The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (5 page)

After the icefish, which much to her surprise had been quite palatable, Arla left Hekman and went up onto Kettle Lane. It was one of those streets in the old town that had attracted a large number of artisans of the better kind. The people whose shops filled Kettle Lane were not men and women who lived over their shops. They were skilled, prosperous, and expensive.

The bowyer’s shop was at the northern end. It was easy to find. The bowyer had erected a large sign in the shape of a drawn bow above the door so that it could be seen from a distance. Arla hesitated on the doorstep. She wasn’t used to buying bows. At Ocean’s Gate they’d made them, though that hadn’t been a skill she’d picked up herself.

A man appeared in front of her. “You want a bow?”

It was not a particularly polite enquiry, and for a moment she thought about turning away, but Hekman had said this was the best bowyer in town.

“If you have something suitable,” she replied.

The man looked faintly surprised, then he smiled. “You’re an archer,” he said.

Arla shook her head. “Any fool with a bow can call herself an archer.”

“Ah, a guard archer.”

“A lawkeeper,” she corrected him.

His face changed. It changed, she realised, because he was
expecting
a lawkeeper archer. He had been told not only that she was coming, but who she was.

“Please come in,” he said.

She stepped through the door. Her first thought was that she had never seen so many bows in her life. Her second was that there were not many that she would buy.

“A recurve,” she said. “Fifty pound pull, about forty inches. I have a twenty seven inch draw.”

The bowyer nodded. He wandered the length of his back wall, which was thick with bows, and pulled down two. He offered the first to Arla.

She took it. It was unstrung, but it looked like the sort of bow the king might use, or the Mage Lord. If she went wandering round Gulltown with such a thing over her shoulder someone would probably try to steal it, just for the ivory inlay. It felt good, though. She put it to the ground and bent it back with one leg.

She gave it back to the bowyer. “No.”

He smiled and put the bow on the counter. “No,” he said. “I thought not.” He offered her the other bow. This one felt the same, but it was black. Arla had never seen a black bow before. She flexed it, tried the grip in her left hand.

“What’s it made of?” she asked.

“The best materials. Sweetwood and Caler bone. The colour is dye, taken from the juice of the night berry.”

She nodded. “A string.” He gave her one, and she fitted it to the bow, twisting it a dozen times as she fitted it. She played the taut string next to her ear, and then pulled it, drawing the string alongside her cheek with two fingers. She released it.

“A sweet tone,” the bowyer said.

“Arrows.”

The bowyer led her through to a back room, and there were thousands of arrows, different shaft lengths, materials, flights, heads. He picked an arrow off a shelf and offered it to her.

“Not a barb,” she said. “I want a clean head.”

He chose another. It looked about right, so she laid it alongside the bow and drew it back again, squinted down the shaft. “You have unflighted arrows of the same weight and somewhere to shoot?”

“Of course.”

It took another hour to tune to bow. Arla shot over a hundred arrows at the bowyer’s targets, making small adjustments to the string, the arrow rest, the nocking point until she was happy that she could hit anything she wanted. In that hour she grew fond of the bow. It was a little different from her old favourite that had perished in the warehouse fire, but it had advantages. It was a few ounces lighter, and to be honest it was a stronger weapon – more robust.

There was the colour, too. It was the most sinister looking bow she had ever seen, and she chose arrows with black shafts and red flights. It was like shooting fire out of darkness.

Eventually she was satisfied. She unstrung the bow.

“How much?” she asked.

“It’s paid for,” the bowyer said. “Lawkeepers’ account.”

“We have an account?”

“Payment is guaranteed by the council,” he replied.

“Still,” she said. “I want to know how much.”

“Seven gold,” he said. It was a lot. Arla was used to Samara’s coin now, though it had taken a while. In the guard you got what you needed from the guard. Here you had to pay for everything. A copper bought a loaf of bread, three bought an ale, twenty coppers made a silver, three silvers would rent you a room for a week, and twenty silvers made a gold. Seven gold was a lot, but she couldn’t say the bow was overpriced. She’d never bought one before.

“I’ll take it with me,” she said. Arla had expected to have to come back and pay for it later, but this was better. She took a quiver and a wrist guard as well and restrung the bow before she left. It felt good having a bow on her shoulder again. She’d been short of practice recently, so much so that her bow fingers stung a little from an hour of shooting. She needed to find somewhere to practice regularly.

Back at the law house things seemed chaotic. Ulric was sitting in his usual place by the door and a couple of labourers were tearing down one of the walls so that the front room by the entrance was becoming part of the hall. The air was full of dust and one of the labourers was singing a popular song very badly while he worked. She pulled a face at Ulric.

“The chief wants to see you,” Ulric said. “He’s in the big room with Gilan.”

She had to be told where the ‘big room’ was. When she found it she saw that Hekman and Gilan weren’t alone. There were several other men and women with them. Recruiting was going well, she guessed.

Hekman saw her come in. “You took your time,” he said, but there was no sting to it because he smiled.

