His thoughts turned to the carriage, about a quarter-mile distant through the woods. A horse would be a vast improvement on even a strong man, but the time it would require, and the trouble inherent in unhooking, calming, and leading a beast whose master had been clubbed unconscious…
“Fuck it,” he said, and went back to the cliff’s edge. “Leocanto!”
“Still here, as you might have guessed.”
“Can the two of you make one of my ropes good and fast to your belt?”
There was a brief muttered conversation between Locke and Trav.
“We’ll manage,” Locke yelled. “What do you have in mind?”
“Have the idiot hold tight to you. Brace your arms and legs against the cliff once you’ve lashed yourselves to one of my lines. I’ll start hauling on it with all I’ve got, but I’m sure your assistance won’t hurt.”
“Right. You heard the man, Trav. Let’s tie a knot. Mind where you put your hands.”
When Locke looked up and gave Jean their private hand signal for proceed, Jean nodded. The secured rope was Jean’s former belay line; he seized the working end just before the coil that lay on the wet ground and frowned. The sludge underfoot would make things even more interesting than they already were, but there was nothing else for it. He formed a bight in the rope, stepped into it, and let it slide tight around his waist. He then leaned back, away from the cliff, with one hand on the rope before him and one hand behind, and cleared his throat.
“Tired of dangling, or shall I let you have a few more minutes down there?”
“Jerome, if I have to cradle Trav here for one second longer than I absolutely must, I’m going to—”
“Climb away, then!” Jean dug his heels in, allowed himself to lean even farther back, and began to strain at the rope. Gods damn it, he was a powerful man, unusually strong, but why did moments always come along to remind him that he could be even stronger? He’d been slacking; no other word for it. He should find some crates, fill them with rocks, and heave them up a few dozen times a day, as he had in his youth…. Damn, would the rope ever move?
There. At last, after a long, uncomfortable interval of motionless heaving in the rain, Jean took a slow step back. And then another…and another. Haltingly, with an itching fire steadily rising in the muscles of his thighs, he did his best impression of a plowhorse, pushing deep furrows into the gritty gray mud. Finally, a pair of hands appeared at the edge of the cliff, and in a torrent of shouts and curses, Trav hoisted himself up over the top and rolled onto his back, gasping. Immediately the strain on Jean slackened; he maintained his previous level of effort and just a moment later Locke popped over the edge. He crawled to his feet, stepped over beside Trav, and kicked the would-be bandit in the stomach.
“You fucking jackass! Of all the stupid damn…how difficult would it have been to say, ‘I’ll lower a rope, tie your purses onto it and send them up, or I won’t let you back up’? You don’t tell your bloody victims you’re just going to kill them outright! You come on reasonable first, and when you have the money you run!”
“Oh…ow! Gods, please; ow! You said you…wouldn’t kill me!”
“And I meant it. I’m not going to kill you, you cabbage-brained twit; I’m just going to kick you until it stops feeling good!”
“Ow! Agggh! Please! Aaaaow!”
“I have to say, it’s still pretty fascinating.”
“Aiiiah! Ow!”
“Still enjoying myself.”
“Oooof! Agh!”
Locke finally ceased pummeling the unfortunate Verrari, unbuckled his harness belt, and dropped it in the mud. Jean, breathing heavily, came up beside him and handed him his soaked coat.
“Thank you, Jerome.” Having his coat back, sopping or no, seemed to salve some of Locke’s wounded dignity. “As for you. Trav. Trav of Vo Sarmara, you said?”
“Yes! Oh, please, don’t kick me again.”
“Look here, Trav. Here’s what you’re going to do. First, tell no one about this. Second, don’t fucking go anywhere near Tal Verrar. Got it?”
“Wasn’t plannin’ to, sir.”
“Good. Here.” Locke reached down into his left boot and drew out a very slender purse. He tossed it down beside Trav, where it landed with a jingling plop. “Should be ten volani in there. A healthy bit of silver. And you can…wait a minute, are you absolutely sure our driver’s still alive?”
“Oh, gods yes! Honest truth, Master Leocanto, sir, he was breathin’ and moanin’ after I thumped him, he surely was.”
