The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  Farther up the hill the town became less congested, the houses larger and better made. Trees were planted in stately avenues and banners flapped atop the spires of tall towers. The streets became wider, and Rol began to breathe more easily, though with his travel-worn clothes he was more remarked by the better-dressed strollers who passed him by. When he paused and looked back he was able to see the lights of the port strung out down the hillside and along the shore to the northwest and southeast. He realized that the hill and harbor made up only a portion of the entire town; it extended in haphazard fashion for thousands of yards along the coast with no order or design to its layout.

  Ascari was unwalled, as were all of the cities of the Seven Isles. They relied on their navies to keep out invaders. Grandfather had said that though the Isles might war amongst themselves from time to time, when an outsider threatened any of the seven he would find himself attacked by all. Not even Bionar had ever felt strong enough to assault the Isles by sea, though Arbionar had been a colony of hers once upon a time.

  The last building before the wooded summits of the nearer hills was a stone tower, although the term did not do justice to its gaunt massiveness. Unlike the rest of the town, it was unpainted and unadorned, constructed of massive courses of dark masonry, and it seemed to be built into the hill itself, with low wings extending back from the cylindrical base of the main structure. Not so much a dwelling as a fortress. A light shone high up in a window, and near the conical roof Rol thought he could make out an open space, a balcony of some kind. There was a huge double door a fathom from its foot, reached by a steep wooden staircase. Set within it, a smaller postern was framed in iron. Clambering up, Rol hammered on the wood of the postern with his fist, not allowing himself time to think or hesitate.

  He waited. Nothing. He stood unsure and afraid, hand on the hilt of his dirk. The tower seemed dead and empty despite the light he had glimpsed far up its flank.

  All this way he had come for this, and if it turned out to be a barren errand, what then would he do? The night seemed vast and empty and alien to him. He knew of nowhere else in the world he might go.

  The door scraped back on its jamb, startling him. A hooded figure stood holding a candle-lantern. He stepped back, and came close to falling off the stairway.

  A woman—no, a girl. She was not hooded but had a heavy mane of black hair that fell down on either side of her white face. Her eyes were so pale as to be almost colorless, with no whit of warmth to soften their hue. She stood silent, as severely beautiful as a marble statue.

  “I’m here to see Michal Psellos,” Rol stammered.

  The cold eyes looked him up and down, and then the door was slammed shut in his face.

  He stood gaping for a moment, and then began hammering on the door with his fist. “Open up!” When that failed he drew his dirk and pounded on the stout timbers with the pommel, suddenly furious.

  The door opened again. The hard white face was unchanged, but something glittered at the girl’s waist. Before it could register, Rol felt a hard punch to his midriff, and his legs turned to water. He fell to his knees. There was no pain, simply a sense of utter weakness. He had no idea what could have happened, even when he bowed his head and saw the dark stain on his shirt.

  He looked up again. The girl seemed to be studying him. Then her foot came up and kicked him in the chest. He toppled backwards, off the wooden stairway, and thumped to the earth six feet below. Lying on his back he looked up at the distant brilliance of the stars until, one by one, they went out.

  Four

  THE HOUSE OF

  MICHAL PSELLOS

  “YOU ARE A RARITY, MY YOUNG FRIEND; A LIFE WHICH sidled past the edge of Rowen’s blade. Perhaps she likes you.” A laugh, unpleasant to hear.

  Rol opened his eyes. His vision was filled by a face. A bearded man, hair dark and shiny as jet, the beard oiled and waxed into a curled point. His eyes were the color of a skua’s breast, and they changed even as Rol watched. His eyeteeth were made of fang-sharp silver. He smelled of perfume.

  The man withdrew. Rol tried to sit up and found that he was naked, bound hand and foot to the posts of a heavy iron bed. A dull pain burned relentlessly below his rib cage. It was stuffy, and the sweat trickling into his eyes blurred his vision. He was in a candlelit stone room, windowless, circular, the ceiling upheld by heavy beams. More, he could not lift his head to see, but he thought he glimpsed a dark shape sitting at the corner of his eye, close to the bed. The girl? As he tried to twist his neck to look, the pain turned his bowels to water and left his dry mouth in a hiss. He closed his eyes until it passed.

