The Dagger of Trust

by Chris Willrich

  "We'll leave before daybreak," Sebastian said. "I thank you all for your faith. May I say, Admiral, Taldor is well-served by you."

  "Taldor is best served by actions," Kasaba said, "not flattery. Dismissed."

  As if to blunt the admiral's sharp words, the governor said, "Be careful on the Sellen. It will try to lull you into thinking it's a harmless, lazy sort of river. But it has its secrets."

  "Be most wary of those you meet," Brother Zaganos added with sudden, surprising lucidity, hushing the gathering. "Human motives can be as hidden as shoals and bars beneath the surface of a river. Worse, loyalty and treachery are attendant in every activity. One might think of them as two tributaries to the same river. Take care you do not trust appearances."

  As they left the office, Viridia said, "Well, that was a strange farewell."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In the first gray hints of dawn, Riposte cast off from Cassomir's harbor and passed the flickering magical lighthouse called Treacherous Jack. Captain Tambour took no unnecessary risks, and rather than sailing into mouth of the Sellen, the vessel anchored and awaited the brightening of the day and the rising tide.

  Even as the sun rose and the waters surged, the wind proved unfavorable, and Sebastian glowered and swore, caught between a risky passage and the probability of waiting for hours. He was rescued by an unexpected source.

  "I can give you a blast of wind," said Leothric, and showed Sebastian his family heirloom, the magical fan of winds from far-off Osirion.

  "No jokes, please," Leothric added.

  The wind at its back, Riposte weighed anchor, hoisted sail, and proceeded into the river's maw.

  After the gyrations of the Jagged Saw, the mouth of the Sellen was like a nap in a hammock. Yet Gideon noticed that in this circumstance Sebastian had called upon a river pilot from Cassomir. Perhaps Sebastian respected this passage more than that of the Porthmos. For all that the Sellen was the longer river, its mouth was smaller than the one leading to Taldor's capital.

  Gideon had traveled by riverboat before, but not aboard a craft this large, nor this river. He was surprised by the restfulness of it. The river pilot in the crow's nest had his head bent like a vulture's and cast a gaze like a hawk's, peering for hidden sandbars and rocks. But unlike the roaring threats of the ocean, the river's dangers were sly and quiet. An unknowing man like Gideon could ignore the risks and enjoy the ripples of wind upon the smooth waters, the bright flash of fish in the shallows, the shadows of willows stretching out from the shore, the flight of birds shaking free of the branches to careen over the crow's nest and its brooding occupant.

  He began strumming his harp without thinking, a trill, a chord, a slowly shaping melody emerging from imagination and memory like the river's bends emerged from the morning mist. He was so immersed, there at the bow, that he didn't notice Corvine standing beside him.

  "If you like," she said, "I could build a harmony for that song."

  He looked up. "Consorting with the enemy, Mistress Gale?"

  "So you're planning to use this for Dreams on the Sellen?"

  "Maybe. Probably. There's a long way to go."

  "An exchange then, Mister Gull. I help you with this one, you help me on a number for Death in Cassomir."

  Gideon nodded and strummed. For a little while, he was just a musician, sharing space with a collaborator he'd long admired. Funny how that word collaborator had a different ring to it in the music business than it did in the spy business.

  Corvine began her warm-up exercises, breathing her way up and down the scale in a manner that put Gideon in mind of ghosts.

  "Hey," said the gnome quartermaster, Grizzendell. "Stop that. That's bad luck, that."

  "If I don't regularly warm up, I assure you it'll be bad luck for my voice."

  "Can't be helped. Whistling's bad luck aboard ship. Calls up foul weather."

  "That wasn't whistling. I was just getting my wind."

  "Just as I said. Wind calls to wind. We'll get a storm, sure."

  "Superstition!"

  "You risk your life on the water for thirty years, you can tell me what's superstition."

  "Grizzendell," put in Gideon. "Couldn't we relax the rules a bit? We're upriver after all, not at sea. The river has its own rules."

  Grizzendell looked at Gideon as if caught out in a minor technicality. The gnome walked away, muttering, "No good'll come of this. No good at all."

  "Thanks." Corvine patted his hand.

