Bloodheir

by Brian Ruckley

  “Come, then,” she said as she set off down the path that curled away through the bleak gardens. “What will you be teaching me today?”

  “We should start with the knife, I imagine. Always easy to carry a knife somewhere about you.”

  “A knife? That’ll not help me much if some White Owl’s trying to stick me with a spear, or some Inkallim’s chopping me up with a sword.”

  She thought she heard Coinach sigh then. It was a faint, resigned sound. It made her smile, and she almost reached out to pat him encouragingly on the back.

  “We’ll make it a big knife, lady,” he said. “The biggest we can find.”

  III

  Urik the Wardcaptain was drunk when Ammen Sharp killed him. Falling-down, stupid drunk. Ammen would have made the attempt anyway, for he had no reserves of patience to draw upon, no caution left to soften his urgent hunger for revenge. That luck should so smile on him as to lead Urik into a tavern and keep him there long enough to render him defenceless only made Ammen more certain of the rightness of his course.

  He had followed the Wardcaptain from the Guard House of Kolkyre’s Harbour ward. The foulness of Urik’s mood had been obvious from the first moment he stamped out into the evening. His path to the nearby tavern had been direct and determined. It was easy for Ammen to follow undetected. Sprawled flat on the roof, staring down at the door from which he expected his quarry to emerge, he had allowed himself to wonder briefly just how much trouble the Wardcaptain of the Guard was already in. His distress, his pressing need to drown it with ale, suggested that the bribes Urik had taken from Ammen’s father had come to light, or were about to do so. Perhaps the Guard itself was close to turning on him; to sending him to the headtaker. In the end it mattered not at all, since Ammen Sharp meant to save them the trouble.

  When the Wardcaptain came stumbling out onto the street below Ammen’s rooftop perch he managed only a few strides before he fell on his face, into a puddle. As soon as he saw that, Ammen slithered back from the edge of the roof and lowered himself into the alley at the side of the tavern. Inside, he was urging Urik to rise, to gather himself enough to move on. Late as the hour was, and dark the night, there was still too many people abroad here. Even now, he could hear laughter out in the street, some little band mocking Urik’s state. Ammen silently cursed whoever it was, hating them for interfering, for coming between him and the man who had killed his father. Soon enough the merry voices drifted away, and the only sounds he could hear were Urik coughing and spitting and the slopping of mud as he tried to rise.

  Ammen went out into the street. Urik was a stumbling shape reeling off down the long slope towards the sea. There was no sign of anyone else, but Ammen kept to the darkest places as he followed the Wardcaptain. It mattered greatly to him that he should not be caught, if only because he had other business to attend to once Urik was done with.

  After Ammen had acquired his little knife a year ago, his father had told him often how to kill a man, demonstrating with sharp movements, clenched fists. Not the heart: too well-guarded by ribs. The throat, perhaps, or the groin, where the blood would pour like a fountain. With a bigger blade, you could try to open a man’s guts or spear his liver, but Ammen’s knife was too small for him to be sure of such a result.

  The throat might be the best, the surest, now that Urik was too drunk to resist.

  Ammen had not had cause to use the knife in anger since that night a year ago in the darkened alley. For all his pride in bearing it, and in the manner of his winning it, he had never been one to seek out confrontation. His father had taught him that the best victory was the one gained before violence became necessary. In the long run, it was almost always better to use intimidation, bribery, deceit than your fists to bend a man to your will: their effects were, Ochan had always maintained, more reliable and long-lasting.

  Urik had come to a halt. He was leaning against a stall, his feet sliding out from under him in small increments so that he sank slowly towards the ground. Ammen Sharp crouched down in the doorway of a basket-maker’s shop. The darkness pooled there was deep enough to hide him from any casual eye.

  Glancing up and down the street, he saw no one. He could hear only distant voices; nothing of immediate concern. He watched Urik, wondering if the Wardcaptain had gone as far as he could go.

