A lower-voiced, confidential-sounding comment from the knight floated back: “If I were you, Bardol, I’d get out of town as fast as I could. Now, Roehis and I have got a nice bit of a fief lined up out in the east near the Blue Mountains, and we could use some good vassals. . . .”
Órlaith grimaced slightly to herself when the last torches rolled away.
Why am I here? There must be a purpose to this.
She’d stayed by the tree, and her dark clothing melted in well. Being motionless in a dangerous situation . . . or while hunting, or both . . . was second nature to her; she stayed still until she moved, and then moved with no waste motion. Now she stayed in that relaxed tension, because someone was coming up behind her. Two someones, moving from tree to tree and doing it very well, their footsteps barely audible at all even to a trained ear.
They passed her quickly, flitting to the edge of the road and taking a knee behind some bushes. Órlaith blinked in surprise; even in the darkness she could tell they were too small for normal adults.
Young, she thought. Girls, and in their early teens. Neither of them is going to be small when they grow up. If they do.
They waited patiently behind a bush; the cold bit deeper, but neither moved. Perforce, neither did Órlaith; instead she used her time by seeing details as you did in the dark. Closing her eyes and then opening them for that moment when your pupils were at the largest, looking and then flicking the eyes away so that your brain filled in things that had been below the level the waking mind noticed.
She’d been right about the sex and age. One was taller and had a few tiny blond hairs escaping a dark knit pullover cap, worn balaclava style; the other a little shorter and less slender, and brunette, she thought. Both were in nondescript dark clothes, worn but not ragged. And both carried coils of rope bandolier-style over their shoulders, with blades and hatchets at their belts; one had a small crossbow as well.
They waited until the torches disappeared in the direction of the river, and she was fairly sure that one of them had been looking west all that time to give them all-around coverage. They waited a little more, while pedestrians or riders, bicyclists or rickshaws or pedicabs went by. The biggest interruption was a herd of cattle that must have been driven in from the eastern plains, plodding along and lowing discontentedly. When that was past, except for what it left on pavement, the two girls moved off in unison with no need for words, like one mind in two bodies.
However they had lived through the months since the Change, they hadn’t been starving—the way they handled themselves bespoke fitness. They were sticking to the sides of the street, moving from doorway to doorway down the Avenue of the Immaculate Conception—probably still SW Main here, she couldn’t remember when it had been modernized to honor the city’s Patron—and that meant . . .
They’re heading for the City Palace. I’m going to follow them. None of this is an accident.
Knowing where someone was going made it much easier to follow them. She waited until they were well ahead, then stood and strode out and turned down towards the west on the south side of the street; that would make it easier to keep track of them along the north side. They’d probably pick up on her, too, eventually. But she didn’t look as if she was following anyone; she looked and moved like someone on an errand who knew where they were going. In fact, she’d look like a Gods-sent bit of good fortune to the clandestine pair, distracting people who saw her coming at a distance while they snuck along a little ahead of her.
And my, didn’t my training include things I’d never imagined would be useful, but turned out to be, like how to sneak around a hostile city! Brigid the Forethoughtful bless my instructors and my parents!
As she walked past the old County Courthouse—five stories, stone-built in a severe Renaissance style nearly a century before the Change, and still in use nearly half a century from now—she saw lantern light at many of the windows, and smelled honest woodsmoke, though with an unfamiliar tang to it; after a second she realized it was sawn timber being burnt, from torn-down frame houses. Órlaith simply nodded to the squad of spearmen at the entrances, and they stiffened in unconscious response to her assumption of authority, a language of the body that she would have had to work hard not to show.
The building to her left was steel and glass and sheet metal and blue tile, looming huge; in her day the spot was occupied by a duplicate of the County Courthouse and both were exactly that—they housed courts, the Courts of Record, the Courts Baron and the Court of Star Chamber, along with some extremely comfortable guest suites that had locks on the outside and barred windows.
So it went down the tree-lined street for block after block, traces of the familiar amid eerie alien weirdness.
At the intersection where you had to turn right to get to the City Palace—which had originally been the Multnomah County Central Library—there was a four-way checkpoint of timber X-forms supporting coils of barbed wire, with a fire burning in a big metal bucket in the center, providing a little heat to those grouped around it and a bit more reddish, flickering light.
Besides killing their night vision any farther out, she thought.
It was manned by more infantry, all with shields and spears and a variety of crossbows. All young to youngish men, and all notably hard-looking.
“Ay, chica!” their leader said. “Where you goin’? It’s after curfew.”
Órlaith looked at him and replied in faultless Spanish: “Any particular reason you think you need to know, asshole?”
He bristled, and several spears were leveled. One of his followers laughed and grabbed his crotch.
“Because we’re supposed to check!” the first man replied in the same language. “And we’re”—he hesitated, probably mentally translating something—“we’re authorized to hand out summary punishment for civilians breaking curfew!”
“Civilians? Take a look at this, pendejo.”