  “I must go to work,” a low voice said, a woman’s.

  “Very well.” It was the bearded man. “But be back after the middle hour—this fellow will need someone to watch over him, and I have appointments to keep.” No answer but the sound of a door closing softly.

  “Look at me,” the man’s voice said sharply.

  Rol obeyed him. The man filled his vision again. The colors swirled in his eyes, like oil on water.

  “You are Ardisan’s kin—I would know that countenance anywhere. Perhaps it made Rowen turn her blade aside. She senses these things too. Hold still.”

  Something hot and moist was pressed against his sternum. A tingling spread from it, a warmth that invaded Rol’s head and made him dizzy as if he were inhaling smoke.

  “Well, you’ll live, which proves my point. The Blood runs in you—but how true, I wonder?” Here the man raised a vial of scarlet liquid in the candlelight and studied it intently. Seeing Rol’s bleary puzzlement, he smiled, his silver fangs catching the light in turn. “Call it payment, if you will. If it’s as pure as I think, it’ll keep us in bread and oil for many a day.”

  “Psellos?” Rol croaked.

  The man bowed. “Indeed. Ardisan is dead at last, I take it. Well, he was a worthy fellow in his time, but he was a fool to bury himself out in the middle of nowhere as he did. We conceal ourselves more easily the more cattle we have around us.”

  He leaned close over Rol as though recording his features. “Yes—I see your mother in you.” He glanced back at the door. “She was a beauty too.”

  “You knew my mother!”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “How? How could—” Rol tried to raise an arm but failed. “Why am I bound?” he demanded.

  “One must be cautious. You could be anything—a doppelganger out of Kull knocking on my door.” And he gestured with one long-fingered hand to a shelf near the ceiling. It was lined with jars, and in each floated a face, a severed head in which the eyes glared brightly. One blinked, and its mouth opened in a soundless snarl, making Rol flinch.

  “But I can loose you now, I think. Don’t try to sit up—you must allow the poultice to do its work.” He began untying the knots that held Rol to the bed. “They came for him in the end, did they, the local cattle?”

  “They burned our home. And Morin and Ayd they killed too.”

  Psellos looked up at that. “I would not worry overmuch about golems, useful though they are. Your grandfather had a way with them, it’s true. My talents lie elsewhere.”

  The poultice felt as though it were sinking through Rol’s chest, dragging his ribs down to meet his backbone. He grimaced. “Talents? I understand none of this. What did they kill him for—why did they hate us so? How are we different?”

  Psellos’s strange eyes went dark. “That’s for another time, I think, when your guts have stopped leaking out of your belly. Rest for now—and do not try to rise or even raise your head. Do not touch the poultice.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “You cannot drink, not yet.”

  “Why did she attack me—that girl?”

  Psellos threw back his head and laughed. As he did, Rol could have sworn that for a moment a sharp, finger-thin tongue whipped out from between his lips. It was black.

  “Ask her, if you dare. But if she had meant you to be dead, you can be sure you wou
ld be, blood of Orr or no. Sleep now, my bonny boy, and be thankful I came home when I did.”

  He snapped his fingers with a crack, and Rol slept.

  Movement on his chest woke him, something warm and heavy slithering there. Frozen by fear, he felt the thing crawl off him, plump onto the bed, and then land with a slap on the floor. His shaking hand felt the place where the girl had stabbed him. It was covered in some manner of slime, and there was a ridged scar, but the wound had closed. He felt clear-headed, incredibly thirsty. The room was dark, save for the guttering stump of a single tallow candle by the bed.

