Clearwater Dawn (13 page)

Chriani glanced down all four corridors, the libraries to the west, galleries north and south. No sound in the stillness surrounding them.

I believe so.

She nodded.
Show me where you found him.

Why?
Chriani’s own voice in his head carried an edge it shouldn’t have had.

Because whoever killed him did so in an attempt to murder my father
. As Lauresa turned back, her words were just as sharp in his mind.
Because Barien was my warden and my mother’s warden before that, and was no less dear to me than he was to you, and I would see the place where he fell.

Chriani stepped past her, led her on. At the midpoint of the corridor, opposite the silent busts of Lauresa’s own line, he stopped. He made the moonsign quickly, noted the look she gave him.

When you found him
, she said,
what did he say?

He said nothing,
Chriani thought evenly.
You heard me tell your father and Konaugo.

I heard what you told, them, yes. I also felt the lie in your words then like I do now.

“This errand is done, princess.” Even at a whisper, his voice was a harsh echo against the stones, swallowed by his footsteps as he stalked away.

Konaugo knows it, too
, she said simply. Her voice carried the same even tone in his head, unsettling somehow when she should have had to call to him from along the corridor.
Barien taught you stealth? Insight, instinct?

My mother taught me,
Chriani said sharply
.

Then use those gifts. Barien was attacked within sight of the central court. He should have moved for the great hall, or the garrison quarter at least.

He was chasing whoever it was…

He was mortally wounded, tyro. Whoever had attacked him was gone or they would have finished the job.

Chriani stopped. He stared down the length of the corridor he’d followed the night before, looked south to where Lauresa stood.

He was forty strides from being able to raise the alarm,
but instead, he turned east and south and died alone. Why?

Faint footsteps along the central court in the distance pushed Chriani to one side, watching as another courier ran past. He felt a trace of anger, felt Lauresa’s question resonate. So obvious a point that his missing it spoke to his state of mind the night before. All the blind anger that had driven him. All the fear.

He walked back to where the princess stood, crouched beside her. Faint traces of red-black still clung to the mortar of the stones, he saw. Maybe scrubbed just once after all.

What did Barien say to you?

But even as he heard her words, Chriani’s gaze slid along the stones of the floor. Something there. Faintly scratched, the outline of a dagger or knife.

“Seek the blade…”

Chriani spoke aloud as he slipped to hands and knees, ignored the look he caught Lauresa give him as he searched both alcoves and the corridor to north and south. He felt the instincts take over, felt his senses somehow separate from himself, spilling out into the space around him.

Along the corridor, he saw the telltale signs of others having searched, before and after the body was taken away, most likely. Konaugo and Chanist would have asked the same question Lauresa did, would have spent most of the night seeking an answer to it. But the dagger-mark was faint, barely distinguishable from the faint cracks of wear and age that veined the dark marble of the floor.

Follow by fourteen. Keep it safe…
But to the questioning look Lauresa gave the thought, Chriani only raised a hand to silence, following the corridor north, the direction the dagger pointed.

Fourteen paces? Not likely that Barien would have been able to make a full stride in the condition he was in. He counted fourteen flagstones instead, dropped low to the floor, the princess following. With no dagger or blade on him, he felt for the picks, took the largest out and ran it around each stone in turn across the breadth of the passage until he found the one that shifted, just slightly.

The instincts his mother had given him. Barien had sharpened them. He let his senses fill him, tried not to think.

Beneath the stone was black sand, packed hard above the foundations below. With the picks, Chriani dug through it silently. Just as silently, he pulled up a knotted strip of blood-soaked cloth where it wrapped a sheathed dagger, Ilvani glyphs across the leather.

Where he went to work the knot free, he felt Lauresa’s hand on his shoulder where she dropped to kneel beside him.
Replace the stone
, she said
. Leave no trace.
Chriani did so, listened again when he was done to be certain that they were still alone.

In an alcove, he knelt to slip the knot easily, unfolding the strip of cloth to reveal the image on its underside. The insignia of the prince’s guard, the same embroidered grey that he’d pulled from Barien’s lockbox the night before. This one torn roughly along the seam that joined it, stained red-black. Chriani could only stare.

The dagger he’d never seen before, but he knew it all the same.

It was an Ilvani design, darkly malevolent where his shaking hand held it to the light. The haft was steel and bone, thin so as to lock tight to the hand that could hold it in any grip. It was set with cap and clasp of dull-gleaming dwyrsilver, the same style as the narrow single guard that flared to a pair of razor-curved spikes. The twist of the blade, the perfect balance, spoke to speed and deadly fury. A scalloped blood-edge crowned its base, shaped and honed to do as much damage being pulled free as it would deal on the initial strike.

Chriani noted the double edge of the dagger etched with an intricate pattern of fine flowing scar lines. A legend engraved in an Ilvani script, unreadable to his eye. One of the older tongues of the Greatwood. Over that legend, the dull stain of dried blood clung to the well-worn steel of the blade — but in a specific and stylized pattern. The steel was acid-etched in twisted lines, creating a flattened groove whose rough surface would bind and color the blade with the blood of those it slew.

The glyph that Barien’s blood made was one that Chriani had known since the day he was born.

It will take more than one of them…

The Valnirata hated Chanist.
Ilvalachna
they called him and his father alike. The Ilvani Scourge. There were stories they told in the Greatwood that the rangers and the border guard would repeat in mocking tones, of how the Ilmar alliances had always been little more than gauze shrouding Brandishear’s great lust for domination. Chanist plotting secretly as his father before him had plotted, seeking to one day crush all the Ilmar and the Valnirata alike beneath his foul hand.

