by Dale Lucas
“You think I’m a coward?” Rem asked.
“I think you’re a babe in the woods,” Torval said. “And if you’re not careful, you’ll get one or the both of us killed.”
Torval turned and strode away, shaking his head as he went. Rem wanted to follow him, but couldn’t quite manage to. His feet were rooted where he stood. He heard his father’s voice in his head.
Abroad? What makes you think you could keep yourself safe outside these domains? Without my protection?
Your place is here, Remeck. Your purpose is here. Out there, you’d be eaten alive.
A babe in the woods, Torval said. And if you’re not careful, you’ll get one or the both of us killed.
Torval was a good distance from him now. Rem finally put one foot in front of the other and followed, but he made no attempt to catch up. Give Torval some space for a time, he thought. Myself, too. He maintained a steady distance from the dwarf, but never closed it.
The sound of singing drew his eyes off toward the shadows on his right. There he saw two swaying inebriates stumbling out of an alleyway, joined in a raucous, badly harmonized chorus from an old Loffmari ship’s ballad. They leaned on one another as they reeled off into the night.
Rem suspected the dwarf was right. He wasn’t cut out for this work. Wielding authority and imposing his will had never been his strong suits, had they? How many times had his father scolded him for the same offense, something that Rem saw as no offense at all? Do not ask the servants, command them, his father would say through clenched teeth. And stop thanking them. It sets a bad example. He was fooling himself if he thought he could do this. He had only jumped at the opportunity because he was desperate. His rent was due and he was dead broke. He’d made it all the way to Yenara on the coin from a hocked sword and a traded destrier—but now he was in danger of ending up destitute, desperate, homeless, and hungry.
Just as his father said he would, if left to his own devices.
Perhaps that was why it meant so much to him. He did not simply want to start anew, to make his own way in the world—he wanted to earn his way into something. A trade, a fraternity or guild, a noble pursuit. Almost by accident, he’d found that fraternity, that noble pursuit, in the wardwatch. If he could succeed here, now, and make a place for himself, that would prove that his father—that everyone who had ever assured him that he was only a creature of the court—was wrong.
Perhaps that even he had been wrong about himself. Everything he’d ever owned or called his own—including his doubts about his ability to stand alone, to make his own way—had been handed to him, not earned. Some mad part of him had decided that the only way to banish those inherited assumptions was to divest himself of them and go find—go earn—new truths that contradicted them.
Or maybe he was just lonely. He’d been in Yenara for almost a week now, and he’d been on the road for a month before that. He couldn’t really say that he’d made any friends. He usually thought of himself as a loner, but the realization that, for weeks, he hadn’t shared a friendly word with anyone, hadn’t caught up with anyone or been caught up on, hadn’t seen a familiar face or looked forward to a meeting … it was startling, strange, yet completely undeniable.
Yes. He was lonely.
And desperate.
And, truth be told, he did like Torval, even if Torval was not so fond of him. He sensed that there was no lying in the dwarf, no guile. He judged things purely by his gut instincts and his observations, and he would challenge Rem at every turn.
And that was precisely what Rem needed.
Because he wasn’t giving up.
“Hey!” he called, and hustled to after the tromping dwarf.
Torval threw a glance back over his shoulder. He did not slow his pace. “It’s nothing personal, lad—some can do this work and some can’t. I’m sure there’s something out there for you to—”
Rem slowed as he hove up abreast of the dwarf. “Shut your gob,” he said.
Torval stopped. He turned to Rem, scowling. “What did you say?”
“I said shut your yapping gob,” Rem answered. He half expected to suddenly feel Torval’s maul crack him headwise. When that didn’t happen, he plunged on.
“Fine,” Rem said, “I underestimated the gravity of that situation and I fouled up royally. I’ve learned from it. You’re not going to dismiss me that easily.”
Torval cocked his head. “And what makes you think you have a choice in the matter?” Torval asked. “If I say I’m done with you, Bonny Prince, I’m bloody done with you—”
“Call me ‘Bonny Prince’ again,” Rem snarled, “and I’ll shove that maul up your cack-hole, headfirst.”
