Thy Father's Shadow (Book 4.5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “That last one is not exactly a selling point,” Terian said hoarsely, his fingers massaging his throat.

  “Nonetheless,” Guturan said without expression, “you will be expected to conduct yourself in the manner of House Lepos’s heir, including in the social arena.”

  Terian eyed the money pouch and knew instinctively that it was gold, all gold. No bronze or silver needed, not for a true nobleman’s purse. He eyed it, gave it thought, considered passing, just brushing it aside and leaving. He wavered, stared at it, and Guturan moved it closer.

  Terian thought about the boarding house again, of the communal kitchen, of his hour per day to prepare his meals. The memory of clutching his blanket tightly around him when he slept. Of the time that a street urchin hit him in the head with a snowball while he stood outside a warehouse. The thoughts ate at him and he tasted something sour on his tongue.

  He took the extended coin purse.

  “Your father told you to be back before surface dawn, yes?” Guturan called to him as he started down the stairs.

  Terian thought about firing back a sharp look as he clacked down the wooden steps but he refrained. “I’ll be back by then.”

  He didn’t see his mother when he reached the foyer, so he simply stepped out of the front door as the doorman opened it for him. One of the servants ran up to him and started to ask him about his need for a carriage, but he waved the man off. Walking will do me good. Besides, there is no shortage of carts and wagons willing to haul me back from Sovar, if I so need it. And very few of them haul corpses.

  He passed the gate guards and they saluted him. He ignored it as his heavy footfalls clattered along the main avenue. He looked to his right at the Sovereign’s palace; at the enormous, smokeless fires that burned on the top of its guard towers, and he felt a seething anger at the mere sight of them. From there he turned his head to look at Shrawn’s manor, and felt his fury grow stronger. You bastard, Shrawn. How different would my life be if my father didn’t constantly feel your dagger at his back? His anger flashed, then settled. Possibly not any different at all.

  He stormed off to his left, trying to control his steps lest they become a fitful stomp, petulant in his anger.

  The walk to the square took only ten minutes, and it was bustling with all manner of servant activity. Terian felt the weariness in his legs from the morning’s long ride, and the thought began to settle in about the walk to Sovar. Why am I even going there? It was an idle question, one he didn’t really need an answer to. He already knew the answer, anyway.

  Because it’s where I always end up. Every time. It’s the only place in this dank hellhole where I can be … me.

  By the time he’d come to the far end of the square, the novelty of walking had worn off. He was weary from the journey, and he ached from the Lockjaw curse his father had cast on him. A man with a small cart waited at the far end of the market, a wide bench pushed against the high back of the open cart. It was a vehicle with one purpose, and that was to convey passengers around the city.

  He signaled the man as he approached and was met with a wide grin. The blue face of the cart man was made even more accentuated by the phosphorescence glowing above them like a milder version of an azure sky. It was not a blinding light by any means, but Terian could see well enough by it. The cart clacked through Sovar as the cart man hustled along, using his own legs to convey the vehicle and his passenger.

  They were stopped momentarily at the gate as the guards made note of his name on a roll of parchment. He knew the same roll would be checked again, later, when the time came to readmit him. Terian was unworried about that, though; he knew more than one secret path into Saekaj if it came to it. Sometimes it had.

  The traffic stopped in the lane of the tunnel immediately outside the gates, and he watched the cart driver make the turn across the traffic as they began a slow descent into the tunnel that led to Sovar. Within a hundred feet, the smooth brick gave way to rutted clay and the passage became rough and bumpy, and Terian felt the shock of the journey in his bones. A thin pad lay between his backside and the bench, and he was thankful for this concession to comfort.

  The journey down to Sovar took almost a half hour as the foot traffic increased around the Granary, the enormous chamber between Saekaj and Sovar dedicated to the storage and sale of foodstuffs grown in the Depths, as well as to fish brought up from the Great Sea. The crowds were heavy around the tunnel that led there and continued to be heavy as they slowly made their way down into Sovar.

