Dona Abbie had resumed rocking him. “He’ll need to nurse in the morning. I know a woman who lost her own baby tonight, she can care for him.”
She did not say until you get back, Kirin noticed, but he accepted it as a given. “Thank you, Dona Abbie, and please thank her.” The offer relieved him so much that for a moment he knew shame. But the task awaited. “Dona Zella, can you help me get out of Aretzo without anybody else seeing me? I’m going to go rescue the Prince.”
She smiled then, her approval better than a warm fire in winter. “Certainly.”
* * *
“There, now your skin looks more Silbari,” Kirin heard Zella say many minutes later, after painting his face and hands with brown dye. He had kissed his son goodbye and Dona Abbie had carried baby Grigor off into the night. “Are you ready?”
He fumbled for the waterproof bag. “I think I’ve got everything.” He squeezed it again, trying to force the last bit of air out before he plugged the vent with a wax-coated cork.
“No, boy; are you ready?” She held his eyes with her calm steady gaze. “Ready to do whatever it will take to undo the damage you’ve done?”
He paused, swallowed the first words that came to his mind, and centered himself before he nodded. It’s the only way. Even if I die in the trying. “Yes, Dona Zella. I’ll find the Prince, free him and get him back here. After that—”
She held up a finger to cut him off. “Will come whatever comes. Keep your thoughts on your task and leave the rest to the Seraphs, Kirin.” She patted his cheek, blessed him, and said, “Now follow me.”
Zella led him out the back of her quarters to a path around the ruins of the old sanctuary. Mud squelched underfoot as he followed her. It ended at a little stone-walled basin overhung with mangrove trees. Cracked stairs lead down into the water and a rowboat bobbed at the end of a tether, tugged by the ebbing tide toward an opening barely visible through the low-hanging branches.
“I’ll row,” she told him. “You don’t know the way. Watch out for anybody out there on the water with us, I don’t want to run into another boat.”
They both got in and Kirin held the branches aside while she rowed them out into the canal. Most of the buildings were dark, save for one drinking house lit by oil lanterns and raucous with drunken singing; dawn wasn’t far away but the waterside taverns never closed. Kirin drew his Shadow over the boat like a shield while Zella grunted at the oars. They slid past the noise and out between two long wharves lined with sleeping ships. A faint lightening of the eastern sky warned of dawn’s approach.
Few lights shone in the harbor where anchored ships slumbered. The New Trade Gate had closed for the night and the only moving ship rode the falling tide out through the Old Trade Gate. Zella turned her rowboat toward the high seawall closing off the north end of the basin. Soon they bumped gently against the wet stone.
“Let me see, Kirin,” she grunted quietly, and he drew his Shadow back inside him. Moonlight bathed the wall and the slick fronds of seaweed exposed by the tide. “Find the drain-gate.”
Only a few feet away his night-sighted eyes picked out the top of an arch where it poked above the water. “There it is, Dona.” He helped pull them along the wall until the prow of the rowboat butted the keystone. The ebb tide pushed at them as it tried to cram a quarter of the Harbor’s water through an opening only twelve feet wide and half-blocked with crisscrossed granite slabs. The steady flow pressed the rowboat against the stones.
Zella shipped the oars. “Right. The passage is twenty feet long. The smuggler’s opening is near the bottom on the right side. Be careful that the bag doesn’t snag on anything, or your clothes either. I don’t want you to drown down there in the dark and wet.”
“It won’t be dark to me, Dona,” he told her as he tied the double lashing over his shoulders and around his waist to snug the pack against his back. Wearing this soft leather shell made him feel like a turtle.
He rolled over one side of the boat while Zella balanced it by leaning the opposite way, then he held to the gunwale while she leaned back and looked down at him. Her hand brushed his wet hair aside to touch his forehead.
“Come back to us, boy,” she whispered to him.
“I will,” he promised. “Thanks for everything.”
Then he took several deep breaths, exhaled most of the air, and dived.