Torval was silenced by the threat. Rem decided he should press on, before Torval realized it was all bluff and bluster.
“I erred; I’ve begged your pardon. Let’s move on. You can hold whatever opinions you might of my abilities, you bloody little stump, but you will not judge my potential on a single blundered arrest. You can ask Ondego to shove me at someone else when we get back to the watchkeep, but I’ll tell you right now—”
Torval punched him. It wasn’t a teasing knock upside the head as he’d offered earlier in the night, either—it was a full force, hard-fisted battering-ram job that knocked Rem onto the hard-packed mud of the waterfront street. Rem hit the earth hard, tasted blood. He spat out a mouthful of red, bubbling saliva. He dared a glance up at Torval.
The dwarf stood over him, sausage-fingered hand extended. He was offering Rem help back onto his feet.
Rem accepted. “You bloody little …”
“You made your point,” Torval said. “Now shut your sauce box before I crack you again.”
The dwarf offered a sly little half smile. Rem offered his hand, a show of peace.
“Partners? If only for the night?”
Torval took his hand and shook it. “As you say,” Torval answered. “And if you call me ‘Stump’ again, I’ll break every bone in your body and throw you into the bay for the sharks.”
Rem nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Now come on,” Torval said after a persistent silence. “Let’s head back. Shift’s almost done.” The dwarf started on his way. Rem followed. His jaw felt like a piece of cracked sculpture.
The two of them trudged back up the gentle slope of the hill, toward the cut of the canal and the bridge that crossed it. Rem couldn’t believe how silent and empty the streets now seemed, after a long night of warm bodies, activity, and noise. Somewhere between the third and fourth bells, everyone seemed to feel their exhaustion and return to where they slept. He guessed it would stay like this for another hour or so, until the city’s shopkeepers, stall men, and workers rose for another day of labor. When the first light of dawn appeared on the horizon, the brother of the watch at the Great Temple of Aemon would ring the morning bells to herald the day. An hour after that, the city gates would open, horse- and ox-carts would trundle across the cobbles, and life would return to the streets.
They crossed the bridge over the canal that snaked down toward North Harbor. As they did, Rem saw some people moving below, down by the waterside—washerwomen and tanners’ wives carrying buckets of water back to their hovels, a drunk singing himself to sleep, a few thin cats, and one scrawny stray dog. The canal and the city were all shrouded in a thin mist, and that mist made the world soft and dreamy, like something one imagined, not like something that was actually there.
They were well over the bridge, two or three blocks past, trudging uphill back toward the watchkeep, when someone screamed far behind them. Rem and Torval both spun toward the sound. They waited, and were rewarded with yet another scream. Exchanging only momentary glances, they took off running back the way they’d come. To Rem’s surprise, Torval’s thick little legs carried him quite swiftly.
Before they reached the bridge, they saw a woman come tottering out of the morning fog. She was old and bent, and Rem guessed that she was one of the washerwomen he’d seen down by the ca
nalside. When she saw them running closer, she threw out her bony old arms and waved them frantically.
“A dead man!” she shouted. “A dead man down by the water!”
“Shut it!” someone called from a dark alley off to their left. “Some of us are trying to sleep!”
“Dead!” she carried on. “All the gods, he’s dead!”
Rem and Torval reached her. “Where?” the dwarf demanded.
“Down there,” she said, pointing toward the canal with one shaking finger. “Right down there, on the near bank, just under the bridge!”
Torval nodded and led the way. Rem followed the dwarf down a side street that ran parallel with the winding canal until they found a flight of stone steps that led down to the water. As they descended, the smell of dead fish and mold grew stronger. Rem nearly choked. He hadn’t noticed the stench coming off the canal when crossing it, but down here—right beside it—it was unmistakable. He sincerely hoped no one drew their drinking water out of that turgid stream.
