Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
The Finest in Fantasy from MICHELLE WEST:
The House War:
THE HIDDEN CITY (Book One)
CITY OF NIGHT (Book Two)
The Sun Sword:
THE BROKEN CROWN (Book One)
THE UNCROWNED KING (Book Two)
THE SHINING COURT (Book Three)
SEA OF SORROWS (Book Four)
THE RIVEN SHIELD (Book Five)
THE SUN SWORD (Book Six)
The Sacred Hunt:
HUNTER’S OATH (Book One)
HUNTER’S DEATH (Book Two)
Copyright © 2010 by Michelle Sagara.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1499.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Inter-net or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First Printing February 2010
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
S.A.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18506-3
http://us.penguingroup.com
This is for Gordon and Katri West.
Even if I could choose my in-laws, I don’t think I would have
had the temerity or self-confidence to ask them to consider
being mine; they came with Thomas, for which I will be eternally grateful.
Acknowledgments
The care and feeding of a writer—or at least of this one—is often a thankless job. To ameliorate that in some small way, because I am enormously grateful for those in my life who do, I’d like to thank them.
I have a small house and a large extended family, and one of my youngest son’s friends told his mother “so many people live there!”. While this is not actually true, it might as well be. My mother and father, Ken and Tami Sagara, my husband, Thomas West, my two sons, Ross and Daniel, hold the fort. They shop, clean, and eat around me when I’m writing, which means I can write. They also listen to me fret and complain, but I’d probably do that anyway. Thomas first-reads as well.
My extended family: John & Kristen Chew, and their two sons, Jamie and Liam, bring the world to the writer when the writer is being a deadline-obsessed hermit. They frequently accompany my brother and his wife, and there’s something comforting about the sound of the Wii in the living room, because it means someone’s having fun.
My very extended family: Terry Pearson, who reads everything in the roughest possible form any person but me will ever see it in, and the denizens of both the Michelle West Yahoo group and my livejournal, who patiently endure the long gaps in my on-line participation. I know that some writers need to interact and be social; it energizes them. It energizes me, too—but on occasion it’s the type of energy that makes it harder for me to sit still in front of a keyboard, and when I realize that’s happening, I do shut down a bit.
When the book is finished, I send it to my editor, Sheila Gilbert. It really is like sending a child to their cousin’s after all these years; in as much as a business that weds creativity can be, DAW is part of my family. I felt that way seeing Sheila, Marsha, and Betsy (Wollheim) at the Worldcon in Montreal, and I felt that way about those who couldn’t make it, like Debra Euler. I also want to mention Joshua Starr who is the very helpful person who answers the phone when I call these days. It is a blessing to be able to send the book that I worked on for over a year to them.
Prologue
11th of Wittan, 409 AA Averalaan
WATER LAPPED AGAINST THE CURVED SIDES of the ships that lined the docks in the harbor overseen by the Port Authority. This gentle but persistent slap of sea against bow wasn’t always silent—but at the height of day in the summer, other noises, louder and more insistent, held sway.
Cursing, some genial, some jovial, but most ill- tempered, issued forth in a dozen different languages from the mouths of sailors as they lowered gangplanks into crowds and maneuvered cargo hoisted by nets or hooks from the hidden, but cavernous, ships’ holds. Men in clothing fine enough to distinguish them from these sailors were little better in their choice of words, and these, too, arms free of burden, came streaming down the planks, anxious for solid ground beneath their feet.
The breeze that came from the sea was strong enough to kick flags from their limp positions at the top of masts, and these flags, higher by far than the roofs of the tallest buildings found in the Free Towns, made the port look like an odd, floating city, or perhaps a small empire, for each ship was rumored to be its own small nation, and laws on the deck were the captain’s laws. Three ships east, flag flying high, was the full sun against an azure that suggested sky; beside it, in purple and gray, a merchant ship declared its allegiance. The ships themselves differed in size and style, just as manors might; they shared the long, long stretch of dock because there was no other way to deliver their goods to the largest city in the Empire.
Only in port were the men governed by the laws of the Empire of Essalieyan, and the Port Authority had volumes of just such laws for visitors and those new to the City itself to peruse. A reminder, or a warning, they sat behind the harried clerks who looked at manifests, ordered checks of cargoes and containers, and made notes for the purposes of the magisterial guards whose duty it was to protect the interests of the Kings—or more likely their taxes—on this side of the water.
These clerks could be heard speaking in any number of languages, and the words that came most frequently to the lips of tired sailors never crossed theirs. They could be curt, they could be cutting, and they could—with ease—see through a person as if they had ceased to exist at all. But no one who wore the colors of the Port Authority—an austere teal with a hint of silver—was both crude and employed; they dispensed law in the fiefdom of the Port Authority as if they were nobles. Harried, overworked nobles in this season.
