The Grave Thief: Book Three of The Twilight Reign (6 page)

‘You tell the Archmage to exercise restraint before he fights back,’ Lesarl said firmly. ‘The last thing we need is battle-mages reacting to provocation - or any other more subtle measures of retribution. Some of your brothers rival Larat for a twisted sense of humour.’

‘And if the priests have a second focus of their complaints, that does the nation no great harm,’ Dancer agreed. ‘It will take a long time before people turn against the mages, they’re too fearful for that. The College can instruct its members to maintain a low profile for the meantime.’

‘Lesarl, how soon can the trial start?’

The Chief Steward shrugged. ‘Four or five days. There are formalities to deal with, but the evidence is collected so the judge is ready. There are a number of ways the defence can prolong matters, but that can only last so long.’

‘Good, so let’s announce the trial date and set up a quiet meeting with the dukes of Merlat and Perlir.’

‘And you’ll bring along your choice for Lomin as well?’

‘Yes, I want Lokan and Sempes to have a chance to object. I’m making enough enemies without consulting with the two most powerful people i—’ A spark suddenly flared in his mind, stopping Isak mid-word. A trickle of magic swept the room, prickling and questing over his skin. He looked at Conjurer, but the woman showed no reaction. A shiver ran down his spine like the touch of a girl’s fingertips and a voice whispered in his ear.

Without thinking he turned back to the window. Xeliath was out there, the young brown-skinned woman who’d been tied to his fractured destiny. It looked like Morghien and Mihn had been successful in getting her to Tirah before any of the power-players in this game tracked her down and killed her. Lesarl caught the movement and shot an enquiring look towards his lord. Isak nodded.

‘She’s here; just about to enter the city,’ he murmured.

It was clear from their faces that Lesarl hadn’t yet shared that interesting piece of information with them. Isak managed to produce something approximating a grin as he pictured their reaction.

Heading towards the door he said, ‘Those of you interested in what my foreign policy is to be will be delighted to hear that I’ve added a new complication.’ He stopped as he reached the door, Lesarl on his heel, and turned back to the coterie. ‘There’ll be a new guest at the palace tonight, a young white-eye.’

‘And how exactly does that affect the nation’s foreign policy?’ Dancer asked, voicing the question on the lips of all the faces turned in his direction.

‘Her father didn’t exactly give permission for her to leave, and he’s a lord - one of our not-so-friendly neighbours, the Yeetatchen.’

Their protestations and questions floundered in his wake as he left the room. Outside, the narrow stair was lit only by what faint light crept up from the floor below, where a single lamp cast its light over the first-floor corridor, barely illuminating the three doors there. The two bunkroom doors were propped open; he glanced inside as he passed them and saw the usual labourers’ junk in each: canvas bags, the odd oilskin coat and a pervasive smell of sweat and mud.

At the end of the corridor a second stairway led down to the ground floor. It was a little too narrow for his massive shoulders, so he had to turn slightly sideways to get down them. Stationed at the bottom was Citizen’s eldest daughter. The girl, who shared her mother’s build, heard him coming and started to open the alley door on her left, giving it a shove when it stuck a little, swollen with damp and lack of use.

Isak knew she had a long knife concealed in her right sleeve, and not one just plucked from the kitchen’s rack, but the blade made no appearance as she stepped out and scanned the street. The door on her right led into the tavern - Isak could hear an argument going on just the other side - but right now it was bolted shut.

Isak didn’t wait for Lesarl. He pulled his hood low over his face and stepped cautiously out into the street. Citizen’s daughter may have checked, but that was cold comfort: she’d neither notice nor be able to do anything about that which Isak was looking out for. Two strides took him to the corner of the building, and from there he could peer around the tavern and survey the length of the street whilst concealed in the tavern’s shadow.

But it looked empty; his sharp eyes and ears caught nothing untoward beyond the occasional drip of water.

A glassy sheen had covered the cobbles as the night-time temperature fell. The day’s rain had given way to a faint mist hanging in the air, catching the yellow-tinted moonlight of high Alterr. Isak was about to move off when he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head left, looking down the route he had intended to take home now that the streets were deserted. In the darkness, a good hundred yards off, something stood.

