Raven's Ladder

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  Perhaps something surprised him. Have you heard of the menace that lurks in the ground?”

  Blinking through the swollen bruises, Jes-hawk looked around, amazed. Then his face contorted with rage. He looked back to the circle of riders. “Where’s Lynna?” he roared, blood and spittle spewing from his lips. “Where’s my sister? Let me see that wretched traitor so I can—”

  The giant knocked him to the ground as easily as a bear cuffing his prey. Jes-hawk lay silent in the dirt. Shanyn started forward again, but Tabor Jan seized her and held her back.

  The challenger bowed. “Forgive me. I’ve forgotten my manners. I am Captain Ryllion.” And with the same hand that had struck down Jes-hawk, he reached out and clasped Tabor Jan’s hand.

  Margi could see Abascar’s captain wince at the force of that grip. “Soon you and your people will forget all about the troubles of the past.” Ryllion grinned, and both sisters felt a chill at the sight of those beastly yellow teeth. “And eventually you’ll agree,” he said, “that this was a great day for Abascar.”

  15

  SNYDE’S FALL

  And that’s what happens!” Snyde barked, spinning the vawn on its heels so he could address any vengeful pursuers. “That’s what happens when you try to put down Snyde ker Bayrast!”

  He was riding back to Barnashum. He had considered taking his chances in Bel Amica, but the thought of starting over—unknown, without leverage or authority—changed his mind. Some of Abascar’s survivors still valued the words of King Cal-marcus’s aging ambassadors. He might reassemble his sympathizers there. So after stealing back his vawn from the Abascar company at Mawrnash, he had taken to the woods.

  For a few days he saw nothing more interesting than trees and passing rainstorms. Nevertheless, he sensed someone—or something—following him.

  He tried to cheer himself by remembering Cal-raven’s startlement and the blow that had struck him down. Now, with the king out of the way, Snyde could make House Abascar listen to him again. He had followed King Cal-marcus’s instructions with excruciating attention for so many years. That was how he had been taught, this son of the famous Bayrast ker Boon. He could bring back the old law and sweep the filth—all those Gatherers and insubordinates—out of his sight.

  After Cal-raven’s company had abandoned him in the forest, Snyde had staggered southward, fearful of Cent Regus savages. To his surprise, when an ambush came, his attackers weren’t beastmen but bandits. Finding no currency, the robbers threatened to leave him there, bound, unless he told them something useful.

  Whole and beautiful, the idea had bloomed. He’d told his assailants he could show them a soldier carrying treasure from a fallen house. They’d find a fancy farglass and a sword of the finest Abascar craftsmanship. He also promised them money but refused to tell them he had concealed it in his vawn’s saddlebag for safekeeping.

  The bandits agreed to follow him with a promise of punishment if his claim proved false. He convinced them that their target was dangerous. “Kill him first, then take what he can give you. He’ll track you down if he survives.” They boasted that their crimes were precise and clean.

  Snyde liked that turn of phrase. Cleanliness was important to him.

  “I have to get back indoors,” he now told the vawn after a tailtwitcher scolded them from a nearby tree. “Away from all this disorderly nature.”

  As if it had heard him, a structure revealed itself through the gloaming—a hunter’s hut like the kind that had once sheltered him and his father during hunts. This was not House Abascar’s territory, nor did it belong to House Bel Amica, but the houses had negotiated some shared shelters in the neutral ground of unclaimed wilderness. This was one of those crude wooden boxes, long neglected.

  The idea of setting foot in such a derelict structure annoyed him, but his exhaustion overpowered his distaste for dust, moss, and rot.

  Snyde climbed down from the vawn and paused to brush the creature’s she’d scales from his trousers. He hated the hard work of steering these filthy reptiles. No matter how hard he whipped this animal, it stumbled, swayed, brushed against trees, and would not follow instructions.

  Examining his hands, he found that he had dirt beneath a thumbnail, and he began to carve at it with the edge of his pocketknife. When he couldn’t scrape the darkness out, he cursed and bit into it, tearing off the soiled edge. Better not to have nails at all than to be found with soiled edges.

