CHAPTER 2
A
House in the City
SNOW FELL ON Ille
Glaive on the night known as Gallows Eve. Warmed by the spring sun
during the day, the black mass of the city melted the snow on
contact. Paved streets were slick with grease. Dirt roads were
sodden and stinking, slowly disintegrating into rivers of animal
waste and mud. The rats were out. Thousands of rodents scuttled
along ledges and drain ditches, up crumbling walls, armless
statues, soot-blackened trees and lead roofs. The explosive snap of
traps being sprung was the only noise that broke the silence before
dawn.
The watcher crouching
in the shadows heard but did not heed it. His cloak of boiled wool
was topped with a second layer of waxed pony skin so he felt
neither the cold nor damp. The pony skin had been purchased at
Tanners Market seventeen hours earlier, and the watcher had sat and
waited in a nearby alehouse while the vendor had dyed the skin to
his specifications. “Matte black?” the vendor had cried upon
hearing the watcher’s requirements. “A fine blond hide like this
and you want to ruin it with cutter’s ink?” It mattered little to
the watcher whether the vendor’s protestations were a result of
genuine indignance or a plot to drive up the price. The watcher had
haggled because a person buying an expensive waterproof cloak and
requesting that it be rendered worthless by cheap dye was unusual
enough. A person refusing to haggle for such a cloak would be the
talk of the market within an hour. Vendors loved to crow about
their takings. This particular horse-and-donkey skin vendor would
never crow again however. Once the watcher had picked up the cloak
he’d had a change of mind. Despite its growing population and the
continual redrawing of its walls, Ille Glaive acted like a small
town. People knew people. Word got round. And the watcher crouching
in the shadows could not risk word of his arrival entering the
wrong ears. He knew the game. He had lived it. Better to kill a man
quietly and bloodlessly by snapping the small bones in his neck
than risk alerting enemies to one’s presence.
The watcher had felt
some tension in the minutes leading up to the kill and then nothing
after it. His thoughts had not returned to the vendor since. He was
different now, burned. All that was combustible had gone up in
flames and only case-hardened iron remained.
Rocking onto the
balls of his feet he kept his leg muscles limber. Out of habit he
read the wind. It blustered south to north and then east to west as
if it were trapped within the city walls. Not a good night to loose
arrows or hunt deer. If the people in the house he was watching had
kept dogs they would be alerted to his scent by now. There was no
blind spot, no downwind to conceal oneself from animals with
exceptional senses of smell. The watcher knew this house and its
two occupants though, knew they kept no dogs and set no watch.
Despite this he would take no chances. Circumstances may have
changed.
It was the watcher’s
one wish in life that they had changed in his favor.
Two lamps were
burning in the house. The brighter one was set close to the lower
rear window on the left. Thick oak shutters had been closed against
the darkness but the house was old and damp and its owner had no
interest in spending money on repairs and the shutters were warped
and poorly fitted. Light poured through knotholes and around the
frames. The second lamp burned in an interior room, showing itself
as a faint glow around the windows on the east side of the
building. Like many dwellings in Ille Glaive the house was narrow
but deep. It was built from amber sandstone that had aged badly.
The bricks were soft and porous. A heavy rainstorm would strip
them, leaving milky orange puddles around the foundation. It was a
problem with entire generations of buildings in the city, resulting
in the strangely rounded skyline of Ille Glaive.
Silently the watcher
rose to standing. Time to get a closer look.
The three-story house
was unusual in that it commanded an acre of walled land in the
rear. The property had once belonged to some minor lordling who had
used the grounds closest to the house as his pleasure garden,
equipping it with a copper-roofed folly, a fountain carved to
resemble a lake trout and a courtyard laid with alternating black
and white stones. The lower half of the land had once been a
working kitchen garden, complete with boxed vegetable beds, a stock
pond and caves for storing ice. All of it was overgrown,
tumbled-down and streaked with bird lime. A litter of rat droppings
and poisoned rat carcasses had killed the lawn. Weeds had grown to
man-height in beds once raised for artichokes, and a thick crud of
algae now booby-trapped the pond. The entire property—both the
house and grounds—looked as if no one had tended it in thirty
years.
