City of Night

by Michelle West

  But Angel was clearly used to walking, from somewhere to the port, and from the port to somewhere. He started to walk, as if the path were so familiar it guided his steps, and Terrick, curious, fell in. He did not ask the boy where he went; he was content—and this surprised him—to follow.

  Garroc’s son followed the harbor’s line until it reached the seawall. It was not a short walk, and further, was not in the direction of Terrick’s home and much-desired dinner, but as they climbed the stairs along the seawall, Terrick understood the purpose of this odd pilgrimage.

  In the moonlight and the starlight of the humid night, the walls curved out in a demicircle, and in its center, a lone statue stood. Or towered. Terrick stopped walking for a moment, to see what Angel would do: Angel continued to walk.

  Night, Terrick thought. Night was the time that the people of Averalaan chose to approach this statue, this solitary edifice. It was superstition, and at that, a superstition that was entirely Weston at heart, which prevented sensible people from arriving in the daylight hours. Terrick knew this; he had come, himself, during the day. In the day, one could clearly see the towering figure of a man, carved from ancient stone that the salt winds had not managed to weather or destroy. Nor had the seagulls and the other birds that chose his shoulders as perches, unaware of the gravity and the import of his ancient legend.

  He joined Angel at the foot of the statue; Angel looked up at the forbidding profile of a man in his prime. “Moorelas,” Terrick said softly.

  Angel nodded.

  “Why do you come here?”

  “Everyone knows his story,” Angel replied. It was not the answer Terrick expected, but so little about this boy could be expected. “Everyone knows it. Priests, merchants, guards, children. It doesn’t matter where you are, or where you go—you can see children skipping ropes and stone tosses, and you can hear them sing his name. Here. In the Free Towns. In any town in the Empire, I think.

  “It’s peaceful here, at night. It makes me feel like the world is a smaller place.”

  Terrick nodded, although in truth, Moorelas’ Sanctum, as this statue was inaccurately called, had never quelled the onset of brief and desperate desires for home. “He is known, by a slightly different name, in the North.”

  “Oh?”

  “Morr Aston.”

  “Do they talk about where he fell?”

  “In the City of the Dark League, in the time of gods. He injured the god whose name we do not speak, but in the end, he was betrayed by his companions, and he perished before the god could be killed.” Terrick looked up at the hope of the mortal world, if such a thing could truly exist in the time when gods walked the planes. “Why do you not visit in the day?” He expected the common lore to answer him: Moorelas’ shadow was considered, by many, a harbinger of doom. And, Terrick supposed, it was a safe and tidy harbinger, as it could be so easily avoided.

  Angel said, quietly, “I have. But I watch the docks during the days.”

  Terrick, slightly humbled, and not of a mind to share this, said gruffly, “Dinner.”

  Home was a set of rooms above one of the smithies in the Common. It suited Terrick in the rainy season; in the humidity of the summer months it was barely tolerable—but when he had first arrived on these foreign shores, the habits of his youth had not yet been shrugged off, and in the smithy, there was continuous warmth. In his youth, the village smith would have occupied the building, making rooms available for his sons and their wives—but in Averalaan, while smithing was an honorable trade, it was one of dozens. And the sons of this particular smith were not of a mind to make their father’s space their home.

  It was strange to Terrick.

  More so, The Ten, with their disavowal of blood ties. But what could one expect of the City ruled by men who chose wives to bear children for their own fathers? Terrick had chosen his course, and he intended to stay the distance. He had learned.

  He glanced at the boy by his side. “Is this the first time you’ve visited Averalaan?”

  Angel nodded. In Rendish, he said, “It’s very large.”

  Terrick chuckled. “Aye, it’s that.” But he fell silent again; it was seldom that he had company on his trek to the Common from the busy port docks. The Common at night was silent; magelights, well below the heights of the trees for which the Common was famed, were glowing brightly in the humid air. The sky was cloudless, the stars clear. The face of the bright moon was edging to fullness, but it was the dark moon he sought for a moment.

  Years, he thought. Years he’d been here, and the moons and the stars were the same. The stalls, boarded over, and patrolled frequently even after sunset, were also the same, and if the men and women who occupied them had weathered those years, so had he. He had not lifted an ax since he had set his own aside. His hands ached a moment, remembering the ghost of her weight.

  “Here,” he said, more sharply than he had intended.

  Angel heard the shortening of the syllable without apparently understanding it; he followed where Terrick led. The door that led to his room was to one side of the smithy, and the stairs that door opened into were narrow and steep, and framed by a wall to either side.

  “You live above the smith?” was the question that drifted up Terrick’s back. There was, in his tone, a mild surprise, and given how carefully neutral the boy had forced himself to be thus far, it caused Terrick to smile. But it was a pained smile, an echo of the smile he might have offered his younger self; he certainly would not have cared to offer that younger man anything as sensible as advice.

  Thinking this, he made his way into the kitchen. The windows that fronted the Common were open to the moon’s full light, which silvered everything it touched. In this half-darkness, he made his way to the lamp.

  “I live in the dark,” he told Angel.

  “You don’t have a magelight?”

