by Matthew Ward
Draped in weed, he made it to hands and knees. “Where… Where am I?”
The Merrow turned away, disgusted.
Kasvin knelt before the old man, skirts puddling about her. Her aspect again demure, enticing. “You’re home, Lord Akadra. Your city needs you.”
Lord Hadon Akadra, who’d disappeared without trace years before. Who’d been thought dead so long. Or, Hawkin realised sourly, perhaps thought didn’t cover it. A trick of the lichen-light, so worshipful in Kasvin’s presence, revealed a face pale and grey, marred by thick black veins beneath the skin.
Except the veins were moving. Pulsing like river weed.
Stomach curdling, Hawkin bit down on her hand to stifle a cry.
Too late. An age too late.
Kasvin’s head snapped about. “Show yourself.”
Hawkin felt the pull at once. The desire to please Kasvin and thus earn pleasure herself. Revulsion held it at bay. She bolted for the stairs. The Merrow moved to stop her, a black shape in the darkness. A shoulder to his ribs flung him aside, leaving the way open.
“Hawkin?” The anger was gone from Kasvin’s voice. “There’s no need to run.”
The words crawled beneath Hawkin’s skin and burrowed deeper. She blinked and called forth the horrors of the night as a shield. The drowned Drazina in the streets. The writhing weed in the river. Hadon Akadra’s greying, inhuman features. They gave her the strength to forge on, though legs faltered.
When she looked up again, Kasvin stood between her and the stairs. “Stay… Please?”
Hurt, cajoling tone was poor match for knowing smile. Not that it mattered. Not so close.
One glimpse of her eyes, and Hawkin Darrow floated away on a blue-green tide.
Tzadas, 6th Day of Dawntithe
She beckons you with winsome smile,
With slender hands as cold as frost.
Her icy kisses brush your cheek,
And when you meet her eyes, you’re lost.
The River Bride, she knows your sins,
The broken vows, the wronged, the dead.
And drags you down among the weeds,
To share her drownling’s marriage bed.
Sothvane nursery rhyme
Thirty
Nothing like a morning constitutional to air the cobwebs. Or so Kurkas had repeated to himself at least three times since leaving Stonecrest at dawn. The walk was part of his informal routine now that military life lay behind. Not that passersby would have guessed. Given the cold snap of the morning he’d set aside steward’s informal cloth for battered uniform, its golden phoenix dulled by the passing years.
That morning, aching muscles could have done without routine. Counting by the years, he remained several summers shy of his sixtieth birthday. But not all years were equal. Too many lost on the battlefield. Stolen away, lost in Otherworld’s mists. A couple of days, most thought. It had been longer. Much longer.
But even though the morning breeze cut sharper than it should, Kurkas held his course. All the time in the world to rest when they laid him in the sod. So long as there was a good drop or two to drink along the way, all was to the good. Cut right down to it and the only thing separating old soldiers and new were the years between. The calling was the calling.
Near-deserted streets roused unease. Even in that early hour – even with the curfew only just lapsed – the cobbles should have been thick with labourers and tradesmen. What should have been rivers of humanity had slowed to a trickle, the streets quiet and seldom more than a handful of souls in sight.
As Kurkas neared Silverway Dock, silence and sparseness retreated before the growl of the mob. Five hundred or so men and women in work clothes and wool cloth facing off against as many again at the harbour gate. Where the first group held pickaxe handles, shovels and boat hooks, the second was unarmed… all save the two-score watchmen and the portly man in harbour master’s shabby finery who stood at their fore. Beyond the gate, the tangle of warehouses and merchantmen sat still and unattended save by circling gulls.
“You’re all in violation of guild contracts!” shouted the harbour master. “Back to work, and we’ll say nothing more about it!”
“And if we don’t?” someone bellowed from the crowd’s anonymity.
“Then I’ll have my men clear the gates!” The harbour master jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “And your fellows here get your wages as well as their own!”
Fifty swords and five hundred fists against an equal number with improvised weapons and malice in mind? Good luck with that. And that was already assuming that the workers at the harbour master’s back fought with him, rather than just watched the brawl from a safe distance.
