‘I’ve done a little.’
‘How come your father didn’t follow in your grandfather’s trade?’
‘Being a Seer isn’t a trade. It’s a calling.’
‘Watch that one,’ Chase warned, ducking under a thick root. ‘What do you mean, “a calling”?’
‘Potential Seers are chosen by the acolytes in the temples. The smartest boys are sent to Temple Jarudha and tested for innate arcane abilities. If they show promise, they are enrolled to train as acolytes. If they learn what they’re taught, they might eventually be offered a place in Temple Jarudha as Seers. That’s how my grandfather became what he was.’
‘And your father wasn’t called?’
‘No,’ Crystal replied.
‘So he took up the drug trade instead.’
‘Drugs are only a small part of the business,’ Crystal corrected. ‘My father traded all kinds of goods to and from the city—hemp, wine, pottery, fabrics, wool, live animals.’
‘Then why drugs?’
‘Demand. Users want as much euphoria as they can get. It’s easy money. If we didn’t supply it, someone else would. Why ignore opportunity? That’s the difference between success and failure. You’re a thief. You should understand that simple principle.’
‘There’s a problem,’ Hunter announced.
Chase and Crystal crowded behind him and saw the collapsed tunnel ahead. ‘Some more digging,’ Chase said. ‘Here’s the shovel, Hunter.’ He handed the tool to the young bodyguard, who refused to take it.
‘It’s your idea to be down here,’ Hunter muttered. ‘You dig it out.’
Chase turned to Crystal, who smiled and said, ‘He has a point.’
Chase snorted and his mouth twisted into a sardonic grin. ‘Step aside, big boy,’ he said as he pushed past Hunter, ‘and hold that lantern as high as you can so I can see what I’m digging.’ He bent to the task, scooping aside the earth and small rocks from the top to see how much damage the collapse had made to the ceiling. Gradually he emptied the upper portion and then dug into the base. The shovel crunched and Chase flicked out the load at Hunter’s feet.
‘Shit!’ the young bodyguard yelled. Chase turned to see what had surprised the young man. A skeletal hand jutted from the shovelled earth.
‘That’s not a good sign,’ Crystal murmured. ‘You’d better dig the rest out carefully.’
Chase shovelled the earth, slowly uncovering the rest of the skeleton as he cleared the tunnel. ‘Looks like the poor bastard got buried alive,’ he said as Hunter’s lantern revealed the remains.
Crystal squatted to fossick among the bones and withdrew a ring. She held it up to the lantern and Chase saw that it was gold inlaid with a ruby. ‘This is an expensive ring,’ she informed the others. ‘My grandfather had one like it.’
‘There’s a bag here too,’ said Hunter. He retrieved it and handed it to Crystal, who opened it gently on the ground. Five assorted door keys, a green brooch, three gold shillings and a shattered vial tumbled into the light. Crystal picked up the keys, the scarab and coins and slid them into her trouser pockets. ‘They might come in handy later,’ she said.
‘We’d better go back,’ Hunter suggested. ‘The tunnel’s too unstable.’
‘This fell in a long time ago,’ said Chase, ‘and it caved in from the side, not from the ceiling. Like a trap.’
‘Trap?’ Crystal repeated.
‘I’m guessing,’ said Chase. ‘It isn’t what I’d expect of a natural cave-in.’
‘So you know something about tunnelling?’ Crystal asked.
Chase shook his head. ‘No. Just thinking logically from what I see here.’
‘Who’d set such a trap? And how come my grandfather never got caught in it?’ Crystal queried.
‘Your grandfather probably set the trap,’ Chase replied. ‘He didn’t want anyone else finding what he’d hidden.’
‘Did he tell you about traps?’
‘No.’
Crystal stared at him and then at Hunter who seemed to be sweating. ‘Then how we will know if there’s any more of these things?’
‘We won’t,’ Chase admitted.
Crystal was silent. Finally she said, ‘We go on, but you take the lantern and lead the way.’ Her eyes were fixed on Chase. He shrugged and said with a sly grin at the bodyguard, ‘Hunter should go second then, so I can see.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He judged the time to sleep by his physical sensations. His eyes ached from constantly peering into the darkness beyond the lantern and weariness seeped into every fibre. The tunnel was in solid rock so no more roots dangled from the ceiling, but moisture seeped through tiny pores in the walls. He turned to his companions. Crystal and Hunter looked exhausted. ‘What’s wrong?’ Crystal asked.
