by Tom Deitz
“And tomorrow night”—Avall looked troubled but went on—“tomorrow night, much as I despise the notion, I’ll try to bond with what’s left of the gems. I don’t think I have it in me to try that before then, and I refuse to let any of you try.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight,” Avall said through a yawn, “we set watches, while the rest try to get some sleep. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m exhausted.” He looked around expectantly. “What do we have for bedding?”
“My camp bed didn’t make it,” Lykkon sighed, “but we all have our cloaks. There’s the rug itself, and a couple of cushions I had scattered around.”
“More than enough to keep us warm,” Avall said through another yawn. “Now then, who’s taking first watch?”
“I will,” Riff volunteered. “Seeing how I was most sober before all this began, and seem to be least … affected now.”
“Very well,” Avall agreed. “Now, what say the rest of us take inventory, and when anyone gets too tired to work, that person can go to sleep. The fire won’t last all night anyway, unless we work at it. Fortunately, we won’t need it for warmth.”
“No,” Myx said softly. “But what will we do when winter really does arrive?”
CHAPTER IV:
DEAD OF NIGHT
(ERON: TIR-ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXIV–MIDNIGHT)
Tyrill san Argen-yr took a deep breath and shuffled toward the bridge. It was one of two bridges that stretched from the Isle of The Eight to the banks of the Ri-Eron, in which the Isle was centered. This was the southern bridge, however: the one Tyrill had rarely used for most of her eighty-odd years, simply because she’d had no reason to use it. South Bank—by convention, not Law—was largely the province of what passed in Eron as a middle-class (there was effectively no lower), and was therefore the haunt of assorted businesses and small holdings belonging, in most cases, to Common Clan or clanless. A few High Clans had holds there as well, notably Lore, and some of what were known as the Earth Clans—like Beast, Grain, and Tanning—but they were the exceptions.
Some of those holds were in ruins, too, courtesy of rebellion run rampant on Mask Night, thirteen nights before. Fortunately for their owners, most were sufficiently extensive that even fire could not claim all of them. And fortunately for Tyrill, ruins made excellent shelter.
The Eight knew she had sheltered long enough in the lee of what had been the kitchen of one of Beast-Hold’s septs: sheltered there and waited, clad in the darkest, most nondescript hooded cloak her squire, Lynee, could find, while she watched the night progress and traffic on the South River Walk grow thin. And if anyone had chanced to note her there—why, they would have seen nothing more than a thin, white-haired crone sleeping off too much drink—as evidenced by the empty beer pot beside her, and the smell of the stuff lavishly splashed across her tattered clothing.
She was, however, as sober as the neatly laid flagstones beneath her, when she steered her way into the moonlight. Two moons shone bright on the Ri-Eron to her right, as she angled toward the waist-high wall that marked the edge of the River Walk. She made a point of wobbling and occasionally flailing for balance, too—this in spite of the cane that was far too necessary, and joints that hurt far too much. Once, she even let herself stagger into the wall itself. She would have to be careful about that, though; too much motion would draw unwanted attention to what needed as few witnesses as possible. Still, she made it a point to stop and cough loudly several times, each time raising her hand to her lips.
She wondered if it was wise to attempt what she was planning. A quarter ago she would have said no, but a quarter ago her Kingdom had not been in chaos, her loved ones lured away, imprisoned, or dead, and she herself unhomed. Why, if not for the bravery and largesse of her Common Clan squire, Lynee, she might well be dead herself.
But if things went as they ought tonight, someone else would die instead.
She had never killed anyone outright. But she now possessed a tool with which she could kill at some distance while remaining relatively undetected, and it would be a shame not to use it for the greater good of Eron.
She wondered about that, too: who that half-seen figure had been, that had left those objects on the floor of her favorite two-son’s shrine. She did not wonder what they were, however, nor how to use them; and their use had, indeed, become almost second nature in the few days since she had acquired them.
And there was her target now!
