The steward might be complicit, with the gentleman’s house near the water-front perhaps too conveniently rented. More than staff might possess the keys, which left Lysaer’s back lethally vulnerable.
Dace rubbed the thread concealed in his left wrist. Features too old for his natural years, he rued the day he had given consent to the affairs of Fellowship Sorcerers. His true form as a woman might side-step the town watch, even assume a street child’s garb and join the loud-mouthed ragamuffins who played stickball on the doorsteps of the wealthy. At least as an urchin, he could watch the door. The forfeit advantage of Davien’s disguise scarcely mattered if his liege fell to a predatory conspiracy.
Undecided which way to turn, Dace fretted, while the pooled midday shadows lengthened towards afternoon.
Summer 5923
Undercurrents
The steward rushed into the lord’s private study seconds after the tinkle of glass disrupted the household quiet. He noted the smashed casement rondel first. Then, in sepia shadow, the master himself, seated across from the sparkle of fragmented glass. Lysaer s’Ilessid had turned his stuffed chair from the desk, the medallion carpet scuffed where the lions’ paw feet had furrowed the pile. On the papers behind, the inked quill just laid down suggested the day’s correspondence, rudely interrupted.
“Light preserve!” gasped the steward, breathless from his sprint. “You’re unhurt?” His solicitous fuss met rebuff although the gentleman said nothing. A fair man informally clad, cuffs turned back and his collar unlaced in the heat, should not possess such a magisterial bearing.
To mask his inquisitive interest, the steward temporized stiffly, “Does my lord have enemies?”
Arctic blue, Lysaer’s eyes, in a face chiselled clean of expression. Unlike other pedigree lordlings, he never unbent under chatty sympathy. A faint sparkle of glass sequinned the wrist he raised from the chair arm. His clenched fingers, uncurled, served his stinging reply: nestled into his palm, the pried chunk of cobble-stone a vandal had tossed from the street.
“Children!” The steward huffed in disgust. “Poor-quarter ruffians at their careless games. Rest assured, I’ll summon the watch. They’ll haul the insolent wretches into custody straightaway.”
Lysaer’s mild response struck the note green ambassadors always mistook for agreement. “What befalls young offenders when they’re declared guilty?”
“If they can’t pay the fine for disruptive behaviour and punitive repairs?” The steward took the liberty to inspect the damage, then clucked over the crack found in one of the casement mullions. “The urchins are sent to the docks, where forced labourers pick apart worn ropes for oakum. They serve a month for every silver sentenced in recompense.”
The brisk move as Lysaer shoved upright stirred the air like the first hint of storm. “Get Dace up here to polish my boots. I’ll be off to the magistrate inside the hour.”
The steward bowed. “Your Lordship, my word is sufficient to seal the conviction. No need to address this low grievance in person.”
Lysaer’s fixed regard never wavered, clear as a mineral pool before the geyser’s eruption. “I have no complaint to press charges. None whatsoever. My purse will settle the landlord. And the fine, if your accusation is not proven spurious. Now send Dace!”
“The boy Quince will tend your footwear,” said the steward, his arch condescension routine to coddle a flighty lord’s fancy.
Lysaer’s firm response still raised no flag of warning. “Dace is off on an errand? I’ll await his return.”
The steward rubbed his hook-nose, discommoded. “Then your boots will be polished by my own hand, while the matter of finding a glazier awaits on your vanity.”
Where another aristocrat might have deferred, Lysaer’s silken inquiry pressed, “Where is Dace?”
The steward prevaricated. “Milord, such unpleasantness is beneath your attention.” Given no leave to dismiss the question, he squared his tapered shoulders. “If you insist, regretfully, I’ve just dismissed Dace for thievery.”
Lysaer said nothing with such elegance, the steward cleared his dry throat. “I don’t know what the wretch stole, milord.” Deceit flowed off his oily tongue. “That would be the cook’s grievance.”
“My business alone!” Lysaer rebuked. “Dace is part of my retinue, fellow, and no lackey attached to this house. If the resident staff is displeased with his conduct, I expect the malfeasance brought to me directly. I will not be deferred. Fetch Dace back. I want him retrieved from the street before sundown unless you prefer your own trip to the magistrate to save him from a vagrancy charge!”
