The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (19 page)

Gilan nodded. “We’ll find out when we get back,” he said. “But now we have another problem. It’s kill-one-kill-all with these folk. He’ll be after one of us next, and I don’t like being hunted.”

The cabin door opened and the captain returned with the mate in tow, and a couple of deck hands. In no time at all they had cleared everything from the captain’s table and the two sailors left again. The captain turned to Gilan.

“Where shall we begin?” he asked.

“I need paper and ink,” Gilan said. “I need a roll of all the men on board, and Diara and I will need to speak to them in private, one at a time,” he said. The last thing he wanted was the captain sitting in on his interrogations.

“I see,” the captain looked disappointed, as though he had missed out on some game or other, some unexpected fun. “Well, then, the mate will bring you the men as you need them, but only if they are off duty. You must work shift by shift, as the ship does. I shall take my place above.”

He left. Gilan exchanged a look with the mate. “Your crew roll?” he asked. The mate went to the back of the cabin and opened a drawer. He pulled out a heavy, leather-bound book and brought it over to the table.

“Here,” he said. “It’s not a list though, not like that. We write the men who come aboard and those who leave.”

It was better than Gilan could have hoped. He wanted the names of those who had come aboard in Samara. The rest could be questioned later. It seemed that his job had just become a lot easier. He opened the book and turned the pages until he came to the last written page and ran his finger down the names. Ten men.

“We’ll speak to the passenger first,” he said.

The dim pools of yellow light seemed to help, and Sam found himself wandering from one to another, weaving from lamp to lamp down the night time streets of Morningside.

He was vaguely aware that he had done something wrong, that he was in danger somehow, but when he tried to summon his reason to tell him what it might be, he found that reason lingered just out of reach. What was clear to him was that he had a task, a job that needed to be done. His mind was filled with coin clipping. If he tried to think about anything else his head swam with fog and uncertainty.

It was hours until morning, but he knew that he didn’t want to go home. When he thought of home he got the feeling of wrongness again, and he shied away from it.

He stopped for a while on the edge of Morningside and sat on a bench beside one of the city wells. He took a drink of water, pumping it into his hand with an old pump that made far too much noise for the time of night. He splashed a little of it on his face.

Sam was used to the way that his mind worked. He was a plodder, and he knew it. He had always believed that it was the most reliable way to get from one place to another. He built the paths of his thought painstakingly, one step at a time, and when he got where he was going he was certain of his conclusions. He could tell anyone how he got there. Others, he knew, thought differently. They were inspired. They leapt from premise to conclusion in a moment. They knew things without being able to say how they knew them.

So Sam knew that his mind was broken, because he was leaping about from one place to another, skirting those things that seemed uncomfortable, and strange ideas appeared without preamble, surprising him as much by their presence as their content.

He had plodded his way to the conclusion that the coin clipper would be someone who saw a lot of coins, but now other ideas sprang forth faster than he could establish their merit.

Delando.

The house of Delando, a mid-sized trading family, or it had been. Some years ago they had suffered some misfortune. The father had died of an illness. They had lost several contracts that had been their bread and butter. The mother had died. All that was left was Grail Delando, a young man of twenty-something years. Sam had heard men talk of the turnaround in their fortunes. Men spoke admiringly of the young man, how he drove a hard bargain, how he bettered the prices of others. Wise men shook their heads and wondered how he did it.

Coin clipping.

If you only pay with nine tenths of the coin how easy was it to pay a tenth more than others or charge a tenth less.

Sam knew where the house of Delando stood. He had almost wandered to its door, his feet guided by the monkey thoughts jumping around inside his head. But it was still dark. The first hints of dawn were some way off, and so he stayed seated on the bench by the well and waited, all the time trying to rebuild the steps by which he had reached his conclusion. But Sam was rebuffed by his own mind.

He did not sleep, and time passed slowly.

People came before the light. Before the city awakened, its vanguard sallied forth from a thousand homes to collect water, and sitting by the well Sam saw many of them. He drew curious glances, but nobody challenged him, and he in his turn did not speak. He watched.

The sense of wrongness increased.

Many of the water carriers were children, young boys and girls, child apprentices or sons and daughters doing morning chores, and Sam knew what children were for.

They were for killing.

