City of Dragons: Volume Three of the Rain Wilds Chronicles

by Hobb, Robin

  As he entered the chamber, both of them looked directly at him. He fought an impulse to straighten his ragged shirt. Instead, he stiffened his spine and returned their gazes. It had been a hard trip; let them look at him and see what his expedition had cost. Then he nodded to them gravely and received their answering nods. He did not approach them. Not yet. Alise’s message for Malta was safe in his bag. He would give it to her privately.

  Leftrin’s gaze roamed the chamber briefly, confirming that the fellow who had been following him had ghosted into the Traders’ Hall behind him. He did not look at him directly; he didn’t need to, for the man was no stranger to Leftrin. It was the Chalcedean “merchant,” Sinad Arich. He kept his wet cloak and hood drawn close about him as if he were still cold, but Leftrin recognized his eyes. The man had threatened him with blackmail once before over his liveship, forcing Leftrin to give him passage up the river. How he regretted it now. He should have followed his first impulse and killed the man and dropped him overboard. It chilled Leftrin to know the Chalcedean merchant was still in the Rain Wilds. It meant he had not given up on his mission.

  Why was he here tonight? Leftrin was virtually certain that Arich had been involved in planting that traitor in the expedition, but he was also convinced that the man could not have acted alone. The Council had hired Jess Torkef and sent him to Leftrin as a hunter to provide for the dragons. Possibly he was hoping that Jess had returned on the Tarman, bringing parts of slaughtered dragons with him. A grim smile twisted Leftrin’s mouth. He was going to be disappointed. And desperate enough to try something else. Arich had no real choice. His monarch, the Duke of Chalced, held his family hostage; unless the merchant could provide him with dragon parts for the cures the Duke supposed would heal him, their lives would be forfeit. Arich had deceived, threatened, or bribed someone on the Council to put a traitor on the Tarman. Someone, or perhaps several someones.

  Leftrin descended the steps slowly until he stood before the Council table. He cleared his throat, but there was really no need to draw their attention. All the Council members had straightened in their chairs and were staring at him. Silence spread behind him: he heard the small sounds of people rushing to take seats, shushing one another as they did so. He raised his voice. “Captain Leftrin of the liveship Tarman requests permission to address the Council.”

  “The Council is pleased to see you have safely returned to us, Captain Leftrin. We cede you the floor.” This husky pronouncement came from Trader Polsk. Her brush of gray hair had been groomed back from her face but was slowly resuming its usual unruly stance.

  “And I am pleased to see you in good health, Trader Polsk. I return to announce that our expedition was successful. The dragons are safely settled. I am pleased to report that every dragon survived the move. I am saddened to say that two of our keepers lost their lives. One of the hunters assigned to our expedition died also. The rest of our party was alive and well when I left them.” He used his right hand to scratch his left shoulder, contriving to turn toward the doors as he did so. Gray-cloaked Arich was just slipping out. Well. That was interesting and very unexpected. Had he already heard enough? He longed to follow the Chalcedean, but it was impossible right now. He turned back to the Council. All eyes were focused on him.

  “I bear written authorizations from the dragon keepers and the hunters Carson and Davvie to collect the second half of their wages, as was agreed would be paid upon the successful completion of their task. I also request that the rest of the contract money for the liveship Tarman and his crew be paid in full this day.” He opened his shoulder satchel as he spoke. The authorizations were all on a single sheet of Alise’s precious paper, rolled and tied with a string. He pulled the string free, extracted the keepers’ contracts, and stepped forward to set them on the Council table.

  Trader Polsk and several of the other Council members had been nodding. She ran her eyes over the papers and then slid them down the table. As the papers moved from member to member, they kept nodding. But when they reached the last member of the Council, and Leftrin did not resume speaking, the agreeable bobs slowed and then stopped. Trader Polsk glanced at her committee members and then fixed him with a gaze. “And the rest of your report, Captain Leftrin?”

  “Report?” He raised one eyebrow at her.

  “Well, of course. What did you find? Where did you leave the dragons and their keepers? Did you indeed locate Kelsingra? How far from here, and what are the river conditions along the way? What are the salvage possibilities? We’ve many questions that need answering.”

  He was silent for a moment, framing his reply carefully. No sense in angering them too soon. How best to approach this? Directly.

  “I’d prefer to settle this contract before we move on to casual conversation. Perhaps we can discuss my sharing the expedition’s findings after we’ve received our pay, Trader Polsk.” And perhaps not, he thought.

  She straightened in her seat. “That seems highly unusual, Captain.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Not at all. I prefer to finish with one contract before negotiating another.”

  Her voice was acerbic. “I am sure the Council agrees with me that hearing your report is an important part of ‘finishing’ this contract. I do not believe we have discussed the possibility of another contract.”

  Alise had helped him prepare for just this moment. He opened the shoulder bag again and extracted his copy of their original contract. He unrolled it and feigned reading through it, his brow wrinkled as if puzzled. Then he looked at Trader Polsk over the document. He made his voice almost apologetic. “Nothing in our contract specified that a report was due to the Council on our return.”

