Authors: Pamela Freeman
A
WEEK AFTER
their visit to the jeweler’s, Doronit called Hildie and Ash into her office from the training floor.
Hildie slipped through the door without knocking and Ash, looming over her, followed, carrying his knives and staves. He was coming along well, Doronit thought. Improving rapidly at singlestave and knifework, and learning to read and write surprisingly quickly. He’d actually be making her real money soon. And then there were his
special
gifts . . . though it wasn’t time for those yet. He had to be bound even more firmly to her. And this assignment might be another knot in that rope.
She smiled at them impartially, the boss’s smile. “You know Martine, the stonecaster?”
Hildie nodded, Ash shook his head.
“Lives down near the shambles,” Hildie said to him. “Got a good name. Accurate, like.”
“She has the Sight, apparently,” Doronit said, “and has Seen a . . . an attempt on her life. Soon.”
“Ranny?” Hildie said sharply.
Doronit shrugged. “It doesn’t matter who’s behind it. Martine wants us to provide protection. You two can take the first watch. And no staves. We don’t carry staves through the city without good cause. Knives will do. Off you go.”
She let them turn to the door, then she called Ash back. “There will be death tonight, Ash. The stonecaster saw it. Make sure it isn’t yours.”
He nodded, grave-faced, and followed Hildie.
Doronit was only a little worried. She’d made the caster check that he’d be safe and, though no casting could be relied upon entirely, Martine had said that Ash should come through the encounter intact. She was less sure about Hildie. Doronit wasn’t so concerned; risk was the nature of her business, and anyway, Hildie didn’t have the same gifts as Ash. Those were . . . well, not irreplaceable, but rare. Very rare.
She went to the corner of the room where a concealed panel in the floor hid her cashbox, and deposited Martine’s payment. She smiled, as always, at the sight of her treasures. She had hiding places all through the house and outbuildings, and in other places too, and she felt safe every time she looked at them. They reassured her that she’d never go without a meal or decent clothes, even if she lived to be a hundred. She’d been dressed in castoffs and rags for too long when she first came to Turvite. She smoothed the fine wool of her trousers under her hands and smiled again, then closed the panel and went to inspect the Dung brothers’ attempts at archery.
Hildie led the way to Martine’s through part of the city Ash had rarely visited, the oldest part, which predated Acton’s invasion. They went through a small open space not far from the docks, which Ash had never seen before, but it set his nerves strumming. He had heard of this place: Doronit had mentioned it, laughing. His father had once taught him a song about it, a song of melancholy chords and dying cadences. In a past so long ago that even the stone-dwellers who live under the cliffs had forgotten, the place was once a ford over an open stream, the song said, and next to the stream was a black rock, a sky-born rock, where the local gods came to meet their worshippers.
The tip of the black rock still jutted through the cobbles and gravel of modern Turvite, no more than two hands’ width showing above the ground. Next to it, encircled by roots, stood the only full-grown tree in the city, throwing around it in summer an umbrella of green. It looked both incongruous and right, that oak tree, Ash thought. It towered over the cottages around it, out of place, out of scale. Yet if he looked only at the tree, he could see its shapeliness. The sweep of its branches had grace, and the yellowing leaves were pale flames against the sky.
Even in the heat of summer, though, Turviters did not sit under that tree. As Ash and Hildie went through, he noticed that others passed by almost as though they hadn’t seen it. The song had said that Turviters never spoke of the place to each other nor mentioned it to visitors. The open space had no name, although every other crumb of the busy cake had a label, every crooked alley and dead-end street in the city had a name.
Ash could feel the tree at his back as they went into a small side street, could sense the black rock sitting there, its power seething. How could the Turviters ignore it? It called him back with a whisper of many voices saying his name. The voices were cajoling, inviting, familiar, like the voice he had heard in the cradle, the voice he heard in his own head. He had to force himself to go on with Hildie, feeling a cold sweat crawl down his back.
As they disappeared into the winding streets, the voices died, disappointed, like a wind dropping. He found himself walking more briskly, as though while he had heard the voices they had drained him, but now his energy returned. What would have happened if he’d gone back?
