The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (31 page)

The signal from the beach meant that they had not detected Hekman’s men, and that the trap was about to close. A boat was lowered. Gilan eyed it with suspicion. It was even smaller than the boat they had used after the sinking of the Red Fox, and it looked as though a cough might tip it over. Four king’s men swarmed down a rope into the tiny vessel, stowed their bows and seized their oars. Diara climbed down after them looking for all the world as though she was born to it. She took a position between the pairs of oarsmen.

It was Gilan’s turn. He took hold of the rope and clumped down the side of the ship, wary of his feet slipping, his hand slipping, and aware how far below him the little boat was. The climb down seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, and when his feet touched the boat it seemed to shy away from him, determined to cast him into the sea.

“Try to step into the centre of the boat,” Diara said.

Gilan did as he was told, and noticed that the men on the outside of the boat dipped their oars to steady it. He successfully made the transition and crawled carefully forwards, keeping his weight low until he was crouched in the bow.

The oarsmen began to pull, and Gilan felt the boat buck as it surged across the small waves that rolled in. He wondered how deep the water was beneath them. Not that deep, he supposed, because the ship could not sail here, but deeper than he was tall, that was for certain.

He raised his head and peered towards the shore. There were shapes now, coming forwards from the back of the beach, and surely that was a horse and rider, and there were others. He muttered an oath.

“There seem to be a lot of them,” Diara whispered.

“I count ten,” Gilan replied, but even as he counted the number grew. Fifteen. More. They had expected one man, perhaps as many as three.

“I hope the chief is ready,” Diara said. “Otherwise this might be difficult.”

They drew quickly closer to the shore. The oarsmen pulled with an eagerness that Gilan found he did not share. It felt as though he was the one falling into a trap.

A voice called out from the shore, wanting to speak to Delantic. Gilan looked at Diara. Obviously she could not reply. He could see that she had slipped her bow out from under the coat and had already put an arrow to the string. She raised a casual hand to the man on shore. That was clever. Delantic would not have been a man to shout in such circumstances. He had been arrogant and careful of his dignity as captain of the Red Fox.

They were close now. The men on the beach were no more than thirty feet away, and he could begin to make out details. The boat still had the benefit of the moon behind it, but that wouldn’t hold for long. The men on the beach were walking towards them.

The boat touched sand and stopped, tilting and turning a little as the following wave pushed it.

Diara loosed an arrow, and a man fell.

The beach erupted into chaos. Gilan leaped from the boat, drawing his blade. He splashed a couple of steps up to the beach and thrust at the nearest man, who had still to readjust to the new situation and promptly died. An arrow flashed past Gilan’s head and he heard it strike the wood of the boat. That told him they had archers at the top of the beach, or higher, perhaps on top of the low cliff behind.

Men were shouting now, and he heard the drum of horses’ hooves on the sand. A group of riders were making for the western end, back towards Samara. He ran up the beach and swung at another man, but found his blade blocked and turned. He jumped back, barely in time to avoid a cut that would have gutted him.

The beach was now no more than a background. Gilan was veteran enough to know that he faced someone of equal or superior skill, maybe even one of those they sought. He saw nothing but the other man’s body and his blade, no more than a shadow and a deadly gleam of steel in the moonlight.

He heard arrows fly both ways, but none struck him. Perhaps the man he was fighting served as a shield, but he, too, was a shield, and he realised that it did not serve him. The other was a moment quicker, an inch more accurate. It was enough to kill him.

Gilan began to step sideways, trying to force the fight parallel to the beach. That would give Diara a shot. His enemy seemed to know what he was trying to do, and resolutely kept Gilan between himself and the sea. He was good enough to do it, too. He stepped quickly whenever Gilan moved, but the lawkeeper could see no way to force an advantage from it.

In old tales swordfights could go on for hours, but Gilan knew that most ended within a minute, and his time was nearly up. Yet again he faced an opponent who had the measure of him, and this time there was no Gadilari to come to his aid, no sea in which to leap.

But there was Diara.

Gilan drew his opponent into one more attack and swayed backwards away from the scything blade, and fell. He tried hard to make it look like a stumble, and it probably did. He was betting his life that Diara had an arrow on the string, waiting.

The man standing over him smiled. Gilan saw the flash of teeth in the moonlight. The hesitation was a mistake. Another flash, an arrow, and the gloating swordsman was thrown backwards and spun around. Gilan sprang up again.

Diara’s shot had not been perfect – the arrow had taken the man in the right shoulder, cutting into the soft flesh just below the bone – but it was a crippling blow. He had been right handed, and now as he scrambled to regain his feet he was forced to switch to his left, and he was bleeding heavily.