CHAPTER 34: ZELLA
Zella rowed the dinghy back to her temple. The harbor remained empty of moving vessels, the one taking the night tide had gone and the rest slept at their anchors and docks. Years of practice helped her find her way through the night-dark canals of the Sump without Kirin to play lookout. The waning tide made it harder work than rowing him out to the seawall had been. But she managed, and gratefully grounded the little rowboat’s prow against her rickety dock. She rubbed her aching back, wishing she had a decade or two fewer years, then plodded back to her half-ruined Temple. A light flickered behind the window. Abbie must be back and would certainly have a hundred questions.
Zella sighed. As she opened the back door she noticed a black shape moving on the grounds. She paused on the doorstep and demanded, “Who’s there?”
A soldier, and then two more, appeared out of the night. The trio held drawn steel and their faces and hands were pale; Gwythlos. Their eyes were wide in the night and the tips of their swords trembled. Zella recognized frightened men on the verge of doing something violent simply because they were afraid. She held very still and scolded herself for failing to expect this. Everyone in the Sulfur Serpent knows where the DiUmbras worship! Of course Kirin’s enemies would find out. She pushed down her fear and locked it away, controlled her breathing.
Then a harsh Gwythlo-accented female voice spoke from inside her rooms.
“Come in and sit down, Priestess. We will speak.”
Zella startled and peered inside to find Abbie sitting at the far end of their rickety table. A single candle flickered in front of her worried face. Behind her loomed a large pale-skinned man in a cowled cloak, holding a naked sword in gauntleted fists, and five more men behind him. Beside him stood a woman with a glowing green aura twice the size of Zella’s own; a Gwythlo Druid.
So much power in her! She must be Boerga, the Gwythlo military chaplain.
At the look in Boerga’s eyes, Zella’s breathing quickened despite her best control. She read hatred there like none she’d ever seen before. Her knees went weak. Mother Umana, lend me your strength! And Seraph Shali, your tongue, for surely I need clever words now!
The men behind Zella closed in, threatening to prod her with the tips of their blades. She stepped inside, went to her own chair and set her hands on the back. Haughtily she demanded, “Who are you, to invade my temple with armed men at your call?”
“Sit,” Boerga ordered.
“I prefer to stand,” Zella answered curtly, meeting the other woman’s eyes unflinchingly. The man growled and the swordsmen behind her stirred, but Zella stayed where she stood. “What do you want?”
“Where did you take the acrobat?” Boerga snapped, glowering. “We know he came here, leaving tracks in the mud of your courtyard. But he did not pass out that way, and is not here now, so where did you take him?”
“Kirin? To the harbor, of course.”
“Where is he now?” The Gwythlo woman’s fingers twitched and her aura throbbed.
“Well beyond Aretzo.” Zella shrugged, added carelessly, “How fast does a ship sail? The wind is to the southeast and fresh. I suppose it might be as much as ten miles out by now. Perhaps he’s looking back at the city right this moment as we disappear behind him.”
Abbie sat still as this not-quite-a-lie fell from her superior’s lips. Boerga snarled something in her own language and the man growled wordlessly back. Then the Druid stared at Zella again, teeth bared in an expression nothing like a smile.
“And his spawn?”
“Spawn?” Zella stared at her. “What do fish have to do with—oh.”
“Hi
s cursed child!” hissed Boerga, raising a fist. “It must nurse, he would have to leave it with a woman. Where is the little darkie abomination? Tell me!”
At that moment Abbie pointed to the pathetic wrapped corpse on the sideboard, and said in a patently false voice, “Right there. If you had asked me earlier, I could have told you then and saved you time.”
Zella’s heart sank. If Abbie had kept quiet and pretended ignorance, there had been a chance that the younger priestess might have lived through this. Zella mentally composed herself as she tightened her hands on her chair’s back. Father Haroun, aid us now!
Boerga strode to the sideboard, peeled back the wrapping, then whirled back to glare at Abbie with a thunderous scowl. “This is not his! But you know where it is, don’t you?” The Druid’s aura thickened, and she raised her hands threateningly toward Abbie, for the moment disregarding the older priestess.
Zella spun in place and flung her chair at the three men behind her. Without waiting to see whether she hit any of them, she dropped to the floor with a pained grunt and rolled under the table.
