The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  Ravis disguised a deep breath beneath a mocking appraisal. “You’re either a little too early for carnival, my lady, or your last client had a fancy for a boy.”

  “Where am I?”

  Ravis was surprised by the anger in the young woman’s voice. Most prostitutes were skilled masters at parrying insults. And then there was that accent again: soft, raspy, rounded. He tried once more. “Did someone drug you and bring you to this place?”

  “What is this place?” The woman all but screamed out the words. In her frustration she stepped forward into the sliver of light that marked the alley’s center.

  Ravis bit on his scar. Hair the color of dark honey caught the light. Eyes spindled in black and gold flashed in anger.

  “If you are not willing to tell me where I am, then you leave me no choice but to find someone who will.” She stepped over the second man’s body. “Thank you for saving my life, by the way.”

  Ravis almost laughed, but didn’t. As every second passed he was less sure of who the woman was. She looked, acted, and spoke like no prostitute he knew. Someone must have brought her here either blindfolded or unconscious. Catching hold of the woman’s arm, he said, “You are near the harbor front.”

  The woman pulled away. “What harbor front? What city? Why are you dressed like a man from a film? And why do you sound like a”—she struggled for words—“like a pirate?”

  Ravis did laugh then. Long and heartily, his chest pumping hard against the lacings on his tunic. The woman looked at him with barely concealed malice. She didn’t move away, though, he noticed. After a moment he calmed himself.

  “I have been called many things, my lady, in many different cities, but I have yet to stoop to piracy. I would need a ship for that, and following a rather regrettable set of circumstances this morning, a ship is the one thing I definitely don’t have.”

  Ignoring this statement, the woman said, “Please, just tell me where I am.” She sounded tired now.

  Ravis noticed a trickle of blood dripping down her right middle finger. The source of the cut was hidden by a ring of many-stranded gold. There was something vaguely familiar about the interlacings of the threads. Ravis felt a pulse of unease beat deep within his heart. “You are in Bay’Zell, in the kingdom of Rhaize.”

  “Bay’Zell? What language is that?”

  “My lady, Bay’Zell is an ancient city. Its name goes back further than I care to recount at this moment.” Ravis glanced at the body of the second man. “We must go now.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I have just killed two men this day. And I don’t know about where you are from, but I assure you that here in Bay’Zell they skin men for less.”

  Ravis took the woman’s arm once more, and when she resisted him this time, he didn’t allow her to pull away. Marching her out of the alleyway, he checked the harbor front for likely witnesses. Everyone—the fishwives, the drunks, the passersby, and the dockworkers—were all looking ostentatiously out to sea. Which meant everything was worse than he thought. They all knew what had gone down in the alley and were trying, very badly, to pretend that they didn’t. The good citizenry of Bay’Zell were famous for many things, but the ability to hold their tongues wasn’t one of them.

  “Keep your head down,” he hissed to the woman, positioning himself so that his body was between her and the people on the street. There was little point in hiding his own identity now, but there was still a chance the woman might go unnamed.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  “Lady, for someone on the run you ask far too many questions.” Normally Ravis would find pleasure in issuing such a tidy reply, but the truth was he had no idea where he was headed. He just knew he had to get away.

  The woman struggled to free herself as they raced down the street. Ravis pressed his fingers deep within her flesh. She was going nowhere. He hadn’t saved her just to let her get away. A foreign accent, a lack of basic geography, and a ring whose golden strands defied the eye were just a few of the things that intrigued him.

  Ravis marched the woman on a course back toward the main docks. With rows of tall ships, mazes of rigging, and a fleet full of street girls and merchant seamen on the move, it was the perfect place to fall in with the crowd. Of course it didn’t help matters that the woman was dressed like a boy. Ravis shrugged. The port city of Bay’Zell had seen stranger things in its day.

  As he drew level with the gangway that had been so recently vacated by Clover’s Fourth, Ravis spied the dockhand he had spoken to earlier. The man was sitting on the dock, legs swinging out above the water, an unstoppered flask in his hand.