Chriani felt a sudden chill. From a dark corner of his mind, he saw the torn edge of the wound that had laid Barien down, felt the burning again where Lauresa’s name was marked off on his skin. An extension of the mark his mother had made there, told him to never show but to never feel shame for. The same Valnirata warclan mark that adorned the blue-grey steel of the blade.

And when he looked to Lauresa suddenly, conscious that she had stepped away from where she’d been standing close beside him, he saw a trace of cold anger in her eyes. Looking not at the blade, but at him where he held it, stared at it with a recognition he cursed himself silently for not being smart enough to hide.

He felt the ring on his finger, forced himself to clear his thoughts again. He offered up a wordless oath on Barien’s soul in the hope that she couldn’t feel what was in him now.

And then from the hall ahead, footsteps, rising quickly. A steady guard’s pace, boots loud on the stones. As he rose, he felt Lauresa’s hand find his, the ring pulled from his finger. The dagger and the insignia she left with him.

“Keep it safe,” she whispered, her voice as cold as her look had been. “Wait for my word. If anyone asks, you accompanied me as I attempted to obtain a selection of journals but found the archives unexpectedly closed.” She was already heading up the corridor, walking slowly as she motioned for Chriani to fall in behind her.

He had only managed to slip the dagger and the insignia within his shirt when she slowed at the corner, Ashlund and two garrison guards there to greet her. Her presence requested by the prince, their message and her response a blur in Chriani’s mind.

Against his chest, he felt the cold steel of the blade, caught a withering look as Lauresa glanced back to him.

“You are dismissed, tyro. We grieve with you for Barien’s loss.”

“Highness.” Chriani nodded, caught Ashlund’s dark look as he and the others escorted Lauresa away. He followed them to the central court, watched them make for the great hall and the throne room beyond as he headed for the gates.

On the walls, he walked the morning away, not remembering any details of the routes he paced or the people he passed until Vanad, the younger tyro he’d seen the previous night, came looking for him.

“Message from Konaugo,” he said. “You’re to the armories.” Chriani only nodded, then took his time making his way to the Bastion barracks. Through the gate to central court, there were a half-dozen guards on duty where there’d been two the morning before. They returned his salute as he passed, Chriani’s footsteps echoing where shadowed arches climbed into the bright light of the lamps above. The same view he’d seen through untold days, but it felt different now. An outsider’s perspective. Feeling the cold in the stone as he hadn’t felt it since that first day he’d been dragged here on Konaugo’s orders. Then, he’d feared that when the gates pounded shut for the night, he’d be trapped inside them. Now, he knew that when they shut, he’d be outside.

The garrison halls were alive with movement, couriers passing in both directions alongside a steady stream of the prince’s guard emerging from the armory corridors, armor and weapons bundled and slung between them where they walked two by two. He asked after Konaugo, a terse nod directing him to the southeast tower.

The armory was a great deal emptier than it had been the night before. Something happening. As Konaugo checked the edges on a brace of longswords, the ranger at his side nudged him, the captain looking up to see Chriani in the doorway.

“The prince’s company rides tonight. Get two score shields and spears to the stables. Bundle three hundred broadhead shafts in quivers of twelve, as many of the officers’ arrows in equal number. Be quicker about it than you were in getting here.”

“Yes, lord.”

Konaugo returned Chriani’s salute with a detached air, but whether he’d forgotten his anger of the night before or simply had more important things on his mind, Chriani didn’t know or care.

The Bastion armory had always seemed an anachronism, a legacy of a much older, much more troubled time. The larger armories of the city outfitted garrison, constabulary, and the rangers who patrolled the far southern borderlands and the Locanwater steppes along the Greatwood’s edge. The Bastion armory was the prince’s own, though, and as well-tested as his guard was, the long years of Chanist’s peace meant that the spears he pulled from their tall black racks had rarely seen handling beyond the time it took to edge and oil them.

The air was thick with dust as Chriani worked, and over the time it took him to bundle and pack spears and shields from the armory, out of the Bastion, and across the keep to the stable gates, his lungs and eyes were heavy with it. He checked and counted out the arrows, cut himself once on a razor-sharp head. Virtually all officers of the prince’s guard cut and fletched their own shafts, a tradition that extended back to the Incursions. Each with some color, some pattern, some marking of runes along the wood that would identify them. In the time of Chanist’s father, they had ranked their count of the dead that way, it was said.

Konaugo’s own arrows had his K scribed on the blades, charcoal-blackened shafts and crow-feather fletching. For shooting in darkness, Chriani suspected. Invisible where they would cut you down. He checked the spin and the balance as his mother had taught him, noted with annoyance that Konaugo seemed to know what he was doing.

Chriani had given up wondering by his third trip whether the captain had enlisted any other tyros to assist him, not bothering to count the subsequent trips that he spent in wondering what had happened to inspire all the sudden activity. An attack on the prince high certainly accounted for the stronger defensive presence in the keep and the Bastion itself. But in the stable, there was Chanist’s own stallion being groomed and shod by Kathlan while Ashlund checked over its harness and tack. Outside the gates, Chriani counted forty horses to match the number of quivers he unlashed the last of, watching one of Ashlund’s party from the night before distribute them.

At the sight of Kathlan, Chriani faded back, a sudden reflex. From the doorway, he watched her, tried to still the pain that flared suddenly in his chest and his gut.

He drifted carefully into the shadows then, slipped behind him to the still air of the leatherworks. As anxious as he was to not let it be known he was available for further orders, he was more anxious to listen to the snatches of conversation he could overhear through the gapped wall to the stable proper. He’d had his ear to the wall for a short while, catching Ashlund mutter something about the height of the prince’s stirrups and Kathlan respond indelicately that he engage in an action as disturbing as it was probably physically impossible.