  “Never let them catch you unpolished,” he said, mimicking his mother’s shrill command.

  Inside the hut Snyde found a table, a few dishes dusty with the remains of dead insects, and a decent clay goblet that contained the ghost of something sweet.

  A quick inventory of the cupboards turned up only an abandoned tailtwitcher nest. But Snyde was never content with a quick inventory. He searched the cupboards again and tapped on their wooden frames, certain that somebody had concealed something here. It was just the way people behaved. He had learned this from a lifetime of careful observation and rigorous recordkeeping when it came to others’ failings, crimes, and indiscretions.

  An aggressive attention to propriety—it was what he had inherited from his father.

  Whenever Bayrast ker Boon passed through a crowd, people sprang to attention and bowed. The troop commander had intimidated his soldiers into extravagant respect and precision so that they snapped into salutes as sharply as puppets on tight strings. He had improved his son in the same way.

  In the privacy of his room, recovering from his father’s beatings, Snyde would carve the names of everyone he knew into the wooden frame of his cot and then make a mark to represent every offense, every indiscretion. He became a resourceful spy and relished the sharp impact of justice, especially upon those who had mocked or annoyed him. He enjoyed the moment a transgressor realized that judgment was inescapable. He savored the work of ensnaring young women who had rejected him, catching them in some kind of gossip. And he learned how to draw attention to certain laws at certain times, to show he was on the respectable side of a very stark line.

  Wherever Snyde went, he found that almost everyone else was wicked by comparison.

  “What’s your secret, filthy old house?” he muttered, kicking at the walls and floors and listening for a hollow note. He stared at the stones beneath the table. A small puffdragon was peering out between two of them.

  Puffdragons were rare vermin—squirmy little lizards without arms or legs, and when their yellow tongues flicked into the air, sparks burst forth. Some travelers kept them caged for the purpose of lighting campfires or torches in the wild, but most avoided them because of the stink that lingered after each puff. If a puffdragon wriggled its slender green ribbon of a body into walls or under a house and stayed for more than a few days, the house would absorb an indelible stench—that is, if the monster didn’t accidentally burn it down first.

  “So,” he said, “how deep is your burrow, little lizard?” He reached forward, then drew back, remembering that the brown bristles of its spiny head were not thick hairs but sharp, barbed needles. He rattled the tabletop, which turned out to be a heavy, loose disc of wood propped precariously on the crooked pile. The lizard shot out of its den with a complaint that sounded like a drunkard’s fit of hiccups, punctuating its passage with putrid smoke—a line of dark and dissipating clouds—as it escaped.

  Snyde knelt down and pulled one of the stones free. Reaching in, he drew out a dusty brown bottle. A cork still tightly sealed it. He held it aloft as a trophy. “This rare bottle of Abascar brew goes to Ambassador Snyde ker Bayrast.”

  One night Bayrast had come home furious. King Har-baron had promoted his own son, Cal-marcus, to serve as the new captain of the guard. Bayrast felt the position was owed to him.

  To Snyde’s sharp sense of fairness, this was unfortunate but entirely acceptable and lawful, for King Har-baron could appoint whom he liked. But his father surprised him with the ferocity of his displeasure.

  In the morning he found hi
s mother spreading cream over bruises on her face. Looking at him sternly, she had said, “Never let them catch you unpolished.”

  Snyde wished she had taken him with her when she vanished later that same day.

  No one organized a search. People gave each other troubled, silent glances when his mother’s name came up among the Housefolk.

  And then one night his father came home carrying a fur merchant’s hat. He hid his bright green prize under his bed mat, never saying a word about how he had acquired it. The one time Snyde asked, his father said only, “I straightened out something gone crooked.”

  Snyde later heard the news that someone had found a fur merchant beheaded in the forest and a woman bludgeoned to death at his side.