  “Hey! You!” Ravis cried.

  The dockhand looked up, squinted, and then laid a palm on his chest. “Me?”

  “Yes, you.” Ravis beckoned him over.

  Draining the last drop from his flask, the dockhand scrambled to his feet. He was dressed in flamboyant rags, like an actor playing the part of a beggar. His green linen britches flapped about his ankles, and his flour-sacking tunic was tied and belted with string. He scuttled forward quickly, walking with his shoulders hunched and back bent in the manner of a man twice his age. When he spotted the woman standing behind Ravis, he touched his forelock with exaggerated respect. “Good day to you, miss,” he said, his gaze dropping swiftly to her legwear.

  The woman opened her mouth to reply, but Ravis silenced her by scoring his fingernails into her shoulder.

  A thin cry sounded in the distance. Other cries followed quickly. Ravis guessed the two bodies had been found. There was no time to waste. Turning to the dockhand, he said, “Earlier you mentioned you had a place where I could stay until the next ship sailed south. Take me there now.”

  The dockhand lifted his chin in the direction the cries had come from. “Matter of some urgency, is it?”

  Ravis was losing his patience. Reaching forward, he grabbed the strings of the man’s tunic. “Take me there now or I’ll slit your belly where you stand and leave your innards for the gulls.”

  The woman gasped.

  The dockhand nodded. “Aye,” he said calmly. “If that’s the way it is, my lord, you’d better come with me.”

  T H R E E

  C amron finished the letter and then leaned back in his chair. His head ached and his thoughts didn’t seem as clear as they had earlier. Clenching his fist, he beat down on the letter and the table beneath. There was no way to get around it: his father was going to be hurt.

  Berick of Thorn was a great and noble man—everyone said it. Yet sometimes Camron thought his father was too great, too noble. It was hard to argue with a legend. Camron took a deep breath, then unclenched his fist. He had to believe that what he was doing was right.

  He could leave right now, with no warning, retreating into the darkness like a smuggler rowing out against the tide. That wasn’t his way, though. Disagreements were one thing, deception another. Camron smiled gently, but not without bitterness. Perhaps he had more of his father in him than he knew.

  Uncomfortable with that thought, Camron stood and made his way across the room. Flinging back the shutters, he looked outside, searching for something, anything, to distract him. The lights of Bay’Zell sparkled to the west and Camron focused upon them with almost mad intent. He didn’t notice the quill still nestled in his hand. He didn’t feel its tip jab hard against his leg.

  The letter was all but done now—it waited upon a signature, nothing more. Camron could imagine his father reading it, the parchment held only as close as his fierce pride would allow, the tendons on his wrists taut with the strain of steadying his grip. Only Camron knew just how hard his father worked to prevent his hands from shaking.

  It was then, thinking about his father’s courage—the terrible strength of his will now pitted almost exclusively against the slow wasting of his limbs—that Camron knew he had to deliver the letter himself. He owed his father that.

  Back at the oakwood desk, he brought the quill to the ink. A drop
of his blood gleamed upon the tip. Camron shrugged, dipping the nib into the silver pot and replacing the red bead with black. With a heavy hand he signed his name. Camron of Thorn. It was a formal signature, but then it was a formal letter: a notice of leavetaking and a declaration of intent.

  Harsh words had been said earlier. Words that even now, hours later, brought heat to Camron’s face. He loved his father, but things had been said and ultimatums had been given, and now there was no going back.

  Camron shaved a portion of sealing wax from the block and held it in a spoon above the flame. Tinted by a complex mixture of sulfates and vegetable dyes, the wax had an unmistakable purple cast. It was the color of veins stretched over bone. Besides Camron and his father, only one other person on the continent sealed his letters with that hue.

  When the wax smoked and turned to liquid amethyst, Camron let it spill upon the page. He stamped it with a seal that he kept inside a box, and then, just as the wax began to harden and bloom, he scored a C upon it with his nail. The sight of the crude initial made Camron frown. He hadn’t sealed a letter that way for years. When he was just a boy, before he had been allowed to use the family emblem or colors, he had sealed all his letters with a C. His father had insisted upon it, saying he always wanted to be sure of reading his son’s letters first.

