The Seer - eARC (37 page)

In their youth, Innel and his brother had slipped in among those wagering to hone their understanding of the process. They had gotten good return for a time, and then Mulack had reported them to the king, and they had been instructed to stop.

For a time after the coronation, executions had fallen off and the in-city holding dungeons had swollen to capacity. Innel had given Putar a position in the complicated hierarchy of the execution team and told them to clear it out. Now Yarpin’s criminal population was cautious again.

Innel considered Tierda, still standing silently in front of them. When her reports by messenger bird were not encouraging, then were not detailed, he had sent for her. Disruptive, he knew, to take her away from the conflict. “I would have thought three months and four companies enough to quell the trouble at Sinetel. What is the problem, Colonel?”

A tense exhale. “Ser, the townspeople hide in the woods, picking us off as we approach. They know the mountains better than we do.”

He wanted to tell her this was a weak excuse, that other mining villages along the northern range were watching, slowing the ore they owed the capital city. That every month this continued, the crown looked increasingly impotent. “You must end this treasonous resistance, Colonel.”

“Yes, ser.” From her tone and expression, he could tell there was something else she didn’t want to say.

“Speak.”

“Not all those hiding in the woods are townspeople,” she said reluctantly. “Some are ours.”

“Ours? What do you mean?”

“Deserters, ser.”

Innel scowled. “How many?”

“Perhaps—five in a hundred, ser.”

At this Innel stood. “That many?”

“Yes, Lord Commander. I—ah. I think they may be aiding the insurgents, from some of the”—she hesitated. “Arrows we are now facing. Our arrows.”

Tierda, he reminded himself, had a fine grasp of tactics and a fast eye. Her troops respected her. She was far from incompetent.

“Bring them back for me, Colonel. I want the deserters there.” He pointed out the window.

She followed his look. “I assure you, ser, I’ve done everything I can. I—”

“I know. Enough.”

There must be a way to encourage the soldiers to continue to fight, beyond the threat of death.

“Settler’s rights to the soldiers if this is won,” he said. “Provisional land grants, certified only after they produce at least two heirs who have come of age in their homes.” Land and children tended to effectively turn soldiers into loyal citizens, keeping them where they were put. Better to lose soldiers to the countryside than to the rebels.

“Yes, ser.”

“Land and children,” he muttered. “Your child. He now lives with your sister’s family.”

She paled, swallowed. He knew the trouble she had gotten into under Lason, having the boy at her high rank.

“He belongs to my sister’s family now,” she said, keeping her look distant.

“A mistake anyone could have made,” he said, watching her face. “Was it? A mistake?”

She focused on him, clearly considering what might be the prudent answer. She exhaled. “No, ser, it was not.”

Good; she had spoken directly, even under this duress. She didn’t know, and he wouldn’t tell her, but this had been his test of keeping her rank, that she would speak truthfully to him.

“I’m not Lason,” he said. “I don’t care if you drink or smoke or make babies. I care that you win. If your command suffers for any reason, I’ll take it from you. If it’s a child, I’ll feed it to the royal pigs. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, her lips twitching in a near-smile, then sobering, as if she had suddenly decided he was not joking at all.

Good. Now for the reassurance.

“Some people think women make better commanders. What do you think, Colonel?”

“Some do, ser.”

“Well said. If it were up to me, every soldier, man or woman, would bear at least one brat before taking a command position. The pain you go through makes you better equipped to understand the necessities of battle.”

“I’d have to agree with that, ser.”

“And less hesitant to share pain. On your way back to Sinetel, go through the other mining villages. Make sure they know the price for disobeying the queen’s orders. Examples should be clear and easy to understand, and, like the broken toes, should not prevent them from working the mines. We must keep the ore flowing.”

“Yes, ser.”

“I will expect to hear of your successes soon.”

She bowed her head and left, looking in equal measures relieved and troubled.

Innel sat back in his chair, taking a long look at the young man who stood at attention on the other side of his desk. He thought of his mother, then of Cahlen, and found himself oddly at a loss as to what he might say.

The man was twitching, struggling to hold still. Nervous. More nervous than surprised.

“Selamu, is it? Selamu al Garaya, yes?”

“Yes, ser.”

Innel was fiddling with Pohut’s arrowhead. If his brother had still been alive, if they had come to power together as they should have, as they had planned to, he had no doubt Pohut would be the one to handle this now. What would his brother have said?

“How long have you been sleeping with my sister?” he demanded.

