by Martin Davey
Something in his eyes, open and honest like she had never seen them before made Ysora stop and take a breath. She stirred the vomit for a moment longer and then sighed and reached into her pockets, handed him the paper. “I don’t want to do this again.”
Tiege opened the paper and read. He looked at her as he tore the paper into strips and then yet smaller strips. When he was done he dropped them all into the bucket, the tiny squares of paper darkening in the water and vomit. “What we want and what we have to do is not always the same.”
“I have to do nothing.” Ysora felt flushed. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Tiege moved closer. He seemed taller, it wasn’t often Ysora had to look up to meet a man’s eyes. “But what about your mother? What about Vicki, Ressel or Sorra? Don’t you owe their memories anything?”
“I think you lie. Maybe you are Redmond and maybe you aren’t. It proves nothing. Cioran is a good man and deserves better than to have me rooting through his papers when he’s preaching the will of the Five.”
Tiege looked at her, his full lips pursed, his tight-fitting clothes as dark as his hair. “Maronghavian,” he said.
“What?”
“Cioran has been teaching you the writings of Maronghavian. I saw the book on the counter.”
Ysora picked up the bucket. “So, what, you’re spying on me now?”
Tiege put his hand on the handle of the bucket, next to hers. His gloves were warm. “And did the Guardian tell you what happened to Maronghavian?”
Despite herself, Ysora felt her heart quicken at the touch. She let go of the handle. “He told me he was captured by the Prince of the Marches and tortured to death for not renouncing his faith.”
Tiege nodded, a barely perceptible movement of his head. “Good.” Whether he meant what had happened to Maronghavian or the fact that Cioran had told her what happened, wasn’t entirely clear. “My Master has told me to ask you something, Ysora.”
Ysora was beginning to wonder if there was really a ‘Master’ at all. “He did, did he?” She tried to sound bored, instead she just ended up sounding tired. She snatched the mop away, careful to avoid touching his hand. Why was he wearing gloves on such a warm day? Did he always wear gloves? She couldn’t remember, though getting to know Tiege, she thought it might be one of his affectations, a pose to try and appear darker and more dangerous.
“He did,” Tiege said, a small smile quirking his beard. “He said to ask you whether your dreams leave you with a headache in the morning.”
Ysora’s breath caught for just a moment, hating herself for the look of guilt that she couldn’t stop flaring across her face. Everybody dreams. Nothing to hate herself for there. “A strange question,” her voice sounded unnaturally high to her ears. “No more than anybody else’s do, I suppose.”
Tiege didn’t return her weak smile. “He also said you’ve seen the twisted tower’s steps washed red. That was many years ago. The Paramin will be awoken again soon and more than the steps of his temple will run red.” He watched her closely for any sign of a reaction. Ysora did her best to disappoint him, though she felt her own face go cold.
“There you two are!” A small delicate hand landed on Tiege’s shoulder. He didn’t jump, instead he unfolded his arms and turned to reveal Addison in the doorway. “We’re getting quite the crowd in here,” the blonde woman said, her voice almost accusing, her smile as false as Ysora’s own, though far prettier no doubt. “I never knew a pool of sick could be so interesting.” She looped her arm through Tiege’s own, despite her size she left him no room for argument. “Come with me, Tiege, that dreadful Len keeps hounding me about working here. As though I’d work in a place like this.” She laughed prettily.
Ysora watched them go, still holding the bucket in her hand, the mop handle resting against her shoulder and the stench of vomit rising about her face.
Tiege didn’t even look back once.
CHAPTER 20
Shadows and dark corners everywhere.
Everywhere Landros looked there were black corners concealing monsters and creatures from the bowels of the Nameless One’s prison itself. Dead boys scrabbling at the floor, dead mothers with skin sloughing and flaking away, dead friends with hair and bone and brain spattered over their faces.
He pulled up his collar and hunched his shoulders and moved on through the streets of Katrinamal. Paper rolled about the road in the breeze from the end of the world, cats and dogs prowled dark alleys feeding on scattered garbage, and drunks and whores shouted out as he passed.
