The Water Road

by JD Byrne

  Nor did a collective leadership, some kind of council, seem like a plausible alternative. Antrey knew about the history of the Confederated States of the Arbor and the mess it was because of the competing agendas and prickly egos of the various city-states that made it up. The same would probably be true of the Neldathi. In the context of the Triumvirate, the Confederation worked well, or at least well enough, thanks to the need to stand on equal footing with the other nations. Without other influences, a Neldathi confederation would die for certain.

  Before too long, through the misty gray sheen of the rain, Antrey could see the Water Road up ahead. She could also see, off in the distance to her right, upriver, the faint outline of one of the garrison forts. She decided to change course and head back east, away from the fort. She hopped across the ever-dwindling stream, landing with a squish in the mud on the other side. Looking back over her shoulder, she walked until she could no longer see the fort at all. She decided to walk another hour and then to look for the best place to cross the river.

  While she walked, Antrey returned to the question of who might best bring the Neldathi clans together. Out of the blue, or rather the damp gray, came a flash that surprised her as much as anything had in the past several days. Why not herself? She was Neldathi, at least partly, but did not owe allegiance to any one clan. Quite the opposite—no clan would want to lay claim to her. She had no part in the disputes and feuds that raged between the clans. Her only goal was to educate them and bring them together.

  Although if she was honest with herself, that was not completely true. While Antrey had absolved Alban of his sins when it came to the Neldathi, she was not inclined to extend any such grace to the rest of the Triumvirate. The Altrerians almost certainly did not know precisely what was being done in their name, but they still shared blame. Their attitudes towards the Neldathi were evident everywhere, from the words transcribed in Rangold’s book, to the ones like Gintie and Myral she dealt with on the street, and to the more educated classes. To all of them, the Neldathi were little more than animals, and even more dangerous. There was vengeance to be had against them.

  But she was no leader. She had never led anything, or anyone, in her life. There were two things in her favor, however. For one thing, she was the only one who knew about the Triumvirate program. She knew how the disputes between the clans had been exacerbated all those years. That had to count for something. For another, through all those years in Alban’s service, during which she read nearly all of those books in his library, Antrey had learned a great deal about the world that the ordinary thek, not to mention average Neldathi, would not know. She had learned about military strategy, diplomacy, and how to deal with adversaries. She could put all that knowledge to the service of Neldathi unification. Assuming anyone would listen to a word she said and give her the chance.

  After an hour of walking through the low, rolling hills, Antrey again turned south towards the Water Road. She chose a spot along the riverbank that was shielded from the road by a hill to provide an extra measure of cover. There was no garrison fort visible in either direction. In front of her the river lay black, slow, and silent as it flowed east towards the Bay of Sins. Had she planned this journey months ago, she might have consulted a map and found a spot where the river was narrower than this one. But that option was closed to her now. Besides, avoiding detection was more important, and this spot appeared as good as any for that purpose.

  She stood on the riverbank and thought, for a moment, about whether to wait for nightfall before crossing. She decided against it. For one thing, the river was clear of traffic right now. Not so much as a flatboat was visible either upriver or down. At night, it would be harder to avoid any craft that passed by and harder for them to see her. She didn’t want any grand plans of Neldathi unification to die struggling for air in the dark water under a merchant vessel. Also, if she crossed now, there would be enough daylight for her to have time to find a suitable campsite on the other side.

  Antrey let out a long sigh and sat down on the damp riverbank. She took out the last portion of bread from her satchel and ate it while she rested for a few moments. When she was done, she strapped the satchel to her body as tightly as possible and walked down to the water’s edge. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder. Towards the Endless Hills. Towards what had been home for the past seven years. Then she turned, took a deep breath, dove head first into the dark water, and began to swim.

  Chapter 12

  “So it’s come to this,” Strefer said, to nobody in particular. She was sitting in the Battered Pikti nursing a crushing headache. On the bar in front of her sat a sad row of empty ale mugs, each having been depleted more quickly than the one before. Just a few days before she had been working on the biggest story of her career, the biggest of any reporter’s career anywhere, only to see it perish in the flames of Olrey’s fireplace.

  She had done as she was told, returning to Tolenor suitably beaten down to meet with Tevis. He nearly hit the roof when Strefer told him where she had gone and who she had been talking to. Burned once already by the retelling of the story, she provided Tevis only the most essential of details, from the day of the murder to the meeting with Olrey. Tevis dressed her down in harsh tones, strutting around his office like a scorned lover, before ultimately calming down. Whatever she had done, Tevis knew she was good at her job. And he knew she wouldn’t try anything so stupid again.

  By the time she returned to Tolenor, Alban’s murder was no longer a secret. Nor was the identity of the prime suspect, the halfbreed Antrey who had been his assistant. To an ignorant observer it looked like the Sentinels and the Grand Council were being particularly open and forthright about the situation. Strefer knew that was not the case. The Sentinels concluded that Antrey spun into some fit of rage and lashed out at Alban, but refused to speculate on what the source of that anger might be. They must have some ideas, however, given where and when the murder took place.

