Here was Bayen’s last stronghold.
“These will do,” the senior man said and opened the doors to two studies. “Two will suffice, I assume.”
Liv and Emilia entered the first, leaving the man to face me.
Uncle Phost and the two Corneth men that had followed us this far had exhausted their courage and were looking for the exit.
“Uncle,” I said. “Emilia wishes that you remain with us.”
“You mean to stay here?” he asked.
“For some time, yes.”
“Won’t she set fire to the place?”
Archivists peered out at us from a dozen studies. I could hear others collection up their things. The first emerged and hurried away, while the senior archivist struggled to decide what to do.
“This is not what I had in mind. We are not equipped this.”
“You’ll manage. Lord Rahan shared a tower with Emilia for an entire season. The fires she started were never so severe that the keep was in danger. Well, there was that one time.”
Emilia popped her head out of the small room. “Evand, we should start with a study of Sikhek.”
Her quick thought spun my head and tried to get hold of the larger struggle around us without losing my grip on the man in front of me.
“A fantastic thought, Emilia,” I said and asked the archivist. “Who should we speak to in order to get access to the collections record regarding Minister Sikhek?”
“I—beg pardon, sir? What does the former minister have to do with this?”
“Lower your voice,” I said and hunched down as if expecting magical fire from Emilia. “Harsh words can set her off by accident. We don’t want a fire in here her first day.”
Panic nearly took him as more of priests abandoned their studies. A group of clerks emerged up a nearby stairway and joined the exodus. The senior archivist was left alone and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Can you help with my request?” I whispered.
It took him a moment to recall what I’d asked for, and a curiosity dislodged his fear. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said and hurried away.
The Corneth men used the opportunity to flee. Uncle Phost would have done the same, but Ellyon had him by the arm.
He hissed at his, “You expect me to bow to this terror?”
“When was the last time a Grano was the most powerful person in Zoviya?” I asked.
“You can stow all your prepared speeches, Yentif. I’ll not be as easily scared or outwitted as these cretins. You can put away your Yentif smile, too. I may be your mother’s brother, but it will be a hot day in Bayen’s imaginary hell before I call you Grano and back you for the throne.”
I put on my captain’s face and changed tactics. “Would a chest full of Rahan’s gold convince you to listen to what we have to say?”
This froze him in place. He looked up and down the hallway and Ellyon checked that the nearby studies and carols were empty.
“How much?” Phost asked.
“Enough to cover your debts,” Ellyon said.
“Where is it?”
“Aboard our galley. It is yours if you’ll stay for a time.”
He pursed his lips, shook his head, and looked ready to spit at me.
“I was taken from your sister when I was five,” I said. “The Yentif who murdered her are the same Yentif who wish everything to go back to the way it was.”
“You are no different. Rahan’s man.”
“I am not,” I said. “I’ve broken from him, as have the Ludoq, and our Goddess. I mean to claim this city and make it the capital of Zoviya, ruled by the Grano, not the Yentif.”
“You great fool. You will not displace the Corneth. Vall failed. Yarik failed. Rahan failed. Who the fuck are you?”
“Uncle, we have already won. The archive belongs to Emilia now. She would name you the Lord of the Archives if you can call on the Grano to replace the soldiers who have fled. The city’s heart is in our hands.”
He studied Ellyon’s face. “They actually mean it to do? You’ve a plan to take the city?”
“We know every family here,” I said, “and where their loyalties lie. I will be King Grano of Zoviya by season’s end. Are you with me?”
“King not Exaltier?”
“There will be no more Swords or Mouths of Bayen. The church has failed Zoviya. I will not.”
He rubbed his hands together and checked the hallway one more time. “I’ll see that gold.”
“Ellyon will take you to it. Gather the Grano and bring them here in force.”
“I only have—”
“We know how many men you have. Bring them all. They will be enough to hold the plaza.”
He continued rubbing his hands together for a long moment before he led them away at a trot. I stood watch in the hallway for the returning archivist while Liv and Emilia spent some quiet moments in their study. I let them be, rather than presume they needed my assistance. There was no judging how hard an episode it has been for Emilia.
When Liv opened the door and stepped out, she was smiling. “Asleep,” she whispered and pulled me up the hallway a few paces. “She gave herself a headache turning the heat on and off. She’s was terrified that she’d killed a few people and needed to count everyone in the city four times to be sure. Poor girl. Thank you for leaving her alone. The quiet does her good. It sounded like it went will with Phost?”
“So far. Emi was right that he is more in love with his money lenders than his wife. We’ve done more today than I could have hoped, but I’d be happier if our plan extended beyond the securing of the archives and plaza. I told Phost we had a plan for taking city, so we better come up with one. The locals might react quickly once word gets out that we have occupied the archives.”
“She will be very reluctant to burn anyone, should it come to blood.”
“As she should be.”
“We’ve been over this, love. One victory at a time. The pot has been stirred and we are in the position we desired. As the situation changes, we will adjust. The only thing we are missing now is our daughter and our people aboard the galley.”
I nearly apologized for the necessity of leaving them behind but bit it back before I got myself into trouble.
