City of Night

by Michelle West

  “I was by his side. He wielded an ax, then; they called him Stormfury, and—” Terrick laughed out loud at the memory, “he was embarrassed by it. Not even frostbite could redden his skin the way embarrassment did, and the old women loved to tease him.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was their way of showing him that he had become—in so short a time—like a son. He would rather, he told me, face the raiders. He did not want our admiration, and he did not want our mute obedience. But he had at least the first, and if we were not mute, we listened more often than not, and it was his lead that we followed.

  “And when he left the village, I asked his leave to accompany him to his home, or what was left of it, and he granted it.” He paused, and then added, “I served Garroc, in the North. And when Garroc met Weyrdon, and I saw Garroc take Weyrdon’s measure, I understood what would happen next.” He wanted to stand.

  He did not.

  “Weyrdon was a man,” he said quietly. “Older than either of us, but younger than I am now, he was unlike Garroc; in Weyrdon, with his honey eyes, it was said that Cartan walked the earth again—and in its fashion, Angel, it was true. I had seen Garroc, among the villagers, and I had left my home to follow him—but Garroc was to Weyrdon what the lamp is to the high sun.

  “Garroc did not understand why men were willing to serve him. His humility was part of the reason they did, but he was not falsely modest, and as likely to issue a challenge at a perceived slight as any other man. He had had no desire to found a clan of his own, although he could have.

  “But he understood, when he met Weyrdon, some part of what we saw in him.”

  “But you said Weyrdon wasn’t like my father.”

  “He wasn’t. What your father struggled to do, Weyrdon did as if it were simply a matter of breathing; he led. He walked among the dead, and he grieved for them, but their deaths—in our eyes—were ennobled by his grief and his gratitude. He came to the women to help wash the corpses of the fallen and clean them before they were placed on the funeral pyres.

  “He could make himself heard—and felt—across the tented camps of a large army. His men did not worship him, but they revered him. He was like the warriors of legend,” Terrick added. “And born to us in a time of need.”

  “There were wars?”

  Terrick was silent.

  “Terrick?”

  But Terrick did not answer the question. Instead he said, watching the lamp fire and wishing that it were larger and louder, with a voice of crackling wood and timbre, “Garroc came to me after our campaign at the borders of Arrend. Five great clans were united behind Weyrdon’s shield, and the eldest sons of many smaller clans bore spears in his vanguard.

  “He told me he intended to offer his ax to Weyrdon. I knew,” Terrick continued. “I knew, but I had avoided the knowledge for as long as I could. He was my lord,” Terrick added, “in the Southern use of the word. I was his liege.

  “He asked me to serve Weyrdon; he felt that Weyrdon would also honor my service. I refused.”

  “But why?”

  “Garroc was the only man that I wished to serve.”

  “You thought that Weyrdon was worthy of his service.”

  “Yes. He was worthy of the service of any.”

  “But not yours.” It wasn’t a question. And it was. So many years, Terrick thought, since he had heard those words. So many years since he had refused to answer them. He might have refused now, without shame and without demur on the part of his guest.

  Garroc’s son.

  “Perhaps,” Terrick said quietly, “I felt I was not worthy to serve him.”

  Angel tilted his head to one side. He opened his mouth to speak—or possibly eat, as he seemed to never stop—but food didn’t enter that mouth, and words did not leave it. Which was good; he was exercising some caution. Not even a guest called his host a liar with impunity.

  Terrick rose, muttering about oil for the lamp. It was feeble, but he wanted to be free of the confines of the table. The boy would not press him for an answer, and he did not wish to surrender it. But the answer lay there in the silence, and the spaces between the words he had been willing to share.

  Weyrdon was revered.

  Garroc? No. Respected, yes, and followed. What he achieved, he achieved with struggle and work, and the dream of the achievement was always brighter, and more perfect, than the achievement itself.