  Snyde began to watch his father closely, newly aware that the man could, in fact, transgress. And one evening he followed as the bitter commander crept to the bedroom window of a soldier named Ark-robin, who had just married a beautiful young woman—Say-ressa.

  An idea struck Snyde as clearly as a hammer strikes a bell. He lay resonating all through the night, plotting what he would do.

  Ark-robin found an anonymous note on his doorstep in the morning. It exposed Bayrast’s transgression. The very next night Ark-robin set a trap with the help of Prince Cal-marcus, and in the morning King Har-baron stripped Bayrast of his medals and sentenced him to hard labor outside the walls.

  Snyde had come forward, admitting that he had exposed his father. He won King Har-baron’s favor and was appointed as a royal informer, a surveillance officer among the people.

  Bayrast lived among the Gatherers for a short time and then vanished.

  Meanwhile, Snyde’s resourcefulness earned him a position directing Abascar’s artists. It kept him moving throughout the house so he could spy on the behavior of others without drawing much attention to himself.

  During Cal-marcus’s reign, Snyde had been so highly favored that Ark-robin’s young daughter, Stricia, often asked him for advice on how to win Prince Cal-ravens hand in marriage. He had made Stricia something of a project, for he greatly enjoyed the way she bowed and called him master. Such a pretty girl. Such soft hands.

  He put the bottle on the table. “What man with any brain could have rejected her? She should have been mine.” He had never touched strong drink and had often boasted of that very thing. But he was very thirsty. Perhaps it was only juice.

  He took out a knife and dug at the cork. The cork crumbled and fell into the drink. He cursed, poured some of the crumb-cluttered liquid into his hand, and sniffed its sweet perfume. “Honey.” He tested it with the tip of his tongue. Indeed, it was sweet, and it tingled in his throat.

  He poured it into the cleanest vessel he could find. But the bowl was cracked, and honeywine began to seep onto the table. So he gulped down all that remained in eager, noisy swallows.

  “How,” he roared through a burning throat, “can anyone say they enjoy such stuff?”

  A few minutes later he was throwing more branches onto a fire and singing at the top of his lungs, forgetting all fears of beastmen. He was happy—excitedly so.

  He danced in front of the fire, singing one of the exaltations to King Cal-marcus. But he did not get far before he went down on his knees to weep for the loss of the king he had so dutifully adored and, even more, for the loss of his privileges.

  A great wind rushed through the house. The gust swept soot out of the fireplace, spreading it across the floor, even as it carried a swirl of sparks out the window into a night that had crept up while he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Sorry, mother!” he exclaimed. “I’ll clean it up! Go back to bed!”

  As he stared out into the darkness of the moaning trees, he heard a moon-hound howl somewhere, a hungry and lonely sound. He shuddered. The wilderness is a horror! The heavens declare chaos.

  He had a sudden vision of Cal-raven surrounding the hut with an armed host.

  Look what the drink has done to me. That wretched hunter, leaving it here to tempt a thirsty traveler.

  The vawn outside shrieked in sudden distress, and Snyde sprang again to the window. “No.”

  He took a brand from the fire and ventured out. “Thieves, I’ll burn you!” he roared. “Wolves? I’ll set your fur on fire!”

  The vawn was untouched but afraid, raking the ground with its hind feet as if it would dig a hole and hide itself.

  Snyde walked a circle around the reptile and the tree where it was anchored. Then he walked a wider circle but found nothing.

  Crossing the space between the vawn and the hunter’s hut, he halted abruptly and gasped. He had almost stumbled into a deep and strangely shaped cavity.

  “That,” he mused, “is one big footprint.” He glanced about at the shadows. He pressed his forearm against his mouth to silence his voice. I will not entertain any thoughts of mythological creatures. The world is what has been proved.

  He heard a sound like branches breaking, sensed a darkness descending.

  Looking toward the hut, he watched its beams bend and break, the whole shelter collapsing under the weight of a winged colossus.

  16

  BROWN AND MOUSEY

  The scar burned through Cal-raven’s sleep. Like a hook caught tight around a bone, it dragged him up from the blur of half dreams into waking.