Arla took the bow from her shoulder. “Worth every minute,” she said.

Hekman turned back to the others. “For those of you who don’t know her, Arla is one of our officers. Talis and Gadilari will be hers. Right, that’s all. Arla, you can come through to my room and I’ll tell you what I told the others.”

She followed him out of the room. In a few turns they came to Hekman’s sparse office. He sat in one of the chairs. Arla sat in the other.

“Officer?”

“Yes. That’s what we’ll call it. Ulric and I have settled on ranks, and wages. It’s like this – bottom rank is lawkeeper, paid one gold a week. Next up is officer, that’s you, paid two gold a week – you’ll have two lawkeepers to command. Above that we’re not sure yet, but I think there will be a deputy in charge of each law house, and Ulric thinks we’ll need a rank between officer and deputy.”

“Two gold?” It was more than she had expected. She could live quite well on that. “That seems fair.” In fact she hadn’t really looked for rank – or not so soon. She expected to have to prove herself first.

“Now to business.” Hekman looked grave, and when he explained to her what Gilan had got from the death men she understood why – hundreds of children over decades. It was unimaginable.

“Ulric has discovered who owns the warehouse that burnt,” Hekman said. “In the morning we will wait to see what Ella Saine tells us, and then speak with the owner.”

“You think the owner is the killer?”

“It is possible, but the warehouse has not been used for its proper purpose for twenty-five years. Anyone could have used it. The man who owned it back then is dead, and his son inherited it seven years ago. I don’t think he even went to look at it.”

“But we don’t know that.”

“True, and we will keep him in mind, though I cannot see what the trading house of Tarquin would gain by such murder. It is their building, or was. I will ask Ella Saine what she knows of them in the morning. She knows most of the trading houses through her father.”

“I’ll be here,” Arla said.

Their business finished, Arla went back to the front of the law house and found Ulric still behind his table, watching the labourers tidying up the mess they’d made. It seemed that the door of the law house now gave onto a large open room with a corridor leading back into the rest of the building. Ulric had lined up a couple of chairs.

“Arla,” the fat man said. “Your people are waiting for you in the big room.”

“My people?”

“Talis and Gadilari.”

Arla didn’t really want to do this now. She was tired. Her back and arm were starting to hurt again. But this was duty, and she understood duty. “Tell me something about them,” she said.

“Talis is an archer, originally from White Rock, which is interesting. We don’t get many from White Rock. The Mage Lord’s people tend to stay with him. She’s young. Can’t say how good she is with a bow. Gadilari was a merchant guard. Served two different trading houses before joining us. Swordsman, so he says. Gilan offered to test him tomorrow if you like – if we have time. He’s older, maybe thirty-five summers. That’s about all I can tell you.”

“It’s something,” she said. She left Ulric watching the labourers and walked back through the irregular maze of the law house until she found the big room again. They were waiting for her, and they stood when she entered the room.

Talis was very young – no more than eighteen, Arla guessed. She looked nervous. She was carrying a bow, and Arla examined it briefly. It was a typical northern weapon, effective enough, but not as versatile as the black recurve. Talis was wearing her leathers on her wrist, and they looked suitably worn, scuffed a thousand times by a bowstring.

Gadilari looked more confident, but that could simply be age. He wore a long sword, a typical swordsman’s weapon, but he was dressed in cloth. There wasn’t a trace of armour or leather. That wasn’t typical. Arla preferred a short blade. If a man was far enough away that she needed a long pig sticker like that she figured she could put an arrow in him

“Your sword,” she said, and held out her hand.

Gadilari hesitated, which she took as a good sign. He wasn’t used to being without a blade. He drew it smoothly and offered it hilt first. Arla inspected the blade, but didn’t take it. It was good steel, and had seen some use, but it looked cared for. She looked at Gadilari himself.

“You’re not Samaran,” she said.

He shrugged. “Not originally,” he said. Arla waited. “East,” he added. “A town called Sarinka.”

“And how good are you with that blade?”

Gadilari thought about his answer for a moment. “Better than average,” he said.

That was good. Arla liked that. It said enough without saying too much. She turned to Talis.

“White Rock,” she said.

Talis nodded. “Two years,” she said. “I wanted to see the south. That’s why I left. Everybody asks.”

“And did you know the Mage Lord well?”

“He spoke to me twice, directly,” Talis said.

“And what did he say?”

Talis flushed. “The first time he asked me to pass the wine,” she said. “The second he said: ‘do you think you can put an arrow in that bastard’s eye?’.”

“And could you?”

“Yes.”

That, too, was a good enough reply. Arla decided that she liked her two lawkeepers, but there were other skills they might need in this line of work, and she was unsure that she possessed them herself. One of these was talking to people, getting them to talk to her, and she knew she had a tendency to be abrupt.

“Go home,” she said. “Be back here at dawn ready to work.”