The watcher knew this
to be untrue. To tend meant to care, and the owner of the house
very much cared about its setting. Over the three decades he had
occupied the building he had cultivated the shambled, run-down
appearance it presented to the city of Ille Glaive. Despite its
well-regarded address, this house did not appear to be lived in by
people with money or consequence. Thieves gave it the once-over
before moving on to richer prospects, fishmongers and milkmaids
seldom bothered to solicit for business, passersby rarely gave it a
passing thought.
If they’d looked more
carefully they would have seen the locks and bolts. Vor-forged
iron, the finest in the North, had been hammered at high heat to
form the door hinges. The locks themselves had once secured cell
doors on the infamous Confessor’s Walk in the Lake Keep. The
house’s owner had received them in exchange for a favor—he
specialized in turning a blind eye into hard goods. The Lake stamp
could still be seen on the lock plates if you knelt very close and
studied the mark below the keyhole. It was the same with the
rickety shutters: put your eye to a knothole and the truth was
there to see.
Wrought-iron
grillwork, posts sunk deep into the sandstone and fortified with
cement, barred entry to the house through its windows. This did not
worry the watcher. He knew these people and their
routines.
And he was prepared
to wait.
Dropping to a crouch
he approached the lamplit window. Broken glass had been spread on
the ground beneath the lintel. The man toed away the debris as he
moved. Although he’d been taught stealth a quarter century earlier,
entire years had passed where he’d had no reason to use it. In many
ways his life had been arranged like the checkerboard pattern of
the courtyard: black and white, black and white. Stealth,
weapons-training, secrets and surveillance were part of the black,
part of the life that he’d once believed was his calling. His
missions and travels were all in the black. The white . .
.
The white was gone.
Over. Even a child knew that if you burned something to a cinder
the only thing left was black.
The watcher took up
position beneath the window. He had been observing the house from a
distance since nightfall and had seen nothing out of the ordinary
in the sequence of lamps lit and snuffed. No one had arrived or
left—also ordinary—and the footprints stamped in the mud on the
front and back paths revealed little. During the eight hours of
darkness, the watcher had kept his speculation to a minimum. Too
early to draw conclusions. Too little information to rule anything
out. Now, though, as he rose level with the knothole and took his
first look into the house’s interior his breathing pattern changed.
It slowed with readiness.
And
anticipation.
The coin-sized
knothole was partially obscured by the underlying grillwork so his
view of the room was restricted to a narrow wedge. The watcher
could see a closed door. A worn but exceptionally fine silk rug
covered the floor beyond the entrance. Its colors had faded to drab
rusts and grays and its design of fully fanned peacocks’ tails and
halved figs was barely legible. Bookcases stained a color close to
black lined the walls. Folded manuscripts, rolled scrolls, chained
psalters, loose papers, glazed and lidded pots, specimen jars, wood
boxes and books, hundreds of books, had been jammed at force into
the space between shelves. The house’s owner spoke seven languages
and could read more than twenty. His body had been wheel-broken
thirty-one years earlier by an enemy shared by both him and his
watcher, and he could not rise from a chair unaided nor walk
without the aid of sticks. Yet he possessed one of the finest minds
in the North.
The watcher respected
the mind. He knew enough to accept that he could not comprehend all the powers that the mind
possessed. He had been careful with his actions and thoughts.
Mental restraint had been taught to him along with stealth, but it
had never been a discipline he had mastered. He knew enough to
approach the house long after midnight, when its owner’s mental
capacities were likely impaired by fatigue and red wine or stalled
by sleep. He knew enough also to avoid strong spikes in his
thoughts, and he did not name what he hoped to find.
The owner was
slouched in a padded, high-backed chair in the center of the
lamplit space. The chair was angled away from the window and the
watcher could view only a sliver of its side profile. He saw a hand
extending beyond the heavily cushioned armrest; the wrist slender,
the fingers crowded so close they looked fused, the nails as yellow
as dog fangs. The hand trembled but executed no voluntary
movement.
The watcher settled
in to observe the hand. It was likely its owner was asleep, but
nothing was certain.
Darkness endured.
Snow stopped falling and the temperature dropped. Ice skinned
puddles and formed a crust around the watcher’s boots. He listened
and did not move. The house was quiet, undisturbed by footfalls and
opening doors. When the second, interior lamp went out he guessed
its fuel was spent as no noise accompanied the sudden darkness.
