Shanakan (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 1) (12 page)

The guard came back with a pair of torches, and he took both and returned to the tower. Serhan was sitting on the edge of the hole with his legs hanging into the darkness.

“Good,” he said. “Now I want to go down there alone.”

“Cal, that would not be sensible.”

“Trust me.”

“You say that a lot. I am your friend and ally, and you should trust me more,” Grand reproached him.

“It is not because I do not trust you, Darius. Some of the things that I know are dangerous – even the knowing of them. I want to protect you.”

“That is a poor excuse. That arrow should have killed you, but you knew it would not. How? What do you expect to find down there? I have so many questions.”

Serhan looked at him for a moment, as if weighing his reply.

“Darius, I cannot tell you what saved me from the arrow. Let it be enough that Gerique felt it would be an embarrassment for himself if I were downed by an arrow from a... ” He appeared to search his memory for the right phrase, “half starved brigand with bad teeth.”

“Gerique?” Grand was surprised, even shocked. “He has protected you in some way.”

“The suggestion was made that it would be a betrayal to allow what passed between us to be known. So you do not know.”

“This I understand, but what lies beneath us?”

“I have no idea, but it is possible that it will prove even more dangerous. Please allow me to go first, alone, and see what is there.”

“As you wish.” He lit a torch and handed it to Serhan who dropped down through the hole at once. Grand listened carefully. He heard scuffling, metallic noises, a faint curse, then a long period of silence. It grew so long that he became concerned. Then he heard a voice speaking, very quietly, somewhere below.

“Cal?”

“I am still here.”

“What have you found?”

“It is worse than I feared. As far as you are concerned, nothing. Can you pass down my cloak and a length of rope?”

“In a moment.” He fetched the items and went back to the hole. Serhan stood beneath with the torch. He looked worried, and excited at the same time. Grand dropped the things to him and he went away again. More noises drifted up. After a couple more minutes he appeared in the light again.

“Take this,” he said, and passed up something wrapped in the cloak and well tied with the rope. It was about a foot and a half by a foot in size, and six inches thick. Grand put it to one side, and turned to help Serhan out of the pit. “And this,” Serhan said. “But do not take it out of its sheath.” He passed up a sword. It was not marked at all by age, but the hilt was plain and had a dull satin glow, and it was light, lighter than it should have been.

Serhan came up out of the hole and insisted that they replace the stone. He seemed troubled, scared, pale, but oddly exultant.

“You must have found something very special down there,” Grand ventured.

Serhan seized the front of his jacket. “I found nothing,” he said. “Never mention this; not that we were here, not that I went below.”

“As you wish, Cal. It never occurred.” Grand looked into Serhan’s eyes, and was afraid. He was afraid because he could see that Serhan was afraid, and he had never seen that before; not even when he met the Faer Karan for the first time. As soon as he had seen it the fear was gone, and his friend slapped him on the shoulder.

“So,” he said. “I’m starving, shall we go down and see what they’ve got cooking in the camp?”

Tarlyn san Porwill Saine stood on the wide, west-facing balcony of his substantial home and looked down across the city. As he looked he ground his teeth with anger and frustration. There were fires in Callista again. He had no idea who had set them this time. It could be royalists, or bandits, or the guard. Even a simple crime or arson was a possibility. Whoever was to blame it would mean that more people would be dead, or fleeing the city.

From where he stood he had a sweeping view across Samara. His house was at the top of Morningside, close to the Peaks, and to the south, by the sea, he could see the citadel, which looked quite fine after the attempt to restore it a couple of years ago. It was unfinished, though. The guard from Ocean’s Gate had told them to stop. He’d explained to them at length that they would use it for a fortified warehouse, but that hadn’t changed anything. It was too much of a defensible position for the guard to permit it.

This side of the citadel was the ruin of the Great House, traditional seat of the Kings of Samara, the house of Tarnell. There had been fourteen kings in an unbroken line from the same house, and they had been good kings, by all accounts. Samara had prospered, grown, and become the centre of the world. The streets had been thronged with artists, sculptors and musicians, or so it was said. It was all so long ago. The population was half what it had been before the coming of the Faer Karan, before the end of the kingdom. Houses stood empty, the docks were deserted, and the streets were rutted and pot-holed.

He felt a pricking in his eyes and turned away. It was his city. It had been his father’s before him, and on before that. The trading house of Saine was almost as old as the line of Tarnell, and they had always been rich, powerful, and at the centre of things.

Tarlyn was not a thin man, and he walked with a comfortable rolling gait back into the house to where his breakfast was laid out on the big oak table that failed to dominate the room. He looked around and saw that Crise, his servant, was waiting discreetly in a corner.