  “Gods, no. They’re expensive.”

  “They seem to be all over the place.”

  “Aye, they seem to,” Terrick said, struggling to light the lamp’s oil. “But it’s just light, and the lamp does me fine. There’s a seat by the table you can take if you’ve a mind to sit; you’ve been standing all day. It won’t take a minute to get food, but it’s not fancy; I don’t cook much in this weather, and I don’t get many visitors,” he added.

  The boy surprised him. “Do any of the ones you get try to kill you?”

  He ceased his fumbling with the lamp, although he did not turn back to the boy. In the darkness there was a quiet that light—any light—seemed to break. He schooled his expression—such a Weston phrase, that, and it now came naturally to him—even though the boy couldn’t see it. Then he forced his hands to continue their work.

  “That’s an odd question to ask of a man who works as a clerk for the Portmaster,” he said at last, choosing the words with care, but delivering them as if they were unimportant.

  “It’s not to a clerk that I ask it,” Angel replied gravely.

  “And did your father have visitors who were fool enough to try to kill him?” And did one of them succeed, boy, is that why you’re here? The lamp flared to life, flickering as he opened the valve to allow more oil to burn. He lifted it and turned to catch the boy’s wary expression. His own, he knew, gave nothing away.

  “Twice,” he replied. “My father sent us into the house; my mother closed the shutters.”

  “But your father came back.”

  Angel nodded.

  “Did you see his enemies?”

  “Not alive.”

  “And dead?”

  “When my father was digging a grave.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about them?”

  “They were marked,” he said. “Tattoos, I think.”

  “Their hair?”

  Angel nodded. “Like my father’s. But not the same.” He paused and then said bluntly, “Why did they try to kill him?”

  Terrick snorted. “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re not surprised.
”

  “No. I would have expected Weyrdon—” he lifted a hand. “Do you understand how far away from home your father was?”

  “He was at home,” Angel replied.

  “Aye, perhaps he was. But he left Weyrdon, and none of us—not one—understood his purpose.”

  “Maybe he loved my mother enough to stay.” A hint of steel in those words. A hint of defiance.

  Terrick could have explained to the boy why everything he had just said was wrong; he opened his mouth to do just that, shutting it on the edge of the words. Did it matter, in the end? They were dead, Garroc and this wife, and all they had left behind stood before Terrick in a lamplit room.

  Terrick shook his head. “I forget myself,” he said. “We both have to eat; we can talk when there’s food ready.”

  “There was a third visitor,” Angel said, when food was on the table between them and bread broken. It was warm and humid in the confines of the small room, and the lamp cast shadows that reminded Terrick of large and open fires in a much colder clime, beneath the early night sky.

  Terrick ate. He said nothing, waiting for the boy to offer more, but when it became clear that the boy wouldn’t shoulder the conversation himself, Terrick at last set aside the caution and isolation of almost a decade. That he did it quietly, and with a minimum of fuss, did not lessen the fact.

  “Tell me,” he said, “about this third visitor.”

  Angel shrugged. “My father didn’t send us away,” he said at last. “I don’t think he was surprised to see the man, but I don’t think he was happy either. He didn’t invite him into the house, he didn’t offer to feed him—and my mother didn’t either. They always did that,” he added softly. “They fed everyone who stumbled across the field. If they didn’t crush anything while they were doing it.” He stopped eating for a moment, his eyes vacantly staring at the contained fire on the table. After a moment, his gaze became focused, and he pulled it away, glancing at Terrick.

  “He was of Weyrdon, I think.”

  “You’re not certain.”

  After a moment, the boy said, “He was of Weyrdon.”

  Terrick nodded. “Your father spoke with him?”

  “And he walked away,” Angel replied, tearing bread into smaller chunks almost absently.

  “The stranger said nothing to you?”

  “He asked if I were Garroc’s son.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Nothing. He nodded, and he left.”

  “How long ago was that?” Terrick was sifting through manifests and shipping schedules, the paper in his mind almost as readily accessible as the actual paper in his hands would have been. “Three years?”

  The boy was surprised enough that he let it show. But he was careful enough to hold his words for a moment, and when he did speak, surprise had given way to the beginnings of suspicion.

  Garroc, Terrick thought heavily, he is your son.

  “It was three years ago. Why do you ask?”

  “Meaning, how do I know?” Terrick smiled grimly. “One of the men left the Ice Wolf.”

  “They all leave the ship.”

  “He left and did not return. I did not see him return to the port until the Ice Wolf had sailed north and back again, carrying a different cargo. He was not,” Terrick added, “a man that could easily be missed in a crowd.”

  “Not by you, you mean.”

  “Not,” Terrick said heavily, “by anyone. He is not a young man, and it was never his intent to remain in the Empire; it would have been beneath his dignity to absorb or reflect Imperial customs.”

  “My mother said Arrend is part of the Empire.”

  “And your father?”

  “He . . . didn’t agree.”

  “In this, trust your father. We make no war upon the Empire or its subjects,” Terrick added, “but we pay no tribute to foreign kings. Make of that what you will.” He paused and then added, “I mean no insult by this, Angel, but if you go to the Ice Wolf, you keep your mother’s opinion to yourself.”