‘I suggest we sleep here,’ Chase proposed.
‘How much further?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he replied. ‘I’m too tired to keep going. And I’m hungry. And I need a piss.’ He handed the lantern to Hunter and pushed past the others to disappear into the dark along where they’d travelled. Hunter checked the lantern’s oil level, topped it up and sat against the wall. Crystal rummaged in Hunter’s backpack for water and a carrot, and ate while she waited for Chase to return. He reappeared a short while later. ‘I needed a shit as well,’ he informed Crystal as he sat beside her.
She screwed up her face. ‘I suggest we don’t sleep too long. The sooner we get this over with the better.’
‘I’ll put out the lantern,’ Hunter suggested.
‘What if something comes along?’ Crystal asked.
‘This tunnel’s been out of use for years,’ Chase reminded her. ‘You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?’
Crystal glared as she folded her arms firmly across her chest. ‘Get some sleep,’ she snapped. Hunter doused the light.
Chase closed his eyes and leaned against the tunnel wall, reminded of the darkness and claustrophobia he experienced during his brief sojourn in the Bog Pit. He could hear Crystal’s soft breathing to his right and Hunter’s deeper breaths to his left. His life was taking him into places he never imagined entering. He’d always been afraid that he would eventually end up like his father, working his life away in the heat and noise of a foundry for little pay and less satisfaction. But a random meeting with an old blind man in the Bog Pit had brought him into a tunnel with a rich granddaughter and her personal bodyguard, searching for a fabled treasure that was needed to save the city from an ancient peril. He felt as if he had suddenly strayed into the lyrics of an heroic ballad. Admittedly, there were no monsters to fight, no epic battles, but at least he was in an adventure. Yet an inner voice was warning him to leave the adventure to the granddaughter once he fulfilled his legacy. His sister and her son needed him to find work in the city.
Crystal listened to the men breathing in the tunnel’s darkness. Hunter she could trust. He was like a son, and nearly the age of her real son, had he lived. Fifteen when she became pregnant to Reed Hill, her father’s anger was brutal when he learned what had happened and he immediately brought in a surgeon to make her abort. She never confessed to her father who got her pregnant because she knew her father would have had him killed, but Reed had the good sense to leave the city and she never heard from him thereafter.
And then Will Merchant came wooing her—or rather he wooed her father, knowing that Crystal’s hand guaranteed him access to her father’s growing trading empire and fortune and the incumbent social status. It wasn’t that Will didn’t love her—she knew his feelings for her were genuine—but his other intention was clear, so that when her father willed the business to his son-in-law instead of to his only child and daughter, Crystal was neither surprised nor bitter. The only bitterness she held towards Will was for the death of their son, Spear. She was pregnant again at age nineteen, a new bride, and she gave birth to a son, Spear Sunlight Merchant. It was a hard birth, complicated from the scarring she suffered aborting her first child, so
much so that the physician warned her to never get pregnant again because she could die giving birth a second time. Glad to have borne one child into the world, she cherished the infant feeding at her breast. If she’d known what was going to happen, she would never have returned to working in the family business. Instead, at Will’s frequent requests, she left Spear in the care of a nanny while she helped her father and her husband with the daily trading business. Will promised to check on Spear every time it was his lunch break just as she did when it was hers. But one day he chose to stay longer in a meeting instead of checking on Spear, and that was the fateful day the nanny forgot to keep an eye on the toddler as he played on the cliff overlooking the bay. No one saw the boy fall. If Will had been there—if he’d kept his promise—it would never have happened.
‘You okay?’
The voice in the dark startled her. She gathered her thoughts. ‘Why?’
‘You were talking in your sleep.’
‘Oh?’ she murmured. ‘What did I say?’
‘I didn’t understand it.’
Crystal waited for the thief to say something more, but he kept his silence. He was different to anyone she’d met—fascinating, despite his poor background. Though she doubted the authenticity of his tale and the reasons for being in this tunnel, something about him made him seem trustworthy—for a thief.