There was always a chance, however slim, that the man would be as good with his left as he was with his right, but a couple of exchanges were enough to tell Gilan that it was not so. He pressed forwards with confidence.

This was not about the law. Gilan’s mind was filled with the image of the dead boy that Hekman had brought back from Gulltown, with all the young lives that this man had ended. He was angry. He wanted justice and revenge, but mostly it was anger.

He cut the man once on the hip, and followed that up with a thrust that finished the duel, piercing the man’s right side. Gilan kicked his sword away and stood over him for a moment, waiting for him to reach for a dagger, to try to escape, but he just lay at Gilan’s feet and stared up at him with blank eyes.

“What you’ve done,” Gilan said. “You should consider this a mercy.”

He swung his blade two handed and brought it down hard, a single blow that buried steel a foot deep in the sand, severing the head cleanly from the body and flooding the pale sand with darkness.

The job was done.

He straightened and looked up the beach to see if his help was needed anywhere, but it seemed that those who could do so had fled. He could see a dozen bodies on the sand, misshapen lumps, and somewhere a horse screamed in pain. The chief’s men were coming down off the cliff. The fight was over.

Gilan turned back to the shore.

The boat had turned side on, and was now tilted to and fro by the waves. Someone was slumped down inside it, and other shapes lay around. Nobody was standing. He began to run towards the sea.

“Diara!”

Gilan reached the boat in a couple of strides, and saw her at once, still wrapped in the ridiculous coat. She was lying on her side, and he was relieved to see that her eyes were open. He picked her up and stood her on her feet, but she seemed unsteady.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded.

“Just get this bloody coat off me,” she said.

Gilan unfastened it and pulled it away from her. It was soaked with seawater and must have weighed sixty pounds. He cast it aside. With the coat gone he could see blood. Her sleeve was coloured with it.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

“Not much,” she replied. “That damned coat took most of the strength from the arrow, but I fell, and then I couldn’t get up. The boat kept banging into me. I barely got off a shot when you went down.”

It explained the poor shot. It had been very close to no shot at all, and Gilan would have been at the swordsman’s mercy.

“We’ll get it seen to,” Gilan said, but Diara shook his hand away.

“It’s nothing,” she said, and turned to the oarsmen. Gilan joined her, lifting two of them out of the boat. One was dead and the other had a shaft through his upper arm which had rendered him unable to fight with sword or bow. One of the others was unconscious, but had been lucky enough to fall on his back in the water, and so was still alive. The fourth was also dead with an arrow through his throat.

“It didn’t go as well as we expected,” Gilan said.

Diara said nothing. She took the legs of the unconscious man while Gilan lifted him onto the beach. There were lights coming towards them, a row of lamps. At each corpse they stopped and someone examined the body. The lights got to the second man Gilan had killed. A hand pulled the shirt aside. From where he was Gilan couldn’t see if the man bore the familiar tattoo.

“Is this one your work, Gilan?” It was Serhan, the mage lord.

“Aye, and good work it was,” he replied.

Serhan nodded. “It’s better that he’s dead,” he agreed. “But they have two stones now.”

The first arrow came from the boat. Sam saw the flicker as it left the bow, and a man fell. That must be Diara, he thought.

“Now,” he said. He did not need to shout. The men and women around him were ready, and a whisper would have carried.

The archers that had come with Delantic’s friends got one volley away before the lawkeepers shot them down and took their place on the cliff top. Surprise was complete. Sam found himself next to Arla, and she was raining arrows down onto the beach at a steady, mechanical rate. More men were falling.

A group of horsemen broke away from the base of the cliff just below them and rode hard to the west. Arla raised her bow to shoot again, but Serhan was suddenly there beside them.

“No,” he said. “Let them go.”

Arla looked at Sam, and Sam nodded. He didn’t know why Serhan wanted them to escape, but he trusted him.

“You have a plan?” he asked.

“Only two of them are here,” Serhan said. “If one escapes he will lead us to the others.”

“Then we must follow,” Arla said.

“That task is in hand,” the Mage Lord said. He stepped off the cliff and slid down its crumbling face to the beach. They followed him, rather less elegantly. The fighting on the beach was over, the sand littered with dead men. The lawkeepers knew what they were looking for. They lit lamps and moved from body to body stripping off the shirts, looking for the mark.

Serhan already knew. That was obvious. He strode down the beach to where Gilan was helping Diara out of the modest surf, and Sam followed. There was a body without a head, or more precisely a body that had been separated from its head. Serhan looked down at the corpse.

“One of them?” Sam asked. Serhan nodded. He spoke a few words to Gilan and then turned back to Sam.

“We must go back to Samara,” he said. “They will be trying to do something tonight and we must prevent it. I will explain when we are there.”

