by David Keck
“There was confusion at the palace this morning,” said Lamoric. “I have to get home.”
The priest stopped. “The oathtaking.”
“It is very important,” said Deorwen. “May we see the Patriarch?”
The priest cocked his head. “Madam, he has not yet—”
The sound of determined footfalls drew their attention. A sturdy-looking priest was jogging toward them. “Provost!” the priest called. “Thank the Powers I have found you. He is taken.”
Their priest seemed to recover in an instant. “What do you mean ‘taken’?”
“Provost, Patriarch Semborin is prisoner in the Mount of Eagles, hostage—against his will—in surety of our faithful conduct.”
“By every Power of Hell, it’s bloody sacrilege!” The man’s voice returned from polished vaults, and the messenger raised his hands.
“Kinsmen of every duke but Mornaway, Yrlac, and Gireth have been locked in the towers. Ragnal was in the blackest rage.”
The sinews of the provost’s neck stood under his beard.
“Ragnal was in a rage? By Heaven, we will send word to every king and Patriarch from this spot to the Yawning Gulf! With Semborin in chains, he will hear no more of justice or recovering the marches. He will demand that we carry our treasury to his strong rooms, but I’ll see him stripped and begging forgiveness in the streets before he gets a clipped penny!”
“With respect, Provost, they will kill him.”
“With respect?” the provost stood, crackling. “I will hear that from Ragnal’s own lips,” he concluded.
“Father, you are provost of the high sanctuary?” asked Lamoric.
The priest rounded on Lamoric. “Sir, you will explain how you’ve come to be climbing from the crypt of my sanctuary, and you’ll do so before you dare draw another breath!”
“We are sorry to have startled you, Provost,” said Deorwen. “This is Lamoric of Gireth, son of—”
“Gireth?” The man’s eyes flashed. “And you have avoided Ragnal’s hospitality thus far?” Smiling, the provost turned to the messenger. “Canon Gilmar, would King Ragnal free Patriarch Semborin for a duke’s son?”
He had hardly said it before Durand had his fist on his blade.
The canon quavered, “Provost, I am not certain that these people are within our power to give.”
“Provost,” said Deorwen. “My husband is not the heir.”
“Landast is the elder brother, yes.” The provost nodded to himself. “And so there is no reason to deny His Majesty’s wishes except spite.”
“The king’s men will be watching us, Provost,” said Gilmar.
“Every man in cassock or cowl, I expect.”
“He has Patriarch Semborin.”
“Then you must begin by clearing our new friends from this very public place, I think. I find myself in a very spiteful temper just now.”
_________
PRIESTLY HANDS PROPELLED them into a tiny windowless room: the vestry. And the three were left to spend all the hours of daylight crowded under heaps of priests’ finery. There was Durand crushed in with Deorwen but unable even to ask her what she had meant by that night in the riverbank sanctuary. All winter, Lamoric had been frantic, and the summer before he’d been playing the Red Knight. But he was not a bad man. He had a good heart. Without Durand playing wedge between them all winter, they might have come together. He stared at the two, wondering what would happen if he let them be. There was no way forward for him with Deorwen, and a wound didn’t heal with the blade still in it. He had to go.
It seemed days later—darkness filling the ancient vastness of the high sanctuary—that Canon Gilmar’s head appeared in the doorway.
“It is arranged,” he said. “Come.”
At a small door, the provost awaited them.
“Have you got a bit of meat pie or something?” asked Heremund.
The man scowled for an instant, then pressed on. “In my novice days, I studied at the monastery of the Warder’s Gates off Farrier’s Street. There was a window in the kitchen-house. The kitchen-house was built in the thickness of the ancient wall. The cooks tipped rubbish to the gulls. There will be a rowing boat waiting to carry you across the gulf to Scriven-sands.”
“Have the king’s men abandoned their search?” asked Lamoric.
Gilmar laughed: a puff of breath. “No,” said the provost. “There are watchmen and sergeants of the king’s guard in every street.”
“We must get out,” said Lamoric.