Not that, he was sure, as soon as the words left his mouth.

“Ser.” The man’s mouth moved silently for a moment, and he gulped as if he did not have enough air. “Some three months, ser.” It came out a croaking sound.

“And what advantages do you think this gains you?”

“Ser Lord Commander?”

“Don’t fence with me. I’ll win. No delay, either. Speak.”

Selamu’s eyes went as wide as they could go, and he swallowed over and over.

Innel sighed with frustration. Now he had terrified the man into silence. He looked at the arrowhead, put it on the table, clicked it against the wood while he considered. “Answer,” he said, trying for a gentler tone, suspecting he was not succeeding.

“She’s beautiful, ser.”

“Cahlen,” Innel said, not quite a question. “My sister? What are you attempting here? What do you hope to acquire in this?”

“Acquire, ser?”

Innel had already looked into this man’s records. Reliable. Obedient. No mention of being simple-minded or addled. “Tell me what it is you want. Say it slowly. Breathe.”

The man stuttered, began to tremble violently. “Ser. I—nothing. She is. I only. Just to—”

“
What
?”

“Continue.”

Continue?

The man blushed deeply, which Innel found curious and yet somewhat reassuring; it was far harder to pretend to blush than it was to lie.

“You are saying that you
like
her?” he asked, finally coming to the only remaining conclusion.

At this the man nodded eagerly.

Innel stood, came out from behind his desk. Selamu visibly tensed as Innel slowly circled him. Average height, without visible scars, his shoulders square. He seemed healthy enough and to all appearances unexceptionally average.

Cahlen?

When Innel had finished his inspection, he sat on the edge of his desk. Sweat was now beading on Selamu’s brow, trickling down his face. The vein in his neck was pulsing fast. “Did you think to keep this secret?”

In a whisper, Selamu replied: “We tried, Lord Commander.”

“You’re a fool.”

“Yes, ser.”

Another long silence as Innel tried to imagine his sister having sex, with anyone, let alone this man, and failed. He pushed the image away. “Don’t for a moment think this gives you any advantage in your unit, in your barracks, or even so much as an extra crumb of bread with your meal.”

“No, ser.”

“And don’t be clumsy.”

“No, ser. Yes, ser.”

Innel drummed his fingers on his desk. “Did you have an anknapa when you came of age?”

“No, ser. We were too poor.”

“I will send one to you.”

“Yes, ser.”

“You will study. With devotion.”

“Yes, ser.”

Innel had no idea what else to say. “Go.”

The man saluted and then fled, his relief obvious.

Innel stood in the toilet room of the Frosted Rose, which smelled far worse than he recalled. “You do not have her.”

“Lord Commander, it might be best if I resign this commission.”

Innel had been thinking something similar. But now, hearing the words, he found himself not much liking the idea. The fact remained that Tayre was the only one of his many hires who had even reported back to him. “Why do you suggest this?”

“I have been seeking your quarry for over two years now. Perhaps someone else might do better. I will return your souvers to you and go on my way. All you need do is say you wish the contract over.”

“No.” That Innel would not say. Not yet. “How is it that you have lost them now—how many times?”

“Oh, I know where they are. They are in Munasee.”

“What? Then why are you here? Why does she still breathe?”

“Munasee is a crowded city, Lord Commander, with an abundance of places to hide, and she has gained some new sophistication in her evasions.”

“So you can’t catch her and you can’t kill her? Perhaps you need help.”

A laugh. “I’ve seen your help, ser. They make more rumors than they follow, create more trails than they uncover. I’ve had to kill some of them to clear my way. I assure you, ser, when I need help, I’ll hire it myself.”

Innel wondered how much coin he’d wasted on searchers who were now dead by this man’s hand. “The cost you’ll pass onto me, of course.”

A single syllable that might have been tamped-down amusement. “You have a mage. All the help I could possibly hire would cost less than that one bit of trouble.”

It was hard to argue with that. Tayre’s expenses were small beside what Maris was costing him, who in these last three seasons had found nothing.

Maybe she was the one who needed help. Now that he had his hands in the treasury, that was an option. He put the thought aside for later.

“Lord Commander, if you really want this girl, we must change our tactics.”

“Oh, we must, must we?” Innel’s could hear the strain in his own voice.

“Yes. I believe that we can approach her directly, if we give her nothing to be wary of.”

“Explain your meaning.”

“Allow me to offer her a contract with the crown. To give her the monarchy’s protection. This will assure that there is no threat for her to foresee.”