Neither of the two known occupants of this house was capable of
quiet movement. Still. If there was a third occupant, a newcomer .
. .
If.
The owner’s hand
jumped off its padded perch. The watcher reined his thoughts. The
hand hovered, suspended in space, and the watcher held his breath
as he waited for its tendons to relax. As seconds passed he
imagined its owner questing, taking
stock of his surroundings, assessing change. The watcher doubted
whether the strong emotion in his thoughts had roused the owner,
but he could not rule it out. Coincidence as a concept left him
cold.
Finally the hand
relaxed. It moved inward and then disappeared as the owner brought
it to his lap. Cushions stuffed with horsehair creaked, and the
watcher caught a glimpse of the owner’s head as the owner tilted
forward in the chair. The skull was close shorn and the small white
crater behind the left ear was clearly visible. Their mutual enemy
had not been wholly satisfied with the results of the
wheel-breaking and had ordered the drill. He, too, had been aware
of the fineness of the owner’s mind and had sought to limit it. The
watcher suspected that their enemy had miscalculated, for when the
drill bit emerged from the skull, globs of gray matter clinging to
the bore, the owner had entered a fugue-like state that lasted a
year. He awoke the next spring to find the hole in his skull
patched with a plate of hip bone and his mental abilities expanded
in ways that no one could have anticipated and very few people
alive could comprehend.
The watcher pushed
his lips into a hard line. A hole in the head.
Worse things could—would—happen.
He remained still as
the owner angled his torso sideways and attended something on the
opposite side of the chair. Pottery clinked. Refracted light
streaked along the bookcases as the owner raised a glass to his
lips and drank. Done, he resettled his weight against the backrest.
The watcher waited for the owner to reach for one of his canes and
beat it against the floor in summons, but the man remained still.
After a time his breaths grew shallow, and the number of seconds
between exhalations became constant. The watcher knew this because
he counted them.
So the owner would
not take to his bed for the final hour of night. To do so he would
have had to rouse the second occupant to help him from the chair.
When he was satisfied the owner was asleep, the watcher backed
away.
An owl growled as he
slipped through the shadows toward the rear door. The call sent a
shiver of expectation down his spine. Old habits died hard. Raven
and owl. Both birds—neither of them natural homers—were used by the
Sull to bear messages over distance. It was an owl that had marked
the beginning of his calling, and a raven call that had ended it.
The last journey, that final absence, had begun with a raven
perched in a tree.
Aware that he was
entering dangerous territory, the watcher closed down his thoughts.
His choices were made. They could not be undone.
Sliding into position
against the rear wall, the watcher listened for signs of stirring.
The first cock was crowing in the east, and that meant the house’s
second occupant would be on the move. Like many who were
tower-trained, she was a creature of routine. Up before dawn, fire
to be lit, water to be boiled for the pot. The watcher glanced at
the covered woodstack that lay on the opposite side of the door and
drew his knife.
The eastern sky was
beginning to lighten when he heard a second-story door swing shut.
Heavy, measured footfalls sounded as someone descended the stairs.
It was her, the woman. You could hear her age in the hesitation
between steps. When she reached the ground floor, thick rugs
muffled her movements. Minutes passed. No lamps were lit. Tin
chinked against tin. Footsteps clacked against tile. A series of
bolts retorted in quick succession—Chunk.
Chunk. Chunk—and the rear door juddered into
motion.
The watcher waited
until he saw the woman’s booted foot alight on the top step before
launching himself forward. Free hand clamping the woman’s forearm,
he snapped the arm back and up, forcing it into a breakable V
behind her back. His knife hand went straight for the
throat.
“Scream and you will
die,” he murmured, aligning a foot of razor steel along the turkey
skin that formed her jawline.
The woman did not
scream. She whispered two words.
“Angus
Lok.”
His name. He did not
acknowledge it. His mind was on the door—open and letting in cool
drafts—and the exact placement of the knife. Before asking his
first question he twisted her forearm into her back.
She gave a little cry
of fear and shock as the powerful reflex to step forward drove the
blade against her throat.
“No screaming,” he
reminder her, his lips kissing her ear. She smelled old and
sexless. A dried-up hag who stank of the meals she cooked and the
bedpans she emptied. The half-filled sack that was her right
buttock was pressing against his right thigh. Mary Gagg was her
given name, though she preferred to be called Mistress Gannet, and
she kept house for the man in the chair.
