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

Sam spent a lot of time thinking. He had little else to do. He didn’t have enough people to patrol the city so he sat and thought about how he wanted things to be. The one thing he kept coming back to was that he needed a Shan.

The Shan were an ancient race, once persecuted by men and everywhere driven out of Shanakan apart from the Island of Cabarissa. Sam knew little about them, but what he did know was this. The Shan were smaller and weaker than men. They were no use at all in a fight. They knew a lot about herbs, especially poisons. He knew that they were now under the protection of the Mage Lord. He also knew that they were truth tellers. You couldn’t lie to a Shan. It was difficult to imagine a more useful skill for a lawkeeper to have around.

The problem was how to get one. There were none in Samara, none in any of the cities on the south coast, and they were not great travellers. He didn’t even know how to go about sending a message to Cabarissa, other than writing to the Mage Lord, and he was reluctant to do that. He’d always believed that avoiding the attention of the mighty was the key to a long life.

But one Shan would be worth fifty men.

“Sam?”

He looked up. Gilan was leaning around his door jamb.

“What?”

“First one’s here,” Gilan said.

“And?”

Gilan shook his head. “Fat,” he said.

“Send him in.”

“Sure? I could just tell him no.”

“I’m not busy.”

Gilan vanished again and Sam waited. It wasn’t long before another face peered around his door. Gilan hadn’t been lying. The man was fat.

“Sit,” Sam said, and the fat man balanced himself on the chair. He seemed quite comfortable there. “You want to be a lawkeeper?”

The fat man smiled. “I wouldn’t really be much good at that, would I?” he asked. “Running around the streets and all that.”

“Then why are you here?”

“My name is Ulric.” Ulric leaned back in his chair and it creaked. “I work as the factotum for the house of Bernalis, a trading house. It’s not big, but not small – sort of middle sized, I suppose. I could do the same for you.”

Sam studied the man. Beneath the obvious bulk he looked intelligent and confident, but Sam didn’t know what a factotum was. “Exactly what could you do for me?” he asked.

Ulric spread his hands. “Everything,” he said. “Think of it this way – I have contacts all over the city. I know people. I know how to get things done. I know grooms, cooks, merchants, smiths, tailors. I know everyone. I can get the best things for the lowest prices. I hear you’ve got the Yarrow Street stables. Do you have a groom yet? I can get you one, a good man, and a man who knows horses. Who’s going to buy the food in for your men? I assume you’ll run a commissary here. Someone has to cook the food, someone had to clean the floors, look after the paperwork, make sure you don’t run out of things. That’s me. I don’t know anything about the law and I don’t know one end of a sword from the other, but I can make it work for you. If the lawkeeper of Samara is a man on a horse, I’ll provide the horse, the sword, the clothes. You worry about the man who sits on it.”

Sam stared at him. He hadn’t thought of it like that. He was looking for swords and bows, but this was just as important.

“And why would you want to do this for me?” he asked. “Doesn’t Bernalis pay you? You won’t get rich here.”

Ulric leaned forward, an earnest expression on his face, and his triple chin went quadruple. “I understand,” he said. “What you’re doing is important – it’s important for merchants and grooms and innkeepers, for all of Samara, and more to the point it’s important that it’s done well, and honestly. I’ll keep the books straight, I’ll make sure that your people are honest and those you trade with are honest, because you’ll need that, and I can spot a cheat a mile away.”

“And what’s to stop
you
from cheating me?” Sam asked.

“Me?” Ulric laughed, and shook, and Sam feared for the chair he sat on. “But lawkeeper, I am the most honest man in Samara.”

“Those are just words, Ulric, but you have the job for a month if you want it, and then we’ll see.”

“Thank you. It is a decision you will not regret.” Sam expected him to move, to get up and leave, but Ulric stayed put.

“What is it?”

“Well, we have things to discuss.”

“Such as?”

“Names.” Ulric leaned forwards, putting his weight on the desk. “We have to talk about titles, names and such.”

“What do you mean?”

“I noticed that your man on the door called you Sam…”

“It’s my name.”

