The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  The man she'd thrown the knife in was the last one standing. He staggered away, eyes wide, waving his sword in front of him. "What the hell are you?"

  "Vengeance," she said. She blinked out. He screamed at the top of his lungs. She moved behind him, stepped back into the world of flesh, and cut his throat.

  She ran to Gaits. Lying in the alley, his chest rose and fell, but he was out cold. They were only three blocks from the Marrigan. She had to work fast. Raxa moved from body to body, turning out pockets. The alley stank of blood and feces. She supposed it had been too much to ask for a signed order from whoever had sent them, but other than a few iron and bronze coins, the attackers' pockets were empty. Not just of anything interesting. Empty of anything.

  She checked their hands, ears, and necks. No rings on their hands or ears—but one of them had a slim iron chain around his neck, hidden beneath his shirt. On its end dangled an iron ring bearing a black stone.

  She snapped the chain and pocketed it. Despite the work her knives had just done, they felt a little flimsy. She undid two of the dead men's sword belts and strapped them around her waist. She scooped up Gaits and used the wall to help her stand, legs straining. As soon as she'd shifted him over her shoulder, she tottered down the alley.

  Raxa was shiny with blood. So was Gaits—and he was leaking steadily. The Order had an in-house physician, but he was out of the question now. They had a backup, too, but at that moment, he'd be overwhelmed with other casualties. And the attack on the Marrigan had been too organized. They might have people waiting to ambush any wounded who went for the physician's help.

  There was only one option. She was going to have to see Lady Vara. All the way outside the Pridegate.

  Raxa struck southwest, keeping to the back alleys. Gaits' limp body pressed her down with every step. She'd only made it two blocks when footsteps rasped down the tight street. She ducked behind a jumble of wooden crates. Two members of the city watch jogged past, dressed in the black and silver of their station.

  When the noise of their boots faded, she cut off the hem of her shirt and Gaits' sleeves, using them to bind the cuts on his arm, ribs, and hip. Done, she picked him back up. Lifting him took twice as much energy as it had the first time. She staggered along block after block. After a mile, she hit the boulevard of Pavvers. Forty feet wide, completely exposed to the night. Detouring around it would take her a mile and a half out of her way. With gritted teeth, she waited for the pedestrian traffic to thin to nothing, then moved across the boulevard as fast as she could.

  In the shelter of an alley on the other side, she leaned against the wall. With a quiver, her thighs went out from under her. She slid to the ground, grabbing Gaits' hair so his head wouldn't bang into anything on the way down.

  He inhaled with a start. His head jerked back. "Let go—!"

  She clamped her hand over his mouth. "Still your tongue before they find us and cut it out."

  Muffled by her hand, he said something that might have been "Raxa."

  "Yep," she said. "You've been hurt, Gaits. I'm taking you to see a friend of mine, but you're heavy as shit. Can you walk?"

  Gaits tested his legs, faltering. Raxa swooped a shoulder beneath his arm. Leaning on her heavily, he shuffled southwest with her.

  "What happened?" he murmured dreamily.

  "You tell me. When I got to the Marrigan, it was burning like a Falmac's Log. And a group of thugs was hauling you off."

  "Thugs," he repeated. "One minute normal. The next, they were everywhere. Flames and swords. They were saying something. Something like…" He gazed forward, head swaying as he walked, eyes as leaden as shadowcut glass. Just as Raxa was sure he'd forgotten what they were talking about, his chin jerked up. "'When the man steps too far, the brother must put him down.'"

  "The hell does that mean?"

  "Don't know."

  "Any idea who they were?"

  "No uniforms. Didn't recognize—"

  He stumbled. Raxa caught him, pulling him back to his feet. "Save your strength. We've got a long way to go."

  Block by block, they advanced through the city. As they neared the Pridegate, she squeezed his arm. "Gate's ahead. Time to play the Ale Game, okay?"

  Gaits nodded weakly. As they neared, a soldier in black and silver moved to intercept them. His eyes fixed on Gaits' bandages. "What's got you out so late?"

  "Well," Raxa said. "You see—"

  Gaits convulsed, retching so convincingly Raxa nearly did, too. The guard scowled and backed off, waving a hand in front of his nose. "Get him home."

