Holding the stranger’s gaze, she tells her companions, “Another table.”
They rise from their chairs at once, though they do not mask their reluctance. One is her captain of guards. He commands the defense of her train. He does not pretend equanimity as he draws a poniard from his belt, shows it to the stranger, then stabs it into the table where it is ready for Kelvera’s use. The other man is her captain of wagons, responsible for managing the diverse owners, burdens, teamsters, and beasts of her train. More readily than the guard captain, he goes to request a seat at a nearby table.
Black does not acknowledge the captains. Waiting, he ignores the poniard.
The caravan-master leans back in her chair. She does not judge the shaped man or determine her response in advance. Nor does she invite him to share her meal. When she has appraised him for a moment, searching her memories of other travels through this land, she says, “Call me Blossom.” Endless days of shouting have made her voice gruff as a grindstone. “You are?”
“Black,” he replies without hesitation. He is already sure of her. She will answer him or she will not. If she does, she will do so honestly. If she does not, she will betray no hint of what she withholds.
“Black, hmm?” muses Kelvera. “Interesting.” Her tone suggests disinterest. “Not a name I know.”
Black shrugs. He does not respond.
The caravan-master studies his silence. With an air of distraction, as though she is unaware of what she does, she reaches out and taps the hilt of her guard captain’s poniard. “An urgent matter, you said? Then speak. I cannot guess your mind.”
Black nods. “Blossom,” he says. Despite his haste, he hopes to distract her from her natural suspicions. “Why are you called Blossom?”
She raises her eyebrows. “That is what you wish to know? And you call it urgent? I am Blossom because it pleases me.”
Black almost smiles. “And I am Black because I have forgotten my other names. My travels have been as long as yours. I forget what I can. The rest is urgent. If it were not, I would forget it as well.”
Kelvera feels a tension in her shoulders easing. Rare as they are, shaped men are dangerous, and this one more so than others. Now, however, she understands that he is not dangerous to her. Frowning, she draws the poniard from the table and pushes it away from her.
“Then speak,” she repeats. “Those who trust me to lead them have their secrets. I will keep them. But anything else—” She spreads her hands to indicate the world she knows.
“Have you incurred losses?” he asks abruptly.
She squints at him. “What, ever?”
“In this kingdom,” he explains. “On this journey.”
“No,” she answers. Then she admits, “Attacks are inevitable. The wealth of my caravans is legend. But my captain of guards knows his duties. His men are well trained and armed. One guard took a spear in his thigh. An arrow killed the personal servant of a dealer in fine spices. We left seven brigands dead. I do not call the outcome losses.”
Black nods again. “And no desertions?”
Kelvera slaps her hand on the table. She pretends indignation. “I treat my people well, men and women. They do not desert.” After a moment, she laughs humorlessly. “Not in this kingdom. The old wars began here. They ended here. This land is considered perilous. Shapers and wild powers are said to remain, perhaps hidden in this very forest. Even cowards do not desert here.”
Black’s manner remains abrupt. “When did you last pass this way?” He means from west to east, from the strange deserts in the far west to the richly mined mountains a hundred leagues eastward.
The question catches Kelvera off guard. She counts backward in her mind. “Two seasons ago? No, more. But less than three.”
“Did you incur any losses then? Any desertions?” Black needs an explanation for Tamlin Marker’s killer’s ability to claim so many brigands without the aid of followers known in the town. “Did any wagons leave your train?”
The caravan-master collects her thoughts. “Any wagons?” She dismisses losses and desertions. “In this kingdom? Before the destinations they hired me to reach?”
Any matter that a shaped man considers urgent is important to her as well, though her reasons are not his. If Black is not dangerous to her, his presence and his questions imply danger nonetheless. His interest is a warning she means to heed.
For the third time, Black nods.
“Yes,” she replies slowly. She makes certain of her memories. “But not in Settle’s Crossways. A league to the east. In virgin forest. Near that misplaced mountain, the old fumer. For no discernible reason.”
