The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (4 page)

BOOK: The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2)
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Seven – What Arla Saw

By the time they’d ridden over the bridge and back to the Law House Arla was feeling more like herself again. Her eyes still smarted and her throat felt raw, but she was clear headed once more. She was also aware of burns on her arms and back that made riding uncomfortable. The pain didn’t bother her much because she was completely focussed on remembering what she had seen in the room under the warehouse, examining every detail over and over again.

It didn’t mean anything. The images made no sense, but she knew the detail might be important to someone, to Hekman perhaps.

She climbed down from her horse outside the Law House. Her skin felt tight, and she was thirsty. Perhaps she’d done more damage to herself in the fire than she suspected, but that didn’t matter now. First things first. Gilan was there to help her, and she walked in though the front door. The fat man saw them coming.

“Blood and fire, Gilan! What have you two been up to?”

“Business,” Gilan said.

“Paper,” Arla said. “Ink.” Ulric provided both at once, and Arla began to draw. She’d always had a talent for images. If she saw something she could render it on paper, and she did so now, transferring the images in her head onto the pristine white parchment. She drew carefully, checking against her reinforced memory with each stroke of the nib.

Hekman appeared, but Arla ignored him. He stood and watched while she drew, and when she finished he stood and looked. Arla looked herself. It was nonsense, of course – the scratchings of a mad bird in the snow.

“I saw the fire,” Hekman said. “What happened?”

“There was a room under the warehouse,” Gilan said. “It had something to do with the boy. Someone set fire to the whole thing.”

“And this?” Hekman pointed to Arla’s sketch.

“What I saw,” she said.

“The building was burning,” Gilan explained.

Hekman turned the paper round so he could see it. He studied it for a while.

“A cage?”

“So it seemed.”

“And how big?”

“Shorter than me,” Arla said. “It could have been made for a child. It was man shaped – tall, thin and slightly wider. It was suspended from the roof by a rope.”

“And this?” he pointed to the other part of the sketch.

Arla looked at it. This had been the hardest thing to draw. She’d seen it only for a moment when the beams had fallen and she was thrown down.

“A drawing on the floor,” she said. “Chalk, perhaps. It might have been paint.”

The image looked like part of a circle, or two concentric circles – about a quarter. Between the circles there were four symbols.

 

“It means nothing to me,” Hekman said. “Anyone?”

“Never seen anything like it,” Gilan said. “Could it be something from the old tongue?”

“Ulric?”

“Not the old tongue, chief,” the fat man said. “I’ve seen enough of that in books and it looks pretty much like ordinary writing, but that the letters are jumbled up.”

Hekman stood for a minute, staring at the strange characters, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. They waited. He looked at Arla. “You need a physic,” he said. “Ulric?”

“I’ll send for one at once.” He turned to Arla. “There are beds in some of the rooms upstairs. You can rest there until he comes.”

“Rest?” She did feel tired, and more than a little feverish, but she didn’t want to let this go.

“You’re in no fit state to go about town,” Hekman said. “And nothing’s going to happen for a while.” He turned away from her. “Gilan, I want you to go and talk to the death man, the one that was here. Ulric will tell you where to find him. Ask him about other deaths like the boy, then ask him about other death men. There must be a few dozen in Samara and I want you to speak to them all. If one death man’s seen two like this, then there could be more. I want to know how many.”

“Chief.”

“There are two men in one of the back rooms. We signed them this morning. One of them’s called Ifan. Take him with you. Go.”

Gilan went, and the room seemed a lot bigger.

“Ulric, send a runner to Ella Saine. Tell her I want to consult her urgently on a matter of scholarship. And another thing – find out who owns that warehouse.”

Hekman turned back to Arla. “You need to rest and get well. If the physic comes before the answer from Ella Saine you can come with me when I talk to her, but now rest. You’ve done well. This is the first thing we’ve had that really points somewhere. Ulric will bring you anything you need.”

Arla nodded. She’d rather have gone with Gilan. She was beginning to like the big man. But Hekman was the chief, and as a guard it was one thing she understood – orders were to be obeyed. Ulric pointed her up the stairs and she found one of the beds – a wooden frame with a straw pallet that looked lonely in an otherwise bare room. She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her short sword and dagger. She’d lost her bow somewhere in the warehouse, which was a shame. She’d liked that bow. A good recurve like that would be hard to replace.