  Rol sat up, and immediately a shadow came out of the corner and a cool hand shoved hard against his breastbone, pushing him supine once more. It was the girl, Rowen. He felt his heart thudding under her palm as she held him down. Her hair was hanging dark as a raven’s wing over one eye; the other seemed almost to take on the yellow hue of the candlelight. She was older than he had thought, not a girl but a full-grown woman, his senior by ten years at least. There were shadows under her eyes, fine lines running from the corners of her nose to her mouth. Her lips were dark as a bruise, and on the back of the hand that pinioned him, blue veins stood out stark against the pale skin. Rol was strong for his age, his muscles hardened by work at sea and on land, but he realized that the strength in her slim arm was greater than his own.

  All the same, she seemed to him one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

  She took her hand away slowly, as if expecting him to spring up again. Her eyes never left his face. She reached at the side of the bed without looking and took hold of a clay cup. This she put to his lips and tilted backwards. Rol drank cool water greedily, some of it trickling down his chin and neck.

  “Thank you,” he gasped.

  The girl said nothing, but laying aside the cup, she bent over his chest and examined the place where she had wounded him. Her hair brushed Rol’s ribs and stomach, glided across his navel. He felt the cool fingers on his belly for a moment, before she straightened again.

  “Get up,” she said, turning away. “Get dressed.”

  He had become erect while she had been examining him, but she had given no sign. He turned his back on her, cheeks burning, and pulled on his clothes. They lay over a stool by the bed, and had been washed and their rents mended. A needle and thread sat to one side. Rol wondered if the neat stitching was his companion’s work, but thought it better not to ask.

  Now that he could see the room upright, he saw that it was larger than he had supposed, with several doors and alcoves set about the walls. Many shelves and bookcases stood about, all heavy with manuscripts, jars, pots, and leather-bound grimoires as thick as a man’s bicep. A few small round tables sat here and there, and a yard-high brazier red with burning charcoal heated the place well enough to bring the sweat popping out on Rol’s forehead.

  On one empty part of the wall, heavy iron rings had been set into the stone, and from these shackles hung.

  The girl drew back a chair from one of the tables and gestured for him to sit. There was a full pitcher of water thereon, bread, apples, cold mutton, and pickles. Rol wolfed it down with a will. He could barely remember the last time he had eaten a decent meal. Ayd would have scolded him for his table manners, but Ayd was dead now—and what manner of thing had she been anyway?

  He looked at the girl, Rowen, with a new resolve. If there were princesses and queens in the world, he thought, they must look like her. But he had not forgotten the cold violence he had suffered at her hands.

  “Who are you?” he asked, emboldened by the good food in his stomach and the close intimacy of the chamber.

  “Who are you?” she asked in her turn, raising an eyebrow.

  “I . . .” He hesitated. “I suppose I don’t know, not anymore.”

  She shrugged as though that were answer enough, and taking a poniard from the scabbard at her waist began sharpening it deliberately with a small whetstone.

  “Why did you attack me?”

  She pointed the blade at his face. “You had a knife in your hand and were hammering at Psellos’s door. That is enough, usually. In Ascari the questions come afterward.”

  “Were you trying to kill me?”

  She paused in her work. “Yes.”

  “Psellos doesn’t think so.”

  “He may think what he likes.”

  “Are you his daughter, or his wife?”

  The unsettling eyes stabbed out at him, as cold and hostile as those of a spitting cat.

  “No wife. No kin. I work for him.”

  “What do you do?”

  She actually smiled, but there was no humor in it, a bitterness rather. “Whatever I have to.”

  “Psellos, then.” The exasperation was fraying Rol’s voice. “What kind of man is he? A man down on the wharves warned me against him. How did he know my grandfather, my mother?” The last words were a sobbing croak.

  Rowen regarded him with mild interest. “I dare say you’ll find out, in time.”

  After that Rol gave up on her. He rose from the rags of his meal and set about exploring the chamber. He was not altogether surprised when he found that every door leading out of it was locked. His dirk was gone, and there was nothing he could see in the place that might serve as a weapon. He did not relish the thought of tackling the girl bare-handed. Rubbing his chest, he leafed through the tattered books on the shelves. He could read, after a fashion, but the words within them were in languages he did not know, illustrated with arcane engravings. There was an unclean feel to some of the tomes, which made him wipe his fingers on his breeches after he had laid them back down.