  Raxa smiled tightly, agreed profusely, and hustled Gaits through the exit. They soon came to a sturdy wooden house, its dark yard fenced with pine branches. Raxa hammered her fist on the front door. Wood scraped inside. The door flung open, revealing a woman as thickly built as a bull. Her short, slate gray hair stuck from the sides of her head like a rogue dandelion.

  Her voice was hoarse with sleep. "What kind of asshole dumps trash on my step in the middle of the night?"

  "Lady Vara," Raxa said. "It's Raxa. My friend's hurt."

  "I got eyes. And you got three seconds before I slam the door on your nose."

  "The Marrigan's been attacked. We've got nowhere else to go."

  "Boo hoo."

  Raxa bit back a curse. She motioned to the silhouettes of goats and sheep behind the fence. "Come on, Vara. I've brought half your stock in off the streets."

  "So you brought me one more wounded animal to save." She swore, grunted, and stepped aside. "Get inside before the watch sees you."

  Inside, Vara lit a lamp. Gaits had gone pale and shaky. Raxa led him to the back room and helped him lie down. The boards were well-scrubbed, but blood was the strongest ink there was. The room smelled like fur and manure. Vara entered, kneeled beside Gaits, and unrolled a leather kit. The shiny metal tools inside looked like something between thieves' picks and a torturer's tools.

  "You're a physician," Gaits said.

  Vara took a slim pair of scissors from her kit. "Bah."

  "'Bah'? What is 'bah'?"

  "Yes, she's a physician," Raxa said. "Of animals."

  "Animals? You're a butcher?"

  "Don't think so." With a deft swoop, Vara cut through the front of his shirt. "But if you don't hold still, I may turn into one."

  She worked with the firm sureness of someone used to holding down thrashing ewes and calves, cleaning, stitching, and bandaging his wounds. Gaits did some gasping and moaning, but to his credit, he didn't scream once. When it was done, he lay panting on the floor.

  "I owe you big." Raxa smacked Vara's solid shoulder, grinning at her. "And our boss will owe you much bigger."

  The woman grunted, cleaning her tools on a grimy cloth. "You mean to stay?"

  "Until he's recovered, if we can. Right now, though, I need to get back to the Marrigan. I'll be back by dawn."

  "Raxa!" Gaits sat up and grabbed the leg of her pants, delirious, bloody-handed. "Don't leave me!"

  "You might not be the only one who got hurt. Besides, we have to learn more about who did this."

  He held fast to her pants, pleading, eyes bulging. Vara rolled her eyes, got a wax tube from her kit, and trimmed off its end. As Gaits babbled on, she dumped milky fluid down his throat.

  "That'll snuff him like a candle," Vara said. "Now go see to your friends."

  "Thanks again. Vara, if anyone shows up while I'm out? Run and don't look back."

  Vara jerked a thumb at Gaits, who'd rolled onto his back, drooling. "What about him?"

  "You try to save him then, and you'll both die."

  Outside, Raxa took off at a jog. A column of smoke rose from within the west side of the Pridegate. To the east, the spire of the cathedral and the lump of the fortress watched over it all.

  She could smell the smoke from a mile away. Before leaving Vara's, she'd changed into one of the woman's spare shirts and left the looted swords in the back room. Raxa now looked like nothing more than an average lowlife d
rawn by the promise of a fiery spectacle.

  Outside the Marrigan, the attackers had vanished. They'd been replaced by a squadron of the city guard. They stood calmly and watched the building burn, passing around flasks of liquor.

  When Raxa couldn't stand it any longer, she walked toward the closest soldier. "What's going on?"

  The man gave her a glance that started out brief and quickly turned lingering. "Something wrong with your eyes? Someone set the flame to it."

  "Aren't you going to try to put it out?"

  "What for?" He spat in the street. "The cockroaches are finally being burned out of their hole."

  It was a moment before Raxa was able to reply. "Do you know who did this?"

  "Rival gang, I'd bet. But whoever it was? They deserve a feast."

  She had to walk away before her dagger found itself twitching from his jugular. She made a circuit around the building, eyes out for anyone wounded, or any clues as to who had brought the Marrigan to its ruin. There was nothing left but fluttering ash and drying blood.