Soft as feathers on clean skin, Black urges, “Tell me.”
“We had not left the desert,” she answers, still slowly, “when a wagon purchased a place among us.” She trusts him to know of the desert she mentions. “Its owner was an old man. More than old. He appeared ancient, with a face cut by the erosion of years, skin worn thin until it seemed transparent, and a frame much emaciated. He wore a long robe that may once have been red, but was now faded to rust. His beard, white and well-kempt, reached to his waist. Altogether he resembled a hierophant who had given his life to the worship of a desert god.”
Black prepares another question, but Kelvera does not pause. Having chosen to answer, she answers fully.
“Still his movements were not decrepit,” she continues. “Indeed, his steps were sprightly when he elected to walk, which was seldom. Also his voice was not ancient, though it quavered. At times, laboring caravans raise a mighty din, yet he was able to make himself heard.
“We required a name. He allowed us to call him Sought.
“With him, he brought four guards, and also a teamster for his oxen, but no personal servant. We called his lack of an attendant strange, yet his wagon was stranger. It was all of wood, more a house on wheels than a wagon, and painted the same worn hue as his robe. Also it was made without windows—without as much as chinks between the boards—to ease the heat within. Its only opening was a door at the rear, a door too sturdy to be forced, which remained locked at all times.”
The caravan-master shrugs. She has no cause to doubt her choices. “I accepted his company. I did not begrudge him his strangeness, and the price he offered was generous. But I would have accepted him without payment for the sake of his guards.
“My men are good. His surpassed them. I have rarely seen arms and armor of such quality. Their training was diligent, their skill prodigious, and their vigilance in their master’s name exceeded all bounds. If they ever ate or slept”—she remembers them with as much awe as her nature allows—“I say this seriously, Black—they did so only when he admitted one or at most two of them to his house. With four such men in my employ, I could dispense with ten others and call myself well defended.”
For a moment, Kelvera drifts among her memories. To prompt her, Black asks, “He named his destination, this Sought?”
Her full attention returns to the shaped man. “He did not,” she replies more sharply. “He said that he would go with me as far as I went. Then he would find another caravan to continue his journey.”
“Yet he turned aside?”
She folds her arms. “As I have said. He did not emerge from his wagon while we rested here. But when we had passed a league beyond Settle’s Crossways, his teamster pulled his oxen from the road. There the old man informed my captain of wagons that he was content. He needed rest, he said. He would bide where he was for a time. His guards would suffice to fend for him.”
“Fend for him?” Black interjects. The phrase troubles him. It matches his hasty speculations too closely.
Again Kelvera shrugs. “So he said. As he asked no return of coin, I had no cause to refuse him.”
Black is silent for a moment. Within himself, he wonders whether his purpose will require him to confront a foe he cannot comprehend.
A foe against whom his own powers will have no meaning. Despite his ability to forget, and his singular resolve, he is forced to acknowledge—not for the first time—that he is afraid.
Yet he masks his uncertainty. His manner is unchanged as he asks, “The place where he joined your train. Is it known for its winds?”
“Known?” snorts Kelvera. “Say infamous. It is an unholy hell of winds. Their dust can strip the flesh from bones. Every outcropping of rock has been sculpted until it resembles a fiend yearning for release. Those winds—” She shakes her head to dispel thoughts of over-turned wagons, mangled deaths, spilled goods, maimed beasts. “There is a price in pain to be paid for crossing that stretch of desert.”
By these words, Kelvera tells Black that the land of her birth holds to an alien theology, one which would not be recognized in the kingdom he serves. The temples created by the King have not yet excreted such arcana as hells and fiends. Perhaps sorceries are possible in the west that are inconceivable here.
He knows now that he has entered deep waters. For him, they may be bottomless. Nevertheless his purpose is at its most compulsory when he fears it.
As he gathers himself to thank the caravan-master, however, his doubts prompt one more question.
