The Traitor's Daughter

by Paula Brandon

  The governor spoke with the voice of common sense, and ordinarily Aureste would have accepted it as such. But Uffrigo was no ordinary source. With his brows arching high above wide eyes, his tender solicitude, his burlesque concern, the man begged for dismemberment. As always, Aureste controlled his impulses, but the words, the questions and suggestions, could not be ignored. Jianna dead? Murdered—perhaps tortured first? The pain that struck him was almost physical, and sharper than any he had known in years. He had felt something like it when Sonnetia Steffa had wed Vinz Corvestri, but never since, and for an instant the sensation was all but unbearable.

  He pushed it away expertly. Uffrigo was wrong, she was alive. He had touched her mind, he had met her in some realm beyond reason; she was alive. Composure restored, he was able to reply with assurance, “I’ve reason to believe otherwise and therefore, in the matter of those troops, can brook no delay.”

  “Well, you’ll brook a few days’ worth, at the very least. There’s no help for it. And please don’t wound my feelings with further offers of money.” Uffrigo sipped his wine with appreciation. “My good cynic, you must believe that I am in earnest when I tell you that the soldiers are needed here in Vitrisi. There’s a veritable riot going on in the Spidery. That is no exaggeration. The exuberant Faerlonnish guttersnipes of the neighborhood are busy burning, pillaging, and murdering. Ostensibly they protest the quarantine. In reality, they seize the opportunity to loot. The best efforts of my troops barely suffice to contain the unrest. I can spare none of them.”

  “Scarcely a serious menace.” Aureste’s negligent shrug dismissed the insurgents. “It’s an insult to your stout Taerleezi men to suggest otherwise. Lease me a single squadron, Governor. I’ll pay you five thousand and return them to you within days. You can surely do without them for so short a term as that.”

  “Ah, you tempt like an evil spirit, my friend, but I cannot give in. You know that Palace Bonevvi was torched within the past week. Neither Councilman Coscaa nor his lady wife made it out alive. The councilman’s zeal in defense of Taerleezi interests will be missed. Then there was the massacre of the Scythe Street guardsmen. And the murder of the Watch at Frog Well. The explosion and destruction at Gate Blackshield. The Sishmindri immolation, not two weeks ago. The attack on the Oats Street Armory and the mutilation of the Taerleezi dead. Your Faerlonnish resistance people have whipped this city into a frenzy and if I cannot oblige you at the moment in the matter of the troops, then you must lay the blame at Faerlonnish doors.”

  “I do so, Governor. And if burning the Spidery and everything in it to the ground would halt the plague, disinfect the city, and free a squadron of your troops to recover my daughter, then I will personally supply the oil and gunpowder.”

  “Ah, Aureste, Aureste.” Uffrigo warbled a laugh. “I could almost imagine that you speak in earnest.”

  “I do.”

  “Your spirit is admirable. And I must confess, the concept is pleasing. I’m much inclined to accept your offer, but for the small matter of containing the blaze. Once the pestiferous Spidery and its plaguey inhabitants are consumed, what prevents the fire from spreading throughout Vitrisi?”

  Vitrisi could burn, and welcome, if its destruction delivered Jianna. He could scarcely voice this sentiment and therefore Aureste replied, “I’ve every confidence in the ability of the Taerleezi authorities to protect and preserve the city.”

  “We Taerleezi authorities have enough to occupy our attention without the additional nuisance of controlling creative home-grown efforts at municipal replanning. Make up your mind to it, my friend. You must wait some few days for those troops, and no sum of money is large enough to alter matters at this time.”

  It was no ploy. Uffrigo meant what he said. Expecting to encounter the usual venality, Aureste was taken aback. When the greatest of all weapons, money, seemed to lose its power, he found himself momentarily at a loss. Moreover, a certain filminess of the gubernatorial eyes, a smooth blankness of expression, silently signaled his dismissal.

  For one moment the anger that he so often suppressed threatened to burst restraint. For one moment he doubted his own ability to control it. Then the habit of decades came to his rescue and he contrived to incline his head with an air of good grace, although he did not trust himself to speak.