Worse, a third crowd was gathering on the street’s outskirts. Maybe folk looking for a bit of early morning entertainment, but you never could tell. And if fighting started? Weren’t no such thing as bystanders then. You picked a side, or had one chosen. The brawl would become a riot, and there’d be nothing for it but screams and cracked skulls.
And it had been such a nice, quiet morning.
A constable rounded the corner from Tarbridge Lane and retreated just as quickly, heading for the nearby guardhouse. That lass, at least, had good instincts.
Not so the harbour master, who remained unaware how precarious his situation had become, or was so lost to indignation he didn’t care. “You have until the count of ten!”
The watchmen drew their swords.
“One!”
The growl about the gate grew louder and deeper.
“Two!”
Kurkas straightened from habitual slouch and pushed his way through the harbour master’s crowd, heading towards the blockaded gate.
“Three!”
A watchman gave Kurkas a filthy stare, received a harsher one in return, and stepped aside at the sight of the battered phoenix.
“Fo—” The harbour master turned his scowl on Kurkas. “This isn’t Stonecrest business.”
“How long d’you reckon it’ll stay that way once I report back to Lord Trelan?”
Fresh jeers broke out at the blockade.
The harbour master’s scowl darkened. “What do you want?”
“Ain’t what I want.” Kurkas set his back to the blockade. “What do they want?”
“Does it matter?”
His opinion of the harbour master, already low, plummeted sharply. “You’ve not asked?”
“No I haven’t, because it doesn’t matter.” The harbour master raised his voice, no longer talking to Kurkas, but through him. “I’ve supply barges to provision. They’re contracted for the work. They’ll come to heel, or I’ll send back to the palace for the Drazina. There’s a war on!”
Civilians. Not even a day since Lord Droshna’s declaration, and already they were puffing out chests and strutting around like dunghill cocks. “You want another one right here, right now? Because that’s what—”
“And is war reason to rip food from our children’s mouths? To fill Thrakkian bellies while kin go hungry? That’s not my Tressia!”
The interruption was bellowed from behind Kurkas, the crisp, authoritative voice maddeningly familiar until he turned from the harbour master’s paling features to see for himself.
“Impossible…” he muttered.
Lord Hadon Akadra stood at the blockade’s forefront, looking about as out of place in such company as it was possible to be. It wasn’t just the powdered face and immaculate clothes amid the garb and grime of earthier classes – nor even that Kurkas, like much of Tressia, had long given him up for dead – but that he was slumming it on the dockside at all. Lord Akadra had never been one for the common touch. A flogger during his time in the army and as heartless a judge as any found warming a bench in the city’s courts. Not exactly the clay from which men of the people were fashioned.
More than that, Hadon Akadra didn’t look a day older than when Kurkas had last seen him, near eight years back. Apparently, vanishing from the face of the world agreed with him.
Didn’t seem fair, considering.
The harbour master swallowed, amazement yielding to obsequiousness. “Lord Akadra… I’ve orders direct from your son.”
Lord Akadra strode closer, rubbing absently at his neck. “And when did Viktor ever know what was best for this Republic? He never listened to good sense… never listened.” His eyes snapped to Kurkas, his voice regaining its crispness. “I know you, don’t I?”
“Vladama Kurkas, sah!” Habit brought Kurkas to the salute. He stared past Akadra’s shoulder without meeting his eyes. “Had the good fortune to serve in your hearthguard, sah!”
“And now you wear Katya Trelan’s phoenix?” His voice took on a sour, gravelly growl. “No loyalty any more.”
Kurkas passed up the obvious retort that Katya Trelan had been ashes long before he’d exchanged the Akadra swan for the Trelan phoenix. Long years in Akadra’s service had taught him to pick corrections with utmost care. But still…
“Begging your pardon, sah, but we thought you were dead. Old Brass? Drove him to the bottle for sorrow, you did.” Never mind that Sergeant Brass had drunk himself stupid out of celebration at being free of Akadra’s exacting commands, and second out of shame for having mislaid his master. Pride made little account for fondness, or lack thereof. “Does the Lord Protector know the good news? Be glad to see you, he will.”
