The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (9 page)

Sam was back in the law house long before night fell. He had done what he could for Arla and her cause would not be served by him hanging about the Great House or the citadel. He had a killer to catch.

He waited.

To pass the time he went out into the yard and examined the cage he had brought back from the river. It was covered in mud, blackened by the fire and twisted out of shape by the violence of the warehouse’s demise. He drew a bucket of water from the well and set about cleaning the thing.

It was certainly unlike anything he had seen before. Arla had described it as a cage, and it was clearly that. The front and back were joined by a series of eight hinges. Three of them were torn apart and the rest were locked solid, but the design was clear enough. The cage had bars that went across where hands and feet would go, bars that would hold the limbs in place. There was even a mechanism for adjusting them. The head was not held, but Sam guessed that straps had been used and the straps had burned away.

The cage was a custom-made device, moderately complex to build, and designed for one simple purpose – holding a child. No adult could have fitted in the thing. You would have to be less than five feet tall – quite a lot less.

Sam looked for a maker’s mark. The cage would have been put together by a smith, and a smith usually put his mark on a piece of work as substantial as this. He was hoping that the smith had built it in relative innocence, not knowing the sinister purpose for which it was intended, though it was hard to image any purpose for such a device that was not sinister.

He ran his hands across every flat surface, but there was no mark. That itself could be a clue. The killer could be a smith. Even if not, there were only about two hundred smiths in the city, and it might be a productive strategy to speak to all of them. It would take time, of course, but surely nobody could forget creating such a piece?

He went back into the law house and collected a cup of hot jaro from the cook Ulric had hired. It was sweetened with honey the way he liked it and enlivened with some Pekkish spice. He took it back to his room and sat for a while thinking on all that had happened in the last few days. Dusk was approaching, and he was impatient to begin laying his trap. He found that he couldn’t sit for long, so he got up and walked the empty corridors of the law house. He had sent them all away apart from Ulric and the cook. There were seven of them, and of course the two guards on loan from Ocean’s Gate who would not knowingly be part of the trap.

He walked into the big room. Empty chairs clustered around the bare table. It looked a naked and forlorn space without the lawkeepers to fill it.

He drifted on, eventually coming to the newly enlarged front hall where Ulric was sitting behind his counter. He put down the paper he was reading when he saw Sam.

“Chief?”

“Bored,” Sam said. “Worried.”

Ulric nodded. Sam noticed that Arla’s bow was lying on the desk. Ulric had unstrung it and had been in the process of oiling the bow string. He saw Sam looking at the bow.

“A fine weapon,” he said. “Needs to be cared for.”

“She’ll be back,” Sam said.

Ulric nodded. “More coming in tomorrow,” he said. “More for the job. Another five.”

“Where do you find them?” Sam was genuinely curious. He’d put it about that he was recruiting, but there had been little response. Ulric made people appear out of nowhere, and they were all of good quality, men and women with skills and more than the average common sense.

“You forget, Chief,” his mouth quirked into a smile. “I know everybody.”

Sam sipped his jaro. It was beginning to cool. “I’ll be out all morning,” he said.

“Of course.” Ulric knew about the plan, the trap. “They’re coming in the afternoon.”

Outside the sky was darkening. Sam went back to his office. He stopped in the kitchen on the way back and had his cup filled again. There was a map on his desk. Ulric had found it for him earlier in the day. He had no idea how Ulric managed to do so much while never seeming to move from the front desk.

He opened the map. It showed the streets of Samara, the important buildings, the river, the sea. It even showed the old dock in Gulltown where the warehouse had been. He studied the area. More than a dozen streets, alleys and lanes led from the waterside into the warren that was Gulltown’s heart. Some were too narrow for a cart to pass, and some of them twisted their way through the buildings so that there was no stretch straight for more than fifty paces. It was no surprise, looking at this, that Findaran had been unable to catch their watcher.

He took the map into the big room and laid it on the table there. Sam could not go with his men. He must wait here until morning, and he worried about that. He would have felt better if Arla had been with them. Her level head would have been an asset.

“Am I the first?” It was Gilan. Sam looked at the window and was surprised to see the night outside. The big room was lit with lamps, and somehow he hadn’t noticed them. Ulric must have lit them before Sam came into the room.

“The first,” Sam confirmed.

But in minutes they were all there, and Sam could feel a keen edge to the atmosphere. They wanted this.

Sam told them the plan. He pointed to the map and gave each of them instructions. It was clear enough in his head what each man and woman had to do, but he doubted his ability to convey it to the others, so he made them repeat it back to him, to tell him what they were supposed to do. When he was satisfied he sent them out into the night to prepare themselves and eventually he was alone again.

It was a simple plan and it might come to nothing. An idiot would fall for it, or perhaps someone who thought they were cleverer than they really were. It was the same thing, really. But if there was even the faintest chance that it would work they had to try it.

Ulric’s head appeared around the door.

“Anything to eat, Chief?” he asked.

Sam shook his head.

“You should eat. It’s going to be a long night and there’s a stew. Even I can’t eat it all, and the cook’s going home.”

A long night. “All right,” Sam said. “I’ll join you.”

The cook had apparently been waiting behind Ulric, because he appeared a moment later with two large, steaming bowls of food. Sam suspected a benign plot, but the food smelled good, very good, and he realised he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“You should try to sleep,” Ulric said as they ate. “You’ll need to be sharp.”

“Not me,” Sam said. “I just need to be there.”

*

He had slept, in the end. The meal was heavy and dragged him down into a welcome oblivion and he awoke with the dawn and the sound of a sparrow bleating outside his window. He’d slept in one of the upstairs rooms. He’d also slept remarkably well.

