to calculate the harbor fees. Mags hands it to him, then he takes some records from the satchel the scrivener wears on his back. He compares them to the manifest. Mags says, “Your load looks light compared to previous ones. And you’re three days early.”
“Our enterprise wasn’t paying out,” Sivarts says. “No sense in staying in Yness.” He knows questions like these are within Mags’s purview, but it’s always felt like prying to him. Fortunately the Shield’s informants say Mags isn’t an informant for their competitors.
“Why the rush?”
“Time. Tide.”
Mags checks the crew roster again and digs out more records. He says, “Why do you have three cabin boys? On your previous voyage you had two. I thought that was the standard Shield complement now.”
Sivarts says, “One fell ill in Yness. We took on a new boy to handle his duties.”
“Ynessi?”
“No, Hanoshi,” Sivarts says. “And a Shield boy. He’d been left behind by an earlier ship. Got a long-deserved whipping for tardiness.”
“You’re lacking two rowers.”
“Powder burn.”
“That why you took on a healer?”
“Yes,” Sivarts says. “My rowers’ boy has a heavy hand. That’s why he took ill, too.” Sivarts shakes his head. “Shame to lash someone so sick. He really couldn’t appreciate it.”
“This healer a Shield orphan too?”
“No,” Sivarts says, “but she’s Hanoshi. Traded her craft for passage home.”
“Good,” Mags says. “Let’s take a look at your cargo.”
“Is anything out of order?”
“Not that I can see,” Mags says, glancing at the paperwork. “But, security’s been tightened. We could be at war with Ayden in a few hours.”
“War? What’s changed in the last week?”
“Time. Tide,” Mags says. He turns to a guard. “You come with us.”
“You realize this is a Shield galley?”
“Entirely, Captain.”
Sivarts smiles with clenched teeth. So that’s the way of it. They need better informants. “Let’s go below.” He ushers the agent and reduced party forward.
The search is perfunctory, Mags’s point made. In twenty minutes the dinghy is leading the galley to the pier, where the cranes go to work immediately. Once Mags has moved off, a wagon is brought up. Two sailors carry a stretcher out of a stern cabin. On it an unconscious figure is wrapped to the chin in clean white sheets. What’s visible of her face is badly burned.
The new cabin boy, Rowan, walks with the stretcher to the wagon. He helps load her, then climbs aboard himself.
Sivarts says, “They’ll take her to the Castle. You’ll come with me to see an owner.”
“She’ll be taken care of
?” Rowan says.
“Yes.”
The boy squeezes Everlyn’s hand and climbs out of the wagon. He and the captain walk uphill.
The wagon rumbles through the Harbor, nearly overwhelming the screeching that comes across the sky. The poth stirs, but can’t sit up. The straps beneath the sheets are too tight.
Before the lowest gates of the West Crest a crowd of workers has gathered. A few are half-drunk from earlier that evening. Most are sober and well behaved. No one says anything as Sivarts passes through them, but they barely part, forcing him to rub his pristine silk against their dingy leathers and sagging cottons. Rowan nods at them, but their faces don’t unscowl.
Sivarts says to a Crest guard corporal, “Who’s let these people gather?”
“That’s Quiet’s business,” he says. “Ours ends at the gates.”
“And where are they?”
The corporal has no response.
“Open the gates, then,” Sivarts says. “I have company business with Chelson. Sivarts, captain of Blue Belong.”
A guard in a lamplit guard box checks some papers. He shakes his head. The corporal says, “I’ll have to send for confirmation.”
“Has this city gone mad?” Sivarts says.
“Just doing our duty,” the corporal says. A glance sends a private walking toward Chelson’s house.
The crowd stares at the captain. Their faces are flashes of beard and bitter flesh in the lamplight. Their eyes are holes. Tiny shuffles and slow shifts press them closer to the captain, who puts an arm in front of the cabin boy and reaches for his sword.
Rowan says, “Why are you here?”
A woman in a worn tunic carefully repaired and soft leather pants that have been severely brushed says, “I will not pay for their war.” People shake their heads. “None of us will. Whatever Ayden did.”
“If they did anything,” a painter says.
“What did they do?” Rowan says. “Did they attack us?” He asked Sivarts for permission to go home, but the captain refused. Now he really wants to go. His father, as a sergeant in the army, would know what’s happening.
One of Chelson’s footmen approaches. “I’ll take them,” he says to the corporal.
The corporal opens the gate just wide enough to admit Sivarts and Rowan. Still, the woman in the tunic tries to slip in. The corporal gives her the back of his hand and sends her sprawling. Fish that had been hidden under her tunic spill onto the cobbles. The guards laugh, which makes the crowd grumble. This quiets the guards, and the sound of steel sliding from the guard’s scabbards quiets the crowd in turn. The painter helps the woman up.
Sivarts can’t imagine Chelson sleeping. His face is a shell, his eyes glassy and unblinking, black as a doll’s, his body, like his will, unbending. He seems particularly stiff when he meets them in a room off his courtyard. It’s lit by a brazier so tepid it sucks light from the air rather than casts it. The servants look as wan. Only the footman who fetched them has a spring in his step.
“This is Rowan,” Sivarts says, “the Hopper’s boy and its only survivor.”
At the name of the ship Chelson’s eyes clench. Sivarts figures he knows something of the story already. He proceeds as if it’s new, though.
“Three days ago,” he says, “he showed up at our agent’s in Yness with a woman and a remarkable tale.”
“Where is the woman?”
“The Castle,” Sivarts says. “She’s injured and uncooperative.”
“Who have you told this story to, boy?”
Rowan says, “The captain and the agent.”
