Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  Near cousin to the overland merchants were those inside the Recityv walls who set up handcarts in alley-fronts all across the city. Things they sold were a half step up from goods had on the road. That included the flesh trade. When a man or woman wanted practiced love, it could be bought. Some whores went it alone. Their services were cheap and fast and often had for a drink or drab of laudanum. The savvy ones, though, attached themselves to the Geneese family, who plied that particular trade with great aplomb.

  And at the top of the commerce ladder: the Merchant District. Here, there were three levels of commerce. The night market, which buzzed all around her now. Then, in the day, a different set of merchants would line up in chalked stalls. These usually stocked discounted items cleared from the shelves of the merchant buildings. And highest in the pecking order were the merchant family warehouses. The district had as many as forty-seven families.

  Helaina moved casually through the night market, feeling at home in a way she never quite did at Solath Mahnus. She loved the immediacy and urgency of chalked slate announcing goods and prices. It left the buyer with the sense that items written there might soon be gone, that prices weren’t fixed.

  Eager chatter filled the air. The sweet smell of honeyed barley-bread. The sharp tang of roasted sausages. More than a few musicians played on street corners—not carnival tunes, and not the airs of operettas. No, they played accompaniment to stroll and purchase by; they played songs like “Coins to Rub Together,” “Jubilee Is a Bargain Made,” and “Give It Here, It’s Mine.” Gods, how she missed all this.

  Before she knew it, and before she was ready, she stopped in the middle of the central merchant road and turned to face her family’s warehouse. The bright, warm light of night commerce lit the granite facings, giving it a stout, lasting appearance.

  In heavily serifed letters, chiseled into the stone above the high entryway, was a single word: STORALAITH. Her family name. One of the most influential merchant houses in Recityv. One she’d have been asked to run if she’d remained in the business. One that believed she’d betrayed their interest in her very first year as regent.

  Dear absent gods, I’m going in.

  She was too old to be afraid of the ghosts of her youth. Besides, she’d been right to pass sanctions on trade. And it was thirty years ago. She didn’t even bother to knock. Knocking would suggest that she didn’t feel she was still permitted to enter the home of her family. She signaled to her Emerit guard, who would be close by and hidden, that she was going in alone. Then she opened the front lock with the key she still carried—a key fashioned by a Dimnian craftsman, nearly impossible to replicate.

  The buzz of night commerce muted as she closed the door. Inside, a few oil lamps had their wicks turned down low. Her father preferred oil light to alchemical lamps. Flickering flames outlined furniture in the front sitting room. Closed doors to offices on the right. A lacquered banister ascending the stairs to the bedchambers above. And more light on her left—the kitchen, where the real business always took place.

  Helaina put her key away and took a long breath, steadying herself. Then she went in. It wasn’t a surprise to see her parents bent over glasses of chilled milk, scratching at numbers on a ledger, and conversing in hushed tones as they’d always done. They sat at a thick butcher-block-type table—sturdy enough for family meals and the occasional side of beef they portioned themselves. She missed that, too. In a family tradition, everyone wielded a knife of Alon’Itol steel and helped carve up the meat. Throwing slices of parted beef fat at one another had been good sport; laughter had kept them company during the task. Her father told all his old jokes about how if the family failed at its “business of knowledge” they could all become butchers.

  As far as she could remember, this was the pose she’d last seen them in, too. If she squinted, it looked like they were bent in prayer, their words having a similar kind of reverence.

  They didn’t notice her right away, so she stood and watched for a while. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen them since she’d been made regent. And most of those had come before the trade sanctions she’d invoked. She’d run into her father twice since, and both times he’d skirted her and disappeared. Both times it had been when a vote had come up to revoke the sanctions, which had commonly become known as the “Knowledge Law.”