  ~

  The Order had a protocol for an event like this: get out, get safe, and keep your fool head down until you knew what was going on.

  In the morning, Gaits looked pained and deathly pale, but he was lucid again. Vara's version of tea involved ten different weeds from her yard and only a sprinkling of good Galladese leaf, but that did nothing to stop Gaits from gulping down half a pitcher of it.

  He sat at the table, looking unusually delicate within his bandages. "Right now, everyone who made it out has scattered to the six winds. They're going to stay scattered until we know who hit us—and where we need to hit back."

  Raxa took a sip of lukewarm tea. It was bitter. Grassy. "Where do we start?"

  "In a situation like this, you always start with the most likely culprit. In this case, that's the Sealed Citadel."

  "For the theft of the Jerrelec Collection? I can buy that. What I can't buy is that they'd come after us wearing plain cloaks."

  "Why not? It would be easier to sneak up on us that way than to march out in the black and silver."

  "Yeah, but when the Citadel rolls in like that, it's to do more than crack a few skulls. They're there to send the message that if you step out of line, they'll use your guts to fertilize their crops. If it had been the Citadel, as soon as they made their attack, they would have shed their cloaks to show their colors. But when I went back last night, they had no idea who'd made the attack."

  "Unless that was a cunning trick to avoid retaliation." Gaits frowned. "But that would only make them look afraid of us. Let's say you're right. Who else could it have been?"

  "I don't know. A rival gang. Or maybe the nobles we've been robbing took up a collection to hire someone to get back their goods. Whatever it is, I picked up a few things that might point us in the right direction."

  As Gaits' eyebrows attempted to take flight, she went to the other room and picked up the last night's harvest. Back in the main room, she clunked the two swords down on the table, following this with the small clink of the black ring.

  "Pulled these off the guys who were trying to haul you away," she said. "What do you think?"

  His gaze shifted between the swords and the ring. He picked up the ring, holding it up to the light. "Do you recognize this?"

  "No. Should I?"

  "I don't, either. I'll send you to Telly, our jewelry man. He knows every gem cutter and sigil in the city. If anyone can identify the owner, it'll be him." Wincing, he set down the ring, picked up a sword, and drew it. "Rather plain. What were you hoping to do with this?"

  "Figure out who made it."

  "Worth a shot. For some projects, we've used a smith named Farben. He might know something about the swords' make."

  "I've got my own guy." Raxa stood. "No sense wasting time. Sit tight while I run these down."

  Before she left, Gaits penned a quick letter to Telly, folding it once. Raxa tucked it in her pocket, rolled the swords in one of Vara's spare blankets, and exited. It was a warm summer morning and the air smelled like the purple blooms of the gannet trees growing on every boulevard. To Raxa, it still smelled like smoke, blood, and steel.

  Telly the jeweler was on the way to Benner's. His was a small shop tucked into a quiet corner of the Emerald District. Telly was silver-haired with a small pointed mustache and eyebrows like inverted V's.

  He glanced over the letter Raxa brought him, then looked up at her. "Gaits all right?"

  "You heard about what happened to the Marrigan?"

  "Way I heard it, everyone who was there is currently at rest in the carneterium."

  "If you could trust rumor, every single one of us would be rich, dead, or pregnant."

  "True enough." Telly laid a black velvet cloth on his counter. "Let's have a look at it."

  Raxa gave him the ring. He held it up to the light, shining it back and forth, then produced a bulging glass lens affixed to a brass handle. Holding the lens over the ring, he muttered to himself, then set down the lens for another look with his bare eyes.

  Eventually, he shook his head. "Don't recognize it."

  "Seen anything like it?"

  "Yes, I've seen darkstone embedded in black iron before. As for the cut of the gem or the scrollwork on the shank here? Never."

  She swore under her breath. "Do you know any organizations that use rings similar to this?"

  "None." Telly rolled the ring around his palm. "Like me to keep this for you? Ask around?"

  "I'll see what I can turn up on my own. Thanks for your help."

