The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns

by Wexler, Django

  Marcus turned, looking for Giforte. The bare-chested man had met his charge head-on, grabbing the staff before the vice captain could swing and using it as a bar to push Giforte into the wall. He was of a similar size to his late companion, and Giforte’s face had gone white with the effort of keeping the staff from being pressed against his throat. Marcus ran at them, arm drawn back for a brutal downward cut, which the man only noticed at the last moment. He half turned, taking the blade at the base of his neck, a blow hard enough to break bones. When he staggered backward, the saber came free, and blood exploded from the wound. The bare-chested man took one more step backward, groaning, then collapsed to the floor.

  Silence fell, and Marcus could hear his own rapid, ragged breaths. Giforte still held the staff in front of his face, unmoving. His eyes were closed, and his throat worked rapidly.

  “Vice Captain?” Marcus said. “Are you all right?”

  There was a long pause before Giforte opened his eyes, blowing out a deep breath. “I’m fine,” he said. “Eisen? Jones?”

  “I’m all right, sir,” Eisen said, voice a little shaky. “Right through my arm. But I think Jones is dead.”

  A moment’s investigation showed that he was right. Marcus tried to shift the huge wooden thing off Jones, the other Armsman, but found that he couldn’t even budge it. Opening the wardrobe door, he found the whole thing was stuffed with sacks of bricks. It must weigh a ton.

  He indicated the bricks to Giforte.

  “They were waiting for us,” the vice captain said.

  “Or waiting for someone,” Marcus said. “There might be a lookout upstairs.”

  They looked at each other, sharing the image of a man with a pistol trained on the stairs, just waiting for someone to ascend. Marcus took a deep breath.

  “I’ll take a look,” he said. “See if you can get this door open.”

  “Sir—”

  Marcus was already crossing the room, bloody saber still in hand. The right move would have been to wait until the others could get inside, but one man was dead already; he couldn’t stomach the idea of sending another into what might be a trap. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. Light flickered against the flaking plaster of the roof. Someone has a fire lit.

  He paused, considering his options, then raised his saber and took the stairs at a run, hoping to startle anyone who might be waiting into a hasty shot. The wood creaked alarmingly under his boots, but he cleared the last step and immediately threw himself sideways, out of the line of fire, landing in a crouch.

  The second floor was another large room, this one unfurnished except for three dingy straw pallets. At one end of the room was a heavy iron cauldron, with a merry firelight coming from inside it. Standing next to it was a young man in worn leathers, in the act of dropping a small bound notebook into the flames.

  “Don’t move!” Marcus growled, hurrying over. The young man raised his hands, no surprise evident in his features, and stepped back. A glance into the cauldron confirmed Marcus’ fears. It was a mass of glowing paper. Those bastards downstairs were buying time.

  “You’re under arrest,” he said, awkwardly aware that there was probably a proper way for an Armsman to arrest someone, and that he didn’t know it. “Keep your hands up and don’t try anything.”

  The young man smiled. He had a thin, expressive face, with a neat beard on his chin but smooth cheeks. When he spoke, Marcus could hear just a trace of a gravelly Murnskai accent.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and smiled a little wider. “It’s good to meet you, Captain d’Ivoire.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WINTER

  In an effort to calm her jangling nerves, Winter was trying to make an inventory of all the things that were making her anxious. This didn’t help, but once she’d started she found she couldn’t stop.

  First and foremost was the dress, or “the damned dress” as she thought of it. It had been uncomfortable to begin with, but she’d assumed that it wouldn’t take long before old habits reasserted themselves. Now it had been two days, and while she was able to go for minutes at a time without thinking about it, sooner or later she would turn around quickly or get hit by a gust of wind, and the feel of the long skirt’s fabric brushing against her legs would have her grabbing for it in a panic.

  The top was nearly as bad. It was by no standards indecent, but the short sleeves and billowing fit made her feel half-naked. The figure it draped was, while not generous, still clearly that of a young woman, and every time Winter caught sight of her reflection in a shopwindow she had to fight a powerful urge to find something with which to cover herself. She even found herself missing the tight pinch of her self-tailored undershirts. At least she still had a hat, even if it was a slouching felt thing instead of the brimmed officer’s cap she’d grown used to.

  Second—or maybe it was part of the first—was the constant dread of impending discovery. Winter had lived for two years among the men of the Royal Army, knowing that any slip that led to someone finding out her true gender would lead to her being locked up and sent home at the very best. Walking around a crowded city, dressed like this, was worse than walking around naked. She felt like the most brazen of whores, shouting out her most closely held secret for all to hear. The apparent unconcern of those around her would be shattered at any moment by—someone, some authority, who would drag her away somewhere to answer for her crimes.

  Third was the more mundane anxiety that she was not getting anywhere with her assigned task. She had given herself a day of simply walking around in her new garb, getting used to the idea. She’d somehow expected to attract stares from every eye, as though the news would race out ahead of her that here was Winter Ihernglass, dressed as a girl! In fact, nobody paid her the least attention, aside from a few street vendors who took her relatively well-washed appearance to mean that she had money.

