The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (11 page)

Marching through the streets at the head of fifty men reminded Arla of what it had been like as a guard. The king’s men weren’t quite up to guard standards when it came to marching, but their feet drummed the road in time and the clink and rattle of swords and armour, the smell of leather and oil brought it all back.

Marching had never been a favourite with Arla. She preferred shooting arrows in the butts for obvious reasons, but marching had always been a communal thing with the guard. Swords and bows marched together, cavalry at the rear where they didn’t put dust in the faces of their comrades.

This was different. She walked with Calaine, Talis and Gadilari at the head of the column, and they didn’t keep time. She could see Talis had trouble staying out of step with the marching beat, but it was faster than Arla was used to, and she simply lengthened her stride.

It was close to midday when they arrived at the gate of the House of Tarquin, and with a final crash of booted feet, a last rattle of steel, the column came to a stop and stood silently before it. Could the inhabitants really not have noticed?

Calaine nodded to her and Arla went to the door and knocked. It opened fairly promptly, suggesting the soldiers had indeed been heard. The man who opened the door was the same one that had answered Gilan’s more aggressive knock.

“Again?” he said. “I told you to go away.”

“Arla Crail, Lawkeeper Officer. We’re here to search the house and grounds in connection with a crime of murder.”

Where the man stood he couldn’t see the soldiers or Calaine. He was too far back.

“Crail?” he said. “You’d better run back to the law house before I tell the king’s men where to find you.”

Arla was still trying to think of a suitable response to this when Calaine stepped up beside her. The princess didn’t have to speak. The lackey visibly recognised her. He bowed at once.

“Do-Regana,” he said. “I didn’t…”

“No,” Calaine said. “Just open the door. Now. Or my men will break it down.”

The man took the risk of putting his head through the door. He saw the fifty heavily armed men standing in the street. “Of course,” he said. “Of course. It will take just a moment.” He had no choice. Arla could see that Calaine was angry and she was sure that the lackey could see it, too.

The door swung open and Arla stepped forwards into a pleasant courtyard full of the scent of flowers. It was surrounded by whitewashed walls and on one side a large balcony overlooked the space, a stairway led up to it. There was a vine on one wall, and everywhere the wall and roof were capped with red tile. It looked a very charming place to live.

The steward had retreated half way across the courtyard and Arla saw him signal to a gardener, who quickly vanished inside the house. Talis and Gadilari had followed her in.

“We’ll search the place from top to bottom,” she said to them. “You know the sort of thing we’re looking for, but keep your eyes open for anything that looks odd. Remember, there are no closed doors here. We look everywhere.”

Talis and Gadilari left her. Arla’s job, she’d decided was to question Tarquin. She saw him emerge onto the balcony, and even from this distance she could see the look on his face change from anger and outrage to concern, and even to fear. Calaine had brought twenty of her soldiers through the gate and they stood impassively in a line across the courtyard, hands on sword hilts.

Arla walked to meet Tarquin.

“What is this about?” the merchant demanded. “Why are you here?”

“I told you before. We have questions. There have been murders, at least one of which was committed on your property.”

“The warehouse? I’d hardly call it property,” Tarquin said.

“What you call it is hardly my concern, Tarquin,” Arla said. “It was yours. It was the scene of a particularly unpleasant crime, and there was every indication that it had been used for the same purpose on previous occasions.”

“We haven’t used it for years,” Tarquin said. “It was rotting, there’s no traffic at that dock, and it would have cost too much to fix. My father stopped using it. There were too many thefts.”

“How many years ago would that be?”

“Thirty? Thirty-two, I think. I can’t remember. I was only a boy.”

“It was maintained by someone,” Arla said.  The walls were sound and there was a lock on the door.”

“Really?” Tarquin looked genuinely surprised.

“Perhaps you’d like to check your accounts and see if you were paying for it?”

“I’ll get my steward to look,” Tarquin turned to find his steward.

“I suggest you do it yourself, Tarquin. Your steward, or anyone in this household, could have been responsible.”

Tarquin looked at her. “Murder?” he asked. “One of my people?”

“Or yourself,” Arla said. “You could have killed the boy.”

Tarquin’s eyes flashed. He clearly wasn’t used to being accused of murder. Arla couldn’t guess if it was a sign of innocence or guilt, or maybe just a sign of a poorly controlled temper. He regained his composure quickly enough.

“I am innocent of any crime,” he said. “I am a trader, nothing more.”

“Perhaps you can suggest who else might have the authority to spend the money?”

“What makes you think it was my money?” Tarquin countered. “Anyone with a full purse could have had it done. It was no secret that we’d abandoned the warehouse.”