  There was no gate at the entrance to the lower chamber, no guards to keep anyone out as the tunnel split off from the main road that led down further into the earth, toward the Depths and the Great Sea. The air became danker and dirtier down here. The air was choked with coal dust; that awful-smelling stuff mined from the Depths and often burned for fuel in Sovar. There was no chance of wood down here; what little made it underground became furniture, not fuel.

  There was a thick layer of soot over everything, in spite of a dozen natural chimneys that allowed the worst of the coal smoke to gradually filter out and be replaced, in time, with cleaner air from outside the caverns. Terian had seen Sovar on those occasions, and there was no cooking of anything on those nights. Cold, yeasty, unbaked dough or rough, unsoftened roots with raw mushrooms were a welcome feast on those days. He suspected many of the occupants of Sovar simply didn’t eat on those occasions.

  The noise of the place was a low roar, countless voices talking over one another, barking commands, shouting transactions from the thousand stalls that lined every single step of the thoroughfare. Barkers promoted their goods in voices so loud it would put the cart merchants of Reikonos to shame. The things being sold were of little interest to him, however. There were other bars, better ones, in Saekaj. Ones that served real liquor, distilled whiskey, things made from the good grains and barley and oats that came from the surface. But there were limits in those places, and everyone was always listening, always watching. Shrawn is always listening in those places. As his father had said, nothing in Saekaj went ignored. Nothing within its proper circles could be ignored; it was too tightly knit.

  Sovar, on the other hand, offered the veneer of anonymity. That was all it was, in practice, he knew, but it was enough. Shrawn is probably still watching down here, but even his eyes might miss something, and even his ears are necessarily deaf to what goes on in Sovar. Everyone in Saekaj might indeed know what a noble did in the pit that they called Sovar, but although it was whispered about, it would never be brought up in polite circles. And that is its strength, Terian reflected as the cart pulled through a street and barkers surrounded him on either side, trying desperately to catch the noble visitor’s attention.

  He ignored them all, though, and the wild colors that surrounded him. While the majority of the structures were simple mud dwellings carved into the rock, there was vek’tag hair cloth everywhere, some of it shaded by wild dyes of a sort that would have been unusual even in Reikonos. He had been gone so long he had nearly forgotten the strong pigment of the wildroots that grew in the Depths, the flowers of which were an inedible byproduct of the growing process. It was cheap, being a principal castoff of a vital part of the food production that allowed the entirety of Sovar to subsist. It gave Terian’s eyes something to look at in any case, garish distractions from the dull and dark structures that had been built in nearly every available square foot of Sovar.

  The smells were a distraction of their own. They ranged from the sooty, permeating odor of the coal that was burning in the communal ovens to the scent of thin stews that were fragrant with the mushrooms, wildroot, and vek’tag meat that seasoned them. And season them is about all those things do, in the amounts the poor of Sovar have. Terian blanched, recalling the time he’d traveled into the Back Deep of Sovar with his father to visit one of Amenon’s childhood friends. It had been an awkward experience, one that brought the hot flush of shame to Terian’s cheeks even now. He could recall
asking when the real food would arrive after being served a thin stew with a piece of wildroot floating in it. A look from Amenon had been enough to quell any further comments. Only later had his father told him that as honored guests, they had received the wildroot as a reflection of their status. The rest of the family had gotten only the stew, with perhaps a few fragments of the root to gnaw on.

  A bump in the road brought Terian’s attention back to the increasingly crowded lane. They’d turned onto a narrow alley, barely wide enough for the cart, and Terian smiled. At least some things don’t change. The cart stopped in front of steps carved down into the basement of a building that reached three stories in height. Terian stretched as he got out of the cart and handed the quiet driver a piece of gold, earning a grateful—and enthusiastic—thanks. He realized that the cart driver didn’t make that much in a day of labor under normal conditions and immediately handed the man a second piece of gold from the full purse that he’d tied to his belt.