The drunk who’d been singing to himself was tottering on the far bank now. “What’s all the commotion?” he shouted across at them. “What’s that old fishwife on about?”
Torval ignored him. Rem saw that someone else lingered farther upstream on the near side of the canal—another woman by the look, with a basket of laundry lying beside her, barely visible in the moonlight.
They trudged toward the base of the bridge. Already, though dark, Rem could see the body. It lay at the mouth of a large circular sewer drain that emptied into the canal. The dead man’s legs lay toward the water. The upper half of his body was shrouded by the shadow of the drain.
“You ever seen a dead man?” Torval asked.
“He’s not my first,” Rem answered, though he supposed the body he was about to see would be a far more shocking sight than his mother or his grandparents, washed and well attired and arrayed with some dignity on their funeral biers.
“Nor your last, on this watch,” Torval replied.
They reached him. The dead man lay still and silent, half in and half out of the drain, a brick-lined cave as wide as a man’s spread arms from fingertip to fingertip. Their lantern had stopped burning hours ago. Torval looked to Rem and gestured toward the torches slung across his back.
“Light up,” he said. “You never, ever want to step into one of these drains—not even right in the mouth of it—without ample light.”
Rem drew out a torch. “Why is that?” he asked as he clamped the torch under one arm, then fetched the flint and steel from his pocket.
Torval was grave. “There’s not just life on Yenara’s streets,” he said. “There’s plenty more under it. Always be wary when you get near these outlets.”
Rem nodded. He would take Torval’s warning to heart. In moments, he’d summoned sufficient sparks to light the torch’s pitch-soaked head. He handed the torch to Torval and knelt beside the body.
Rem didn’t notice any stench above and beyond that of the canal itself and the drain that trickled into it, so he guessed the dead man was fairly fresh—perhaps just a few hours old, and recently washed up on this muddy bank. The roiling gold-red flames of the torch cast a bright, flickering light upon the corpse and a short distance into the black maw of the sewer drain. Satisfied that nothing lurked in that darkness to snatch him, Rem edged closer.
“Turn him over,” Torval said.
Rem nodded. He reached out, took two fistfuls of the dead man’s jerkin, then heaved backward. The body turned over easily.
The first thing Rem saw was the horrid, red-black grin drawn across the dead man’s pale, hairy throat. It was a deep slash. In all likelihood, he’d bled out fast—perhaps in as little as ten or twenty seconds.
But then Rem noticed a few other unpleasant details. The dead man had two broken fingers on his right hand. The front of his leather jerkin was punctured and torn in at least three places, indicating that the fellow had been cut and poked before finally being slashed and bled. Finally, there was the fellow’s strange tattoo—a five-pointed star inside a circle that enclosed his right eye.
“Looks like they worked him over before they killed him,” Rem said.
Torval said nothing. Rem turned, ready to argue with the dwarf if he claimed that Rem was being too hasty in his judgments, too concerned with details. That would be just like the stubborn little bastard, wanting to deflate Rem’s still-emerging sense of competence.
But Torval seemed to have nothing to say. Even in the golden light of the torch, Rem saw that the dwarf was pale, his eyes wide, his mouth slack. Apparently, the sight of the dead man was quite a shock to him.
“Torval, what is it?” Rem asked, honestly concerned. It was the first time all evening the dwarf had been speechless.
“That’s my partner,” Torval said. “That’s Freygaf.”
CHAPTER SIX
Torval used the little brass whistle that all watchwardens carried. The shrill note it sounded seemed to ring far and wide through the close quarters of the Fifth Ward. In no time, Rem heard the sound of bootheels slapping walk boards and cobbles as any watchwardens within hearing of the whistle came running. Likewise, many a sleeping resident woke to the urgent call and cursed the watchwardens for the bloody noise they made. Torval did not even have the belligerence left in him to dress these complainers down and urge them back to their beds. He simply stood by the canal bank and waited. Rem, meanwhile, took the opportunity to examine the site where Freygaf’s body had been discovered.