  Before that memory returned in full, she heard her father clear his throat. Her eyes focused, and she found her parents staring at her. Without averting his eyes, her father picked up a meat tenderizer and pounded the table three times with it like a gavel. Loud cracks filled the kitchen. For a man nearly eighty years old, he was still strong in his arms. She’d thought he was simply being impudent, but shortly, a young man she scarcely recognized emerged through the kitchen’s rear door.

  “What’s the matter, Da?” Then her brother Mendel looked up at her. Fifteen years her junior, he’d grown taller and thicker than their father.

  Mendel’s face rushed through an initial smile of pleasant surprise to a look of concern, and then—she thought—a hint of distaste.

  “Helaina, dear, you’re all crippled over with rheumatism,” her mother observed. “Are you drinking green tea? Try turmeric powder, dear.”

  Helaina smiled. Her mother never stopped being a ma.

  “Please show the regent her way out,” her father said.

  “Gemen,” said her mother with mild reproof.

  He cracked the meat tenderizer down once more for good measure. “Merta, don’t cross me on this. Storalaith hangs by a thread because of that girl.” He jabbed a finger at her. “We’re just this side of crooks, as they see it. Law always sniffing around. Conducting audits of our inventory. Threats all the while.” His own words seemed to drive his anger to new heights, and he slammed the tenderizer down again, this time on its flat side, producing more a crack than slam. “And that’s on the commerce of information, dove. It’s madness!”

  She hadn’t heard her father call her mother “dove” since she’d lived here.

  Mendel put a hand on his father’s shoulder to try and calm him. “Helaina, it’s late. I assume you’re here for personal reasons, and not as regent?” His tone turned up at the end, as in a question.

  Helaina nodded. “A little of both, actually.”

  “Can it wait ’til tomorrow?” Mendel suggested, looking down at his father and back up.

  Her brother meant that Gemen Storalaith would be engaged in trade tomorrow. She’d do better talking to them if he wasn’t here.

  Not seeing the exchange, her father closed his ledger, took a long draught of his cold milk, and leveled his appraising eyes on her. “Then let’s have it. Start with the regent bit; I’d like to know why you grace our warehouses so late on an official errand. You can’t hardly tax us anymore than you already have. Or maybe we should just get to it and sign over our stock to you now.”

  She waited while her father vented, giving her mother a patient look. “I need access to the family vault.”

  Her father brayed out a caustic laugh. It sounded wet in his chest, like he had the blood cough, but he didn’t fall into any spasms. “Unbelievable. Access to our vault. That’s what you want? Is that an official request? Or is it my daughter needs money? Maybe to bribe a few votes to pass another trade law.”

  “I could make it an official request,” she said coolly. “But I don’t want to do that.”

  “We might need you to, Helaina.” It was her mother, trying in her own way to smooth the divide between daughter and father.

  “Why do you need to get in?” Mendel asked. He showed no suspicion, and it was a fair question, besides.

  She stepped forward and placed her hands on the edge of the table, mostly for support—she’d been walking and standing a long time. “The day I was named regent, I came here, do you remember?”

  Her parents both nodded.

  “I had something with me. Something I placed in the Storalaith vault, because to me there’s not a sa
fer place I could have kept it, not even in the deeps of Solath Mahnus.”

  “What was it?” Mendel’s curiosity was piqued.

  She gave them each a long look. “A letter,” she said. “Now, will you let me in?”

  Her answer seemed to surprise them. And none of them spoke while her father considered her request. He led the Storalaith Merchant House, after all was said and done. It was a vast operation, with gatherers in most cities and towns across the Eastlands. In fact, to hear the merchant houses tell it—trade legends being what they were—Gemen had sent gatherers over the seas in merchant ships and into the Bourne itself.

  Her father waved the tenderizer dismissively. “Very well. Let’s get you your letter and the hell out of my warehouse. Bad for business,” he muttered.

  As he started to stand, Mendel gently pushed his father back into his chair. “I’ll see to it, Da. You finish the day’s ledger, and your milk, too.”

