Watcher of the Dead (6 page)

He would die rather than allow it.

Shifting his position, Angus warded
against numbness in his feet and legs. He needed to be ready to
depart any time. Any figure passing in the darkness might be Sarcosa.

It was easy to find information once
you had a name. Surgeons needed income like everyone else. They could
not afford to keep themselves hidden. Inquiries, lightly pressed, at
the gold market north of the water gardens and the Great Round east
of the fortress had supplied the facts that Angus had needed. Sarcosa
lived on the east bank, on this street. He doctored an exclusive
clientele of lords and ladies, rich merchants, bankers, and
captains-of-the-guard. He was said to have paid visits to the
fortress. By several accounts he was a fine-looking man,
silver-haired, dignified, striking in his black cloak and boots. His
rooms were modest, as he chose to spend his money in other areas of
his life—young prostitutes, Angus understood—and because
of that, he rarely saw patients there. Sarcosa was a beck-and-call
surgeon, attending the rich and privileged of Morning Star. He came
to you.

Armed with this information, Angus had
investigated the street. He was cautious in his movements, as he
could not rule out the possibility that the Phage knew exactly what
he knew. The surgeon’s rooms lay directly east of the water
gardens, the park of man-made canals, fountain walks and lily ponds
where the rich and well-dressed displayed themselves on fine days.
The street was quiet and boasted few businesses. Its character varied
depending on its closeness to the water gardens. West was good, east
bad. Drainage was a problem in the eastern section, and great ditches
and culverts had been dug to divert floodwater. The sheltering walls
of many of these culverts had attracted the most desperate men in the
city. As soon as Angus had spotted the community of ragged,
dirt-eating beggars on the far corner of the surgeon’s street,
he had begun to design a plan. The beggars stopped water from running
down their culvert by building a makeshift dam of scrap wood, rotten
clothing, animal hides and dung.

If they could block water. He could
free it.

It was easy. The west part of the
surgeon’s street lay below the high-water level of the Eclipse.
Break the floodwall downstream and water came pouring into the water
gardens and the street, blocking off roads to the north, west and
south. East was the direction the surgeon now had to turn to leave
his street. East to this crossroads, past the watcher who was waiting
there.

Angus had followed Sarcosa on every
trip he had made over the last four days and nights, ghosting behind
him, an unremarkable figure in a dun-colored coat. The surgeon had
tended rich dowagers in their manses while Angus had stood outside in
the shadows, looking in. When the surgeon had taken dinner in a
well-favored tavern, Angus had waited at a safe distance, far down
the street but in sight of the tavern door. He had accompanied the
surgeon to a mummer’s show and followed him later as he stopped
at a small house to leech a patient. Later still the surgeon had
visited a pleasure hall. Angus joined him for the long walk home.

When the sick called for Sarcosa he no
longer arrived alone. A shadow trailed him, sometimes at a distance
as far as three hundred feet. Look and you were unlikely to see it.
But the shadow always saw you.

Angus barely slept. He ate scraps off
the street, bread slid from vendors’ stalls in passing, chunks
of boiled meat thrown into the culvert as a charity by the Bone
Priests. He drank the water. With every day he became more invisible,
as if dirt and raggedness and desperation were magic concealing him
from people’s eyes, and the more he gathered about him the less
detectable he became. He recognized this and used it. Above and
beyond that he did not care.

He lived for one thing.

Men and women in the culvert, the
beggars, the shit-eaters, the insane, did not question his right to
be among them. They recognized their own truth in his eyes. All here
were lost or losing something.

No one challenged him to a fight.

Angus lay in the collective warmth of
their bodies and did not rest. Dawn glowed in the eastern sky and the
city stirred. A street vendor rolled out his brazier and set it
upstreet and upwind of the culvert. Business had been good since the
flood. A group of maids in white caps and white aprons headed for the
markets, empty baskets in hand. They crossed the street well before
the culvert and averted their gazes as they passed.