I won’t go back,
he thought,
not ever
. But a part of him, a small trickle of desire, sent his thoughts back to the tree and the rock. He knew he would be able to point in its direction no matter where he was in the city, as though it were a lodestone and he a compass needle.
“Were you talking about Ranny of Highmark?” he asked Hildie, to take his mind off the altar stone.
“Mmmm.”
Ash had never met Ranny. He’d heard stories: she was wild, profligate, ruthless, intelligent enough to know when others were more intelligent and to hire the best minds she could find. She was the head of a large merchant family that spread over half the world.
“She wants Martine dead. Tried to hire Dufe to kill her.”
Dufe was a safeguarder Ash met occasionally in the taverns. He had worked for Doronit briefly before Ash had come to Turvite.
“Why?”
Hildie shrugged. “Goes back to a reading Martine did for her, they say. Told her she knew the day and the time of her death, and the cause of it, but wouldn’t tell her anything more. Said it were against her code.”
“It is,” Ash nodded. “There’s no stonecaster born will tell you the time you’re to die. They say it takes all the joy out of living.”
“Ranny reckoned she’d avoid her death altogether. Be somewhere else. She offered Martine . . . well, she offered her a lot, just to tell her
where
she was going to die. So she could avoid the place. But Martine wouldn’t do it.”
Ash grinned. “Traveler’s proverb: ‘He who runs away from Death has Her as a traveling companion.’”
“Tell Ranny that.”
“I still don’t understand why Ranny wants Martine dead.”
“Because if Ranny can’t know the time of her death, no one’s going to know. That’s what she said.”
“How do you know?”
“Dufe told me.”
Ash laughed to himself. Ranny had picked the wrong man there. Dufe was as far from a killer for hire as a safeguarder could be, which made him wonder if he’d ever gone through one of Doronit’s tests in the back alleys of Turvite. Would he have killed the girl thief? Somehow Ash didn’t think he would have walked down the alley in the first place. Maybe that was why Doronit had fired him.
They reached the stonecaster’s house at dusk. It was a small house in the middle of the old part of town, with the caster’s sign outside: an outsize canvas pouch hanging from the balcony, which jutted out over the street. He would have known anyway — there was a ragged circle of ghosts standing back from the door, waiting to be let in. Most of them were standing in the middle of the road, but they didn’t care — ghosts in Turvite were used to being walked through without so much as a by-your-leave.
Martine was on the balcony looking down at them, so the first sight he had of her was her face upside down, with long dark hair falling either side so that it was like looking up a tunnel, with her pale face the light at the end. She seemed very tall.
“Push it,” she said. “It’s always open.” Her voice was strong, but with an undertone of sweetness, like fresh mead.
The ghosts eddied and moved forward, but only one came to the door with them. The stonecaster must have spelled the door. It was often done. A ghost could only enter if it had some connection with the human visitor.
Hildie held the door open for Ash but he waited for the ghost to go ahead of him. Ash swallowed hard, to stop his gorge rising. It was the girl he had killed, clear as day, with the strong paleness of the newly dead, as though someone had drawn her with white wax on a black slate. He could see through her, of course, but it was like seeing through mist, or through a cobweb. He hung back, but she gestured him forward and he realized that the spell meant that he had to go in first, with the ghost following behind him in a wave of cold and burial cave stench.
He went past her with that chill that he always felt passing a spirit, and stepped through the door with all the prickles raised on his spine. They didn’t seem to affect the Turviters. He supposed that if you were surrounded by ghosts from the time you were born, you got used to them. He’d been pleased, when he first came to Turvite, to find that everyone could see the ghosts. In most places he’d been the only one, he and his mother, although she always acted as if she couldn’t see them. In Turvite the ghosts were so strong that everyone knew they were there — they were proud of them.
He turned in time to see the ghost slide in behind him. Hildie kept the door open for a moment more before following, as though she wasn’t quite sure if the ghost were entering or not, then closed it with the snap of a good latch.
