by Tim Jones
"I told Mors not to mess with the Ishkarat, but he wouldn't listen. 'Gold,' he said, 'gems, jewels, magical treasures of fabulous power.' He never got near any of them, and in the end, the Ishkarat got him. And now I don't have him any more."
In a dusty street just south of the Street of Apothecaries, the big Archer halted, tears pouring down his face. He cried in silence. Kendik stood awkwardly for a moment, then put his arms around Atlan's shoulders. "Now who's making a scene?" he asked gently.
Still crying, Atlan started walking again. By the time his tears had stopped, Kendik had made a decision.
"False duke or true, I'm sick of doing the bidding of others. I'm going to take this—" Kendik withdrew Vulumensthetika's letter from his pocket—"and I'm going to rip it up and throw it away, and then I'm going to find Anarya, and help you find whoever killed your brother. But first—"
Kendik ripped open the envelope, pulled out the letter, and made to tear it into pieces. Though his muscles strained, the parchment would not rip.
"Cursed thing—"
He gave one final tug, then crumpled the letter in his hand, drew back his arm, and hurled the balled-up parchment as far as he could. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, covered his head with his cloak, and moved on, Atlan by his side—two cloaked pilgrims in a dangerous world.
X
The letter landed on the roof of a house. It rested there until the early evening, when spits of drizzle turned to steady rain. The roof sloped slightly back from the street, and the rain carried the letter off the roof and down into the back garden.
The house's tenants were poverty-stricken newcomers to Borzim. They had yet to venture into the wilderness of weeds, refuse, and half-starved cats behind their house, and they did not see the letter fall between a rotting sack and a midden of fish bones.
Despite the rough handling the letter had endured, it was smooth, uncrumpled, and unmarked. It lay in the rain and waited, patiently, to be found.
Chapter 9
"Don't tell me we bought all this just for lunch," said Atlan.
He struggled over to the kitchen table and deposited a sack full of bread, parsnips, slabs of butter wrapped in cabbage leaves, new carrots to replace the disheveled ones lurking in the cupboard, apples, and two cheeses which gave off a powerful odor of goat. Kendik had waddled home under the weight of an amphora of wine and a jug of beer.
"No," he replied, "but it's a start."
An hour later, the two of them were much less hungry. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting here in what Ken-dik had already begun to think of as their house, legs stretched out, mug of beer in hand, discussing the woes of the world with his companion of many adventures as the afternoon sun sent thin fingers of light to dance across floor and table.
"I think," said Atlan, "I will go and see Uthaia."
"Who's that, then?"
"Someone who was a friend of mine—a very good friend, if you take my meaning—back in the old days, when Mors was off in Bartertown learning to be a Thief and I was making my own way in the world. I did my time in a couple of adventuring groups, and she was the finest swordswoman you ever saw, no offence to your Anarya. We were in this fight once, and she ..."
He embarked on a long, beer-fueled reminiscence of long odds and desperate courage, although Kendik noticed that Atlan's narrative seemed to focus more on the suppleness of Uthaia's body than on her prowess in battle. A different woman filled Kendik's thoughts, as she had since she walked out of the darkness of Kaer Volost as if stepping out of an ancient tapestry. So strong, and yet so vulnerable. Where was she now? Was she still somewhere in Borzim, searching for her aunt? Had she received word that the old woman had passed to the company of her ancestors, or moved elsewhere? Was Anarya even in Borzim any more? Had she—he allowed himself a pleasurable stab of jealousy at the thought—met up with some other man? Was she now that man's companion, his consort, his lover?"
"— and that's what I'm going to do!" finished Atlan, lurching to his feet.
"Sorry—what are you going to do?"
"I didn't think you were listening. I'm going to find that house she bought when she decided to settle down, and I'm going to see if she's still married to that idiot she decided to settle down with. And I'm going to tell her a thing or two. And if I'm not back tonight, you'll know she realized she made a mistake marrying that idiot after all."
