The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (29 page)

Cal was very aware of his role in Shanakan. He was the mage lord, and that was everything. He was all that stood between the land and the inevitable return of the Faer Karan. He was ruler, protector, the guarantor of the people’s freedom, the court of last resort. He was a tyrant, a healer, a warrior, a stern father, though only young, an executioner, and a giver of impossible gifts. All of this required distance.

He had learned harsh lessons about being too close to others.

He was also required, as far as possible, to be infallible.

The departure of the Faer Karan had not birthed an age of brotherly love. Ambitious men had seen a chance to rule and tried to seize it, and Cal had stopped them. Samara Plain had been his statement, his lesson to all those who doubted his power, and he was certain that it had saved thousands of lives, but it had been hard to do what he had done, to make so many widows and orphans. He did not wish to be tested again.

He sat on the floor and stared at the shifting light within the vanished room, listened to the music of the spell. He was sure that he knew its mechanism, but he forced himself to examine it again, and a third time. He did not want to make a hasty error.

There was a path, a thing that had to be done, a final twist, and the bag would rise out of the well and open once more, the room would simply appear. Yes. He was sure. He spoke the words, made the gesture, released the power that was required.

It was like a machine, an impossibly complicated machine. Worlds twisted before his eyes, things turned, rose and fell. Stone and wood, flesh and bone passed through one another like mist and shadow. He heard a gasp behind him, and assumed that it was Ella that allowed herself to be audibly impressed.

The magic was gone, and he looked into a room quite different from the white and empty chamber that had been there a moment before. The floor was still wood, and the walls may once have been white, but there the similarity ended. He saw chains suspended from eye bolts in the ceiling, a cage hung from them, a plain wooden table – long and narrow – that was stained with blood. On the wall along the left side there were more chains and these ones ended in manacles. They were surely custom made, for no standard restraint could catch the hands of the wasted children who crouched there, filled with fear and clothed with nothing more than grime and their own filth.

There were two of them – a boy and a girl. They could be no more than ten, perhaps twelve years old.

Ella pushed past Cal and went to them, taking off her own coat. She wrapped the boy in it. Diara followed her. Cal was surprised. She had not thought Diara the maternal sort, but here she was, hard on Ella Saine’s heels donating her own clothes to wrap the girl.

Cal had other concerns. He walked to the centre of the room and examined the table. It held no secrets that he would want to know. There were no drawers or hidden compartments. It was too simple a piece of wood. He looked elsewhere.

In a corner of the room a floorboard shifted under his foot, and he bent down and lifted it clear. Beneath, among the joists, was a small ivory box. He picked it up, and at once felt the magic within it. The box itself was an exquisite piece of work, the top carved in a relief of birds, swallows perhaps, chasing each other through realistic leaves. Only the colour was wrong. It was held shut by a simple brass latch, but Cal didn’t open it. He slipped it into a pocket.

“Ella?” She turned. “Will you arrange for the safekeeping of the children? Our hunt is not done.”

“I will,” she said.

Cal walked out of the room and stood in the hallway with Sam, Gilan and Arla until Diara joined them. Sam led the way back to the law house.

Cal left them in Samara and went home to White Rock. He wanted to be alone when he examined the thing he had taken from the hidden room. He could return in the blink of an eye if he wished, but he needed to be away from the noise and distraction of the city.

He stepped through a black door into his own private chamber and dismissed the spell. He walked over to a desk set by the window and pulled the ivory box out of his pocket. He had a couple of hours, and with luck that would be enough time to learn the secrets of the stone within.

He left the box on his desk and went to the door.

“Alder!”

There was quite a long pause. Cal smiled. In any other household a servant would have come running at his call, but this was White Rock and Cal’s servants had been gifted to him by the Faer Karani Gerique. Chief among them was Alder, an insolent old stick of a man. Cal had tamed him somewhat, but the man had never been seen to hurry, ever. It impinged too much on his dignity.

“My Lord.”

The old man strolled into view, scowling at the inconvenience.

“Bring me wine and food,” Cal said. “You know what I like.”