The room was bright with lamplight and firelight shining on pale yellow walls and bright blue painted woodwork. There was a frieze of leaping fish against the yellow around the ceiling. It was like coming into daylight after the dim dusk of the street. Ash blinked and looked away from the ghost.
The stonecaster had come down to meet them. She
was
tall, with very white skin and long green eyes. A strange, foreign face in this city of yellow hair and blue eyes, but beautiful in its own way. She held her head very high. Ash was reminded of the stories of the Lake People, the only people of the old blood who had withstood Acton’s invasion. They were said to hold their heads like that, proud and undefeated. Most Travelers looked down, not up, in case their glance was seen as insolence and invited a curse or a blow. Ash had been taught by his parents to look, not down, but sideways, to keep his chin pointed ahead rather than up. “No need to invite trouble,” his father had said, and his mother had been in a dark mood all that day.
The stonecaster looked at the ghost and sighed. “Well? What is this?” she asked Hildie.
“I killed her,” Ash answered.
The stonecaster turned to look at him, and as her green eyes met his, he felt the same churning in his stomach that he felt with Doronit, and the same confusion, and a kind of recognition. These, like Doronit’s, were eyes that he knew, and more, she had a pattern of speech and lilting voice almost completely obscured by Turviter inflection, but still there — a palimpsest of an earlier tale. That voice brought back nights on the Road around the fire circle, and stories and songs in a language the Turviters would not have understood.
“She was trying to kill me,” he added, carefully suppressing everything but the business at hand. He turned to the ghost. “Weren’t you?”
The ghost looked at him blankly.
He wasn’t going to let her get away with that. His voice sharpened.
“Weren’t you?”
Reluctantly, the ghost opened her mouth. “Aye.”
As always, it was a deep, scraping voice like rock on steel, a sound that sent shivers down to the fingertips. The three humans shuddered as one, and Hildie looked shocked and a little worried. She looked at Ash as if she’d never seen him before.
“Didn’t know they could talk,” she said.
The stonecaster raised an eyebrow, not at the ghost, but at Ash. She didn’t seem surprised. “Well. Sit, then.”
The ghost, Martine and Ash sat on the rug. He could faintly see the yellow and blue of the wool through the ghost’s body.
Hildie took a breath, recovering her normal calm. “Naught to do with me,” she shrugged. “I’m here to keep watch.” She dropped the bar across the door and produced a wooden wedge from her pouch to fix it firmly in place, then moved to the window that gave onto the street. She settled into the window seat, turning her head from left to right and back again in a slow, steady scan.
Martine spat in her left palm and held it out to the ghost, who laid her own hand into it. Ash could see the shudder go through Martine at the touch; he knew that feeling, that sudden scent of earth and touch of cold stone.
The caster produced her pouch of stones and with her right hand threw five of them on the rug. The stones fell across the pattern, and every one of them landed on the yellow. And every one of them was facedown.
Ash stared at them as she turned them over.
“Death. Hidden Death. That’s yours,” she said to the ghost.
The ghost nodded.
“Then Flight. Danger. Liberation.” She turned the last stone over and hesitated.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Death of the soul,” Martine said softly. She looked up into the empty eyes of the ghost. “This is him, not you.”
“I don’t understand,” Ash said.
Martine became brisk. “These stones tell the story of her death: Death, Flight — that’s you running away — and Liberation. I would say that this young woman is finding death more pleasant than life.”
The ghost nodded. Ash felt a stab of pity go through him.
“I’m . . . sorry,” he ventured, and looked for a moment too deeply into the ghost’s eyes and grew dizzy.
“So,” Martine said. “She has come to pay her debt to you by warning you. You are in danger — danger of losing your soul, losing who the gods want you to be. Do you understand?”
“But . . . from what?”
The ghost shook her head at him, smiling in derision.
He got angry. Even the ghosts were laughing at him now.
“From what?”
he shouted at her.
The dead voice came again, reluctantly. “From who, cully,” it said. And that was all. The pale, young face faded away, still smiling.
Martine let her left hand fall back into her lap. “That one is gone for good,” she said. “She’s paid her debt and left. It was well done.” She looked at him curiously. “It seems you lead an interesting life, young man.”