Over supper she said, “I’m sorry, I thought you understood. You should have gone with Ramin. The front door is hopeless. Even with the right bribe in the right hands, none of them will be seen to hurry. That might imply that money holds the power, not themselves.”
I growled, and wished again to show them other ways to hold power. A fist gripping a broadsword, a booted foot kicking in a door.
She said, “The palace is divided, half and half. The prince has time and no authority, while the chancellor has authority and no time. Both men train their staff to keep petitioners away, for entirely opposite reasons.”
I grunted. “How is anything brought to happen? Ever?”
“Oh, the city finds its way. All our business passes through the chancellor’s hands; just, not through the front door. Ramin will take you back tomorrow. Be warned, he will probably scold.”
“I don’t doubt it.” If he were mine—but nothing here was mine, except the Skopje. I wanted to step outside, simply to look at her. Wood and tar and canvas, pegs and ropes: I knew her absolutely and trusted her the same, and I could say that about nothing else in Skander. Not my crew, nor my new friends. Nor myself, even, or what I would do tomorrow.
Tonight—what would I do tonight? Drink, and listen to this woman.
Watch her, too. She had wit both ways, wisdom and humor; I would be happy just to listen. My eyes were still full of palace smoke, which made them sore and restless both at once, and I would be happy to close them and just listen. But then I would doze, I knew. The smoke had gone into my head and was numbing yet. So I kept my eyes open and my mind alert by dint of watching her. Her skin in the lamplight, how the lines were dressed in shadow like a web of softness laid over strength; her hair, that had been tempered and pinned close to her skull, was another heavy fall of shadow now. Her mouth was mobile, lightly mocking. Her eyes were steady, scrutinizing, always honest and so not always kind.
If I’d been younger, I might have made a grand gesture of a grand offer, the courtesy of my body for her night’s delight. She would have laughed me out of the door, I think, even if she had been a younger woman.
But then, if I had been a younger man, I would not have seen the value in her. There are advantages to the slow creep of age; there is recompense. Not everything rots at once.
When there was space, when there was a quiet fallen between us, I said that, or something like it.
Even older men can make fools of themselves. She smiled and told me to go to bed, and did I want a child to light me the way?
~ ~ ~
Come morning, true to her word, Ramin took me up through the city again. On our way I saw a sprawled heap in a gutter, a groaning sorry mess of a man I thought might have been one of my crew. Another day, I might have stopped—but he was Rulf’s man, not my own. One of the young bloods; let him bleed. If he was bleeding. The dark wet stain he lay in might be wine, or vomit; it might be piss. Truth? I didn’t care.
On another narrow street I saw a shaggy blond head lean out of an upper window. Again, I thought that was one of mine; and wished him well, as a man’s dark arm reached to draw him back inside. I liked the lad; indeed, I’d seduced him myself from his father’s farm, before bad land and bad luck had had the chance to sour him. Left to make my own choices, I chose well, on the whole. Rulf? Not so. He had been a lucky king, but he’d needed that, to offset his disasters.
Sometimes I was astonished that he’d ever won the throne at all, let alone held it for so long. That none of his wars had killed him, and none of his mistakes, and—particularly!—none of his friends.
That Croft had apparently never even tried to kill him, even from exile. Where were the Skanderene assassins? The city was famous for its dealings with death.
Perhaps Croft had had his bones poisoned, his hair soaked with bane. Perhaps Rulf was dying even now as he gloated and lamented over his fallen foe, as I chased about on his stupid, deadly errand here in Skander, here at Ramin’s heel. Here in the chancellor’s back yard, in his house, in his kitchens, where there was heat and sweat and hurry, loud voices, no time.
Ramin snared a servant, greeted him by name, said, “Where is the steward Cephos?”
And would have been answered with a backhand blow, except that I was there. I caught that blow before it landed, a hand’s span from his head; held it the way a cliff might hold a hurled stone, unmoving, undisturbed.
