Winterfinding

by Daniel Casey

  “Hello?” Riv asked to the darkness.

  “Aye.” A voice returned its tone more familiar, not like Umma’s.

  “Who’s there?”

  There was a chuckle, “You were thrown into my cell, mate. I should be hearing who you are first.”

  “You’re not Lappalan.”

  “Not by a long shot. And I hope I live long enough to never see the Aral ever again.”

  “I’m Riv, captain of the Kopis.”

  “Ah, there it is then.” The voice had a twinge of cynicism to it. “I was supposed to be your pick up.”

  “Cochrane.” Riv said flatly, his eyes had adjusted to the dimness. He could see the outline of the man sitting in the far corner.

  “You were supposed to get me and my associate, Towsend, from Wick. Take us up to Anhra so we could make our way back to The Cathedral with our precious bits of information.” Cochrane’s voice was sour.

  “Pallas.”

  “Yeah. I serve at the Canon’s pleasure.”

  “You’re not just a mercenary then?”

  “No, well, yeah. Officially, I’m a Sulecin justiciar. But in the Cathedral proper, that just means I’m a clergy merc. I’ve done a good number of jobs for him.”

  “What happened? The woman made it sound like they nabbed you in Lappala.”

  “Not quite. We made it in easily enough, bartered and conned our way into a meeting with a cartel member. Then used him to get into the Registry. Ended up pinching the books Pallas wanted with ease.”

  “Getting out though…” Riv slid back so he could rest against the wall; he was suddenly more tired than he had ever been.

  “Getting out.” Cochrane’s voice drifted off. There was silence for a beat, and then he continued, “We ended up in the deep mines. Old. Abandoned. We had to keep going further and further into them to get away from the guards. Eventually, they gave up. I guess they figured we’d die in the maze of shafts.”

  “How did you get back out?”

  “Luck. Dumb luck.” Riv could hear Cochrane laughing a bit. It was desperate sounding. “We emerged out in the dunes of the Aral. Had books, a compass, weapons, no food, no water. We headed northwest.”

  “Was it exposure?” Riv asked.

  “No,” Cochrane shook his head, “Towsend and I ran into some rovers. They could see we didn’t belong out in the Aral, so they thought they’d pick us up and turn us over to the local magistrate for some reward. There were about twelve of them, mounted.”

  “You made it though.”

  Cochrane shook his head, “I did. I had to wrap up Towsend’s body and get it to a proper place for burial. By the time I got to Wick, I was sure you’d be long gone. Guess you got held up.”

  There was a pause, but Riv refused to fill the void, “Anyway. I wasn’t there for more than a couple of nights when he found me.”

  Riv shrugged, “Who?”

  “Haven’t met him yet, eh? Well, you’d know him if you saw him. Tall, even for these people. Strong, I think he may be all muscle and bone. Blackest eyes like they’re all of night. He found me with far too much ease and I’m not easy to find when I’m looking to lay low. Fighting him was a waste.” Cochrane held up his forearm, it was entirely covered in a sad looking grey bandage, “Bastard held my arm in fireplace until I gave up the books.”

  “Why didn’t he kill you?”

  “Same reason they didn’t kill you.”

  “They think we know more.”

  “They know we know more.” Cochrane echoed. “So they put me on a skiff out of Wick and next thing I knew I was on board this monstrosity.”

  “All of this isn’t because of what we were contracted to do.” Riv shook his head.

  Cochrane snapped his fingers and point at him, “Just so. They had already unleashed this fleet whether we were involved or not. I think we’re just flies in the ointment.”

  “What can we tell them?” Riv muttered. “They’ve got my ship.”

  “Your ship is gone.” Riv snapped his head toward Cochrane. He shrugged, “They’ve probably already disassembled it for parts or scuttled it. Just like your crew are either dead or part of a new navy.”

  “Pallas though.”

  “I figure he’ll find out about this around the same time the rest of the Cathedral does.”

  “That’ll be far too late for anyone to do anything.”

