The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (21 page)

“It’s there, right enough,” he said.

Gilan breathed a sigh of relief. The gamble had paid off. Now he could be fairly sure of two things – that the captain was one of the six and that all of them bore the same distinctive tattoo. It was pretty certain that they were no longer in danger from the crew. He pushed his advantage.

“He must be bound. In a number of hours he will reawaken, and then he will be a danger to us all, for we all have seen his face and the mark upon him.”

Even the mate looked sceptical. He pushed at the body with his foot. “He really looks dead.”

“We should take his head off,” Diara said.

“No,” the mate said. “We’ll bind him, as you ask, and we’ll see if he comes back to life. If he does, then your case is proven, if not, then you’ll be talking to the authorities in Pek.”

It would have to do. Gilan made a note to inspect the binding himself. The last thing he wanted was the captain getting loose again. He’d meant what he’d said. If the man got loose he’d be a danger to them all. They had all seen his face. They all knew what he was and what he had done. The knots would have to be tight.

To Arla it seemed as though Hekman sauntered out onto the street without a care in the world. It was likely that the danger from across the street had passed, as the chief seemed to have the weapon that had threatened them in his hand. She exchanged a look with Ulric. Neither of them spoke.

She opened the door and stepped out into the street, ears tuned for a crossbow releasing, an arrow on her bowstring. She called across the street.

“Chief?”

Hekman looked up and frowned, then he smiled.

“Arla.”

She gestured at the crossbow, a wordless question.

“Yes,” he said. “I came down the street, coming to see you, and I saw the door shut and a quarrel in the door, so I cut round the back. There was a man in the window holding a crossbow, so I gave him the flat of my blade across the head and took the weapon. You might want to fetch him out.”

Arla glanced up at the window. “You didn’t see Gadilari?”

“Gadilari? No.”

Arla was surprised to see Hekman for any number of reasons. Ella had come to tell her that he had knocked out his guard and escaped her custody, but Ella had not expected to see him back at the law house. He seemed almost lucid, but there was something about him, an air of distraction, that she could put down to the blue crystal. She led him into the law house and Ulric took the crossbow off him. She sent a couple of lawkeepers over the road to investigate the man Hekman claimed to have struck down.

She took Hekman to his own office and sent for two cups of hot jaro. She knew that he still wasn’t right, and there was no way he would be leaving here unescorted, but she also didn’t want to upset him. It was a little like dealing with a crazy uncle.

“Why are you here, Chief?”

Hekman looked around him as though establishing exactly where ‘here’ was. “My office,” he said. His eyes focussed again. “I came for help,” he added.

“What kind of help?”

Hekman frowned again. “It’s difficult. I keep getting distracted, but at the same time things just come into my head. I know who’s doing the coin clipping, but the crystal is pulling me…” He struggled for words. “Towards evil.”

“But you have done nothing,” Arla said. She made it a statement, not a question.

“No.”

But almost. Arla heard it in his voice. He had come close to the irredeemable, teetered on the brink. It was immeasurably important that he had not crossed the line.

“It’s best that you stay here in the law house,” Arla said. “In your office. We will be your eyes and ears, your arms and legs.” Hekman nodded.

The two cups of jaro arrived, and they sat in silence and sipped their drinks for a minute.

“Tell me about the coin clipping,” Arla said.

Hekman started as though woken from a reverie. “Yes,” he said. “Coin clipping. It’s the house of  Delando.”

“Really? How do you know?” Arla was surprised. Delando had recently become a byword for shrewd trading.

Hekman shrugged. “I can’t say,” he said. “But it’s them. It has to be them.”

Someone banged on the door. Arla opened it to find one the lawmakers standing outside looking worried and confused.

“What is it?”

“Gadilari,” the man said.

“What about him?”

“The man we fetched out of the house was Gadilari. He’s still out.”

Arla looked at Hekman.

“That was Gadilari?” he asked.

“So it seems.”

“I didn’t see his face,” Hekman admitted. “But he was sighting the crossbow through the window. Why would he be doing that?”

It was a good question, but there could be any number of answers. Gadilari could have been checking the angle of the shot to make sure he had the right window. If he’d found the crossbow abandoned he would have wondered if it was the one that had been shot at them. It could have been nothing more than idle curiosity, or testing the weapon. She shrugged. The killer who had been there before Gadilari must have fled before he arrived, abandoning the crossbow, but for the life of her she could not think why he would do such a thing.

“What matters is that they got away again,” she said. “Perhaps he heard Gadilari coming.”

“There’s only one stair,” Hekman said. “Apart from that the only way out is through the window. Your bowman must have left before Gadilari got into the house.” He shook his head as if he was trying to clear it. “But we have to send someone round to the House of Delando. There’ll be a furnace in the basement, I expect, and a coin press. You’d better take hammers. The door will be strong and locked.”