  The trip to Sermont meant that Strefer didn’t even get the byline on the stories about the murder. Tevis took the official line from the Sentinels, punched it up with a few of the crime-scene details Strefer provided, and sent it to Sermont for publication. The story made no mention of any possible motive. It was still a big story, and Tevis was lucky she had been in the right place to exploit it. After a few days had passed and he had suitably cooled off from his initial reaction to Strefer’s exploits, he praised her ingenuity for being able to get to the scene of the crime when nobody else would. “Next time, just come and talk to me before you go off half-cocked, all right?” he pleaded.

  “Next time,” Strefer said, raising the mug in her hand in mock toast before emptying it. She knew there wasn’t going to be a next time. No next time because she was going back to what she did best. Blood! Sex! Debauchery! Give the people what they want! Why try to educate them about their world or broaden their horizons? Why bust your ass to try and shine a light in the dark places they don’t care about? “Another round here,” Strefer shouted into space, towards nobody in particular.

  The bartender, who had been chatting with a customer at the other end of the bar who was still sober, walked down and started cleaning the empty mugs out from in front of her. “Sure it’s not time to call it a night?”

  She leaned forward on her stool, nearly falling off, and bore into his eyes. “What are you insinuating, sir?” she asked with uncalled-for vigor.

  “I’m insinuating that you are drunk, Strefer,” the bartender said, calm in the face of her accusation. “Gods help me, I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “You look here,” she said, pointing a wavering finger towards him. “How many times have I been in here, sitting at a table in the back minding my own business and you come and bust my chops for not buying enough to drink? Huh? Now you’re telling me I’m buying too much? Well, that’s very confusing, isn’t it? What is the right answer, professor?”

  “Fine, fine,” the bartender said, retreating and
picking up a fresh empty mug. “Your money’s as good as anybody else’s here, I guess.” He poured a fresh mug from the keg, put it down in front of her, and then walked back to the other end of the bar.

  “Well spoken, good sir,” she said, hoisting the mug in his direction. She had focused her attention on this new mug of ale, and how it was so alike and yet so different from all the others, when she felt a heavy hand slap her on the back.

  “What brings you here on such a fine evening, Strefer?” said a familiar voice as someone slipped onto the stool beside her. She turned to see Rurek, his good mood shining through the grime and exhaustion of a full working day.

  “Surely you jest?” she asked.

  Rurek took one look at her and then pried the mug out of her fingers, sliding it down the bar beside him, out of her reach. “Strefer, let me tell you, this is not a good look. What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” she asked, with even more sarcasm than she intended. “Why, nothing’s wrong, Rurek. What could possibly be wrong about all this? I am here, in my element, among my people!” Her voice rose in volume with each word until it was attracting attention from the rest of the tavern. “Whatever possibly could be wrong, old friend?”

  “You’re a better drinker than you are a liar, Strefer,” he said in a hushed tone, as if to set an example for her.

  “All right, fine,” Strefer said, “maybe something is wrong. And maybe I don’t want to talk about it, huh? Maybe I’ve come to mourn the death of truth in our society. You know, you were right the other night when you said the people who read my paper don’t really care about what happens here. They just want the sensation. The blood and sex and shit. And we in the business are more than happy to provide it. For a fee, of course, which seems kind of sleazy, doesn’t it? But that’s the way the world works. Is there any place…has there ever been any place…where people really cared about the truth?”

  “Don’t your people care, Strefer?” he asked, trying to be positive. “When the Great Awakening happened decades ago, the Guilders didn’t just stop worshiping the old gods. You chucked the entire cultural structure that had grown up around them. You got rid of the temples, the priests, the rituals. And you just moved on. The truth that there are no gods prevailed over tradition and dogma. That’s better than what the Telebrians did, right?”

  “Small comfort,” Strefer said. “What did you do with my drink?”

  Rurek ignored the question. “Then there’s Oberton,” he said before summoning the bartender to order his own mug of ale.

  “Where?” Strefer said. The name did not register with her.

  “Oberton,” Rurek said, turning to her. “You’ve not heard of it?”

  Strefer shook her head.

  “Oberton is a city in the Arbor…” he said, before Strefer interrupted with a wave of her hand.

  “Hang on. I thought the names of all the cities in the Arbor ended the same way: Tomondala, Kerkondala, whateverdala,” she said, emphasizing the last two syllables before trailing off.

  “Sort of,” Rurek said. “In the ancient tongue, ‘dala’ literally meant ‘walled city.’ So ‘Tomondala’ literally means ‘Walled City of Tomon.’ The seven city-states that make up the Confederation are all walled cities, so their names all end the same way. But there are lots of other cities and towns in the Arbor, Strefer. You didn’t think there were only the seven, did you?” he asked with the kind of grin that said he hoped she did, so he could hold it over her in the future.