“A dire desert, then,” he remarks. “What gods are worshipped there?”
If the old man is in truth a hierophant—
Kelvera rolls her eyes. “What else?” She has her own reasons to scorn religions. “Wind and sun. In that region, there are no other powers that can be asked for mercy.” Then she shrugs once more. “Those prayers are not answered.”
Thinking, Lungs and livers, air and heat, Black can delay no longer. He must obey his purpose.
But when he rises from his chair, the caravan-master stops him with a gesture. He has warned her. She has a warning of her own to deliver.
Leaning close, she says, “Heed me, Black,” a whisper no one will overhear. “You are a shaped man. That Sought was not. Be wary of him.”
Black raises an eyebrow at her recognition. She does not need to say the words he hears. If the old man is not shaped, he may yet be a shaper. Also his guards are fearsome.
More formally than is his custom, Black replies, “Accept my gratitude, Blossom. I am in your debt.”
This debt he hopes to repay.
Kelvera returns a smile as disturbing as his. The more she thinks on him, the more she desires to understand the danger. It may spill onto her caravan. “Perhaps,” she suggests, “we will meet again.”
She means to add, When we do, we can discuss who is in debt. But Black forestalls her. He is in haste. “We will not,” he says like a man who is already gone. Giving her no time to respond, he strides for the doors.
Still he wants guidance. It will shorten his search. At the doors, he pauses to grip the arm of the most recent arrival, a burly chandler still wearing his leather apron mottled with dried wax. Black invokes his sigil of command as he demands the location of Haul Varder’s workshop.
The chandler glowers, torn between umbrage, distorted rumors, and an inability to refuse. He tries to sound angry as he directs Black. To some extent, he succeeds.
At once, Black releases the man. Through the swinging doors, he leaves the inn and enters the glare of the midafternoon sun.
He is at his most certain when he is afraid.
Two streets and three alleys from the inn, he finds the wheelwright’s smithy and woodshop. The structure resembles an open-sided barn, providing abundant space for Haul Varder’s forge at one end and his lathes at the other. Near the forge stands an anvil. Between and above the ends, he has storage for his iron and hammers, for his supplies of wood, and for racks to hold his chisels, saws, and other tools.
The place is near the edge of the town. But this stretch of Settle’s Crossways is not extensive. Black judges that he is two hundred paces from Jon Marker’s house, perhaps three hundred from the caravan’s road. Above the workshop’s roof to the east, he can see the tops of the nearest trees.
He hopes to find his quarry there, but he is not surprised when he does not. If the ritual that required Tamlin Marker’s murder is near its culmination—and if the wheelwright is involved, as Black now believes—the final preparations are being made. And they are certainly not being made in the town. They are not being made anywhere that risks witnesses. Their perpetrators will seek seclusion against even the most obscure mischance.
The ashes in the forge are cold. They have been cold for some time. The sawdust around the lathes has not been swept. The lathes themselves wear a fine fur of dust, as do their tools. If Black had spent more time questioning townsfolk, he would no doubt have learned how long the shop has been unattended. But he does not need that knowledge. The scent of evil is strong here, as acrid as acid, as bitter as kale, and fraught with intimations of bloodshed. To his shaped senses, it is as distinct as murder, overriding even the stink of cold ashes and the warm odor of drying resins. He will be able to follow it.
A brief stroking of his thigh summons his horse. While he waits, he searches for some sign of Haul Varder’s intent, some indication left by carelessness or haste. But the search does not have his full attention. Kelvera has answered his more practical questions. It is his need for understanding that troubles him. He cannot gauge the peril ahead of him. He is forced to consider that an impossible ritual may be the only possible explanation for the smell that haunts his nose.
His mount greets him with a soft whicker as it trots forward. Despite the hard use he made of it earlier, it is strong and ready, as refreshed as a horse that has enjoyed days of rest and rich pasturage. The ways that it has been shaped are subtle, difficult to discern, but they are potent. The beast will not fail him until he fails himself.