Arla stared at him. “How do you know all this?” she asked.

Hekman shook his head and smiled, but it was an apologetic smile. “It’s just… obvious,” he said.

A commotion elsewhere in the law house came to their ears, and Arla left Hekman in his office with strict instructions to stay where he was, and went to investigate. It felt odd giving orders to the chief, but he accepted it meekly enough. He knew somehow that he wasn’t entirely the man he should be.

Ulric’s entrance hall was chaos again. A group of lawmakers had come back from the town, two of them injured and spreading blood and disorder around the room.

“Report!” she commanded, and the noise subsided. One of them saluted – it was a guard salute and not really warranted.

“We were attacked on Black Corner Hill,” he said. “Crossbows, but we managed to cut back down the hill and come along the waterfront.”

“And the mission?”

The lawkeeper smiled. “We have a name,” he said. “We have two names.”

“Two?”

“Aye. We found a place where the other name had been used – a tavern – and he’d dined there with a man that the landlord knew.”

“And the name?” Arla knew that this was a breakthrough, or might be.

“Irian Delantic,” the lawkeeper said.

“And the landlord knew this man? Really knew him?”

“For years,” the lawkeeper told her. “Knew where he lived.”

This was good, Arla thought. A genuine breakthrough. Now they had a thread to pull on, and not one that could snap so easily for the tugging.

Gilan slept. He needed it. After all, he’d been up pretty much all of the night and had missed his chance to sleep on board.

He took himself down to their closet cabin and spent a few minutes wedging the door so that nobody could get through it without waking the dead. He was not an especially heavy sleeper, but he was weary to his bones and knew he would sleep deep if he slept at all. He left Diara on deck. He knew she was tired too, but she swore she could last a four hour stretch, and he believed her. She watched the captain’s body like a hawk and never took her eyes off it.

So Gilan slept. In spite of it all, sleep came quickly and if he dreamed he remembered none of it when he awoke. It was banging on the cabin door that awoke him, and Diara’s voice.

“Four hours, Gilan,” she called through the door.

He swam up from the darkness, eyes heavy, mouth foul. He still felt exhausted.

“A minute,” he said. His voice felt thick on his tongue. He sat on the side of the bunk and rubbed his eyes. There was almost no light, just a few illuminated cracks in the door from the dim lamp outside. “All’s well?” he asked.

“Aye,” Diara said. “But there’s sailors creeping around the deck, some of them too near the captain for my like. You’d best get up there quick before they do some mischief.”

Gilan fumbled for his boots, pulled them onto his reluctant feet. He decided that he liked Diara. She was brusque and humourless, but solid with it. She had the competence of someone who had seen too many battles to be foolish. Gilan undid his wedging of the door and pulled it open. Diara was a pace outside, bow in hand. She looked fit to drop.

“You could have called me earlier,” he said.

“I said four hours,” she replied.

“You did,” Gilan agreed. “And I’ll say the same. Four hours. You’ve earned it.”

Diara nodded and they swapped places. He stood on the deck outside the cabin and listened while she wedged the door in her own fashion. It was a dim little space he stood in. He wondered if Corban Saine was sleeping soundly in his own bunk.

He looked towards the captain’s cabin. The door was closed and there should be nobody there, except perhaps the mate, but Gilan could see no light below the door. He turned and went up the steps to the main deck.

The night was clear, and above the sails the sky was a generous scattering of stars on the deepest black. There was precious little light on deck and the ship wallowed gently along in a modest breeze. He stood and soaked it up, the gentle creak of ropes and wood, the smell of tar and salt. He touched the hilt of his sword, loosened it in its sheath, and walked towards the stern where the captain was secured. Diara had been right. A couple of sailors were dozing almost within arms reach of their prisoner. He ignored them and bent over the body. It was tied to one of the stanchions that supported the port rail, feet out in front, head slumped forwards.

The ropes seemed sound. He reached down the back and tested them.

There was a knife lying in the scuppers. He only saw it because the light of a star glinted on the blade as the ship rolled. He picked it up. Everything about this was wrong. He could feel his gut clench. The knife was bloody and the blood was fresh.

He crouched in front of the captain and lifted the head, looked at the face.

It was not the captain.

He spun around, but the two sailors remained still. A cursory examination told him why. They were both dead.

He drew his blade and ran up onto the captain’s deck. There was supposed to be a man at the wheel, but it was deserted and the wheel lashed.

Gilan did not believe that Diara would have missed such drastic events on her watch. The captain had somehow freed himself, killed the sailors and vanished, and all within the couple of minutes that had elapsed between Diara leaving the deck and Gilan coming up the stairs from below. That was quick. It meant that the captain must have had help. Gilan suspected that the help was now lying dead on the deck.

He turned and faced the bow.