A crawling dread slithered down Isak’s neck. No man stood there; its body was entirely black, and almost invisible in the fog, but he could guess something of the stance - it was on all fours. Visions of the Temple Plaza of Scree flooded back to him: the terrible slaughter done in the firelight, the towering figure of the Burning Man illuminating the terrified figures around him and in the distance, the humped back of the Great Wolf, stalking.

Now Isak could make out little more than a shape and a pair of burning eyes in the dark. It was untouched by the moonlight and almost hidden in the fog. Shadow upon shadow, imagination or not, the black dog did not move an inch. It simply stood there with its baleful gaze fixed upon him.

‘My Lord?’ Isak jumped at the voice, his heart giving a lurch until he realised it was only Lesarl standing behind him. Lesarl gave him a quizzical look.

‘Look,’ Isak said quickly, pointing down the street, but when he looked back to where the black dog had been standing, the words died in his throat. The street was empty, and silent. Isak stared at where the creature had been, then searched all around in vain for it.

‘What is it?’ Lesarl said as he rounded his lord to look at where Isak was still pointing.

‘I- I’m not sure,’ Isak admitted after a pause. ‘There was . . .’ he stopped.
I thought I saw a ghostly dog
wasn’t the sort of thing he really wanted to tell his Chief Steward. Isak hurriedly opened his senses to the Land and reached out all around. Aside from the taste of frost and mud on the air the only thing he could sense was Conjurer, in the room above, a faint flicker of magic in her body that grew as she felt his questing. There was nothing more. Hoping that he’d be able to sense something similar to Morghien’s ghosts when they touched his mind, Isak reached as far as he could, but felt nothing at all.

‘There was?’ Lesarl prompted quietly. The man had seen enough during Bahl’s reign not to question his new lord’s first instinct.

‘I thought I saw something, I must have been wrong.’ Isak shook his head and took his hand off Eolis’s hilt, where, predictably, it had drifted without him even being aware.

‘My Lord, I find that a little hard to believe,’ Lesarl said firmly. ‘Your expression is not that of a man whose imagination has just played him false. So what is it that you saw?’

Isak glared at the man, but Lesarl waited patiently until the young white-eye exhaled and let the anger fade with his breath on the night air.

‘What do you want me to tell you? What I thought I saw disappeared in the time it took to turn my head, and anything that can do that without me sensing where it went is a little out of your field of expertise.’

‘I do understand that, my Lord,’ Lesarl said, bowing his head, ‘but still I would share the burden I see in your face; no man should look so haunted—’ He broke off as Isak gave a humourless snort.

‘Haunted? Aye, that might just be it.’ He took a step closer and leaned down to look Lesarl in the eye. ‘I dream that death walks in my shadow. I have ever since the fall of Scree. On the edge of earshot I keep thinking I hear the footsteps of the Reapers. I feel the ground move at my feet as a grave opens before me; I remember the pain Aryn Bwr felt as he was cut down in battle, and it is so familiar to me I ache for it.’

He stopped and straightened, a hard expression falling across his face. ‘And tonight I see a black dog with burning eyes standing in the road before me, something my mother’s people believe to be a portent of death to come. Now who will share this burden with me?’

Lesarl stared up at him in alarm. For a moment Isak suddenly saw the Chief Steward for the man he really was: beneath his calculating expression and sardonic grin, Lesarl was just a man with a mass of worry-lines on his thin face and a nervous shiver enough to shake his bony body from head to toe.

‘We will all share your burden, my Lord,’ Lesarl said after a moment, his usual calm restored. ‘Your advisors, my coterie, the Palace Guard, the whole tribe: if Death comes for you, He shall not find you alone.’

Isak sighed. ‘It’s good of you to say so. Something tells me otherwise, but if the future was fixed I’d already be dead, so perhaps you’re right. Come on, it’s time to meet the herald of our latest woes; you’re going to hate her.’

‘A white-eye lord’s daughter?’ Lesarl scowled at the ground as he started off at Isak’s side down the street. ‘I think you’re right there.’