“I will have it brought at once,” Alder said, inclining his head in a shadow of a bow. Cal left him to get on with it. He had a soft spot for the old man. Alder had taught him the old tongue, and without that Cal’s history might have been quite different, and a lot shorter.

He went back to the desk and allowed himself a moment to feel the nature of the magic that pulsed through the box. There was a disturbing quality to it – the same uncomfortable, insistent sensation that he had felt in Delantic’s house, only here it was stronger. The magic felt thready, like the green creepers that grew determinedly up the sides of White Rock’s keep.

He put a glove on his right hand and carefully undid the latch. He flipped the lid open.

The stone inside matched the description of the one that had been taken from the law house. It was blue, crystalline, about the thickness of two fingers and the length of his thumb. He did not think it possible that it was the same stone, but he was comforted by the similarity – what he learned here would apply elsewhere.

He tipped the box and the crystal rolled out onto his desk.

He had the impression of blue threads, just as he had seen surrounding Sam Hekman before Soul Eater had freed him. They pushed their way out from the crystal, reaching towards him.

Cal drew his blade and placed it on the desk beside the stone, and the blue threads visibly recoiled from it. The blade was his last resort against this thing. A touch from Soul Eater and it would be destroyed, the magic sucked away, doused like hot iron in a bucket.

He began to get a sense of the thing. This was his greatest talent – a gift from the Shan – he could hear and see old magic, pick the bones of it from the past. Quite quickly he wished that it was not so. The blue crystal contained nothing but pain.

The door opened behind him.

He turned and saw a man with a tray – food and wine. “Put it there,” he pointed. The servant stepped across and laid the tray down on a table. Alder appeared in the doorway. It was apparently his pleasure to supervise others doing what he had himself been asked to do. It didn’t bother Cal.

Alder stared at the crystal. The expression on his face was not what Cal might have expected. It was one of distaste, almost as though he knew what the blue stone was.

“Alder?” The servant’s eyes snapped up to meet Cal’s. “Do you see something, Alder?”

“A vulgar stone,” Alder replied. “In a particularly insipid shade of blue.”

That was vintage Alder, but there was something about it that didn’t quite ring true. There had been more than distaste in the servant’s face, but Cal could not have said what it was – certainly not fear, which he might have expected if the old man had seen the stone for what it was.

He smiled. “I need to be alone now, Alder. See that I’m not disturbed.”

“Unless I deem it necessary,” Alder said.

“Absolutely necessary,” Cal shot back.

The old man left. Sometimes Cal wondered why he didn’t give Alder some position where he didn’t have to see him so much, librarian perhaps, but when he was tempted he found that he didn’t want to be without his chief servant’s irreverence. It kept him grounded as much as anything did.

He turned back to the stone. It was questing out once more, blue threads creeping across the desk towards his gloved hand. He laid his other hand on Soul Eater’s blade and the blue threads stopped, shrank away. It was almost intelligent, perceiving a threat and retreating. He wondered at that.

He closed his eyes and listened. This was the first stage. He could hear, so distantly, the sounds of creation, the first words of magic that had made this thing, and the sounds meant something. He followed them, fading in and out of silence, like a figure wandering through caves. He picked up fragments, glimmers of a distant light, and piece by piece the original spell revealed itself.

Cal could not retrieve the whole thing. He had done this before, and with a four century old spell, but this was older, more frail, a ghost.

Yet for all that, he found enough to understand what it was and what it did.

It was an evil thing.

The heart of the crystal was a drop of human blood, and around it, hard and blue, lay the essence of the deeds the owner of that blood had perpetrated. Cal would have guessed that the colour of pain was red, but he was wrong. It was blue, a bright, insidious blue.

And he knew everything he needed to know.

He pushed away from the desk and helped himself to a glass of wine. He took it over to the window and looked out across the forest, over the roads that stretched away from White Rock to all points of the compass.

Surely they would not do it?

He ate without conscious effort, not caring what it was he put in his mouth. He was vaguely aware of cheese and fruit, the simple hard bread that they baked in the castle kitchens, but his mind was trying to unravel the future as another mind might see it. There had to be a plan here, and he must understand what it might be. These men, these killers of children, had lost. Eventually the city would triumph over them, Sam would track them down, or Cal himself would, and if it took too long he would bring Borbonil and Cabersky, his tamed Faer Karan, to bear. There were no better hounds to hunt these people down.