They could also offer answers to a person who asked when a ship was expected to dock.
It was from one such man that the pale boy with the very unusual hair had received such information, and he had come every day to the port at dawn, finding—somehow—a space in which to stand and observe that did not often put him in the way of busy, or grouchy, men.
Terrick Dumarr was the name of the clerk who had been called to dispense the information. He was, as clerks went, an imposing figure: Six feet, four inches in height, and some very large number of inches around, none of which were fat. He was a far cry from young, but he had weathered age with the spare grace that would not be out of place in the Commanders of the Kings’ armies; nor would he have looked out of place had he been standing by the far wall in chain mail with a sword at his side.
He was not, however, relegated to the far wall, much as he might have wished otherwise. He, like the other men and women, had responsibilities that could somehow be reduced to the sheaf of papers that littered the three desks behind his broad back. But if he was expected to work, he was also expected to eat, and he waited for the sonorous horns to sound out the hour.
He glanced around the large room. Support beams were placed throughout its length, but no walls divided the room, the exception being a single very thin wall, with its obvious windows, that served to separate the employees of the Port Authority from men so impatient or temperamental that they might consider violence at the receipt of news little to their liking.
Instead, small fences with velvet ropes that had both faded and frayed over time were erected throughout, an obstacle course for those who had business with the Authority. Some of these, well-dressed and reprehensibly well spoken, would journey, manifests signed and sealed, from the Port Authority to its sister in suffering, the Merchant Authority, where most of the commerce in the Empire was controlled.
But it was not these men, in various poses of irritation, boredom, or exhaustion, that demanded Terrick’s attention; it was the boy.
Three days, Terrick thought, as he caught sight of the boy’s hair; the rest of the boy, who was not yet of any notable size, could be lost in the crowd, but his hair, its pale locks rising in a spiral, could not. He was perhaps fourteen, if Terrick judged correctly, perhaps younger, and it was clear that the worn pack he carried upon his shoulders—at all times—contained the whole of his previous life, whatever that had been.
But he was quiet, this one, and when he had chosen to address the first clerk he could see, he had spoken in Rendish. The clerk—Barriston—was barely up to the task of identifying the language, but had he been unable to distinguish it at all, he would have been employed elsewhere, which would have been a blessing.
Instead, with his small scrap of knowledge a bandage over the gaping wound of his ignorance, he had bid the boy remain, and he had come to the area in which the Port Authority’s employees took a moment of rest. “Terrick,” he’d said, tapping the man smartly on the shoulder, “I have one of your barbarians outside.”
Terrick, prevented from strangling Barriston by the necessity of both eating and breathing—the Authority guards frowned on what the Empire would have considered murder—had merely nodded. In any other circumstance he would have taken his time, but whoever the visitor was, he’d spoken to Barriston for long enough.
“He’s young,” Barriston felt the need to add, “and if he were Imperial, I’d give him the lecture on running away to join the merchant ships.” Meaning, of course, that it was up to Terrick to deliver that lecture—in the appropriate language.
But when Terrick emerged from the relative privacy of the back offices to the wide and open crowd that comprised the Authority in its busiest season, he stopped walking, and received, as a reward for this moment of surprise, a back full of Barriston, scurrying head down to his wicket. Terrick mumbled something which Barriston heard as an apology; the large man didn’t bother to correct this. Instead, he looked at the boy, his wide, gray eyes unblinking. Almost self-consciously, he straightened his back, lifting his shoulders and assuming every single inch of the height so many Imperial citizens found so interesting.
Barriston regained his place behind his own wicket. The boy was then directed to Terrick, who pulled a stool up to one of the wickets that had been closed—for the half hour—for lunch. It had taken the boy five minutes to reach Terrick, and during that time, Terrick had watched in silence, evaluating.
The boy wore an old cloak that trailed a few inches off the ground; it was sturdy, the color faded to a serviceable gray. His boots were a shade of brown that suggested both age and dust, but they were whole, although the laces were knotted in places, suggesting wear. He also wore a short sword, which he never touched; it hung on his left side, implying that he was right-handed. He was young for its weight, by Imperial standards—Terrick thought him fourteen, with a margin for error of two years on either side. There was nothing about the boy to suggest affluence, and indeed his weight suggested its opposite—but all of these things paled into insignificance beside the fact of his hair.
It was so pale a platinum as to be white, and it had been pulled from face and neck, greased, and twined around hidden wire. A spiral. It was dusty, yes, as the boy was—but it was unmistakable.
The boy was not injured; he didn’t limp; nor did he cringe when people attempted to cut ahead of him in their impatience. He chose merely to turn sideways and slip out of their way, ignoring their glares or their angry words; he never chose to confront.