  He walked down the steps and opened the door, pausing to look inside before he stepped in. The place was dim, a lone lamp burning over the bar. The man standing behind the bar—which was made of stone quarried in the Depths—was unfamiliar, as gaunt as most of the residents of Sovar, and he glared at the intruder for almost a second before he registered surprise and then bowed his head rapidly at the sight of his noble guest.

  Terian didn’t strut as he walked in, but he knew many a time in his youth he surely had upon entering this establishment. It was called the Unnamed, or at least so called by anyone who knew it. Most of the establishments in Sovar had names painted outside to draw attention, banners of vek’tag cloth with names dyed on them. Not the Unnamed. It remained hidden in a darkened alley, and catered to a very specific brand of clientele. In a sea of establishments fighting for attention, it went nearly unnoticed.

  Nearly.

  Terian’s eyes roved around the room, picking out a few day laborers with their skin darkened by exposure to the light of the surface, a few layabouts with the tell-tale shiftiness of con men who would sing any song they could for another piece of silver, and even someone dressed like a noble, in the corner. He did a double take when he saw who it was, and a broad grin crept over his face as he made eye contact, altering his course to carry him to the corner table where the man waited with a smile of his own.

  “Xemlinan Eres,” Terian said, matching the man’s smile. It felt good to smile. Unusual but good, like he hadn’t done it in quite a long while.

  “Terian Lepos, my own personal hero,” Xemlinan said, with a deferential nod of the head. His smile never wavered.

  “Me, your hero?” Terian said with a laugh. “You were always my hero. Living in Sovar but richer than most nobles. Buying this place,” he indicated the Unnamed with a wave of his hand, “I mean really, who doesn’t dream of owning a bar where they can drink for free?”

  “It’s not free,” Xemlinan said, taking hold of a bottle that rested on the table next to him. There was already a glass across from him, as though he’d been waiting for someone to show up. “But this … is on the house.”

  Terian sat down, looking at the glass as Xemlinan poured it full of amber liquid. “You already had a glass out, and a bottle of Pharesian brandy on the table.” He looked across at his friend, who poured with a steady hand. “You knew I was coming?”

  “I got a message from your father,” Xemlinan said, picking up his glass, “saying that you were on your way down from the surface. That he would be meeting with you and to expect you shortly thereafter.”

  Terian stared across at Xem, then down at the brandy, before picking up the glass. “It’s like he knows me or something.” There was an unintended mournful quality in the way he said it.

  “That would be fair to say.” Xem picked up the glass lightly in dexterous fingers, and slugged it back in one. The faint red of his fine wool coat, made from the small number of sheep that were grazed on the surface, was almost distracting in its lack of bright color. “I consider it also possible that he knew the message he would have to deliver would be unpleasant, and suspected your natural desire to retreat to more comfortable surroundings afterward.”

  Terian stared at him, glass still in hand. “That would be fair to say as well. He certainly delivered an unpleasant message.” Terian’s fingers went to his throat, massaging it almost unconsciously.

  “Did he lay down the law upon you?” Xem asked with a faint smile that wasn’t remotely genuine.

  “Martial law,” Terian said, finally drinking the brandy. It was good, burning all the way down to his belly. “‘Keep your drinking, whoring, shameful tongue to yourself and do your duty.’” Terian felt his face go taut from the memory of the Lockjaw spell. “Or something of that sort.” He took another long, burning drink.

  Xem filled his own glass once more and topped Terian’s off. “Your father is not a man for mincing words.”

  “Indeed not,” Terian said, and removed his hand from his throat. “It didn’t take many words at all to get his point across.”

  Xem raised a thin white eyebrow at him. “Did the point sink in?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does,” Xem said, looking at him seriously as he put the bottle back down and picked up his glass, cradling it close to his fine wool coat. “I have joined your father’s … team, as it were—”

  “His ‘team’?” Terian said mockingly. “It’s not an army unit?”