Órlaith smiled thinly and flipped back the collar of her coat as he raised a kerosene lantern. It was probably burning gasoline now, which was rather dangerous, and he turned the knob that elevated the wick to produce more light, which made it even more so, but the incandescent mantle functioned perfectly. He blanched as the brighter light fell on Sandra Arminger’s token.
“Who’s your lord? Baron Emiliano?”
“No, not that stuck-up cabrón. Eddie Liu’s our boss. . . .”
Then he visibly halted and mentally shifted gears: “I mean, Lord Edward, Baron Liu de Gervais, is our good lord.”
Órlaith maintained a sneer, though inwardly she was shivering. Those were names she knew; Eddie Liu had died in the run-up to the Protector’s War, and Emiliano during it. Liu’s son Odard had gone on the Quest of the Sunrise Lands with her parents, and died heroically; there was a chanson about it, which Johnnie had sung once. She remembered that because it had made Mother cry. His younger brother Huon was the current baron, and a friend of the family—her mother and father had been godparents to his children, and his sister’s, a very close bond in Association territory.
“I’ll tell Lady Sandra that you’re on the job. Now get that fucking barbed wire out of my way before I throw you on it and use you as a bridge to walk on!”
Several of the men came forward to drag the X-forms out of her way. As she stalked through with all eyes on her—to sotto voce mutterings that included but were not limited to whore, dyke and bitch—she saw a slight flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. The sort you’d see if someone came running, was boosted by a friend with their hands linked into a stirrup, dove over an eight-foot-high barricade, landed soft-footed and silently in a forward roll and stayed flat in a leopard-crouch.
That’s the girls. They’re using me as cover while they get through this.
While the first took a run herself, hit the brick wall, ran up it for ten feet and clamped her hands on a window-ledge, then brought her feet up a
nd launched off in something like a cross between a forward twist and a somersault that landed her in a crouch.
I know that technique, Órlaith thought. I’ve done it myself and it’s not easy. I was taught it. Mother and Da were taught it, by—
The girl using traceuse style ran to the other side of the enclosure as soon as her feet touched the ground, and then paused in a crouch. The one who’d been on the ground launched herself forward, the blond parkour type made another stirrup and threw her over the barrier; then she jumped directly at it, gripped the uprights of the timber X as if they were the handles on a vaulting horse and flipped in midair, ending up arching forward with her hands outstretched and knees nearly up to her chest, ready for another rolling landing.
Oh, my, they’re good.
She didn’t try to focus on it; all the bright light shone in her eyes would have made that futile, but your peripheral vision wasn’t as easily hurt that way and experience filled in details.
Where are they going? she thought.
Certainly to the City Palace. But the hints she’d gotten about the visions you could expect at the Kingmaking were all to do with family, her family, House Artos. And crucial moments that led to the founding of the High Kingdom and its fate. Some within living memory, some very distant.
And my grandparents . . . Mother’s parents . . . are almost certainly there now. But what are these two going to do? Assassinate them? Lord and Lady know plenty of people had good reason to want them dead! I really wouldn’t like to rescue them . . . I mean, I suppose I would . . . I loved Grandmother Sandra and I wept when she died, but . . .
She went through the checkpoint with the same casually determined stride, and north along Horse Heaven Hills Avenue; named after the great victory of the Prophet’s War, and formerly . . . in fact, now . . . SW 10th.
Nobody had turned this into the Palace District, not yet. There were more people about, and more light—from baskets of metal wire hung from the defunct electric light posts, with wood burning in them. There were also occasional bodies hanging, by their necks, left that way to inspire terror of the new overlords. Everyone she saw looked angry, or frightened, or preoccupied, or just stone-faced; she had to show the badge several more times, and the reaction got more polite, though no less impressed, as she got closer to the Palace.
The problem was that she’d lost track of the two extremely athletic girls.
And I don’t dare stop, she thought. But I’m pretty sure they’re heading in the same direction. I have to get close to Norman and Sandra, because that’s where they’re going . . . for one reason or another.
The City Palace—here still bearing PVBLIC LIBRARY BVILT BY MVLTNOMAH COVNTY ANNO DOMINI MCMXII chiseled into the white stone below the eaves above the third floor—was just the core here-and-now, a Georgian rectangle of white sandstone and red brick covering about an acre, with steps leading up to the three tall arched doorways in front, a second story of great arched windows illuminating the vast public spaces, a third story that in her day was the family apartments, and a flat roof with a stone balustrade all around that she knew as a pleasant gazebo and garden. Giant elms embowered the big building on three sides; some of them were even the very same trees she’d climbed in as a child, though there weren’t any of the sky-bridges that connected it to the surrounding buildings.
The problem is . . .
Órlaith had just never bothered to learn the history of the City Palace in any detail. She certainly hadn’t ever looked at the original floor plans.
Unlike Johnnie, who can recite it to you chapter and verse, and the date every single picture and statue was put in, and where it came from beforehand. I love art, but he’s a maniac about it.