The bridge terminated in a guard station staffed by Priests of The Eight. Or, more properly, by Priests of the Ninth Face, since that radical sept now governed its parent clan. The guards changed shifts eight times a day, generally at cross-eighths, so that the portentous times—midnight, dawn, sunset, and sunrise—were always policed by the same person. That guard would have come on duty almost two hands ago, and if he was true to his habits would step outside precisely at midnight, take a turn around the station, perhaps piss over the parapet if he thought no one was looking, then return to duty.
When he did, Tyrill would be ready.
Another breath and she staggered farther up the way, but not far—never far—from the wall. She also coughed into her fist again, but when she lowered it, fingers still deft from eighty years of smithing snared something from the folds of her clothing—something a quarter of whose length she could conceal in her hand, while the bulk ran up her sleeve. Something she had previously loaded with a small glass dart tipped with one of the most potent poisons in existence.
And there was the guard: right on time! He had sauntered out of the back of the station and disappeared around the farther, western, side. Tyrill quickened her pace in his absence. Range could be crucial with this particular weapon. He turned the corner obligingly; she slowed again as he started past the station’s front wall and toward her.
It was now or never.
But he wasn’t turning! He was coming toward her! Had she drawn more attention than she thought?
“Lady,” the man called with polite authority. “It’s late, and there is a curfew. I must ask—”
He never got a chance to frame his question, because Tyrill chose that moment to cough again. Only she didn’t really cough. The hand she raised contained a blowgun of Ixtian origin, and that blowgun housed a dart tipped with scorpion poison. The cough was a puff of wind carefully applied. And such was Tyrill’s luck—or skill—that her first attempt struck home. She couldn’t see the dart, of course, but she did see the man swat his neck where bare skin showed above his blue surcoat. Nevertheless, she betrayed nothing, merely reeled to the rail again and used it to brace herself (with the blowgun still in her hand in case she had to drop it into the river hastily), while the man continued forward. He managed three more steps before his eyes went very wide and he stumbled. Turning clumsily, he fled back to the guard station—perhaps to summon help—except that he could not cry out, for that poison froze the voice early on. Then the breath. Then the heart. Tyrill didn’t even have to dispose of the body, for the man—frantic in his haste—struck the wall as he tried to turn the corner onto the bridge, slipped on something she couldn’t see—and tumbled over. She heard the splash as he struck the water a span below her feet.
One less whisker on the Ninth Face, she chuckled to herself, then continued drunkenly on. And Fate was not merely with her tonight, He was courting her, it seemed. For not only had the guard disposed of his own body, he had also knocked the poison dart free. It glittered on the stones where he had stood, visible courtesy of particularly cooperative moonlight. Tyrill ground it to dust beneath her heel, wondering why she felt so little remorse about killing that man; wondering, more to the point, who should be next to taste the scorpion’s sting.
Tyrill was not the only person haunting the smoky shadows of Tir-Eron that night. Her senior squire, Lynee, was also busy, but much farther down the River Walk, where the private estates of the less prosperous members of High Clan septs began to give way to those of rising status in Common
Clan. Granted, a third of the buildings facing the pavement were still businesses or small holds, and a third were state-run apartments given over mostly to clanless folk—and now, refugees from South Gorge and Half. But a third were also the holds of private citizens or families; most walled, and far enough from the heart of the city that the turmoil that had marred Mask Night had reached there but sporadically. Only one had been torched, and that in error. And while the Ninth Face had dutifully made their sweeps in search of High Clan chiefs they could disempower, they had found no one home—in large part because those chiefs were already sheltering in disguise with trusted, but less politically visible, neighbors.
Lynee’s family owned a candle shop farther west, but one of their primary customers had long been an increasingly affluent Common Clan family, and it was that estate she was approaching now—like Tyrill, in the guise of an unsteady drunk.
She was not drunk, however, when she knocked a certain cadence on a certain gate and was summarily admitted—not to the estate itself, at this time of night; but into the gate-warden’s quarters, where waited another member of the former Council of Chiefs.