“I have recruited watchmen of my own,” said the provost. “You will find the first in a shop door by a burning candle. Each has his eyes on one street. You move when the watchman tells you the way is clear. Thus, you will pass from one watchman—one street—to the next until you reach that kitchen.”
They would be the only strangers on the move in Eldinor, they knew no one, and a single broken link in the provost’s chain would leave them stranded. This was too precarious to trust. “We should have gone in daylight with the crowds,” said Durand.
The provost’s lip twitched. “They stopped every soul abroad in the streets today. Everyone was questioned. They stood guards on the grand docks. Nothing bigger than a nutshell’s been allowed to set off since the dawn bells rang.”
Deorwen nodded. “We don’t know these people as well as you must. How will we be certain that none of your watchmen has been caught?”
The man grunted a laugh. “Or turned, eh? They will make the Eye of Heaven when you sight them, one finger bent. And they’ve been given a bit of the Book of Moons to quote you as you arrive. Each man has a line, and none should repeat.”
“Subtle are the priests of Atthia,” said Heremund, quoting something clever, but the provost fixed the skald with a steady eye.
“If the enemies of Heaven delve deep, we must dig still deeper, skald. I will not put another life into the hands of this king’s sycophants.”
Heremund nodded a contrite bow.
The provost turned to his man, Gilmar, who put his eye to the crack at the sanctuary door.
“I see the candle,” Gilmar replied. “He shows the Eye of Heaven.”
“It is time,” said the provost, and Durand felt his heart flinch.
Lamoric took the provost by his arm. “We will see this through yet. And I am grateful to the Powers that my poor hide was not fit to trade for a Patriarch’s.”
“The king’ll choke on this,” said the provost. “Go.”
With that, they shot from the door, running toward the first candle and a green-kirtled woman in a shuttered cook-shop, sliding to a halt on her doorstep.
The woman’s face was broad as a pan. “ ‘Prince of Heaven am I,’ ” she began. “ ‘Neverborn. Lord of Roads. Warder at Crossroads. The Longwalker, I am called, quoth he.’ Come inside a moment, I can’t see what Bacca’s holding up. The priest’s a fool doing this at curfew. Still, it couldn’t be helped.” Durand blinked at the fragment the woman quoted. She slipped a hand between Durand and Deorwen, squinting between them. There was a crowd in her doorway, and they were in sight of a broad swath of King’s Walk.
“Madam,” said Lamoric. “I thank you for your—”
“—There it is,” she announced, brushing Lamoric aside. “Do you see him? Bacca? He’s there past where there used to be a fountain. He’s making the Eye. Poor souls. Not even a stitch of decent clothing.”
There was, indeed, a small man twenty paces down Sanctuary Street.
Nodding thanks to the woman, they set off, running down the rutted cobbles. A burly man in a hairy surcoat met them.
“You must be Bacca—” Lamoric began.
“ ‘My King, My Brother, I have watched as old spirits preyed on young. I have spent an age at your side, no help to give, too far to reach.’ Lordship, Ladyship. Sir. Anno’s at the end of Queen’s Pell. That’s him there, with the scar he got from the foundry. You can’t see it from here, mind.”
Lamoric glanced vaguely down a street thick wit
h gloom and peat smoke, but each time these people opened their mouths, Durand heard the words of a dream. All this talk of crossroads.
“Wait, step in for a bit,” said the man. “Anno’s seeing something.” Durand twisted to see the little figure dancing and waving his hands. He heard boots and armor between the walls.
Heremund tugged him inside the smoky darkness of the stranger’s front room, giving him a good hard look. Durand’s head was still spinning. He found himself gazing at the stranger’s silhouette as though he might utter prophecies next. What light there was came from a lidded hearth.
After a long spell in silence, the man, Bacca, put his nose out the door, and they were off again.
“ ‘You need not cast me out,’ “ proclaimed the next man, “ ‘for I cannot remain so far from their need.’ “ These words pitched Durand’s mind back to a well in his father’s mountain stronghold. He remembered a figure as large as giants made from scraps of rope and shoeing nails.