“And the woman, who has she?”
“No one,” the boy says. “I brought her straight to the agent’s.”
“She’s barely told us anything,” Sivarts says. “She had no contact with anyone except Rowan, and he never left her side.”
“Summarize.”
“Four days before Rowan came to us and not long after the Hopper made the turn east, the galley was attacked and badly damaged by a small dragon—a dragon that was being ridden. It carried off the captain.”
“Where did the woman come from?”
Why would Chelson be more interested in a stranger’s history, Sivarts thinks, than his captain’s fate? “The Hopper followed the dragon and found an island in the ocean. Possibly Gladsend.”
“It doesn’t exist.”
“Or maybe not. The woman, Vel, was living there. She had a sword. She defended her land.”
“Admirable. Why was she there?”
“She wouldn’t say. Right after the galley landed, the rowers, led by one called Bearclaw, attacked the crew.”
“While chained?”
Rowan says, “Before he was taken Tuse made sure they would be freed so they wouldn’t burn alive.”
Chelson scowls. “Go on.”
“The battle took to the woods,” Sivarts says. “The woman took the crew’s side, apparently. She saved Rowan from Bearclaw, their last man standing, after he killed ours, a harpooner named Igen. She was badly injured, so he sailed her to Yness in the galley’s dinghy.”
“What about the dragon and its rider?”
“No sign was found of them. The cabin where the woman lived, though, had a second bed. It could have been his. She said it was a man’s. Said his name was Jon.”
“And Tuse?”
“No sign of him either. The woman said she didn’t know anything about him or a dragon, ridden or not.”
“Is all this true, boy?”
“Yes.”
“A boy sailed to Yness in a dinghy from an island in the ocean, and he kept a woman alive?”
“We had the wind,” Rowan says, “and supplies from the island. The woman kept herself alive. She knows medicine.”
“Probably how she stayed alive on the island,” Sivarts says. “She was horribly burned at some point.”
“Was the rider Aydeni?” Chelson asks.
“I couldn’t tell,” Rowan says. “He was flying very fast. He had a beard. But his skin looked as dark as ours.”
“But could he have been?”
“Possibly.”
Sivarts says, “The woman is Hanoshi. In fact, she’s wearing an old Shield captain’s blouse.”
Chelson has half a thought then pushes it aside. “Probably some ragpicker’s prize,” he says. “What matters is, you must be sure.”
“How?”
Chelson brushes a fleck from Rowan’s shoulder. “What will you be, boy, when you grow up?”
“A captain.”
“No,” Chelson says. “You will be what I say you will be. Isn’t that right, Captain?”
Sivarts says, “Yes.”
Rowan looks at Sivarts. No matter what you wear, you’re never not a cabin boy, he thinks.
“So was the rider Aydeni?”
Rowan’s father always reminds him, “It’s not your lie if they make you tell it.” So he says, “Yes.”
“Good,” Chelson says. “At Council this morning, you will repeat that. In the meantime, Sivarts, you stay with the woman.”
“She needs a surgeon more than me.”
Rowan brightens at this. Boys and their attachments, Chelson thinks. Nonetheless, if it will grease his compliance, Chelson says, “Of course. The Shield takes care of its own. I’ll have our best surgeon attend to her, not one of those bloodletters or useless herbwives.”
Rowan relaxes. Sivarts departs. Chelson gestures to his footman. “Have they arrived?”
The footman shakes his head.
Chelson’s expression suggests he doesn’t know if this is a good sign or a bad one. “Tell my house guard to assemble. They’ll escort us to Council. And see that the palanquin is readied. I will give you a note for the surgeon before we leave.” The footman bows and leaves. “Have you ever ridden in a pala
nquin, boy?”
Rowan says, “No.”
“You won’t today either,” Chelson says. “Always provide a diversion. By the time people realize you’re not where they think, they may have run out of fish and rocks to throw at you.”
5
* * *
Derc slides into an improvised pantry. Shelves wall it off from the rest of the kitchen that fills much of the tower’s basement. He feels his way around, listening, but no sounds come from the darkness.
“Give me the candles,” he says. They’re passed down and he paces the kitchen’s perimeter. Their quarry isn’t here, and the sculleries must sleep in the nearby dorm. They’ll be arriving soon, though, probably in less than an hour, to light the fireplaces and ovens. The kitchen serves all the companies in the tower, and the slightest fault in service is considered a great slight.
Derc goes back to the grate and slips in a pool of something on the floor.
Holestar calls down, “What’s the problem?”
Derc checks the ground. Olive oil. He looks around. A jar of peppers is smashed on the floor, and jars don’t leap from shelves by themselves.
“He’s been through here,” Derc says.
“That clinches it,” Skite says. “He’s Aydeni. If he’d been working for a company, he’d have had a key to the door.”
“Let us in the back door,” Holestar says. “We can’t fit through the grate like you, Little Man.”
Derc grits his teeth.
Holestar watches the candleglow fade as Derc heads upstairs.
While they wait they put the grate back into place. No sense in letting anyone else know there’s a secret way into the tower. They might need it themselves some day.
Several minutes pass. Skite works the door latch absently. Holestar hisses. “Let’s go in and see what’s happened to him,” Holestar says.
The men reopen the grate and squeeze into the basement, nearly shattering several more jars, and replace the grate behind them as best they can in the dark. They feel their way to the stairwell whose stone steps end in a door ajar. Candleglow seeps past it.
Holestar peers through. The candles are scattered on the flagstone floor. One remains lit. Holestar doesn’t hear anything, so he and Skite draw their weapons and enter the arched service hallway beyond.
The Dragon Round Page 27