  Quick to anger, slow to awe, slower still to love. But the shadows he cast were the length of a man, no more and no less. He knew doubt and he knew despair, and he mastered them both with effort.

  Terrick understood that man.

  “So . . . he left you.”

  “No.” Terrick shook himself with an effort that Garroc would also have understood. He returned to his chair, with oil. “I went with him. I was Garroc’s man, and this was understood—Weyrdon was secure enough in his power that it was not seen as an insult to Weyrdon.”

  Angel was silent for a long moment. “And when he left Weyrdon?”

  The silence was thicker and heavier now.

  “You left with him.”

  “I could. I was not of Weyrdon.” Terrick’s breath was sharp. “Boy,” he added, thickly, “I would have followed him into exile and I would have died at his side or his back.”

  “He would never have asked that of you.”

  Terrick’s laugh was bitter and deep. “He asked it a hundred times.”

  Angel watched Terrick’s face as his laughter faded; the bitterness remained. Terrick could mask his expression, but chose, at that moment, not to do so. He waited instead, wondering what the boy would say. Or if, in the end, he would say anything at all.

  Angel’s eyes were the color of winter sky in the lamplight when he at last shook his head. It was a slight motion, a contained one; he would speak, then.

  “From what you’ve said, my father’s departure from Weyrdon’s side was a disgrace.”

  Silent, Terrick nodded.

  “If he asked you to fight at his back, he meant you to face death—and facing it, risk dying. He would have asked that of you,” the boy continued, after a pause, “because when he taught us to use these swords, he asked it of us, and we were younger and weaker. We didn’t understand, then. We understood it later.

  “But he would never have asked us to live in disgrace,” Angel continued. “Possibly the children, or the old women, but I don’t think so.” Angel picked up a wedge of thick cheese. “He would never have asked it of you.”

  Terrick said nothing for a long moment. And then, rough- voiced, he said, “Boy, do you ever stop eating?”

  Angel, half the wedge now in his mouth, laughed, and Terrick rose. “Sleep here,” he said. “I’ll wake you in the morning; I have to be down at the Port Authority by sunrise.”

  14th of Wittan, 409 AA Averalaan

  Terrick had learned to sleep in almost any weather, facing almost any threat. A warrior’s trick—to take what was needed in the gaps of time that were offered. He had obviously fallen out of the habit, and it pained him; it was not the only thing that he had lost with the passage of time, but it was telling.

  The boy slept in the room, on the floor just beneath the open shutters, his face turned toward the bright moon. Her touch whitened his hair, and made his skin glow silver; the heat, at this time of year, was profound. As was so often the case with the young, sleep softened the edges of his expression, robbing him of years. Angel looked very much a boy.

  But this boy, Terrick thought, in the silence of the early morning, had offered him some measure of peace. He would not have asked it—would not have dreamed that the asking would serve a purpose. Unasked for, he had offered Terrick truth: Garroc would not have asked any man to live a life of disgrace, bereft of honor or dignity. Not even Terrick.

  That measure of peace, he had carried with him into the slowly unfolding, spare chaos that was the daily Common. Not all of the farmers or merchants had opened their stalls or parked the
ir oddly designed wagons, but enough, used to the early morning routines of the City’s varied workers, had; they charged a slightly higher price than they would charge in a few short hours, but Terrick, home after they had left for the day, paid their premium, purchasing bread, cheese, wine, and smoked meats before he returned to his home.

  It was not unoccupied, for the moment.

  Garroc’s son. Terrick smiled briefly, and then drew breath.

  “Boy,” he said, in a harsh, Rendish bark. His smile grew as Angel startled out of sleep without completely evading its grip. “Do you intend to sleep all day?”

  Given that the moons still ruled the sky, it was perhaps a less than generous question.

  The mumbled apology that slid out of the boy’s half-open mouth was entirely Rendish. The older man’s grin broadened. For all the sleep he lacked, Terrick faced the morning as if it were a true dawn, and not another dismal, simple sunrise over a foreign city.