A second boat was rowing in from the ship, and they waited until it had arrived and retrieved the dead and wounded king’s men. Serhan didn’t talk to them. He stood quietly at the western end of the beach looking towards Samara. When the boat departed Sam walked over to where the mage lord brooded.

“Time we were going, my lord?”

“It will be several hours before they are back in Samara,” Serhan said. “Only then will we know where the others might be.” Despite that he spoke words and the black door appeared, a piece of the night darker than the rest, hovering above the sand. Sam called the lawkeepers to order and they filed obediently through the opening, back to Samara and the law house.

*

The Mage Lord gathered them together in the big room. He sat in a chair at the front and waited until they were quiet, then he stood.

“I have studied their magic,” he said, “these men who kill children. I have taken it apart and learned their secrets. I know what it is that they intend to do.” He walked over to one side of the room and looked out of a window. “They plan to destroy the city,” he said.

There was an immediate chorus of protest and disbelief. Serhan allowed the noise to fade and pulled a blue crystal from his pocket. Sam assumed it was the one he had taken from Delantic’s hidden room. It was still blue, but lacked the lustre that Sam remembered.

“This is dead,” Serhan went on. “There is no harm in it now, but once it held the despair, pain and suffering of countless hundreds, perhaps thousands.” He turned to Sam. “The one that you found by the dock in Gulltown – were you not tempted to destroy it?”

“No,” Sam replied without hesitation. “It seemed a dangerous thing to do.”

“And so it would have been. Breaking the crystal would have released a portion of what lay trapped within it. It would have harmed you, and certainly those who were close by. It is probable that you would have lost your wits.”

“Madness?”

Serhan nodded. “Aye, that. And violent rage.”

“So they plan to break a crystal?” Arla asked.

“More than that. They have two, and with two there is a way that everything contained within them can be released. Anyone who is close enough will be driven mad if they are not killed outright.”

“How close?” Sam asked.

Serhan shrugged. “A mile? Five? I cannot be sure.”

“Five miles? That is the whole of Samara.”

“We should get people out of the city,” Arla said.

“Who?” Serhan sat back down again. “We cannot move everyone, and if it happens tonight we may have less than two hours. It is better to prevent it.”

“But they are being followed,” Sam said. “You will know where to find them. Can you stop them?”

“I can.”

Gilan had been looking puzzled for some time, and now he spoke. “My Lord, I do not understand,” he said. “Will they not destroy themselves? And even if they somehow survive, the city will be torn apart.”

“Their own crystals will be a defence. They will absorb some of what is released,” Serhan said.  “They have been playing a game all this time, seeing which of them will have to die to provide what they need. As soon as you began the hunt it was leading to this. They knew that they would eventually be caught or killed, that you would not give up. They must reduce the city to chaos, as it was under the Faer Karan, and then they can move on.”

“Why not simply flee?” Arla asked. “They could have left Samara and we would not have known it. We still do not know their names. They could still leave.”

“They kill often because they need to. It keeps them alive,” Serhan said. “If they went elsewhere they would have to be careful, to get the measure of a new place, and that would take time. It is time that they do not have. This is the limitation of their magic, the evil heart of it. This mass killing will strengthen them, and they will be able to move or stay as they please.”

“How long have they been doing this?” Arla asked.

“What matters is that we stop them.”

“How long?”

Serhan looked at the floor. “The crystal that I examined was hundreds of years old. I imagine the others are similar.”

There was a moment’s silence as they all took this in. Sam thought of the carnage and suffering that was implied. Thousands upon thousands of dead children, and it had been possible because there was no law, because a missing child did not matter to Samara. He vowed to himself that if they survived the night it would no longer be so.

“So it is simple,” Sam said. “You will know where they are, you will stop them and we will kill them.”

Serhan smiled a crooked smile, but there was no humour in it. “Simple, yes,” he said.

A commotion at the door drew their attention, and Ulric appeared. He began to speak, but was pushed aside, and Borbonil entered the room. He fixed his blank white eyes on Serhan. Serhan stood.

“Well?”

“I have failed you,” the shape shifter said.

“How?” Serhan strode across the room. “You knew how vital this was.”

“I regret my failure,” Borbonil said. “But I could not follow them all.”

“They split up?”

“They rode together as far as Samara, and down into that area that is called the Old Town. After that they scattered. I did not know which of them to follow, so I flew higher, and was able to see more, but only three. Six of them I could not follow.”

“And the three?”

“I visited each of them. None was the one that you sought and none knew where he had gone.”

“You are sure of that? Perhaps we should question them again.”