  “Come, come, my dear fellow,” the governor encouraged. “It is only a brief delay, and we may yet hope for a happy conclusion. But if it should happen that all does not end well, then here’s a thought to console you. As you yourself once remarked, it is not as if you had lost a son.”

  * * *

  He was back in the grand Belandor carriage again, the Cityheart behind him, the streets of Vitrisi before and about him. For a time he yielded to an uncharacteristic sense of weary defeat, and the city flowed by unheeded. His mind turned in upon itself, drawn to the past, and he found his memory swarming with unwelcome images a quarter of a century old. Onarto Belandor with his foolishly trusting face; the Magnifica Yvenza, formidable even as a young woman; a couple of sullen, dough-faced little sons, their names forgotten; various visitors, retainers, and dependents at Belandor House in the wake of the wars. He had not thought of them in years. Long ago he had perfected the art of excluding uncomfortable recollections, but somehow they found entrance now. Onarto was gone, doomed by his own kindly simplicity, but some of the others lived on to plot vengeance. Now they had taken Jianna and her sufferings were likely to tax their powers of inventive cruelty, because she was Aureste Belandor’s daughter.

  His eyes were stinging. It took him a moment to recognize the urge to weep, something he had not experienced in nearly half a lifetime. He did not give way to it now, but minutes passed before he regained full self-mastery. Presently, however, the magnifico’s pronounced quality of natural resilience reasserted itself, and he began to notice his surroundings.

  The carriage was rattling along Harbor Way. The warehouses rose on either side, their eaves bright and noisy with Scarlet Gluttons. At the Box an auction was in progress, and he saw at a glance that the bidding was slow. Perhaps the object of sale lacked wide appeal—it was a female Sishmindri displaying the loose, sagging belly and emaciated limbs indicative of recent pregnancy. Or so such signs were generally interpreted, but nobody truly knew, for the creatures had never been induced to breed in captivity. Certain owners actually regarded this sterility as an expression of unspoken defiance, but Aureste knew better. The Sishmindris were incapable of deliberate design; they hadn’t the intelligence. If in bondage they produced no spawn—or sprats, or whatever they begot when left to their own devices—then the reason was simply biological.

  Whatever her recent past, the female’s flapping gut, scrawny legs, and manifest apathy surely depressed bidding. But another consideration might have been equally responsible. It had long been known that Sishmindris were susceptible to the plague. It had long been suspected but only recently proved that the disease could pass from amphibian to human. This scientific advance had triggered a spate of Sishmindri slaughter throughout the city. Certainly the majority of owners were too sensible to sacrifice their valuable chattel. But even among the canniest, a newly delivered specimen of unknown provenance invited suspicion. The female on the auction block was likely to sell for a small handful of silver, and her merchant-owner would take a substantial loss. Such was the sad state of the market.

  She had probably hit the Vitrisi docks within the past twenty-four hours, freighted by ship from one of the inland river ports. Aureste’s mind flew to the wharves, where the stevedores unloaded cargo and the merchant seamen drank away their free time in the waterfront taverns. Hardy men accustomed to labor, discipline, risk, and privation. A wealth of potential muscle, there.

  Perhaps he need not wait for those Taerleezi troops after all. The sweepings of the waterfront could hardly compare with Uffrigo’s trained guards, but there was much to be said for immediate availability.

  Aureste issued orders and the carriage changed direction,
heading toward Renuvi’s Row, which bordered the waterfront and boasted no fewer than five roaring taverns, the heaviest concentration in the city. Long before he reached his destination, he caught the tang of smoke on the breeze, with its too-familiar suggestion of charred meat. Another vast bonfire in the Spidery, another mass cremation of the plague’s nameless victims. But there was something different today, something wrong, and it took the anomaly a moment to register. The smoke was floating in from the west. It did not originate in the Spidery, but the odor was unmistakable and the implications were disturbing. Aureste frowned. Ordinarily he did not much concern himself with the raging progress of the plague through the slums. But the blaze of pyres creeping west across Vitrisi into the decent parts of town suggested a certain pestilential presumption impossible to ignore. He would ignore it for now, however. There were more immediate concerns.