How long before they found the body of Clerk Lovelin? How long before the judgement of the Keepers fell upon his head? He pulled his collar tighter, the thoughts sending a chill coursing through his body despite the warmth of the breeze.
Only when he was halfway there did Landros know where he was headed. To the Fiddler’s Tree. The thought of the golden windows, of the crowds inside, of Elian’s deep, dark eyes. He knew he had to go there. Even if she had a patron for the evening, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He needed to be with her, tell her how he felt about her, lose himself in those eyes, in the sound of her voice, to lay with her under the stars and smell her perfume.
Strange that it took the knowledge that this might be his last night alive to realize how he felt about her. A shout from behind him, more of a scream, and Landros looked back to see a woman hunched over a dark form lying in the road, a dark figure running away and sending boxes and barrels spinning across the road. Three people hurried to the woman, one of them seeming to be wearing the blue uniform of the Guard. Landros walked on, trying to stop peering into every shadowy corner.
He turned down Pierce’s Street, the houses leaning close overhead. People had tied washing lines between the topmost windows and shirts and bed sheets flapped in the breeze like agitated ghosts. Landros watched them fluttering, spectral and grey in the night. Ghosts. Isn’t that what ghosts were? Fluttering, insubstantial things that wisped in the wind and moaned and wept in the dark? Their presence something barely seen, leaving only a cold shiver in their wake?
But then what was that creature who could possess the bodies of the dead, if not a ghost? Something that had no place in the world of the Keepers.
“Hi beautiful, where are you going in such a hurry?” A woman, pretty even with the scar puckering the skin from below her eye to her jaw, had him by the arm. She wore a white dress, open at the breast, milky white skin. One look at Landros’s eyes and the woman widened her own, raising her hands as though to ward him off. “Hey, sorry sir. I didn’t mean nothing by it.” She hurried, almost ran away into the night, her thin white dress billowing about her legs in the breeze. Another barely realized ghost in the nightscape of Katrinamal.
Landros watched the woman run before he carried on into the night. Would Elian see such a change in him? Would she show such fear? He couldn’t imagine her showing so much emotion toward anything. Even her lovemaking was cool and slow and methodical. Controlled and quiet. She had told him about some of her patrons as they lay in the tangled sheets, the smell of sex and sweat heavy in the air. Patrons who came to her with furtive eyes and damp coins. They were the worst, the nervous ones who smiled with wet lips and fidgeted with uneasy hands. Elian told him about those patrons, about their bites and their slaps and their punches, told him in the same cool, detached air with which she made love.
He needed that coolness now, that detachment. Would he tell her what had happened? He didn’t even know the answer to that question. All he knew was he needed her body close to his, needed her coolness, her remoteness. He needed to smell her perfume. Always the same perfume. He could smell it even now if he closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
He remembered having the same feeling once before. That time, he had drunk too much ale with Pascal and Torra and he had thought to persuade her away from her patron of the night with his smooth tongue and his winning smile. Elian had been cool and detached as she leaned out of the window of Mother Jendra’s and
sent him away vowing never to make the same mistake again. Tonight would be different, he wasn’t a drunken fool with a stolen flower clutched in his fist. He was a Captain of the Watch with eyes bleak enough to send whores scurrying back into the shadows.
Things were different.
This could be his last night alive. The Keepers passed their judgements as people slept. Visited their dreams. What would the punishment be for failing a Clerk? The Bonding River was for scum who stole or raped or defied the Dream. Surely some far worse fate would be devised for somebody who had led a Clerk’s killer to him.
Possibly his last night alive and he wanted to spend it with one of Mother Jendra’s children? Not his oldest friend, not his roommate, not any of his men at all. Only a woman who he had spent one night with. He thought there was probably some profound insight behind that thought. For now he ignored it as he tried to ignore all the shadowy corners and hurried his way through Katrinamal and on to the Fiddler’s Tree.