“So much the better for you, then. You can have the silver in that purse. When Jerome and I have left, you can come back and take whatever we leave. My vest and some of this rope, for sure. And listen to me very carefully. I saved your life today when I could have killed you in a heartbeat. Sound about right to you?”
“Yes, yes you did, and I’m so very—”
“Yes, shut up. Someday, Trav of Vo Sarmara, I may find myself back in these parts, and I may need something. Information. A guide. A bodyguard. Thirteen help me if it’s you I have to turn to, but if anyone ever comes to you and whispers the name of Leocanto Kosta, you jump at their word, you hear?”
“Yes!”
“Your oath before the gods?”
“Upon my lips and upon my heart, before the gods, or strike me dead and find me wantin’ on the scales of the Lady of the Long Silence.”
“Good enough. Remember. Now fuck off in the direction of your choice, so long as it isn’t back toward our carriage.”
Jean and Locke watched him scamper away for a minute or two, until his cloaked figure had faded from view behind the shifting gray curtains of the downpour.
“Well,” said Jean, “I think that’s enough practice for one day, don’t you?”
“Absolutely. The actual Sinspire job’ll be a bloody ballroom dance compared to this. What say we just grab the two spare coils of rope and make for the carriage? Let Trav spend the rest of the afternoon out here untying knots.”
“A lovely plan.” Jean inspected his Wicked Sisters, recovered from the edge of the cliff, and gave them a possessive pat on their blades before slipping them into his coat pocket. “There, darlings. That ass might have dulled you a bit, but I’ll soon have you sharpened up again.”
“I hardly credit it,” said Locke. “Nearly murdered by some halfwit country mudsucker. You know, I do believe that’s the first time since Vel Virazzo that anyone’s actually tried to kill either of us.”
“Seems about right. Eighteen months?” Jean slipped one wet coil of rope around his shoulder and passed the other to Locke. Together, they turned and began to trudge back through the forest. “Nice to know that some things never really change, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER SIX
BALANCE OF TRADES
1
“WHOEVER PUT THOSE ASSASSINS THERE obviously knew we used that path to get back to the Savrola,” said Locke.
“Which doesn’t mean all that much; we’ve used the docks often. Anyone could have seen us, and set them there to wait.” Jean sipped his coffee and ran one hand idly over the battered leather cover of the small book he’d brought to breakfast. “Maybe for several nights. It wouldn’t require any special knowledge or resources.”
The Gilded Cloister was even quieter than usual at the seventh hour of the morning this Throne’s Day. Most of the revelers and businessfolk who provided its custom would have been up late on the Golden Steps, and would not rise for several hours. By unspoken consent, Locke and Jean’s breakfast this morning was designed for nervous nibbling: cold fillets of pickled shark meat with lemon, black bread and butter, some sort of brownish fish broiled in orange juice, and coffee—the largest ceramic pot the waiter could find to bring to the table. Both thieves were still having trouble adjusting to the sudden turnaround in their nights and days.
“Unless the Bondsmagi tipped another party off to our presence here in Tal Verrar,” said Locke. “They might even be helping them.”
“If the Bondsmagi
had been helping those two on the docks, do you really think we’d have survived? Come on. Both of us knew they were probably going to come after us for what we did to the Falconer, and if they just wanted us dead, we’d be smoked meat. Stragos is right about one thing—they must mean to toy with us. So I still say it’s more likely that some third party took offense at something we’ve done as Kosta and de Ferra. That makes Durenna, Corvaleur, and Lord Landreval the obvious suspects.”
“Landreval’s been gone for months.”
“That doesn’t rule him out completely. The lovely ladies, then.”
“I just…I honestly believe they’d come after us themselves—Durenna has a reputation with a sword, and I hear that Corvaleur’s been in a few duels. Maybe they’d hire some help, but they’re hands-on sorts.”
“Did we bilk anyone important at Blind Alliances? Or some other game when we were playing our way up through the floors? Step on someone’s toe? Fart noisily?”
“I can’t imagine that we’d have missed someone disgruntled enough to hire assassins. Nobody likes to lose at cards, to be sure, but do any really sore losers stick out in memory?”