The palace bells in the five towers tolled the news to the city. King Hawkeye, King Ironfist the Second, was dead. People hurrying to set up their stalls in the markets, farmers carting in their fresh produce on creaking wagons, watch guards playing cards on duty, thieves idly loitering in the narrow alleys, women feeding babies, children looking for playmates, all stopped to listen to the doleful bells chiming across the rooftops of Port of Joy. ‘The king is dead. Long live the king,’ said the barkeep in the Three Barking Dogs tavern.
‘Not any longer,’ Hammer muttered.
‘Fuck the king,’ said Tiny, and the companions laughed as the bells tolled the news.
Four princes gathered around the royal bed in the dead king’s chamber to dutifully pay their respects. Prince Gift shed silent tears for his dead stepfather, but the other sets of eyes were dry. The King’s Scribe, Listener Recordkeeper, waited patiently for an opportune moment to inform the princes that Queen Livia wanted to meet them in the throne room. ‘And what does our royal stepmother want?’ Prince Shadow asked.
Recordkeeper bowed politely to the prince and replied, ‘I’m not in possession of that knowledge, Your Highness, but she expects you all to attend.’
Shadow looked across the bed at Prince Inheritor and found his older brother staring back. ‘Looks like you get a crown,’ Shadow said, with unmasked sarcasm.
‘Let’s see what our mother has in mind,’ Inheritor quietly replied.
‘Stepmother,’ Shadow muttered bitterly. ‘She’s not my mother.’
‘Has word been sent to Thirdson and River?’ Inheritor asked Recordkeeper.
‘Birds are already dispatched, Your Highness,’ he explained.
‘We will need to organise a funeral,’ Inheritor added.
‘The arrangements are already with the Seers, Your Highness,’ Recordkeeper reported.
‘I think we should go to the queen,’ Lastchild said.
‘She’s never been a queen,’ Shadow said.
Inheritor nodded to Lastchild and put a hand on Gift’s shoulder. ‘Enough time here. Let’s go.’ He looked at Shadow with a forgiving smile, waiting for his brother to acknowledge the gesture.
‘Go ahead,’ Shadow said without emotion. ‘I’ll follow shortly.’
When the room was empty, Prince Shadow stared down at his dead father’s pale, icy-hued face. Late afternoon light slanted through the tall leadlight bedroom window and speckled the wooden floor with rainbow colour.
‘Finally dead, you stupid old bastard,’ Shadow said. ‘After all of your pretensions and manipulations and attempts at being more of a king than you ever could be, you’re dead.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and studied the transparent skin on Hawkeye’s cold hand. ‘So, what happens now? Do you become a ghost? Are you going to come back and haunt us like they do in the ballads? Are you, right now, being scolded by Jarudha for all your transgressions and sins, my father, and being consigned to hell instead of Paradise?’ He touched the waxy skin and withdrew. ‘Or are you just a dead lump of meat that’s ripe for the worms?’ He stood and paced around the end of the bed, pausing as if he was talking to an old friend to say, ‘My stepmother will decide that Inheritor will be king now. Did you know that’s what she planned? Did you she tell you?’ He snorted. ‘No surprise anyway, eh, Father? Who else could she choose but Inheritor? Eh?’ He stared at the corpse, wrapped under the embroidered dark-green quilt, torso bulging across the middle. ‘Not me. Not Shadow.’ He approached the bed on the opposite side and looked down at Hawkeye’s empty face. ‘You know, I even dreamed once that she might upstage us all and name that little bastard Gift as her choice for king. How ironic would that have been, eh, Father? Little Gift, the mixed mongrel baby son, king of the city? You would have laughed. I would have, too. But then he wouldn’t live very long afterwards, would he? He would have had too many brothers wanting him to have an unfortunate accident. Little Gift would have been as dead as you. As dead as Shortear.’ He slumped onto the bed again and looked away at the stone ridges in the wall. ‘So now I have to focus on getting rid of Inheritor. No more games. I don’t know who killed Shortear, but whoever it was has given me a cover for getting rid of Inheritor—before the coronation, of course.’ He returned his attention to Hawkeye’s corpse and straightened the line of the quilt under the dead king’s beard. ‘Can’t have too many kings dying in succession, can we, Father? Makes us look weak to our enemies. At least Livia, Jarudha bless her curious little heart, has given me some working space. She wants to see you off in six days’ time. Then she wants ten days of public mourning for you and then at least a cycle to prepare for Inheritor’s coronation. Generous use of time, eh, Father? But then Livia has nothing but time, does she? She’ll be quite a picture of tragedy, my poor stepmother. The citizens will weep for her. She’ll be a royal icon—the poor queen whose family was murdered and died around her. Shortear. You. Inheritor.’