  Ochan’s insistence that violence was to be avoided had its exceptions, of course. Sometimes, Ammen had come to understand, there was no choice other than to unsheathe a blade or tighten a garrotte. If a man would not step aside, would not listen to reason or threat or the tempting song of coin, then his challenge must be answered in other ways. That was the nature of the world.

  “There’s none to look after us, boy,” Ochan the Cook had muttered to his son once, while they stood together before the body of a man who had just been strangled on his orders. “Some folk say that when there were Gods in the world, everything was all light and warmth and loving. Everyone was kind and noble, and everything was all orderly and peaceable. Doubt it myself, but even if it’s true that’s not the world as it is now. That’s not the world we live in.”

  He pointed at the sagging corpse in front of them. The man’s hands and feet had been tied to the chair, his head hooded with a burlap sack. The knotted rope was still taut around his livid neck.

  “We’re not much more than dogs on two feet, boy, and don’t you forget it. Sooner or later, you might have to fight for what you want. The ones who know how to fight come out on top, the ones who don’t .

  . . well, there. You can see. They end up tied to chairs with bags over their heads.”

  Now, edging out from his hiding place into the street, Ammen Sharp knew that the world did not even adhere to the simple rules that his father had set out. Sometimes the ones who knew how to fight ended up dead anyway, their heads smashed in on the floor of someone else’s warehouse. It was not only the Gods that had abandoned the world, but all sense, all justice. If even men such as Ochan, strong and powerful men who understood the pattern of things, could come to such an end, what was there left to believe in, to hope for? Not much. But there was revenge. Punishment.

  Ammen edged up behind Urik. The Wardcaptain was retching. In a moment or two he would probably be on his knees, emptying his stomach. His entire attention, drunken and dislocated as it might be, was focused on the rebelliousness of his own body. Ammen took one last look up and down the length of the street: empty. Silent. He grasped Urik’s greasy hair with his left hand, pulled the Wardcaptain’s head up and back and stabbed him in the side of the neck.

  Urik made a stupid, incoherent noise and tried to turn around. He was pawing the air. Ammen Sharp stabbed him again, and a made a couple of quick sawing motions with the blade. Blood was pulsing out in thick black splashes. That was enough to tell Ammen the wound would be fatal. He stamped hard on the back of Urik’s knee, knocking him down. The Guardsman twisted as he fell and landed on his back, staring vacantly up into Ammen’s face.

  “For Ochan the Cook,” Ammen hissed, and spat on the bridge of Urik’s nose. He jammed the knife in again, into the front of Urik’s throat. Part of him would have liked to stay, to watch the Wardcaptain’s last breaths rattling bloodily out, but the pleasure of savouring those moments did not outweigh the risk of being caught. It would be ill-disciplined, silly, to ruin everything now by being captured.

  Ammen Sharp ran this time. He went as fast as he could in the dark of the city’s narrow ways, following one of the possible routes he had plotted in his mind during those long hours of waiting on the tavern’s roof. He did not need the light of day, here amongst the alleys that had once been his father’s domain.

  Down, down towards the harbour he ran, cutting this way and that, back and forth amongst the crowded ramshackle houses of poor fishermen and shore-scavengers. The bolt-hole he had found for himself, an abandoned kiln in a workshop long ago ruined by fire, awaited him: safe and secret. And as he ran, his mind raced too. He was done with Urik, but a further task
remained to him. One more death was required in answer to what had happened in Polochain’s warehouse, and he already knew it would be far more difficult to contrive than Urik’s had been. It might even be beyond him; attempting it might achieve nothing but his own death. Nevertheless, he would try. It was the least his father deserved.

  So, somehow, Ammen Sharp would find a way to kill the Shadowhand.

  IV

  “I heard you had a disagreement with Aewult’s whore.” Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig had an unpleasant, bitter smile on his face as he spoke.

  Anyara avoided his gaze. “I thought she was a singer or something,” she said.

  “A dancer, once upon a time I think. Still, she loves his wealth, his glory, not him,” Roaric said with a shrug. “Makes her something of a whore, doesn’t it?”