Jean scowled and sipped his coffee. “Until we know more, this speculation is useless. Everyone in the city is a suspect. Hell, everyone in the world.”
“So in truth,” said Locke, “all we really know is that whoever it is wanted us dead. Not scared off, not brought in for a little chat. Plain old dead. Maybe if we can ponder that, we might come up with a few—”
Locke stopped speaking the instant he saw their waitress approaching their booth—then looked more closely and saw that it wasn’t their waitress at all. The woman wearing the leather apron and red cap was Merrain.
“Ah,” said Jean. “Time to settle the bill.”
Merrain nodded, and handed Locke a wooden tablet with two small pieces of paper pinned to it. One was indeed the bill; the other had a single line written on it in flowing script:
Remember the first place I took you the night we met? Don’t waste time.
“Well,” said Locke, passing the note to Jean, “we’d love to stay, but the quality of the service has sharply declined. Don’t expect a gratuity.” He counted copper coins onto the wooden tablet, then stood up. “Same old place as usual, Jerome.”
Merrain collected the wooden tablet and the money, bowed, and vanished in the direction of the kitchens.
“I hope she doesn’t take offense about the tip,” said Jean when they were out on the street. Locke glanced around in every direction, and noticed that Jean was doing likewise. Locke’s sleeve-stilettos were a comforting weight inside each arm of his coat, and he had no doubt that Jean was ready to produce the Wicked Sisters with a twitch of his wrists.
“Gods,” Locke muttered. “We should be back in our beds, sleeping the day away. Have we ever been less in control of our lives than we are at this moment? We can’t run away from the archon and his poison, which means we can’t just disengage from the Sinspire game. Gods know we can’t even see the Bondsmagi lurking, and we’ve suddenly got assassins coming out of our assholes. Know something? I’d lay even odds that between the people following us and the people hunting us, we’ve become this city’s principal means of employment. Tal Verrar’s entire economy is now based on fucking with us.”
It was a short walk, if a nervous one, to the crossroads just north of the Gilded Cloister. Cargo wagons clattered across the cobbles and trades-folk walked placidly to their jobs. As far as they knew, Locke thought, the Savrola was the quietest, best-guarded neighborhood in the city, a place where nothing worse than the occasional drunk foreigner ever disturbed the calm.
Locke and Jean turned left at the intersection, then approached the door of the first disused shop on their right. While Jean kept a watch on the street behind them, Locke stepped up to the door and rapped sharply, three times. It opened immediately, and a stout young man in a brown leather coat beckoned them in.
“Stay away from the window,” he said once he’d closed and bolted the door behind them. The window was covered with tightly drawn sailcloth curtains, but Locke agreed that there was no need to tempt fate. The only light in the room came from the sunrise, filtered soft pink through the curtains, enabling Locke to see two pairs of men waiting at the rear of the shop. Each pair consisted of one heavy, broad-shouldered man and one smaller man, and all four of the strangers were wearing identical gray cloaks and broad-brimmed gray hats.
“Get dressed,” said the man in the leather coat, pointing to a pile of clothing on a small table. Locke and Jean were soon outfitted in their own matching gray cloaks and hats.
“New summer fashion for Tal Verrar?” said Locke.
“A little game for anyone trying to follow you,” said the man. He snapped his fingers, and one set of gray-clad strangers moved to stand right behind the door. “I’ll go out first. You stand behind these two, follow them out, then enter the third carriage. Understood?”
“What carri—” Locke started to say, but he cut himself off as he heard the clatter of hooves and wheels in the street immediately outside. Shadows passed before the window, and after a few seconds the man in the brown coat unbolted the door. “Third carriage. Move fast,” he said without turning around, and then he threw the door open and was out into the street.
At the curb just outside the disused shop three identical carriages were lined up. Each was black lacquered wood with no identifying crests or banners, each had heavy drapes drawn over its windows, and each was pulled by two black horses. Even their drivers all looked vaguely similar, and wore the same reddish uniforms under leather overcoats.