  The air was thick with dust and honeyweed pipe smoke. Canvas-filtered sunlight inside the carriage felt warm against his skin. He’d been stripped to his leggings and boots and covered with a thistleleaf blanket. If he moved, he would learn just how badly he was broken.

  Two women laughed coarsely outside the canvas. As the carriage tilted up a steep slope, he watched red bouldernuts tumble along the floorboards until they disappeared under the bench where he lay. He tried to lift his head and groaned.

  “Shh.”

  A boy sat against the front of the canvas, knees drawn up to his chin, bound at the ankles. His wrists, too, were tied and pulled back behind his head where they were strapped to one of the struts that supported the canvas. He appeared to have been dipped in mud. “Are you actually awake?” he whispered.

  “I told you,” Cal-raven moaned, “not to come after me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the boy whispered. “I came after you to warn you. Snyde’s a traitor.”

  Cal-raven clenched his teeth, realization worsening his pain. “I know, Wynn. I knew all along.”

  “We’re captives,” the boy announced.

  They were paid to kill me, he thought. But they sold me instead. I’ve never been so grateful for the greed of wicked men. “How long have I slept?”

  “Don’t know. You were asleep when they picked you out of the hole. And we’ve been on the road two days since. Maybe three. Not sure. I can’t stay awake either, not since they caught me. My horse got away.” Wynn had the cleverjay figurine caught between his bare toes and was slowly turning it around and around. It must have fallen from the shreds of Cal-raven’s jacket when his captors pulled it off of him.

  If the birds saw what happened, maybe Scharr ben Fray will come. Or… At the thought of the Keeper, he raised his head, and the flare of pain knocked him flat.

  “If you’d listened to me,” Wynn muttered, “we wouldn’t be here. I was gonna warn you about—”

  “I knew already, Wynn. You can’t just charge ahead, thinking you know better than everyone. You endanger us all.”

  Wynn went on as if Cal-raven had never spoken. “Grudgers. They were plotting against you in the caves. Six of ’em. But don’t worry. I took care of five.”

  Cal-raven coughed into his hand and was alarmed to see spots of blood. “You’d better explain that.”

  “Found them plotting. They talked about Snyde. I sealed ’em into a cave and came to warn you.”

  “Sealed them in? How did you…” He stopped. “You didn’t drag the girls into this, did you?”

  Wynn’s smile stayed, but his hands clenched into fists behind his head, and his gloves of dry mud cracked.

&n
bsp; “I knew, Wynn. I was going to draw them out, away from the people, and reckon with them in the woods.”

  Wynn’s face flushed red. “Well, you didn’t.”

  “No. The earthquake came, and five of them disappeared.” Cal-raven endured the pain to sit up. “What happened after you sealed them in?” The boy frowned. “Don’t know.”

  The wagon lurched to a stop. Cal-raven heard vawns snuffling in the brush and two women whispering. He heard branches snapping as the women walked away from the wagon; then their voices echoed into a deep space.

  Another slave pit.

  The voices quickly turned bitter and mean. The pit was, it seemed, empty, when they had apparently been expecting new captives to sell.

  “Did you tell anyone that you’d captured the grudgers?” he continued. “Or that you were coming after me on a horse?”

  Wynn shrugged.

  “So, thinking you could save me from Snyde, you rode right into the slave traders’ hands.” He sighed. “And you probably told them you were following me.”

  “I didn’t say your name!” he squealed a little too loudly.

  Their captors’ debate ended abruptly. One climbed through a flap in the canvas to land between the two prisoners, and she pinched Cal-raven’s cheeks. “Ay, yummy. The pretty one’s awake.”

  She was younger than he was and not unattractive. Above her freckled, fierce expression, a shock of short red hair jagged out about her head like a crown of autumn leaves, and her pointed chin was scarred with a scab. “You’re gonna do as you’re told, aren’t you? Hate to have to bruise you any worse.”

  “I’m going to win you a fortune bigger than any you’ve imagined,” he replied as the wagon began to move again.