  Hours passed. Rowen sat watching him, patient and untiring as a stone. Rol wondered what time it was—surely the winter dawn could not be far off? He was exhausted. Finally he gave his companion a last glare, and fell asleep leaning against the wall. He disliked the idea of the bed with its ropes.

  He was on the bed when he awoke, nonetheless. Sunlight streamed into the room through windows that had been hidden behind drapes the night before. The charcoal in the brazier had sunk into ash. Psellos and Rowen were standing by it with their backs to him.

  “He’s full-blooded,” Psellos was saying. “I don’t know how it can be, but old Grayven is never wrong. I knew Amerie must have cuckolded the fool, for all her protestations of love.”

  “Who was the father, then?” Rowen asked.

  “You have me there. But I mean to find out, one way or another. In the meantime, he’ll stay.”

  “Another stray to bleed dry?”

  “No—he’s much more than that.” Here Psellos ran a hand up into the black mane of Rowen’s hair. Grasping a fistful, he drew her head back sharply and set his mouth on hers. When he released her, there were red teethmarks about her dark lips. He held out his other hand, and without a word she placed something in it. A clink of coin. Psellos smiled into her pale face, rattled the gift in his palm. “A good night. You got the book?”

  “Yes. Now I must change. I stink.”

  “I like it when you stink,” he said, grinning. She tugged free, leaving black hairs in his fingers. Psellos’s face twisted with mock contrition. “Everything must have a price, Rowen. It is the way of the world.”

  “I know. You taught me well.” She left the room without a backward glance.

  Psellos stood shaking his head. Smiling still. Then he pocketed his coinage and, turning, kicked the bed. “Up.”

  Rol sat up in the bed.

  “Come. If you are to stay here, then we must make you useful.”

  The Tower was even more spacious than it looked from without. Rol followed his host up a series of corkscrew stairs until they came out on a wide-open space, the balcony he had glimpsed the night before. Morning had come. They were several hundred feet above the level of the sea here, and in the bright winter sunlight all of Ascari could be seen spread below, and beyond it the blue vastness of the Wrywind extending to the horizon. They were looking east, toward Dennifrey,
and a life that already seemed part of the vanished past.

  “Rol, is it?” Psellos asked casually. “Well, that will do. I am your master now, Rol. You may stay here under my tutelage as Rowen has, but in return I expect perfect obedience.”

  “My boat—”

  “Sold this morning. It will help to defray your expenses.”

  Outraged into silence, Rol took a moment to master his voice. “What if I do not wish to stay?”

  “Then you will never have your questions answered.”

  He glared at the man. And Psellos laughed.

  “You dislike me. Good. That’s well enough for a beginning.”

  Thus the education began.

  It was enough, for the moment, that he had stopped running. His mind accepted Psellos’s patronage the more easily because he had nothing of familiarity left in the world, not one face he knew. It was easier to convince himself that there was no alternative. And so he submitted.

  But he was not admitted to any degree of intimacy. In fact, Rol was at first little better than a scullion, set to all the menial tasks within the Tower that Psellos’s whim dictated. Perhaps this was meant to humble him, but he had been raised to accept hard work without a murmur. So he scrubbed floors and gutted fish and cleared hearths equably enough, and all the while he watched and listened and learned the running of the Tower household.

  It was a large establishment, for all that the Tower itself presented an austere frontage to the world. Psellos, Rol quickly discovered, was a man of wealth and influence, and he kept a certain style. To do so, he must needs surround himself with a small army of attendants and underlings.

  There was the cook, Gibble—a short, rotund fellow with a bald pate and ferocious eyebrows. He was absolute master in the subterranean chambers that constituted the kitchens, but lived in mortal fear of his employer. He commanded a platoon of spry street urchins who shopped or stole for him according to the dictates of the day’s menu. When the last course of the night was taken up to the Master’s chambers, Gibble would sink back into a wide-bottomed carver and apply himself to the bottle with a dedication that was awesome to behold, while his stunted underlings gorged themselves on the table’s leftovers as recompense for their errand-running.