It was hard not to bow to the man who rose to meet her from where he’d been reading in the gate-warden’s common hall. One usually bowed to Clan- and Craft-Chiefs, and certainly to ones as renowned as this one, for Lynee had come to meet Ilfon syn Kanai, former Craft-Chief of Lore, who—happily for him—had been absent from Tir-Eron during the uprising: a fact about which Priest-Clan was known to be deeply concerned, since Lore, with Smith, War, and Stone, was among the most powerful clans.
In any case, Ilfon was not one to stand on more than minimal ceremony, and merely grinned wryly at Lynee’s amazement—which made her blush furiously, to her chagrin. But how could she not? Even in a nation of handsome men and beautiful women, Ilfon surpassed the norm. Though not as tall as many, his features—like Strynn’s—were absolutely symmetrical in a way that had been studied, in particular, by Paint, but by the sculptors in Smith and Stone as well. Like Strynn, too, no one feature tipped the balance toward perfection, but again like her, the consensus was that Ilfon’s face achieved some “finer synthesis” of all elements deemed, by the beauty-obsessed Eronese, to be desirable.
That had been … before. Now, he was dirty by design, had dyed his hair a nondescript brown, and cut it roughly. Finally, he’d managed to convince one of his squires that it was in the best interest of all involved to break his nose—which indeed served as a very admirable disguise—especially as the swelling and bruising had not entirely abated.
But it was not Ilfon’s looks that concerned Lynee now; it was what he might have to tell her.
“I’ve little time,” Ilfon said, motioning Lynee to the other seat, then glancing up to see if their nominal host had departed.
“Nor have I,” Lynee replied, though she accepted his offer. “Tyrill’s abroad tonight, doing who-knows-what, though I suspect.”
“What?”
“I will only say that if any of the Face are found dead under mysterious causes, they might be less mysterious to Tyrill. Beyond that—”
Ilfon grinned again. “I’m used to wait-and-see.”
Lynee shifted restlessly. “Lord … have you learned—?”
Ilfon nodded in turn. “Most of what Tyrill desired. Unless things have changed in the last two hands, the King’s heir is, indeed, safe, as is the heir’s foster-one-mother.”
“You found Evvion?”
“It wasn’t hard. You know how she hates ceremony? Well, she hates revelry more. She therefore tries to find some reason to absent herself from Tir-Eron on Mask Night. And frankly—and to her benefit now—she’s been so unobtrusive for so long that people tend to forget she exists. She’s like a shadow. You don’t think of her as real—not since her husband died—Avall and Merryn’s father. Before that, you should’ve seen her. Then again, you should’ve seen him. You know he and I were bond-brothers?”
“I did not,” Lynee confessed. “It never occurred to me to wonder, much less ask. In any case, Evvion is … where?”
“With what remains of Eemon’s elite in one of Stone’s summer holds down near the coast.”
“I thought Evvion was Criff.”
“There is no Criff anymore, not really. Certainly not since almost fifty of them were poisoned on Mask Night, including the top ten chiefs at one sitting. But long before that Criff—Clay—was part of Stone, and Stone had already effectively reabsorbed it through necessity after the plague. In any case, Evvion has Averryn and between them and these wretched usurpers lies what is supposed to be the most unassailable clanhold in the Kingdom, save those that belong to War. Oh, Priest can dig them out—or starve them out in time. But it will take time. Right now, they’re counting on chaos in Tir-Eron and the absence of the royal levies to cement them into power. That and Common Clan support, which, as you can see, is not universally in favor of the Face—and clanless, which is mostly concentrated here and south of here, where the war did the most damage.
“The problem is,” Ilfon went on, “those people are used to appealing to Priest-Clan when times get hard, and Priest has suddenly found its resources at a low ebb when demand is at its highest.”
“So you think they may fall?”
Ilfon shrugged. “I have no idea. The Kingdom has at least four aspects right now. There’s the army, to start with, and whatever they’re up to at Gem. They might return soon and they might not, and if they do, I wouldn’t want to be Priest-Clan.