“Here comes the archivist,” she said, I spotted the man and the load of books and journals he carried. He stopped twenty paces away, and I had to cross to him.
“She is calm?” he asked.
“Yes. Enough to find some sleep. It would be best though if you could get everyone clear of the building, in case she has bad dreams.”
His ashen expression lengthened, and he hurried to hand over the stack of materials. The weight of the collection was astonishing.
“All on Sikhek?”
“Only a primer. There is an entire section of histories dedicated to his centuries,” he said and his curiosity trumped his concerns for his health once again. “What are you after?”
“We would know expose our true enemy. Sikhek has some connection to a family in the east. They are not what they seem, and I mean to uncover them.”
“That would be the Savdi-Nuar, a vile collection of warlock and witches Sikhek had coddled for generations. He deeded them the Crimson Valley in Aneth many centuries ago, and they have remained loyal to him throughout.”
“So these are the wrong books.”
“Yes. You will want others,” he said, took back the set, and hurried away. When he returned, it was with a stack almost twice as high.
“Why do you hate the Savdi so much?” I asked as he handed over the set.
“They take orders from no one. For centuries—as if they were deities above Bayen. Their sacrilege is without peer.”
I leaned close as said, “Bayen whispers to Emilia. He speaks of an evil in the east born of Sikhek’s treachery. You have put us on the right path.”
He blanched. “She is sent by Bayen? Many think she has to do with Barok and his new religion in the north.”
/> “Yes. Tell no one. The ranks of the faithful have been infiltrated,” I whispered and encouraged him to get to safety. He marched away as if to war.
I loved the lie I’d crafted, but as I sat down with the stack of books, no amount of good fortune could have kept me happy. The old volumes were records of transactions, loans, and deliveries of crimson—the commerce between the church and the Savdi-Nuar. I would have cut out my eyes rather than read more of the dust old tombs if the pursuit was not so important.
Liv opened the lattice door to my small room, and Emilia slide in around her. “You found something already?”
“You’d told be about the family in the east, but it didn’t seem so important at the time. The archivist heard one mention of our effort and put me onto a family in Aneth the way a farmer would point a hunter at a forest full foxes. Reading all of this, I am beginning to wonder.”
Liv sat down with us and the pair listened intently as I told what I’d read so far about the Savdi-Nuar and the freedom they enjoyed in their valley. Tariffs did not apply to them. Taxes were waved. They owned a monopoly on crimson that had been enforced three times by Sikhek’s Hessier. We divided the stack of books into the three studies and scrounged a meal of bread and cheese from what the priests had abandoned.
The Grano arrived in numbers that evening while the three of us read. There was a bit of drama when some of the church soldiers thought to stop them, but Ellyon and Wayland had been captains of men too long to be upset by church rabble. A bit of blood was shed in the foyer but the color disappeared into the vibrant rugs. They got busy securing the building and the plaza while the city convulsed around us. Neither the archivist nor the Corneth dared to approach Emilia, and our men secured the plaza’s gatehouses one after another.
It made Emilia sad that they feared her so much, but she would not say it.
We focused on the Savdi while we waited on the city to calm down and beg an audience with us. A second day of reading became a third and then a fourth. We did not mind the quiet and enlisted Okel and a dozen other lettered men to dig through the stack with us. Every book told the same story. The Savdi-Nuar where ever so much as scratched by a Conservancy that had an iron grip upon every other family and interest in Zoviya.
“Who controls who?” Emilia asked me and Liv the next morning.
“Sikhek or the Savdi, you mean?” Liv asked.
“Yes. It doesn’t make sense. Sikhek murdered millions—build the Warrens and all the other dark places. There is nothing special about the Savdi that I can see. They are a family of miners by every account here, so how have they survived so long with such access to Sikhek? What if it’s the Savdi that control him and not the other way around?”
“Something to do with this third spirit you encountered?”
“I don’t know, and I bet there is not one mention of the spirit in the entire archive.”
“We need to be moving faster,” Liv said and she was right. Winning Alsonelm seemed trivial.
52
Sikhek Vesteal
I lay on the beach for two days. My left eye healed first, then my ears. My crushed lungs would not inflate, and I could not make my limbs work out of the water. Nothing tried to eat me though, so I lay slumbered in the embrace of this relative comfort and waited for Geart’s implacable magic to do its relentless work.
Footsteps startled me, and I coughed up a bit of water. A single figure crept close, and my milky eyes focused enough to recognize the blue and gray of an Anethean sailor. He searched the tattered scraps of my clothes before checking if I was alive. He mumbled about the reward he might get for saving me before deciding to push the brine from my lungs.
The first gasp of air was a new pain, and I longed for the days when I felt nothing and could heal as fast as fire could burn.
Then again, feeling pain was not the only sensation my restored condition allowed. I dreamt of a feast, the touch of a woman, and the warmth of a bottle of wine. They would be a proper reward for surviving the depths. It was time for me to move on. Somewhere in the north, perhaps—a Khrimish vineyard staffed with long-legged redheads. These thoughts where the taste of madness, but I enjoyed them all the same.