“You’re too generous with petty dishonesty, milord,” the steward chided. “By far too forgiving as well. The man’s of dubious background. Scarcely quality, and I would further suggest, unworthy of your noble stature.”
Lysaer smiled with corrosive contempt. “I’m not forgiving, or overly generous. Cross me, and the fine for this case will be docked from your payshare.”
The steward blanched, stiffly bowed, and departed. Sweat moistened his nape as he clicked the door shut. Not from the afternoon’s stifling heat but sprung from the dreadful, sudden awareness he had tweaked the tail of a sleeping tiger.
Alone once again, Lysaer strode to his desk and sat down. He unclenched his right fist, smoothed the rag held wadded inside, and reviewed its message in crudely stained writing. Then he took up fresh paper and quill and composed a cryptic response.
“Spend this for a private room at the Galley-men’s Rest, and above all, avoid being seen. Stay until I come myself.”
Lysaer sanded the ink. He folded the note around a ten-royal silver piece, then sealed it with wax and a torn scrap of cloth: a distinctive fawn linen, torn from the lined jacket of one of his liveried servants. His mouth a clamped line that made state envoys cringe, he lobbed the packet through the broken pane. Then he polished his own boots with grim intent to impose upon East Bransing’s magistrate, then proceed with a meeting of greater importance.
The Galley-men’s Rest straddled the breakwater, a concoction of plank walls and shake roof propped upright on gangling stilts. Renovated from a pierside fish-shack, the structure looked ready to slide with a tired splash into the harbour. A rope-slung gangway bridged the canal sloshed by the incoming tide. The propped-open door-panels sported matched port-holes, salvaged off a scuttled shrimp-boat.
Arrived in the blued shadow that silted the entry, Dace Marley paused and surveyed the tap-room throng: a garrulous stew of crews from the mackerel skiffs and shirtless stevedores come straight off the docks. Gin sold at a tuppence the tot, which a slogan scrawled over the bar claimed to sprout curly hair on a virgin’s tits.
Dace breathed a fust of alcohol fumes thick enough to fuel the bull’s-eye lamps. Several sawn off oar-handles leaned by the tap, ready bludgeons to quell drunken riots.
The lowbrow dive was a sly choice: inconceivable, that the Light’s avatar would rub shoulders with such unsavoury company. Dace waded into the raucous heave. He by-passed a dice game, ducked a contest at darts, and two meaty fellows locked in an arm wrestle, circled by bettors screaming encouragement. Grotesquely displaced, Dace was greeted with mockery.
“Lost your way, fella?”
“Come in slumming for a two-minute trick?”
And from the one-eyed smith in the corner, picking his teeth with a meat skewer, “How much d’ye charge to lick a man’s todger to a spit polish?”
Dace grinned. He had worked the rough bars in Etarra as a pretty young woman, unfazed. “How much would it take to watch you do the same for everyone’s wide-eyed amusement?”
Through the startled laughter provoked by his cheek, Dace inquired after a private room.
Whiskered in wool almost to the eyebrows, the landlord weighed the request. “Would that be for a bed with one doxie or two?”
Dace raised open palms. “No wenches.” Before the onlookers made sport, he retorted, “I’ve two soft hands, after all. They’re clean, I know wher
e they’ve been, and better, their service is free.”
The obscene roar of approval rattled the rafters, while the floor-boards shuddered to the tidal chop that slopped against the slimed pylons. Dace ignored the next round of chaffing and offered up Lysaer’s ten piece.
The landlord claimed the coin with a moist fist. “Ah! That particular room, reserved for the gentleman, is it? The fee doesn’t budge.” A deft move whisked the bribe out of sight and bestowed upon Dace a grimed key. “Under the stairs and out the back door. Take a stroll down the dock. The quarters for blueblood whoring are under the copper cupola.”
Dace acquiesced to the landlord’s extortion and made his way through the rear exit.
The annex reserved for private dalliance was a gazebo, enclosed in weathered clapboard and roofed in the verdigris scrap of old sheathing torn off of derelict hulls. Dace approached, touched by a sudden qualm, as if an incipient warning of danger crossed the straight grain of Lysaer’s orders. Yet he had to earn the unquestioned trust his true purpose required.
