by Micah Yongo
“I hear rumours of her.”
Neythan looked at him. “What kind of rumours?”
“Rumours of how she turns on her own kind.”
Neythan placed a hand on the other man’s forearm as they rounded another stall. “That is strange talk for a ranger to hear.”
Yevhen looked down at Neythan’s hand, then to Neythan. “Nevertheless, from time to time such things are heard.”
“From whom?”
“You needn’t concern yourself with that.” He slowly eased his arm from Neythan’s grasp. “Those who speak of such things are few – lapdogs, like me, who from time to time hear the talk of their masters above the table. Such whispers, for us, are of little worth. After all, who would we tell? The Brotherhood itself knows that we whisper, and that we dare not go beyond that. We’re as fond of breathing as we are the silver you pay us… but then I happen upon you, one in pursuit of her. And, as in all my dealings with your kind, I seek for my services to be had, to deal my secrets. Yet you have no silver, no gold. And so how, as is custom, are you to pay?”
“I have the feeling you are about to tell me.”
“What better price is there than your skill?”
Neythan smiled wryly. “You want a favour.”
“A favour, yes. The perfect way to put it.”
“And in return?”
“In return… I will tell you where she is.”
Neythan stopped.
Yevhen, again, waited for him.
Neythan glanced at the passing crowds and then stepped toward the ranger. He spoke quietly. “Say that again.”
“I will tell you where she–”
“You know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“The Brotherhood seeks this girl and is yet to find her, and you… How could you possibly know where she is?”
“I am a ranger, Neythan. My business is to know and find, just as yours is to seek and kill. It has always been this way. In truth, it’s strange the Brotherhood hasn’t already come to me. Ashamed perhaps, because she is one of their own. But this failure is to our gain, should we make this bargain.”
Neythan just stood looking at him.
“I suppose your doubt is understandable,” Yevhen said.
“How did you learn her whereabouts?”
“That will be part of the bargain, Neythan. I cannot–”
“If you want me to trust your claim then you will tell me how it is you’re able to make it.”
For a moment, they just stood there with people moving either side of them. The ranger eyed Neythan for a while. And then, abruptly, smiled gently. “Very well.”
“Very well, what?”
“The answer is simple – a tailor. One with whom your ‘sister’ has visited. One who has helped her, and who knows of where she has been and where she will be, who may even know something of her plans.”
“And who is this tailor?”
“He is one of your Brotherhood’s tailors, just as I am one of its rangers. Just as there are those who are its innkeepers, smiths, and who knows what else. Your kind, you have people in every city. Some, I have learned of; many I have not and never will. But this man, he is one of them, and she visited with him for two nights and two days.”
“You are certain.”
“I saw them myself. Sat with them. Ate with them.”
“Ate? When? Where?”
“They are good questions, Neythan, truly. But their answers have a price.”
Neythan’s gaze had fixed to the man now. There was no more market, no more people or headache, just this man who claimed to know the whereabouts of the person Neythan had been seeking since that night at Godswell. He spoke slowly. “Be careful, Ranger. You should be sure of what you say. It would be unwise to trick me. I am just a youth, as you say. We are not given to temperance when slighted.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He turned to resume the walk. “But come. We must yet walk.”
They passed a stall kept by an old woman with no teeth and a black shawl wrapped tight to her head like a widow. Two monkeys sat in wooden cages on the counter, each clothed in small vestures like little men, one clapping a pair of tiny cymbals, the other playing a drum.
“I will tell you all you desire,” Yevhen said. “Even take you to the tailor should you so choose. All I ask is a favour.”
They passed through a screen of beaded strings, into a small sheltered square of fruit stalls walled off by leaning planks of wood and tattered drapes. Yevhen stopped at one of the stalls and nodded at the man behind the table, taking a couple of pears. The man huffed and nodded back grumpily. Yevhen smiled and turned to face Neythan, a pear in each palm.
“So… will you hear my request?” he said.
Neythan thought about striking Yevhen in the throat with the blade of his palm, thought about wrestling him to the ground there and then and pressing his thumbs against his eyes until Yevhen let go every last secret detail Neythan desired – where she was, how he knew, why they’d eaten together. He glanced about at the crowd and understood now why Yevhen had insisted they meet here, in the marketplace. He looked again to the taller man and his glassy pale blue eyes.
The waiting ranger cocked a thin eyebrow. “Will you?”
Neythan exhaled long and quiet through his nostrils, and nodded.
Yevhen smiled. “Good.” He handed Neythan a pear.
He wandered away from the stalls and stood in a less busy corner, leaning against another support beam. Neythan followed, stopping close by, watching the people come and go around him as he bit unhappily into his pear.
“I seek a jewel,” Yevhen said.
Neythan smiled humourlessly. “I should have guessed.”
“A very particular jewel. Very precious.”
“You want to steal it.”
“Retrieve it, yes.”
“And so would have me play the thief.”
“In a way.”
Neythan bit again into the pear, which seemed to be turning sourer with each mouthful. “You seem an able enough man. Why should you need me?”