He checks his horse’s girth and tack, an old habit. Then he mounts. Though he is no longer patient and believes that he knows his way, he circles the workshop twice, testing the air in every direction. When he is done, he trots toward the eastern outskirts of the town.
There near the fringe of the forest, Settle’s Crossways is a haphazard collection of buildings. The shifting sunlight shows him several large warehouses belonging, no doubt, to prosperous merchants. It shows him hovels where the town’s poor scrabble for shelter, hoping that their proximity to the warehouses will ease their efforts to find work. And among the hovels and warehouses, he discovers a scattering of more sturdy homes. These lack such amenities as roofed porches. Their owners are not reluctant to enter with mud, dirt, and the droppings of horses and cattle on their boots. Still they are solid houses, made to last. They belong to men or families who do not care for appearances, but who mean to be secure in their homes.
Black does not expect to see lights in the windows at this time of day. They face the westering sun. Their occupants do not yet need lamps. But the windows of one house glow. Covered as they are with oiled cloths, they give him no glimpse of what waits inside. With the sun on them, they should not glow as they do. Yet they are unmistakable in the dwindling afternoon.
The scent of evil leads Black to the lit house.
He dismounts. Silent as nightfall, he approaches the door. When he places his palm there, he knows at once that his quarry is absent. This is Haul Varder’s house. The odor of his doings permeates the door, the walls, the glowing windows. Black is sure. But the wheelwright is not here.
Someone else occupies the house. Someone else lights lamps against the coming darkness. That someone, alone, has lit a profusion of lamps.
Black considers departing as he came, in silence. He can follow the obscenity of Tamlin Marker’s murder unaided. He does not fear the men who killed the brigands. But an impulse overtakes him, and he knocks.
The quaver of an old voice calls, “What?” An old woman’s voice. “Go away. He is not here. Leave me to my prayers.”
Black does not ask permission to enter. Lifting the latc
h, he steps into a room lit by a noonday sun of lamps, lanterns, and candles.
The old woman sits in a comfortless wooden chair surrounded by many lights. Her hearth is cold, but she does not need its warmth. The flames give abundant heat. A dew of sweat glistens on her brow and gathers in the seams of her face, giving her the look of a woman who has labored too long in the last years of her life. Nevertheless she wears a heavy shawl over her shoulders, and she clutches it to her breast as though she imagines that it will protect her.
She turns her head unerringly toward Black, and he sees at once that she is blind. The milky hue that covers her eyes is too thick to permit sight. Still she has heard him. She knows where he stands, just as she knows every lamp, lantern, and taper around her. She keeps them lit at every hour of the day and night. When one or several go out, she refills or replaces them with no fear that she will set herself or the house aflame. It is not Haul Varder who desires them, though the woman does not need them. They are her prayers.
“You dare?” she croaks at Black. She sounds both querulous and frightened. “Be gone. Leave me. When he catches you, he will teach you to respect his mother.”
“I do not fear him,” Black replies like the coming night. “You have no cause to fear me. Only tell me what he does, and I will go. Only tell me where he is, and I will go.”
“Tell?” the old woman retorts. The puckering of her mouth betrays her toothless gums. “I? Tell you? I will tell you nothing. You are a blackguard who preys on weakness. I am a gods-fearing woman, gods-fearing. I do not go to the temples. I cannot walk so far. But that does not make me evil. I worship here, do you understand? I worship here. There is no temple-goer more devout.
“If you do not go—if he does not catch you—I will call down Bright Eternal’s light to consume you. I will cast you into Dark Enduring’s agony.”
To an extent, Black believes her. He does not doubt that she will hurl her lamps and lanterns at him, as many as she can reach. He does not doubt that her aim will be good. But he also knows that he will not burn. His cloak and his shaping will ward him. Still he seeks to calm her. If she acts against him, her house will become conflagration. He will be forced to rescue her. He may be forced to find aid for her before he can resume his purpose.