‘When?’ Rubin asked.
The girl looked up again, her face as pale as milk. ‘Five days ago,’ she concluded.
So the emperor’s men were, in fact, the empress’s men. Why would Archange seek out Reeve Kerr Guillaume? She clearly knew nothing of his disappearance. And who was the strange visitor?
‘Did he give his name, the visitor?’ he asked Dorcas.
‘I expect so, sir, but no one told it to me.’
‘Baltazar will know.’ His father’s body servant for decades.
‘He’s gone.’
‘All the men have gone?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She told him the only ones left in the house were Rosa, who was simple, and Dorcas herself, who had no family and nowhere else to go.
Rubin looked towards the City, distant and dreaming in the spring afternoon. Only the Shield could be recognized at this distance, and it was merely a blur, a thumb-print. As always, answers he sought would be furnished by the rich and powerful, and in the place he had only just left. He sighed.
‘Are you returned for good, sir?’ the girl asked timidly.
He shook his head and stood. He took out the only coin he possessed – a gold imperial and three silvers – and gave them to her. If his father was dead, then she and Rosa were his responsibility.
‘Keep the doors and windows tight locked,’ he told her. ‘I’ll send—’ What would he send? ‘I will send word when I can. I will send instructions when I discover if my father lives.’
‘I don’t have my letters, sir,’ Dorcas said, eyes cast down. ‘Neither does Rosa.’
‘Then I will send a message with someone I trust,’ he told her. Who this mythical someone might be he had no idea.
He smiled at her encouragingly, then, guilt plucking at his heart, left her sitting on the bench in the thin sunlight as he began his return towards the City.
Back in the hospital he was startled out of his reminiscence when a voice asked him sharply, ‘Are you related to this man?’
He turned. The woman was barely shorter than him, dressed in the drab tunic of a hospital helper. Her grey eyes stared at him with distaste.
‘He is dying,’ Rubin said simply.
‘Are you related to him?’
‘No.’ Rubin flashed a smile, but his normally fathomless charm had no effect. The hospital helper glared at him impatiently.
Then she said, ‘These people are readying themselves to meet their gods. They are not here for your entertainment.’
Entertainment! Rubin felt anger rise. ‘I was trying to help,’ he said, as pleasantly as he could.
‘He does not know you are here. At best, you are only confusing him. Those who really want to help clean up blood and vomit and shit, wash the floors and labour in the laundry cleaning soiled bandages and sheets. You have been here all morning, I’m told. If you are not related to the man, if you are not prepared to get your fine hands dirty, then leave this place.’
Her grey eyes were sheened with dislike. Even after all he had been through, Rubin was unused to being disliked by anyone, particularly this woman with her sharp words and hostile eyes.
‘I am searching for a woman,’ he said, changing tack.
‘Ahh,’ she said, nodding, as if that explained everything.
‘An injured warrior,’ he said. ‘Fair-haired and—’
‘I have treated a thousand injured warriors,’ she interrupted briskly. ‘Many of them women. Many of them fair.’
‘She is skilled at tending the sick,’ he ploughed on. ‘I thought she might be working at a hospital.’
‘I’ll watch out for her. I will tell her, if I see her, that her friend is looking for her. I have little better to do with my day,’ she added with heavy sarcasm.
‘She has a badly injured arm,’ he added.
‘Injured?’
‘It was hurt in battle.’
‘Yes, I know what injured means,’ she replied irritably, ‘I’m a surgeon. It has not healed?’
‘No, she carries it strapped across her chest.’
For the first time she looked at him with interest.
‘Is she of the City?’
‘I don’t know.’ He understood the point of her question. City folk healed much more quickly than foreigners. But he was lying now, eager to be away from her probing gaze, wishing he had not met this woman, cursing the whim that had brought him to this hospital.
‘What is she called?’ she asked, her earlier hostility vanished. Her voice was deep and smoky and could be inviting in other circumstances, he guessed.
‘Dorcas,’ he told her, casually purloining the servant’s name. ‘And you are?’ he asked her, trying the smile again.