  “I’ve prepared breakfast,” he told Angel gruffly. “It’s not much—you’ve eaten more than five men my size, and I seldom have guests. But it’s better than nothing; get up, wash your face and hands in the basin, and eat. But eat quickly,” he added, glancing out the window. “We’ve little time before the sun crests the ocean, and I have a job I’d like to keep.” This last, he said with a perfectly straight face. The boy nodded, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. He didn’t scoff, and by the lack of this, Terrick recognized, with a pang, the truth of his Imperial heritage. But Angel did rise, and he did clean up—inasmuch as a boy living out of a packsack could—and eat.

  “Will the Ice Wolf be in port?”

  “Waiting,” Terrick replied. “If she’s made harbor. If not, we’ve the day ahead of us.”

  Angel nodded, his glance straying to the dark streets of the Common.

  “Nervous?” Terrick would not have asked a Rendish boy of Angel’s age the question unless he wished to provoke.

  Angel simply nodded. The grave glance he turned on Terrick was drawn, and tired.

  Terrick’s voice gentled as he spoke again. “You’ve been on the road, boy,” he said as he pushed himself up and away from the table, the legs of the chair squeaking against the floorboards. “But you’re almost there.”

  Angel nodded. He finished the last of the bread he had called so hard, and rose, pushing his empty chair silently across the floor.

  “I don’t know what to say to him,” Angel told Terrick, as they traversed the empty streets. In half an hour, the farmers would be in the Common, and in an hour, the first of their customers would join them. Terrick would be installed on the stool in his wicket, listening to the complaints of tired men and women, and Angel would be waiting for the Ice Wolf. The Northerner knew which of the two would be the more difficult task, and he said nothing, waiting for Angel’s words to play out.

  “I don’t know what to ask,” he said softly. “I know I had to come here. For my father’s sake. For his name.” He glanced at Terrick and Terrick nodded. “But I don’t understand why my father couldn’t come before he—before. I don’t know what I’ve got to say that my father couldn’t. Or didn’t.”

  Above them, the leaves of the great trees stood like anchored clouds, and the starlight, fading slowly, punctuated the skies. Were it not for the heat and humidity of the City in this season, the moment of quiet would have made of the City a place where Terrick might feel at home.

  But Angel, unused to a city of this size, trudged by his side, begrudging the South not one degree of its heat. If sweat hadn’t beaded on the boy’s forehead, Terrick would have wondered if he felt it at all. But . . . he didn’t complain.

  He stopped walking for a moment, and Terrick grimaced; the Portmaster was Northern in temperament if not in action, and he forgave dereliction of duty just as coldly. He could not, it was true, attempt to have Terrick executed, but his ability to exile Terrick from the small fiefdom that was the Authority office had never been in question. He said nothing, and after a moment, Angel continued to walk.

  “Do I offer him my sword?” he asked.

  Take your hair down, boy, Terrick thought, but did not speak; he had said it enough, and it was clear that inasmuch as he could, Angel understood its significance. “I am not the right person to ask.”

  “Because you never did?”

  “That, too.” He shrugged, walking a little more quickly. “I don’t understand what happened, between your father and Weyrdon. But if the one Weyrdon visitor you had was any indication . . . he was asked to perform some duty in exile, and in secrecy. I don’t know what it was; I don’t know if he succeeded or failed. Because I don’t, I don’t want to give you advice. If it’s bad, and you follow it, you’ll pay. If it’s good, and you don’t follow it, you’ll feel like a fool. You are not,” he added quietly, “a fool. I do not know what you have to say to Weyrdon, but you’re cautious enough. You’ll do fine,” he added.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  Terrick grimaced. “Perhaps not. But I would like to believe it, and if your father talked to Weyrdon’s man, and neither of them died—as you suggested—there’s every chance that the belief is not unfounded.”

  Angel nodded, hesitant.