And when he stopped, at last, in front of Terrick’s wicket, the gray circles under his eyes seemed to occupy half of his face. Terrick nodded at the boy, and the boy grunted back.
“I’ve come,” the boy said in Rendish, “for the Ice Wolf. I was told you would know when it was due in port.” He paused, and then added, “Or if.”
Terrick nodded, and reached for the paper beside his elbow, as if it contained information that he didn’t readily have. He leafed through the paper, the Essalieyanese words blurring until they were odd scratches, as they had once been in his youth. “It’s due in three days, but those are sailing days; it may be delayed by a day or two.”
“Which dock?”
“Seven,” he replied.
“Three days.”
Terrick nodded. He felt, rather than saw, Barriston’s harried glare. He even opened his mouth to begin the lecture one generally offered the young, but his jaw snapped shut before the words escaped. The boy wasn’t running. “Three days,” he said quietly. He did not ask the boy where he was staying. It didn’t matter. He would be back, and Terrick guessed that he would wait by the docks, or as close as was safe, until the Ice Wolf made port, cast rope, and laid down gangplank.
Nor was he wrong. For each of two days, the boy had come; he was on the docks before the sun touched the horizon, and he lingered until the moon could be seen, bright and clear, in the humidity of the Averalaan summer.
On the third day, seeing him in the crowd, Terrick lifted his head; when the horns lowed the start of lunch, Terrick left his wicket, but instead of retreating to the relative quiet of the desks that lined the back wall, he braved the crowd. Not that the crowd was ever that thick when he chose to risk it; like the sea over which the Port Authority played Baron, it parted when he dove in.
The boy looked up as he approached.
“Come eat with me,” he said, surprising them both. “I’ve food, and there’s not as many of these damn people in the back. I’d be glad of the company.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed slightly; he had some pride left in him. But he was not suspicious, and in the end, he nodded and followed where Terrick led.
Terrick did, in fact, have extra food. A whole loaf, thick smoked meat, a round, soft cheese in the thin cotton cloth that gave it shape, and cherries. He had wine, but offered the boy water instead. He nodded at a chair, which the boy pulled toward the desk.
“Boy,” he said, while he tore the loaf in two roughly equal halves, “why are you looking for the Ice Wolf? You’re far from home, if you think you belong on its decks.” He paused, ripping the two halves in half, and added, “I’m called Terrick in these parts.”
“I’m called Angel,” the boy replied.
Not a Rendish name. Not even close. Terrick recognized it as an Imperial word, although he couldn’t recall what it meant. “Angel?”
“My mother chose it; my father accepted it. I was born in the Empire,” he added. It wasn’t a precise description, because the Empire was very, very large. But Terrick understood that it meant the boy was not born in the North, and nodded.
“A wise man doesn’t stand between a mother and her son,” Terrick replied.
A glimmer of a smile touched the boy’s lips. It was there and gone again, and Terrick, with decades of life and observation behind him,
knew that the boy’s father was dead. And likely the mother as well.
But the boy surprised him. “My father used to say that.”
“Wise man,” Terrick replied, with a wry smile. His glance strayed to the boy’s hair. And away. Years of working at the Port Authority had taught him how to talk, how to listen, and how to ask questions in a variety of tones—but there was no easy way to ask the question that hovered behind his lips. No way of knowing whether or not it would give offense. In the North, it would. But the boy was not born to the snow and the brief, brief summer.
“Do you speak Weston?”
Angel nodded. His mouth was dusted with bread crumbs, and he chewed slowly and methodically. When he spoke again, he abandoned Rendish, and instead adopted the informal and slightly accented Common that came from the West. “I heard what the other man said,” he told Terrick softly. “Barbarian.”
“Why did you not ask your question in the Imperial tongue?”
Angel shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, swallowing. “Someone told me the Port Authority would have men who could speak my father’s tongue, and I wanted to see if it was true.” He took a long drink of water, and then said, “And it was. Are you from the North?”
“I was born there,” Terrick replied casually. As if being born in the North was not significant. As if living in a city with more people in its sprawling walls than were contained in some small nations was, as it seemed to be for so many who lived here, a matter of accidental choice, a simple whim.
But the boy looked up at Terrick. “And you live here?” As if he understood the significance. As if he could.
“Your father did,” Terrick pointed out.
“You were born in Arrend?” The boy pressed.
Terrick chose to take a long drink of wine; he drained the cup. Filled it again, noting the boy’s serious expression, his dark eyes so at odds with his hair and the paleness of his skin. Winter skin, Terrick thought. Terrick’s was as ruddy as an Imperial.
City of Night Page 1