Innel made a doubtful sound. “A contract to . . . ?”

“To advise you, ser. Is that not what you want her for? But for it to work, there must truly be no danger to her or her family.”

“By which you mean . . . ?”

“You must genuinely forgo your goal of killing her or harming her in any way. You must change your intention.”

Innel imagined the girl and her sister and nephew in the guest wing of the palace. He could explain that they were cousins of his, targets for kidnapping, and he had brought them close to protect them. It wasn’t even that far from the truth.

“To secure her under contract . . . that would be acceptable.”

“I might be able to improve her impression of such an offer by making sure that what she and her sister are doing to make money isn’t enough. See to it that her rent is raised. Arrange to keep her wages low. To live in Munasee is already expensive; this could make her more desperate.”

“Won’t she foresee this as well?”

“I doubt it. She foresees danger when it is imminent, a skill that is improving daily as the attempts on her life by various hounds give her ample practice.”

Innel wondered how many of the hounds after her were working for someone else. Or, having started in Innel’s employ, had figured out what she was and were now pursuing her for their own ends with no intention of bringing her to him. Tayre, at least, kept coming back.

As if reading his mind, Tayre continued: “They won’t catch her by force any better than I have, Commander. Their efforts might even work in our favor—frequent threats will make her more willing to come under your protection. Indeed, a few additional attempts on her life prior to presenting your offer might be useful. I can arrange those.”

Innel considered the proposal for a long moment. “All right. Go ahead and bait the trap. If you can get her under contract I will put aside my passion for having her head in favor of having her well in hand.”

Chapter Nineteen

Amarta woke with the sun’s first light, crawling out from under the blankets on the floor of their one-room apartment, shivering in the morning chill. She put on one layer, then wrapped a wide strap across her waist, crossing it around her breasts, then back again, tying it tight.

Dirina struggled to sit up on her side of the cot, where Pas was still sleeping. For a moment her sister simply sat there unmoving in the dawn light through the small, high, shuttered window, like one of the sea-sprite statues on the white terraces of Munasee’s governor’s mansion that spanned the great canal.

Amarta paused a moment. Dirina was beautiful, she realized. Beautiful and so sad.

No surprise, there, though. If Amarta let herself, she had plenty to be sorrowful about, too. At least Dirina didn’t have to entertain men anymore to keep them fed. She should be happy enough about that, but she was not.

Grieving Kusan. Grieving Kosal.

Amarta had no sympathy for either. They had both lost Kusan, had both lost another place they might in time have called home and people who had made the mistake of caring for them.

Like Nidem.

As for Kosal—at least her sister had had such sweetness for a time. What had Amarta had? A few kisses, painful when she forgot to keep them from memory.

Amarta turned away to finish dressing. Dirina pulled on her clothes and set about to mix hot water with the fats and oats and farrow that made up most of their meals.

“You out all day, again?” Dirina asked.

Amarta pulled on another layer against the spring chill, then another on top of that to bulk out her stomach. She’d cut her hair short again, and while it was harder to seem a boy as she grew—even her face was changing now—with a hood and downcast look and the right movements she could fool people for a few moments. In this city thick with people like grass in a meadow, a moment was often all it took.

“Yes.”

In truth it was only maybe, but she’d discovered that uncertainty meant Dirina was more likely to argue, and she didn’t have time for it, not with Magrit looking to give someone the messages to deliver and others who would take them if Amarta were not first. She now made more coin as a courier than Dirina had ever from going with men. She felt rich when she was paid, so rich. But that feeling ended at the market. How could everything here cost so much?

“Ama,” her sister said quietly, as if reading her thoughts, “I can make money for us, too.”

Amarta pushed aside her sudden flush of anger, instead looked down into the warm mash that her sister had handed her. She had as little desire for it as she did for this conversation. She mixed the mash with her fingers, as if that might help, scooped it out, pasted it on her tongue, swallowed before she could taste.

It eased hunger, she told herself sternly. They had eaten far worse and far less.

But they had also eaten better and enough, and it was too easy to remember those times.

No. Life was about leaving the warm places with food and people you liked so much, so that you could protect them from what was following you. There was no sense in lamenting what could not be avoided. She put more of the mash into her mouth.

“Ama, I can—”

“I heard you the first time,” she snapped.

Her sister gave her an angry look. “Then—”

“You are not going with the men. Never again. It’s not safe.”