I said, “The steward Cephos?”
“Please, you will, you will find him in the storeroom, down that corridor,” a frantic flicker of his eyes to show me where.
I nodded graciously and released his wrist. Ramin ducked ahead, to where indeed a man was checking sacks.
“Cephos! I have been looking for you!”
That earned him a slap too swift for me to intercept, even if I’d been inclined to.
“Master Cephos to you, little brat. And I have been waiting for you; I had word from your mistress. Yesterday, I think.”
The blow was taken for granted; the unfairness of the rest reduced Ramin to spluttering incoherence. With a shrug, the steward turned to me. “You would be Harlan the Sawartsman?”
“I would. I need to speak to your chancellor.”
“Yes. Come with me.”
He took us through a side-door and into another world: a half-world rather, a hollow between the domestic quarters and the public rooms. Rulf’s rede-hall was a single vast and open space, where you had to work out for yourself who was king and who was carl, who lord, who stable-lad. Here the very shape and structure of the house separated servants from their masters. It was like walking within the skeleton of a great beast; within the walls ran a network of stairs and passages, narrow and awkward and secret as spies. Secret for the light-footed, at least, for the slender and flexible. Ramin was cat-quiet and cat-swift, the steward much the same. I knocked my head on low beams, stumbled over sudden steps, scraped my shoulders against both walls at once.
We passed a dozen doors before at last the steward unlatched one and beckoned us through. I straightened my poor cramped spine with a grunt of relief—and struck my head one more time, on something that swung away from the contact and then back to hit me again.
This time I didn’t even try to hold the oath back to a mutter. At my side, the steward flinched; behind me, Ramin giggled; ahead, someone laughed aloud.
I reached up to snare the rope-hung obstacle, a bar of polished wood like a ladder’s rung or a child’s swing. Just one of many; for a moment I thought we’d been brought into a spider’s lair, the room was festooned with so many ropes and bars. A spider with a sailor’s ken, knowing knots and bindings and how to rig a space so that no two ropes should tangle.
Beneath that web, two men: one standing, one lying on a couch under a coverlet of cloth-of-gold. Both pale, shaven-headed. I took them for eunuchs, one more layer of officialdom to be circumvented.
It was the older of the two, the man lying down, who had laughed. He was grinning still. Glowering at him, wondering if he was sick or indisposed, I saw how the coverlet lay flat where his legs ought to have been; his body ended abruptly, just a little below the hips.
Now I understood the ropes and rungs. He was broad-chested, vigorous despite his age, despite his pallor; no doubt he could pull himself around this webwork as handily as any sailor aloft. Handier, without his legs’ weight or the need for footing.
And he was grinning at me yet, waiting for something; and―
“Croft!”
~ ~ ~
I was the king’s windmaster; the breeze comes at my calling. A gale, when I shout. I had learned long since not to shout withindoors, even in a hall. Even in Rulf’s great rede-hall. In that close space, that day—well, I shouted.
I broke the room.
Those hollow walls splintered like bird-bones, shattered like windowglass. Ropes snapped and tangled, spars flew like straws. Ramin was blown clear across the room; I never saw what happened to Cephos.
Croft lay in the ruin of hi
s couch, clinging to his companion, laughing and laughing.
~ ~ ~
Soon, in another room, that first passion spent:
“They call me Fenner nowadays,” he said, “hereabouts. Or simply Chancellor.”
We used to call him Fenner the Helpless, because he never needed any help. I had never been the right man for this mission. Rulf had subtler thinkers he might have sent, souls as suspicious as his own. Blunt and trusting are poor qualifications for an ambassador, especially to a city as insidious as Skander.
“You seem. . . shorter than you were,” I breathed, still barely trusting my own voice. Rulf and I were friends as two cats are friends, always sidelong in the corner of each other’s eye; Croft and I had been friends as two bulls are friends, always head to head. I couldn’t measure my danger here, or his own.