The first pair of gray strangers stepped out the door and hurried to the first carriage in line. Locke and Jean left the disused shop a second later, hurrying to the rear carriage. Locke caught a glimpse of the last team of gray strangers all but running to the door of the middle carriage behind them. Jean worked the latch on the rear carriage’s door, held it open for Locke, and flung himself inside afterward.
“Welcome aboard, gentlemen.” Merrain lounged in the right forward corner of the compartment, her waitress’ clothing discarded. She was now dressed as though for a ride in an open saddle, in field boots, black breeches, a red silk shirt, and a leather vest. Locke and Jean settled beside one another in the seat across from her. Jean’s slamming of the door threw them into semidarkness, and the carriage lurched into motion.
“Where the hell are we going?” Locke began to shrug off his gray cloak as he spoke.
“Leave that on, Master Kosta. You’ll need it when we get out again. First we’ll all tour the Savrola for a bit. Then we’ll split—one carriage to the Golden Steps, one to the northern edge of the Great Gallery, and us to the docks to catch a boat.”
“A boat to where?”
“Don’t be impatient. Sit back and enjoy the ride.”
That was difficult, to say the least, in the hot and stuffy compartment. Locke felt sweat running down his brow, and he grumpily removed his hat and held it in his lap. He and Jean attempted to pelt Merrain with questions, but she answered with nothing but noncommittal “hmmms” until they gave up. Tedious minutes passed. Locke felt the carriage rattling around several corners, then down a series of inclines that had to be the ramp from the upper heights of the Savrola to the sea-level docks.
“We’re almost there,” said Merrain after another few minutes had passed in uncomfortable, jouncing silence. “Hats back on. When the carriage stops, go straight to the boat. Take your seat at the rear, and for the gods’ sake, if you see anything dangerous, duck.”
True to her word, the carriage rattled to a halt just a few heartbeats later. Locke planted his hat over his hair once again, fumbled for the door mechanism, and squinted as it opened into bright morning light.
“Out,” said Merrain. “Don’t waste time.”
They were down on the interior docks at the very northeastern tip of the Savrola, with a sheer wall of black Elderglass behind them and several dozen
anchored ships on the gleaming, choppy water before them. One boat was lashed to the nearest pier, a sleek gig about forty feet long, with a raised and enclosed gallery at the stern. Two lines of rowers, five to a side, filled most of the rest of its space.
Locke hopped down from the carriage and led the way toward the boat, past a pair of alert men wearing cloaks as heavy as his own, quite inappropriate for the weather. They were standing at near attention, not lounging, and Locke caught a glimpse of a sword hilt barely hidden beneath one cloak.
He all but scampered up the flimsy ramp to the boat, hopped down into it, and threw himself onto the bench at the rear of the passenger gallery. The gallery, fortunately, was only enclosed on three sides; a decent forward view of their next little voyage would be vastly preferable to another trip inside a dark box. Jean was close behind him, but Merrain turned right, climbed through the mass of rowers, and seated herself in the coxswain’s position at the bow.
The soldiers on the dock rapidly pulled back the ramp, unlashed the boat, and gave it a good push away from the dock with their legs. “Pull,” said Merrain, and the rowers exploded into action. Soon the boat was creaking to their steady rhythm and knifing across the little waves of Tal Verrar’s harbor.
Locke took the opportunity to study the men and women at the oars—they were all leanly muscled, all with hair neatly trimmed short, most with fairly visible scars. Not one of them looked to be younger than their midthirties. Veteran soldiers, then. Possibly even Eyes without their masks and cloaks.
“I have to say, Stragos’ people put on a good production,” said Jean. He then raised his voice. “Hey! Merrain! Can we take these ridiculous clothes off?”
She turned only long enough to nod, and then returned her attention to the waters of the harbor. Locke and Jean eagerly removed their hats and cloaks, and piled the clothing on the deck at their feet.
The ride across the water took about a third of an hour, as near as Locke could tell. He would have preferred to be free to study the harbor in all directions, but what he could see out the open front of the gallery revealed enough. First they headed southwest, following the curve of the inner docks, past the Great Gallery and the Golden Steps. Then they turned south, putting the open sea on their right, and sped toward a huge crescent island of a like size with the one on which the Sinspire sat.