The Dragon Round (31 page)

Felic knocks on his doorframe. “Do you need me?”

“Still no word of Omer?” Livion says.

“No,” Felic says. “I went to the Tripple myself. He had a drink, he met a man, and he left, but he never took a room. He hasn't returned, nor has he been seen at his other haunts. We've promised perks to a few dozen people to let us know if they see him.”

“Good,” Livion says.

“Should I send to the Round for some dinner?” Felic says.

“No,” Livion says. Felic slips away.

Livion sees Prieve below. Considering how he's been treated today,
he wishes Hanosh retained some of its pre-League sensibilities. Even the little things might help, however much breath they waste. He runs to his door and calls down the corridor, “Felic.”

The young man returns, wearing a light cloak and short-billed cap. “Yes?”

“Thank you,” Livion says.

Felic gives a little bow, touches the bad side of his face, and leaves.

In the Shield's offices, Chelson led
the party into the small hall and shut the door on the underlings so slowly Livion thought he was savoring the latch's click. “I don't know what you're playing at,” he said, “or whom you're playing for, but the stakes are too high for you to sit at this table anymore. Here's what you're going to do.” Herse stood behind him as Chelson jabbed his finger at Livion's chest to make each point. “You will see if this dragon nonsense is true. You will employ every resource at our disposal. And you will fail. In a few days you'll say that Ayden must have been behind the attack. You'll admit that delaying our response put the city at risk. You'll request an extended leave. The company will oblige.” As an afterthought Chelson said, “And you will return those boots.”

“What if I find out Omer was right?” Livion said.

“You won't,” Herse said, putting a hand on Livion's shoulder. “Ayden attacked us. The city will believe us. Why can't you? Do you trust a trade rider more than us? A rat, I bet, who wanted a full purse for his information and promptly vanished?”

Livion can still feel Herse's hand beside his neck as clocks around the Harbor chime nineteen: three quick sets of five and a four. At his office window, Livion watches men and women head home or to the Round, shaking off the day, while on the piers a boy traipses from crane to crane, lighting the lantern by each as it loads and unloads. No movement comes from the gibbets on the bay.

Someone coughs behind him and he jumps. His servant girl is
standing there. The letter in her hand bears a seal of the bright yellow wax Tristaban currently favors.

“She's spoken with her father?” Livion says. The girl nods. Livion points to his desk, she lays it on a clear space, and he unfolds it. He reads the note without surprise and looks at the couch in his office.

His father-in-law gave him the couch when he was made a junior and installed in this office. “It looks comfortable,” Chelson had said, “but it's not. You don't want a guest to be easy. That gives you an edge.”

“What if I want a guest to be comfortable?” Livion had asked.

“Take him to the Round.” His father-in-law had patted the still-empty desk and said, “Don't you get too comfortable either.”

Livion says to the girl, “Let me write a reply.”

“One isn't required,” she says.

Livion flicks his quill across some papers. “Then tell Trist ‘Good night.' ”

The girl leaves. Livion returns to the window.

After Livion left the Shield's offices,
practically sliding down the stairs, Ject met him in the tower's entry hall with his personal guard.

“You did well to speak up,” Ject said, “however wild your story. Two dragons! And Chalfin. I remember him. Nasty business. You're going to the Castle?” Livion nodded. “Good. I'll go with you. We can compare notes.”

A clanking on the stairs lifted their eyes to Herse coming down.

“What notes do you have to compare?” Herse says. “For one so concerned about jurisdiction, the battlefield is as far from yours as Ayden.”

“That it was a battlefield remains in doubt,” Ject said, “but the battle, thanks to your stunt, is in our streets.”

“If you're looking for advice on combat—”

“I'm looking for peace.”

“So am I,” Herse said, “but I'm willing to fight for it.” Herse pushed past them and left the tower.

“I'll find Omer,” Ject said. “And we will prove him wrong.”