  “No horsing around back there,” her father admonished. “In and out.” He jabbed the tenderizer forward and back in emphasis. “And be mindful you’re escorting your regent.”

  Helaina tried not to let the snide way her father used her official title bother her. She had certainly had worse from others. And if she was honest, she’d expected it, even understood it. But that didn’t lessen the sting of it one jot. Her father’s skin bore the large dark spots of age. Though he still had a steady hand, he’d go to his earth soon. She might have just lost her last chance to reconcile with the da she still loved. The man who’d given her the keen wit and values that accounted—as far as she was concerned—for any of her success as regent.

  Mendel motioned her to follow, and he disappeared through the rear kitchen door. She paused next to her father as she passed. She longed to bend and kiss him one last time, put her arms around him. Tell him she loved him. She sensed any of those things would be too much. The gulf between them had widened too far. Instead, she simply reached down and put a hand on his forearm, feeling the warmth of his aged skin. She didn’t look at him as she did so. And he didn’t look up. But neither did he pull his arm away.

  The moment passed in a breath. And it broke her heart with the suggestion of closeness she had forfeited for thirty years. Her da.

  She wondered. If she could go back, would she shun the call to be regent, and stay at her father’s side?

  Get moving, you old dotard. Looking back’s a fool’s game.

  She stifled a grin as she left the kitchen for the Storalaith vault, since the pragmatism she scolded herself with belonged to her father—maybe the best thing she’d inherited from him.

  Down a short hall Mendel waited at an iron door for her to catch up. This was the first, simplest barrier to the family depository. The thickly cast portal had a rather plain keyhole. By rote, Mendel inserted a key into the lock and turned.

  But this was all show. As her brother performed the obvious task, he also subtly pressed a small section of the doorjamb a hand’s length below the lock. This was the true key.

  After they’d stepped through, Mendel closed the door promptly, and turned into a small antechamber. A few chairs were situated in the corners, where attendant tables laden with a few books and low-wick oil lamps stood. A decorative rug spun by a Reyal’Te weaver covered the floor from wall to wall. This room had been one of Helaina’s favorites as a child—quiet, removed from the bustle of warehouse inventory and kitchen conversation. It was great for reading in peace any of the wonderful books they meant to sell—stock, her father called it.

  Helaina smiled at the term—stock. Even as a child, she’d seen through her father’s insistence that she view the books as collateral. The man had a passion for knowledge. He could have chosen a hundred other ways to earn coin. And many of his own family argued there were simpler needs to fill, merchandise they could move more quickly and at better margin.

  Gemen Storalaith would have none of it. Much as it filled his coffers, too, he had it in his head that he was doing his clientele a service. Trading in knowledge, he’d say, is ennobling. He wasn’t wrong, either.

  Her smile soured. She’d inherited that same sense from the man. And it was that feeling that had led her to pass the Knowledge Law. She’d had her judicature counselors draft it, which meant it was filled with a bunch of six-plug words only an academy graduate would understand. But in essence: New information didn’t belong to anyone; so it couldn’t be sold. The profitability of her father’s trade had taken a severe hit; the law required Storalaith to turn over any new understanding it sourced to the Library of Common Understanding. They’d been forced to do commerce in the grey area of scholarship that reevaluated existing knowledge. It was a specialized market. A good one. And her father was expert at it. But her law had crippled his growth and profit potential.

  The Knowledge Law had been the right thing. It made Helaina extremely popular with the people. And she liked to believe that maybe somewhere in his heart, her father was proud that she’d tried to help make enlightenment more widely available. But she’d lost her family because of it, and hadn’t sat at the kitchen table for chilled milk since.

  Mendel approached a second door. This one had no lock at all, just a handle. And when he knocked, it sounded as thin and light as balsa wood. But she listened in sweet memory to the tap. Tap. Tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap. Tap. The same chiastic rhythm repeated three times.

  Nothing happened. After a few moments, Mendel looked back at her, smiling. “Do you remember?” he asked, his eyebrows arching.