She remembered, from their first night in Munasee, Dirina’s swollen face, purple eye, how she hunched over. Dirina had left Amarta and Pas in a field outside the city to make coin the fastest way she knew how. Instead she’d come back badly beaten, told she couldn’t do that sort of thing, not here, not without permission, and she wasn’t getting that without paying for it. They’d hit her hard and repeatedly to make sure she wouldn’t forget.

Dirina refused to cry that night, so Amarta cried for her.

It would not happen again, Amarta had decided, furious with herself for letting this occur. Late that night while Dirina slept fitfully, curled around Pas, Amarta crept into the streets of Munasee, found a lamplit circle of women and dice, and put down the last of the nals they owned, using foresight to predict, narrowing her focus to that one thing, that turning cube and its symbols. They must eat, she told vision fiercely, willing it to listen, to behave, to deliver.

And it did; she correctly named each roll. On the third roll the women were surprised. By the tenth, they were outraged. They grabbed for her. Vision warned her, barely in time. She’d had to drop all the coins to get away.

From this she learned it was not enough to know how the dice would roll or even to know the game rules. She also had to know the people rules.

As dawn lightened the sky that agonizing morning, thin red clouds banding the sky like bloodied blades, Amarta walked the streets of this strange and terrifying city crammed with people, despair and hunger heavy on her, demanding that vision find a way to feed her.

The city was overwhelming. She had not realized how big Munasee would be, how many streets and tall buildings that blotted out the sky, more people than she had ever seen at one time, every direction a crush, the noise even at dawn near deafening. Future flashes were many and contradictory, so jumbled she had to push them away just to think.

She walked the streets, looking for answers, propelled by the anger at what had happened to her sister and the gnawing hunger in her stomach.

Between guesswork and flashes not much clearer than the dirt-caked stones beneath her feet, she stepped into a tiny storefront. There a trader named Magrit eyed her suspiciously but with hope; she needed a message delivered uptown to something called the third district and her messenger had not shown yet. It had not been easy to convince the trader to let a girl she didn’t know take a message for her, and even harder to accomplish it in this huge city of buildings and canals and bridges.

It had taken all day, but she had done it, and when she returned to Dirina, furious and wretched with worry for her, she had brought both food and money.

It had been months since then and Dirina was still not happy about it. “What you do, Ama, it’s not safe, either.”

Again, this discussion?

“I can see the future, Dirina. I am protected.”

An overstatement, to be sure. Since they had come to Munasee, Amarta had reached a sort of truce with her foresight, one that kept her free and alive, though sometimes not by much.

It seemed she had to wait until nearly the last possible moment to slip between the confusing chaos of too many futures and the clarity of immediate action. Vision had kept its side of the bargain, though: she was still alive.

So many people, so many possibilities. That was why they had come to Munasee in the first place, to lose themselves among great crowds. To hide from the hunter. Like a drop of water in the ocean.

“Yes, Ama, but—”

“I’m safer on the streets in the middle of the night than you are in broad daylight,” she said. “Get fixed with it, Diri: I go out and work. You and Pas stay here.”

Pas was awake now, sitting up, looking from one of them to the other, displeased. Dirina handed him a bowl of mash, which he regarded with the same expression.

“Since when do you decide what I do?”

“Since I started bringing back coin.”

Dirina was silent for a moment. Then, looking away, with an almost apologetic whisper, as if she were somehow to blame: “It’s not enough, though, is it?”

It was not. Some days Amarta returned to their rented room with only nals in hand, having spent the rest on some tantalizing bit of food after going hungry all day running the city. Each time she resolved to save some for Dirina and Pas, but hunger somehow kept putting it all into her own mouth.

“I’ll bring back more.” She sat on the floor, pulled on her turnshoes, now tight again.

A pause. “When?”

She’d put it off, asking Magrit for a larger portion of the delivery fee. Watching the trader bargain with merchants, she had learned that no price was ever fixed, that the first offer was never the best, but even so, every time she decided to ask, she changed her mind.

Magrit might say no. Might decide Amarta was too much trouble. Then what would they do for rent and food?

“Today,” she said, willing it to be true.

“Those are tight on you.”

“Leave off, Diri—I’m fine.”

They were a long way from being able to afford new shoes. Everything cost so much, from rent to food. Rumors of shortages from the farms, freighters coming in light—everywhere she looked, what would have seemed a fortune in Botaros was a pittance.