She lay down and winced. The burn across her back came to life again and stung wickedly. She rolled onto her side, being careful not to make the same mistake with her arm.

She closed her eyes.

Eight – Death Men

Ifan was a small man, and an archer, which was unusual. Most guard archers were women, and Ifan had been a guard at Skycliff before the fall of the Faer Karan. Size had probably been the deciding factor. He was young. Gilan guessed he was ten years younger than himself, but he seemed quiet and moved with the sort of grace that Gilan associated with useful fighters. He judged Ifan to be an asset.

They rode along Downside Street and turned into a small alley that didn’t seem to have a name, but Ulric had told him it was the alley with the Great Ship tavern at its head, and this was it.

The death man, Bilan Conir was his name according to Ulric, had his shop on the left hand side of the alley where the sun could never find it. There was no rail for the horses here so Gilan summoned a child and promised him a copper if he’d hold the horses while he and Ifan went inside. The child agreed.

Gilan had never been inside a death man’s place. If the street outside had been gloomy, then in here it was dark. The lamps did little to dispel the darkness. Indeed, Gilan thought that their smoke added to it. He stood just inside the door and rapped loudly on the frame. Conir appeared out of a back room like a spectre, pale and thin and clothed in black.

“Lawkeepers,” he said.

“Aye,” Gilan said. “We’ve questions about what you’ve seen and what you know.”

“I told the lawkeeper all that I know,” Conir said. He looked faintly alarmed.

“It’s simple enough, man,” Gilan said. “You’re no suspect in this. We’re trying to find if the bastard killed any more children, and we thought your colleagues might know.”

The death man seemed to relax at this and showed them through to a small parlour. It was a tidy room, spotlessly clean, but as gloomy as the rest. Three lamps burned defiantly and a window shed a reddish light, reflected off the brickwork of the house opposite. Conir insisted on serving them a glass of tea, which Gilan could have done without, and a plate of small pastries which Gilan found bland, though Ifan seemed to like them.

Conir told them again all that he had told Hekman, and Gilan listened carefully. He knew he wasn’t particularly clever, but he had a good memory and a strong arm, and that would do for this work.

“And the other child, the one that was the same?”

“Here in the old town,” the death man said. “A girl. She was the daughter of a fisherman who lives down on Ship Lane, behind the Shining Wake tavern. Her body was found in the sea nearby. She had the same wound in the skull, marks on the neck and wrists.”

“It happened on this side of the river?”

“I can’t say where she was killed, lawkeeper, but she was taken from the old town and found there, though I suppose the sea could have brought her home.”

Gilan made a mental note to check which way the sea washed things, but he suspected the murder had been done in the old town. It was too much of a coincidence for the body to be found so close. That meant the killer had two places, and maybe more than that. It also meant that he wasn’t just preying on Gulltown urchins.

“We want to talk to other death men. If you’ve seen this before, they may have.”

Conir looked at his hands. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “It will be easier.”

They left the alley and walked their horses a few streets north. Conir walked silently, and the way he moved reminded Gilan of the herons that fished the river banks. He stalked along. They came at last to another house, larger and better appointed than Conir’s. It was on a main road, and so better lit, but it was still painted black, and stark white lettering modestly announced it to be the premises of one Aldus Peron.

Conir knocked on the door frame.

A man emerged from the shop, beaming at them out of a round face framed with blond curls. Aldus Peron was a head and a half shorter than Conir, but had twice the presence.

“Bilan,” Peron said. “Who are your friends?”

“Lawkeepers,” Conir said. He looked at Gilan. “They want to talk about the shrike.”

Peron’s face went behind a cloud. He frowned. “Well, they’d better come in.”

They knew. This killer had been at his work so long that the death men knew him, had a name for him. The shrike. Gilan knew the birds. They impaled their prey on thorns. It was a name he could understand.

Peron took them through to a parlour many times the size of Conir’s. He didn’t offer them tea.

Gilan didn’t wait for polite exchanges. “You know,” he said. “This has been going on for… how long? And you know.”

“You want to know how long?” Peron said. “I don’t know. As long as I’ve been in the trade. Twenty years at least. Others say longer.”

The enormity of what Peron was saying sent as shiver up Gilan’s back. Twenty years? How many children? It could be hundreds.