  There. As if on cue, a man at the end of the table drew a sheaf of papers toward him and began to leaf through them. Leftrin tried to save him the trouble. “If you read the contract, Trader Polsk, you’ll find that my crew and I, and the keepers and the hunters you hired, have all fulfilled each designated task as negotiated. The dragons were removed from the area. The creatures were fed and tended on the journey. We found an appropriate area for their resettlement, and there they are settled.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve fulfilled our end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn. The final payments are due.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “That’s all.”

  “It can scarcely be all!” This came not from Trader Polsk but from a younger man seated at the far end of the table. When he turned his face, the light of the hanging globes danced along a fine line of orange scaling on his brows. “This is no sort of a report at all! How can we be sure of a thing you’ve said? Where is the hunter Jess Torkef who was to accompany your expedition and represent the Councils’ best interest? He was to take notes and make charts as the expedition advanced. Why hasn’t he accompanied you here today?”

  Exactly the question Leftrin had been waiting to hear. “Jess Torkef is dead.” Leftrin delivered the news without regret but took close interest in the expressions it startled from the various Council members. As Alise had told him to expect, a woman Trader in a dark-green robe looked stricken; she attempted to exchange a look with the orange-scaled fellow, but he was staring at Leftrin in horror. He paled as Leftrin added, “I cannot be responsible for anything that Torkef agreed to; his contract is voided by his death.” He paused only a moment before revealing, “One distressing thing I will disclose. Jess Torkef died trying to kill a dragon. He intended to butcher her and sell the parts of her body. To the Chalcedeans.”

  He heard a gasp from Malta, but he did not turn to look at her. He needed to watch the reaction of the Council members. When no one spoke, he pointed out the obvious. “Either Jess Torkef was a traitor to this Council that hired him, or the ‘best interests’ of the Council were different from what I was led to believe and did not coincide with those of the dragons and their keepers.” He looked at each Council member in turn. The Trader in green gripped the edge of the Council table before her. Horrified fury was building on Trader Polsk’s face. Leftrin spok
e to their silence. “Until I know for certain which supposition is true, I’ll be withholding any sort of a report to this Council. And I’ll remind the Council that while my contract stipulated I would keep a log of our journey and make note of any extraordinary discoveries, there was nothing in the contract that said that information had to be shared with the Council on my return. Only that I must gather it.”

  Alise had pointed out that detail to him on their last night together in Kelsingra. She’d shaken her head over the sloppy wording of the document. “You are right, my dear. The Cassarick Traders’ Council was in such a hurry to see us out of town that they truly were not thinking of anything more than being rid of the dragons and their keepers. Some, obviously, dreamed of another Elderling city to plunder, but they dared not write of it too clearly, for they feared others might wake to the possibility. They did not want to share.

  “And some, perhaps, were imagining that the dragons would be rendered into very rare trade goods long before anyone found a place to settle them. Nothing in this contract dictates that we must share our discoveries with them. But I’ll wager that when you return, if you speak of what we’ve found, they’ll try to find a way to take it away from us.”

  They’d been sitting together in the small shepherd’s hut they had claimed as their own. A fire burned on the hearth, its red flames waking echoing red lights in Alise’s curling hair. They’d raided blankets and other furnishings from his stateroom on Tarman to try to make their new lodgings as comfortable as they could, and Tarman had been surprisingly tolerant of his absence. Alise had relished their newfound privacy even if it was much less comfortable than living aboard the ship. Leftrin had cobbled together a roped bedstead for them, as well as a crude table and a bench for seating. But it was still a rough and bare retreat, and outside, the days of winter were growing colder and wetter. They’d been sitting side by side on the floor, close to the firelight, going over the pages of the contract they’d signed with the Cassarick Traders’ Council. Alise had leafed through it carefully, chalking notes to herself onto the hearth stones with the burned end of a stick. He’d been content to sit and savor watching her. He’d known then that soon he’d have to leave her, and while he didn’t expect it would be for long, he still dreaded any time apart from her.

  When she had finally looked up from her study of the documents, her fingertips were black with soot and there was a stripe of it down her nose. He smiled. It made her look like a little striped ginger cat. She’d frowned at him in return and then tapped the contract with a businesslike finger. “There’s nothing here for us to fear. Nothing that we agreed and signed, and I looked over Warken’s keeper contract earlier. None of the keepers signed anything away; their contracts were all about how they must care for the dragons or forfeit their pay. There is no mention of them having to share anything they might find. Even your contract only stipulates that you are to keep a log; it doesn’t say that your notes on exploring the waterways will belong to the Council, or give them rights to anything we discovered. Including Kelsingra. No. They were in such a rush to be rid of the dragons that that was all they focused on. They wrote in penalties for you if you returned with the dragons and keepers, and they stipulated how much money they’d have to pay each keeper ‘with his or her dragon(s) safely settled and content.’ But nowhere did they provide for what they would ask of us if we were successful in finding Kelsingra. It’s odd. That omission didn’t seem so obvious or so dark when I was first reading it and signing it. But now it’s as plain as the ink on the page; they didn’t expect the keepers or the dragons to survive, and they never really expected us to find Kelsingra. At least, the official Council didn’t. I still think there were some who imagined riches to be discovered, and at least two Council members who were dismayed when I said I would come along and speak for the best interest of the dragons.”