  She pocketed the ring and headed to the Sharps. Benner was in back at his forge, banging away on a glowing rod. Seeing her, he held up a finger and motioned her back out front. A few minutes later, the clanging stopped. He entered the front room shirtless and sweating.

  "You again," he said. "What do you need this time? A dagger without a blade? Or maybe I can interest you in a helmet without a crown?"

  "Can you tell who made these?" She set the bundle on the counter and swept away the blanket.

  "Doubt it."

  "Can I pay you to try?"

  Benner curled his lip. "These swords have about as much artistry in them as a privy. Could have been forged anywhere. But if you don't mind tossing your money down a well, I'm happy to take it from you."

  He picked up one of the swords. He gave a detached, bored once-over to the scabbard, then unsheathed the blade with a whisper of leather. His eyes roved down the blade, which was straight and double-edged, and not especially long, short, wide, or thin. When his gaze reached the crossguard, he stopped cold.

  He turned the sword over, then set it down and unsheathed the other, examining its crossguard with a keen eye. He laughed through his nose.

  "What've you got?" Raxa said.

  Grasping the hilt, he extended the sword, indicating its guard. "See that?"

  She leaned in. The guard was your typical two prongs of steel, bent slightly upward, away from the bearer. Functional and unadorned. But where it crossed above the hilt, the shiny metal was marred with a small black stain. It was vaguely heart-shaped, but one lobe was larger than the other.

  "See what?" she said. "That stain?"

  Benner nodded. "Know what it is?"

  "The mark of the group that uses these?"

  "If it was official, it'd be tidier. No, I think it's a signature."

  "Of who? The smith?" Raxa said. Brenner nodded. Raxa tipped back her head. "You guys sign your weapons?"

  "Every artist puts their name on their work somewhere. Painters. Potters. Even stonemasons got a signature—they'll lay one specific stone upside down, say. Weaponsmiths got one, too. Some small, deliberate imperfection that marks it as yours. Nothing that weakens the weapon in any way, mind you. Just something to put your stamp on it."

  "So every smith's signature is unique. Do you recognize this one?"

  "Not offhand." Brenner smiled toothily. "But if you make it worth my while, I can find out."

&nb
sp; She haggled out a price, leaving him with one of the swords and taking the other with her. By then, the sun stood directly overhead. Hard to believe it had only been half a day since the burning of the Marrigan. She touched the hilt of the sword she'd taken from Gaits' attackers. Felt wrong to be wearing it. Like marrying your cousin's killer. But if she could use it to take them down…

  Like Gaits had said, the Order of the Alley was now homeless. Adrift on the six winds. But Kerreven hadn't structured the institution to be so fragile that it could be torn down in one night of terror. Itching for intel, Raxa headed for the One-Eyed Frog, a pier-side tavern designated for use by the Order if their members ever lost a central location.

  Beyond the Frog, women slogged through the mud on the edge of the bay, digging clams and barble shells, whose meat was highly prized, but which Raxa had always thought looked like enormous gray phalluses. She stepped inside the tavern. Compared to the dazzle of the streets and the sea, the interior was as black as a tomb.

  Someone grabbed her right arm. Her left hand darted for her dagger.

  "Raxa." The voice was Jenker's, Order muscle. "Keep your calm."

  He guided her to a back room and knocked a code into the closed door. It swung open, revealing three more Order grunts. Inside, Ackley sat at a table accompanied by a large jug of wine. He was their logistician, a lieutenant same as Gaits.

  "Raxa." He kicked out a chair. "Figured you'd be too slippery for the bastards."

  She seated herself. Jenker poured her a glass of wine. It was light and summery and tasted like apples. "Does anyone know who said bastards are?"

  "That remains a matter of high speculation. But I know this much about them: they're walking dead men."

  "Are we in shape to hit them back?"

  Ackley drained his mug. "We lost the Marrigan. And a lot of good people. But most of us weren't there last night. Most of those who were ran off as soon as they saw it was hopeless. Yet right now, it looks like we're utterly smashed, right? Good. That's exactly what we want them to think."

  Hearing this soothed Raxa better than any wine could. "What about Kerreven?"

  "No one knows."

  "He's the boss, Ackley. How can no one know if he's alive or dead?"