“But it won’t do. You need a title, and Lawkeeper is somewhat ponderous. Besides, in a few weeks this place will be thronged with lawkeepers.”

“I don’t need a title. Titles are for lords and kings.”

“And men in public office. It doesn’t matter what you want. They’ll call you something – captain, chief, sir, boss. If you don’t choose something, they will.”

“I’ve always been Sam, just Sam.” Besides, it was hardly Ulric’s place to be telling him these things.

“Chief,” Ulric said. “You are the chief lawkeeper.”

“I’m not going to tell people to call me
chief
,” Sam said.

“No. I will. And we need uniforms, badges. Lawkeepers will need to stand out on the street.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought, Ulric.”

“Of course. I think red tabards should do – plain red – and a badge. Nobody else uses red and people will see it a mile off. You have to think of ranks, too. This is going to be somewhere where someone has to be in charge.”

“Ranks?”

“It depends how you’re going to organise patrols, how many men, and if you’ll have more than one law house. Perhaps there should be one over in Gulltown. Needed more over there than here in the old town.”

“Ulric, stop.”

“Chief?”

“Write it down. Leave it for me to read and come back tomorrow. We’ll talk then.”

Ulric smiled. “Anything you say, Chief.”

Sam closed his eyes for a moment. What kind or trouble was he getting into now? This man was impossible, but it was just possible that he was what Sam needed – a man to put the horse under his lawmakers.

“Go,” he said.

Ulric stood. He smiled. “See you tomorrow, Chief,” he said. He left the room.

Sam sat back and wished he had a hot cup of jaro to drink. The idea of a commissary suddenly seemed like a good one. So many of the things Ulric said seemed like good ideas – except
Chief
. That would never catch on.

He was thinking about ranks and uniforms when Gilan poked his head round the door again.

“Death man’s here, Chief,” he said.

Sam found the man standing in the yard behind the law house. He was a head taller than Sam and about the same weight, which was remarkable because Sam thought of himself as unhealthily thin. The death man was a stick. The stick was dressed in black, which was what all death men wore. That was tradition.

The black clad stick was peering down at the corpse in the back of the wagon.

“Do you need a hand?” Sam asked.

The death man turned and looked at him. “I need a place to work, somewhere to put my table. I need water.”

Sam saw that there was a hand cart drawn up beyond his wagon. “There’s a well just over there,” he said, pointing, “and you can have the room just inside the door on the right. It has a decent sized window.”

The death man nodded. “Help me with this,” he said. Together they carried his table into the law house. It was a trestle table, legs hinged beneath it and the top thickly varnished. They set it up in the middle of the room with space to move on all sides.

“I can manage the rest,” the death man said.

Sam watched as he filled a bucket at the well, fetched a box from his wagon and finally took the body into the house. He carried the corpse gently, as though it mattered, and laid it out on the table with straight limbs and the head tilted back. Sam had seen enough. He wandered back to his office. He sat for a while looking out of the window, remembering Gulltown. He had a small room in the old town now, just a few streets away. It was no more than a bed, a chair, a table. He’d had a house in Gulltown, a small warehouse, a boat, a life. This was different, but it wasn’t better.

Sometimes he wished he’d had children. His wife had been barren, or he was, he didn’t know which of them to blame, but it didn’t matter because she was dead, and her brother, and her parents – all dead in the violence that had gripped Gulltown after the Faer Karan went. Even Sam had been imprisoned, beaten. He’d be dead, too, if it wasn’t for Hagar Del.

That had been strange: an island of luck in a sea of trouble. Del was a man who’d worked on his boat from time to time. He wouldn’t have called him a friend, but they got on well enough. It had been Del who brought a kind of rough order to the chaos. He’d organised Gulltown, crushed those who opposed him, and rescued Sam from his prison. For some reason he’d trusted Sam, listened to his advice, sent him to meet the Mage Lord’s men outside the city before the battle of Samara Plain.

Now Del sat on the city council with Ella Saine and Sam was lawkeeper.

“Chief?”

He turned from the window to see Gilan there again. He wondered how Ulric had persuaded the man to start calling him chief.

“What?”

“Death man says he finished.”

“Right.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“To me?”