  They strummed and sang. No one forced them to do other work, so he supposed the music was decent. Riposte made good time.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The little Taldan community of Hangman's Harbor was like a dwelling for monkeys. The small wharf lay at the base of a granite precipice, and aside from a collection of riverside buildings on stilts, the houses crouched upon ledges, nestled within caves, or perched atop the cliff.

  There was indeed a prominent noose, hanging high over the river from a plank extending from the mayor's house.

  "Are they friendly?" asked Viridia.

  "They love visitors," Gideon said, remembering performances. "Visitors bring money, and news, and the possibility someone will behave stupidly enough to be hanged. Watch out for trivial-seeming ordinances. And be very, very polite."

  "Good advice," Sebastian said.

  Riposte tied off, the Cassomiri river pilot took his leave, and Sebastian paid the harbormaster her silver and a golden tip besides. She became garrulous then, and informed the landing party, "Be on your guard, good gentlemen and ladies. Strange things have been happening. The mayor's worried and folk are jumpy."

  "What strange things?" said Gideon.

  "Bad luck to speak of it. Ask around."

  Flat land was at a premium in Hangman's Harbor. Fishmongers and a tavern shared space with families hanging out their wash and elders playing chess.

  "Excuse me!"

  Gideon smiled and let a girl of perhaps six rush by. He pondered how much of the confidence of brash children comes from adults willing to indulge them, because those adults fondly remember being indulged as children themselves.

  Yet the adult to whom the girl ran, a washerwoman with a care-lined face and a streak of gray in her brown hair, cast Gideon a suspicious look. She scolded the girl into one of the narrow houses wedged within the contours of the cliff.

  "Shall we speak to the mayor?" Ozrif was asking Sebastian.

  Sebastian looked up at the house with the noose. "No," he sighed, "I'll perform the official niceties." He departed for the steep stairway that switchbacked its way up the cliff.

  "I see a tavern over there called The Dangling Bottle," Leothric said, pointing to a sign depicting a wine bottle hanging from a noose.

  "They've made improvements," said Gideon. "Last time I was here they had an actual bottle and rope instead of a sign. Tell you what, I'm going to make a quick inquiry. I'll join you soon."

  Gideon strolled to within a respectful distance of the washerwoman and stopped. Her back was turned, and she was busy hanging clothing onto pitons piercing the cliff.

  Without looking at Gideon, she said, "Got no time to add customers."

  "I have no laundry, madam," he said in his best Taldan accent. "I do have questions."

  She turned. "Oh?"

  "Have you seen anything strange in the recent past?"

  "Well, well, well." She set her unhung laundry back into a basket. "Has the Grand Prince finally seen fit to answer my message?"

  "What?"

  "My message, I said. They don't breed you lords smart, do they?"

  "I'm not a lord."

  "Well, I'll keep it simple enough for a flunky. I sent a message to Oppara about the ghost fog."

  "We're indeed investigating a fog, but not in response to your message."

  "I sent it weeks ago! Bribed the imperial postman, even!"

  "The Taldan bureaucracy," Gideon sighed, "is accused of many things. Efficiency is not one of them. Why not contact Cassomir?"


  "Cassomir!" she spat. "I don't trust that lazy Bozbeyli or that foreign witch Kasaba."

  "Well, we're here. What've you seen?"

  The woman glanced to see if her daughter was about. "My story's no worse than anyone's..."

  "Somehow I doubt that. I think you've suffered."

  She narrowed her eyes. "Well, I have, whether you think so or not. I'm not complaining. My Zem went fishing past the Sellen mouth every day, until three years ago the storm got him. Some around here still claim I arranged it, punctured the boat or some damn thing. Pharasma take them. Zem wasn't a good man, as such. But he was the man I wanted, and I wouldn't have thrown him back."

  "Go on."

  "Not much to say about that. I raised Raiva myself and I know she'll go wild and leave one of these days. But she'll leave healthy and with some smarts, whether she thanks me or not. Well, a few weeks ago she calls me out before dawn and I ask her what's she been up to, and she says, never mind that, look at the river. And the river's all full of fog. I'd heard Nurl the fishmonger talk about a witchy fog creeping in the day before, but he wouldn't say much and I didn't believe him. He's the Galtan buzzard got Zem's spot in the fishmongers' corner, so I don't like him much. But seeing that fog, I knew Nurl wasn't lying."