He baulked at the thought. Something inside him twisted, rebelling at the idea. But children were for killing. It was something that he both knew and rejected. It made him dizzy to think of it, so he closed his eyes and thought again of coin clipping, cupping his face in his hands and pressing his fingers against his eyelids. His hand wanted to look for a spike, but he denied it.

He realised that he wasn’t carrying a sword. In fact he didn’t even have a knife. A lawkeeper should be armed. He was sure of that. How could he arrest thieves without a weapon of some kind?

When Sam thought of finding a weapon the feeling of unease returned. There was a good reason that he didn’t have one, he knew, but he didn’t know what that reason was. It refused to reveal itself.

The sun rose. It was a slow thing. The first sign was a weakening of the stars. They faded as they sky passed from pure black to the deepest blue. Then there was a hint of pink in the east and the silhouette of the cliffs behind Morningside appeared. A creeping brightness invaded the sky, colouring the wispy clouds, and eventually the first rays of naked sunlight fell across the tops of the houses, and the city came to life.

Sam stood. He was pulled in different directions. He wanted to go to the House of Delando, to discover the truth of his intuition. He wanted to get help from the law house first, but something told him that it was a bad idea even as the rest of him recommended it as the only sensible course of action. He wanted to fetch a weapon, too. He wanted that badly, but he didn’t know where to get one. Home was denied him, the law house was somehow off limits, and he had no money to buy a weapon.

But did he need money? He was a lawkeeper, and he knew that Ulric had arranged accounts with many of the weapons traders in the city. He looked around. He recognised the junction of streets, placed it in his mental map of Samara, and he knew that an armourer’s shop was just two streets away. He set out at once in that direction.

The shop was still shut when he arrived. He looked up at the sign – Kullis Tate, Armourer. A lamp burned outside, which suggested that the shopkeeper had yet to rise. Sam banged on the door. A voice called from within and in less that a minute the door swung open and a face peered out at him.

“You’re Hekman,” the man said.

“And you’re Kullis Tate?”

“I am.”

“I need weapons.”

Tate looked him up and down. Sam could see that the man was considering denying him, saying that the shop wasn’t open, but it seemed that civic spirit overcame his doubts.

“Come in then.”

Sam followed him into the shop. Tate bolted the door behind them, leaving no doubt that this was a special favour rendered to the chief lawkeeper. The shop was a treasure chest of death-dealing steel. There were no bows, but just about everything else was present in abundance. Every shape of blade adorned the walls, from sweeping Saratan cutlasses to dead straight Blayan longswords. In length they ranged from ladies skin cutters to swords as tall as Sam, and every weight and balance. There was armour, too, like a line of empty men across the back of the store.

Sam knew what he wanted. He went straight for a Samaran shortsword and a solid looking nine inch dagger. He picked them off the wall and weighed them, one in each hand. Sam was no artist with a blade. He’d picked one up for the first time just a couple of years ago and hadn’t really taken to it, but he knew the value of being an armed man. It made people think twice.

“These will do,” he said.

“And the payment?”

“Just send the account to the law house. They’ll cover it.”

“Promptly, I hope.”

“Of course.”

Sam made for the door. “Hekman?”

He stopped and looked round at Kullis Tate. The shopkeeper was sitting behind the counter, framed by weapons. He’d picked up what was obviously his breakfast.

“What?”

“You don’t look well. You should see someone.”

Sam nodded. “Just a rough night,” he said. He unbolted the door and stepped out into the sunlight, closing it carefully behind him.

He stood for a moment, trying to remember why he had just acquired weapons.

Coin clipping. Delando. Yes.

He set off down the street at a steady pace, heading back towards the well where he had waited out the dawn. If he turned right by the bench he would be in Delando’s street. As he walked he noticed that the city seemed to have emptied out for a brief time. The first rush had dissipated, and people had not yet emerged from their first meal of the day. It seemed remarkable that the breakfast hour was such a tradition in Samara. He had never really observed it, though his wife had insisted when she was alive. It was as though the city held its breath for half an hour before rushing out to embrace the day.

He came to the well.

Not everybody observed the hour, it seemed. There was a child, a boy of about ten years, struggling to fill a bucket by the well. Sam stopped and stared. He thought that he stopped and stared, but it was as though his mind and body had split apart, for he watched as he drew closer to the boy, coming up behind him, and he felt his hand grip the dagger he had just requisitioned. He drew it from its sheath.