Ject didn't say anything else on the way downhill, tapping the pocket with his paper instead, until they found the street blocked by a group of tanners. They were arguing loudly about the best way to give Ayden its due. They reeked of urine. One said to Livion, “Hey, hero, if you don't want to fight, why don't you leave?”

“Ravis,” Ject said, pointing at him. Ravis pinned the tanner's arms and marched him to the general. Ject said, “You're Strig.”

The man said nothing.

“Of course you are,” Ject said. “I can't forget a face, and how could anyone forget yours, however much you've damaged it? What was it, ten years ago, you thought you could outrun me? No, eleven. How's your sister?”

Strig continued to say nothing.

“I hear of her from time to time,” Ject said. “Nice girl. Hard worker. It'd be a shame if she was brought in because of something you did.”

This got the man's attention.

Ject opened his hand. Ravis released Strig. “When you see her, let her know I'm thinking of her,” Ject said.

“I'll be thinking of you,” Strig said. “You're as bad as the hero here. Waves fall, though, when others rise.” His friends dragged him away before he could say more.

The people looking on might have approved Ject's actions, except they were too afraid to be seen looking on.

Past the boulevard leading to Brimurray, Livion noticed his okono vendor's cart was gone, despite it being lunchtime. Near its place a cart full of apples had gotten one wheel wedged in the gutter. The driver asked several people passing by for help, but none had the time.

Ject ordered his men to pull the cart free. They made short work of it. Then they perked themselves with several bags of fruit. Ject
chose his own apple, fat and pink, crispy and sweet. “This is what I'm fighting for,” he said. “The simple give-and-take of public service. Why disrupt a perfect system?”

Night has the horizon in its
clutches. Livion would get a room at the Round if he could bear the eyes and unspoken questions. Instead he bars the door, sits on the couch, and flops his head back.

A scream wakes him up.

6

A scream in the Harbor at night is not unusual, nor is a person yelling at the screamer to shut up. When he hears guards blowing horns, he gets up, closes his windows, and lies on the floor. The rug is more comfortable than the couch. He falls back asleep.

Felic rings the ship's bell Livion keeps on a shelf to announce the morning. He brings in a basin of water, a cloth, and a small pot of soap, then leaves to get him some breakfast. This isn't the first time Livion's spent the night in his office, although usually it's paperwork that keeps him and he wakes at his desk. Felic returns with a green stirrup of coffee from the Round, an okono, and Ravis.

Ravis says, “It's urgent.”

“So I brought him straight up,” Felic says.

Livion, having washed up and tucked himself together, pours coffee into a bowl. “Have you found Omer?” he says.

Felic shakes his head.

Ravis says, “The general wants you at South.” The wall around the Upper City has five sides; four named after the directions they roughly face and “Gate” in the middle, named after its centerpiece. The city guard's headquarters buttress the south wall.

Livion unwraps his okono. Crab. “Why?” he says, and takes a healthy bite for appearances.

Ravis says, “I'll take you. He'll explain.”

Livion puts down his okono and drains his bowl. The coffee doesn't wash away the crab. He follows Ravis past Felic, realizing that the casual observer might think he'd abandoned the Shield. Given the threat he felt yesterday, he's grateful for the xiphos hanging beneath Ravis's arm.

Unlike most of the buildings uphill
in Hanosh, which are faced with stucco, whitewashed, and roofed with blue tile, South is a broad stone structure built out of the gray granite wall itself. Ravis leads Livion to a side door. Two guards outside recognize him and knock. A guard inside looks through a wicket, bars are removed on both sides, and the door is opened. Beyond an antechamber and a door made of iron bars, stone stairs plunge beneath the Upper City. Livion follows Ravis. The door guard locks and bars the exterior door, then unlocks the inside door. Ravis takes a lantern from the wall and starts down.

Livion doesn't. He says, “Why aren't we going in the front?”

“The general will meet us at the cells,” Ravis says.

“Keep moving,” the door guard says. “Can't keep the door open all day.”

This doesn't feel right.

“Afraid of the stench?” the door guard says. “It'll get worse below, but after a few minutes you won't even smell it. Your partner will, though. Tougher to get out of your clothes than blood.” He laughs. “Go.”

