Blood Ties (13 page)

Hildie, standing beside the window, whistled sharply. Ash was on his feet with his dagger out, his back flat to the wall behind the door, before his mind even registered the danger signal.

“Three of ’em,” Hildie said. “They was keeping watch behind the baker’s. Man and a boy, at the door. One’s gone round the back, quick as bedamned. He’s the one to ware of.”

Hildie had never tried to sound like a Turviter, Ash thought, then shook his head.
“Irrelevant,”
he could hear Doronit say. “Concentrate or die.”

There was a knock at the door. Martine moved toward it, looking questioningly at Hildie. Hildie signaled for her to stay still. Ash heard the faint shuffle of feet behind the door. He nodded to Hildie and she slipped out to the back room.

Martine collected the cast stones and put them back into her pouch. She hesitated, then sat back cross-legged on the rug and cast the stones again. All were facedown. She didn’t bother to turn them over, simply collected them, dropped them into the pouch and reached in for five more. She seemed too calm.

Ash pulled his attention away from her. The knock came again, harder.

“Stonecaster, ho!” a deep voice called. A hand tried the door latch then jiggled it impatiently.

Poor training,
he thought, one ear cocked for sounds from the back room. Then he heard the muffled scratch of boots on the roof. On the balcony. He whistled low to Hildie,
watch out,
and went to the stairs, flattening himself against the wall so he would be invisible from above.

The rattling of the latch grew louder. The bar began to lift a little with each jerk. The wedge that Hildie had jammed in would soon bounce out of its socket. He wanted to call to Martine, but it was too late. There were feet on the stairs. Almost silent. And fast.

Ash moved as the man hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, looking through the doorway to where Martine sat, casting the stones, her dark head bent. The men in the street were swinging the door latch as hard as they could. He knew what the man on the stairs was considering: do it now or wait until the others break in?

Ash moved. He slammed against the man shoulder to shoulder and sent him sprawling across the floor. But the man was quick, and rolled and came back to his feet in an instant, dagger ready. Martine retreated to the hearth, holding a white-handled dagger behind her skirt, and the pouch in her other hand ready, it seemed, to throw in the fire.

Ash felt his concentration narrowing, as it always did in a knife fight, blocking out everything except the other’s blade, the muscles of his chest where movement would first be seen, the play of his feet. In this circle of tension it was curiously silent. “Don’t look at the face,” he heard Doronit say in his head. “Don’t engage until you’re ready to kill. If you’re not ready to kill, don’t fight with a knife.”

The other man was cautious, too, but all he had to do was delay until the others broke the latch. Ash had to move fast. He feinted right, dropped to one knee and struck up as the man moved to block him. The dagger went up under the ribs. Doronit had shown him the spot, had traced it on his bare skin with one finger.

The door latch broke as he pulled the dagger out and blood splashed over the blue and yellow rug. The man fell.

The two from the street charged in. The boy headed toward Martine but halted when she raised her knife. The man centered on Ash, his dagger poised. There was no sound but hard breathing. The man was bigger than him, huskier, and with a much longer reach. That was bad.

They faced each other across the corpse. Ash crouched, dagger edge out and ready. The other gazed at his face.
Mistake,
Ash thought, as he reversed the knife and threw it.
Bad mistake, cully.
“When you throw to kill,” Doronit had said, “aim for the throat. It’s the only spot you can be sure the knife will go in.” She was always right.

The dagger went in through the voice box and the man was choking to death, clawing at his throat and turning blue, taking final gasping breaths. Ash knelt on the man’s chest and drew out the knife, cutting the big artery as he went. His hand was quite steady. He had time to wonder at that.

Behind him he heard scuffling as Hildie sprang from the stairs to deal with the boy.

“No!” Martine said. “Just hold him.”

Ash turned. Hildie was about to cut the boy’s throat. Martine’s knife was already in his shoulder, the hilt sticking out stark white against the blood. The boy was in his twenties, pale-haired, like most Turviters, but with large dark eyes that spoke of other blood, and a face all smooth skin and fine bones. Ash swallowed against the sudden block in his throat. The boy’s eyes were searching everywhere for an escape and flinched away from the bodies of his two colleagues.