Sam could see the exact spot on the back of the boy’s head where the point must go in. He knew the angle.

Two paces shy of the boy he stopped. His body and mind joined each other again like a clash of cymbals, opposite enough that he was frozen by the conflict. The knife slipped from his fingers and clattered on the ground, making the boy start. He turned round and looked at Sam with fearful eyes, but all he saw was a law keeper.

“You dropped your knife,” the child said.

Sam continued to stare at the boy. He struggled to speak.

“Go home,” he said. It was all he could manage. The boy picked up his bucket and set off along the road leading down into the old town. He was weighed down by his load and walked slowly, weaving slightly from side to side.

It was hard for Sam to stop himself from following, but he stood his ground, anchoring himself determinedly to the spot until the boy turned a corner and was gone. He stooped and picked up his knife.

Something was very wrong.

When the crossbow bolt flew through the doorway and smacked into the wall next to Ulric’s head Arla kicked the door shut. Ulric cursed. He looked frightened, which was fair enough.

Arla went to the window and peered out of one corner, trying to make out where the bolt had come from. It sat buried in the wood, pointing back the way it had come at a house across the street. The street itself was quite empty.

There was no real danger to those in the law house. With a curtain over the window and the door closed they could come and go out the back, but Arla was worried about those who were still out in the city. They would approach the front door not knowing that an assassin was waiting in the house opposite. She would have to do something.

“He’s in the house opposite,” she said. “The one with the white door.”

“I can go round the back,” Gadilari said.

“A sword’s no good against a crossbow,” Arla told him.

Gadilari grinned. “If he sees me,” he said.

Arla thought about it for just a moment. Gadilari was not one given to false confidence. If he thought he could get in behind the bowman and sort this out, then he probably could.

“I’ll distract him,” she said. “Go to the back door and shout when you’re ready, then wait a few seconds.”

Gadilari went. Arla put an arrow on the string of her bow and unlatched the door, hooking it with her foot so she could pull it open.

“Ready!” Gadilari’s voice drifted through from the back of the house and Arla pulled the door open. She knew what to expect, so she didn’t stand and wait for it. She dived forwards, heard the crack of a second crossbow bolt hitting the wall just above her and came upright. It took a while to load a crossbow.

Her first arrow ripped through the window where she thought the assassin was reloading. She doubted that he was stupid enough to be standing there, but her arrows would keep his head down. She shot three more, all of which flew through the bottom half of the window, and jumped back through the law house door while the third was still in the air. Ulric slammed it behind her and they both heard a third bolt hit the door.

“He’s good with that bow,” Ulric said. He was sweating, still scared. Arla guessed that nobody had ever tried to kill him before. She didn’t share his opinion. It wasn’t hard to hit a man forty feet away with a crossbow, and the first shot had been missed.

Now they could only wait. If Gadilari was careful it could take him fifteen minutes to work his way round to the back of the house opposite. Arla peered through the corner of the window again, but there was nothing to see. Someone walked past, but it was just a citizen, and the bowman didn’t waste a bolt. The street wasn’t exactly a main thoroughfare, but neither was it a back alley. There would be a steady flow of foot traffic and the odd wagon as the day grew older.

“Something to eat?” the fat man asked.

Arla shook her head. “Jaro would be good,” she said.

Ulric bustled off towards the back of the law house, glad to be away from the assassin’s threat, Arla guessed. She looked out again. Nothing. She tried to imagine how far Gadilari had got. He had to turn right out of the yard behind the house, and probably go down the next street, then back up to this street a hundred paces further down, cross the road and get behind the row opposite. He could run the first couple of streets, but would have to slow down as he drew close to his quarry. The assassin was one floor above ground level, and she hoped the stairs didn’t creak too much.

Ulric came back with two steaming cups and she accepted hers and sipped it. She looked out the window again.

“He should be there by now,” Ulric said.

“Give it time.”

She continued to watch, just one eye around the corner of the window. In truth even Arla was beginning to worry. He’d had enough time to get round behind and then some. He would have to be careful once he got there, but surely by now…

There was a movement across the street. The white door opened, swinging wide, and a man stepped out carrying a crossbow, but carrying it point down, swinging from the end of his arm. She thought it was Gadilari, just for a moment, but it wasn’t.

It was Sam Hekman.