“Crise, will you go and find my son and see if he will be kind enough to join me at breakfast?”

“At once, sir.” Crise was gone and he was alone.

On the wall behind the dining table was a painting. It was one of the works that his family had caused to be rescued from the temple. It had housed all things beautiful, by order of the king, and the house of Saine now had basements stuffed with paintings and statues, tapestries and books. It was a fraction of the collection, but it was something. The rest had burned when the temple had been fired.

This painting was something that had been commissioned by royalty, he had no doubt. It showed the king, he did not know which one, obvious in the traditional white robes of Tarnell with a golden crown on his head. He was sitting astride a noble white horse, and one hand rested on the hilt of a sword while the other was raised in acknowledgement of the cheering crowds. He was followed by a platoon of guardsmen on horseback, resplendent in steel, silver, black and white. They looked very fine indeed. Behind them all stood the Great House as it must have looked four hundred years ago. It was a stunningly beautiful building, if the painter was to be believed, all curved buttresses, golden stone, crystal windows in a hundred colours, glowing in the sunlight so that it almost outshone the king, but not quite. Nothing was allowed to outshine the king.

They still had a king, he reminded himself, or at least a man who claimed to be king. Simon Tarnell told anyone who would listen that he was the twenty-seventh monarch of the old line, and there were quite a few who did listen. He looked at the picture again. What would that clean, noble, smiling monarch have thought of the dirty, brutal figure that claimed to be his heir?

He sighed. Nobody would ever know. The old Samara was dead and gone, and the new one, the Samara that his family had fought to hold together for nearly four centuries was disintegrating under his stewardship. It was not his fault. He had held the traders’ guild together, protected the food convoys coming into the city, supplied Ocean’s Gate with enough food to keep them off his back – at great personal expense – and he had tried so hard.

None of his predecessors had been forced to cope with Simon Tarnell, though in truth many of the pretender’s forebears had been little better. The idiot attacked the guard whenever he could, and in response the Ocean’s Gate guard attacked him, and burned houses, and killed. On top of all that there were more bandits every year, and his own personal militia was already struggling to protect his house and the guild’s convoys.

He could have coped with Tarnell, or the bandits, or the guard, but certainly not with all three. Perhaps this was finally the end of Samara. In a few more years it would be a town, then a ruin.

“Daydreaming again, Father?”

Tarlyn turned, and smiled. His son was very dear to him, and a source of some pride and happiness, even in a dying city. The boy was bright, good looking, cheerful, and everything his father wished him to be.

“Corban, did you sleep well?”

“Like a log. You?”

“Fine. I will need your help today. We’ll be putting together another shipment for the blood suckers at Ocean’s Gate. I want you to look out some things for the guard captain. You seem to know what will please him.”

Corban smiled a sour smile. He was only seventeen, but much older in many ways.

“I know his vices, father, that’s all.”

“Then cater to them.”

They sat at the table and began to eat. Both of them took their meal in a way that suggested food had never been a problem. They picked over what was on the table, looking for the tastiest morsels, not eating most of what was there.

“I had an interesting encounter in a tavern last night,” Corban said.

“I do wish you wouldn’t go there. It’s dangerous.”

“I had Brunt and Tercel with me. They are good men and would have protected me from any harm.”

“Indeed, but they cannot protect you from everything, Corban.”

“Do you want to hear this?”

“Very well, tell your story.”

“There was a man there who said he had recently come from the north. He arrived the day before yesterday, and he was offering his sword out for hire to whoever wanted it.”

“Did you hire him?”

“No, Father. Brunt didn’t like him at all; called him a stringy, yellow backed boot robber.”

Tarlyn laughed. “That’s Brunt.”

“Anyway, it was what he was saying that was interesting. Apparently something is going on at White Rock.”

“What kind of thing?”

“One of their guard captains, perhaps two of them, have started hunting bandits.”

“Great skies above us! Why?”

“I don’t think he knew, but he did say that lives were spared, people sent back to their villages, and some were branded and banished. He himself showed me the burn scar on the back of his hand. Apparently the bandits in White Rock’s domains are almost extinct.”

“White Rock is Gerique. Nothing would be happening if he didn’t know about it. What’s he trying to do?”

“Eliminate the competition?”

“Do you know where we can find this man again? I would like to question him.”

“Of course, father. By the time we finished buying him drinks last night he was very drunk, so we put him up for the night. He’s downstairs, in a room with a lock on the door.”

“You surpass yourself, Corban,” Tarlyn grinned. “We have a few hours before the Ocean’s Gate guard arrives – shall we see if he’s awake?”