  “Pfft,” she said, waving off his accusation, “of course not.” She wasn’t so drunk to concede that she had never actually given the matter any thought.

  “Oberton is a city that’s almost right in the center of the Arbor, somewhere between Maladondala and Vertidala,” he said.

  “Somewhere?” Strefer asked.

  “Nobody is quite sure where it is, to tell the truth,” he said.

  “Wait, are you sure it really exists at all?” Strefer asked. “It sounds a little fishy.”

  Rurek rolled his eyes, as if the existence of Oberton was a settled fact where he came from. “It’s not like the other cities in the Arbor, Strefer. It’s up in the trees, built along the tops of the massive trunks that have grown up there. They say you could be standing right underneath the town square and never know it.”

  Strefer was not quite buying this, but he might as well continue, anyway. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  Rurek took a drink and continued his explanation. “It’s renowned as a city of learning and history. Sort of like your people, Strefer, when the awakening came and the priests and monks of the various orders there put aside the gods and became scholars of history. They say Oberton has a great library that holds many ancient texts and great secrets. In Oberton, they treasure learning and truth above all else.”

  “Good for them,” Strefer said. “But that doesn’t make me feel any better, Rurek. They don’t buy newspapers, at least the one I work for. Why don’t you cheer me up? Tell me why you’re in such fine spirits tonight?”

  “Nothing specific,” he said after finishing his own mug and signaling the bartender to bring another. “Today was just one of those days that makes you appreciate the job. I won’t lie, when I signed up for the Sentinel life I wanted to head out to one of the forts on the Water Road. I never thought I’d be stuck playing babysitter for the unrulier parts of society.” He paused to take a long drink of the full mug the bartender had set before him. “But today, I helped a panicked mother find a child that had wandered off. I brokered a peace between two merchants, next door to each other, who were to the point where they were about to burn down each other’s shops, along with half the city. And then the sun set and the stars came out, shining down on a brilliant cloudless night.” He took another drink. “Did that help?” he asked with a laugh and another clap on the back.

  “Not really,” Strefer said, still looking for her last mug. “Job satisfaction is not something I would put in the plus column for me, at this point.”

  “Why? You normally seem to love this job. What happened?” The question hung in the air unanswered. “Come on, you know it will make you feel better to talk about it.”

  “All right, all right, let me ask you something.” Strefer turned on her stool to face him directly. “You’re a boss, right? You get to boss other people around, right?”

  “A few people,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Good for you,” Strefer said, steadying herself. “Let’s suppose, hypothetically speaking, that one of your employees, one of your charges, goes off on his own and does some really excellent work. Great stuff. Finds out some key bit of information that nobody else knows about. But he doesn’t share it with you, which he should, to be fair. He thinks it’s so important, so explosive, that he had to take it further up the chain of command right now.” She pounded the bar for emphasis at that point. “What would you think about him? Tell me, would you congratulate him on a job well done? Or would you just yell at him for an hour because he went above your head?”

  Rurek dodged the question. “Did you go over Tevis’s head about something?”

  “Don’t change the subject!” Strefer shot back at him. She pounded the bar again. “Answer the question!”

  “All right, calm down,” he said, putting his hands up to protect himself, only half in jest. “Personally, it wouldn’t bother me that much if someone went over my head. If the information was as important as you say it is and time really was short, I would understand that. Sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right. However,” he said, pausing to emphasize the change of tone, “professionally I would be very angry. The chain of command only works correctly when it works every time. The same rigid discipline that says my charge should come to me first is the same one that may require a comrade to save his life if I say so. Or it doesn’t. Understand?”

  She did, but didn’t particularly care for the answer. All she said in response was “Hmphf.”

  “Now, why don’t you
answer my question? Did you go over Tevis’s head with a story? Because I bet that would make him all kinds of angry.”

  “Now you tell me,” Strefer said, pointing at him. “Where were you a few days ago? I could have used that bit of wisdom.”

  “Sorry,” Rurek said, shrugging. “You know where to find me. Besides, my consulting fee is pretty cheap.” He tapped on the rim of his mug with one finger. “So what was it?”

  Strefer shook his head. “I shouldn’t tell you. Really, of all people, Rurek, you should not be the one I tell.”

  “C’mon,” he said in mock surprise. “After all the things I’ve told you, even when it gets me in trouble, you’re going to hold out on me?”

  “All right,” Strefer said. Whether it was the ale getting to her or something deeper, she felt the need to unburden herself to someone else. Tevis was out of the question. And, really, who else was there? Pathetic as it was, Rurek was the closest thing to a friend Strefer had. “I know why that Antrey girl killed your clerk,” she said in a loud whisper.

  Rurek sat up bolt upright on his stool. “Come on, Strefer. Nobody knows that. We don’t even know that. If what you went behind Tevis’s back with was some kind of fairy tale you pulled out of thin air, he was right to be angry with you.”