“You told no one?” he asked.

Peron shrugged. “Who was there to tell? The Faer Karan? Ocean’s Gate? The King? None of them gave a damn.”

“And nobody tried to stop it?”

“One or two,” Peron said.

“And?”

“They went missing, some of them. Some of them found nothing at all. Are you going to look for him?”

Gilan bristled at the question – that it should be a question at all. “We’re law keepers,” he said. “We will keep the law.”

Peron looked at him. “You’ll try,” he said. “I believe you will.”

“How often does he kill?”

“Sometimes two in a week. Sometimes a year will go by, but we might not see them all. Some in the trade don’t look. Some don’t want to look.”

“And it’s always the same,” Gilan asked. “The wound in the head, the restraint?”

“More or less.”

Gilan questioned Peron for another hour, extracting the details and locations of every murder, every kidnapping, every corpse that he knew of. There were a lot of them. It seemed impossible that this had gone on so long, that so many children had been stolen, tortured and killed without him knowing about it. It should have been the topic of conversation in every tavern, the subject of every street corner gossip, but instead it was a secret, a dark, hidden shame.

It did not seem worth the trouble to seek out other death men. Peron had told them all they needed to know. The city was littered with the dead. They came from every social stratum, every neighbourhood, almost every street it seemed, and the slaughter had been going on for year after year – decades of blood.

Gilan was angry. He rode briskly back to the law house and Ifan rode beside him, silent as he had been on the way out. It was not until the law house was in sight that he finally spoke.

“Damn, Gilan,” he said. “I thought the Faer Karan were monsters. But this…”

“Aye,” Gilan said. “I’ll see the bastard dead if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Nine – The Shining Wake

Arla was asleep when the physic came. She was surprised to be woken. She thought the pain would have kept her awake, but it had not. It came back, though, with a rush.

The physic seemed to know her job. She examined Arla’s burns and produced a cooling salve that lessened the hurt. She had gentle hands, and the process wasn’t especially painful.

“Drink this,” the physic said, pushing a blue glass bottle at Arla.

“What is it?”

“Good for you,” the woman said. Arla eyed the bottle. She’d never been given anything like this at Ocean’s Gate, but then at Ocean’s Gate they had the Faer Karan, and they could cure all ills with a few words and gestures. It was ironic that of all the great Faer Karan strongholds in the world only Ocean’s Gate still had its shapeshifting lords. Now they were in thrall to the Mage Lord, but they were still there, could still cure or kill.

“All of it?” she asked.

“All of it.”

Arla did as she was told. The liquid was sweet. She suspected that it had been mixed with honey and alcohol to make it more palatable, but that was fine with her.

“What was it?” she asked.

“A restorative. It will help to deaden the pain and keep you free of fever.”

Arla gave the empty bottle back. She could already feel the pain fading, her weariness being washed away by the potion. The physic was packing up her things. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. “Your burns are not serious, but should be watched. Try not to do anything violent.”

She left. Arla sat on the bed for a while. She didn’t feel tired any more. There was a window, but all it showed her was a house on the other side of the street from the law house and rooftops rising up to the opulence of Morningside and the cliffs above that. It was a pleasant enough view, but Arla was bored.

She left the room and went downstairs. She looked for the room they’d been in earlier, but almost walked into Hekman in one of the corridors.

“You’re up,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You saw the physic?”

“Yes. She said it was alright as long as I didn’t do anything violent.” It was a half truth. She saw Hekman smile briefly.

“Good timing, then,” he said. “I’ve had a message from Ella Saine. She’ll meet us in the Shining Wake. Are you up to walking?”

“Yes,” Arla replied. She’d heard of the Shining Wake. It had a reputation for serving silver food at copper prices, mostly fish. Arla didn’t particularly like fish and she’d never been there. It wasn’t the sort of place you went if you needed to keep a low profile.

It wasn’t far. Nowhere in the old town was far, really. They walked down a street towards the sea. It glittered ahead of them, and this particular street had been adopted as a market. It was lined with stalls selling whatever folk had to sell. Arla barely looked at them.

“You lost your bow,” Hekman said. “In the warehouse fire.”

“Aye.”