Sam dressed and washed, then went downstairs. Ulric was there and there was a welcome smell coming from the kitchen.

“Ulric?”

“Chief?”

“Whatever you put in my food last night, don’t do it again.”

Ulric stopped eating his breakfast, a fork half way to his mouth. His expression was carefully neutral.

“Didn’t you sleep well?”

“Like a labouring man without a worry in the world,” Sam said. “First time in years. It was unnerving.”

“Right,” Ulric said.

“I’m serious, Ulric. Don’t do it again.” He shrugged. “At least ask me first.”

“Will do, Chief,” the fat man said, and began eating again.

“What is that?” Sam asked, pointing at the plate.

“Eggs.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“It’s got mushrooms in it, and spices, and other things that I don’t remember.”

“And the leaves?”

“Do you want to try it?” Ulric offered his plate.

Sam took a careful forkful and put it in his mouth. He had no idea what the cook had done with it, but it didn’t taste like eggs. It was better.

“Is there any more of it?”

Ulric pointed to the kitchen.

Sam ate. Maybe it was what Ulric had slipped him the night before, but he was hungry. There was no hurry. He knew that it would be an hour before Donnal and Findaran arrived and he needed them. There was no rushing this.

He drank three cups of jaro, and on top of a good night’s sleep he began to feel the tension building up in his muscles. He had to flex his fingers to keep them loose, and he rolled his shoulders to ease them.

The two guards turned up and he let them sit for a while, eat something, have a cup or two of jaro before he spoke.

“We’re to Gulltown again,” he said. “I’ll harness the wagon.”

Donnal shook his head. “Surely there’s nothing left to find in the mud?”

“Maybe, maybe not, but I’m going to have another look.”

He left them to their preparations and went out back into the yard. He hitched up the horse and climbed onto the wagon. His hands felt clumsy on the reins. He took a couple of deep breaths and flicked the wagon forwards. Donnal and Findaran were waiting round the front and fell in behind him as he drove towards the bridge.

He let the horse walk at its own pace. Every now and then he flicked the reins to keep it moving but to all appearances their progress was leisurely, unhurried. Sam wanted to gallop. He wanted to be in Gulltown. He wanted to see if this was going to work - and at the same time he was thinking of Arla. Her day of grace would expire some time this afternoon and if the king was determined to kill her then he would. There was nothing that Sam could do to stop him other than what he had already done and said.

He had not been bluffing. If the king killed Arla he would shut down the lawkeepers and he would do it for the reasons he had stated. One law. The law applied. It didn’t matter who you were or how much money you had there was only one law. He was reasonably confident that any trial would result in her release.

They crossed the bridge and turned south into Gulltown.

Sam watched the houses along the river road. Dilapidation was the rule here. Windows were boarded, slates missing from roofs, and nothing had been painted for decades. The smell of poverty, an unpleasant cocktail of human waste and rotting vegetation, pervaded the place. There were a few people in the street, but this was a quiet part of town. People lived here, but nobody worked on the river any more. It was a good place to do things that you wanted to go unnoticed.

They arrived at the burned out dock.

Sam took the knotted rope out of the wagon and tied it to the axle again. He threw it over the side and sent the spade after it. He climbed down onto the mud. This time he started with a grid, making it bigger than the last one, marking the lines with his knife. Occasionally he glanced up at the sea wall, looking for a sign of the watcher.

He began to dig. It was important that it looked genuine, so he dug down at least a foot in each grid square, running his knife through the mud and sand to see if anything solid was there. He found a bent spoon, a rusted piece of iron that could have been anything, an old wheel rim, or part of one.

Sam had dug his way through twelve squares when the watcher appeared. He had stood up to ease his lower back, digging his fists into the muscle, and there he was, a lone figure standing about a hundred paces down the road. Sam looked down quickly. He turned his back on the figure and glanced across at Donnal and Findaran. They were both visible.

“Donnal, there’s a white cloth in the back of the wagon. Bring it over, will you?”

The guardsman stood up and did as he was told. The cloth was large, and Sam had made sure that it was untidily piled so that as Donnal struggled to gather it, it could be clearly seen up and down the street. That was the signal.

Sam watched him bring the cloth over. When he stood on the edge by the rope Sam waved him back.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I’m coming up.”

He was two thirds of the way up the rope when he heard the sound of steel on steel. The guards’ heads snapped round at the noise. Sam heaved himself over the lip of the sea wall and stood, panting, looking towards the watcher.

Gilan had reached him first. He could tell it was Gilan by his size. He was a head taller than the watcher, and now they were fighting. Sam wasn’t a fighter. He was less use with a sword than he was with a bow, and he couldn’t shoot a barn door five times out of ten, but he knew talent when he saw it, and Gilan was good, even for a guardsman, but watching the fight he could see that Gilan was losing.

The other lawkeepers had broken cover and were running to Gilan’s aid.

The guards looked at Sam.

“Go,” he said, and Donnal and Findaran drew their blades. They, too, ran towards Gilan and the watcher.

It was only seconds - ten or fifteen seconds between Gilan facing the watcher and the next lawkeeper arriving. It was Gadilari. Sam saw the big man go down and the watcher turn to face the new threat. But Gadilari was a different prospect. Swords flashed and the watcher stepped back. A couple more passes and it was the watcher who fell.

Sam was running, too, but he was the last to arrive.

Gilan was cut, but he wasn’t dead. The watcher’s sword had taken him in the left shoulder, and even now the other lawkeepers were stripping off his shirt and binding the wound. It would require a physic, but Sam didn’t think him in any danger.