  Camron tugged his hands through his hair. Closing his eyes for a moment, he tried hard to find some peace.

  There was none to be found. He and his father had moved too far apart, their differences were too many. Berick refused to move against the Garizon king. He wanted to watch and wait and see. Camron respected his father’s judgment in all things, but he was wrong about this. You didn’t watch a man like Izgard of Garizon, you destroyed him before he destroyed you.

  Camron heard a faint sound in the distance. Smashing pottery. One of the servants must have dropped a tray. The noise prompted him to action. Slipping the letter inside his oxblood tunic, Camron made his way down to his father’s apartments.

  Castle Bess was situated on the coast southeast of Bay’Zell. Like a crab, it nestled amid the rocks and tidal pools: dark, secretive, shielded. It was not an elegant structure like the manor house at Runzy. There were no gardens, or fountains, or dainty facades, no courtyards or shaded arbors or palisades. There were stone walls cut ten paces deep and foundations that bored straight down to hell. It was a Garizon-built castle in the heart of Rhaize, and there were a score of others like it along the coast.

  Garizon had twice conquered and occupied Rhaize. Once five centuries ago in the dark, chaos-filled days following the breakup of the Istanian empire, and then again three hundred years later during the time of the plague. Fifty years ago they had tried again.

  And Berick of Thorn, Camron’s father and the person he was about to leave to his life of nursing stick-thin bones and muslin-thin skin, was the man who had smashed the Garizon forces at Mount Creed. Nineteen, Berick was. Nineteen, commanding a force of twenty thousand men. The Garizons had not been expecting opposition. The Sire and his forces had traveled to the lower south for the Shrine Wars, and Berick had been forced to raise an army single-handed. The Battle of Mount Creed was one of the bloodiest in history. Forty thousand men died over two days and a night. Berick had won a hard-fought victory, coming down from the mountain with less than fifteen hundred men.

  Camron pressed his lips into a hard line. That victory had lain heavily on his father’s mind for half a century. Only hours earlier, in the heat of their fight, when Camron had blasted his father for refusing to take action against the Garizon king, Berick had cried:

  “What value is victory when all a nation’s sons are dead?”

  That was at the heart of the matter: his father’s conscience. Berick lived every day with regret. Every night he dreamed of forty thousand corpses laid out upon the northern face of Mount Creed.

  At nineteen Berick of Thorn had been a general. At twenty he was a diplomat, a politician, a man of peace.

  Slowly Camron shook his head. Peace was a fool’s policy now that Izgard was king.

  Footfalls sounded in the distance. Camron tensed for the briefest of moments, then relaxed. It was the nightwatch taking their positions for dusk. A little later than usual, but then everyone in the castle knew that Hurin’s normal punctuality was currently waylaid by lust. The captain of the guards was attempting to bed the plump, beautiful, and famously cool-shouldered Catilyn of Benquis.

  More footsteps padded softly below. The tiniest of warnings pulsed high in Camron’s cheek. The castle guards were not known for stepping lightly. Hurin insisted that all his men wear stiff, boiled leather boots.

  Camron stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. The only sound came from cooling beams shifting in their couchings. He hurried downward: something wasn’t right.

  He saw the blood before he saw the body. At first he thought it was a cloak—a wide flare of crimson spread over the bottom three steps—then he spied a pale hand trailing in the pool of silk. Camron’s gaze traced the line of an arm up through the shadows to a torso of raw meat. The guard, a young nephew of Hurin new to his post this past winter, had been sliced open from throat to groin in a series of clean butcher’s cuts. The skin and soft tissue beneath had been pared from the rib cage, then pulled back to expose the heart.

  A ritual slaying.

  Camron’s stomach clenched shut like a trap.

  Father.

  The pulse in his cheek became a sharp, rapping pain. The world sloughed away to a single, desperate line. The distance separating Camron from his father’s study was the one thing that mattered in the black pit that had become the night.