  Walking through the streets of a city unobserved was a new experience for Winter. A few vague early memories aside, she’d spent her entire childhood at Mrs. Wilmore’s and had gone more than a decade without venturing farther from the old manor house than the neighboring estates. Then she’d run away to Khandar. The Colonials had had the run of the city before the Redemption, but their uniforms and skin color meant they would always be objects of attention.

  It was something they’d all gotten used to, and she’d stopped noticing the feeling until it was suddenly gone. Here she was just a girl, one among thousands, a little out of the ordinary for this neighborhood but no more so than dozens of others. She felt as if some sorcerer had turned her invisible.

  The second day, she’d resolved to get down to work. Janus had supplied her with plenty of coin, and she’d rented a room at a hostel, then set about canvassing the town for some sign of the Leatherbacks, the revolutionary group she was supposed to be joining. This proved to be less than successful. Winter found that while people didn’t pay her any mind walking by, the minute she opened her mouth she was irretrievably marked as an outsider. Quite apart from her not knowing any of the locals, her voice lacked their twanging accents, and she was so ignorant of the local dialect that she found some of the patois borderline incomprehensible.

  The district was loosely referred to as the Docks, a poorly defined area covering roughly half of Vordan’s Southside. It was bounded in the north by the bank of the Vor and in the south by Wall Street, a broad thoroughfare that was all that remained of Vordan’s medieval city wall. There were more houses beyond Wall Street, but that was widely agreed to be where the Bottoms began, a swampy, unhealthy district that even the Docks looked down on. In the west the river and the street met at the southern water battery, forming a section of city shaped like a wedge of cheese. To the east, though, the Docks gradually petered out, residential buildings, shops, and wine sinks gradually transforming into the warren of dirt roads and vast warehouses that surrounded the Lower Market.<
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  Life in the Docks had three poles, one of which was those warehouses. Every day, thousands of tons of goods—produce, meat, cereals, animal fodder, and other foodstuffs for the most part—were brought into the city via the Green Road from the south, the wagons forming a line miles long down the swamp-bound causeway. Thousands more tons—almost anything that could fit aboard a ship, including silk and coffees that had originated in Ashe-Katarion—entered the city from the west, shipped upriver by barge from Vayenne at the Vor’s mouth or from another city on one of the river’s many tributaries. More barges, narrower and shallow-drafted, brought stone, cheeses, and wool from upriver. All of these things needed to be moved from boat to wagon, wagon to boat, boat to warehouse, or any combination of the three, and a substantial portion of the people living in the Docks made their living doing exactly that.

  The second pole was the Fish Market, hard against the river. People who worked in the Fish Market were easily distinguishable by scent, and mostly lived in their own section of the district known as Stench Row. Every morning before dawn the fishermen laid out the day’s catch, and representatives from kitchens all over the city, from the noble estates to the lowliest slop houses, came to browse. Thriving if whiffy businesses at the edges of the square processed the rotten rejects and unwanted organs into various forms of fertilizer or pig slop.

  On the southern side of the Docks was the Flesh Market, which Winter had learned was not nearly as vile as it sounded. It was simply a large square where farmers from downcountry could come to hire extra hands, and as such waxed and waned with the seasons. Right now, at midsummer, business was booming as the planters hired help in advance of the autumn harvest. Farmhands were traditionally paid their first week’s wages in advance, and the presence of large numbers of young men with money in their pockets had encouraged the growth of a complex network of brothels, wine shops, and feuding gangs of thieves.

  All of this Winter had been able to discover in the first couple of days, just by wandering around and observing who went where. That there were discontent and revolutionary activity going on, too, was beyond a doubt, because everywhere she looked there were posters and painted graffiti inveighing against the king, the Last Duke, the Borelgai, the Sworn Church, the tax farmers, the bankers, and any other group that could conceivably hold any power. One intense-looking young man had given her a pamphlet claiming that there was a conspiracy among the greengrocers to take over the city, which even as an outsider Winter had to say sounded a little unlikely.

  What she hadn’t been able to find was any evidence that the Leatherbacks existed outside of popular fantasy. The broadsheets sold at street corners for a penny were full of their doings, how they’d robbed this shop or beaten up that Armsman, but details were suspiciously few. There were certainly no Leatherbacks chapter houses, no signs saying “Revolutionary Conspiracy This Way!” and by the third day Winter had started to wonder what Janus had been thinking to give her this assignment. She’d spent a lot of time and quite a bit of his money in wine shops and taverns, buying rounds all through the evenings and pumping her new best friends for information, but no one had been able to tell her anything beyond vague rumors.

  Nevertheless, focusing on the task at hand had calmed her down a bit, as had the reflection that it could have been much worse. Since that horrible night in the ancient temple in Khandar, she’d played host to a thing—a demon, the Church would have it, though the Khandarai word was naath or “reading”—that Janus had named Infernivore. A demon that ate other demons, that had torn the power right out of the body of the Concordat agent Jen Alhundt. Winter could feel it, deep in her mind, waiting like a river crocodile, placidly but with the coiled-spring potential for sudden violence.