  "Was it perhaps an especially thick fog, greenish, almost like a curtain in which you could see images?"

  "Yes. How'd you know?"

  "I've seen it. I've seen things I didn't want to see, in that fog."

  "You're telling me, mister. I saw my husband in that fog, like he'd never drowned." She closed her eyes, remembering. "Zem was reaching out to me. His coat dripped water and his eyes were cold, blaming me for not checking the shape of the boat that day. I took Raiva and fled up the big stairway, and when we came back Zem and the fog were gone."

  "And that's all?"

  "That's all, and good thing too, or I might have to move. You understand, if you've seen it. But go ask around—lots of people have seen the fog, and seen things they don't want to."

  "I will."

  "And you'll see what bad straights we're in. It's Galt, I tell you—somehow it's Galt ready to ruin us. You tell the Grand Prince, you make him send wizards, knights, paladins."

  How about bards? Gideon thought but didn't say.

  As his steps led him toward the Swinging Bottle, the girl Raiva materialized again at Gideon's feet, in a way that made him want to give her name to the Shadow School. "You should talk to Nurl," she said, in a way that made it clear she'd heard the whole exchange. "He may say things to you he won't say to Mother."

  "All right. I will."

  "Will you find out where the fog comes from? Is it Cheliax? I think it's Cheliax. Mom thinks it's Galt, but I think devils are more dangerous than guillotines. Don't you?"

  "I think I'm glad neither are about."

  At the fishmonger's corner, there was a rich smell of ice and aquatic guts, and various fish heads eyed Gideon accusingly. "Which of you is Nurl?" Gideon asked.

  "I'm Nurl," a large, mustachioed man answered. "Who wants to know?" His accent was indeed Galtan.

  "It's worth a gold piece if you take a break at the Swinging Bottle and tell me about the fog."

  They entered the place, Gideon walking stiffly, not meeting the gazes of his friends. By this he meant to suggest he was not working closely with anyone, and the other bards took the hint. The gold piece was exchanged for many silvers, and once converted to alcohol, the silver loosed Nurl's tongue.

  "It's as she said," said Nurl, "there was a feeling of seeing the past, things dreaded. And the sense of some entity within, watching."

  Gideon leaned closer. "What did you sense? What did you see?"

  Nurl shook his head. "No one has enough gold for that. But the fog's been back, many times. I've seen it three times myself, though the second and third encounters had me fleeing. One vision was enough."

  "All right."

  "One more thing, and this is free: You're going to hear lots of talk against foreigners—Galtans, Andorens, Chelaxians. But I think the real threat is druids."

  "Druids?"

  "Druids. Always looking down on us. Gnomes, too. And elves. Don't trust any of those woodsy folk. Not really human, are they?"

  "Thanks for your time, Mister Nurl."

  Joining his friends at their table (for now he didn't care what Nurl thought), Gideon asked, "What have you learned?"

  "The Bellis Mead's quite good," Leothric said.

  "We have several accounts," Viridia said. "Here." She passed him a journal within which the bards had quickly scribbled notes. He skimmed a couple of interviews.

  There she was, my beloved Rilly, dead these five years of the pestilence. I saw her covered in boils and calling my name, worse than the day I fled the temple where the clerics tended her. I'm alive today, and I shouldn't be, and I saw that in her eyes and heard it in her voice. She said, 'Vors, come back, you said we'd share everything.' I don't want to talk anymore. Just don't you trust those Andorens.

  I saw my old man, and those hands that slapped—slapped my mother, slapped my brother, slapped me, till the day I slapped him back with an axe. His head wasn't on quite right. He said he'd come for me, and he'd make me sorry. I felt like I was four years old again and him pressing my head down on the old stove, but I told him to go back to whatever devils or demons slapped him around nowadays. He went, too. Whatever foreign magic's making the dead come back, ma'am, give me an axe. I don't mind serving my time again. I'll send 'em back to Cheliax.

