The Cull Tarr softened Bes-Strea up for conquest, and he planned to stop them.
The market’s desolation hadn’t spread to the quay. He’d scarcely jumped to the stubby dock after Tiler when desperation overtook the crowd. Tier dwellers waited behind a row of eight guards bearing long staffs and blocking the path to escape. The guards gritted their teeth and sweated in their russet jackets.
Gannon yanked Tiler through the well-dressed mob. “Head into the warrens. And find Mostin.”
“Then what?”
“Stay sober and find me.”
Tiler lumbered across the pavers, griping at the instructions, and Gannon pivoted back to the commotion. Men and women in fine jackets waved gold coins and demanded seats on the narrow carvir he’d just vacated. Behind them, hosts of servants laden with trunks and packages, stacked furniture, and iron-bound chests cast frightened eyes at a handful of approaching Cull Tarr.
“People only!” A barrel-chested tier guard yelled orders over the press and stopped a merchant with an entourage of servants carrying trunks. Tangled gray hair clung to the sweat on the guard’s face, and his nostrils flared. “You can bring your coins and the clothes on your backs.”
The subsequent uproar drowned out whatever else barked from his mouth. Guildsmen shouted and shoved, some employing personal guards to ensure their escape. Cull Tarr jacks bulled aside the bodies barring their path to the dock. They thrust aside the guards’ staffs and ushered those through who plated Cull Tarr pockets with gold.
“Tier guards!” Gannon shouted. His history with tier guards wasn’t all sweets and sunshine, but he needed allies and took a chance that the Ellegean men might see things his way. Worst case, he’d sprint after Tiler for the warrens.
The guards swung around, confusion wrinkling their brows. Their attempt to manage the panicking crowd suffered its doom. The jacks collected gold, and the mob raced up the dock. Women screamed, forced from the edge into the river. The carvir’s captain pushed off the dock in an effort to save his boat, but those already close to boarding leapt the distance. They fell across the rowing crew, more piling in behind them. The carvir rocked, tipped, and swamped.
Hands bracketing his mouth, Gannon bellowed, “Tier guards!” He turned on his heel and strode toward the warrens.
“Who in Founders’ Hell are you?”
A better response than nothing, Gannon halted and spun to face the brawny guard with the sweaty gray head. “Gannon of Mur-Vallis.”
“Sergeant Parrie.”
Gannon shook off the tension from the quay and sized up the eight guards. “I saw what you attempted to do there, Sergeant. I figure you’re decent men, and The Cull Tarr are stomping all over you. I’m here to do something about it, and I’d welcome your help.”
A guard chuckled. “You and who else?”
“The warrens. That’s where I’m headed.”
The sergeant scratched a long scab above his eyebrow. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there. The warrens are in a bad way.”
“I don’t doubt it, but give me a better reason.”
“You won’t get out alive.”
“That’s a good one,” Gannon admitted, “but I need a better one, Sergeant. We aren’t reclaiming this city without the warrens behind us.”
The tier guards regarded him as if he were spectacularly naive or raving mad. He planted his hands on his hips. “You can’t convince me that life in the tiers is any more agreeable. This is our future and our children’s future unless we change it. First, we locate a man named Mostin. That’s our starting point. We find him and go from there.”
Sergeant Parrie sucked his breath through his teeth. “Mostin? Your man Mostin was an underlord, and last I heard, he’s dead.”
***
Mostin wasn’t dead, but he didn’t look particularly alive either. Gannon sat across from him in a smashed up tavern on the warrens’ north side. The man still had a refined primness about him, regal in bearing despite the stitches in his chin, broken wrist, swollen nose, and flecks of dried blood in his wavy hair.
Gannon’s eight tier guards stood behind him, alert for any unexpected company and leery of the company they kept. Mostin’s twenty enforcers lounged and drank, Tiler popping back cups of spike like juice.
“I’m an underlord,” Mostin admitted, gently probing a bruised jaw, “but it’s not what you think. Rordan-Bes never took too kindly to our terms after his mother’s defeat. He made a show of compliance, sold a little land, arranged apprenticeships for a few handpicked warrens rats who coughed up some stolen silver. The first tier opened on Brightest Night until this mess with the Cull Tarr. Our new masters have no love for warrens and defiance gets your neck stretched.”
