Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  So the owner would not take to his bed for the final hour of night. To do so he would have had to rouse the second occupant to help him from the chair. When he was satisfied the owner was asleep, the watcher backed away.

  An owl growled as he slipped through the shadows toward the rear door. The call sent a shiver of expectation down his spine. Old habits died hard. Raven and owl. Both birds—neither of them natural homers—were used by the Sull to bear messages over distance. It was an owl that had marked the beginning of his calling, and a raven call that had ended it. The last journey, that final absence, had begun with a raven perched in a tree.

  Aware that he was entering dangerous territory, the watcher closed down his thoughts. His choices were made. They could not be undone.

  Sliding into position against the rear wall, the watcher listened for signs of stirring. The first cock was crowing in the east, and that meant the house’s second occupant would be on the move. Like many who were tower-trained, she was a creature of routine. Up before dawn, fire to be lit, water to be boiled for the pot. The watcher glanced at the covered woodstack that lay on the opposite side of the door and drew his knife.

  The eastern sky was beginning to lighten when he heard a second-story door swing shut. Heavy, measured footfalls sounded as someone descended the stairs. It was her, the woman. You could hear her age in the hesitation between steps. When she reached the ground floor, thick rugs muffled her movements. Minutes passed. No lamps were lit. Tin chinked against tin. Footsteps clacked against tile. A series of bolts retorted in quick succession—Chunk. Chunk. Chunk—and the rear door juddered into motion.

  The watcher waited until he saw the woman’s booted foot alight on the top step before launching himself forward. Free hand clamping the woman’s forearm, he snapped the arm back and up, forcing it into a breakable V behind her back. His knife hand went straight for the throat.

  “Scream and you will die,” he murmured, aligning a foot of razor steel along the turkey skin that formed her jawline.

  The woman did not scream. She whispered two words.

  “Angus Lok.”

  His name. He did not acknowledge it. His mind was on the door—open and letting in cool drafts—and the exact placement of the knife. Before asking his first question he twisted her forearm into her back.

  She gave a little cry of fear and shock as the powerful reflex to step forward drove the blade against her throat.

  “No screaming,” he reminder her, his lips kissing her ear. She smelled old and sexless. A dried-up hag who stank of the meals she cooked and the bedpans she emptied. The half-filled sack that was her right buttock was pressing against his right thigh. Mary Gagg was her given name, though she preferred to be called Mistress Gannet, and she kept house for the man in the chair.

  “Where is my daughter?”

  The woman hesitated.

  Mistake. He drove the forearm into her back. This time he did not relax the pressure and the knife blade opened flesh.

  “None of your daughters are here. They’re all dead.” Her voice was surprisingly defiant for someone who was bleeding at the throat. She always had been a tough old bird. He remained calm as he repeated the question. “Where is my daughter?”

  “Which one? They’re all buried behind your house.”

  Angus Lok glanced at the door and then along the rear wall to the study window. No change in the lamplight, but that didn’t mean anything. “When did she come here?”

  The woman blew air through her nostrils with force. Blood sheeted across the blade. “She hasn’t come. No one has come. Search the house—you won’t find anything. They’re all dead.”

  Another twist of the forearm into the back. The blade was in her throat now, resting against the ribbed membrane of the trachea. “One more time. Where is she?”

  The woman measured her breaths; one for each word. “I. Don’t. Know.”

  He moved the knife inward. Distributed evenly, the force on the blade pressed but did not cut. “Last chance. Where is she?”

  She was scared now. He could feel the tension in her muscles and ligaments: a woman made of wire. Mentally, he relaxed. Here it was, the moment all torturers waited for, the instant when their subject perceived they weren’t getting out unhurt.

  There’s a world of hurt out there, Angus Lok thought as he maintained pressure on her throat. He’d seen it, he’d inflicted it, now he lived it. The woman didn’t know her luck. Live or die, it barely mattered. She still wouldn’t know her own luck.

  Even before she drew a breath to speak, Angus Lok expected the truth. This interrogation was done. He knew it, the woman knew it, and now the only question in her mind would be: Will I live? She hoped to—that’s where the truth came in—but she wasn’t a fool and knew she no longer dealt with reason.