  After a half moment to remember, she returned a grin, then repeated the rhythmic knock. But this time in its proper pattern: Left. Left, right. Left, right, down. Down right. Right.

  Beneath her knuckles, the door swung slowly open on hinges that used gravity to pull it back. She smiled, happy to have remembered on her own.

  The short hallway beyond chilled her skin. Cold stone surrounded them on every side; another dim, low-wick oil lamp burned at the corridor’s end. Here forward, all was thick granite. She and Mendel came to the last door. She marveled now at the piece of genius stonework—practically seamless, set on a near-soundless caster system, graven with a simple undecorative word: SO.

  So was a Dimnian word meaning “speech-song,” and an archaic connotation at that. This last door could be unlocked only by the sound of the voice. But the ingenuity of the lock went beyond mere so. The door had been attuned to the voices of the Storalaith family. Speech, it turned out, had qualities that followed family lines. Like a tonal fingerprint. It was as distinctive and different as one cloud is from the next. And for the price of a very old Masson text, Gemen Storalaith had bought the service of a Dimnian who knew the art of fastening the door with a speech-lock only a Storalaith could open.

  Mendel parted his lips to speak. Helaina put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. She wanted to do it. She felt like a child again, and that didn’t seem so bad a thing. He smiled and gestured grandly for her to take over.

  Helaina stepped closer to the door and said, as they always had, “Don’t let me in.”

  The childish joke of it made them both laugh, since the door, of course, rolled back at the sound of her voice.

  Once the half-stride-thick granite slab had opened fully, her brother picked up the oil lamp and they went in. “Don’t let me out,” Mendel said, and the portal rolled shut again—vault doors were never left open.

  Mendel lit several oil lamps to brighten the vault, as Helaina noted the receiving desk set beside the door, where a handy copy of the ledger was kept. Her father was a stickler for such redundancies.

  Then she looked up, and came to an abrupt stop. Her father’s trade had expanded. Where he’d begun with texts, the vault now showed tidy sections of various information goods. In one corner a tall cherrywood rack—much like a wine rack, but deeper—held a vast assortment of maps.

  Next to the map rack stood a table laid out with dozens of different kinds of ores and minerals. She hadn’t mastered mineralogy, but s
he’d gotten streetwise in their value and uses. Her father had no interest in platinums and golds and qualens, it would seem. Useful as those metals were in commerce, it appeared they hadn’t the leading qualities these ones did.

  Helaina caught whiffs of aqua fortis, strong water, and vinegar—reactants that could be used to test mineral authenticity.

  Beside the table stood a large cabinet with glass doors. Inside it, on tall shelves, were glass bottles with cork stoppers. The bottles held powders and liquids in various quantities. She knew her father better than to think he’d peddle false nostrums to the ignorant, or even useful ones to the sick—nostrums weren’t his trade. Mendel saw her quizzical stare and crossed to the cabinet, opened the left door, and drew down a bottle. He opened it and dabbed a finger in a pale magenta powder, then put his finger in his mouth.

  “Rhubarb powder. Good drink flavoring.” He grinned.

  Helaina laughed softly. She knew the cabinet held more than culinary ingredients, but before she could ponder it further, her attention turned to the dead.

  On the left wall hung several large anatomical sketches. Beside them, from a series of spikes driven into the stone, hung intact skeletons. The sizes and shapes varied; these were the bones of different races—human, Tilatian, Far, Mal, Dimnian, and others. She was no anatomist, but she’d swear on there being at least those races. What disturbed her most, though, were the sketches themselves. They’d been marked up in odd places. Strategic places. It looked to her like the biological frailties of each race had been meticulously noted—information that had a certain buyer.

  Looking around, she had the sudden realization that Storalaith had moved beyond simply acquiring and reselling understanding. It had gone into the business of discovery. They were using what could be learned in the books, and advancing the knowledge themselves.