It was true, of course. Just because it was Tarquin’s warehouse didn’t imply that he was responsible for what went on there, or indeed that any of his people had a hand in it. Arla realised that she wanted it to be Tarquin because she didn’t like him very much, but it was no basis to arrest the man.

Talis appeared behind the merchant.

“What is it?” Arla asked.

“Locked door.”

She looked at Tarquin, but the merchant just shrugged. “Get my steward to open it,” he said. “He holds the keys.”

Arla followed Talis and the steward along the side of the house and through a small door. This led into a passageway, clearly part of the servants’ quarters. It was narrow and whitewashed. At the end of it another door was set in the side wall, and this, too, was open. She followed Talis down into a cellar and by torchlight to a heavy door set in a stone wall. A heavy lock secured the door via a ring and hasp assembly.

“Open it,” Arla said.

The steward looked nervous. “I don’t have the key,” he said.

“Who does?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was Trader Tarquin, but I’ve never seen it open.”

Arla turned and looked at Tarquin. She raised an eyebrow.

“Not me,” Tarquin said.

“Are you saying that neither the master of the house nor his steward have the key to this door, and that neither of you knows what lies within?”

Tarquin and the steward looked at each other. “It seems that we are,” Tarquin said.

Arla turned to Talis. “Break it,” she said.

Talis drew her short sword and slid it down the back of the hasp. The lock itself was far too strong, but where the hasp was attached to the adjoining wall looked weaker. She tugged a couple of times, and nothing happened.

“More room,” she said. Arla and the others backed off a step and Talis braced her right foot against the wall next to the door, wrapping both hands around the sword’s hilt. She heaved, lifting her other foot and putting that into the task as well.

The hasp ripped free and Talis fell to the floor with a crash. She picked herself up and after a brief inspection put her blade away. She looked at Arla.

“Go in,” Arla said. Talis went through the door, holding up a torch, and the others followed.

The room was small, and looked to be empty apart from a large wooden box in the middle of the floor. Talis waked over to it and lifted the lid, which didn’t seem to be nailed shut. She looked inside.

“Nothing,” she said.

Arla looked into the box. It was quite empty. She went back to the door and examined the lock. It was the sort of lock that said something valuable was being protected. You didn’t put a lock like that on a door to protect an empty box. She stepped back into the room.

“… to be here,” Talis said and looked at her.

“What did you say?”

“With a lock like that, something ought to be here,” Talis said.

Arla looked back at the door. Something was wrong. She had been two steps away and yet she hadn’t heard Talis speak. There hadn’t been even a mumble outside the room.

“Talis, count to a hundred.”

“Count?”

“Yes. One, two, three – you know.”

Talis looked puzzled, but she did as she was told.

“One, two, three, four, five…”

Arla stepped through the door again.

“Six sev…”

She could see Talis’s lips moving, but there was no sound, not a hint of a whisper. She watched for a while. How was that done? You could block most sound out by using cloths and blankets, and she guessed that was what the pile of blankets in the empty warehouse had been for, but this was different.

This was magic.

It put a whole new layer of suspicion on the house of Tarquin. Someone, she was sure, had the key to this place. She stepped back inside.

“…enty-five twenty-six…”

“Stop counting.” Talis stopped and looked at her, but Arla was busy examining the room. She spotted what she was looking for almost at once. There was a hook attached to the ceiling just above the empty crate. She took the torch over to the wall and looked. She found a cleat, somewhere where a rope could be tied off. She went back to the box.

“Help me move it,” she said. Talis took one side and she took the other. Together they shifted the box over to the wall. Arla went back to the middle of the room and examined the floor. It was clean – spotlessly clean. She crouched down and ran her hand across the stone. It came away with hardly a mark on it. She moved a pace towards the door and did the same thing again. This time her hand was filthy. She wiped it clean on her trousers and moved again. Perhaps it was just that the box had protected the floor from gathering grime, but a few more tests confirmed her suspicion – the clean area was a circle.

She looked at Tarquin and his steward. They both looked puzzled by her antics, but neither looked worried. Someone else, then, but clearly someone in this household.

It all fitted. A cage had hung here, suspended from a hook in the ceiling, the rope tied off at the cleat. A circle like the one she had glimpsed in the warehouse had been chalked or painted on the floor, and a magic spell of some kind had been cast so that the sounds of torture could not be heard beyond the door.

She had nearly missed it.

“We’ve found what we’re looking far,” she said. “Talis, you stay here until you’re relieved, and if anyone comes into this room who isn’t a lawkeeper, shoot them. Shoot them dead.”

Tarquin started to protest, but Arla cut him off. “A child, possibly many children, was murdered in this room, in your cellar. Would you like to tell me how that might be possible without your knowledge?”

The merchant looked confused. “Here?”