“The jewel is kept in a certain place, a chamber in the palace.”
Neythan stopped chewing. “You mean the sharíf’s palace.”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying you want me to steal from the sharíf?”
“The jewel is not his. In truth he barely knows of it.”
“Yet it is in his possession.”
Yevhen nudged himself forward from the support beam where he was leaning and stood in front of Neythan. “You asked of my kin,” he said. “Earlier – ‘is he really your cousin?’ you said.”
“Yes. So?”
“No doubt you wonder about my origins,” he gestured lazily. “My hair, my eyes, my skin.”
Neythan waited.
“You’ll have guessed my blood is not of the Five Lands… I am a Kivite, Neythan. From beyond the Reach, north of the twin seas.”
“A barbarian.”
Yevhen parted his lips to answer but then thought better of it. He gave a wan smile. “This jewel was stolen from my people in the time of Sharíf Theron. I simply wish to return it.”
“And you tell me? A servant of the Sovereignty?”
“The Sovereignty you serve has more pressing matters than a stone it took two centuries ago. Matters that you, by an agreement with me, can easily remedy.”
“You’ve waited a long time to rob a trinket. A hunter in Calapaar, a ranger for how many years, yet only now you seek to take this jewel.”
“It’s taken many years to even learn its whereabouts. I discovered it just days ago. It’s why I came to the city, only to find, thanks to the efforts of your ‘sister’, that the sharíf has elected to keep two Shedaím by him in the palace at all times.”
“Two Brothers? Here in the city?”
“Two that I know of, yes. You can imagine my surprise to have found you, a third, and one who may yet strengthen my hand.”
“I have agreed
to nothing.”
“You have agreed to listen. You know as well as I it is the reasonable thing. A trinket – as you call it – in a crypt, a forgotten one at that, is of no worth to the throne compared to a betrayer, a Brother turned against her own, killing one after another. You know what you must do.”
Neythan took another bite of the pear, chewed slowly. Killing one after another – so there had been further deaths. He wondered how many. Three? Four?
“It is a royal tomb,” Yevhen continued. “Its contents are rich. I want only the stone, a black pearl, fixed in a pendant; whatsoever else you come upon you will be free to add to your bounty.”
“I am no thief, Yevhen. We are not alike.”
Yevhen considered him. “No… we are not… ill of me to say so.” He took another bite of his pear and chewed, looking out again to the gathering customers opposite them beneath the shade. “Nonetheless things are as they are. I have something you want, you have of me the same. So. What is your answer?”
Neythan looked at him and then back to the crowd. He took a final bite of his pear and tossed the bitter seeded core to the ground. “Let’s go back,” he said. “I must speak with Caleb.”
Twenty
T R A D E
Neythan sat next to Caleb at the tent booth and watched the people bustling along Hanesda’s narrow walkways as though it was a sport – builders and masons from Harán, merchants from Calapaar’s coastal market towns, garment-makers from the High East. There were even Súnamites here, just as Caleb had promised, selling spices and fabrics from the Summerlands – the whole world, it seemed, packed together in one place, and all of them moving hurriedly along the city’s streets and gangways as though they were being chased.
It was a similar story in Sumeria’s other cities – Qadesh, Sippar, Qareb – each one filled with too many people and not enough time, the fruit of having sprung up along the ever-fertile banks of the Swift back when the neighbouring Harán was little more than dirt and sandshrubs, before the Low East discovered bronze and iron and how to forge them, and then how to dig deeper wells, further inland, and build their settlements around what they’d dug. Still, Hanesda remained the biggest, built atop a sloping valley on its north and eastern sides and overlooking the Swift to its south and west. A sprawling whitewalled network of terraces, alleys and squares where friends behaved like strangers and strangers sought to make friends, all in the name of trade. It took some getting used to. Not the kind of adjustment a golden-haired Kivite, unaccustomed to the warmer weather and heavily peopled streets and a native of the barren city-less scrublands of the Reach, should find easy to make. But then that was just one of the many strange things about the ranger, how comfortable he’d seemed strolling through the cluttered passageways of the marketplace and laying down his wishes.
“Do you trust him?” Caleb asked.
Neythan glanced at him, then back to the street opposite. “Not really. But then how much can I trust a man I’ve known a day?”
Caleb gave a conceding shrug. “His price is steep – go rob the sharíf himself.”
“I know… What of Nouredín? How well do you trust him?”
Caleb shrugged again, made a wry face.
“You’ve known him long?”
“Years. But time isn’t always a teacher when it comes to people.”
“How did you come to know him?”
“He’s a broker. Came upon him in a village in the High East, south of Tirash. I was trying to find buyers for a cage of peacocks I’d brought up from the Narrow. The man I’d gone there to meet had refused to do what was agreed. Wouldn’t buy. So there I was, stuck on the back side of the desert with this cage of birds and no buyer. One of the hirelings knew men in the town, sent word, not the kind of thing I like to normally do. I like to know whose silver I’m taking ahead of time. But, as I said, it’s desert land, ten days’ journey at least from almost anywhere. If I go on with the stock how am I to feed them? And they are nervous creatures. Two had died already on the way. So anyway, word comes back from the town, this man Nouredín has taken an interest – which is a relief – and what’s more is willing to come out from the township to meet me and see the stock. Which, well, he didn’t have to do, did so as good faith, to make life a little easier for me. As I said, the creatures are skittish.