  “Who says they need to?” Cochrane’s voice was distant, “This fleet is laden with bithumin, I can smell it. Raw. Feels like it’s floating in the air and coating my throat with some sour oily film. There must be enough to swap for all the treasure in the Spires, Cathedral, and Essia combined. This is a final venture.”

  “Why now though?”

  “Because it’s gone.”

  “What is?”

  “The bithumin.”

  “Impossible.”

  “The books we snatched, they weren’t ordinary ledgers. They marked the exact amount of bithumin mined from the very beginning of Lappala. We took the two most recent volumes, which showed that mining was futile. The bithumin was gone. And what’s more, it made it clear that the stuff was poison.”

  “That’s madness.”

  “Nope, completely true. Bithumin, especially the more refined it is, will spike growth in crops but it will then leech all life from the soil. It’ll scorch the land leaving nothing but a dead sandy mess.”

  “So they had to stop you. And they had to stop me from bringing you back.”

  “They need to know who knows. That’s the information they want. In the meantime, they’re making one last grand gesture. Then cutting us off.”

  “The countryside, it’ll collapse.”

  “Not at first.”

  “When it does though, it’ll come fast.” Riv was solemn.

  “Think so?” Cochrane asked.

  “Rikonen refined bithumin to its purest state. Used it to become the heart of the world. When the Spires cut it off from trade, there were reports of the fields going sour.”

  “Storms they said, dust storms.”

  “Aye, huge storms. I saw them, leagues wide, leagues high. They rage for hours and leave everything covered in feet of dirt. The storms choked the city off, kept them from getting supplies to break The Blockade.”

  “Silvincians have won that already.”

  “I was just at The Blockade. It’s going strong. Rikonen is all but dead. But that woman, she didn’t seem to know it. Said they were heading there.”

  “It took them years to build this fleet. They must have assumed that The Blockade was just a passing thing, after all, merchants were still buying bithumin and shipping it north.”

  “If this fleet decided to break The Blockade…” Riv thought.

  “Why would they?” Cochrane shook his head, “They’ll just sail on, to Anhra or even Bandra maybe. Either way. The Spires are going to get a gift poisoned gift.”

  There was quiet as the two men sat. Both knew in their hearts that they’d be lucky to see sunlight again. Riv thought of his ship, his crew, and of Asa, and then he chuckled a bit.

  “What’s so funny?” Cochrane asked.

  “If we had been on time,” Riv tapped the back of his head against the wall, “If we had left when I wanted to, we would have gotten to Wick before this fleet would gotten to us. We could’ve dodge all this.”

  “If only.” Cochrane shrugged.

  “If only.” Riv muttered.

  Rikonen

  “My point is—we have a plan.” Soren stood over the desk rummaging through the parchments and journals strewn all over and haphazardly piled up.

  Since Wynne had left, Soren had been desperately trying to piece together his research. It had been arduous not the least of which because of Wynne’s own notes. While not in code, his notes were an obscure shorthand seeming only to gesture toward Wynne’s own intuition. In trying to figure out just what exactly made Kira Ambrose so important while holding Wynne’s seat on the council, Soren had run himself ragged. S
leep often overcame him like a thief. He’d startle awake, confused. Soren had resolved not to let it happen again, he couldn’t afford to lose time. The result was a jittery mania.

  “The council had a plan as well, before Landis returned and vetoed it.” Qala said dismissively as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other standing bored in the doorway to the chamber.

  Soren spun around pointing viciously at Qala, “You need to shut your mouth.” Picking up an armful of papers he quickly folded them into the leaves of two large ledgers lying on the small straw mattress just inside the room.

  “Are you ready now?” Qala asked bored. Soren gathered the ledgers up into one arm and brusquely shoved her out of the way. He strode down the cold dark hall with Qala following close on his heels.

  “You,” Soren was assertive as he opened one of his ledgers and began to re-order the loose pages not looking at Qala as they walked, “barely have an inkling of the kind of man Wynne Landis is and what he did for this city. All you know are the benefits you’ve received from his efforts.”