“What happened to you?” Gannon nursed a tipple that had gone flat as a plank and tasted like someone had filtered it through the gutter.
“Tier guards.” Mostin eyed the men over Gannon’s shoulder, and Gannon glanced back as a few guards grumbled.
Parrie held up a hand and helped himself to a seat, his wild gray mop reassembled into a short tail. “Some are loyal to Rordan; some learned the hard way that they answer to new masters.”
Mostin raked a hand through his hair and watched flakes of blood sprinkle the table. “And some are exploiting the chaos to get rich.”
“Can’t deny it,” Parrie said. “We’ve dealt with our share of conflicts among the tier guards. Rordan might be his mother’s son, but now he’s got the tier master yanking on his leash. The Cull Tarr pick favorites and set the rest of us against each other. Their laws change with the day, and the influencers make it so we don’t know what side is up.”
“Influencers?” Gannon winced. “How many?”
“Two,” Parrie replied. “A man and woman.”
“Where are they, usually?”
“Hard to say,” Parrie rubbed his stubbled chin.
“The truth, Gannon.” Mostin sipped his tipple, grimaced, and dumped it on the dirt floor. “The warrens are as fractured as the tier guards. The underlords see an opportunity. The Cull Tarr aren’t any nobler than the guilds or tier wards. It’s a filching mess.”
Gannon tapped his fingers on the table. The turmoil in Bes-Strea made his brain sore, but the city needed to resist a full submission to Cull Tarr rule. Nor-Bis might be a lost cause, but Bes-Strea and the cities south and east had a chance.
He brooded over his year on The Wandering Swan. The odd thing was that this chaos didn’t exist on Cull Tarr ships. With few exceptions, Tilkon’s operation had run smoothly, the Protocols adhered to, the laws consistently applied. The Shipmaster ruled, and the preachers focused on saving souls. Maybe it was the small size or the clear duties or the way the crew shared the ship’s wealth. Maybe the realm proved too unwieldy, the provinces too isolated, too independent and easily corrupted. Whatever the reason, the Cull Tarr lost their bearings on land and were dragging Ellegeance into the trenches with them.
His gaze swung to Parrie. “How many tier guards can you rally?”
The sergeant’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Without question? Eh, maybe thirty, forty if given time. Others might join in if we’re putting on a hearty show.”
“Not awful.” He turned to Mostin. “From the warrens?”
Mostin swiveled to the twenty men behind him for the answer. “How many?”
“None,” one man said, and they all chuckled. Mostin frowned, and the man revised his answer. “Sixty that won’t loot.”
“How many Cull Tarr jacks?” Gannon asked.
“Spread out? Three hundred.” Parrie pursed his lips. “Too many. They’ll stick it to us as we climb the tiers.”
“Not if we don’t climb the tiers,” Tiler said from his table.
Gannon chuckled and slid his conspirators a devious smile. “What if we suddenly show up on the top tier?”
“Pylons.” Mostin grinned, and Parrie’s eyebrows shot up.
“Three days. We meet here.” Gannon said. “Let’s locate a locksmith who
can spit out a few keys.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Parrie’s tier guards showed up with azure bands tied around their upper arms, and Gannon swallowed down his emotion. He met the sergeant’s eyes. “The queen’s color.”
The husky man nodded. “We’re all Ellegeans this day.” He tipped his head to the pile of blue strips on a table. “Compliments of the Tradecrafters’ Guild. Extras for anyone who joins the cause.”
“Don’t want us stabbing the recruits.” Tiler stuck a second knife in his belt.
Gannon’s army had shown up with knives, clubs, and spears, a few axes, and a hodgepodge of bows, all weapons he hoped wouldn’t see much use. He carried the dagger he’d borrowed from Vianne during his first escape to the swamps, and he’d slipped a sharp fishing knife in his boot’s sheath. “Oh, hell.” A last-moment thought stopped him, and he jerked his chin at the sergeant, signaling for a private conversation. “We have a problem.”
Parrie scowled, the scab carved above his eyebrow particularly menacing. “A little late.”