“Where is my
daughter?”
The woman
hesitated.
Mistake. He drove the
forearm into her back. This time he did not relax the pressure and
the knife blade opened flesh.
“None of your
daughters are here. They’re all dead.” Her voice was surprisingly
defiant for someone who was bleeding at the throat. She always had
been a tough old bird. He remained calm as he repeated the
question. “Where is my daughter?”
“Which one? They’re
all buried behind your house.”
Angus Lok glanced at
the door and then along the rear wall to the study window. No
change in the lamplight, but that didn’t mean anything. “When did
she come here?”
The woman blew air
through her nostrils with force. Blood sheeted across the blade.
“She hasn’t come. No one has come. Search the house—you won’t find
anything. They’re all dead.”
Another twist of the
forearm into the back. The blade was in her throat now, resting
against the ribbed membrane of the trachea. “One more time. Where
is she?”
The woman measured
her breaths; one for each word. “I. Don’t. Know.”
He moved the knife
inward. Distributed evenly, the force on the blade pressed but did
not cut. “Last chance. Where is she?”
She was scared now.
He could feel the tension in her muscles and ligaments: a woman
made of wire. Mentally, he relaxed. Here it was, the moment all
torturers waited for, the instant when their subject perceived they
weren’t getting out unhurt.
There’s a world of hurt out there, Angus Lok
thought as he maintained pressure on her throat. He’d seen it, he’d
inflicted it, now he lived it. The woman didn’t know her luck. Live
or die, it barely mattered. She still wouldn’t know her own
luck.
Even before she drew
a breath to speak, Angus Lok expected the truth. This interrogation
was done. He knew it, the woman knew it, and now the only question
in her mind would be: Will I live? She
hoped to—that’s where the truth came in—but she wasn’t a fool and
knew she no longer dealt with reason.
She inhaled at some
cost to her throat tissue. “She never came here. Cant received a
message ten days back—it concerned her.”
He waited, but she
had nothing else to tell him. He killed her swiftly and soundlessly
and laid her body on the ground below the step. Dawn had broken.
The world had broken. Light neither warmed nor illuminated Angus
Lok as he turned his back on the corpse and entered the
house.
These rooms and
hallways were known to him. This had been his waypoint, the first
stop on his travels. Information, equipment and hard currency had
always been available to him at this house. Its hospitality had
been taken for granted. Three years ago, for a period of nineteen
days, he had lived here, recovering from injuries he’d judged too
revealing to be viewed by his family. Deceit laid upon deceit. He
had thought of Heritas Cant, the house’s owner, as his friend. Now
he knew differently. They weren’t friends, they were
coconspirators. They conspired, he and Cant. Masters of the North,
collectors of secrets, keepers of mysteries, instigators, saviors,
judges, executioners, liars. The Brotherhood of the Long Watch, the
Phage. Cant hadn’t been his friend, he’d been his source. That brilliant mind filtered information
into perfectly separated particles. It doled out only what you
needed, no more. This must be done. This must
be watched. A threat is rising in the South.
So where had been the
warning? Your family is in
danger.
Five words that would
have changed everything, yet Cant had never spoken them. He, who
never missed anything, who had spies spying on spies, who possessed
foreknowledge of every assassination and failed assassination in
the Lake Keep, and who monitored every gate, tunnel, break in the
wall and fortuitously placed ladder that offered entry into the
city of Ille Glaive.
Your family is in danger.
He had known it—as
sure as the gods were dead he had known it. Assassins the caliber
of the Crouching Maiden were routinely monitored by the Phage.
Kings and ruling houses had been brought down by the Maiden’s hand.
She should never have been allowed within a hundred leagues of the
farmhouse. Yet she had been allowed, and Darra Lok, Bess Lok and
Maribel Lok had died by her hand.
Wife. Daughters.
Angus Lok breathed
and did not think.
He acted, because
that was what the Phage had trained him to do. The rattle of a pot
filled with water on the boil masked the sound of his footsteps
down the darkened hall. The walls had been painted with lime and
the soft porous finish had trapped a decade of smoke. An
oblong-shaped paleness marked the absence of a framed painting.