  Qala rolled her eyes, “These pass three years have been just delightful.” She fidgeted with her leather gloves, and then adjusted her scabbard belt.

  “I don’t want to get into a generational debate with you.”

  “Sure, sure,” Qala had heard the lecture before, “You’re the responsible older brother; I’m the spoiled little sister. I don’t know what things were like in your day.”

  “You don’t.” Soren said shaking his head. “There’s been so much change over the last fifteen years. You’ve never known what it was before. I was old enough. This city was chaotic and bitter before Landis organized it. He’s the reason we can even have this conversation.”

  “I don’t know.” Qala smirked, “I could have this conversation as a guild enforcer speaking with a journeyman. What do you think we’d have been? Shoemakers? Masons? Probably odd fellows.”

  Soren shrugged, “We’d have been lucky to have been rowhands or caravaners.” They reached the council room coming to a stop before the entrance. “Shit, am I ready for this?” he whispered to himself.

  Qala put her hand on Soren’s shoulder, “You know you are. They want to be kept on task; they just need a sure hand.”

  Soren hadn’t been in the council room since the corsairs had presented the alm, Kira Ambrose. Wynne had told him then to pretend to be the Prime Alder so that he could observe the men. Before they had brought Wynne back to what remained of the civic council, the Alders had all agreed to hold the alm as ransom. The Cathedral would demand her return and having that advantage might be enough to alleviate the siege, several convinced themselves it would be enough to end The Blockade for good. Soren had his doubts but said nothing.

  His rise within the council was due almost entirely to finding Wynne’s daughter Fery (which was simply dumb luck) and then Wynne himself (which had been considered at best a pointless search and at worst suicidal). But he had found them both, he had presented them to the Alders, and been rewarded with a seat on the council. Wynne had even made him an early confidant upon his return to the civics and his own election as Prime Alder.

  Yet Soren knew the rest of the Alders were not as assured of his abilities as they had been with Wynne, and even though Soren was carrying out Wynne’s stratagem, the other Alders were plagued by doubts. They would whine that capitulation to the Spires was the answer, then in the same breath demand more expeditions to the sister cities—Heveonen in the northeast and Paraonen in the northwest. The Alders would bicker about rationing, demand a draft to forge an army (“A tiny, tiny half-starved army,” Qala always muttered), and cry to flee the city through the barren fields believing the simooms not nearly as bad as claimed.

  Terrible, panicky ideas, the lot. Wynne had given Soren one directive when he had left with the alm, his daughter, and the queer rover that had stolen through The Blockade to find the alm—keep to the plan. Doing so was becoming more and more difficult. Today the council had gotten it in their heads that Wynne had fled the city, abandoning everyone, and was heading to The Cathedral to curry favor for himself alone.

  There were Alders that were claiming Wynne was living luxuriously in Sulecin with his daughter married off to a Vicegerent. It was nonsense, of course. Nevertheless, Soren needed not just to reassure them of Wynne’s character, but also of his plan. To do so, Soren needed to understand it better. The long hours in the Prime Alder’s chambers, combing over Wynne’s research from the athenaeum, trying to make it fit with the plan that he had left for Soren in the others. It had been maddening. Qala had been there, to support him, and without her, he would have fallen apart.

  Now he took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. Nodding to Qala, she opened the door and Soren strode into the council room. There were pockets of conversation, all quick, nearly urgent sounding. He felt eyes on him but he didn’t look at anyone, rather he walked deliberately to the center lectern at the head of the room. He laid the ledgers down, pretended to fuss with them, straightened his own tunic, and then looked out over the Alders. They all looked frozen, gazing at him dumbfounded and hungry.

  “My fellow Alders…” Soren’s voice broke the quiet moving through the room with such assurance that nearly all the Alders either sat on the narrow wooden benches or turned to toward him at attention.