“You’ll be needing another. The best bowyer in Samara is up on Kettle Lane, or so Ulric tells me. When we’ve done with Ella Saine you can go up there and see if he can make you what you want. A recurve, wasn’t it?”

“A good one.” Arla was surprised. She’d thought to pay for a new bow out of what she earned. A good bow cost three or four gold – more than she expected to earn in a month. She stole glances at Hekman as they walked along. He was living up to Ulric’s promise that he was different. She’d not seen him laugh. She’d not seen him angry either. Whatever kind of life he’d had before this seemed to have burned such things out of him, and to be fair he didn’t look in the best of health.

They came to the bottom of the street and stepped out onto the strand. The bay here was full of small, brightly painted boats. The piers that clustered near the mole at the eastern end were lined with small ships. Somehow the sea here seemed cleaner and more exciting than it did in Gulltown, even though it was the same sea. Arla knew nothing about boats, but they had an indefinable air of adventure about them, especially the ships.

Hekman didn’t pause to admire the view. He turned left and walked steadily until they came to the Shining Wake. It was bigger than Arla had imagined. Its white face occupied fifty paces of the waterfront, and it was busy. She tried not to meet anyone’s eyes as they went in, easing through the lunchtime crowd.

Sam seemed to know where he was going, and she followed as closely as she could. They came to a corner table by one of the low windows that looked out over the bay. A man and a woman were sitting at the table, and they could not have been more different.

The woman, Arla guessed, must be Ella Saine, member of the king’s council, and one of the very few people in Samara said to be on terms with the Mage Lord himself. She looked like a child – small, pale, thin and quite dowdy. The man was something else. She knew him by reputation. The guards at Ocean’s Gate, and most of the folk in Gulltown, called him Killer Kane. The guard had been trying to kill the man for years before the Faer Karan ended, and it had been mutual. He was broad, scarred, powerfully built, and he sat with his back to the view scanning the tavern.

There was a story going round Samara that Kane was Ella’s bondsman, that she’d won him in a wager from the king, or that she’d saved his life – something like that. Now Kane was hers and, if stories were to be credited, loyal as a dog.

Ella smiled and stood.

“Sam, how are you?”

“Well enough,” he said. He sat at the table. Arla remained standing, unsure what she was supposed to do. Ella looked at her.

“Arla, please sit,” she said.

Arla sat, wedging herself at the end of the table as far from Kane as possible. From here she could see most of the bar by turning her head. Kane seemed to be ignoring her.

Hekman pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic, and Arla recognised it as the sketch she’d made back at the law house. He put it in front of Ella. Arla had to admit that Hekman didn’t waste time. There were no pleasantries. He told her the story, plain and simple, the murdered boy, the death man’s evidence, the warehouse, the room beneath it, and the fire. Ella listened patiently.

When Hekman finished it was Arla that she turned to.

“This is what you saw?”

Arla nodded. “Aye.”

“Do you know the symbols?” Hekman asked.

“You’ve been burned,” Ella said, still looking at Arla. Arla shrugged.

“Had to try and see,” she said.

“It was a brave thing to do. Foolish, perhaps, but brave, and it paid off.” She turned back to Hekman. “I can’t tell you what they mean now,” she said. “But I’ve seen something like this before, and I think I know the book.” She passed the paper back to Hekman. “I think this is magic, Sam,” she said.

“Magic?”

“Not like the Faer Karan,” she said. “Not like the Mage Lord. This is something older and darker, but I can’t be sure. I’ll have to read the book again. I’ll come to the law house tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Sam said. He made to stand up, but Ella waved him down again.

“Stay and eat,” she said. “I want to hear about everything else, and the icefish here is wonderful.”

Hekman didn’t quite sit again. He was poised between up and down. “I need to get back to the law house,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Ella said. “The world won’t descend into chaos if you take half an hour for lunch. Besides, I’m sure Arla wants to try the icefish, and I’m paying.”

Arla didn’t want to answer, but Ella looked at her and she decided it would be impolite to remain silent. “I prefer meat,” she said. Ella frowned.

“Honest if not diplomatic,” she said, and the frown turned into a smile. “But I guarantee you’ll like the icefish. They only serve it when they’re running off the coast, just once a year for a couple of weeks.”

Arla nodded. It looked like she was going to get to try the icefish.

She noticed that Kane was smiling.

BOOK: The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2)
3.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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