But Arla saw a spark in the steward’s eye. He looked at Arla, then at Tarquin. “Trader Tarquin,” he said. “Your cousin, Delatin Quoyn, he is often in this part of the house.”

Arla looked at them. “Quoyn? Is he here?”

“No,” Tarquin said. “He’s not been at breakfast for a few days now.”

Arla had to get back. This was a real break, a genuine suspect and an intact location. She had to tell Hekman and get lawkeepers posted here and have the room taken apart. She walked out of the room and ran into Gadilari coming down the corridor.

“You found something?” he asked.

“Aye,” Arla said. “We found something.”

For a moment his face was completely unreadable. Arla saw him look beyond her to the door. He produced something from behind his back and held it out to her.

“So did I,” he said.

At first glance she thought it was a dagger. It had a hilt like a dagger, the handle built up with strips of leather to make a comfortable grip for a hand, but instead of a blade it possessed a spike, a simple rod of steel no wider than a grain of wheat and the length of a man’s hand. The tip was sharp.

There was no doubt in Arla’s mind what this was, what it had been used for. Her imagination showed her the spike being driven hard into a child’s skull, penetrating the bone, plunging into the soft matter beneath.

She looked away. “Where did you find it?”

“One of the rooms upstairs,” he said. “The servants said it was the chamber of a man called Quoyne.”

“Proof,” she said. “Ten gold says he’s the man you killed this morning.”

“Aye,” Gadilari said. “I’ll not take that bet.”

Sam did not know if his threat had worked, or if it was something else, but Arla was alive, free, and now in the company of the Do-Regana with a sizeable squad of king’s men. It was a relief. More than that it was a demonstration that Arla need no longer fear being abroad in the city. It had been such a public display of her rehabilitation, such a plain and unambiguous show of acceptance that word of it would spread quickly.

Now Sam could use her as much as he wished.

He had thought when he first hired her that he could dispense with her services if things became too uncomfortable, but he had found it impossible. It would have been wrong. The law, he had come to realise, was not simply a set of rules. It was a principle that defined what and who he was.

He had never felt like this about being a fisherman, or his time as a citizen officer of the Gulltown militia. Lawkeeping was a calling, and something in Sam answered that call. This was who he was now, live or die. He was like a great bell that had languished in mud and sand all his life, responding to every blow with muted, dull tones, and now he was hoisted on high in the clear air and every touch, every tap set him ringing – the deep sweet tone of his voice filling him with purpose and clarity.

He did not fully understand it, but it was enough for him that he heard the call and answered it.

He sat at his desk in the law house and waited for Arla and the princess to return. He knew that he was out of his depth. They had caught a suspect and killed him. It had not been the best result, but now that suspect had got up and walked out of the law house and they had nothing. It was not the way things were supposed to be. Things were happening that he could neither understand nor predict. Magic had always been something distant, aloof, something on a different plane. Today, though, it walked the meanest streets of Gulltown and preyed on the poor that even the Faer Karan had left alone.

But Sam had another concern. Hagar Del had charged him with solving the coin clipping problem, and while it failed to compare with the murders that plagued the city he saw no reason why he should not try to solve it in his spare hours.

He took the coins out of the box by his desk, and at the same time his gaze fell on the strange thing he had dug out of the mud beneath the collapsed warehouse. He picked it up and laid it next to the coins. It was still filthy.

Sam knew nothing about magic, but somewhere at the back of his mind he had the idea that it was often associated with objects – rings, swords, jewels, staffs. He had better take a closer look at the stone.

He walked out the back of the law house and drew a bucket of water from the well. He thrust the odd shaped stone into it and rubbed it vigorously with his hand to dislodge the river grime that clung to it. Cleaning the stone proved hard work. The thing was reluctant to give up its humble disguise, but smear by stain he wore it away until the water was quite the colour of the river itself.

Eventually he was satisfied and wiped the thing off on a corner of his shirt. He held it up to the light. At first it was just translucent blue, like a sapphire, but the biggest sapphire he had ever seen. It caught the sun’s light and glowed, putting to shame the summer sky beyond. But as Sam stared at it, the thing seemed to grow, to take up more and more of his field of vision, almost as though he was falling upwards into it. He found it very hard to look away, and it was with a touch of panic that he tore his gaze from the thing and looked once more at the yard and the wagon sitting there.

But it was not just his gaze that had been engaged. It had spoken to him – not in words, but in some other way. He knew things now that he had not known a few moments before.

Teroganacy: the word from Ella Saine’s book. He knew what it meant.

He knew what the blue stone was.

He knew what it wanted him to do.

*

Arla returned triumphant. She had searched Tarquin’s house and her lawkeepers had found irrefutable evidence that something connected with their case had been going on under Tarquin’s roof.