‘My name is Thekla Vincerus.’
Vincerus! He wondered what relation she was to Marcellus and to the new empress. He bit down the impulse to tell her his own name. After all, Vincerus trumped Guillaume every time in this City. But he could not resist asking, ‘Have you heard word of Marcellus?’
‘Marcellus is dead,’ she said.
They will tell you I am dead. He felt a ghostly chill as if Marcellus stood at his side once more. But not as a ghost, he amended. I know Marcellus lives.
‘So they tell me, but I pray it is not true,’ he said.
‘His death was witnessed,’ Thekla told him. He saw that, though her clothes were shapeless, they were made of good cotton, the stitches fine. She had dark curls which she pushed back impatiently with her wrist from time to time.
‘By whom?’ he asked, though he had heard the tale often enough.
‘By the soldier who killed him.’
‘Whose word can, of course, be trusted,’ he replied. ‘Assassins being generally trustworthy fellows.’
‘Why are you interested?’ she asked, but before he could answer she added, ‘What is your name?’
He was about to explain himself, for he had a treacherous impulse to ingratiate himself with this woman, but he remembered Marcellus’ other advice. Keep your head down and your opinions to yourself, young Rubin. ‘I was a soldier,’ he answered, ignoring her second question. ‘Marcellus was my lord. Is my lord. I truly believe he will return.’
She looked him up and down. ‘Why are you no longer a soldier? We need all the warriors we can find.’
‘Yet we have sent an army to aid those who were once our sworn enemies,’ he countered.
‘Marcus Rae Khan’s is a private army to do with as he wishes. It has always been thus. He chose to aid the Blues in their fight against the northern barbarians.’
‘Leaving the City poorly defended.’
She stared at him, but she had to accept his point. Then she smiled and he felt himself relax and he smiled in return.
‘Come here again at this time tomorrow,’ she told him, touching his arm reassuringly. ‘I will seek news of your Dorcas. I’m sure that between us we can find her.’
He nodded and smiled, as if well satisfied, and she walked away. Rubin took one last look at the old man, who was sleeping, then went out into the hot, humid afternoon, vowing to place as much distance as he could between Thekla Vincerus and himself. His resolve to find Valla, and quickly, hardened, for Thekla had only shown interest in the warrior when Rubin said she had an injured arm strapped across her body. Whatever interest the remaining Vincerus Family had in Valla was unlikely to be friendly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WATER WILL ALWAYS have its way eventually.
After centuries of being channelled and controlled, confined and crushed by the many layers of the ancient City, anonymous and unremembered by most of its people, the great river Menander had finally burst its restraints and now flowed in a deep channel through what had once been the Red Palace. In daylight it looked like a slow-moving sea of mud, still filled with the debris of the buildings it had destroyed. But at twilight it shone like molten pewter.
Rubin sat on the river bank, on the low wall of a ruined building, and watched the sun go down through a
haze of pink mist. These days mist lay on the centre of the City each evening and morning, and the remaining towers of the palace, poking above heaps of rubble, were muffled silhouettes in a murky rose-coloured world. On the river bank opposite Rubin he could just make out a broad flight of steps leading down to the muddy water. He wondered what part of the palace they had been in, for he was sure he had never seen such a wide staircase before.
Where he sat was once the barracks and stables of the Gulons, the century of the Thousand deployed primarily for the use of the emperor. The flood had washed away every wooden building, every saddle, bridle, horse, cat, rat and man in the place, leaving only the thin film of mud which enrobed most of this part of the City. First the rats had returned, and now the area was the haunt of beggars and the desperate and hopeless and the petty thieves who preyed on them. It was a dangerous place for a man alone with only a long knife to protect him, and Rubin planned to be well away before the sun touched the western horizon.