  She’d been certain, when Janus insisted she accompany him on the breakneck voyage home, that it was Infernivore he really wanted. Winter had expected him to be sent into battle against Black Priests and supernatural horrors; her current task, while it went against the grain, was certainly better than that.

  Now she was sitting in a tavern that fronted on the River Road, which was as close as the Docks came to an upscale area. It was a big establishment, built to serve the evening rush of workers coming off their loading shifts, and at midday there were only a scattering of patrons. The plank floor was covered in sawdust (easier to sweep up spilled beer, not to mention blood and vomit) and the round tables were big, heavy things on wide, solid bases, unlikely to get smashed in the event of roughhousing. The mugs and flatware were of the cheapest clay kind, the sort that would start to flake and fall apart after a few washes, but Winter suspected they rarely survived that long. Clearly, the tavern-keeper knew his clientele.

  Winter had one of the tables to herself. Most of the rest of the customers were women, sitting in pairs or small groups and talking quietly. A few older men or odd-shift workers congregated near the fire, where a desultory dice game was in progress. A bored-looking serving girl brought Winter a plate of something she claimed was beef, boiled into unrecognizability and floating in its own juices inside a rampart of mashed potatoes. She attacked it voraciously. Two years eating either army food or Khandarai cuisine had given her a longing for good old-fashioned Vordanai fare, and she’d discovered the tavern meals here in the Docks were exactly the sort of bland, brick-heavy stuff she’d eaten as a girl at Mrs. Wilmore’s. The beer was good, too. The Khandarai made good wine and liquor, but what they called beer was, at best, an acquired taste.

  She hadn’t intended this to be an intelligence-gathering stop. That usually came later in the day, as chairs filled up and the drink started to flow freely. She barely looked up at a nearby rustle, and nearly choked on a mouthful of beef when a woman flopped into the chair beside her with a flounce of colorful skirts.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “You’re Winter, right?”

  Winter sputtered, grabbed for her beer, and gulped frantically. The woman waited patiently while she swallowed, and Winter used the opportunity to look her over. She was a girl of eighteen or a little older, with a broad, heavily freckled face and brown hair in a tightly pinned bun that exuded a halo of frizzy, escaping strands. She wore a long skirt with a red-and-blue pattern and a sleeveless vest, exposing pale-skinned arms and shoulders already showing a hint of red from the summer sun. Her button nose was peeling, and she scratched it absently.

  “I’m Winter Bailey,” Winter said, when she’d recovered. That was the name she’d given in the course of her investigations, and she didn’t see any point in denying it. “May I ask who you are?”

  “I’m Abigail,” the girl said. “You can call me Abby. Everyone does. Do you mind if I have a drink?”

  “I don’t think you need my permission for that,” Winter said, buying time.

  “A drink here, I mean. I’d like to talk to you.” Before Winter could answer, Abby waved at one of the serving girls and pointed to the mug in Winter’s hand, then held up two fingers. “I hope you’ll join me.”

  “Much obliged,” Winter said. She looked down at the remains of her meal and decided she wasn’t hungry anymore. “Would it be fair of me to ask how you know my name?”

  “Perfectly reasonable, under the circumstances,” Abby said. She gave a smile so sunny Winter could almost feel the warmth on her face. “You’ve been asking questions about the Leatherbacks, haven’t you?”

  Winter froze. But, again, she could hardly deny it. She reached for her mug, took a sip, and nodded cautiously.

  “And you’re obviously not from around here,” Abby said.

  “Neither are you.” Abby lacked the characteristic Docks accent.

  “True! I suppose that makes us strangers together.” The serving girl arrived with two more mugs, and Abby took them and set one in front of Winter. “Now, either you’re a Northside girl who has gone chasing the wrong rumors—”

  Winter was about to speak up, since that was exactly what she was claiming to be, but A
bby went on quickly.

  “—or you’re a spy. Armsmen, Concordat, something like that. Although, no offense, if you were Concordat I would expect you to do a better job of blending in.”

  “So I clearly can’t be a spy,” Winter said. “I’m too incompetent.”

  “You can’t be a Concordat spy,” Abby corrected. “I wouldn’t put it past the Armsmen to send some clueless girl over to the Docks to ask silly questions. Or you could be a very good spy, posing as an incompetent one to get your targets to let their guard down. That sounds more like Orlanko to me.”

  “What does this have to do with you?”

  “We were curious which it was. Had a little money on it, in fact. So I thought, well, the quickest way to get an answer is always to ask directly.”

  “So you want to know if I’m a spy?” Winter said.

  “Exactly!”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “Ah,” Abby said, “but that’s exactly what a spy would say, isn’t it?”

  Winter raised her mug, found it empty, and took a long pull from the new one Abby had ordered. The girl matched her enthusiastically.

  “All right,” Winter said cautiously. “I’ve answered the question. Now what?”

  “What do you know about the Leatherbacks?”

  “Only what I’ve heard,” Winter said. “They stand up to the Concordat and the tax farmers, try to help people. And that the inner circle is all women.”

  “Not many people know that last part,” Abby said. “Or else they don’t believe it. So you just decided to come down here and try your luck?”