Angus Lok tried to recall the painting’s subject, but
failed.
When he reached the
entrance to the study, he tensed his thigh muscles and kicked down
the door.
Surprise had been
lost the instant he crossed the threshold into the house—you
learned early in the Phage that sorcerers always warded their
doors. Over the years he’d learned a few things for himself,
though. One of them was: Violence creates its
own surprise.
The door smashed
against the floor. Splinters shot across the room like darts. Dust
ballooned from the rug. A screw dropped from one of the hinges,
bounced across the room, and came to rest at the foot of the
chair.
Heritas Cant leaned
forward and studied it. A pair of bulb-headed walking sticks were
propped against the side of his chair and he tapped the closest one
lightly as he contemplated the screw and then the door it had
anchored. “Half inch longer and the door would have held,” he
said.
Seen head-on, he was
not a lovely sight. Muscle had withered. Tendons shortened by
disuse had drawn in his limbs making him look like a man about to
shiver or pray. There was a ball of bone behind his neck:
collarbone, rib cage or spine? Angus did not know. Live through a
wheel-breaking and you became a puzzle of bones. Spurs, bunions,
extra knuckles, serrated ridges: anyone who looked long enough gave
up trying to name the pieces. There were too many for a start. Put
the puzzle back together again and you’d be left with spare parts.
Beside, there was the greater puzzle of Heritas Cant: How did he
manage to live?
Angus slapped a
heavily booted foot on the door and entered the room. He had
detected a decline in Cant—an additional hollowing around the eyes,
a thinning of the skin across the bridge of his nose—and it freed
him of fear. Coming to rest in front of Cant’s chair, he looked
down at the man he had known for thirty years.
“Where is Cassy?” His
voice was low and controlled. It was the first time he had spoken
his eldest daughter’s name in twelve days. The sound of it filled
him with something too reckless to be called hope.
Heritas Cant’s head
palsied in a chicken-pecking motion, yet his gaze remained level.
His eyes were a deep bloody brown, and you could see the reckoning
in them. When he spoke his voice was sharp. “No pleasantries, eh?
Will you murder me in my chair, or drag me outside like Mistress
Gannet?”
It was bait and Angus
knew better than to bite it. “You received a message ten days ago.
Where is she?”
Cant sighed thinly.
He was dressed in a loose blue robe of goat wool belted with a
strip of black silk. Underneath he wore a floor-length linen
nightshirt that was slip-tied at the neck. His feet were shod in
the kind of boiled wool slippers that were slipped on babies’ feet
and called booties. They swung weightlessly as he pulled himself
into an upright position in the chair. “Casilyn Lok, or someone
matching her description, was seen selling a pendant at the
thrice-day market in Salt Creek.”
Salt Creek was
southeast of the farm. Cassy had no knowledge of the terrain or the
roads to the east and no reason to head anywhere but west to Ille
Glaive. “It wasn’t her,” Angus said. “She would come here.” Both
his wife and eldest daughter knew what to do in an emergency.
Take the old sheep road to Ille Glaive. Enter
the city at night by the northern gate and head straight for Cant.
He will protect you from harm.
The man they loved
had lied to them.
Cant slid his right
hand beneath the silk belt. Arm muscles moved beneath his skin in a
complex series of pulleys as he closed his fist around an object.
With a gleam of triumph he tossed something shiny onto the
floor.
Angus knew several
things then. First, that Heritas Cant was tracking his
daughter—that was Cassy’s gold pendant on the floor—and second,
that despite all stealth and precaution, Cant had been aware of his
presence all along, probably from the very moment he had entered
the city. The pendant had been ready inside his belt through the
night.
Squatting, Angus
scooped up the chain and its strawberry-shaped pendant. A pretty
fancy bought for a daughter on her sixteenth birthday. The metal
was too brightly yellow to be named pure gold, but that had never
bothered Cassy. “I love it, Father. It’s
beautiful. What do the words say on the back?”
Angus pushed the
necklace into his weapon pouch. Standing, he appraised Cant. The
broken man watched him from from the padded coffin of his chair.
With difficulty he retied the silk belt as his waist. As always it
was shock to see him use the dead hand. Cant’s left had been
shattered and rebuilt. It looked like a hand, but did not function
as a hand. All the small finger bones had fused, and the right hand
had to do the fine work of forming and cinching the bow. The left
was reduced to weight work; pinning the silk as the task was done.