  She inhaled at some cost to her throat tissue. “She never came here. Cant received a message ten days back—it concerned her.”

  He waited, but she had nothing else to tell him. He killed her swiftly and soundlessly and laid her body on the ground below the step. Dawn had broken. The world had broken. Light neither warmed nor illuminated Angus Lok as he turned his back on the corpse and entered the house.

  These rooms and hallways were known to him. This had been his waypoint, the first stop on his travels. Information, equipment and hard currency had always been available to him at this house. Its hospitality had been taken for granted. Three years ago, for a period of nineteen days, he had lived here, recovering from injuries he’d judged too revealing to be viewed by his family. Deceit laid upon deceit. He had thought of Heritas Cant, the house’s owner, as his friend. Now he knew differently. They weren’t friends, they were coconspirators. They conspired, he and Cant. Masters of the North, collectors of secrets, keepers of mysteries, instigators, saviors, judges, executioners, liars. The Brotherhood of the Long Watch, the Phage. Cant hadn’t been his friend, he’d been his source. That brilliant mind filtered information into perfectly separated particles. It doled out only what you needed, no more. This must be done. This must be watched. A threat is rising in the South.

  So where had been the warning? Your family is in danger.

  Five words that would have changed everything, yet Cant had never spoken them. He, who never missed anything, who had spies spying on spies, who possessed foreknowledge of every assassination and failed assassination in the Lake Keep, and who monitored every gate, tunnel, break in the wall and fortuitously placed ladder that offered entry into the city of Ille Glaive.

  Your family is in danger.

  He had known it—as sure as the gods were dead he had known it. Assassins the caliber of the Crouching Maiden were routinely monitored by the Phage. Kings and ruling houses had been brought down by the Maiden’s hand. She should never have been allowed within a hundred leagues of the farmhouse. Yet she had been allowed, and Darra Lok, Bess Lok and Maribel Lok had died by her hand.

  Wife. Daughters.

  Angus Lok breathed and did not think.

  He acted, because that was what the Phage had trained him to do. The rattle of a pot filled with water on the boil masked the sound of his footsteps down the darkened hall. The walls had been painted with lime and the soft porous finish had trapped a decade of smoke. An oblong-shaped paleness marked the absence of a framed painting. Angus Lok tried to recall the painting’s subject, but failed.

  When he reached the entrance to the study, he tensed his thigh muscles and kicked down the door.

  Surprise had been lost the instant he crossed the threshold into the house—you learned early in the Phage that sorcerers always warded their doors. Over the years he’d learned a few things for himself, though. One of them was: Violence creates its own surprise.

  The door smashed against the floor. Splinters shot across the room like darts. Dust ballooned from the rug. A screw dropped from one of the hinges, bounced across the room, and came to rest at the foot of the chair.

  Heritas Cant leaned forward and studied it. A pair of bul
b-headed walking sticks were propped against the side of his chair and he tapped the closest one lightly as he contemplated the screw and then the door it had anchored. “Half inch longer and the door would have held,” he said.

  Seen head-on, he was not a lovely sight. Muscle had withered. Tendons shortened by disuse had drawn in his limbs making him look like a man about to shiver or pray. There was a ball of bone behind his neck: collarbone, rib cage or spine? Angus did not know. Live through a wheel-breaking and you became a puzzle of bones. Spurs, bunions, extra knuckles, serrated ridges: anyone who looked long enough gave up trying to name the pieces. There were too many for a start. Put the puzzle back together again and you’d be left with spare parts. Beside, there was the greater puzzle of Heritas Cant: How did he manage to live?

  Angus slapped a heavily booted foot on the door and entered the room. He had detected a decline in Cant—an additional hollowing around the eyes, a thinning of the skin across the bridge of his nose—and it freed him of fear. Coming to rest in front of Cant’s chair, he looked down at the man he had known for thirty years.

  “Where is Cassy?” His voice was low and controlled. It was the first time he had spoken his eldest daughter’s name in twelve days. The sound of it filled him with something too reckless to be called hope.