  Lheanor’s son made Anyara uncomfortable. He meant well, she knew. He thought himself a friend and ally of her Blood, and no doubt she could trust him in that. His anger was so raw, though, his character so veined with hostility, that it coloured his every conversation. Anyara suspected that what she saw in him was a distorted reflection of herself as she might have been, had she not learned to hold back bitterness and sorrow by strength of will. She found it ugly.

  They rode together down towards the harbour. Coinach was, as always now, at Anyara’s side. Roaric’s Shield boasted half a dozen burly members, and they had taken the lead, barging a path through the crowds of Sea Street. A sealer’s boat had arrived that morning, carrying sick and exhausted survivors of the fall of Glasbridge. Their own flimsy vessel had been driven ashore on Il Anaron’s bleak northern coastline, after drifting, without stores of food or water, for a long time. Roaric meant to see to their care himself, and had invited Anyara to come with him.

  “Anyway, I was pleased to hear you had put her in her place,” the Bloodheir continued. “She imagines herself untouchable merely because she shares Aewult’s bed. As if such things counted for anything here.

  She’d do well to learn a little discretion.”

  “I was told Aewult is leaving, in any case,” said Anyara. She had no wish to dwell on her encounter with Ishbel. Even the memory of it made her angry, at both Ishbel and herself. It had been an act of weakness to so deliberately pick an argument with the woman.

  “It’s true,” Roaric said, and his pleasure was obvious. “The advance companies of his army have already marched. He’s out at the camp himself, trying to herd the rest into some kind of order. I’ve not seen such a mess of an army in a long time. At least Gryvan knows how to command a host. He didn’t see fit to share that wisdom with his heir, apparently.”

  “I don’t envy Taim Narran, when Aewult catches up with him.”

  Roaric laughed. “Oh, he can look after himself, your Captain. I’d count myself lucky if I was half the man Taim is. If it’s true, as I heard, that the Shadowhand has gone off on the trail of your brother, it’s him you should be concerned for.”

  “Orisian can take care of himself as well,” Anyara said, hoping it was true. The news that Mordyn Jerain had left at dawn, taking only a small company with him up the old Kyre road, had taken everyone by surprise. In truth, she suspected that Orisian would be distinctly unsettled should the Shadowhand catch up with him. “Some of my brother’s companions would probably enjoy the opportunity to tell the Chancellor a thing or two, anyway.”

  The Bloodheir looked at her questioningly, and Anyara smiled.

  “Yvane. I don’t think you’ve met her.”

  Sea Street was broader and longer than any thoroughfare Anyara knew from the Glas valley. There were several grand houses – the homes of rich merchants and Craftsmen, she guessed – but much of its length was lined by shops and yards and stables. Though the day was cold and the air damp, the street was busy. She might be imagining it, but Anyara thought she could detect a certain boisterousness about the crowds that she had not seen before. Nobody here would mourn the departure of the Haig army.

  One of the Tower’s maids had whispered to her as she prepared to ride out that, only last night, a Taral-Haig spearman who had got drunk in the wrong tavern had been badly beaten. He was found in an alleyway, battered, bruised and stripped naked. The maid had been simmering with excitement as she recounted the rumour.

  The quayside itself was, if anything, even busier than Sea Street. Seagulls swept in tight circles above, at least as noisy as the humans below. Anyara had never seen so many vessels: the whole length of the waterfront was lined with everything from fat cargo ships to tiny rowboats. Life and trade continued here in all their variety, no matter what shadows threatened. The crowds were such that people pressed close to the horses. Anyara could sense how uneasy Coinach was becoming. If he was ashamed to have been given the task of standing as shieldman to a woman, it did not show. He was, Anyara was coming to recognise, almost obsessively alert to the slightest hint – invariably imagined, as far as she was concerned

  – of threat to her.

  “The harbour master’s taken your cast-ashores into his own house,” Roaric told her. “They can’t stay there, though. He doesn’t have the space.”

  Anyara remembered that house from when she had arrived here with Orisian and the others: the first real warmth and welcome they had experienced since the night of Winterbirth.

