The Thief's Gamble (Einarinn 1) (45 page)

'Are you all right?' Aiten and I spoke as one as we helped Ryshad to sit down. I fetched him a cup of water but he waved it away with an expression of nausea.

'Have you been taken to that white-haired man yet?' he asked us shakily, unable to meet our concerned glances.

'I have.' I could not keep the tremble out of my voice. Ryshad looked up and I saw my own ordeal reflected in his warm amber eyes. That instant of shared experience somehow gave me strength and I saw an answering spark of determination rekindled in Ryshad's gaze.

Aiten looked at us, fear in his face. 'I take it this is bad?'

'Yes,' Ryshad said slowly. 'And I guess we're supposed to tell you how bad so that the fear will make it ten times worse.' A trace of the usual steel strengthened his voice. 'So I won't. It's bad, Ait, very bad, but nothing you won't be able to handle.'

I wondered at the conviction in Ryshad's tone and from the fear remaining on Aiten's face, he did too.

'So what happened to you?' I wanted to distract him and to find out what I might be facing when the next set of games were played.

Aiten shrugged. 'I was handed over to a handful of them who did their best to knock me senseless. They must have thought they'd softened me up so some rump — some old man started asking questions about why we were here. I didn't say anything so I was stripped and — and searched,' he blushed furiously, 'and thrown in here.'

'Don't feel bad about it, Ait.' I could see it was bothering him. 'Six guards can swear I'm a genuine redhead now. They're just doing it to try and break us down.'

Ryshad looked up from the floor as if our naked state had only just occurred to him. He stared at me rather like a thoughtful horse dealer.

'Did any of them try anything? Do you think any of them might be persuaded—'

'Rysh!' Aiten's tone was outraged.

'It's all right, Ait, honestly.' I put a reassuring hand on his arm. 'Don't take this the wrong way but I'd let them stuff me six ways to Solstice if I thought it would get us out of here. But none of them did so much as help themselves to a quick handful.'

Ryshad flashed me a half-smile. 'Well, that tells us their discipline is better than most troops I've ever met.'

'Sadly,' I agreed with a faint grin.

Ryshad got to his feet and began to examine the cell. As he was looking up at the grating, the door opened once more and Shiv was thrown unceremoniously in. Luckily Aiten was in position to catch him since he was unconscious, hair still matted with blood and clothes stained with seawater.

'How come he keeps his breeches?' Aiten muttered crossly as he laid Shiv gently down, stripping off his jerkin to pillow his head.

'Because there's not much point in humiliating an unconscious man.' Ryshad knelt beside him. 'Which means he's not come round since we were taken.' He looked grim as he examined the wounds to the back of Shiv's head, gentle fingers teasing apart the long black hair crusted with blood.

I shivered. 'I'd be happier if someone wasn't taking the trouble to think things like that through.'

Ryshad sat back on his heels. 'Whoever's in charge here is a clever bastard. Why do you think we're being put together one by one like this? Assume everything is being calculated to disturb us, to eat away at us. And fight it.'

I don't know if we were being listened to somehow, either our words or what we were thinking, but I can't believe it was coincidence that the door opened again a breath later and the guards threw in another limp body.

I recognised the fur-trimmed cloak before Ryshad rolled the corpse over to reveal what was left of Geris's kindly, freckled face. I choked on something halfway between a wail and a scream and clapped my hands to my mouth to stifle any further outburst.

Ryshad came and put his arm around my shaking shoulders.

'It's Geris?' he asked softly, already knowing what the answer must be.

I nodded numbly and then broke into shattering sobs. I had been dreading this moment. Logic had told me to expect it but my gambler's blood had kept urging me on to hope for the kind of improbable ending Judal used to stage at the Looking Glass. I had lost friends before but the danger had been part of the wager, part of the game, and we'd all gone in eyes open. I had not been able to shake the conviction that Misaen would somehow look after Geris, in the same way he cares for drunks and little children. He was too nice a person for anything really bad to happen to, surely?