At least it hadn’t snowed their first winter here. The ocean, a day west, kept the air warm, people said. Then they said it was the canals, or the stones in the ground. But when the winds blew from the eastern, white-topped mountains, and snaked through Amarta’s layers, she wondered if that was the sort of thing people said to make themselves believe they were warm when they really weren’t. Like pretending the mash in her mouth tasted good.

She put the half-full bowl onto the floor and went to the door. Dirina followed her with a worried look. Did her sister’s face know any other expression?

“When will you be back?”

“Later.”

“Amarta.”

The courier work required confidence beyond sense. She must seem sure in every word and step, or she had no hope of traversing this dangerous city or escaping the near-daily attempts of the hunter to catch her.

“You want to eat more than mash, Diri? Let me work. Stop nagging. I’m safe.”

And she would be. She and vision had an understanding.

Amarta touched the coins tucked tightly in the wrap under her chest, the ones Magrit had given her, to reassure herself they were still there. They replaced the small folded message she’d delivered earlier. Magrit had given her the larger portion without argument. If Amarta had known how easy it would have been, she would have asked months ago.

She frowned at this thought. Why hadn’t she?

It was the many layers that vision gave here in Munasee, fuzzy and befuddling. Too many threads to follow. An unsolvable maze, right up until whatever danger tried to grab her was nearly upon her.

But there was another reason. Magrit’s future was as wretched as the rest she passed on the street. Magrit would not keep her business. She would be lucky to keep her life. Amarta had seen enough.

She wove through the crowds of the Ocher Market, so named for the pale bricks that ringed the square. She ducked under shaded booths, listening as she went to the sounds of laughter, shouts, and insults, for anything out of the ordinary.

Something tantalizing was being fried in a brazier at the center, distracting her. She pushed away thoughts of food. Not today; today she would go home directly, decide with Dirina what to spend the money on.

Heading toward the Great Canal she stepped into the lines of people slowly moving onto a green bridge. It occurred to her as she shuffled forward up steps onto the bridge that all the people around her were like the sand in a sand-clock, slowing and narrowing at the neck to trickle out the other end in both directions. At the apex of the bridge, where the crowd sluggishly came to a standstill, she craned her neck to see what blocked the exit. A fallen cart, perhaps, or some other altercation—she couldn’t see. While she waited, she gripped the railing and looked out at the water in which various bits of who-knew-what floated. Up canal, short of the huge governor’s mansion, was another green-blue bridge. Beyond that the ruins of a yellow one.

The War of the Bridges, it was called. House Helata built most of the bridges, the one she stood on being the first, and built them high enough to allow their oceangoing ships to sail to the governor’s port. Then the other Houses had built bridges, not high enough to allow Helata’s tall ships to pass. These new bridges mysteriously fell in, in one case taking some forty people into the canal as it collapsed. Helata took them over. As more and more of the bridges had become green or blue, House Helata’s ships, large and small, took over the canals.

In front of her the flow of people began again, the tight crowd carrying her forward.

A hand on her arm yanking her off the green stone steps into a carriage, a hood over her head.

Vision took over. She followed instructions, dropping to a crouch, and half-crawled her way through the forest of legs to the far side of the bridge, where the flow of feet took her in the opposite direction, expelling her again into the Ocher Market. A dash left to the Fishermen’s Inn, a pause, then it was over, the danger past.

She exhaled a laugh, walked easily through the crowds and over another bridge, passing the Key Market, named for its shape: long and thin, booths on both sides ending in a circular area with a public well at the center. Frying bread and vegetables and meat made her mouth water. She slowed, wondering how much of today’s coins she could spare.

None, she told herself again sternly.

A man stumbled across her path, smelling of smoke and drink.
He would lurch left, then right, then drop drunkenly into the shadows of the alleyway beyond.

Instead he stopped in front of her, stared at her curiously, his future shifting as she watched.

He had stopped, she realized, because she had stopped. She herself had changed the moment, and that had changed his attention, thus his future. This was why she must adopt a plan, any plan, and stay with it until vision’s alarm. Otherwise it was like trying to catch a spilled bag of beans before they all touched the pavement. Too much, too many, too fast.

Like the night a handful of men had surrounded her, each one a glimpsed spray of possibilities, too many to sort through. In a near panic she ran, vision a confusing and mumbling advisor. Only when she had begun to run in earnest, dashing down into a basement stairwell, hiding in a tight corner, did vision give her a clear sense of direction: stay and wait. A mouse in the dark. They had gone right by her, inches from where she hid.

There was no reason to tell Dirina about that escape. Nor the many others.