  “You can almost smell the relief that we’re to see the back of Aewult and his army, can’t you?” said Roaric, gazing out over the lively crowds. “The news has gone around the city faster than a plague of sneezes.”

  “It’s good to see more happy faces,” Anyara agreed. “I don’t look forward to Aewult’s return, though.

  It seems unlikely that he’ll be any more pleasant once he’s got a victory behind him.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we’ll see much of him after the fighting’s done. He hates it here. He hates us. Even his desire to gloat, and to grind our faces into the dirt of his triumph, won’t be enough to keep him here.

  That’ll be a still happier day for us all, when we’re watching his back disappear off down the road to Vaymouth.”

  “He’ll be High Thane one day,” Anyara said distantly. “My brother’s master.”

  “Perhaps the Black Road will do us a favour and kill him,” Roaric said with a grim smile. “Failing that, we can only wish his father a long life. And that’s not something I’ve said before.”

  The people the harbour master had taken into his house were desperate folk: destitute, hungry, half of them sick. Anyara listened to their tales, and offered what comfort she could. She felt more anger than pity. Glasbridge had been a fine town, prosperous and bustling. The Black Road had ruined it, and all of the lives that centred upon it, just as they had ruined so much else. In seeing these shattered people, Anyara saw afresh all the loss and suffering that had been inflicted on her Blood; it was embodied in their thin frames, in their fearful, exhausted faces.

  She did not stay long. She promised them that they would be helped, and fed, and have the attention of healers. Roaric assured her they would be given shelter in Kolkyre’s northern quarter, where so many Lannis folk had already congregated. And then she left, taking her anger and distress away lest it should show itself too clearly. It would not help these people, she thought, to see that the sister of their Thane was just as helplessly distraught as they were.

  Coinach escorted her back along the harbour and up Sea Street. The Tower of Thrones stood ahead of them, like the last pillar of some immense edifice long ago crumbled away.

  “I’d hate to have to live all my life in a place like that,” Anyara said.

  Coinach looked up at the soaring tower, but said nothing.

  “It’s too old, too . . . unlike everything else,” Anyara went on. “It feels cold to me.”

  “You miss your own home,” Coinach said, turning his attention back to the crowds filling the street.

  “There’s nothing strange in that.”

  “I do miss it. I don’t know how much of a home it’ll be when I return, tho
ugh. The castle burned. My father – half the people I knew – won’t be there any more. Where’s your home?”

  “Now? I don’t know. Wherever you go, my lady. I’m your shieldman.”

  Anyara watched him for a moment or two. He did not look at her, but at the dozens of faces that they passed. His eyes ranged over the street scene like a hunter seeking birds in a field.

  “Where did you leave from when you marched south with Taim Narran, though?” she insisted.

  “Anduran.”

  “Were your family still there? When the Black Road came, I mean.”

  Coinach shook his head, gave her a short, inexpressive glance. “I have no family to speak of, lady. My father died when I was very young, drowned on the river. My mother, and my sister, died of the Heart Fever.”

  “Oh.”

  They rode a little further in silence, ascending the long, slow rise of Sea Street. Two men were arguing, facing each other over a broken barrel from which a slick of some dark liquid had spread. They jabbed fingers at each other, spat accusations. Nobody paid them any attention. Anyara took her right hand from the reins and flexed it. There was a bruise across her knuckles. Coinach had taken his task of training her seriously, and it had not been an easy or painless experience.

  “You’ll have to stop calling me ‘lady’,” Anyara murmured. “It doesn’t seem right, coming from someone who’s going to be beating bruises into me with a training blade.”

  In the dimming light of that dusk, Anyara was on Kolkyre’s northern wall, by the Skeil Gate, to see the last of Aewult nan Haig’s army disappearing up the road that would lead them to Kolglas and beyond.

  The long column of supply wagons had been out of sight for some time. Now only the rearguard – a couple of hundred mounted Taral-Haig spearmen – could be seen, and they would soon vanish into the distant gloom.