They left. Arla stayed in the big room for a moment. Home. Home was a rather shabby room on the unfashionable side of the old town, about as far away from the harbour and Morningside as you could get. She didn’t like it, but it was all she had been able to afford. Now she could get somewhere better, somewhere with a view that didn’t smell like Gulltown.

She slung her bow and winced. Another bottle of the physic’s potion would be useful about now, but she wouldn’t see her again until the morning.

Ella spent the evening in her father’s library. It was, without question, the finest library in Samara. The reason for this was simple. The trading house of Saine had effectively stolen a great number of books and paintings from the temple after the fall of the old kings. They had, naturally, claimed to have saved them. The temple had burned down, and what had not been taken had been lost. It was her father’s wish to return the books to the city, but until there was a suitable building they lived on in his private library.

Tarlyn Saine and his predecessors had cared for the books, but age will tell on parchment and ink. Many had been copied and re-bound. Many had not. Ella herself had copied more than a dozen volumes. Her penmanship was good, and she enjoyed the task, and the quiet hours spent among the ancient pages. She had learned the old tongue, partly taught, partly deciphered herself, in order to better understand what she wrote, and her mind was now filled with ancient words.

It took her a couple of hours to find the book.

Each time she came to copy a new work she looked at many and chose one. This book was one that she had rejected, placed back on the shelf where it was slowly crumbling to dust. It had not seemed important, or indeed pleasant.

She took the book carefully from its shelf and placed it on a table where it lay on a white silk cloth like a wealthy merchant on his death bed. The title had once been bold, marked out in gold on the black leather cover, but now there were only flecks of the precious metal, and it was written in black on black.

Ella held a candle behind the book and bent down so that she could see the rise and fall of the cover by the light of the flame. The words were still there.

The Paths of Low Magick.

She opened the book. She had done this before, and again it opened on the page she had glimpsed months ago, and there lay the symbols, or two of them at least, that had been on Sam’s bit of paper. This was the right book, her memory had not played her false.

She read the page. It seemed to be describing the symbols – a guide to their meaning and divination. The ‘∩’ symbol headed the page.

House. Protection. Safety. Defence. Prison.

Beneath that lay ‘O’ and to Ella’s eyes it looked like a simple character, but it was defined as time, eternity, unending, continuity, more properly a snake swallowing its own tail.

That was all on this page. She took a thin-bladed knife that she used for such work and very gently inserted it as close to the leather cover as she could. She teased the pages apart, blowing gently at the paper ends.

She eased the pages over and lay the book open at this new place. It was a title page, and despite her care it seemed damaged. Many words were unreadable.

‘The Paths of Low Magick.

‘Their practice and workings forbidden by …

‘…these signs that you may know them…

‘Death. The cutting of the head from the body…

‘…vigilance against evil…’

And that was all. About two thirds of the words had simply faded, or somehow been absorbed by the black leather cover. Many things were clear from this, however. She was right in thinking that the symbols related to magic, though they seemed to be linked to a practice that was outlawed, even back before the Faer Karan. It was also clear that the book was beyond recovery. She could not read it if it was in this state. It was forever lost.

Nevertheless, she felt that she must do what she could, and so she fetched a pile of clean paper and a pen and began to copy out what little remained. When each page was finished she turned the next as best she could with knife, silk and air, and began again. No page was complete, and some had gone so completely that she could not discern a single word, but she persevered long into the night. When her candle failed she lit another. She refilled the lamps twice.

After a while she stopped reading the words and concentrated on the letters. The words themselves were disturbing. It was like seeing something in half light, shadows and bits of a silhouette. What the book described was evil. It involved the killing of men women and children in terrible ways, obscene practices with dead bodies, the torture of animals. That much she could glean, but not the purpose. The book was true to the fragments on its title page. It did not seem at all concerned with how to do these things, but rather the ways in which they could be found out.

She stopped. There was a picture, almost whole. It showed a human head viewed from the side and the front. It showed a needle. There was a word that she had never seen before: Teroganacy. She stared at the picture for some time before she copied it. It was so close to what Sam had described. The coincidence filled her with a sense of dread, and at the same time a sense of achievement. She had found something that would help, a clue, an arrow to point the way. But if that was true then the knowledge forbidden so long ago had somehow survived, and there was magic involved.

Sam and his men had swords and bows and a great deal of courage, but she had seen what magic could do at the Battle of Samara Plain, and those images were still fresh. She had seen one man stand against two thousand, and the two thousand had never had a chance. Until that day she had thought of Cal Serhan, the Mage Lord, as a man. After the battle that illusion had been shredded, and yet he remained well intentioned. He had not conquered Samara, but saved it. He did not want the crown, he did not collect taxes, he did not expect the people to obey him except on one matter – there must be no war. He had instead gone back to White Rock and ruled there as the Faer Karani Gerique had done before him.

She put the book aside, and as the first hint of dawn coloured the sky over her head she wrote a letter.

She wondered how long it would take to reach White Rock and the Mage Lord’s hand.