“I doubt that.” Akadra tugged at his collar. “After all, Viktor sent me away. But I’m back, and I will see things put right.”
Exile? No wonder the Lord Protector had always been cagey about his father’s fate. He’d let the old goat off light for being in deep with Ebigail Kiradin. Others had ended on the gallows.
Kurkas opened his mouth to reply, but Akadra’s attention had slipped elsewhere – not to the harbour master, but the crowd swelling behind the increasingly dwarfed knot of watchmen.
“We look to our own!” he roared. “Not one sack of grain nor scrap of meat for my son’s war! Not while there are empty bellies! I give you my word as the last of the Council: I’ll stand with you if you’ll stand with me! We feed our own!”
“Feed our own! Feed our own!”
New voices took up the chant. The blockade thickened as men and women slipped past the knot of watchmen to join their fellows at the gate. The harbour master bellowed orders that no one heeded above the din.
Kurkas sighed, plans for the day washed away alongside the harbour master’s tenuous authority. It hadn’t been Stonecrest business, but it was now, sure as cider was apples. As he forged his way back to saner streets, a young woman on the blockade’s fringe caught his eye. Not so much for a black dress more suited to low lights, sweet drinks and private company, but for the fact that she alone wasn’t chanting, and that she alone was smiling.
Izack shook his head, a man beset by that contrary combination of surprise and the inevitable foreseen. “The city’s gone bloody mad.”
Even by its own austere standards, the old council chamber was steeped in gloom. To Josiri’s eye, little of it was the fault of the room itself, but the news that the occupants had brought with them. Mandalov’s ridiculous painting, now bearing the plaque Lord Droshna’s Triumph, offered sardonic counterpoint to recent events.
At least Captain Tzila was elsewhere. After events a day prior, the further she was from him the better Josiri liked it. Not that the Drazina were wholly unrepresented. Grandmaster Sarisov was a calm, composed presence opposite Josiri, his uniform and greying moustache immaculate and his swarthy features furrowed in thought.
Josiri flicked through the reports and his own careful notes, the handwriting crisper for Shalamoh’s gift of eyeglasses. Stoppages and protests had overtaken the city’s western half, halting shipping and slowing manufacturing to a crawl. Perhaps two or three government granaries had been spared the revolt – slim comfort, as there was no operable wharf to load the supply barges.
“It’s not madness,” he said. “Folk are worried.”
“They should worry,” snapped Sevaka. “About the Hadari.”
Her features, normally so ready with a smile, bore a decade’s worth of lines they hadn’t just a day before. Of the morning’s tidings, hers were the worst. Three border villages razed. Rosa missing. No wonder she was wound tight. For all that Sevaka was present in body, her soul had ridden east.
Archimandrite Jezek stirred in his chair. “The Hadari are leagues away. Our citizens are afraid privation is just around the corner. This could have been handled better.”
Viktor scowled. “You take issue with this city’s governance, my lord archimandrite?”
Jezek flinched. Viktor’s relationship with the Lumestran church was a complicated and unfriendly one. What latitude Elzar possessed he’d earned through a bond closer than blood. Jezek was out of his depth, and knew it.
“The past doesn’t matter.” Ironic to hear those words uttered by Arlanne Keldrov, upon whom the past was such a weighty burden. She’d been a league beyond the city gates, riding for the Southshires, when the herald had found her. “What matters is our response.”
“I’ve emptied the watch houses,” said Josiri. “I’ve thrown a cordon around Silverway Dock and had the bridges closed to cut the flow of bodies to the protest. I’ve smaller watches set at the Bretherhithe and Fullwell wharves.”
It wouldn’t stop the determined. Too many alleys, sewers and rooftops to cover, and not nearly enough constables to do the job.
“How many layabouts are we talking?” asked Izack.
“Too many,” Josiri replied. “If trouble starts, this will go badly.”