“Come, sit,” he wheezed, hoarse from laughing, hauling himself upright on this other couch. “Drink with me. The people here make little stronger than bread beer—but I have all the palace as my plaything, which means half the world, and the better half. Our guests learn to be open-handed. I’ve a honey brandy from the Brach that would be worth the journey to Brachia on its own account, rowing against tide and current all the way.”
Unexpected, abbreviated, very far from safe, he was still Croft. Of course I would drink with him. He wanted to talk, to tell me how clever he’d been, and how sly. We’d had the same conversation over and over, since we were boys together.
I sat the other end of the couch, where there would have been room even if he hadn’t shifted, that space where his legs were missing.
“We thought you were dead.”
“You were meant to.”
The second man had carried Croft in here, as casually as one carries a child. Now he fetched us bowls of glass filled with a clear dense liquor, fire on the tongue and fire to the heart. And took none for himself but settled wordlessly on the floor against the couch’s arm, where Croft could reach out and stroke his smooth oiled scalp, tug lightly at his ear. Servant and lover, then—or I was meant to think so.
Croft had shaved his own head, and his beard too. That was my excuse for taking so long to know him. We look for what we expect to see, and make easy judgments: clothes, hair. Legs.
I said, “How does a crippled beggar, even a beggar king, rise to be chancellor in Skander?”
He snorted. That was not the question I wanted to ask. Even so, he graced it with an answer. “Painstakingly. A doctor fled here because his lord had died under his knife. I took the same chance, and lived. A man may shrug a burden off and get by the better after. You might learn that, if you chose. I traded legs for influence; the city’s prince was curious to watch the cutting and the healing after, and so I reached the palace. That prince is dead now, but I am here yet.”
“Your bones are in Sawartsland, in Rulf’s lap. Named and known.” Unmistakable, or so Rulf thought. “Did you have your doctor keep your legs in pickle, till you needed them?”
“And then attach them to some other body, and hope they looked to fit? I might have done.” He sounded pleased with me for suggesting anything so wily, so unlike myself. “But no: I bought a man at market and had my doctor break and bind his legs, just as Rulf had done with me. Then I kept him alive until I needed him.”
For years, that meant: years and years, in pain he knew too well. And then killed him, boiled his bones, wired them neatly together and sent them to us. I might have said anything, nothing; it would make no difference now. I said, “What for, old friend? Is there some way of vengeance here, that I can’t see?”
He laughed. “Oh, I have had my revenge on Rulf, although he doesn’t know it. He has no child, does he?”
“None—though not for want of trying.”
“Of course. He’d want a dynasty. He’ll never have one. I sent him a woman long ago, a hedge-witch to poison his seed. No sons for Rulf King, however hard he tries.”
It would never have been hard to put a woman in Rulf’s bed, even from this distance. I wondered which woman and whether he had kept her, whether she worked her spells yet or one time had served for all time, a curse-bane lurking at the root. He had tried witches of his own, I knew, but Croft’s must have been the stronger. No surprise, if he found her here in Skander.
He went on, “In the end, I knew he’d want Toland back. Adopted by the new king, sired by the old: that speaks of dynasty, what better? And what better way to push him into it than sending him my bones, letting him think me dead and the boy adrift? I knew you’d be the one to come, the king’s windmaster. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps this is still vengeance after all. I have stolen his posterity, and now I steal his friend.”
Croft seemed content to smile and wait—not for the first time—for me to catch up with his meaning. I looked at the younger man, and back through time to when he had been younger yet; and spoke to him for the first time, said, “Well, then. If Croft has gone from crippled exile to beggar king to chancellor, what are you now?”
He echoed his master’s smile and said, “I am the chancellor’s legs. As you have seen.”
Which was to say that he was more than that, much more; but he would never be Rulf’s son and never king in Sawartsland. I wondered if Croft had taken other measures to be sure of it, besides stealing the boy’s heart and keeping him close all these years. I had taken him for a eunuch at first sight; I might not have been wrong.