  Heritas Cant’s head palsied in a chicken-pecking motion, yet his gaze remained level. His eyes were a deep bloody brown, and you could see the reckoning in them. When he spoke his voice was sharp. “No pleasantries, eh? Will you murder me in my chair, or drag me outside like Mistress Gannet?”

  It was bait and Angus knew better than to bite it. “You received a message ten days ago. Where is she?”

  Cant sighed thinly. He was dressed in a loose blue robe of goat wool belted with a strip of black silk. Underneath he wore a floor-length linen nightshirt that was slip-tied at the neck. His feet were shod in the kind of boiled wool slippers that were slipped on babies’ feet and called booties. They swung weightlessly as he pulled himself into an upright position in the chair. “Casilyn Lok, or someone matching her description, was seen selling a pendant at the thrice-day market in Salt Creek.”

  Salt Creek was southeast of the farm. Cassy had no knowledge of the terrain or the roads to the east and no reason to head anywhere but west to Ille Glaive. “It wasn’t her,” Angus said. “She would come here.” Both his wife and eldest daughter knew what to do in an emergency. Take the old sheep road to Ille Glaive. Enter the city at night by the northern gate and head straight for Cant. He will protect you from harm.

  The man they loved had lied to them.

  Cant slid his right hand beneath the silk belt. Arm muscles moved beneath his skin in a complex series of pulleys as he closed his fist around an object. With a gleam of triumph he tossed something shiny onto the floor.

  Angus knew several things then. First, that Heritas Cant was tracking his daughter—that was Cassy’s gold pendant on the floor—and second, that despite all stealth and precaution, Cant had been aware of his presence all along, probably from the very moment he had entered the city. The pendant had been ready inside his belt through the night.

  Squatting, Angus scooped up the chain and its strawberry-shaped pendant. A pretty fancy bought for a daughter on her sixteenth birthday. The metal was too brightly yellow to be named pure gold, but that had never bothered Cassy. “I love it, Father. It’s beautiful. What do the words say on the back?”

  Angus pushed the necklace into his weapon pouch. Standing, he appraised Cant. The broken man watched him from from the padded coffin of his chair. With difficulty he retied the silk belt as his waist. As always it was shock to see him use the dead hand. Cant’s left had been shattered and rebuilt. It looked like a hand, but did not function as a hand. All the small finger bones had fused, and the right hand had to do the fine work of forming and cinching the bow. The left was reduced to weight work; pinning the silk as the task was done. It had not always been that way. Cant, like most sorcerers, had been born severely left-handed. The drilling had altered him. As the bit corkscrewed his brain, severing connections and subducting gray matter, it had cleared a space for change. His orientation had shifted instantly, left to right. Colorblindness had been corrected; for the first time in his life he had been able to differentiate between red and green. An echo chamber, Cant called the hole dug by the drill. A place where thoughts could repeat infinitely, where tissue could expand in ways not normally permitted in nature, and where ideas might travel to destinations unintended by their original spark.

  Angus wondered what was moving in that brain now. What was coiling in readiness to repulse an attack? He said, “You knew they were in danger.”

  It was not a question. You could not interrogate a sorcerer.

  Cant executed a one-shouldered shrug. “Knew would be too strong a word.”

  There was no end to how much a man could despise himself, Angus decided. He should have kicked in Cant’s face for that remark. Even knowing what he did about sorcerers he should have tried. So what if Cant had whiplashed the strike right back at him, accelerating it with such fury that when it touched flesh it burned? Angus knew of no living person who could attack with sorcery, but was aware of a very small number who could protect themselves with it, spinning whatever was used against them into the mother-of-all-defenses. Cant was one such man. And he, Angus Lok, hesitated to try his chances against him. Much had been lost to him, yet the instinct for self-preservation was still there.

  Cant bowed his palsying head, acknowledging Angus’ thoughts as if they were spoken words. Yes, go ahead. Despise yourself.

  The broken man said, “The Maiden is subtle. We were aware she headed north to Ille Glaive, yet when she failed to enter the city we believed her business must lie farther north. With the clans.”