She’d lived here with her family from time to time, but it was going to be her brother’s home eventually, once the throne of Montival and the subordinate one of the Lords Protector were separate again rather than united in a single couple . . . or a single widowed woman named Mathilda Arminger Mackenzie, until Órlaith had walked down that trail to Lost Lake and come unmoored in the history of her bloodline.
As a teenager she’d deliberately decided to avoid pinning the emotion of home on anything in Portland’s domains and certainly not on the Palace or Todenangst; there had been hints of that in her father’s attitude, though he’d been easy-going everywhere. Just a smidgen of discomfort around the places where his wife’s parents had operated.
It hadn’t hurt as much as making the same decision about Dun Juniper down in the Mackenzie Dùthchas, either. The plans for a palace in Dun na Síochána, the new capital on the ruins of Salem, had only recently come to fruit; her parents had always found better uses for the money, until the Congress of Realms virtually forced their hands. Not least because the delegates wanted the High Queen to have somewhere suitably fancy to stage the parties and balls and masques and ceremonies they’d be taking part in, and because everyone who wasn’t an Associate resented the way the PPA’s capital exerted influence well beyond the north-realm’s borders just by being there, being so big with over sixty thousand people, and being a center of culture and the arts as well as a wealthy center of crafts, trade and government.
And it was the seat of the Archbishop-Cardinal who oversaw all Montival’s Catholics, and Badia in Italy had made it clear he’d stay right there in Portland until the High Kingdom as a whole had a permanent capital.
Órlaith bared her teeth. Unfortunately that emotionally and even politically wise decision of hers meant she had no idea of how to get around inside the building as it was here—which would be instantly suspicious if she claimed to be an important retainer of Sandra Arminger. She did know that apart from some features like the grand black-granite staircase with its acid-etched flower designs and the domed skylight above it, and the bronze tree statue, the interior had been gutted thoroughly and rebuilt at some point. Lady Sandra had made the last alterations only about the time her daughter returned from the Quest of the Sunrise Lands and married Rudi Mackenzie-Artos-the-First.
Think, think, think. . . .
The street in front of the main entrance was brightly lit by gasoline lamps with reflective mirrors. The guards at the main entrance weren’t the sort of scruffy irregulars she’d seen at checkpoints earlier. Their armor was better, long mail or scale hauberks and the nose-guarded helmets of the Norman era; her grandfather had been a professional historian studying it and his Society persona had let him further live out his fascination, before he branched out into warlording after the Change.
All their gear was dead-black, too, and the shields bore no arms but the Lidless Eye. This was the Protector’s Guard at its birth; it had also been known as the Brute Squad then. The firelight glittered redly on the honed edges of their weapons, and they were alertly examining everyone who entered. That was only a trickle, because it was past dinnertime, though every window in the big building was brightly lit.
Then she noticed a tentative-looking party approaching from the north, and arguing with a civilian usher. They were clutching briefcases and in one instance a leather case big enough to hold maps for display on an easel, and they all looked as if they’d been traveling rough and outdoors recently. Órlaith took a deep breath, and walked over.
The Guard squad didn’t ignore her, although they were focused on the argument too. The usher was a rabbity-looking young man a few years older than her; he had a jeweled knife at his belt, and was wearing tight pants that were probably the closest he could get to hose, a loose shirt and a jerkin.
“It’s impossible for you to see—” he was saying.
“Wait a minute,” Órlaith said, her voice firm but a little bored. “You people are here to do the report, aren’t you?”
It has to be some report or other, with the documentation you’re carrying.
“Yes, yes!” one of them said, a middle-aged woman in blue trousers—what they’d called jeans. “We’ve be
en working on the land survey and plans for the Walla Walla County for a month now, and the progress of the oxen and draft-horse plans and converting field equipment. Lady Sandra urgently needs these for the reorganization plan! It’s key to getting agriculture started up again. That’s the biggest wheat-producing area under control now that’s within hauling distance of the river!”
Órlaith sighed—she recognized an obsessed bureaucrat who couldn’t stop giving you details if her life depended on it—and showed her livery badge. The usher looked suspicious.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“And I don’t know you,” Órlaith said. “But you do know this, don’t you? There is a world outside town, and it’s where the food comes from. Remember food?”
She tapped the badge and then turned away from him.
“Where have you people been?” she added to the party, who wilted under her glare. “You’ve been holding up everything! And I’ve been pounding my arse in a saddle going up the river looking for you! If God had meant us to do that, He’d have given us hooves of our own.”
Another glance at the usher. “Have the Lord Protector and Lady Sandra retired for the evening yet?”
“Well, no, they’re dining late, but—”
“Then Lady Sandra will want to see these people! They’re overdue. Arranging the boundaries of fiefs and manors is important!”
The members of the survey team all nodded vigorously. More important, so did the commander of the door-guard and at least three of his subordinates, all with the golden spurs on their heels. Fiefs were just beginning to be handed out, and every single man-at-arms in the Association wanted one. The demand was still vigorous in her time—the nobility tended to big families—and dispensing land from the Crown’s holdings was politically very delicate. It would be here too, with the added bonus that it was the way the Association had gotten food production going again.
The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 24