  On toward Renuvi’s Row, but at the bottom of Goatsgraze Street came an unwelcome discovery. The carriage halted with a jolt. Shaken from his abstraction, Aureste looked out to behold a knot of Taerleezi soldiers and, behind them, a barrier of upright wooden timbers blocking off the street. A gate in the stockade, wide enough to admit passage of a wagon or carriage, stood firmly shut. The gate was marked with a big letter X daubed in red paint: the emblem of the quarantine. Here? Aureste’s brows rose in surprised displeasure. He snapped his fingers and one of the soldiers, attracted by obvious affluence, approached at once.

  “How long has that thing been here?” Aureste’s gesture condemned the barrier.

  “Quarantine was slapped on two days ago, sir,” replied the guard.

  “It’s in my way. Open up and let me through.”

  “No one but the vapor-men allowed in or out, sir.”

  “You’ll make an exception for me.” Aureste flashed a coin.

  “Don’t you understand? It’s the plague.”

  “I’m protected.” This was true. Aureste had recently taken to carrying a pomander packed with select herbs soaked in vinegar, tortoise urine, and spirits of ammonia, guaranteed by the governor’s own physician to ward off infection. His driver was not similarly fortified, but the driver was replaceable.

  “Can’t do it, sir.” The guard spoke with manifest regret, his eyes fixed on the silver in his questioner’s hand.

  Aureste considered the efficacy of threats and concluded that bluster would not serve him. “I’ve business in Renuvi’s Row,” he explained shortly. “What is the best route?”

  “Quarantine perimeter includes the entire area as far west as Spigot Street, and north to the edge of the Mews.”

  “As large as that,” Aureste murmured.

  “You’ll have to go around it, sir.”

  “That is a considerable distance.” The drive would be lengthy and the afternoon was already well advanced, but there was no alternative; the Taerleezi guard was clearly not to be swayed.

  “When you’re passing nigh the big smokes, a mask were best, sir.”

  He did not need a mask. He had his expensive and doubtless reliable pomander, but there was little point in educating the guard. “You wear no mask yourself,” Aureste observed. “Tell me, my friend, do you and your comrades not fear the local miasma?”

  “No, sir. I chew chicory and carry a Troxius medal. We all do. I keep to the right side of the fence and see to it that other folk do the same.”

  “Commendable. For your good work, then.” Aureste relinquished the coin, and the guard withdrew. Leaning out the window to instruct his driver, Aureste paused, caught by a scene unfolding directly before him. The wooden stockade blocking his passage extended the entire width of the street, terminating on either side at the wall of a tall house or tenement. Similar guarded barricades, probably scores of them, defined the quarantined area. So long as the quarantine endured, there was no departure from the plague’s domain save by illicit means ranging from bribery to arcane device. By all accounts, however, life within the proscribed territories was nightmarish in quality, and inhabitants wild to escape often resorted to desperate measures. One such inhabitant was doing so now.

  It was a woman, young and slim, poorly clad, with dark hair streaming in disarray. Her facial features could not be judged at such distance, but the slender figure and long hair immediately recalled Jianna. She stood atop the roof of one of the four-story tenements fronting Goatsgraze Street. Having somehow made her way to that height, she had managed to affix a rope ladder to a bit of ornamental ironwork. Now tossing the free end of the ladder from the roof, she began to descend. She was nimble but apparently unhinged, for she made not the slightest effort to conceal herself. Taerleezi guards converged on her at once.

  “Go back,” one of them called out. “Back into quarantine.”

  Pausing midway down the ladder to regard the speaker, the girl replied in clear and very reasonable tones, “Things keep fading in and out, back there. And then you can’t hear or see good. It’s get out or fade out.”

  Aureste could see her face more clearly now. She appeared less crazed than hugely obstinate, her eyes slitted, her jaw set in boundless determination. She displayed no sign of confusion or illness. After a moment, she resumed her descent.

  “Forbidden to leave quarantine,” a guard expostulated. “Go back! You understand me? Go back!”

  She neither replied nor obeyed. Down the ladder she backed methodically, while citizens in the street, attracted in numbers by the novelty, yelled frantic warnings, all of them ignored. A command was issued and one of the guards advanced bearing the infamous Taerleezi Toothpick: a pike of exceptional length, designed to maintain suitable distance between executioner and potentially contagious victim. A final warning went unheeded and, amid the shouts of the spectators, the Toothpick plunged into the would-be escapee’s back. She fell from the ladder, dead before she hit the stones of the street.