“Now,” Martine said, and pulled the dagger out from his shoulder. The blood flowed after it, sluggishly, and the boy turned as white as the hilt. “Who sent you?”

There were two corpses on her floor, but her voice was calm. Too calm, her breath too even. It was the voice of someone who had seen events so terrible that nothing would ever be able to shock her again. He was reminded of Doronit, and the thought surprised him. What had Doronit seen that was so terrible?

The boy was silent.

“The mootstaff will not care if I have three corpses instead of two,” Martine said. “Who sent you?”

Hildie pricked his throat with the knife.

“Ranny,” the boy whispered.

Martine relaxed. “Thank you,” she said.

Hildie tightened her grip on the knife and looked to Martine for instructions. Martine jerked her head toward the door. Hildie loosened her grip. The boy bolted for the street, rushing through the crowd of mingled ghosts and neighbors who were staring at them through the doorway.

There was nothing left but the cleaning up. The bright yellow and blue rug was ruined. Ash helped roll it up with shaking hands. (“A reaction, and perfectly normal,” came Doronit’s voice in his memory, “but try not to let the customer see — it undermines their confidence in us.”) He thought he managed to hide them from Martine, though Hildie cocked an eye at him. Once he was used to scenes like this, as she was, the shaking wouldn’t happen. He hoped. He was almost sure he hoped it.

Hildie fetched the mootstaff leader, Boc, who came with a handcart to take the bodies out to the graveyard (no burial caves for these ones). Boc was relieved to know there was no problem with the deaths. “Housebreakers coming by their just deserts,” he said, nodding, as Martine explained, and asked Hildie to give his regards to Doronit. Doronit kept in well with Boc.

The mootstaff were supposed to keep the peace, but there was far too much crime on the streets of Turvite for a handful of men to control. That was why safeguarders were needed. And Turvite lived by the old laws, as did all of the free towns: you could — you
should
— defend your home to the death against all comers, even if all they had in mind was a little pilfering. Ash had sometimes wondered if it dated back to the invasion, when, if you didn’t defend your home, you were dead.

Boc left with a helper trundling the handcart along the cobbles. And that was all. Hildie nodded to Martine and made for the door, but Martine put her hand out to stop Ash from following her.

“Three days’ time,” she said. “Be here.”

He nodded and followed Hildie.

Doronit was pleased with them, he knew by the way she smiled gently at him. She was less pleased when she heard he would need to go back in three nights.

“That’s the festival. We’re booked at the Town Moot.” She shrugged. “Well, get it over with early and join us there. We can’t get a reputation for failing to clean up after ourselves.”

The next day, Doronit sent Ash back to Martine to escort her on a visit to Ranny of Highmark.

“Ranny makes a bad enemy and we don’t want to antagonize her,” Doronit said to Ash before he left. “Just be businesslike toward Martine, not friendly, you understand?”

The Highmarks were a smallish, tight clan, Doronit had explained. Ranny had two brothers, younger than she and not as bright. Her father was dead, and her mother remarried to a Reacher from the mansion next door, a good marriage with fine trade concessions attached. Ranny ruled Highmark under the eyes of her grandparents, both physically hale and still sharp-minded but disinclined to continue running the business day-to-day.

Highmark ancestors included four mayors and eighteen town clerks — the family knew where power resided and preferred it to pomp and ceremony. They took their name from the golden mansion at the very top of the hill overlooking Turvite, the first to be built at that height and still the second biggest.

It seemed to Ash, as they stood outside Highmark, that Martine was unimpressed. “This won’t take long, I just need to talk to her,” she said. “What is your name, anyway?”

“Ash,” he said, startled to realize that after all that had happened, they were still virtually strangers. He felt as though they had known each other much longer than a single day.

“Well, Ash, maybe we can sort this out without more killing.”

Ash stood to one side as Martine knocked at the door and asked to see Ranny. They were let in straightaway by a young woman with chestnut hair and hard eyes who kept her hand near her belt knife and made them walk down the corridor ahead of her to the office.

Ranny was a slight, fair-haired woman with the pale blue eyes you only got when there was no Traveler blood at all in the family. She looked the opposite to Martine in every way.