“Then there are the northern two gorges, in which, so we are told, affairs are much as they were before the war, since they couldn’t get involved in it because of the weather. Their best soldiers are off with the King, of course. But their leadership is, we believe, mostly intact, so it’s quite possible that Avall might start a government-in-exile in, say, Mid-Gorge, then work south to retake Tir-Eron.”
“Which leaves the south,” Lynee said.
Ilfon nodded. “Which leaves the south. It has its own problems, because most of the war was fought there. A lot of the High Clansmen there were in Tir-Eron for the summer, coordinating rebuilding with their Chiefs, or else sourcing supplies. A lot of them bore the brunt of Mask Night, so there are whole clan-septs down south with no one in charge—which means that the crafty among Common Clan are moving into the positions they’ve vacated, which makes them Royalists by default because they won’t want to lose what they’ve so lately acquired. But there are a lot of homeless people down there as well, and Priest is having to send its more traditional, least political, and most altruistic folks there to try to placate more hungry people than we’ve ever had, while trying to shift the blame away from themselves. It’s a neat little dance—to watch, but not, I imagine, to be involved in.”
“And Tir-Eron?” Lynee dared.
“It all meets here,” Ilfon sighed. “And now I must depart. You have what you came for and more. Tell Tyrill I appreciate her efforts, but to be careful. But tell her also that Avall’s heir still lives.”
“He’s Eddyn’s child,” Lynee corrected automatically.
“Avall’s heir,” Ilfon repeated.
And on that small note of tension, Lynee withdrew.
Dawn found both Lynee and Tyrill in bed, and Ilfon a dozen shots downriver.
CHAPTER V:
WHAT DAWN BRINGS
(NORTHWESTERN ERON: MEGON VALE–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXV–BEFORE DAWN)
“Lord Regent?”
Vorinn was awake by the time the second word began and alert before it concluded. He prided himself on that trait, though it had been born into him, not ingrained through training, and was therefore not so much an achievement as it otherwise might have been.
In spite of the formal address, one hand sought the dagger beneath his bed pad even as he squinted into the gloom of his tent. The voice belonged to one of Avall’s former Guardsmen, a man named Ravian, whom he did not know well. He wore full war gear, however, which meant that he was fresh from the front, where
the army kept watch in shifts, day and night. He also carried a small lantern, the light of which obscured a lean and fine-boned face.
“Lower that so I can see you,” Vorinn yawned, rising up on an elbow and scraping the hair out of his face one-handed. “You have a message, I assume?”
Ravian nodded. “The Ninth Face is moving. We can’t tell much in the dark, sir, but there’s activity on the galleries and behind their palisade.”
“Activity?”
“As I said, we can’t see much in the dark—unfortunately. And the enemy isn’t using torches.”
Vorinn was already reaching for his clothes as he slid upright. “Has Tryffon been informed?”
“We came to you first, as is proper. But word should be reaching him and the rest of your Council even now.”
Another yawn. “What time is it?”
“A hand before sunrise, more or less.”
“So Zeff does intend to enforce the deadline,” Vorinn muttered, mostly to himself.
“He intends to do something,” Ravian agreed. “We should know what very quickly.”
“Not soon enough, probably,” Vorinn snorted. Scowling, he snared his leather war-trews from the stand beside his cot and began to draw them on. “Send in my squire and tell the Council I’ll meet them behind our palisade in half a hand. Faster, if they can manage.”
Ravian sketched a bow, then backed toward the entrance flap. “You have but to say, Lord Regent.” And with that he ducked out. Vorinn heard the squire fumbling around in the outer room, but didn’t wait on him to continue dressing. He preferred to manage that on his own, anyway; but squires were useful for things like adjustments and buckles.
One finger later, fully armed down to war-cloak and helm, with a sleepy-eyed squire and a pair of anxious-faced guards in tow, he was striding uphill toward the palisade that ringed his own camp, angling toward the gate that would admit them to the corral in which their warhorses were lodged, ever at ready—in case.