Most inns in the early hours would be closing for the night, stragglers and drunks being kicked out and doors and windows being fastened shut. Otto was not so eager to be rid of paying customers, and many a night would see landlord and last customers draped across the bar in some strange competition to see who could stay awake the longest. The Fiddler’s Tree wasn’t quite at that stage yet as Landros walked through the door, golden light spilling out into the night and the warmth of the inn suffocating in his face.
Things had definitely calmed down after the crush of the earlier crowds. Scattered drunks and whores cuddled up to each other on the benches lining the walls, lone drinkers sat at tables in the middle of the room contemplating the contents of their tankards, chins propped morosely in hands. And Elian sat at the bar with Torra.
Landros’s heart lurched as he saw them, almost a physical blow in his chest. Elian had changed her clothes. Now wearing a white shirt and black pants. Simple clothes that she made look elegant. And what of Torra? Had he changed? He looked fresh and well groomed, but then he always looked like that. Landros’s hands shook as he forced himself to look away, the inn quiet enough for him to hear Elian laugh at some witticism by the Watchman.
Dorian was still in the same seat as earlier. Strange to think that Landros had been away fighting monsters and ghosts and watching a Clerk be murdered while Dorian had been sitting in the same seat all night. His companion was a woman Landros didn’t recognize with grey hair and black eyeliner; no sign of Pascal or any of the other Watchmen. The old Captain had probably drunk them all under the table. No chance of that with Torra, Landros thought with a sour taste in his mouth, Torra would smile over his tankard, share a joke and refill everybody else’s drinks while never seeming to touch a drop of his own.
It was the older woman who recognized Landros, though he had never seen her in his life. Or maybe she had taken one look at his face and that was why she touched Dorian on the shoulder and nodded in Landros’s direction. The old Captain turned his way and stopped for a moment before rising to his feet more steadily than Landros would have thought possible.
The older woman, wearing a fine purple dress which showed her shoulders, watched Dorian walking to him, more than once her lavender eyes moving to Landros. Dorian’s hand landed on Landros’s shoulder, his face serious as he looked into his eyes.
“Are you alright? What’s happened?” Dorian’s voice was quiet.
Hand on his shoulder, face close to his, looking straight into his eyes. The same way Dorian would come to him when he had found Landros crying over a scraped knee or a bruised finger in the practice yard. Landros felt a brief pang of nostalgia for those simpler days. Days when a hand on a shoulder and the comfort of Dorian’s familiar smell could make a sore knee and an aching finger seem not to matter at all.
Landros tried his best not to meet Dorian’s faded grey eyes, who knew what the older man might see there? “Nothing. Nothing really, I was passing the inn and wondered if you all were still here.” In his efforts to avoid Dorian’s eyes, he saw that Elian had noticed his arrival, looking over a slender shoulder at him. She saw him look her way and turned back to Torra, smiling and nodding at something he was saying.
“Nothing is it? What’s this?” Dorian, grabbed him by the wrist, lifted his arm up so Landros could see the back of his own forearm. Thick red blood had stained the arm of his new coat. “Is this yours?” Landros could smell the ale on his friend’s breath, but he seemed as sober and serious as he had when he led them on their patrols along the end of the world. “And this.” Dorian leaned forward to tug at the knee of Landros’s breeches. More thick blood staining his clothes. “And this.” Dorian tapped Landros’s boot with his own. “What in the name of the Keepers have you been doing? Elian said you’d been called to your mother’s house.”
Landros looked down at the bloodstains, wondering vaguely whose they were; the Clerk’s, his mother’s, the boy’s. Perhaps even Feren’s, remembering how the blood spattered across the cell as Clerk Lovelin shattered his skull with the chain. Landros looked at Dorian. His face felt cold. “She’s dead,” he said.
No surprise on Dorian’s face, only a frown of sympathy and a single nod. “I’m so sorry, Landros. First Feren and now your mother. Come and sit with me and Laraine.” Another glance at the blood spattered on Landros’s clothes. “You’ve a lot to talk about.” The woman was watching them both, her legs crossed, the eyeliner about her eyes fine and black. There was a vague sort of expectancy about her as she looked at him, the way her eyes widened, the way her smile was just a little too sincere. The way she leaned forward in her seat as he looked at her made Landros uneasy.