“He wanted and took a hard price, of course. I mean, I had four birds in the cage, all strong and healthy. But we are in the desert. Who else am I going to sell to? He knew this… so anyway, he was impressed with the stock, asked if I was able to get other beasts besides, which I was, and so he partnered with me at a better price to take what I brought him every three moons – monkeys, camels and so on… He was a reliable buyer, more so than the first, always on time, always with silver.”
“You trust him, then?”
Caleb grimaced mildly. “I trust him to pay for goods when he has agreed to do so, nothing more. We’ve seldom eaten together. I do not know his kin. It is not like that with us.”
Neythan grunted.
“When does he want to do it?” Caleb asked.
“Ten days from now. The sharíf is to visit the south corner of the city to see the school before he departs to Qadesh to wed. The ranger thinks that if the sharíf goes, so ought the Brothers who are guarding him.”
“Should it be a difficult thing to take this jewel?”
“Not the way the ranger tells it. The sharíf’s guard are twenty men but most will go with him when he journeys. In the palace will be only cooks and servants, perhaps a handful of armed guards, or so he says.”
“Even so, this is the crown city. The cityguard is what, maybe a thousand men?”
“I said the same.”
“And what did he say?”
“He claims the jewel won’t be missed, that the sharíf barely knows of it. It is kept in a tomb he never visits and is of little or no value to the Sovereignty. He claims as long as our trespass goes unknown we could leave with the jewel and abide a year in the city without it being noted missing.”
“Seems unlikely.”
“I said the same, but he spoke as if all the more certain.”
Caleb grunted and continued working on his sandal as they squatted together on stools by the tent booths. He’d been at it for a while. Several thongs had come loose around the toes. He was taking the remaining thongs, bound from further back on the sole, and dipping the thing whole into a bucket of water, trying to make the leather stretch to tether them at the front.
“Would help, of course,” he said as he continued to work, “if you were able to remember more of the Watcher’s words.”
“So you have said.”
“To come here and nothing more… it’s slim counsel. Bones without meat.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“If we knew, at least, whether your heretic is here.”
Neythan sighed.
“It would be helpful were you to remember.”
“Yes, I know. But I do not. The sticks are as they are.”
“You say he met her, the ranger?”
“Ate with her, he said.”
“And you think he speaks the truth?”
Neythan shrugged again. “He described her likeness to me well. He’s seen her, if nothing else.”
Caleb nodded, turned the sandal over, shook his head. “What is this jewel anyway?”
“A pearl… No, a black pearl, he said.”
“Black?”
“Yes.”
“Strange.”
“Yes.”
“And whose tomb is to be raided?”
“A wife of Sharíf Karel.”
“Karel, you say… Analatheia? Queen Analatheia?”
“You know of her?”
“Of course. As you ought, it is the wife he killed… But the Brotherhood these days…”
“Yes, I know, they teach us nothing.”
Caleb looked up from the sandal. He smiled sheepishly. “I say it so often?”
Neythan shrugged.
“I didn’t know I said it so often.”
“Why would he kill his own wife?”
“Ah, well. Whose story would you hear? There are as many as there are years to have passed since her death. Most say for infidelity. The intrigue is in knowing with whom the betrayal was, or, for some, with what.”
“What do you mean?”
Caleb put down the sandal. “It is said of some she practised the ways of the Magi, and that Karel commanded her to cease and keep his law. When she refused, he had her killed.”
“Loving husband.”
“There will be a secret or two for every man or woman of the royal line, Neythan. Of that you can be sure.”
“This too, you say often.”
“What does he want with this pearl, anyway?”
“He is Kivite. He says it belongs to his people, that Theron stole it when he conquered them.”
“And he’s waited until now?”
“I know, that too I questioned him of.”
“And?”
Neythan shrugged. “He said he’d only recently learned its whereabouts.”
Caleb frowned and shook his head. He dunked the sandal once more into the bucket. “Well. So, how would the deed be done?”
“The ranger and I would enter together.”
“He knows the palace?”
“He knows a man who does, a courtier. He’d be our guide to the tomb and out again; the ranger has bought him.”
“And he is reliable, this courtier?”
“So he says.”
“Must be quite a price the ranger paid, for the courtier to be so bold.”
Neythan nodded.
“What then? Where is the tomb?”
“There are many. Some beneath the palace, some in a crypt beneath the gardens behind. The ranger thinks the one he wants will be under the palace.”
“How does he know?”
“The courtier.”
“Right.”
“The courtier is to take us to the door of the tombs. The ranger will wait there to keep the watch, and I will descend.”
“How does he know this courtier?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“There’s not much to like about this.”