He could not see another living being on deck, and as he prepared to descend to the main deck again the ship seemed to pulse beneath him and for a moment he believed that they had struck a reef.

Fire burst out of the forward hatch, belching heat back along the deck towards him. A figure leaped from the flames, a silhouette against the orange and gold of the fire. They stood staring at each other for a moment, Gilan and the silhouette. It was the captain. It had to be.

Gilan’s guess was confirmed almost at once. The captain drew his blade and began to advance. It was not the action of a frightened man, and Gilan remembered the other man he had fought on the dock in Gulltown when Hekman had sprung his trap. Gilan was useful with a blade, but he’d been outclassed then. He saw no reason not to expect the same. He backed into the open ground of the captain’s deck and waited.

The captain, it seemed, was intent on destroying his own ship, but he was in no hurry. He came up the steps with a smile on his face and circled around Gilan.

“You see what cleverness gets you now,” the captain said. He lunged half-heartedly at Gilan, and Gilan beat the blade away.

“You’re burning your own ship,” Gilan said.

The captain’s smile broadened. “And all of you with it,” he said.

There was screaming from below, and men shouting. The crew, or what was left of it below the foredeck, had discovered their predicament.

“How did you get them to help you?” Gilan asked. He tried a lunge of his own, but it was contemptuously pushed aside.

“I promised them they’d never grow old,” he said, laughing at his own dark humour.

“They were foolish to believe you,” Gilan said.

The captain advanced, delivering several quick cuts to Gilan’s head that had the lawkeeper backing away, and then a thrust to the hip that nearly caught him. He responded with a hack at the captain’s shoulder which was blocked.

“But you don’t intend to die,” Gilan said. “Else what’s the point of this?”

“Clever will get you killed every time,” the captain said. He attacked again, and this time he put everything into it. Gilan was hard pressed to keep his blade out, but he did, even though he had to back all the way across the deck. He felt the rail at the stern of the ship touch his back and stepped sideways to avoid it. The captain failed to take advantage of this, pulling back a fraction. They circled each other again.

It was Gilan’s turn to attack. He launched his best effort, cutting left, right, left, then turning a cut into a twisting thrust to the belly, but the captain was equal to it. He stepped aside and countered, and Gilan stepped away again, circling back towards the rail. It seemed to him that as he neared the rail the captain eased off, allowed the distance between them to stretch.

He wants to kill me with a blade, Gilan thought. Every time there was a chance of him going over the rail the captain backed off. He decided to use it, and deliberately backed into the rail. It made his style less flexible, but seemed to stilt the captain’s game just as much, perhaps more. He tried a direct attack, and was surprised that the captain gave ground, trying to draw him out. He declined the invitation and backed up again.

The smile faded from the captain’s face. There was something more significant going on here than a simple desire to skewer Gilan. For some reason the captain didn’t want him in the water over the stern. That was all right with Gilan. He wasn’t a good swimmer and had no desire to jump, even to escape a blade. Death by drowning didn’t appeal.

Gilan attacked again, but the captain read his attack and pushed past his blade, forcing Gilan to jump back. Even so he felt the cloth of his shirt tear and a touch of steel on his skin.

It wasn’t a good choice, really – drowning or being stuck with a blade. He wondered where Diara was. The captain hadn’t had time to kill her, or anyone else in the forward part of the ship, so Saine and Diara should both still be alive, but probably they were both still sleeping. An arrow in the captain’s back would suit him fine about now.

The captain attacked again, and Gilan backed into the rail. This time the captain didn’t retreat, but pressed home his advantage, and suddenly the choice was real. Gilan had a couple of seconds to decide. He was outclassed, and in a moment he would feel the captain’s steel. The sacrifice he had made in backing up now told against him and he was pinned against the stern rail with nowhere to go.

The captain cut at his hip, and he parried, but the next cut came high, and if he ducked forwards he’d move into the blade and his own counter would be too late to stop the blow. He leaned back. The tip of the captain’s blade whipped past an inch from his throat, but Gilan had moved too far. His centre of gravity had shifted, and the inertia of his movement pulled him further still. He felt his legs leave the deck.

The world slowed down. Gilan was, if not exactly happy, then satisfied that his decision had been correct. Stay alive. That was the guard mantra, and it did well enough for a lawkeeper. If he’d done anything else he’d be dead, and a few minutes more life gave him more options. Besides, he was curious to know why the captain had been so keen to keep him on deck.

The impact with the sea knocked the philosophy out of him. He let go of his sword and thrashed at the water. His head broke free and he dragged in an urgent breath. Above him there were only stars. He turned, and there she was, the Red Fox, moving slowly but steadily away from him on a light breeze, fire climbing her masts, and on the captain’s deck the silhouette of the captain himself, looking down on the dark waters.

Gilan wondered what it would be like to drown.