The men shouted, drawing the Druid’s attention back to where Zella had been standing. She scrambled under the table and out the far side, tearing her skirts as she lunged for Boerga’s ankles. If she could touch the woman skin-to-skin first, maybe she could still give Abbie a chance.
She barely made it. Boerga hurled lightning at her back. Unbearable pain lashed Zella as her spine shattered. But her hand closed on the point where the woman’s riding breeches met her boots. Fingernails dug into the gap, into the skin, and with her last breath Zella willed the command she had never used before.
Die.
The Druid shrieked and jerked free of her grip before collapsing. Zella strained to reach her again to finish the job, but couldn’t. Abbie’s cry cut off mid-syllable with the wet sound of metal slicing flesh. Then Zella’s mind spiraled down into darkness and she knew no more in that life.
CHAPTER 35: KIRIN
Even in fall Aretzo’s harbor wasn’t cold, and Kirin’s Shadow gave him night sight as he dived. But he couldn’t see far through the murky water. The leather pack tried to bob upward, he had to fight it for every foot of depth. He found his way downward as much by pulling himself along as by swimming. The granite slabs that denied this passage to invaders left one-foot-square holes for the tide, which rushed through strongly. It kept rubbing him against the crusted barnacles and slick seaweeds.
When he found the smugglers’ passage he almost turned back from the two-foot-by-two-foot square. Only the flow of water into it assured him that it came out somewhere.
He had no time to waste, his lungs already craved air so much that his chest hurt. He maneuvered himself into the hole headfirst.
The pack immediately snagged against the ceiling. He rolled over and used his hands and knees to crawl through the long stone tube upside-down, while the pack and his straining lungs pressed him against the ceiling.
The far end seemed bright as day when he burst out of the stone gullet. Air had never tasted so sweet. He swam to the beach below the fish-ponds, hid from sight between two rocks to disrobe and wring water out of his clothes, then dressed and looked around.
Aretzo lay behind him. North, the vast open valley of the River Amm gaped between the Bright Mountains and the Ash Needles. The peak of God’s Footstool caught the approaching dawn and kindled like a beacon. He had memorized Dona Zella’s map; many miles north lay ruined Silbariki.
Zella had loaned him a worn brown robe from her alms-box. He took it out of his waterproof pack and pulled it on. It only fell to his knees but covered his arms to the wrist. With his dyed skin, black hair tied back, and the robe’s hood up to hide his ears, he hoped he could pass for a normal Silbari.
Half a mile north of the city the shore road met a cluster of stubby piers, hovels, and warehouses called Fishtown. A double pair of warehouse doors were propped open and a wagon parked in front of them in the pre-dawn dimness. A man and a little boy lead four big dray horses up to it. The man tied off the lead ropes to the wagon and then visibly startled when he saw Kirin looming out of the fading night. The boy moved closer to the man. Their own hoods were pushed back to reveal the brown skin and straight brown hair of typical Silbaris. The man—probably the boy’s father, Kirin thought with an ache in his heart—wore his robe belted above heavy boots. Both belt and boots showed wear, but his neatly-patched robe had been cleaned recently.
“I need a ride north,” Kirin told the wagon master. “I can pay.”
“Hmm.” A dubious look followed. “How far do you want to go?”
“To Belluno.”
The man shook his head. “I only go as far as Isernia.”
Belluno lay only a few miles farther north. Kirin thanked the Seraphs for this good fortune. “Close enough.”
“Show me your money,” the wagon master demanded. When Kirin produced the two silver dohbas that were most of what he had in his pouch, the man shook his head and said, “That’ll only get you to Amm Ford.”
Kirin licked his lips and choked back the plea that tried to force its way from his mouth. It wouldn’t do to show desperation when bargaining. “I can work for the rest of it.”
The wagon master looked him over again, eyes flicking over the thickness of Kirin’s arms where he filled out the too-small robe, and the muscles of his calves beneath the robe’s hem. He nodded slowly and pointed to a barrel inside the warehouse. “Show me. Get that up the ramp into my wagon.”