Shadow rose and walked towards the chamber door, stopping halfway to face the deathbed. ‘I’d have liked you to have lived long enough to see me crowned king, Father. I think, against your better judgement, you would have appreciated that. You see, it ultimately didn’t matter what you felt about any of us, not your stepsons or your real sons. Jarudha has already decided what will be and what will cease to be. You didn’t get to make any choice in all this. I will be king. It’s written so by the Seers who are Jarudha’s law-keepers and it will be so.’ He laughed quietly, shaking his head, and said, ‘I hope hell isn’t as hard on you as life was, Father. You deserve some peace after all this.’ He turned and left the room.
Hordemaster Fist re-read the instruction carefully. He lowered the paper and gazed at the parade ground where three squads were drilling with thundermakers. Change was ringing through the kingdom. The king was dead. A war was raging in the north. The time had come for his master’s rise. And with Prince Shadow’s rise to power came his personal rise. Faithfully serving Shadow was always a risk. The prince was on far too friendly terms with the mad Seers, a situation that never sat easy with Fist because of his hatred for religion, but as long as he focussed on military matters and the prince dealt with politics, he could serve uncompromisingly.
He lifted the paper and read it a third time. He’d expected an instruction to organise Inheritor’s downfall. Instead he was to oversee the elimination of another powerful member of the Port of Joy community, someone not of royal blood, someone, nevertheless, with considerable power and influence. He cocked an eyebrow and smirked. The prince was unpredictable at times, a tactic that made Fist proud of his military protégé because he had taught Shadow how to fight and how to lay strategies. He also appr
eciated how the prince entrusted him with tasks without specific instructions, just a clear goal. The prince allowed him to apply his intelligence and skill to carry out deeds and Fist enjoyed challenges.
He folded the paper, making a mental note to destroy it as soon as he returned to his quarters, and beckoned to a soldier on duty. The men he needed for the job had to be carefully hand-selected and they could not be easily recognised.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
She was glad to move on from the smell of male urine. She had no idea of the time above ground, whether it was daylight or night, but she felt refreshed enough to push on along the tunnel, with Chase leading. If her grandfather said they had to travel for three days, beginning to return, then she felt they had to be close to the tunnel’s end. She wondered how Lin was coping. The shipment concluded a major agreement between the parties and the prince would have to negotiate new terms for the next agreement. If her shipment pleased him, she had excellent reason to secure a more lucrative contract for future shipments. She stopped Hunter to get food and drink from his rucksack. Following the bodyguard in the wake of the dim lantern held by the thief, the tunnel walls seemed endless to her, until the light revealed a wood-and-metal door blocking the tunnel. ‘Is this it?’ she asked hopefully.
Chase held up the lantern and studied the wall to the right of the door. ‘Mrs Merchant, I need your kangaroo tooth necklace.’ He gave the lantern to Hunter.
Crystal squeezed by Hunter and unclipped her necklace. The opal kangaroo tooth glittered in the lantern light as she passed it to Chase who took the tooth and pressed it into a recess in the wall. ‘Nothing happened,’ Crystal said.
‘I’ll try the door,’ Hunter offered, and leaned his shoulder against it.
‘No,’ Chase warned. ‘Don’t push the door. It could be a trap. Push the wall here with me.’ Hunter passed the lantern to Crystal and joined Chase who was leaning against the wall by the kangaroo tooth. Together, they pressed and the wall slid back, revealing an alcove and a step. Chase took the lantern from Crystal and peered into the new area. ‘It’s like a staircase,’ he announced. He unhitched his backpack to squeeze through the opening and entered.
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