Lesarl left his lord to his thoughts as they walked back through the quiet streets, winding their way through dark alleys until they had reached a better district of the city than the docks. The Chief Steward had to walk quickly to keep up with Isak’s long stride, but he was glad for it, for the air was chill and his prominent nose and cheeks felt like icicles. In all his years of service to the Lord of the Farlan, he’d never got used to the cold of Tirah’s night-time streets.

It was strange to see the city so deserted. Hunter’s Ride and the Palace Walk were main thoroughfares, usually only empty when snow lay thick on the ground. The tall stone buildings were dark and silent, with only the occasional pair of shutters showing a glimmer of light at the edges - night-watchmen’s billets and servants’ quarters, for the merchants’ townhouses were as dark as if they were empty, with no light seeping through the heavy drapes that hung at every window to keep in the heat.

A pair of Palace Guards loitered on Irienn Square, the semi-enclosed plaza off Hunter’s Ride which was surrounded by government offices. Their sharp eyes picked out Isak by his height. They saluted, making no move to intercept them.

It wasn’t long until they reached the fountain at the centre of Barbican Square, just before the looming presence of the palace walls. After the enclosed streets the open ground felt even colder, and when Isak stopped in front of the statue on the fountain, what little heat was left in Lesarl’s body felt like it was bleeding away as he obediently took up his position in his master’s lee.

White-eyes! They’re all the same when they’re brooding
, Lesarl thought, suppressing a shiver as the image of Lord Bahl came to mind.
It’s not taken him long to adopt that role. If I ever dreamed of ruling when I was a child, I know better now. I didn’t know then that it scars in ways you could never predict; Lord Bahl once said that his soul felt worn thin, so thin it was hardly there. After Scree I think this one’s the same already. Let’s just hope it doesn’t prove his undoing too.

‘A year, only a year,’ Isak rumbled from the shadow of his raised hood.

‘Since you came this way for the first time?’ Lesarl replied. ‘Almost exactly, yes, my Lord.’

He left it at that, knowing that the white-eye wasn’t asking for a conversation. Instead he turned his attention to the fountain itself. He passed it every day, and it struck him that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d properly looked at it. It was a representation of Evaol, a minor Aspect of Vasle, God of Rivers. The scattering of coins in the fountain were likely nothing to do with her alignment, though, probably just whores hoping for a little luck.

The statue itself was of a column of water reaching up to the waist of a bare-breasted woman, who was running a fish-spine comb through her hair. Rain and wind had taken their toll on the pale stone, blurring some lines and leaving their own on the work. He resisted the urge to stamp some warmth back into his feet, but an involuntary shiver caught Isak’s eye and woke him from his thoughts.

‘Sorry, Lesarl, I’m keeping you out in the cold.’

‘My Lord, that is one of the responsibilities of the high position I enjoy,’ Lesarl said, keeping the reproach from his voice, though he knew he would have to explain the point yet again to his lord.

‘That doesn’t mean you should have to suffer because of my constant whims.’

‘Yes, actually, it does, my Lord,’ the Chief Steward said firmly. ‘My remit spans every suzerainty and aspect of Farlan life, unmatched power within the tribe. However good and loyal a servant you have as your Chief Steward, to fully handle the duties required of that position, he - or she - must have the capacity for cruelty and scheming. And that sort of person enjoys the position of power all too much. Lord Bahl understood it well enough to insist that I do indeed suffer his every whim.’ Lesarl gave a small smile. ‘It was only several years after I took over from my father that I realised you train a dog in a very similar way. Without blind obedience to my master I might well have started to question why it was that I was running the nation yet he wore the duke’s circlet.’

‘So you’re as much a slave to your instincts as I am?’ Isak replied.

‘I’m saying that those who love power are often least suited to it. Megalomania has its uses in a nation, whether anyone will admit it or not, but left unchecked, it is its own worst enemy.’

‘And so for the good of the nation,’ Isak continued, ‘such a person should be trained to come running when I whistle?’ He grinned. ‘I see your point, I suppose. Maybe I should get you a collar as your badge of office.’

‘Yes, Master,’ his Chief Steward said, baring his teeth.