A runner boy came racing down the
street from the north and muscles in Angus’ belly tensed.
Runner boys meant messages. Messages could lead to calls.

The surgeon’s rooms were located
in a house a third of a league down the street. Angus could not track
the boy to the address. To follow him down the street would leave
himself too exposed, so he waited. If the Phage knew what he knew and
wanted to assassinate him, they would watch the house.

After a quarter hour the runner boy
returned, message delivered, and headed back north. Angus stayed in
position. Men in the culvert were rising, scratching their beards,
shaking themselves off, pissing downstream. Few spoke. The smell of
sausages grilling on the brazier was a shared torture. Not for the
first time Angus wondered why the men in the culvert didn’t
simply rise up and overpower the vendor.

He decided they weren’t quite
desperate enough.

Spying a tall figure moving east, Angus
stilled. It was Sarcosa in his black cloak, gloves on, boots
polished, slender leather satchel slung sideways across his chest
like an arrow case. He approached the crossroads and turned north.
Angus forced himself to wait.

As he counted to twenty, he watched for
other watchers. He had been Phage himself once; he knew the deal.
Satisfied that all was normal, Angus rose and left the culvert. He
did not look back.

Morning Star was still coming to life.
Geese on the riverbanks honked as a small and pale sun rose through
clouds. Delivery carts hurtled along the streets, draymen warning
bloody murder if the way ahead wasn’t cleared. Angus kept to
the walls. Sarcosa was a hundred feet ahead, walking briskly with a
sense of his own importance. He turned east, away from the river.
Angus turned along with him.

The area here was comfortable; manses
and law courts, whitewashed taverns and stables, temples with
stonework carvings showing the sun and morning star in opposition.
Sarcosa stopped abruptly and rapped on the door of one of the manses.
He was granted swift entry and the painted white door closed behind
him. Angus glided past and kept going.

Five minutes later he approached the
house from behind. The back door was swung open and the courtyard was
in use. A laundry girl was boiling blankets in a bath over a fire.
Angus continued moving along the lane. Sarcosa’s daylight
visits could be a problem.

Two houses down he spotted a fat and
ancient maid sitting on a bench in her master’s courtyard,
doing little save looking exhausted. “Day, Mistress,â€

For All Bluddsmen

VAYLO BLUDD GAVE the order to Odwin Two
Bear and Baldie Trangu. “Intercept them.â€

Schemes

THEY TOOK HOARGATE into the city of
Spire Vanis. Mallin said the gate itself had been carved from the
largest tree in the world. “A bloodwood from the southern Storm
Margin. It took them ten days to chop it.â€

The Night River

ASH MOUNTAIN BORN was beginning to
suspect something and as Zaya and the Trenchlander pushed off the
barge, she thought about what it would mean if it were true.

It would change everything.

Zaya Mistwalker clambered onto the
barge as it moved from the shore. The Trenchlander pushed it farther,
wading thigh-deep into the water until the current caught the craft.
Ash felt the tug of it, felt the massive power of the tow. She
experienced a moment of unease as she realized the raft was at the
mercy of the current, and then the Trenchlander released his grip and
the barge and its three occupants, two alive and one dead, moved
smoothly downstream.

The Night River was two leagues wide
here. Its sparkling black surface was alive with birds and insects.
Herons claimed shallow banks in the river’s center, and swans
floated on slow currents close to its black shale shores. Geese and
ducks ran ahead of the barge, racing into flight. Clouds of mayflies
hung above the surface, and damselflies, dragonflies and blowflies
flitted through the river-pushed air.

Ash reclined in the cushioned barge
seat, feeling like a queen. Zaya was behind her, working the tiller,
and Mor Xana was standing on the barge’s front edge, silently
watching the way ahead. Khal Blackdragon had commanded him to be her
ghost. During the thirteen days she had been at the Heart Fires, Mor
Xana had rarely left her side. Ash did not know who he guarded.

Just like a child queen, she was
dangerous and in danger.