"Well—don't draw too much attention to yourself—"
"You think a drunk man would attract any attention in this town?" asked Atlan, giving a passable impression of one as he exited the house with a fusillade of belches.
Atlan had a point there, Kendik had to concede. He didn't give much for Atlan's chances of rekindling his old flame, but at least the man was doing something. What was he, Kendik, going to do?
Well, he had seen some attractive women in Borzim, but they were almost all dark haired. None of them looked like Anarya. Surely she would have attracted someone's attention, someone who would remember her.
So he set out to search taverns and markets. He soon found that very few traders were willing to talk with him unless he bought something first, and in this fashion, he accumulated a collection of useless trinkets. He drew the line at buying a monkey from a stallholder who specialized in pets for the rich and stupid, and decided to concentrate on the tavern part of his job description. Nothing there either, except the solace of alcohol, and much lecherous badinage from fellow drinkers wanting to know what, exactly, it was he wanted to do with this young woman he was trying so hard to find.
The afternoon sun was harsh, and his head hurt. He found his way into an establishment in which wine was the beverage of choice, and the clientele (evidently the intelligentsia of Borzim, who divided fairly neatly into philosophers and poets) could take their ease in a trellised garden wreathed in vines. To justify the outrageous prices, the owner had even provided a Troubadour, a lank-haired young man, dressed in a colorful tunic, who strummed a sad-stringed instrument from somewhere west of the Dragon Mountains and sang ballads, some sad, others bawdy. There was a beauty from Bartertown, apparently, and an eager young man from Farram. It had not ended well.
Kendik tuned out the plangent voice and looked at his fellow drinkers. He had ordered a cup of what was, in his limited experience, a very good red, but most of his fellow drinkers were working their way through amphorae. To his left, waxed aesthetes were exclaiming over the beauty of the drawings which one of their fellows was shyly and reluctantly extracting from a bulging folio. To his right, the debate about the future of magic, never entirely absent in Barsaive, had erupted anew. The disputants were a dissipated follower of the school that claimed that magic would never again exceed its present level, and would eventually fade away completely, and a woman of commanding mien who insisted that history was cyclic, and that in due course, the magic and its attendant Horrors would rise again.
Neither scenario held much appeal for Kendik. He finished his cup and decided that this afternoon had gone on long enough. He would return to the house, sleep, and see whether the morning brought better counsel. He got up and made his way towards the exit.
To do so, he had to walk past the Troubadour. He was an unprepossessing young man: under medium height, disheveled, a little chubby, his face pockmarked by some childhood disease. But he could certainly sing. His voice swooped confidently around the simple accompaniment he was playing on his lute.
Kendik stopped for a moment to listen to that voice, and thus realized what the Troubadour was singing.
"She was so young, so fair So alone in a place Not her own, and she Could find a friend nowhere
This young and foolish maid Showed all who passed her by
A picture of the kindly aunt From whose care she'd strayed
She-"
"Stop!" said Kendik.
"He's not that bad!" yelled some wit from the back of the room. But the singer stopped, and looked on apprehensively as Kendik approached him. "Who
is this woman you're singing about?"
Before the singer could reply, a heavy hand closed on Kendik's shoulder.
"Management," said a voice from somewhere above Kendik's head, "does not approve of any patron interfering with the enjoyment of others."
The new voice had tusks, fangs, a large club, and an unfriendly expression. If she was not a sister of Vyaka Longtusk, she certainly qualified for the surname. It took Kendik the last gold coin in his possession to convince Management to let him borrow Viknis the entertainer for a few minutes, and a silver coin to encourage the entertainer, who was still looking distinctly put out, to talk. Kendik led the young man to a table near the door, as far from the prying ears of the other patrons as possible.
"This woman you were singing about, what do you know of her?"
"If you'd let me keep playing, you'd have heard. There was this real beauty accosting passersby at the foot of Lord Tesek's statue, demanding to know if they'd seen her aunt. I went down to take a look at her, but she'd gone—hustled off by a man and an ork, they said. It was a while before I was due here, so I was talking with a couple of friends who had seen her when there was this big commotion."