Grief for Geris welled up inside me and flooded my mind. It fed on fears over my own fate, the shock of the violation I had endured, the sense of failure of our mission for Planir and biting dread at what might happen when this white-haired man led his cursed yellow-heads over the ocean. Irrational guilt that this was somehow all my fault lashed at me; I knew how the world works, I should have taken care of an innocent like Geris. My defences, my hard-won optimism, the hope that we might somehow survive this crumbled utterly. I wept as I had never wept before, sobbing like a little girl whose world had collapsed over a broken doll. I cried until I felt hollow inside, trembling with spent emotion, my head pounding, eyes swollen and sore, insensible of anything beyond the all-encompassing pain of the moment.

Gradually, the storm passed, as all upheavals do. I reached the point where wailing was an indulgence rather than a relief and I became aware of Ryshad's strong arms around me, his masculine scent and the fine curled hairs of his chest that I had soaked with my tears. I drew a deep, shuddering breath and allowed him to sit me against the wall. In some remote corner of my mind it occurred to me that we should all be finding this acutely embarrassing but I really could not be bothered. Ryshad fetched me water and Aiten wordlessly handed me a scrap of linen torn from Shiv's shirt. I wiped my face and leaned back, exhausted. That was when I again wondered if we were being spied upon and a faint spark of anger began to fight back against the chill deadness of grief in my mind.

I looked over at Aiten and saw he was glancing between Shiv and Geris, shame and defiance confused on his face. He felt my eyes on him and bit his lip but met my gaze squarely.

'They don't really need all their clothes, do they? To be honest, I'll be able to think a lot straighter without my stones swinging about in the breeze.'

'True enough.' I fought to keep my voice calm when inside I was screaming at him to keep his stupid hands off my friend and my lover.

Ryshad gave me a glance which made me think he understood my feelings. 'We can't give Geris any kind of burning but we can lay him out and say the rites over him,' he said softly. 'He deserves that, at least.'

So we stripped Geris, washed his poor broken body as best we could and wrapped him in his good wool cloak, achingly redolent of the herbs he'd used to sweeten his linen. I wept again as I saw the ruin of the fine delicate hands that had given me so much pleasure; all his fingers were broken and one had been completely cut away. Nails were missing on hands and feet while soles and palms showed the thin welts of repeated beating with some hard, fine rod. Blisters and burns showed where hot irons had been used on his face, the insides of his arms, and thighs, and groin. His firm, full lips, so well suited to kisses and being kissed, were split and bruised. One of his arms was broken in a couple of places and his jaw and several of the bones in his face were too. He had lost most of his teeth, either smashed or ripped bodily from the gums. Slow tears ran down my face as I closed those soft brown eyes that I had grown used to seeing alert with curiosity and keen with innocent goodwill.

My sorrow was not diminished but my anger mounted as we did not find the one thing I was looking for, the final dagger stroke, the mercy blow that would have released Geris from his agonies. It was not there and I began slowly to burn with a determination to somehow repay the white-haired, ice-hearted bastard responsible, to strike back in some way before I died.

Looking at the shattered corpse that had once been Geris, I finally realised we would never get out of this alive.

None of us had any coin, of course, so we pried dirt from the treads of Geris' boots and made mud to write our names on his palm so Poldrion could record the debt to us. I added Shiv's name and, after a moment's hesitation, Darni's; I didn't think he would mind. We spoke the words of farewell over him, Dastennin's rites proved similar enough to the ceremonies of Drianon that I was used to and I figured Poldrion would know what we wanted. I covered his face for the last time with the hood of his cloak and sat, head bowed, at his side. It was the lowest point of my life.

'Tell me about him.' Ryshad handed me Shiv's over-tunic as he laced on Geris' breeches and sat beside me.

I shook my head in mute pain but Ryshad gripped my arm and I looked up to see intensity in his face and tears standing in his eyes.

'Talk to me, tell me what he was like, remember the good things, the happy times.' A single tear fell down his cheek, unregarded. 'If you don't, you'll only ever be able to remember him like this. I sat with my sister while she sickened and died with the dappled fever and believe me, I know. I couldn't see her past her death pains for a year or more. That's what started me on Thassin.'

I could not think what to say but Ryshad persisted. 'I never knew him. Do you think we would have been friends? What was he like?'