  They walked in silence through streets that were waking to sound: footsteps, morning greetings, wheels that had seen too little oil in too long a time. In the summer stillness, the sea breeze didn’t push away the salt or the scents that gathered in the air. But the shade of night paled noticeably as they made their way toward the Port Authority. Terrick watched the skies, hazy with unshed heat, and he nodded to himself; he wouldn’t be late.

  As if that mattered.

  He shrugged. Maybe it did. Maybe a lifetime of learned prudence—for he’d certainly little prudence in his youth—had become so ingrained it would ride his thoughts and actions forever. Maybe Weyrdon would see the boy and dismiss him for his Northernness.

  And if he did? Terrick shook his head. He’d have his answer soon, for he could see, as the light strengthened, the distant sails of a familiar ship in the deepest part of the bay. He watched it in silence as he walked for a few minutes, and then he turned to Angel and lifted an arm.

  “The Ice Wolf,” Angel said, no question in the words.

  Terrick nodded.

  The boy straightened his shoulders, stiffening his spine; he gained a few inches as he did, although it neither added nor subtracted years. He asked no more questions, and his expression lost the nervous vulnerability that was so common in the unguarded faces of the young.

  They walked to the Port Authority together, and when they reached the doors, Angel bowed to Terrick in a very Northern style. He wanted to tell the boy not to offer Weyrdon the same bow, but kept the words to himself. It was unlikely to offend anyone who was not seeking a reason to be offended, and if one were needed, Weyrdon would not have to look past the boy’s spiraled hair.

  “I’ll wait here,” Angel told Terrick, taking up a position not far from the Port Authority. He paused and then added, “Thank you.”

  Terrick nodded and turned toward the closed doors of the building. At this time, they wouldn’t be locked, but they would be guarded; the guards were in the Authority building before anyone but the Portmaster.

  A building such as this would never have existed in the villages or towns of Terrick’s youth. Doors such as these would not have existed either, and as he opened them, he felt himself stepping across the threshold to another world—one which did not include Garroc’s son. Or Garroc.

  Inside the building the ropes were up, and the runners were leaving their first notes from the Portmaster at the various wickets. Today, Terrick’s would be one of them, because the Ice Wolf was waiting the signal to approach the docks.

  He made his way to the much more modest door that kept the visitors and the clerks on different sides of these wickets and opened it carefully, making his way to the wicket and the scrawled note. There was, of course, no manifest, and no hint of what lay in the Ice Wolf’
s hold; they had requested permission to dock, and it had been granted. But Terrick’s presence was required on the docks—if briefly—in order to obtain the manifests necessary to process the cargo. He had always wondered how the complicated processing of manifests—and the legal need for them—had been explained to the first Rendish ship to seek this port. He did not imagine it had been pleasant, and could not quite imagine that no blood had been shed in the process. But it had happened, and it hadn’t happened on his watch.

  He glanced at the windows, shuttered for the moment, and then rose, walking to his desk to retrieve the inkstand and well that he would refill many times before sunset’s arrival heralded the end of another day.

  Sunrise, on the other hand, had not yet begun this one, and until it did, he could not look past those closed shutters to see the back of the boy that Garroc had raised on foreign soil.

  Angel thought of water: in the bay and across brow and arms and chest, salt of sea and salt of sweat, things that had to be endured. In the planting season, when the cold made sweat seem distant until the work began, and in the harvest, when the heat made the height of day a time to seek refuge in shade and stillness, Angel had endured. But he had had, at that time, a mother, a father, and a roof over his head.

  Now, he had a ship in the distance. It was in no way home, although his father had come from its decks to Averalaan. He still couldn’t think of his father—or his mother—without thinking of death and loss, and on the long road here, sheltered at sun’s height by trees and the royal messenger service’s standing stables, he had thought only of this moment.

  But Terrick’s question had taken root in thought, and he couldn’t ignore it. If he survived, what happened then? What would Weyrdon ask of him, if he asked anything at all?