Gilan shrugged. “You said you weren’t busy.”

Sam left his office again and went back to the room next to the yard where he’d left the death man. The man was still there, and it was evident that he’d worked on the boy. The corpse was clean, the hair tidied and shining; the skin looked refreshed as though he was just sleeping. Sam was impressed.

“One silver coin,” the death man said. “If you want me to do the burial or a burning it will be two.”

“That’s fair,” Sam said. “Ask Gilan. He’ll pay you.”

“If you don’t mind,” the death man said, and his voice changed, all the business going out of it. “If you don’t mind I’d like to know his story.”

Sam raised an eyebrow.

“I work with the dead,” the death man said. “I see so many of them. It helps if I know how they came to it. Do you know his name?”

It was odd that such a man would want this. Sam had assumed that he was inured to it, walled against sorrow and misery, for he must see it every day. He saw no reason to deny the man the little he had.

“We have no name,” he said. “He was killed last night, over in Gulltown. We think he was strangled and thrown off the dock. We don’t know why. Nobody has claimed him.”

The death man put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes for a moment. It was an odd gesture. When he opened them again he looked directly at Sam.

“You are wrong,” he said.

“What?”

“The boy was killed at least two days ago, and he wasn’t strangled.”

Sam stared for a moment before he found his voice again. “What do you know of this?” he demanded.

“Only what I see,” the death man said. “Look here.” He lifted the boy’s arm and dropped it again. “Limp as boiled cabbage,” he said. “A body stiffens after death, and after a while it relaxes again. In this one the stiffness has been and gone. Two days.”

“He was in the river,” Sam argued. “He was below the high water mark. He would have been washed away. You think the river carried him there? I saw no sign of it.”

“There was none. His hair was clean. Drowned people have grit among their hair. The marks on him suggest restraint rather than murder. When a person is strangled there is bleeding in the eyes, it shows as red spots.” He lifted one of the boy’s eyelids and Sam saw the eyes were clear.

“Then how did he die?”

“Here, look.” The death man parted the boy’s hair with a comb. “See.”

Sam saw. There was a puncture wound in the scalp, hidden in the thick hair. It looked no more than an eighth of an inch across.

“You think this killed him?”

“It goes right through the skull. It may not have been fatal, but it seems the boy died in great pain. Did you see the fingers?”

“Of course.”

“His hands were bound by something rigid. There was a strap across his throat. He struggled mightily to free himself.”

“He did that to his own hands?”

“Yes. One of the fingers was broken. I would say he died in very great pain. It may even have killed him. Sometimes the heart fails.”

Sam looked at the body again, but with new eyes. He had thought this a simple crime, a common piece of Gulltown brutality, but if what the death man said was true then it was an altogether more sinister offence.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yes. The boy died in an upright position. When people die their blood pools at the lowest point, and here it’s the feet. He died restrained, standing, tortured. He was left that way for at least a day.”

Sam bent over the body again. He looked at the puncture wound. There was no trace of blood beyond the reddish colouration of the puncture itself. He looked at both eyes, flexed the dead fingers with his own.

“How do you know all this, these signs and meanings?” he asked.

“Stories. I always ask. People will tell a death man, you know. They will tell me almost anything. There’s more, but it doesn’t apply here.”

This was important. Someone like this death man was almost as good as a Shan. He could tell them things that common eyes missed.

“Will you work for me?” he asked.

“A silver coin to lay out a body,” the man said.

“No. Will you come here and work for me, teach other people what you know, how to see the signs?”

The death man shook his head. “I have a business,” he said. “I work the same streets my father worked, and my son will work them after me.”

“Then will you come when I ask it? Will you show others what you do, how you see?”

“I see no reason why not, as long as you pay me.”

“Very well, I shall have them call you, and only you, when we have need. Can you write?”

“I can.”

“Then I would ask that you write down all that you have found and give the paper to Gilan, or Ulric, the fat man. We will provide the paper and ink.”

“I will do that,” the death man said.

“And what was your name? You didn’t say.”

“Conir,” he said. “Bilan Conir. But there is one more thing, lawkeeper.”

“What?”

“I’ve seen this before.”