"Was it the woman?"
"Not at first. A bunch of guards marched through with three prisoners—traitors, everyone said. A dwarf and a couple of humans. Fighting and kicking like anything, they were, but it didn't do them any good. I went out to the North Gate the next day and their heads were up on poles. That taught me to hold my tongue, I can tell you!"
Fortunately for Kendik, the young man appeared to be a slow learner. Kendik poured another drink for his companion, then, aware of Management watching balefully from behind the bar, asked "But you did see the young woman?"
"Sure I did. My mum had caught her!"
Kendik blinked. "Your mother?"
"She needed a job after Dad died, so she went and joined the guards. It makes me laugh to see her in that uniform. Her partner doesn't take any nonsense, though, so I didn't say anything—just watched them go by. My friends were right about the girl, though— she could strum my zither any time! Hey, don't look like that—it's just a way of speaking. She your girlfriend, is she?"
Kendik controlled his temper with difficulty. "Where did the guards take her?"
"Looked like mum and Sezhina were taking to her the guardhouse, then she slipped them and ran off in the confusion. I thought I saw her again, somewhere ahead of me, but I can't be sure. Qualia and Sezhina were puffing and blowing to catch up with her—well, no, my mum was; Sezhina keeps herself pretty fit. I decided I was best off staying out of their way."
At that point, Management decided that enough was enough, and escorted Kendik firmly off the premises. The final shove in the back hurt, but Kendik barely noticed. At last, he had something to go on.
As he walked towards the central square, he tried to clear the wine fumes from his brain. Either Anarya had been recaptured by the guards, or she hadn't. If she hadn't, she could be anywhere. If she had, then she might be in custody. Where did Lord Tesek keep his prisoners?
He went to the guardhouse to find out. When he reached the head of the sweating, complaining queue and asked, the dwarf on duty—was it the same one who had accosted him in the central square on his first day in Borzim?—leaned back in his chair and said "Where do you think? They're under our bloody feet, though if we try to fit any more of them in there, they'll come bursting up through the bloody floor."
"Is it possible to visit a prisoner?"
" 'Is it possible to visit a prisoner?' " mimicked the dwarf. "Of course it's bloody possible! How do you think they get fed?"
Then, to Kendik's intense frustration, the dwarf informed him that visiting hours were over, the prison was locked down for the night, and he'd have to come back tomorrow morning.
"But she's alone ... cold ... frightened ..."
"Oh, 'she', is it? Your lady friend got herself in a spot of bother, has she? Well, you should have been around to save her at the time, shouldn't you? It's no use looking at me like that, lad. Get yourself outside and don't bother us till the sun's been up an hour."
It took the butt of an ork guard's spear to convince Kendik that visiting hours were, indeed, over. With a bruise on his chest to add to those on his shoulder and back, Kendik returned to the safe house in the gathering gloom and spent a cheerless night. Atlan did not return, and Kendik ate alone, sharpened his sword for a while, then went to bed and dropped off into an uneasy sleep.
In the morning, he packed a bag of food for Anarya, then went to the guardhouse. In a passageway towards the rear of the guardhouse, he submitted to another queue and another inspection, and then, at last, he was allowed down the stairs that led to the prison.
It was bedlam. From the rock walls and low stone roof rebounded the cries of prisoners, the shouted orders of guards, and the imprecations of visitors. The prison appeared to have been hacked out of the rock beneath the town yard by yard. Passageways lined with cells led off in half a dozen directions. Between rock wall and iron bars, up to a dozen prisoners per cell slept, sat, or prowled. In some cells, prisoners were chained like dogs. The only light came from guttering torches and the occasional—too occasional—light shaft, from which the sounds of freedom drifted down as the smells of feces, urine, and despair rose to greet the outside world.