  Aureste winced. Her generic similarity to his daughter inspired that response, but in fact his sympathies were hardly engaged. She had been suicidally stupid, or perhaps just suicidal. If the latter, then her plan had succeeded and all had concluded in accordance with her wishes.

  A sizable contingent of citizens lacked the magnifico’s consoling philosophy. As the guards tossed an oiled pall over their victim’s body, the cries of protest intensified. When a smoldering splint attached to the end of the Taerleezi Toothpick was used to set the pall alight, the cries gave way to howls of wrath. The blaze mounted, the flames jumped, and the emotions of the spectators did likewise. The guards were only following standard procedure; a purifying bath of flame was believed to render a possibly plague-ridden corpse relatively safe for handling and prompt removal. The fire benefited all, but the citizens cared nothing for public safety; something in the spectacle of a young woman’s slaughter and instant immolation seemed to have driven them beyond reason.

  The furious outcry swelled and somebody threw a stone that grazed a Taerleezi brow, drawing blood. A pelting rain of rocks and refuse followed. The outnumbered guards drew forth their truncheons, ordinarily effective in subduing unruly Vitrisians—but not today. The citizens snarled and stood their ground. For once it was the guards who gave way, the small band of them retreating in tolerably good order. They were heading for the nearest Watch station. Within minutes they would return with reinforcements, but for now, remarkably, the day belonged to the Faerlonnish.

  The elated citizens, their energies now unfocused, milled in aimless excitement until the arms blazoned on the Belandor carriage drew notice. The lone passenger was recognized and the familiar yelping cry arose: Kneeser.

  A flying rock hit the carriage with a thump. And another. Yet another, better aimed, whizzed in through the window to miss Aureste’s head by a hair. A quiet curse escaped him. He rapped the roof sharply, signaling the driver to depart. Goatsgraze Street allowed no room to turn the big carriage about, and therefore the driver whipped his team left toward the mouth of some nameless alley. The chorus of vituperation broke as citizens scurried to clear the path. Only
one of them, a bold and acrobatic zealot, dared to fling himself upon the vehicle as it passed, thrusting head and upper body in through the window.

  Aureste gazed into a swarthy young face ablaze with hostile excitement. Abuse foamed from its mouth. Almost before he recognized his own intention, he had drawn the dagger from his belt and slashed the face deeply from forehead to jaw. He had not lifted the dagger against another human being in years, but he had lost none of his skill.

  The intruder howled and clapped a hand to his eye. Blood welled between the fingers. A vigorous shove thrust him from the window. The Belandor carriage rumbled on unhindered, pursued only by the imprecations of the witnesses.

  His route was circuitous, and he did not reach Renuvi’s Row before late afternoon. A quick reconnaissance informed him that two of the five taverns he sought were closed, their clientele doubtless reduced by the pestilence ravaging the area. A third was open for business but deserted save for an inert sprinkling of sodden inebriates. The last two were open and comparatively lively, but the patrons ran largely to aging tipplers and flush mariners disinclined to accept perilous employment. Aureste Belandor labored and haggled at length but his quarry resisted all blandishments and at the end of the day he had secured no more than three remotely acceptable recruits.

  * * *

  The mists lay heavy on the northern hills. In the late afternoon, at that time of year, the daylight was already beginning to fail. The landmarks were shrouded, the peaks and skyline obliterated, the trail all but invisible. The ground underfoot was damp and yielding. From time to time, it trembled.

  A lone traveler making his way on foot along the slopes heard the growl of subterranean thunder. The ground shook beneath his feet, throwing him to his knees. And as he crouched there, the shuddering world altered impossibly. The ground beneath him lost its solidity, even its reality. He did not sink in swamp or quicksand, but lost himself in the insubstantiality of a dream. A cry escaped him and his voice—immensely distant—seemed to echo through a limitless void. The surrounding mists clenched; the faint light filtering through them bent and warped, split and jumped, confounding vision. And behind those mists, or within them, resided a huge Awareness.