He was there to meet someone who claimed to have served with Valla. It was almost certainly a trap and Rubin had chosen an escape route and had employed a bodyguard who was sunk into the shadows of the ruins long before Rubin arrived at the meeting-point. The man was called Fenna. He was a veteran and crippled with pains in the arms and legs but he was still handy with a blade and, importantly, with a short bow. Rubin felt something bite his neck and he waved his hand to dissolve the cloud of tiny insects swirling around him. Within moments they regrouped for a new attack. Something plunked into the water at his feet, startling him, and he looked around then quickly stood as brown rats scattered. He still hated rats. Time was racing away, the sun was falling and his informant was nowhere in sight. He glanced towards where Fenna lay hidden, and shook his head.
‘Adolfus?’ a thin, high voice asked.
A sharp-featured child came sidling towards him along the river bank. He was in the rags of a beggar, muddy and grey, and Rubin could scarcely see him in the half-light. He stepped towards the child, who skittered away, wary as a crow. Rubin displayed empty hands.
‘Yes. I am.’
‘You looking for a soldier?’
‘An injured Warhound called Valla. I will pay for information.’
The boy held out a grubby paw and Rubin tossed a copper pente to him. He had plenty of coin, having finally been forced to sell the insignia given to him by Marcellus. The boy caught the coin deftly and pocketed it.
‘Barrabrick, ’e’s yer man.’
‘Who is he and where do I find him?’
Rubin held out another coin and the child sidled closer. Then the boy’s eyes flicked left and Rubin spun round, knife in hand. Two thugs were racing towards him out of the mist. One fell as an arrow punched through his cheek, and he slid in a tangle of limbs on the muddy shore. The other came on. Rubin threw himself to the ground as a second arrow thrummed over him and thunked into the second man’s stomach. He fell, yowling.
From his prone position Rubin managed to grab the boy’s ankle before he could flee. He stood up, clutching him by his skinny neck. The boy flailed about but he was weak and scrawny and Rubin thought the only thing to fear from him was a nasty bite.
‘Barrabrick? Where is he?’ He shook the child in the hope of shaking information out.
‘Leggo!’ the boy screamed as if he was being tortured. His teeth were grey and rotten and his blast of fetid breath caught Rubin in the face. Suddenly weary, he let the boy go and the urchin took to his heels and was out of sight in a heartbeat.
‘That was a waste of time,’ Rubin said to Fenna, who had come out of his hole. The injured men were clearly just petty thugs. They had made no effort to get away and were stunned with pain and moaning for help. Their cries redoubled as Fenna retrieved his valuable arrows, wrenching them out of their flesh.
‘We’d best be off soonest,’ the veteran said, ‘or the brat will return with friends. Or,’ he said, looking down at the two ruffians with an old soldier’s contempt, ‘these dainty boys’ tears will draw their mothers.’
They set off as fast as Fenna’s crippled legs would allow, away from the river to the comparative safety of the Paradise border where Rubin had a room in an inn.
‘Barrabrick,’ Fenna said, panting a little. ‘Sounds like a made-up name.’
‘Boys like that lie all the time,’ Rubin agreed. ‘But he’s unlikely to invent a name. He wouldn’t have the imagination. I’ll wager Barrabrick exists. I’ll ask around.’
Outside the sprawling inn Rubin handed Fenna a half silver for the night’s work and the promise of future help, and watched his rolling gait as the veteran ambled away.
The Bull and Bear was a respectable establishment, large and airy, and it was doing a roaring trade catering to the workers, many of them foreign, rebuilding the centre of the City. Rooms at the inn were at a premium and Rubin had paid a pretty pente for a few nights’ accommodation.
He took a cup of ale and a bowl of meat stew and settled in the corner of the inn, his hood over his head though it was a warm night. He ate quickly, mopping his bowl with a stack of the golden cornbread the tavern-owner’s wife made daily, then washing it down with good ale. He sat back and looked around, his anxieties subsiding a little as the food did its work. He knew most of the patrons. The central table was taken each night by the little Odrysian who was chief architect of the new buildings. His team of apprentices were well behaved and welcomed by the innkeeper.
‘Who builds a palace on a river?’ Rubin remembered the words of the man he had met in the sewers on the Day of Summoning. He had spoken to the architect and learned that the new palace would follow the line of the Menander but not intrude upon the river itself. Several new bridges had been planned – the first was nearly complete – linking north and south banks.