It was late afternoon and light left
the river as they floated south. Other craft, boats and barges and
sculls, had taken to the water. More were being launched from the
shore. All carried lamps that burned with the pure white light of the
Heart Fires. The Sull were creating their own moon this night.

“It is said it takes a thousand
fires to make a moon,â€

Stripping Outer Bark

WATCHER HAD TWO rules. Only bring down
what he could eat and stay away from the Sull. They were good rules.
They simplified his actions and made it possible to live a peaceful
life.

He hunted for small game: wild turkey,
opossum, ground squirrel, hare. When he needed fat he fished for
salmon in one of the streams that forked from the big river. He
wasn’t a good fisherman and could spend half a day catching
nothing, but he was learning. He had time.

He built and tested fish traps,
whittling wood and knotting strips of hide to form lattices. While he
waited to see if the traps would work he gathered plants, tender new
leaves of dock, fiddlehead and chicory. Most of the time he ate them
raw, folding them into his mouth and letting the sweet greenness rest
on his tongue before he chewed them. Food tasted good. On the rare
occasions he lit a fire and roasted his game, he relished the tender
juices and crispy skin.

Most nights he slept out in the open.
He made beds of spruce, balsam and cedar and fell asleep drawing
their rich and soothing fragrances into his lungs. When it rained he
raised the simplest shelters, lean-tos and bivouacs. The nights were
cool but not cold. Even this far north, the snows had passed.

He seldom camped in the same place more
than two nights. He did not question whether it was restlessness or
caution. It felt right to be moving. The forest was large and
contained many things; some were worth seeing, some worth avoiding.
He left it at that.

He knew he was in Sull territory but
saw no reason to leave. He had earned a right to be here. They had
made him who he was.

They had created what they feared.

Most days Watcher put effort into
avoiding them—their fires, their horse tracks, the stone
circles where they erected their tents, their heavily used trails—but
he would not be gentle if they tried to take him.

He no longer feared them. It was not
possible to fear a people after watching so many of them die.

Reaching a fork in the trail, Watcher
turned north. He was heading along a deer path through a section of
forest that looked as if it had been thinned. Elderberries and
bearberries were in bloom and bumble-bees buzzed from plant to plant.
Sun touched Watcher’s face. His pack was heavy with the remains
of the turkey he had killed and smoked last night, and that meant he
would not have to hunt for two days. This pleased him. Later, when
he’d settled on a place to camp, he might work on another fish
trap. He had some ideas about modifying the design. He was pretty
sure his last one had caught, and then released, a trout. Scales left
on one of the interior posts had been his clue.

He grinned at his own stupidity, and
words from another life sounded in his head.

Us Sevrances were never made to fish.

Watcher’s heart leapt.

He continued walking, and after a while
holding himself separate from the familiar voice, the memory faded.
It was for the best.

No good would come from remembering his
dead.

He spent the rest of the morning moving
north, more or less following the course of a swift-running creek.
Boulders on the creekbed made the water froth. He didn’t think
it would be a good place to test traps. He had an idea he might might
whittle a pole, fix the head from one of the queen’s arrows to
the tip, see if he could he could spear some frogs. When he arrived
at a small spill pond fed by the stream he thought he might as well
stop and do a few things. There was a strip of dry bank on its north
shore that seemed as good a place as any to spend the night.

It was his habit to prepare the camp
early and then spend the rest of the day doing as he pleased. Before
he left the Sull camp he had stripped the queen and her den mates of
some belongings, and he now possessed a fine Sull hand knife. He used
it to cut-and-strip spruce and cedar needles from nearby trees to
form a bed. The trick was to use only the soft tips of the branches.
He had woken up the first few nights with sticks in his back. Now he
knew what he was doing, he worked quickly, raising a mound of soft
needles above the bank.

Afterward he cleaned the sticky resin
from the knife with a scrap of hareskin and some fat he’d
pressed from the liver of the last salmon he’d caught. He would
have preferred to use tung oil but it would do.