  “I’ve come to address your seemingly mounting concerns and be assured of your continued compliance with our Prime Alder Wynne Landis.” There was an authority and dismissiveness in Soren’s voice, a trait he quickly developed from having to deal with every petty faction within the council. Before he could finish speaking grumblings and not a few shouted challenges arose from the safety of the rear shadows Soren noted.

  Qala had entered the chamber and was leaning against the door with an amused look. It seemed that there would be no escaping this charade. Soren let none of his emotions show on his face nor in his tone as alder after alder stood up or stepped forward to address him he simply gazed across the room at Qala. The two exchanged a tired smirk.

  “We are getting more and more refugees from wards seven and twelve.” A tall thin alder asserted.

  “Our stores are plentiful.” Soren replied.

  “They are common folk; some are even farmers who abandoned their lands outside the city.” The tall alder added.

  “We can’t be expected to feed and house the entire city in this one small enclave.” Another alder added, a rather fat man in a very bright green robe.

  Soren looked at him hard, “There’s no such thing as a large enclave.”

  “You know what he meant.” A third alder, an elderly looking woman spoke up, “We only have enough for our assembly right now. We could survive here for several more years if The Blockade continues but we can’t…”

  The fat alder broke in, “We won’t survive if we take in more folk.”

  “Seems odd that an alder would be advocating against the interests of the people of the city.” Soren said pointedly.

  “It is in the interests of the city that we speak.” The tall alder replied attempting to sound like a sage.

  “So then, you would have me end the surveys into the city proper.” Soren nodded looking down; when he heard weak mumbling consent picked his head up and coolly gazed into the face of each of the three alders, “Yes? Say it.”

  “That is correct.”

  “We would.”

  “It makes the most sense.”

  “Say it clearly, plainly.” Soren demanded.

  The fat alder was perspiring and though his generally ruddy complexion wouldn’t have suggested it, Soren knew he was flush with anger and shame. Finally, the fat alder nodded, “We,” he gestured to his two other cohorts, “would like the surveys ended and for there to be no more common folk admitted to these environs.”

  “Done.” Soren said quickly and brightly. The alders seemed a bit taken back but couldn’t help grins of victory come over themselves. Soren gestured for a page to come forward
and handed him a piece of parchment on which he had just hastily scribbled the command.

  “Of course,” Soren said, “this ukase will have to be administered and we are already stretched thin so you three will be directly responsible for enforcement.”

  “I, I, I…haven’t the resources.” The tall alder replied. “You can’t expect us to personally carry this out.” The older woman and fat man seemed to concur.

  “I’m sure if you pool your abilities, you’ll do just fine.” Soren smiled, and then waved them off dismissively, “Go on, go out there and start turning people away. We haven’t got a moment to lose.” Soren nodded to Qala who herded the three alders out of the chamber, then closed the heavy door cutting off their protests with a definitive, sure slam. She turned back around with her arms folded grinning wickedly and returned to leaning on the door.

  “So, that’s that then.” Soren said in a false relief. “What else have we?”

  An alder about Soren’s age but with severe, aged eyes came forward, “Alder Redding, thank you for handling that so swiftly.”

  Soren nodded, “What do we need to discuss, Alder Kerr?”

  “There are those of use that find the plan of Prime Alder Landis far too obscure. It feels as though we are merely waiting. That it is a plan of inaction.” Kerr spoke slowly and without malice but it was clear that there was no affection in the man for Wynne or for Soren as his proxy. The remaining alders all assented to Kerr’s claim to varying degrees of civility. Soren cocked his head and gave Kerr a rather fed up look. Turning slightly, Kerr raised his hands in a half-hearted attempt to settle his backers.

  “We have been waiting for too long. We can’t keep doing nothing.” One alder called out.

  “Before Landis returned, we at least had a certain strategy!” Another shouted.

  “He scuttled that! For no reason! Now we have nothing, no leverage at all!”

  “And where is he?”

  “Gone with the girl.” As the alders, all threw out their panicked accusations Kerr stood with a faint smirk on his face before Soren.

  “Fled with his own daughter.”