The man took a long time chatting with himself while he decided what to do with me, but eventually dragged me into a sandy clearing surrounded by tall weeds. He had a tiny fire there and a turtle cooking in its own shell. He fed me broth and asked me questions about my family that I could nod or shake my head at. Yes, I was from Aneth. No, I’d not fought in the battle. Yes, my family was wealthy.
He had a rusty knife in his belt, and its handle was damp from palm sweat and stained black with blood. If he’d been hiding along that strip of beach since the battle, he’d eaten stranger fare than turtle.
The small meal was all I was going to get, but that and fresh air was already inspiring my body. Sitting up was something I was certain I could do.
His yammering was endless, and while banal, I dared not fall asleep while he clutched at his knife. But as he blathered at me through the twilight my heavy eyelids closed.
I dreamt of biting eels and woke shivering. I’d been dragged into the tall weeds. The fire had been buried, and the deserter was nowhere to be seen.
“Stay down,” the man whispered from somewhere close. I managed to roll myself over and saw a two-masted Yudyith corsair gliding close in along the beach. They moved on, and the man appeared over me, knife in hand.
“Your family—they love you, yes? Have coin enough to pay for you?”
He did not like my haggard squawking and did not have the patience for another game of yes and no.
He stabbed my shoulder. It was a halting poke—cowardly.
I twitched but made no other move. The small wound bled red and he fidgeted.
“Where is your family from? Walsemi?”
I shook my head.
“Uvrondi?”
Again, no. Both were close and likely where the man was from.
“You are bit peculiar looking. From Thanin? You’re not one of those gray cloaks from Estechi, are you?”
It was not the story I would have conjured for him, but it would serve. I nodded and fidgeted. He considered stabbing me again but walked down the beach instead. He came back with a turtle suspended on a stick by its jaw. It took him several tries to cut its head off. He restarted his small fire as the sun was setting. He glanced at a rock in the tall weeds the entire time.
I napped with this knowledge and woke to the meal. He fed me more than I expected, and night’s sleep and food had me eager to stand.
“Up?” I whispered. “Move.”
“Oh, that’s a good man. Can you walk? We need not go far to get to the forests above the tithe road—a ways through the marsh and along the river. Fewer patrols this way.”
“Patrols?”
“That bitch from Enhedu and that maggot Sikhek. She pressed me into her navy and nearly get us all killed. Anyone with sense has abandoned them. If I ever lay eyes on that cunt or that fucker Sikhek, I’ll kill him myself.”
I stood up and smiled at him. “I’ll make you a bet.”
“Ha, don’t go exerting yourself there. Need you to make it to your family. Get me some of that gold. Wait—a bet? You have coins to wager? Where are they?”
“Not coins. Our lives. You stab me. I stab you. We take turns. The winner gets the rest of the turtle and whatever you have hidden under that rock.”
He started fidgeting again and almost made a run for it. Then he let out a sad growl and stabbed me high on the left side. The knife went deep between ribs into my abused lung. The man let go of the knife, backed away, and half smiled, expecting me to fall. It had missed my heart, I think, but it would not have mattered if he’s stabbed it clean through me.
“My turn,” I said.
He could have run while I worked the knife free. He stood and watched instead as I jammed the small blade deep into the side of his neck.
The look on his face when I took anot
her turn and stabbed him in the gut was enough to make me laugh. He fell and whimpered about not getting another turn while his blood soaked into the sand.
I ate the rest of the turtle and uncovered a small purse beneath his rock. I left the man his clothes. I was better off naked than in an Anethean uniform.
I would have preferred to find my way up the coast to Khrim, but Soma’s patrols could not be discounted. Any yellowcoat was likely to recognize me. I did not like my chances trying to make my way west overland, either. I waited instead for the corsair to make another pass and waved them in.
They laughed as they came ashore. One had chains ready. None bothered to draw their swords.
“Hardly worth rowing in to get him,” one of them said while prodding the body beside the fire. Their tall sun-baked captain eyed me like I was a snake.
“I am Tasean Roto,” I said and tossed him the small purse. “I was captain of the guard and cousin to our late Arilas Ulrik Roto, who was murdered before my eyes by the pretender Ludoq in Bessradi while the council of Lords looked on. Has Ulrik’s son succeeded him?”
His men froze, waiting on his lead. He opened the purse and examined the deserter’s wounds. “He did. Did your father survive the ambush?”
“My father died three years ago when Sikhek’s conservancy swept through Cyaudi. Have our attacks along the coast succeeded? Sesmundi Bay is not under blockaded.”
Their posture changed, and the captain was quick to answer. “Sesmundi broke out a number of days ago, but their women will be filling our pens soon enough. The rest of the coast is ours.”
“Very well. I bear a message from those in Bessradi who are loyal to the Roto. You will bear me to Cyaudi with all speed and you will not speak to me again.”
He handed me his cloak and when he ordered his brutish men out of my way they leapt back and bowed.
As soon as we were aboard he raised sails and called all hands to the oars. I slept in his hammock and slurped down rich broth while we slid along the Havishon Coast and through the jagged Wellaze Isles. We put in at Yud port at Soulenti five days later, and the captain hurried ashore to hire me a carriage.
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