  Camron moved with the savage intent of a madman. He saw, heard, and felt nothing unless it was directly in his path. His life was reduced to a series of doorways and passages. He had no weapon, no plan, no thought for himself: everything that counted lay dead ahead.

  Distances were measured in heartbeats. Seconds passed like jabbing needles through his heart. The sound of his feet slapping against the stone was the only thing he heard as he ran. Camron raced across the main hall and into the solarium beyond, down through the south wing and up to his father’s apartments.

  Two guards lay dead at the entrance. Camron’s throat tightened. His gaze flicked from one body to the other. No ritual slaying for these men: crossbolts fired at close distance. Dimly Camron was aware of what that meant, but his hands were on the door and his mind was bent on reaching his father, and anything that had no bearing on those things didn’t count.

  “Father!”

  Camron burst into the room screaming. A rancid animal smell, like bones left to rot in a lair, filled his lungs on his first breath. The blaze in the great hearth dazzled him. Dark forms moved around it like witches about a cauldron. A seam of blind terror shot through Camron’s temples, sharp as a metal spike. He felt sick with fear. The room was crowded with light. The air itself was heavy as a blanket. Camron had to push his way through it like a diver through water. He had a knife in his hand—though he had no memory of where it came from—and he brought the blade forward to slice his way through.

  A low, cackling laugh sounded to his left, and Camron whipped his head round. A face emerged from the light. Teeth bared, nostrils quivering, it was barely recognizable as a man. Even as a fresh wave of terror crackled down Camron’s spine, anger rose up to meet it. This was his home.

  Throwing his arms against the light, he beat his way toward the cackling face. The dark forms by the fire made no move to intercept him. Only bodies blocked his path. Camron stepped over men he had broken his fast with at dawn: Hurin; his second, Mallech; and his father’s old servant, Bethney. Limbs were torn from bodies, entrails seeped from wounds. Drying blood sucked at the soles of Camron’s shoes.

  He reached the cackling figure. The light began to dim. Shadows and shadings began to reshape the room. Camron found himself close to a bookcase. The figure in front of him grew silent; now that recognizable forms were emerging from th
e brightness, he was beginning to look more like a man. Was it a trick of the light that had turned him into a monster?

  All questions slipped from Camron’s mind as he spied the body at the man’s feet. The green robe, the gray hair, the worn leather sandals: it was his father.

  Camron’s throat closed. Breath turned to ice in his chest.

  He fell upon the body. Tearing away his father’s tunic, he clamped his fist against the open wound. Blood pooled around his fingers as his hand sank into the unresisting muscle below. Scared, Camron pulled away and began pumping at his father’s chest, striking the rib cage with increasing force until one of the old bones snapped beneath his fist. Biting back a cry, Camron picked up the body and hugged it fast against his chest, smothering, shaking, then cradling—determined not to let his father go.

  The figures by the fire began to move toward the door—heads bowed, their bloodied swords bounced light across their faces. Camron knew they wouldn’t touch him. The ritual slaying by the stairs had been meant as a marker. Someone wanted him to bear witness to this carnage. Someone had exacted revenge and issued a warning and left one man standing to tell the tale.

  The armed figures filed out of the room. Just men now. Just a room.

  The one who had laughed walked away. When he reached the door he threw something down upon the rug. By the time the object landed the man was gone.

  Camron held his father’s head in his lap. With a small movement, he brushed the hair from his face. Such fine gray locks. Silver almost. Funny how he had never noticed just how bright his father’s hair was. Camron swallowed hard. Closing his eyes for a moment, he reached for his father’s hand. A childhood’s worth of memories pressed against his thoughts, and for one brief moment he expected his father to meet him halfway.

  The body in his arms was unresponsive. A tight band of pain ringed Camron’s chest. The letter was a lead plate against his heart. “Dear father,” it read, “I am leaving Bay’Zell tonight. I can no longer honor your wish for peace. I must take action of my own against the Garizon king.”