“I’ll get a drink first.” Otto was at the far end of the bar, leaning across it and speaking in hushed tones to a man with sparse grey hair and big ears with the same wiry grey hair sticking out of them. Otto looked as worse for wear as anybody in the room. Landros could just as easily have walked to the far end of the bar and asked for a drink there. Instead he took a position not far from Elian and Torra, trying to look unconcerned as he leaned on the bar with both arms and rolled a gold coin across his knuckles. He felt two pairs of eyes move to him and did his best to ignore them, keeping his eyes on the coin flipping from one knuckle to the next. It amazed him that his hands weren’t shaking. Amazed him that Elian talking to Torra still bothered him so much after watching his mother murder the Clerk.
“What’ll it be?” He hadn’t even noticed Otto coming over.
Landros slipped the coin into the palm of his hand and then down onto the counter, crest of the Keeper’s facing up. “Ale,” he said.
Otto nodded, selected a tankard from the rack behind him, found something interesting in it, looked closer, and then wiped it away with his dirty rag.
Landros sighed and couldn’t help trying to sneak a glance Elian’s way again. He found himself looking directly into her large brown eyes. “I thought you had a customer for the evening?” Unless that customer was Torra, he suddenly thought. No, Torra was too sly to do anything so stupid.
Elian was sitting on the other side of Torra, leaning on the counter with both elbows, looking over her shoulder at Landros. Torra didn’t look the least bit uncomfortable about being in the middle. Landros had never seen the man look uncomfortable.
“I did,” Elian said. She held a gold coin up for Landros to see, turning in her stool to face him, every movement a picture of grace. “It seems walking across a room to get a lady her drink wasn’t the only feat he was incapable of.”
“Oh.” Landros had no idea what to say to that. Elian looked away for a moment, still leaning on the bar, a faint smile curling the corner of her lips. Torra raised an eyebrow, smiling as always. “You can come with me, then.” The words were out of Landros’s mouth before he knew he was going to say them. He regretted them instantly. If Elian rejected him in favour of staying with Torra...
“Alright then,” she said.
It took a moment for her words to sink in, and when they did, Landros cou
ldn’t help smiling. Strange how such things can make the world seem a better place even after such a bloody night .A night that might be his last. Landros slid off his stool.
“What about this?” Otto had returned with his ale, already his fleshy fist had retrieved the coin from the bar.
Landros looked at Torra, the Watchman unperturbed by being left on his own. For the first time he could remember, Landros didn’t feel a resentful jealousy when he looked at the man. “Give it to him,” he said.
“Thank you very much, Captain.” Torra leaned across the bar and pulled the tankard toward him, ale slopping over the rim with the movement. “Bright and early in the morning again, I trust?”
The morning. How long would it be before the Clerk was found to be missing? Before they found the body? Before they realized Landros was one of the last people to see him alive? Before the Keepers passed judgement on him? “We shall see,” he said, trying to ignore the cold feeling of dread settling in his stomach like a restless eel. He glanced to the door, still nobody coming for him.
“Have no fear, Torra. I’ll have your Captain home and tucked up in bed before dawn,” Elian said, standing next to Landros. It always surprised him how short she was, barely reaching his shoulder. She always seemed so strong and composed that he always thought she should be taller.
“Seeing the way he looked at you, I don’t think it would be tucking that he needs.” Torra smiled and sipped at his new drink.
“Landros!” Dorian raised a hand from his seat on the bench along the wall. The woman next to him sat with her back straight, her eyes fixed on Landros.
He shook his head and nodded to the door. “I’m just going for a walk,” he said. Elian slipped a thin arm through his and the world suddenly seemed a less dark place. The floor sucked at their feet as they walked and the tables were lined with ash and toppled tankards and spilt ale, the smoke of the torches was still thick in the air.
“So where are we going?” Elian asked once they were through the door, a warm breeze riffling in their hair and a lone dog barking in the distance.