  “Well, there was one barge captain who was so thrilled at the thought that he didn’t notice if anyone else was opposing it.”

  She’d pushed away his fingers that were curling her wayward hair into spirals, but her rejection was reluctant. “My love, we need to finish this tonight. I had only one piece of good paper left. I used half to write what I needed to tell Malta the Elderling. Do not let anyone else see it. I had to write in such tiny letters, I hope her eyesight is good! The other half sheet I used to make a document that authorizes you to collect the keepers’ pay for them. They’ve all signed. And so, on this scrap of hide, we will write out what we must try to bargain for and what we are willing to concede in return.” Her voice faltered a bit, and she cast her eyes down.

  He had lifted her chin with his two fingers. “Never fear. I will not barter Kelsingra away. Little enough have we found on this side of the river that would interest the Traders, but I know your fears: that once they see the city, they will strip it to the paving stones.”

  She nodded grimly. “As was done to the first Elderling cities that were discovered. So many mysteries would probably have been solved if all the pieces had been left in one place. Now the artifacts of Cassarick and Trehaug are scattered all over the world, in the hands of rich families and crafty merchants. But Kelsingra, the real Kelsingra on the other side of the river, gives us a new chance to discover who the Elderlings were, to understand and perhaps master the magic they used so freely—”

  “I know.” He interrupted her gently. “I know, my dear. I know what it means to you, even if some of the youngsters do not understand. I’ll protect it for you.”

  The buzz of confused conversation in the Council chamber drew his mind back to the present. The din did not die down but increased as the onlookers conversed with their neighbors and voices were raised to be heard over the rising hubbub. Trader Polsk stood and shouted for order; no one paid attention. Then, abruptly, the room was plunged into dimness. The suspended globes of light winked out, and only the red glow of the hearth fires lit the place. Every voice was stilled in shock.

  Malta Khuprus’s words rang out in the darkness. “It is time for silence. Time for us to listen to Captain Leftrin rather than asking each other questions we cannot answer. Let us be orderly and hear him out as Traders should. The man speaks of a contract fulfilled, a just debt to be paid, and a possible threat to not only the dragons but a threat to all Rain Wilders as well. A Chalcedean plot carried out in the midst of the Rain Wilds? Let us hear him out.”

  “Agreed!” shouted Trader Polsk when Malta paused, and a chorus of affirming voices answered hers. Whatever restorative magic Malta worked on the floating Elderling globes was successful. They brightened slowly to a warm glow that filled the chamber with a pleasant rosy light. Malta had left her seat in the darkness and now stood at the end of the Council table. Her pregnancy was obvious when she stood: her ripening belly interrupted the long, lean lines of her body. Leftrin felt she deliberately called attention to herself. A pregnant woman was not a rare sight in the Rain Wilds, but neither was it a common one. He knew that more than one person looked on her fecundity with envy. She let them.

  “Captain Leftrin.” Trader Polsk’s tone demanded that he focus on the business at hand. “You’ve made a serious accusation. Have you evidence to offer?”

  He took a breath. “Not as would satisfy the Council. I can repeat the words of the keeper Greft and tell you what Jess Torkef admitted to Sedric Meldar of Bingtown before he died. Torkef plainly said he had come in the hopes of killing dragons and selling off their parts, and he tried to persuade Sedric to join him in those plans. Keeper Greft was equally plain in telling us that Jess Torkef had tried to recruit him. I suggest that whoever hired the man and put him aboard my ship may have known that hunting meat to keep the dragons well fed was not the task closest to his heart. Before my barge even left, I received a threatening note, unsigned, but one that directed me to do all I could to aid him.”

  “Do you have this note?” Polsk immediately demanded.

  “No. It was destroyed.”

  “How exactly were you threatene
d, Captain?” This from the young, orange-scaled Trader at the Council table. A small smile played across his face.

  “I’m afraid I don’t recall your name, Trader,” Leftrin observed.

  “Trader Candral.” Trader Polsk seized control of the discussion. “Please do not destroy the order of this Council by speaking out of turn. Do you have a question you wish to ask Captain Leftrin?”

  Trader Candral was not pleased to be rebuked. Or perhaps he did not like being named to Leftrin. In either case, he leaned back in his chair and replied insolently, “I did have a question, and I’ve asked it. How was our captain threatened? And if the threat arrived before he sailed, why didn’t he report it before his departure?”

  Trader Polsk narrowed her eyes but nodded permission to Leftrin to speak. He kept his eyes on her face as he replied. “It was blackmail. The note threatened to reveal certain pieces of personal information. I didn’t report it because I felt I could handle it, and the Council was already urging a more than speedy departure for us. Immediate, if I recall correctly.”