Yet this desperate battle had to have a reason beyond mere survival, because in the end it could not be won. It was about buying time, but for what?

They had thrived when the city had no law, in the ungoverned chaos of the Faer Karan. Before that they had been outlawed and hunted down. Now they were hunted again. They would have to…

He saw it.

It was clever, simple, brutal, and exactly what he might have expected from men such as these. They needed to be forgotten. They needed things to become so dire in Samara that the hunt for them would be set aside. If they were going to do what Cal thought they were going to do, then it would be almost impossible for the city to defend itself, and even Cal, for all his abilities could see no obvious way to stop them.

First things first. He picked up Soul Eater and laid the black blade against the blue crystal. He saw the blue threads shrivel and die. The crystal became just a crystal, its power drawn away into a hungry place, bereft of magic.

Cal picked it up, tossed it in the air where it caught the light from the sun and sparkled. He did not think its colour at all insipid. In fact it was quite a pretty stone now that it was stripped of its power. He dropped it into a pocket, took a last mouthful of wine and began to speak the words that would create a black door.

He had a hundred things to do. Ocean’s Gate first, then the ship. The plan was forming in his head, but he needed to be quick, and thorough, and careful.

If he failed Samara would be lost.

“Chief?”

Sam looked up from his desk. Arla was at his door. Yet again they were waiting for the mage lord. It was frustrating. Keeping the law was Sam’s job, and at present he was unequal to it, or he felt as much.

“What is it?”

“I want to question the prisoner.”

“The old man?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t seem very talkative.”

“I have an idea.”

Arla’s tone suggested that she meant to be mysterious about it, and that suggested to Sam that it probably wouldn’t work because she was afraid that if she laid out her strategy he would think it unworkable or foolish. But Sam was ready to try anything rather than sit and wait for Serhan.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Do you mind if I watch?”

“I think I need to be alone with him, or him to think so at least.”

“I’ll watch from outside, or listen anyway.”

Arla nodded. She could hardly refuse him. He was the chief.

They walked together to the commissary, where Arla picked up a couple of bottles of wine and two cups. She glanced at Sam, but he did no more than raise an eyebrow. He didn’t think that getting the old man drunk was going to work, but he was prepared to be proven wrong.

They went down to the basement. It was still badly lit and the air was still a little thick with smoke. It made Sam’s eyes smart. Arla held out her hand to the jailer and he gave her the key at Sam’s nod. There was another guard here now, an Ocean’s Gate man who sat at a table with a bow in one hand.

Arla unlocked the door and went in. She shut it behind her.

Sam peered through the small grille in the door. The old man sat at the table, head bowed, shoulders slumped forwards. Sam watched Arla take a seat at the table opposite Hummel. She put the cups on the table, opened a bottle with her knife and poured two cups.

“Thought you could use a drink,” she said.

Hummel eyed the cup suspiciously. He didn’t reach out to take it. Arla took a hefty swig from her own cup and put it down again.

“Did you know your mother?” Arla asked. Again Hummel declined to reply, but that didn’t seem to worry Arla. “I never knew mine,” she went on. “Guard born. Mother a guard, father a guard. It’s common,
was
common,” she corrected herself. “Especially at Ocean’s gate.” She sipped at her wine again. “Died when I was two in some pointless Faer Karan squabble.”

Hummel picked up the cup of wine and sniffed it, put it down again and licked his lips.

“Point is,” Arla went on, “The world is a tough place, an unfair place. Some say it’s getting better, and that’s as maybe, but it’s still a bastard of a place to live, and the only place we’ve got. Delantic – the other Delantic – he’s dead. He was dead before the mage lord got there, lost his head apparently.” Arla sipped her wine again, leaned back in her chair and put a foot on the table. “Bound to happen,” she said. “He had a good run, mind. What was he? Two hundred years? Four? Be lucky if I see fifty, myself.”

The old man was clearly distressed by the news that Delantic was dead for certain, but Arla didn’t seem to notice, she just rambled on, talking about herself mostly, and about life as a guard and all the injustices heaped upon her.