The instant the man freed them, Durand reeled ahead, weaving down a foul and dripping alley under the privies of a row of houses to a mouselike woman who peered around her door. She stood no higher than Durand’s belt.
“ ‘I must walk their long roads. I must wait for them at the crossing places, and offer counsel to the lost.’ “
“Madam, we are grateful,” said Lamoric.
The woman confessed that she could never turn strangers away, and gestured. Above her house was a shrine cut from a high corner. A ragged wooden figure under a wide-brimmed hat looked over them. Someone had a lamp burning there, and Durand stepped right into the lane. In the idol’s hand was a knobbed staff.
The Traveler. He could almost see the pennies glinting in its eyes.
Durand gaped at the omen. A lifetime and two hundred leagues from his father’s hall, this provost had chosen the words spoken to him by the Traveler when they stood together at the bottom of the well at Col.
Abruptly Lamoric was at his ear. “By the Heavens.” There was exasperation in his voice, and he tugged Durand into motion once more.
They darted and they hid. They ran along one alley and plunged down a troughed staircase called the Hundred Steps. They passed a sanctuary dedicated to the Nine Sleepers, whose facade glowed with alabaster children, polished by the hands of the bereaved.
“I don’t remember it taking this long,” said Lamoric. “We must be circling the city.” Besides a splinter moon, the only lights burned in shrines and the high windows of the palace above. Down they went. Durand could not help but eye the towered Mount of Eagles as they ran around its knees.
Soon, the reek of muck and seaweed mingled with the peat smoke of the heights.
“We cannot be far,” said Lamoric.
Finally, they were skidding into the doorway of a tavern on Farrier’s Street. Above the door, a stone king’s head hung in rust-weeping chains. Down the street, Durand spotted the great entrance to a monastery: a fan of sculpture carried by doorpost kings or Powers—all lit, sharp and clear, by a huge fire basket. Soldiers stood warming their hands at the blaze; Durand thought he saw one of Ragnal’s starlings.
From the tavern door, a long man in black-rabbit robes was speaking. In that instant, his face was two beads and a knife’s point. “Do you know how many customers I have lost this evening because—”
Durand yanked his blade from its sheath. The guards were turning, and this was not the sign. Bracing the cold edge across the man’s gullet, Durand muscled him backward into the room—host or hostage. They weren’t getting Deorwen or her husband easily.
Heremund pinned his eye to the door as it thumped shut. “I don’t think the buggers saw anything.”
Durand heaved his prisoner round to face the others, the blade flat against his windpipe as the bead eyes goggled.
“What have you to say?” asked Lamoric.
“Oh. Host of Heaven! What was it?” the man spluttered. “Ah, yes! ‘Take what thou wilt, I shall clothe myself in the castoffs of the road, and this forked tree shall be my sign.’ “
It was more of the Traveler’s rant—Durand freed the man into the gloom.
A single clay lamp lit the tavern’s hall—no surprise—but what its flame revealed had them all staring for a moment. Where the courses of the back wall should be, broad foreheads bloomed in the dark. Shadows wobbled in the eyes of kings, queens, and heroes from floor to rafters. One bare-chinned brute stood as round as a barrel.
“What do you call this place?” asked Heremund.
“The Marbles,” said the tavern-keeper. “I am pleased to be the proprietor.”
Heremund stepped to one of the tavern’s big shutters. “That’s our way out done for. I count two dozen men waiting there.”
“They’ve made it a marshaling point,” Durand guessed. “I think I saw one of the clerks. The others will be sergeants and runners.”
“Hells,” said Lamoric.
The tavern-keeper put long-fingered hands over his face. “I told the priest I was more than willing to be of assistance after all his help during my sister’s illness, but I cannot afford to close my business for an entire night. There are tithes and taxes and regular customers. I have a dispensation to operate past curfew to pay for.”
He paced to a second set of shutters. “I cannot be faulted in this. The priests gave me no mechanism to communicate that there might be difficulties.”
As the tavern-keeper peered out, Deorwen crossed to the table where the lamp flickered. Durand noted a blob of red sealing wax.