It didn’t matter, and I wouldn’t ask. Not here, not now. I said to Croft, “I have the Skopje here, and I can find a crew, buy a crew if need be. I can go home, with this news or any. I don’t see how you have stolen me from Rulf.”
“A man can shrug a burden off,” he said again. “And should do, where it has no value. My legs, your loyalty. The ship’s your own; so should your life be. What do you have to go back for? Grown children and a bitter king, neither in need of you. A draughty longhouse cold all winter long, an ice-needle in your bones, and too many people always at your ear. They’ve had the best of you already; enough, now. More than enough. Stay here, and keep what’s left.”
“You’re saying this was a trap for me? Not for Rulf at all?”
“Rulf would never come, you know that. A king without an heir, without children to marry off to build alliances? He hardly dare leave his hall. You, though: of course he would send you, and of course you would come. And once you were here—well. Harlan, stay. Find a new crew, sail new waters. Learn a city, the way you learned the sea. Woo the harbormaster.”
I startled. Perhaps I glowered.
He laughed. “What, did you think that she imagines all those children to be her own?”
Ramin crouched once more in his corner of choice, quiet and still, shrugging off his bruises. Who owns whom is always a question; in his mind, I thought, perhaps he owned me. Or perhaps he had traded me, or given me away.
In my own mind—well, I could see a small house, a quiet house. A great and welcome change from what I’d left, all that bustle and labor and noise. A boy to run errands and make a nuisance of himself, a girl who would know where my boots were; I shouldn’t need more of a household. A house not too far from the harbor, certainly. Convenient for the Skopje, for a new life on and off the water; convenient for friends to visit, back and forth. Or to stay, either way. The harbormaster, if she eventually would; my blond farm lad in the meantime. . .
I said, “Why, whyever would you want that?” Apart from causing Rulf a deal of worry and frustration, which was no more than bread beer against the fiery spirit of what Croft had done already to trouble Rulf.
Sometimes, theft is an act of simple honesty. Everyone belongs to someone else, elsewhere as in Skander; but he said, “I miss more than the sea, and my legs. I have my legs,” tweaking Toland’s ear, simply to see him smile. He said, “I miss my friends. One friend,” and so he stole me from my king.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Chaz Brenchley is the author of nine thriller novels, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Boo
ks of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. His most recent books have been ghost stories, of a sort; his collection Bitter Waters won a Lambda Award last year. As Daniel Fox he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy, Desdæmona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than five hundred short stories in various genres. He recently married and moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.
THE DELUSIVE CARTOGRAPHER
Rich Larson
THE SPRAWLING PRISON WALLS were outlined in a sickly blue-green glow, algae skimmed from the tide pools for crude illumination, and as dusk fell across the waters the gaol looked like an enormous dying sea creature beached on the island shore. Crane rather liked it. He mimed manacles around his blue-veined wrists as he turned to his companion.
“I’m willing to sign the confession, now, Mister Gilchrist,” he said. “Spare me the belly of that stony beast! Think on our many years together, I beg you.”
Gilchrist snorted, beetle-black eyes still fixed on the approaching shore, but a few moments later he spoke. “It can still be me. I’ve been in more of these pits than you. And I’d blend better.”
His sinewy arm against the boat’s carved tiller was dark, dusky. Gypsy. Crane, meanwhile, was bony and pallid in the way more common to denizens of Brask and the north.
“Be that as it may,” Crane said, “I humbly posit that of the two of us, I am the superior negotiator.” He re-checked the waterproofed case tucked into the band of his trousers. “This may come as a shock, Gilchrist, but some find you unfriendly.”
“Outlandish.”
Crane laughed, but Gilchrist was silent as he guided the single-masted sloop around another twisting reef. The warm wind was carrying island sounds, island smells. Night flowers prickled Crane’s nose like needles. He breathed deep.