'He was a good lad, genuinely good-willed,' I said eventually. 'Quite innocent in some ways; no idea of the real value of money and too trusting for his own good. He was loyal, loving.' My voice shook.

'Were you…' Ryshad did not know how to continue but I knew what he meant.

'We were lovers but more by accident than anything else,' I said frankly. 'I think it meant more to Geris than it did to me. He's from a big family and from what I saw, he loved children. He may have had ideas about settling down with me but it would never have come to anything.'

Regret for the loss of something I'd never actually wanted was stupid but it still cut me like a knife.

'Saedrin, who's going to tell his family?' Fresh tears tumbled down my face; I would not have believed I had any left in me.

'Were they close?'

'I think so. He talked about them a lot.' I was suddenly uncertain. How much had I really known about Geris? It hadn't seemed important before; now I wondered what I might have found out, if I'd taken the trouble.

I told Ryshad about Judal and the Looking Glass, about Geris' endless curiosity, his artless chattering on about everything and anything, Calendars and Almanacs, different systems of electing kings, writers ten generations dead and burned. As I talked, I realised how incompletely I had known Geris; where had his fascination with his stupid tisanes begun? I wondered. I recalled the fight at the Eldritch ring, Geris' bravery and his unexpected coolness in a crisis; where had he learned such courage?

When emotion threatened to choke me, Ryshad countered with his own stories, talking about his brothers and his lost sister, about horses he had owned and scholars he had met, anything that followed on from what I had been saying.

I don't know how long we talked. The room darkened and later was illuminated by the glow of torches from the yard above but, at the end, I was calm and Geris was at least alive in my memories again; I could see him as I had known him, not as the broken thing at the side of the room. Geris had told me the Aldabreshi reckon no one is truly dead until the last person who knew them is dead as well. I realised I might have some idea now of what they meant.

The Guest-house at the Shrine of Ostrin

Bremilayne, 2nd of For-Winter

Allin sighed at the triangular rent in the knee of Darni's breeches. She was sitting in the window seat, knees drawn up, glancing intermittently out into the narrow rain-dark street. She thought she'd escaped tedious tasks like doing everyone's mending and she did miss the hard, clear winters of Lescar, so unlike this drizzly place. A knock at the door startled her and she hastily put her feet to the floor, straightening her skirts.

'Come in.'

'Good day.' A man about Allin's father's age opened the door, lowering a wet hood to reveal neatly cut dark hair and a clean-shaven face. 'Are you Allin?'

'Of course she is.' A shorter man pushed past to warm himself at the meagre fire; he shed a tattered cape to reveal disordered grey hair and a ragged beard, and turned piercing blue eyes on Allin.

'This is a piss-poor fire, lassie. Ring for more coal!'

Allin didn't like to admit she hadn't dared to.

'Never mind that.' The dark man smiled at her, his grey eyes kindly. 'We're here to see Casuel and Darni.'

Apart from the Gidestan accent, he reminded Allin of her Uncle Wan-in. 'I'm afraid they're both out at present, sir. Can I tell them you called? You could leave a note.'

She put her sewing aside, remembering the social graces her mother had striven to teach her. 'Shall I ring for wine or tisane?'

'Thank you, wine would be very welcome.' The dark man hung their cloaks on the pegs and went to warm himself. His hands were white with cold, nails blue-tinged.

Allin clasped her own hands tight together and went to ring for a maid. The echo of the distant bell rolled around the silence in the room.

'Are you seafarers?' Allin hazarded an attempt at polite conversation.

'Of a kind.' The little man shot her a wicked grin and, to her chagrin, Allin felt her inevitable blushes rising.

'We are wizards, colleagues of Darni and Casuel.' The dark man smiled at some private amusement.

The door rattled and saved Allin from having to find an answer.

'Fine, tell me something I don't know, Gas!' Darni stormed in.

'Good day.' The dark man turned from the fire and Allin was treated to the rare sight of Darni at a loss for words.

'There's no—' Casuel's words trailed off as he entered. 'Planir?'

He swept a hasty bow and Allin managed a ragged curtsey before her knees failed her and she landed on the window seat with an audible thump.