They went down to the basement, where for some unknown reason one of his ancestors had installed three cells. Tarlyn often wondered about that, but it had at last proved convenient. They found that their unwilling guest was indeed awake, and banging on the door demanding to be let out. With two armed militiamen present Corban opened the door.

“You’ve no right to hold me. I’ve done nothing to you,” the man complained. He was a miserable specimen, Tarlyn thought. His clothes were ragged, his hair long and unkempt, he was skinny and he smelled.

“You must be hungry, friend,” Tarlyn said. “I am the master of this house, and I assure you that we will release you to the greater world shortly, but I insist that you come and have some breakfast with us. We are keen to hear your news from the north.”

The man seemed a little mollified, but still looked at them suspiciously. They led him upstairs and sat him down at the great oak table where he proceeded to eat like a man denied the pleasure for a long time. When he began to slow down Tarlyn spoke to him.

“My son tells me that you are only recently arrived here in our city?”

“Came from here,” the man said, and he did at least sound like a Samaran, probably from Gull Town, down on the flats.

“But you’ve been plying your trade up north?”

“It’s a hard life, sir,” the man said. “Starve or steal, that’s what the general used to say.”

“What general is that?”

“General Bragga. Dead now though. Killed by the White Rock people. Their captain, anyway.”

“The general was a bandit?” Tarlyn was surprised. He’d never heard of a bandit general.

“Yes, sir. Clever man. Great warrior, too, and big as you’ve ever seen a man.”

“So what happened?”

“This man walked into camp, dressed like a prince of something. Not a soldier, anyway, and he ends up fighting Bragga in single combat. Killed him easy, he did, just toyed with him. Never seen a man fight like that.”

“Why did he kill him?”

“Well, he asked the general to surrender, and the general, he just laughs, so they end up fighting.”

“I see. And what happened after the general was dead?”

“Well, the guard came in. Hundreds of them. Archers and swordsmen and men on horses. We all had to surrender, and this man, the one that killed the general, he starts talking to one of our men like he knows him. Man called Delf.”

Delf? That name rang a bell. There had been a Delf who was master builder on the citadel restoration.

“This Delf,” he asked. “Was he a bandit?”

“I don’t know. He was with us for a few weeks. The other man talked to him about building things. That’s all I heard, but first he asked him about us.”

Possibly the same man, then. It was a small world. “What did he ask about you?”

“Who was what. Delf said some was farmers, some was skilled at other things, and he picked me out as a bandit, so they branded me, told me if I ever robbed in their country again I’d die for it, so I came down here.”

“Do you remember the man’s name, the one that dressed like a prince?”

“Oh yes, sir. He was called Serhan. They called him Captain Serhan, though he wasn’t a soldier. His men really thought a lot of him, sir, like he was a lord or something.”

They talked longer, but got little more out of him. He was allowed to eat his fill, and Tarlyn even gave him a few coins, though declining his offers of service. When he had gone he sat down at the table opposite his son.

“Serhan,” he said. “Do you think…?”

“The same man, perhaps. Yes. That story we got from Ocean’s Gate a few months back about the man that embarrassed Borbonil. They really didn’t want to talk about it, but he was from White Rock, in the service of Gerique.”

“We should check it. When the guard get here I’ll entertain the captain. You try to get that young lieutenant - what’s his name? – to one side and see if you can confirm the story.”

“Lieutenant Portina,” Corban said. “He seems a decent sort for a guardsman.”

“That’s the one. Now don’t forget to look up something for the captain.”

“Already done, father.”

Corban went down to the courtyard to oversee preparations and Tarlyn summoned Crise again. He told his servant to send a message asking the guild members to meet at his house tomorrow night.

*              *              *              *

An hour and a half later they were standing in the courtyard below. One side of the space was stacked with boxes and sacks of food and other assorted goods. They had two militiamen with them, but were otherwise alone.

At exactly the expected hour a roll of black smoke rose up from the ground and settled into the unmistakable shape of a black door. This trick always impressed Tarlyn, and he wished he could move all his goods this way. It would be so much easier than convoys.

The first through the door was Captain Gorman, a stocky, short man. He looked strong, but Tarlyn had never seen him use his muscles. Second through was the lieutenant, as they had hoped, then ten strong backed guardsmen.

“Glad to see you’re ready for us,” the captain said, then to his sergeant, “move this stuff through and let me know when you’re finished.”

“A glass of wine while you’re waiting, Captain?”

“Of course.” He turned to his junior officer. “Portina, you look after things here.”

Tarlyn escorted the captain to his private room, where he kept a stock of good wine for entertaining. He disliked the man, found him rough and arrogant, but no merchant would let that get in the way of a deal.

“So how are things at Ocean’s Gate, Captain?” he asked when they had settled into their respective seats.