Glancing back, the tavern-keeper stalked to the table. “Perhaps you could retrace your steps,” he suggested. “There might be another way forward.”
He idly collected an object from the tabletop, but Durand was well ahead of him. He closed his fist over the man’s bony fingers.
“Master tavern-keeper,” said Deorwen, “I think I must ask you to forgive a little curiosity this evening.”
“There are secrets to every trade, of course,” he explained, but Durand gave the man’s fist a good squeeze, catching one shoulder as well.
“Your help has been very valuable,” he said.
“We have nothing whatever to do with the authorities,” said Deorwen. “Please.”
The man’s fist opened to reveal a ring seal—molded with an angular eagle that Durand recognized.
Heremund cocked his head. “That’s the dockmaster’s seal, or a very pretty copy. And I expect, if we popped down your cellars, we’d find the dockmaster’s seal on a few barrels that never made his ledgers. Yes?”
The man shrugged, waving his hands. “When cost is high or demand low, the dock taxes can be more than any man could be expected to bear. It pains my heart to deprive—”
Heremund put his hands up. “I understand. But it strikes me that you’d be a man likely to know how to get something as large as a great wine barrel up from the docks without anyone being the wiser.”
“The dockmasters do not always pay their underlings as they should. There are ways.”
Heremund shook his head, wincing. “We’d have to grease more than a customs lackey or two just now. Hmm?”
“There are other ways, but their value is in their secrecy.” Durand still had the man’s shoulder. “One—one is not too far. The wall is old. There is a drain under the house of an acquaintance.”
“You said that the priest helped your sister,” said Deorwen. “I know that all of this has made you uneasy, and I would ask you to risk nothing more, but our need is great.”
“Ladyship, there is nothing I would rather do than help. . . .”
“We can’t afford a wrong turn, and the city is dark and full of soldiers. There is no other way. Please.”
“Uh.” The man pawed his hair. “Heaven help me, I will take you.” He crossed to the door, daring a quick glance. “All right,” he said, “follow close.”
With a muttered charm, the tavern-keeper led them from Farrier Street into an alley and off toward the wall. Durand followed hard
on the man’s heels as he loped and darted, teeth glinting bare. They saw guards, but never close.
Finally, the tavern-keeper skidded to a stop at the mouth of an alley. “Lord of Dooms,” he said.
A good pool of torchlight shimmered at the other end; a house glowed in the light and its shadow climbed the city wall above. Heremund grunted at Durand’s elbow. “And that’s our bolt-hole, is it?” asked the skald.
“It is,” said their guide. “Perhaps it is not the secret I thought it to be.”
They breathed in the darkness.
Lamoric drew himself up before the stranger. “Friend,” he said, “there is good reason why we cannot stray far from the monastery.” The provost’s boat would be waiting there.
The tavern-keeper threw up his hands. His mouth opened and closed. “There are other breaches, but nothing near and nothing unwatched.”
Durand blinked. They needed the boat; Lamoric and Deorwen had to get free.
He drew himself to his full height. He could think of only one chance, and it might be the best thing for all of them.
“Be ready to move,” he said.
As the knot of fugitives turned on him, he caught Deorwen’s eye and bolted into the torchlight.
11. Tide, Time, and Laughter
He met six men: sergeants with axes in their fists and hauberks on their backs. Slithering on his soles for an instant, he ran off down the main street with the big wall rippling over his left shoulder, a vague suggestion against the stars.
He crashed through a stone fountain and pitched into black spaces. He reeled over broken cobbles and saved himself by slapping walls.
The guards barked that he should stop.
With the cold knifing at his lungs, he spotted a stairway jagging up the wall itself. With the men behind him likely blind beyond their torches, Durand took his chance, surging up above the houses on the open stairs.
“There!” someone shouted.
Durand cursed.
In the streets below, blobs of torchlight shuddered over storefronts and alleys. Three or four parties had his scent now.
Finally, he stumbled out onto the battlements themselves. Over the wall he saw nothing: no horizon, no waves. Somewhere, there were likely to be men walking the wall, but, for now, he could still get free.