  If Angel had, in his caution and his reticence, proved himself to be Garroc’s son, he proved himself to be more, or different, now. He nodded, his expression thoughtful, the passing insult ignored. Terrick himself, at the boy’s age, would have been angry at the implication that he was fool enough to insult Weyrdon, or ignorant enough; Garroc would have been enraged. But the boy? Neither.

  “Did you recognize him, when he left the ship?”

  Terrick nodded.

  “And you thought he might try to kill my father?”

  “In truth, boy, while I thought of your father, I thought it highly unlikely that he would be able to find him. As I said, it’s not his way to bend to foreign customs, and he was unlikely to find much help.”

  “He did find him.”

  “Yes, and it surprises me.”

  “And it doesn’t, as well?”

  Keen-eyed boy. Garroc’s son. But for the first time, Terrick found himself wondering about the mother. Some of the mother—besides just the name—was in the boy, and if it wasn’t the harsh cold of the North, if it wasn’t the steel and the ice, it was as strong in its own way.

  Were you happy, Garroc? Terrick thought, for the first time. As if it might have meaning.

  “And it doesn’t, as well. Where did you live?”

  “In Evanston.” He waited a moment, watching Terrick’s face for some sign of recognition. When it failed to appear, he grimaced—and looked, for a moment, young. “Evanston is one of the Free Towns.”

  “The Free Towns? To the west of the Empire?”

  “Between the Empire and the Western Kingdoms, yes.”

  “A good distance to travel.” Again, he began to sift documents contained only by memory, this time leaving the familiar manifests and Port Authority papers for her maps. The maps with which he was familiar were only accurate along the coasts—which, given they were Port Authority maps, was to be expected—but the scale and distances for the much less detailed landlocked country were good; they would not account for roads or difficult terrain, but they would give him a rough estimate of distance.

  “He made his way there directly,” Terrick said. “And if possible, he traveled by horse or carriage for some part of the journey; he made good time both there and back. He was not known as a horseman of any quality,” he added.

  Angel nodded absently. “So you think he knew where to find my father.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “But the others found him, too.”

  “They did not leave that ship,” Terrick replied heavily. “They may have left other ships from the North, but they did not stop by the Port Authority. We have some custom with the Northerners; it is why I was employed.” In truth, his preference would have been to stand as a guard in the busy building, although the guards saw little battle. Even tired and angry people were aware in some corner of their minds that they depended on the goodwill of the Imperial Port Authority for their living.

  “But not why you chose to take the job?”

  “No.” Terrick found that even the pretense of eating was beyond him, and rose, turning away from both light and visitor so that he might look out into the summer streets. At night, they were their own landscape, as different from day as North from South. He took a breath of humid, hot air, and expelled it from his lungs with a keen distaste. The home-sickness that had characterized his beginnings here was strong, tonight. It could be laid at the feet of this boy, if he were of a mind to assign blame.

  But he was practical; blame served nothing now. “They did not pass through the Authority and I cannot therefore track their journey. They could have been months tracking him down; they could have been years. Garroc came for the Kings’ Challenge,” he continued. “As an entrant, he was not invisible.”

  “Wait—are you saying my father was in the Kings’ Challenge?”

  At that, Terrick turned, a half smile on his lips. “Had he taken the challenge some five years earlier, I believe he would have
won. It is often a Northerner who wins the wreath,” he added, “But if he did not win—and he did not—he was noted, and in the end, he chose to accept employment in House Kalakar.” So much effort, to say the words.

  “He served The Kalakar,” Angel said, ignoring that effort without apparent awareness.

  Stiffly, holding onto his anger with as much care as he had ever held anything, Terrick said, “No.”

  “He did,” Angel answered quietly.

  “No. He was employed—”

  “He was a House Guard,” the boy replied, his face shading, in the lamplight, to a definite red. Protecting, Terrick saw, his father’s memory. Defending his dignity and his honor.

  Unaware that in so doing, he was destroying Terrick’s ability to do the same. “He could not take another master,” Terrick all but shouted. “He served Weyrdon!”

  The boy fell silent, and Terrick thought the matter resolved. But the boy was, in his fashion, still Garroc’s son. “You can serve The Kalakar and serve the Kings at the same time. They rule,” he added, “but they don’t demand the deaths of those who choose to pledge allegiance to the Houses who also serve.”

  “You do not understand the clans. You do not understand Weyrdon.”

  “No,” Angel replied, the heat slow to leave his cheeks. “But neither do you.”

  The silence that followed the boy’s flat statement was as cold a silence as any that Terrick remembered from his youth. And in his youth, as in the occasional winter that crept in beneath the cover of the cold rainy seasons in the Empire, cold could kill. It was not, however, the only thing, and Terrick laid his palms flat against the surface of a crumb-dusted tablecloth to indicate that he had not—yet—reached for a weapon.

  The courtesy—if such a thing was indeed within the purview of the Southern sense of polite behavior—was lost on the boy; he had made his comment as an observation, no more; he had no reason to understand how much of an attack it was.