  There were others, but the pattern was now familiar. Gideon scribbled his own interviews at the end of these accounts.

  "There's a consistent xenophobia here," Leothric said quietly. "I hope we're leaving soon."

  "For once you have your wish," came Sebastian's voice, and the bards were by now so tense they nearly jumped.

  As they left the tavern, Gideon asked, "Why so quickly?"

  Sebastian looked up the cliff. "The mayor's certain a secret cabal of wizards is responsible for the fog—and he's planning his roundups today. I declined to assist, and he was angry."

  "But what if he's correct?" Corvine said.

  "Something in his manner suggests a man in the grip of paranoia. I don't trust him. I trust the river."

  As Quartermaster Grizzendell hauled a few boxes of rations on board, a dozen village constables descended the great stairway.

  "Be prepared," Sebastian warned.

  But the officials moved past Riposte's pier and seized someone in the fishmongers' corner.

  "Cast off as soon as they're up the stairs," Sebastian ordered.

  Riposte departed, but not before they saw Nurl dangling from the cliffside noose.

  "He was no wizard!" Gideon said.

  "I doubt he'll be the last victim of the madness," said Ozrif.

  "Can't we help them?" Corvine asked Sebastian.

  "We will help them," Sebastian said, looking steadily upriver, "them and their children, by ending whatever set this in motion. I'm certain all we'll discover in Hangman's Harbor is death."

  As Riposte steered around the bend, Gideon saw the washerwoman jeering up at the dangling corpse. Owing to one of those tricks of sound that water can play, he heard her clearly. "Where are your airs now, Galtan?" she crowed.

  Gideon thought he saw her daughter Raiva looking directly at him, as if to say, Do you see what's happening to us? Make it right.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It was much the same in other settlements. In the Andoren villages the folk were mainly suspicious of Taldor. In the Taldan villages folk were increasingly suspicious of Andoran. After the third stop, Gideon and the others didn't bother bringing any gear besides coin and weapons. There seemed no reason to disguise themselves or do anything but listen while the good citizens ranted.

  Never trust a snooty Taldan!

  Uppity Andorens!

  They'd chain the lot of us if they could. They hate us for our freedom.

  They'd strangle us in our sleep.
They envy our wealth.

  Plotting invasion ...

  I hear the Taldans have slave pens ready.

  Rumor has it the Andorens're importing guillotines from Galt.

  Imperialist swine!

  Libertine pigs!

  "If I didn't know better," Gideon said that second long day, "I'd say we were on the brink of war."

  "What I don't know," Viridia said, "is what everyone has against pigs. My family raised pigs. Fine animals."

  "Does anyone really care what a few flea-bitten villagers say?" Leothric said. "I've never even seen these places on maps."

  "If the anger stays within a few backwaters," Sebastian said, frowning at the Sellen's muddy flow, "then no, it won't matter. But if it keeps spreading, fighting might break out, and governments might get drawn in. When the people are enraged, the leaders must respond. And not just in Andoran's democracy. Sometimes the tail drags the rat."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It proved to be a surprisingly cheery afternoon, one to put the lie to talk of war. Having finished writing a report and swabbing the deck, Gideon settled down at the starboard corner of the stern to pluck some tunes. The sun sparkled in their wake like a windfall of diamonds.

  Riposte had stopped at two little settlements, one Taldan, one Andoren, and neither reported anything more disturbing than controversy over the annual cross-border raft-fighting competition. (There were accusations that the Taldans had used a strength-enhancement elixir, and that the Andorens had rigged the Taldan raft to be exceedingly tippy.) Now the birds were chirping and the sun was out, and every vessel they met seemed engaged in honest business.

  "I don't like it," Gideon heard Viridia say from all the way up at the bow. "Something bad's about to happen."

  "This is a common problem among people who study drama," Ozrif answered her. "A sensation that any contentment's only setting the scene for some bloodcurdling tragedy. We bards all suffer from it. In truth, there's no more reason to believe happiness precedes woe than to believe that one card precedes another in a game of chance."

  "What you say sounds reasonable, but it's beside the point. Because I know you believe in the perversity of the universe just as much as I do."