Ash took up the standard safeguarder position just inside the room. The chestnut-haired girl stood on the other side of the door in the same position. They nodded to each other, the careful, deliberate nod that said, “Neither of us wants any trouble here but we’re both ready for it.” Her hand kept going to her knife and Ash realized that she was nervous of him. Then he remembered that he had killed two of her . . . what, colleagues? Either way, to her he was dangerous. A part of him was pleased to be thought dangerous by a pretty girl, but he brought his attention back to Martine and Ranny.

They were facing each other. Martine seemed to radiate calm over the desk to the other woman. It didn’t work.

Ranny glared at her, her hands fidgeting with a stick of sealing wax. “What’s the point of you coming here?” she demanded.

“I hoped to negotiate a truce.”

Ranny snorted. “Fine. Tell me what I want to know and we’ll have a truce.”

Martine had considered it, she had told Ash on the walk there. But to tell someone the date of their death was to blight their life. And surely Ranny deserved it now, Ash thought, had invited it, even, by trying to kill her? Still, a swift death and rebirth was one thing; a living death, tormented, was another . . .

Martine shook her head and made her voice gentle. “You won’t believe me, but I keep that secret out of a wish to not hurt you more than I have done so far.”

“You should never have told me that you knew!”

Martine bowed her head so that the curtain of black hair hid her face. “That is true. I should have concealed it from you. But I was surprised it was there, so clear in the stones.”

Ranny scowled at her. “Hypocrite!” she hissed. “No decent stonecaster would ever let someone know that they had discovered the date of a death.”

“That is true,” Martine said.

“Well then!” Ranny exclaimed. She got up from the desk and paced around the room. “Just tell me
when
. If I knew when, I could plan.”

Ash could see Ranny’s dilemma: should she have children if she wouldn’t live long enough to bring them up? Should she have them immediately so that her bloodline would continue? Should she train one of her brothers to take over so the family wouldn’t suffer when she died? Or, if she outlived them, would training one to rule, when he would never get a chance, sour and embitter him?

“I need to
know,
” she said. “You owe it to me.”

“You tried to kill me,” Martine replied.

“You ruined my life. I can’t sleep, I can’t work . . . With you dead, I could at least be back where everyone else is, with no way of finding out.”

“Ah . . .” Martine was startled at that explanation, but it was one Ash understood. Yes, there was a logic and even a justice in it. Martine nodded, also understanding.

“You think you can choose for me, but I should be able to choose for myself,” Ranny said. “You are treating me like a child because you have the Gift and I don’t.”

There was enough truth in that, too, to give Martine pause. Stonecasters did tend to look on their clients like children to be guided, but not by them — by the stones. Had Martine allowed herself to become arrogant, to make choices that rightfully belonged to Ranny?

Ash looked into the pretty blue eyes and saw ambition, anger, ruthlessness, but not much wisdom. Perhaps Martine was treating Ranny like a child, but it might be that it was safer to do so.

“I need to know
when,
” Ranny said.

Martine shook her head.

“Then you’re going to die.”

Ranny walked out of the room and the girl escorted them silently to the front door.

Ash was on full alert the whole way back to Martine’s, wishing that Doronit had sent Hildie or Aelred as well, to guard their backs. It was a relief to shut the door of Martine’s house behind them.

“Do you think I did the right thing?” Martine asked, handing Ash his payment.

Ash paused. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “I would probably have told her, but — she doesn’t look like a woman who would accept any fate. If you told her, you’d be setting her off on a path to avoid her death, and then . . .”

“‘She who runs away from Death has Her as a traveling companion,’” Martine said.

Ash nodded. “You know that’s true.”

“Yes,” Martine said, relaxing a little. “I know less every day, but that I do know.” She smiled. “Thank you, Ash. I’ll see you in two days.”

After Ash had killed the men at Martine’s, he found his mind returning to one point of the night: the moment when Hildie had pressed the point of the knife against the boy’s throat, and looked at Martine for instructions. If Martine had said, “Kill him,” what would Hildie have done? He shied away from the thought, not wanting to imagine himself in Hildie’s place, but it drew him back, time and again, during singlestave practice, on his runs along the sea cliffs, at night. Was that expected of safeguarders? To kill if the client said so?