Sam was amazed. If this was questioning, then it was a method that he had never seen before. Interrogators, especially guardsmen, tended to shout at people, to threaten them, even to hit them, but Arla was not even trying to make him speak, just talking generally, throwing out the odd innocuous question and leaving enough silence for Hummel to contribute if he so desired. And it was working. Even with the shock of Delantic’s death Hummel was becoming restless. He wanted to speak.

“You’ve had it pretty easy,” Arla was saying. “Long life of luxury, anything you feel like eating you can eat, soft bed, good clothes. We guards eat what we’re given, wear what we’re given, do what we’re told.” She sipped her wine again. “This is better, I suppose. I have my own place now – nothing special, but it beats a barracks. You have no idea what it’s like: the snoring, the smell. I could tell you stories that would turn your stomach.”

The old man picked up his wine and drank it down – all of it – in one go. Arla raised an eyebrow and leaned forward. She filled both their cups.

“We did things, too,” Arla said. “Can’t say I’m proud to have done them, but I guess you know what that feels like.”

“I never knew my mother,” Hummel said.

Arla barely paused. “No? That’s a shame, really. They say it robs you of something, not knowing a mother, but what would I know?” She put a second boot on the table. “Loved my father, though. He was a guard captain in the end. He died too. I suppose we all do in the end, or we did. Now…” she shrugged. “Now we could live forever. No war, the mage lord says, so no more dying.”

“She was a whore,” Hummel said.

“And you said you didn’t know her,” Arla said, her tone lightly mocking.

“I never did,” Hummel said. He picked up the cup of wine and drained it again. Sam had seen people drink like that before. It was always a sign that something was wrong. In Hummel’s case it could be that his father, perhaps his grandfather was dead, but Sam thought, hoped, that it might be the first crack in the man’s composure.

“But he told you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you believed him?” Arla laughed.

“Why would I not? He gave me life. He was immortal.”

“He was just a man with a dirty bag of tricks,” Arla said. “I shot him with an arrow and he ran away, bleeding like any other man. My friend Gilan cut his head off.”

Hummel rose up out of his seat as though he intended to attack his tormentor, but Arla swung her feet to the floor and stared at him hard, and after a moment the old man fell back into his chair.

“He wasn’t a good man, Hummel. You know it. The world’s a better place without him.” She reached forwards and filled his cup again. Hummel seized it at once and drank it down. He said nothing. Arla sipped at her own wine. “The things you must have seen,” she said, and shook her head.

Hummel glowered at her, but said nothing. He drank more wine.

“Do you like the city?” she asked. The old man remained silent. “I do. Even when it was a mess with the king’s bully boys running around the town and the guard from Ocean’s Gate taking payoffs from Saine. There’s something about a city, especially an old one. The streets are soaked with life, so many people have walked on them, lived and died on them. So much is possible.”

She propped her feet back on the table and drank more wine. Hummel watched her.

“There’s this little tavern down by the water that I’ve taken a liking to,” she said. “Damned if I can remember its name, but it’s not far from here. It’s like the whole city in a box. You could meet anyone there – mercenaries, king’s men, sailors, merchants, even thieves and whores, though by and large it’s a respectable place.”

“The Sea of Gold,” Hummel said.

“That’s it! You know it?”

“I used to, when I was a younger man.”

“He must have been pretty sure of you, to let you roam the city,” Arla said.

“He was my father.”

“No. He wasn’t.” Arla said it in such a matter of fact way that for a moment it seemed that Hummel hadn’t understood it. He reached for his wine and then stopped.

“What did you say?”

“Surely you don’t believe that?” Arla asked. “That he was your father?”

“Of course he was.”

“How would you know? Because he told you?” Arla laughed, and Hummel looked angry again. She leaned forwards. “Delantic was a liar. He could barely draw breath around a true word. Think about it. Did you see him with a lot of women – a lot of whores? No. And what did he do? He dealt in children. He stole them and sold them to other people to kill – those that he didn’t kill himself. You were probably young enough that you’d never remember, so he called you a son and got a servant he could trust.”

Hummel stared at her yet again. His face was blank, the anger draining out of it leaving it slack and empty. His mouth hung open.