“We’ll call it an oversight. We never finished our influencer conversation. If the high ward has influencers up there, they’ll slap us down before we take a step.”
“That’s a problem.”
“A problem bows can fix if we’re fast and don’t hesitate.”
“No chance for them to surrender?”
Gannon didn’t like it any better than the sergeant. What if it was Catling? Kadan? Fontine? An influencer forced to serve the Cull Tarr who would turn if given a chance. “We can’t risk it. Set up four men with bows who know the targets.”
“I’ll give you six if we have them.” Parrie strode off to relay orders to the archers, and when the instructions ran dry, so ended any reason for delay. They moved out.
Moments before the third bell, Gannon wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. The soft light and mild temperature inside the pylon might have soothed his nerves if the realm’s next steps didn’t ride on this one. If he failed, Bes-Strea belonged to the Cull Tarr.
He stood on the narrow platform at the pylon’s peak. Two archers and thirty warrens rats panted behind him from the long, coiling climb. If all went well, Mostin and Tiler occupied the same position to the south, and Parrie had his tier guards primed and eager to attack from the north. If no one betrayed them.
The bell pealed.
He flipped the latch and stormed through the door into the summer sun, nearly knocking over two tier guards on duty. The men crouched for a fight, and as the pylons poured fighters, they threw down their spears and raised their hands. “On your stomachs!” Gannon shouted, and they dropped.
This high, the pylons marked points around the potted garden. Men and women leapt through the other doors. Tier guards thrust up their hands. A group of Cull Tarr jacks ran from a building and fell before Parrie’s trained force. Those that followed spun and bolted, Mostin’s men on their heels.
“Take prisoners!” Mostin shouted and shrugged at Gannon when no one bothered to listen. With his broken wrist, Mostin was worthless in battle. He and his warrens rats would guard prisoners, assuming they took them. Tiler and his thugs spread out to secure the lifts and staircases.
Gannon linked up with Parrie and forty of his city guards. They pried open the sliding door to the tier master’s hall. Cull Tarr jacks greeted them, long spears outstretched and knives sparkling in the sudden wash of sunlight.
Parrie’s guards met the enemy, pushing them back into the corridor. In the confined space, the thunder of voices competed with the clash of steel. An arc of blood whipped through the air from the tip of a blade. Benches tipped and vases in the windows’ alcoves shattered. A door slid aside at the hall’s end, and more Cull Tarr poured into the fight. A crossbow’s bolt barely missed Gannon’s nose and skewered a tapestry. The archer, his arm banded in azure, paled and cocked the weapon, his hands shaking.
The hallway’s width impeded a full out battle, bodies jammed behind the grappling front lines. Ellegean archers righted a bench, stepped up and shot above their fellows’ heads at any jacks in retreat. Parrie possessed the greater force, and his guards stumbled over the dead and maimed as the jacks fell back.
Then a gap broke at the edge of the Cull Tarr barrier. Gannon commandeered a bow and quiver from a dead man, spilling half of the arrows in his haste. He slung the quiver over his shoulder and beckoned to another archer. They joined the guards streaming through the rift and running for the undefended chamber at the hall’s end. He nocked an arrow, hoping the close quarters would counter his pitiful skill.
“Influencers!” Gannon warned, but the battle’s roar propelled the guards forward, the eagerness for vengeance startling him. They burst into the room, and the ten jacks who’d remained behind to defend the city’s rulers met the barrage. The room’s dignitaries gasped or jolted from their seats. Several dropped to the floor, prostrate in surrender.
Gannon sucked in a breath and drew, expecting a torrent of pain and fear. When it didn’t come, he ducked to the wall and skirted the fight. Deaf to the ring of steel and cries of pain, he scanned the room for influencers. Where were they?
The Cull Tarr tier master remained seated, a sneer of disdain perverting his handsome face. Four preachers flanked him like loyal hounds, conceit lifting their chins despite the bloodshed and death of their own men. The callousness chafed Gannon’s temper like gritty sweat.
Cull Tarr advisors stood with powerful Ellegeans of questionable loyalty. Unmoving in his chair at the table, High Ward Rordan-Bes stared straight ahead, eyes pooling with fear. Behind him, a shipmaster in black brocade held a knife to his exposed throat. Gannon might have cared, but he needed to know the location of the city’s influencers.