“I regret that it will not be possible,” Borbonil said, and those words at least contained some grim satisfaction. “Anyway, I am certain. I offered wealth, I offered life. Not one of them was able to claim either reward.”

“We can save the King and the council,” Arla said. “As many as can pass through a black door.”

Serhan ignored her. “They are in the old town?” he asked. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

The Mage Lord turned to Sam. “We must search for them,” he said. “They must have a building, a hiding place. Their ritual will probably take some time. We may yet find them and end this.”

“And if you do not?” Arla asked.

“It will be the end of the city, perhaps,” Serhan said. “King, council and all.”

“And you?” It was a direct challenge. Serhan smiled again, the same crooked smile.

“I will survive,” Serhan said. “And one or two others. Do you wish to leave? I can open a door now and you can be safe.”

Arla stared at him. Sam could tell she had not expected this. Everyone in the room waited to see what she would say, but Sam didn’t doubt her. “No,” she said. “I will stay.”

“If we are to search it must be done quickly,” Sam said. His words cut through the tension in the room. He went to the table in the middle and pulled out a map. “It could be anything. These are rich men. They could own a shop, a house, a tavern.”

“It will be empty,” Serhan said. “A deserted house, a closed shop. It will have been empty and locked for some time. The ritual must require preparation and the expectation that they will not be disturbed.”

“Hummel said something,” Arla added. “He said the dead heart of the city.”

They looked at the map. Samara seemed to have no obvious centre. Sam could see the flow of streets running up from the strand, on the river side they bypassed the citadel, the Great House and the ruins of the temple, the three great buildings of the previous age, and then dissolved into the rabbit warren of the old town. It would be somewhere in there, he thought, a building that didn’t stand out, and one that might have a basement.

He put his finger on the map in the heart of the old town.

“Start here and work outwards,” he said. “You know your officers.” He began to call names and assign streets.
e
He knew the old city well enough by now, having lived there a while, and could see each street in his mind’s eye. If they were lucky they would find Delantic’s friends, but there was really too much to search, there were too many places to hide.

The Mage Lord let him organise everything, and that worried him, too. It meant that he had no better ideas.

Towards the end Sam called Arla’s name.

“I’ve nobody,” Arla said. “Talis is dead and Gadilari isn’t here.”

Sam looked up. There were only five left in the room – himself, Arla, Gilan, Diara and the Mage Lord – he didn’t count the Faer Karani, and he couldn’t send Ulric on patrol.

“Where is Gadilari?” he asked. It seemed he hadn’t seen the man for days.

“He came back in the afternoon. He’s still investigating the man who killed the farrier. He thinks there was a witness,” Ulric said.

“On his own?” Arla asked.

“I think he wants revenge for Talis,” Ulric said. “And if anyone can look after himself it’s Gadilari.”

“Can you find him? He’s a good blade and would be of use tonight.”

Ulric shook his head. “I sent a runner to his rooms to wait, but he hasn’t returned, so Gadilari hasn’t returned home.”

Sam turned back to Arla. “You go with Gilan,” Sam said. “Diara’s wounded.”

“I’m going,” Diara said.

Sam looked at her. Diara’s face indicated that an argument would be futile, and waste time they didn’t have. Besides, she was probably still useful with that bow. “All right,” he said. “The three of you together.”

“I’ll go with you, Sam,” the Mage Lord said. “But we need to be somewhere we can be found. I need to deal with these people in person.”

“We’ll have to stay at the centre, then, where the search started. That’s where they’ll report back.”

They left the law house.

It was a beautiful night. What clouds had troubled the evening sky had now departed, and the stars ruled above the faint challenge of the occasional lamp. There was a light breeze blowing from the south. It was warm and brought with it the smell of the ocean and the fish and tar perfume of the strand. The city itself was quiet, and most of the houses dark. It was long past retiring time for sensible folk.

Was it always like this, Sam wondered? Was there always some threat stalking the ignorant citizens of Samara, some shadow darker than the simple night? Probably not, he concluded, but often enough that people like Sam were needed to stand between them and whatever form the threat might take. He hoped that tonight he and the others would be enough. It seemed to him, just at this moment, that the peace of the city, the ordinary workaday lives of the folk who lived here, were impossibly fragile, and it shocked him that none of them knew.

They came to a junction of roads and Gilan, Arla and Diara went one way, Sam and Serhan the other. The Faer Karani had vanished again, almost as soon as they had gone out into the street. Presumably the creature was searching in its own way.

They came to another junction and stopped. This was the starting point that Sam had selected, the random place he had placed his finger. There was a well here, as there was at so many city junctions, and a bench. Sam sat on the bench. Serhan paced, pausing every now and then to stare down one or another of the deserted streets that led to where they waited.