“You can’t know…”

“I can’t give you a written proof,” Arla told him. “I can’t find a witness, but I’d wager a thousand gold that Delantic never even knew your mother, that you were snatched on the street and your mother wept for you as any mother would. You’re not his son, Hummel,” she said, and her tone softened. “You’re his victim. Nothing else makes sense.”

Arla sat back again, tipped her chair and sipped her wine. She waited for what she had said to sink in. She was waiting, Sam realised, for the potion she had administered to do its work. Hummel was sufficiently oiled – Sam had counted five cups of wine – the old man was as open to the idea as he would ever be, and Sam could not fault Arla’s argument. He was convinced that she was right. Delantic had not been this man’s father. Hummel had spent a life in servitude to a man who had stolen him from his mother. It was a powerful lever. The only question was would Hummel believe it.

It was not simply a question of the truth. Sam had seen men and women believe things that were plainly absurd, and disbelieve others that seemed blindingly obvious. It depended what Hummel could believe, what tools his life had given him to recognise the truth.

“We need your help, Hummel,” Arla said. Her timing was perfect. A single clear thought dropped into the turmoil of Hummel’s mind, and her tone was perfect too – not pleading, not demanding, but in that between space where it was just a fact, and yet bore with it an acknowledgement that the old man was important. It invited Hummel to change sides.

That, of course, had been the point all along.

Sam was impressed. He had never suspected Arla of such subtlety.

The pause lengthened. Hummel stared at the table, his hand gripped the cup of wine, slowly turning it round and round. Sam found that the urge to say something, to add his weight to the argument, was powerful, but he remained silent. This was Arla’s game, her strategy. He could not be sure that his words would not tip the balance the wrong way.

Hummel licked his lips. He picked up the cup and drained it. Arla leaned across and refilled it without a word, and he drank half of it down again. He raised his eyes.

“I can’t help you,” he said. Arla raised an eyebrow. “I suppose he never really trusted me, never trusted anyone. Not even his brethren.”

“You must know something,” Arla said.

Hummel shrugged, a hopeless gesture. “The blue crystal is in the hidden room. I can’t retrieve it. The other you have. They had a tontine of sorts. The first two to die would serve as weapons to save the rest, but without the crystals they have nothing.”

“Two have died,” Arla said.

“But you have one crystal and the other is locked away. They need two.”

“They have one,” Arla said. “They stole it. The mage lord unlocked the hidden room. He has the second crystal. What are they planning to do?”

“I do not know.”

“You must have heard something, Hummel.”

The old man shook his head. “The dead heart of the city,” he said. “That’s where they will do it. That’s all I heard: two crystals and the dead heart of the city.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know. It was the only way they spoke of it. I was not truly privy to their discussions. I just served wine and food, heard careless words while I was in the room.”

“You must have heard something, some tone of voice, some other hint of what might come.”

Hummel frowned. “I did not pay attention,” he said. “It was all above me, but they were not happy these last few days. They met once at the house to discuss things and I remember a toast they made when they discussed their tontine. One of them said that they would have to go back to the beginning, to start again, and that two of them must die to make it so. They raised their glasses to it, grim faced, and all spoke the words – as it was in the beginning.”

“Just so?”

“Just so.”

“And do you know names, Hummel, their names?”

Again the old man shook his head. “Only Delantic,” he said. “The others all went by names that could not have been their own. Delantic was Trader, among the others were Sword, Street, Whisper, Poison and Stone. It is all I know.”

Arla sat for a minute or so, waiting to see if Hummel would volunteer anything else, but it seemed that she had wrung him dry. She stood.

“Thank you, Hummel. What you have said has been helpful, and we shall bear that in mind. I will send down something for you to eat.”

She left the cell, locked it carefully behind her and handed the key back to the guard.

“Useful?” she asked.

“Somewhat,” Sam said. “He said nothing concrete, but I’m impressed. I didn’t think he could be turned.”

Arla shrugged. “Neither did I, but I thought it worth the effort.”

There was a banging noise and a lawkeeper hurried down the dim corridor towards them.

“Chief.”

“What is it?”

“The mage lord has returned.”