  “The army is idle,” Xem said, head cocked to the side in amusement. “We are not at war, so they maneuver, they drill, they do the things an army at peace would do. Tend to homeland issues, when asked. Your father’s armies await, at his command at all times, but the balance of his time is spent on something more … subtle.”

  “And here I thought I was going to be the adjutant to a regiment at peace,” Terian said, raising his glass in a mock toast. “The old bastard fooled me again.”

  “If you had any desirable options left,” Xem said with a slight wince, “you would not have let yourself be ‘fooled.’ My sources placed you in a ramshackle boarding house in Reikonos, spending what little gold you had in a tavern so foul that only the longshoremen drank there.”

  Terian shrugged. “What’s wrong with longshoremen?”

  “By and large, nothing,” Xem said with a shrug. “I’m certain most of them are fine people. But in Reikonos? The human capital? It is hardly a high paying job, attracting the finest of candidates.”

  Terian rolled his eyes as he shook his head. “That’s your problem, Xem. You think such work is beneath you.”

  Xemlinan gave that a moment to simmer, and then spoke quietly without any accusation. “And your problem seemed to be that you didn’t think any type of work was beneath you.”

  Terian felt his cheeks blush. “Maybe nothing is. Someone has to guard warehouses against thievery.”

  Xem took a long drink of his brandy before delicately setting his glass back on the table so quietly it didn’t make a sound. “Someone indeed has to. It’s a vital job, as is being a longshoreman in Reikonos.” He leaned forward and caught Terian’s gaze with his own. “But someone who has the gifts of the dark knight, who has spent years of their life training to follow in the footsteps of the single greatest knight of the shadows to ever step out of the darkness of Sovar—”

  “Don’t call him that,” Terian said, looking away.

  “Everyone calls him that,” Xem said. “Everyone knows him. He’s a legend. Have you ever even heard of someone rising to the station he has? It doesn’t happen. Ever. Nobility is nobility. The Sovereign does not raise a family up through mercantile activity or civil service. Our little corner of Arkaria is not Reikonos, where even one of our kind might have a house on the bluffs. The ladder in Sovar has no rungs, and there is only one direction one goes on it—down.”

  “It would seem at least one man figured out how to shimmy up the damned thing,” Terian said with mild amusement.
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br />   “And you should pay careful attention to him,” Xem said, finishing his drink.

  “I find it hard to take him too seriously,” Terian said, “for whatever reasons. My own, mainly.”

  “You were his truest disciple,” Xem said with a hint of sadness, “before you left. Before—”

  “My reasons,” Terian said, firmly enough to close the topic of conversation. “My own.”

  There was a near-amiable quiet for the next few minutes as they drank in peace, Xem refilling the glasses wordlessly every time they got low. “Tell me about this … team,” Terian said finally.

  Xem gave him a wan smile. “There are six of us. Seven, counting you.”

  “A real baker’s half-dozen,” Terian said without amusement.

  “We’re sent to deal with problems that the Sovereign needs taken care of,” Xem said, tilting his head a little and straightening his coat. “Quietly.”

  “Assassinations,” Terian said with a nod. “Not really my forte.”

  “We haven’t done any assassinations yet,” Xem said, watching Terian with jaded eyes, “but I’m certain if one was needed—”

  “My father would assassinate anyone, anywhere, at any time in the Sovereign’s name,” Terian said.

  “Perhaps not your mother,” Xem said with a laugh.

  Terian did not laugh. After a moment he allowed, “Perhaps not.”

  Xem grew serious. “We have traveled the world a bit. Dealt with things in faraway places. A bit of thievery,” he bowed in his seat, a most elegant maneuver. “My specialty, of course. We’ve slain a rare monster or two, brought back trophies for the Sovereign.” His face grew more serious. “Killed a few heretics. Weeded out some dissidents and undesirables here at home.”