Fighting back the urge to gag, Kendik set off down the corridors, passing family parties chatting to prisoners or passing food through the bars. For all the interest the guards were taking, it looked as though knives, swords, and cudgels could have been passed through the bars with equal ease.
The guards patrolled in pairs. The first two pairs he asked knew nothing and cared less, but he struck it lucky with the third pair. One was tall, lean, and silent, the other small and plump. One glance at her told Kendik that this must be Qualia, the mother of Viknis.
"Oh yes, dearie, we know who you mean. Brought her in ourselves, we did. She's a nice young thing, if a bit mixed up."
"Is she—"
"Oh, she's fine. We make sure of that. Look after her like she was our own child, we do. We put her in a cell near an airshaft, and at the end of a row, where the smell isn't so bad. She had it all to herself till last night. Matter of fact, we should go and see her now, shouldn't we, Sezhina? I said to them, I said, don't put a grown man in there with a young woman, that's not right. But they just laughed and paid no attention as usual, said they knew what they were doing. That lot wouldn't know—"
The other woman gave her a warning glance.
"Yes, yes, you're right. Walls have ears, eh? Walls have ears. Come on, Sezhina, let's take this young man to see his lady friend."
As they walked down the passage towards the hub of the prison, Kendik looked at Sezhina. He could not shake the feeling that there was something familiar about her. She noticed his scrutiny and scowled at him. He looked away.
The noise and the stench were giving him a headache. As they passed the foot of the staircase down which he had descended, the noise rose to a crescendo; then they were past, and walking down another passage. The noise and the smell lessened until they were almost bearable.
At the very end of the passage, the cell on the right held a woman. Her beauty had been dimmed beneath hunger, grime, and fear.
Her hair hung lank, and there was a dirty bandage on her forehead. She was dressed in a long white shift. Her sword and her armor were nowhere to be seen. She looked up dully, and then broke into a smile that transformed her features.
"Anarya," said Kendik, and in this grim place, he was filled with happiness.
It faded quickly. As she came up to the bars, he saw how painfully thin she had grown.
"Here," he said, "I've brought food—"
There was no pretence of delicacy. She took the fruit and bread from him and ate them with a desperate hunger, until he had to warn her to slow down or she'd be sick. She drank several deep gulps from the gourd of water he proffered, belched, and smiled again.
"Once a day they bring round some disgusting swill, except on all the days when it runs out before it reaches me. This one—" she indicated Sezhina "— has been bringing me food when she can, and that one there, who gave me this bump on the head, has been helping out as well. Otherwise, I guess I'd be dead."
"They told me a man had been put in with you. Has he—?"
"Of course not. He's been in no state to, and in any case, I don't think Atlan would."
"Atlan!"
Anarya went over to what Kendik had taken for a bundle of rags in the darkest corner.
"They dragged him in here last night. He's been badly beaten. Resisting arrest, they said. That's what they got me for as well."
"Who brought him in?"
"Men dressed in black uniforms. They call them—Falcons!"
At the alarm on Anarya's face, Kendik half-turned, to see a phalanx of black advancing on him. They seized his arms and shoved him up against the bars.
"Impersonate a duke, would you?" said one. Another produced a key. "Be off!" he said to Qualia and Sezhina.
Kendik could hear Qualia muttering as she walked away, and Sezhina endeavoring to calm her, but that was not his chief concern. The key rattled and caught in the lock. The barred iron door opened, and Kendik was shoved unceremoniously inside. As he fell to the floor, he heard the door being locked behind him, and got a glimpse of black-clad figures moving swiftly away down the passage.
Tender arms enfolded him, and he was pressed against a soft and yielding breast. It was what he had dreamed of ever since he and Anarya were parted, but not in these circumstances: together, but not alone, with an injured friend lying in the corner, the hubbub of the prison echoing all around, and a locked and barred door between them and freedom.
Chapter 10
I'm in love, thought Kendik Dezelek, as he lay on a pile of rags in the cell he shared with the object of his adoration. Anarya slept, turned away from him, so that all he could see was her back and rump. It was a distracting sight.