The fight in the rest of the room fizzled, the only sound the keening of the wounded. “Get them out of here,” Parrie ordered.
Spattered with blood and out of breath, Mostin filled the doorway. “The tier’s secure. We’re waiting on orders.”
Parrie spared a glance for Rordan and addressed Gannon. “You got this?”
“Almost.” Gannon faced the Cull Tarr tier master. “Where are your influencers?”
The man smirked. “Are you frightened of your own evil?”
In no mood, Gannon loosed the string, and the arrow pounded into the tier master’s chest. The smirking mouth gaped, eyes wide with disbelief. Smug confidence slipped from the preachers’ chins like grease, and they edged back. Rordan’s throat opened with a gout of blood, and the archer at Gannon’s side let loose his arrow. The shipmaster staggered backward, a shaft impaling his neck. A second arrow struck him in the ribs, and the man collapsed.
Blood dribbled from the tier master’s mouth. His head sagged forward, nose bent on the arrow’s shaft. Rordan’s face rested on the table, mashed into a widening crimson pool that trickled off the edge.
Gannon nocked his second arrow and pointed it at a preacher. “Where are the influencers?”
“The doyen called them to Ava-Grea.”
A smile curled Gannon’s lips. He motioned Mostin in and glanced at Parrie. “I got this.” The sergeant exited with half his men. Mostin leaned against the wall, cuddling his damaged wrist.
Gannon handed off the bow and propped his boot on a chair. “Who’s in charge here?”
That question proved tricky for his captives, and when they began a debate, he held up a hand. “All right. Then I’ll tell you all how this is going to work. We’re following the Book of Protocols.” The Cull Tarr in the room nearly fainted, but Gannon had some news for them. “Not the Shiplord’s version, the real one. That means adherence to the law. In this case, Ellegean law… for the most part. No slavery, no indenturing servants, no grift. The tiers will be open to all starting immediately. By the end of Winterchill, you’ll elect a new high ward by a vote. All the people will have a say, including every soul in the warrens. One-man-one-vote, one-woman-one-vote.”
“My respects,” a rotund Ellegean huffed. He pressed a
hand to his heart that displayed the inked urn of the Merchants’ Guild. “You’re proposing a complete disintegration of Ellegean society. It’s impossible on top of preposterous.”
Gannon waved to an archer. “Shoot him.”
The bowman drew and the merchant blubbered, “Wait! I simply advise you of the difficulty, not that it can’t be done.”
At Gannon’s signal, the bowstring relaxed. “This is not negotiable. If anyone intends to stall or sabotage this plan, I suggest you let us shoot you now.” He gave them a count to three to think about it, and no one volunteered. “Excellent choice. Mostin is your high ward until your city chooses another.”
***
“How soon can we hold elections?” Mostin asked, under his breath. They stood at the first tier’s rail overlooking Bes-Strea’s newly opened riverside market.
“Leadership’s not as appealing as it sounded?”
Mostin grimaced. “I’m a wet nurse to overgrown toddlers.”
“Next, we win back Elan-Sia,” Gannon replied. “Rewrite laws, give the factions in the tiers some time to adjust and work through disagreements.”
“It might be quicker to shoot them.”
“Tempting.”
The city guards cut down the bodies of three underlords hung from the first tier for murder. Gannon had initially resisted public hangings, the whole execution ordeal reminding him too much of Algar. Yet, change needed to occur at all levels, and the warrens required a harsh scrubbing to wash the stink out.
“What about the Cull Tarr?” Mostin asked. “With the surviving jacks confined to the barracks and tier guards crowding the inns and taverns, your Hospitality Guild is talking mutiny.”
“They’re your Hospitality Guild.” Gannon chuckled. “Not mine.”
“Fine. In that case, I’ll get my bow.”
“Mutiny in the tiers means submitting complaints, sending scathing letters, and whining. They won’t take up arms or risk getting soiled or scratched. Make it their problem to figure out.” Gannon slapped him on the shoulder. “Have them bring you their solutions, not their problems.”
Kari's Reckoning (The Rose Shield Book 4) Page 18