The future of the City seemed bright: its enemies were now its allies, and besides had left the City and marched away. Now the blockade had ended food and wine and supplies of metal and ores, coal and timber were flowing into the City. In the marketplaces you could already find oysters and spices, melons and figs, bolts of muslin and silk, cocoa and tobacco – for a price. The City had once been the centre of world trade for pearls and precious gems and, it seemed, would soon be so again. Technologies long denied its citizens were starting to filter in. The architect wore on his face a glass and wire contraption such as Rubin had first seen, to his quiet mirth, on the late General Dragonard, as did members of his team. And a welcome innovation was the glass lanterns, filled with oil and hung on the walls to give light and warmth – a huge improvement on the filthy old torches which had made a tavern like this gloomy within moments and uninhabitable soon after.
Rubin sat back in comfort, his stomach full and his mind relaxing. As he watched, three newcomers shouldered their way through the wide arched doorway, looked around as if seeking friends, then made their way to the crowded bar. Though dressed in civilian clothes they had the look of warriors, and none of them was young. Rubin hunched into the depths of his hood and scanned each face, suddenly on high alert. The first two men were unknown to him.
The third man was Arben Busch, his former commander with the Odrysian Seventeenth infantry at Needlewoman’s Notch.
‘Mavalla!’
Valla spun round so fast she nearly fell over. She blinked in the morning light, her head pounding.
‘You’re going the wrong way! Mavalla?’
She shook her head, trying to clear it, and Thorum watched her sympathetically. He was a former infantryman, a huge, freckled man with hands the size of hams and a bulky, muscled body which strained against the buttons of his jacket. His wife Wren, as small and as slender as he was stout, looked on with less patience.
One of the problems of living in an inn was that the ale was cheap and plentiful, and always there. After her duties ended each dawn she and her two comrades would make their way back to the Dragon’s Child, where they had attic rooms, and break their fast with ale and bread. Sometimes too much ale.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ Valla told them. To clear my head, she might have said. Her stomach was threatening to rebel this morning, so after just one cup of ale she was leaving her friends, to take in the dawn air. She should have told them what she was going to do, she realized muzzily. They always had her back, as she had theirs.
The three were in the employ of the engineer responsible for rebuilding the palace on the north bank of the Menander. A huge chamber was being created – for what they had no idea – floored with glorious lapis lazuli. The walls were rising speedily, but not so speedily that thieves did not try each night to climb into the new building and hack off pieces of the precious blue stone. Valla was one of a team of ex-soldiers protecting the floor and other items of value.
Thorum nodded, though his face showed concern. His wife briskly turned and walked back into the inn and, after a pause, he followed. Valla took a breath of dawn air, foul odours scoured away by the night breezes, and headed along the river bank.
When the cadre of elite warriors, the Thousand, was created three hundred years before there was a strict rule that only warriors with three names, one a Family name, could be promoted to its ranks. This directive had been eased over the centuries, so now it could admit any soldier with a record of heroism. Valla, formerly of the Twenty-second, had saved the lives of a group of her colleagues, including Quintus Flavius Kerr, the company commander, single-handedly defending them when ambushed in a ravine in the Mountains of the Moon. Inspired by her promotion to the Thousand, she had changed her name from Mavalla to Valla, putting as much distance as possible between the common soldier who had escaped a life of grim rigour in the orphanage and the warrior in her black and silver armour. But now, in her new role of sword for hire, she had reverted to her old name.
She followed the bank of the Menander until she came to a flight of wide marble steps and climbed them, making her way through the women who came down each morning to do their washing. At the top she paused and looked out over the City. The morning mist was thinning and high above it to the west she could see the distant cliffs of the Salient and she thought, as she always did, of Rubin. She wondered if he had returned there and was living a life of ease. She turned. To the east stood the Shield of Freedom, distant but sharp-edged and clear, the sole symbol of the might and power of the City now the Red Palace was destroyed.
The Immortal Throne (2016) Page 29