Calaine and her soldiers made their separate way back to the citadel and she arrived at the law house with Gadilari and Talis in the middle of the afternoon. She sought out Hekman at once. He was in his office, seated behind a clear desk, staring down at the polished wood with his head in his hands.

“Chief,” she said.

He didn’t seem to hear her, but kept staring at the desk.

“Chief?” She pitched her voice a little louder and Hekman looked up.

“Arla.”

“We found something at Tarquin’s house,” she said.

“You did?” He didn’t sound that interested, which was out of character. She had expected him to be eager to hear the news. She put the dagger spike that Gadilari had found on the desk in front of him. Hekman flinched as though she’d struck him. He looked up at her again. “You found this at Tarquin’s?”

She nodded. “And there was a room silenced by a magic spell so that no noise from within could be heard outside, and a hook in the roof for hanging a cage, and the floor had been cleaned in a circle beneath the hook, to erase the symbols. It seems to point to a man called Quoyne.”

“But no symbols and no cage?” he asked.

“Gone,” she said. “Hidden, I should guess, somewhere else in the city.”

“You found no magic spell in Gulltown,” Sam said.

“No,” Arla admitted. “But there might have been.”

Hekman frowned. He reached out and picked up the dagger spike as though it was something revolting, which she supposed it was. He shifted it to his right hand and gripped it properly. He stroked the spike with the index finger of his left hand.

“A craftsman’s piece,” he said, suddenly putting it down again. “With the remains of the cage we have enough to start questioning smiths.” He sat back in his chair. “The body’s gone, Arla.”

“Gone? Taken? Where?”

“It got up and walked away while we were all fussing over Calaine in the street,” he said.

Arla stared at him. It was impossible, of course. Even the Faer Karan had been unable to reanimate the dead. Unless, of course, he wasn’t dead. But if a man could be stabbed through the heart and not die…

“Magic again,” she said.

Hekman passed her a piece of paper. It contained six vertical lines, some of them broken in the middle. “This mark was tattooed on his chest. Find out what it means.”

“Shouldn’t you ask Ella…?”

Hekman waved his hands in the air. “You ask,” he said. “I’m putting you in charge of this case. Use what resources we have.”

“Me?” She had been a lawkeeper for fewer days than she had fingers, and one of those had been spent in a cell under the citadel. She was hardly fit to enquire into the city’s greatest crime.

“You’re thinking that you don’t know enough, that you don’t have the experience.” Hekman said. Arla nodded. “Well neither do I,” he said. “I’ve been lawkeeper for a month, and most of that month I’ve spent in council listening to people talk about it, even though they know less than I, and I know nothing. If it makes you any happier I’m promoting you to head of investigations. You’ll investigate all crimes. Gilan will be head of patrol when the physic has fixed him up. He and his will keep order in the city.”

“I only have Talis and Gadilari,” she protested.

“There are ten more. Pick four, Gilan gets six. If you find one that seems bright give me the name and we’ll see about promoting them. There’s no secret here, Arla, we’re all making it up as we go along.”

Arla nodded. Smiths and Ella. She had to question the smiths about the cage and talk to Ella about the symbol. She was also looking for Quoyne. If she was in charge she would have to see that all these things were done and yet keep her mind open to new approaches.

But there was something wrong with Hekman. He seemed distant and uninterested. He had already returned his gaze to the plain wood of the desk before him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

He looked up sharply at that. “No,” he said, but then hesitated. He frowned. “Where is your new place?” he asked. She told him. “I will be there two hours after sunset,” he said. “There are some things that I should tell you.”

“Why not here and now?” she asked.

Hekman shook his head. “No. Your place. Tonight.”

“All right.” Arla agreed, but she felt it was wrong. They should be able to talk about anything here. She put it out of her mind and left Hekman looking at his desk. She went to the big room. There were things that had to be done.

*

Sam resumed the struggle. To his right he could feel the presence of the blue crystal like a draft from a door left open, cold and persistent. It had somehow planted something in his mind, a thought, a compulsion. He tried not to look at the dagger spike that Arla had left on his desk, because he knew exactly how to use it now. He knew the place at the back of the skull where it could be driven in, and at what angle.

The crystal had a name, but he did not wish to name it, even in his mind, because naming it gave it strength. Yet it was not the crystal against which he contended. There was another mind attached to it, a mind that sought to influence his own. He understood all this without a word being spoken. The knowledge had been thrust into his mind the moment he had stared into the blue stone.

There was more, too. Much more. But his mind was a battle ground. He could not have said which side had told Arla to expect him at her residence. It could have been either. One side wanted to tell her what he knew, had managed to give her the symbol and the authority she needed to pursue it.

The other wanted to kill her.