At last count, the city constabulary had two thousands on its roster. Fewer, since so many of the younger and abler recruits had accepted commission in the Drazina. The crowds at Silverway Dock alone outnumbered those who remained.
“There will be trouble,” said Keldrov. “Begging your pardon, Lord Trelan, but I saw it often enough in the south back in the day. Doesn’t matter how peaceful it starts, there’s always a hothead itching to strike the tinderbox.”
“Even if there isn’t, we’ll have trouble elsewhere,” said Izack. “I’d Konor Zarn twisting my ear not an hour past dawn, badgering about surety for his merchantmen. They’re trapped in the estuary now the layabouts have raised the harbour chains.”
Keldrov rolled her eyes. “How drunk was he?”
“Almost sober,” Izack replied, deadpan. “If that doesn’t speak to magnitude, I don’t know what will. Filled with rare clarity, he was, and with the backing of the trader’s forum.”
“Then we go in hard and fast,” said Sarisov. “My Drazina can handle it… if the constabulary aren’t apt to the task.”
Josiri let frost creep into his tone. “I’m well aware how your knights ‘handle’ things.”
“Then use the army instead?” suggested Jezek, apparently unaware of Sarisov’s poisonous glare.
“The only regiments I’d rely on for this work have marched east,” said Izack. “We’ve only the 20th within the walls. Not sure I trust ’em to know whose side they’re on if this gets nasty.”
Josiri gritted his teeth. “The aim is to end this with minimal bloodletting. The people have concerns. They’re not misplaced. We should at least talk to them.”
“And offer what?” said Izack. “Look, Josiri, I’ve every sympathy, but there’s a reason we cut the ration. Armies march on their stomachs. Full bellies in the city won’t do any good if the Marcher Lands are burning and the shadowthorns are at the walls.”
“There must be some compromise.”
Sarisov snorted. “Any compromise invites further disobedience.”
Josiri bit his tongue. There was no arguing with a man like Sarisov. To the Grandmaster, he’d always be an upstart southwealder, raised above his station, and too lax with lawbreakers.
“Are we not going to discuss the other matter?” asked Izack. “Their ringleader?”
“We did discuss it,” rumbled Viktor. “Whoever that man is, he’s not my father. My father died
years ago, at the Crowmarket’s hands. He belongs to the Raven.”
Josiri had heard the rumour of a vranakin bounty years ago. He’d believed it at the time, but now…? “Kurkas believes otherwise.”
Rising, Viktor brought a fist down on the table. The air in the council chamber grew colder, the shadows longer. “Kurkas is mistaken!” The scowl melted, and he reclaimed his seat. “Vladama is a good man, and a better friend, but he’s not infallible. Sevaka. Izack. You knew my father. And you, Josiri, saw enough to recognise his nature. Did he ever strike you as a man to concern himself with the appetites of the lowborn?”
Sevaka shook her head.
“Not unless it made them pliant,” said Izack. “Always did have an eye for the ladies. Especially the grateful ones.”
Josiri scowled. Hadon Akadra could never have passed for an altruist. A firm believer in inherited worth, and a natural order that favoured those already fortunate. But leveraging those concerns in others for his own gain would have been entirely characterful. “If it suited his goals, I imagine he was capable of anything.”
Viktor’s brow darkened, but his temper held. “Someone is manipulating my father’s name to legitimise treason.”
Treason. Cold pricked the back of Josiri’s neck at the sudden escalation. Family history alone warned how swiftly and enthusiastically that stain spread.
“What if it’s the Hadari?” said Sevaka darkly. “The icularis are just as active under the Empress as her father. They’re capable of anything.”
Josiri hesitated, certain Melanna’s desire for peace was as genuine as his own. This was beyond her, whatever was happening on the border. But his instincts had been wrong before. “If the Hadari are responsible, tearing ourselves apart serves their goals. Viktor—”
Viktor cut him off, voice flat and hard. “Grandmaster Sarisov. I want the Drazina mobilised by noon. You’re to break the blockade at Silverway Dock. If you can do so peacefully, so much the better, but I want this ended.”
“At your command, my lord.”