Livion can't see how he could refuse. He descends.

The stairs turn twice before entering a vaulted room with a damp flagstone floor. Ravis says, “We'll wait here” and sets the lantern on a small table beside, unbelievably, the remnants of someone's breakfast. Boiled rat, which a live rat is gorging itself on. The lantern doesn't concern it. Livion is regretting that one bite of okono.

Ravis stands in front of a wooden door with a hang lock. Livion looks through the iron bars of two other doors in the room. They lead to barely lit passages lined with cells. The flag of Blue Island is painted on the wall at the end of each. These are holding cells, the least valuable investment in the complex because prisoners don't stay in them long enough to pay for board and sundries and the maintenance fees the city pays are minimal, although, like the other cells, Ject does guarantee that nine out of ten will be occupied.

Several minutes later, the general marches up one of the passages carrying a lantern. His mustache sags from lack of sleep; not a single fold of his uniform does. He produces two keys and hands them to Ravis, who uses the first to let Ject into the small room and the second to unlock the wooden door.

Ject says, “I need your experience.”

“In what way?” Livion says.

“You'll see.”

Ravis opens the door. Livion gags at the smell of fresh blood. The others don't. Around the walls of a large room are scarred chairs, split bamboo rods, coils of rope, heaps of chain, iron bars with pins, and other implements. Chains with hooks hang from the ceiling. In the middle of the room atop the drain are three bodies shrouded in bloody burlap.

“Let's start with the one on the left,” Ject says.

Ravis unwraps a woman. Livion's seen men burned to death and drowned. He's seen limbs torn off and bodies horribly scarred, but he's never seen a person eviscerated. Her rib cage has been wrenched wide to get at her heart and lungs. A black chiton still dangles from her shoulders and covers her thighs demurely.

“She was found on the roof of a warehouse in the Harbor,” Ject says, “spotted by someone farther up the Hill. There was no access to the roof from the warehouse. Now that one.”

The middle bundle is roughly the same size as the first. The canvas is peeled away. Livion follows a barely crusting line of blood from a bare foot up to a scrawny knee and the hem of a black chiton. Blood
pools in the fabric. Her neck is gouged halfway through. One side of her face blushes purple, grit embedded in the skin.

“She's our girl,” Livion whispers. He realizes he doesn't know her name. She'd only been with them three months. Trist doesn't think it worth learning a girl's name until after she's served a year.

Ject is surprised. “When did you last see her?”

“Last night,” Livion says. “Seven chimes. A little after. She brought me a note from my partner. Where did you find her?”

“Her dorm mother found her in a cut through between two Servants' lanes,” Ject says. “The mother was out looking for our first victim, actually. She lived in the same dorm and hadn't come home after reportedly meeting some man. Did your girl go back to your house?”

“Yes,” Livion says. “Maybe. My partner wasn't waiting for a response. She might have gone back to her dorm.”

“When did you go home?”

“I didn't,” Livion says. “I stayed in my office, waiting for word about Omer.”

“Of course. Let's see the third.”

The third body is a man's. His belly is ripped open, his viscera apparently gnashed to pieces. The rest of him is strangely untouched, but for a bruised chin and dried blood on his lip from a shattered tooth.

“And that's my rider,” Livion says.

“He was found not far from the piers,” Ject says, “tucked in an alcove in an alley. Curious, you knowing two of them. And you might have been the last to see each alive.”

Livion edges toward the door. “I had nothing to do with—”

“Did I say you did?” Ject says. “Are you sure you don't know her?” He points to the first body.

Livion shakes his head.

“Come here. I want you to look at these wounds.” Ject squats beside the hollowed girl and waves Livion to him. He says, “What happened here?”

“She looks . . . eaten. I've seen rats do this to galley cats.”

“Pretty big rat, don't you think?” Ject pulls out his dirk and holds it over the wound. “Even if it took two bites to tear away the belly, its mouth would have to have been at least this wide.”

“Where is this going?” Livion says.