It had not always been that way. Cant, like most sorcerers, had
been born severely left-handed. The drilling had altered him. As
the bit corkscrewed his brain, severing connections and subducting
gray matter, it had cleared a space for change. His orientation had
shifted instantly, left to right. Colorblindness had been
corrected; for the first time in his life he had been able to
differentiate between red and green. An echo chamber, Cant called
the hole dug by the drill. A place where thoughts could repeat
infinitely, where tissue could expand in ways not normally
permitted in nature, and where ideas might travel to destinations
unintended by their original spark.
Angus wondered what
was moving in that brain now. What was coiling in readiness to
repulse an attack? He said, “You knew they were in
danger.”
It was not a
question. You could not interrogate a sorcerer.
Cant executed a
one-shouldered shrug. “Knew would be
too strong a word.”
There was no end to
how much a man could despise himself, Angus decided. He should have
kicked in Cant’s face for that remark. Even knowing what he did
about sorcerers he should have tried. So what if Cant had
whiplashed the strike right back at him, accelerating it with such
fury that when it touched flesh it burned? Angus knew of no living
person who could attack with sorcery, but was aware of a very small
number who could protect themselves with it, spinning whatever was
used against them into the mother-of-all-defenses. Cant was one
such man. And he, Angus Lok, hesitated to try his chances against
him. Much had been lost to him, yet the instinct for
self-preservation was still there.
Cant bowed his
palsying head, acknowledging Angus’ thoughts as if they were spoken
words. Yes, go ahead. Despise
yourself.
The broken man said,
“The Maiden is subtle. We were aware she headed north to Ille
Glaive, yet when she failed to enter the city we believed her
business must lie farther north. With the clans.”
Lies and truth always
sounded identical leaving Cant’s mouth: interchangeable, a left and
right hand. “You sent Darra no warning.”
“Your wife was ever
headstrong. I sent her a similar warning three years ago—which she
ignored.”
Crack. Angus kicked out the closest front leg of
the chair. The leg exploded backward, and for a brief moment the
seat base hung suspended in the air. Cant inhaled, and the minute
shift in weight and pressure was enough to tip the corner of the
seat and send it thudding against the floor.
The chair cushions
and their occupant slid forward. Cant flung out a wedge-shaped foot
and jammed it into the rug. At the same time his right hand scooped
up one of sticks that had fallen along with the chair. Using the
stick as a lever he attempted to push himself back in the seat.
Blood flushed his neck as he labored.
Angus watched and
felt nothing. So breaking a sorcerer’s chair did not count as an
attack on a sorcerer. Or maybe it did, and Cant was playing possum.
It didn’t matter either way. He was done here. More questions would
just means more evasions. More lies. It might suit Cant to have
Darra and the girls gone. More likely he fancied the Maiden’s
head—and who better to take it than a Phage-trained man-hunter with
a personal grievance? One thing was certain, you could not outthink
him: that empty space in his brain was lined with
traps.
The stench of hot
metal drifted into the room. In the kitchen, the unattended water
vessel had boiled dry. Briefly Angus wondered if it was a lidded
kettle or a pot. A kettle might explode. Fire might
start.
As Cant cleared his
throat to speak, Angus Lok turned his back and walked to the door.
He knew Cant—there’d be a carefully constructed expression that
would have nothing to do with how he really felt. Fear was what
would fill him now. A broken man, abandoned. An empty
house.
He would not call for
help. The answer to the question How did he
manage to live was simple. Pride.
Angus left him to it.
He had an assassin to hunt and kill. Death would not come swiftly
for the Maiden. When the damned killed the damned the only language
they understood was pain.
As he stepped from
the house into the gray light of day, Cant’s voice pushed against
the small bones of his ears. It was a cheap trick, performed at
sideshows and spring fairs by anyone with half a claim on the old
skills, yet it never failed to please the crowd. That voice in your
ear, a whisper for you alone from a man standing fifty feet away on
the opposite side of a screen.
Cant’s whisper was a
warning.
“Descend too deeply,
Angus Lok, and I will not be able to pull you back.”
Angus Lok did not
break a stride as he headed east.