  Lies and truth always sounded identical leaving Cant’s mouth: interchangeable, a left and right hand. “You sent Darra no warning.”

  “Your wife was ever headstrong. I sent her a similar warning three years ago—which she ignored.”

  Crack. Angus kicked out the closest front leg of the chair. The leg exploded backward, and for a brief moment the seat base hung suspended in the air. Cant inhaled, and the minute shift in weight and pressure was enough to tip the corner of the seat and send it thudding against the floor.

  The chair cushions and their occupant slid forward. Cant flung out a wedge-shaped foot and jammed it into the rug. At the same time his right hand scooped up one of sticks that had fallen along with the chair. Using the stick as a lever he attempted to push himself back in the seat. Blood flushed his neck as he labored.

  Angus watched and felt nothing. So breaking a sorcerer’s chair did not count as an attack on a sorcerer. Or maybe it did, and Cant was playing possum. It didn’t matter either way. He was done here. More questions would just means more evasions. More lies. It might suit Cant to have Darra and the girls gone. More likely he fancied the Maiden’s head—and who better to take it than a Phage-trained man-hunter with a personal grievance? One thing was certain, you could not outthink him: that empty space in his brain was lined with traps.

  The stench of hot metal drifted into the room. In the kitchen, the unattended water vessel had boiled dry. Briefly Angus wondered if it was a lidded kettle or a pot. A kettle might explode. Fire might start.

  As Cant cleared his throat to speak, Angus Lok turned his back and walked to the door. He knew Cant—there’d be a carefully constructed expression that would have nothing to do with how he really felt. Fear was what would fill him now. A broken man, abandoned. An empty house.

  He would not call for help. The answer to the question How did he manage to live was simple. Pride.

  Angus left him to it. He had an assassin to hunt and kill. Death would not come swiftly for the Maiden. When the damned killed the damned the only language they understood was pain.

  As he stepped from the house into the gray light of day, Cant’s voice pushed against the small bones of his ears. It was a
cheap trick, performed at sideshows and spring fairs by anyone with half a claim on the old skills, yet it never failed to please the crowd. That voice in your ear, a whisper for you alone from a man standing fifty feet away on the opposite side of a screen.

  Cant’s whisper was a warning.

  “Descend too deeply, Angus Lok, and I will not be able to pull you back.”

  Angus Lok did not break a stride as he headed east.

  CHAPTER 3

  Do and Be Damned

  STANNIG BEADE LEFT the Hailhold in the same cart he’d arrived in, a six-axle wheelhouse with walls of poison pine. He was dressed in the same narrow-shouldered robe of polished pigskin collared with mink and shod in the same nailhead boots. His hair and beard had been freshly dyed, his nails clipped, and his skin unctioned with resin harvested from thousand-year pines that grew in Scarpe’s Armored Grove. His ceremonial chisel was mounted in his right fist, and it was a testament to Blackhail’s wire-pullers that you had to look very closely to see the steel thread holding the fingers in place. No such subtlety marked the stitching of his wounds. Thick black sutures tracked the length of his throat, disappearing beneath the glossy mink collar, cinching hardened crusts of skin.

  Raina Blackhail was relieved to see the last of them. As she stood on the paved court at the front of Blackhail’s roundhouse and watched the team of horses pull the wheelhouse south, she prayed they wouldn’t stop.

  Go, she wished.

  All the days of living with fear.

  Go.

  Sunlight flickered in and out of existence as bands of clouds passed overhead. It was close to midday; two hours later than planned. There’d been a problem with the wheelhouse—one of the rear axles had required remounting—and repair had caused delay. Raina had not known what to do with herself during those hours. She could not sit and wait. Walk? Ride? How could you go about your life when you feared being discovered for a murderer? In the end she had worked, taking herself off to the cattle shed to assist the spring calving. It was hard, bloody work and it had helped. A distressed cow in labor required one’s full attention. Two calves had been born, but only one had stood and suckled. Raina and the head dairyman, Vern Satchell, had been been lifting the second calf to encourage it to stand when the call had come from court.