Dace poised at the door-sill under the glare of full sunlight. Nothing seemed untoward. Wavelets lapped and sucked at the pilings. The strident gulls mobbing the fish pier sliced the bustle of late-day commerce eclipsed by the board wall of the Galley-men’s Rest.
Dace slotted the grimed key and turned the lock, jumpy as a dropped cat as the panel swung inward. With reason: the gloom beyond held two hooded fellows of muscular build, shod in hobnailed boots out of place on the docks. With them, ghostly white, two more figures wore the robes of Sunwheel priests. Neither of their startled faces belonged to that morning’s temple informant. Dace recoiled, too late. A hard blow slammed into his nape from behind.
As he folded, someone’s mailed grip crammed an astringent, damp cloth over his nose and mouth. A second punch in the belly drove the air from his lungs. Reflex forced him to inhale the drugged fumes. He succumbed to nauseous, wheeling dizziness and sagged into a faint.
Dace woke to a fire-ball searing his skull, and a dry mouth that tasted like ashes. The malaise of the narcotic and the bludgeon just used to fell him, or so he supposed, until his muddled senses picked out the pressure of moist hands clasped at his temples. The intrusive hold sourced the unbearable headache, and more, he felt as though a cincture of hot wire scorched his left wrist under the skin.
Laboured awareness attached that discomfort to the enchanted thread that knotted Davien’s wrought disguise. By the ripe oaths puffed in onion-breath over his head, the Sorcerer’s conjury did more than shape-change his gender.
“… be damned to the nadir of Dark, I cannot read into this wretch! His simple mind’s empty of purpose as wiped slate. Anyone but a moron would be pissing his breeches by now from the morbid echoes of primal terror.”
A blurred shimmer of white betrayed the proximity of a temple priest. Dace shuddered, aghast. Now aware his discomfort stemmed from the active probe of a True Sect examiner, he thrashed weakly and retched.
The temple-trained talent released his entrained grip. “At best, anyway, a lackey’s experience offers us questionable value. Slit his throat, I say, before he wakes up. We can’t have our faces remembered.”
“No,” snapped another gruff voice. “Bind the wretch first. We don’t know why Lysaer sent him ahead, and he may prove more useful alive.”
“He’s only a footman,” the examiner scoffed. “The Light’s avatar will never be swayed by low-class human sentiment.”
“Perhaps not,” the speaker agreed. “But deliberation does not discard an advantage, and patience ensures that we’ll finish our day’s business quietly.”
More grumbling ensued, while one of the cloaked men-at-arms was convinced to step out for a length of stout rope. Dace sprawled on his back, miserable under the after-shock, and reeled by the scents of stale sweat and whore’s musk that cloyed the air like a stain.
Another heavy-set tread creaked the floor-boards nearby. A stranger’s cowled face hovered above, pale as a bloated fish. Dace grasped the distorted impression of watery-blue eyes, thick-lidded beneath sandy lashes. Then a slippered toe shoved him onto his side.
Through his gasping discomfort, his laconic captor observed, “Better test him again, before your dedicate captain returns. I’d rather ascertain beyond any doubt Lysaer doesn’t suspect we know anything.”
The examiner’s protest that naught would be gained became overridden by nervous authority. “And you’d swear by the Canon such stupidity’s innocent?”
“The ethic of my office forbids me to speculate.” The temple’s arcane inquisitor sniffed. “I’ve reported as much as my talent can see. Another probe is a waste, more than likely to injure the subject.”
“This affray goes beyond paltry harm to a servant! How much damage can the True Sect doctrine withstand, subjected to a debate over policy spear-headed by the fallen avatar? Have you better means to find out why the Light of his godhead forsook the war against Shadow in Lanshire?”
The examiner yielded on that point, discomposed. A whiff of almond soap and sweet incense breathed out of his clothes as he bent, pudgy hands cupped at Dace’s sore temples to resume his frustrated inquest.
“I’ll need more help,” he complained to the muscular dedicate poised by the door. “Bear down and restrain this fellow before he goes into frothing convulsions.”
Dace moaned, still unstrung in a muddled haze. The men overcame his pitiful struggle as though they pinioned a rag doll. Stretched against a rug rank with mildew, he braced for the excruciate pain as the examiner pried into his mind.