He lay in a wide-open sewer outlet, a broad, dark passage that led back into the bowels of the city at a vaguely sloped angle, no doubt to allow the outflowing water to run downward and gain momentum before joining the flow of the great canal. Rem, trying to heed Torval’s warning about lingering too close to the open sewer passages, only leaned forward to study the interior of the outlet at one point, and when he did so, he was careful to keep his torch well ahead of him, so that its flickering orange-gold light filled the passage for a few spear lengths. That, at least, would allow him to see anything that might come scurrying out of the dark at him.
There was very little to see in the immediate vicinity of the corpse save the normal detritus that one might find at a sewer outflow: old branches and refuse, a few drowned rat carcasses, and soft piles of who-knew-what droppings. Rem imagined that after a heavy rain, or during the spring thaw, when the river that fed Yenara’s sewers was swollen with meltwater from the distant mountains to the east, the outflow down here could be quite heavy, washing just about anything caught in its flow down into the canal, and along the canal’s final length into the harbor, the bay, and the sea beyond. But presently, there was only a trickle, meaning the waters that flowed under Yenara’s streets and washed away her piss and shit and secrets were at low ebb. That could work to their advantage, he supposed, because the runoff would not have washed away all the clues they could find.
His search of the inner mouth of the outflow tunnel completed, Rem stepped over Freygaf’s body and lowered his torch to the ground. He began a slow, laborious search of the stone drainage trough that led from the mouth of the tunnel down the bank to the canal, and the damp gray mud that stretched away on either side. Almost at once, he saw his own tracks and Torval’s approaching from the south along the bank, still freshly depressed in the mud. But as he studied the soft bank, he realized that he saw something else as well.
There were other tracks that his and Torval’s had crossed and, in one spot, trampled. There were two sets, one close to the mouth of the tunnel, the other set apart slightly. The tracks set apart were clearly human—leather boot of a good make, with solid heels and soles, the sort that only a well-to-do dandy or proud soldier on holiday might wear. The other set of tracks were pressed deeper into the mud, indicating a person or creature of greater mass. These tracks were barefoot, and, if Rem was not mistaken, not human.
“Torval?” he called.
The dwarf, lost in a grieving reverie no doubt, grunted from his vi
gil at the canal bank. Rem caught Torval’s gaze, and jerked his head sideward to urge him nearer.
“You might want to see this,” he said. Rem was fairly sure that he knew what he was looking at. He’d spent ample time hunting in the forests near his home ever since he was a child, both from horseback and on foot. He might not have many useful skills outside of a royal court, but he knew spoor, sign, and tracking like a lifelong ranger. However, he was still new here, and new to Torval. He wanted Torval to reach the same conclusion he had so there was no chance of the dwarf dismissing his observations through the fog of his grief, or out of pride.
Torval dragged his way over to the mouth of the tunnel. He studied the tracks in the mud that Rem indicated. Rem pointed at the outer set.
“Those are clearly human,” Rem said. “But these—”
Torval’s face was red. His broad, muscular little body seemed to be shaking with a rising internal fury. “Orc,” the dwarf grunted.
“That’s what I thought,” Rem said. “Barefoot, too, so probably not a well-to-do sort.”
“Some of ’em wear boots,” Torval said, “but not all. Many prefer to go barefoot when they can—bloody savages.”
Rem heard a definite tone of bitterness in Torval’s already raspy voice. It was the voice of a man fighting a flood of emotions, most of them unpleasant and totally beyond his control. Rem thought he would continue with his surmises so that Torval could concentrate on information and not his feelings.
“Look here,” Rem said, pointing to the place where the tracks turned and moved away from the mouth of the sewer outlet. “The orc tracks are deeper over there, upon approach, then shallower here, as they move away.”
“The orc was heavier on approach,” Torval said, nodding in understanding. “The orc was carrying something?”
“That’d be my guess,” Rem said, standing.
Torval studied him for a moment. His expression of grief and fury never changed, but his eyes narrowed and he seemed to appraise Rem anew.