Kirin went to it, rocked it slightly. Damp, heavy, probably full of pickled fish by the smell. There had been an acrobatic trick the troupe did with empty barrels, but this wasn’t the place to show off tricks, not if he wanted to escape Aretzo unnoticed. He rocked the barrel onto its side, rolled it up a pair of planks the man had pulled out of the wagon, and levered it upright again into a corner of the bed, all with barely a thump.
“You’ll do,” the man decided. “You load here, unload there, and haul water and feed for the horses. We’ll share our food with you and you can sleep under the wagon at night until we get to Isernia. Fair trade?”
Kirin handed over his two coins and they shook hands on it. The man smelled of old sweat and road dust, like a million other working men, and had a strong grip. If he noticed anything odd about Kirin’s skin or garb, he said nothing.
The wagon could hold twenty-four barrels standing upright. Kirin packed them in, sweating and straining and racing the moment when Chisaad or Ap Marn or Duke Darnaud thought to look for him outside the city. In half a candlemark the barrels were done. Then he lashed two layers of bulky sacks of sea-sponges above the barrel-tops. Last, he helped the wagon master’s son Ammin raise a stained white canvas awning on wooden ribs mounted over the load. When they were done Kirin had made sure he still had enough room to crawl inside between sacks and be hidden from view.
The wagon master had his horses fully harnessed, four big sturdy yellow beasts with white manes. He inspected the load and the knots and gave Kirin an approving thumbs-up sign. “What’s your name?”
“Veglic,” Kirin answered, borrowing the name from a pot-boy who worked in the Sulfur Serpent’s kitchen.
The man flicked a glance over him at the lack of second and third names but made no comment. “I’m Varrin Culpatha Chiaver. Hop in, Veglic.”
The wagon pulled out of the little dock complex north of the slaughterhouses as red Fathersun peeked over the horizon and began to lead white Mothersun into the sky. The pale wraith of the Moon of Calm hadn’t quite set behind the Bright Mountains to the west. The wagon rattled up the dirt side road from Fishtown, across the strip of greensward maintained for messenger-horses, and onto the Kings Road. There the heavy oak wheels began to thunder on the stone pavement, a sound soon lost among the dozens of other wagons that joined them.
Kirin peeked out from under the tented awning, anxiously watching for pursuit. His anxiety didn’t fade as the wagon plodded north. Cavalry could move fast, and message
constructs flew faster still.
“You hungry, Veglic?” asked Chiaver’s son Ammin. Kirin nodded his head as his stomach, reminded that he hadn’t eaten since early yesterday, growled.
Ammin grinned and offered him a handful of dried figs from a sack. “We’ve got lots,” he boasted. “Our landlord has a tree at home and he lets us keep half of what we pick.”
Kirin made an impressed noise at this privilege and thanked him, then nibbled on the dense, sweet fruit. It stilled his belly’s hunger but did nothing for the ache in his heart.
Maia, Maia, his heart cried. He fought back tears, with limited success.
“You look so sad,” Ammin observed with a child’s innocence.
Chiaver glanced at Kirin, startled. “Is something wrong, Veglic?”
“My wife died yesterday.” Stating it so baldly made his throat tighten and the tears broke through. “Please, I need some time,” he choked out.
Chiaver’s face softened. “Why don’t you crawl in back and take a nap.”
Kirin did and curled up on sacks of sea-sponges. He pulled the robe’s hood over his face and, hidden from view and masked by the noises of the road, wept for Maia, until at last sleep took him.
CHAPTER 36: CHISAAD
“You what?!” Chisaad, the Acting Royal Wizard, bellowed at the top of his lungs, surprising even himself. In a slightly calmer voice he continued, “How could you let him get away?”
Duke Darnaud drew himself up, put a hand on the pommel of his sword, and glowered. “You forget yourself, darkie mage!”
Chisaad bit back a retort as Ap Marn stepped in. The former Imperial Governor peremptorily demanded, “Explain, Your Grace. You were supposed to kill one man and you had twenty at your disposal, plus Boerga and her wolf. What happened?”
Darnaud looked sulky. “It was his bitch’s fault. She warned your damned tool by tossing her baby to him, right out a fourth-floor window.”
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