No such dreadful horror occurred. The redoubled assault instead triggered a sharp flare from the buried thread that sustained Davien’s working. The examiner grunted. A powerful talent, he sharpened his effort, determined to tear through the unexpected resistance. Whether his next thrust aimed to smash Dace’s psyche at the cost of crippling insanity, the Sorcerer’s construct lodged in Dace’s left wrist blazed into conflagration. The tingling, electrical burst combed through flesh and spirit. The effect doused the examiner’s Sighted incursion as thoroughly as a wet blanket.
For Dace, the burst triggered a flash-point gestalt that exposed his tormentor’s double-blind plot. After the Master of Shadow escaped the field at Lithmarin, and since the True Sect war host’s decisive defeat by a sanctioned High King’s crowned power, Erdane’s high priesthood suspected Lysaer s’Ilessid’s lapse into heresy at the Great Schism had progressed to incorrigible corruption. The examiner sought proof the Light’s avatar had become suborned beyond salvage.
Dace had blundered into a True Sect ambush, arranged under the pretence of a covert meeting. The temple cabal’s interrogation for lapsed divinity was meant to occur here in secret, masked by darkness and the rowdy debauchery of seamen on shore leave. After they exposed Lysaer’s wilful course as a threat to the True Sect cause, none would notice the splash of a naked corpse, sunk off the pier for the crabs. A decomposed body stirred up by the tide might raise some desultory questions. But never for long in the stews of East Bransing, where knifed casualties were the routine victims of drunken disputes.
Dace shuddered and raged. He could not save himself, far less disarm a deadly conspiracy poised for his liege’s destruction.
Already the structure beneath him thumped to an inbound tread.
“Here’s our man with the rope,” the temple authority mused with self-righteous confidence.
“Check to make sure,” snapped the Sunwheel dedicate, crouched over the servant’s pinned wrists. “Let’s have no more pesky surprises upsetting our mission.”
Dace reacted first and bellowed in agony.
A hand muffled his mouth. But not before the incomer’s reaction delivered the ring of drawn steel. The locked door banged, kicked open to admit a shattering flare of daylight. Gloom and shadow fled, pierced by a blade poised for bloodshed.
Dace twisted his head. Dazzled, he picked out distinctive gold hair: Lysaer s’Ilessid, come early to hear the account of t
he lackey whose flung stone had delivered a warning of treachery.
Shock froze the tableau, while Lysaer’s freezing gaze met the servant drugged and held in duress.
The compromised examiner shoved off his knees and spluttered excuses. “My exalted lord! Forgive us, we had to be certain of your man’s loyalty.”
As quick, the cowled priest in authority oiled over the awkward disruption. “Lord Exalted, put up your blade! Naturally, your sacrosanct safety demands our diligent oversight.”
“I found nothing, besides. The fellow is earnest,” the examiner hastened to add. Brazenly indignant, and quite unaware that Davien’s agency had exposed his murderous duplicity, he gushed, “He’s quite unhurt! We gave him a posset to ease his discomfort under our examination.”
Dace held his tongue through the unctuous display. To show more than a commoner’s ignorance would destroy credibility, if not damn him as a minion of Shadow. Yet if his liege shut the door and stood down, the temple cabal might try to recoup their upset initiative.
He had to respond. Dizzy and nauseous, near incapacity as Lysaer’s outraged order freed his cramped limbs, he let the sick after-shock fold him double. With luck, he might spew on the traitorous examiner, or render the air in the stifling shack too disgusting to breathe.
But his retching heaved nothing from an empty stomach. Up-ended by vertigo, limp as slaughtered meat, Dace heard his liege’s rebuke through the whirlpool as consciousness fled. “I will sanction no such cavalier handling or excuse a worthy servant’s abuse. Bear the fellow up. Now! I’ll attend him myself. A harlot’s bed is no place for a sick man, no matter his humble station.”
Summer 5923
Counter-currents
Awake in the comfort of clean sheets, Dace hears his liege’s contrite confirmation: that the steward’s connection had exposed the temple informant’s duplicity; and asked what reward he desires for an act of selfless, true service, he requests the grant of position as his Lordship’s personal valet …