Songs of the Earth (30 page)

‘I promise.’ Gair shook his hand. To be asked to stand for a man on his wedding day was an honour, and doubly so to be chosen over family.
A man’s friends make the best family
, Alderan had once said. The words left an aching knot inside him that he shied away
from examining too closely. He reached for a pawn and made his own opening move.

‘You won’t say anything to Renna, will you?’ asked Darin, responding. ‘I want to keep it as a surprise.’

‘I’ll not breathe a word.’

‘I knew I could count on you to keep it a secret. I’ll never forget this, Gair. You’re a true friend.’

Darin’s hand dropped to his trouser pocket and touched the shape of the stone, whilst the other sent his lector out into the field in a bold assault. Gair frowned over his own pieces and settled down to what looked as if it would develop into another tough game.

He’d left it too late. Now the gates were shut and it was starting to rain, damn it. Smacking the flat of his hand on the stout tarred wood in frustration, Darin stepped back and cocked his hands on his hips. How was he going to get back in now? That wind had an edge to it that sliced straight through his fast-dampening clothes, making him shiver. If he had had an ounce of sense in his head, he would have brought a coat.

Well, he could either stand there getting wetter with every minute or he could walk the walls and see if there was another way in. So, left or right? Left would be best; he might find someplace where he could scale the kitchen garden wall, drop down onto the compost heap for a soft landing, and then slip back inside. His boots were already muddy; a few potato peelings couldn’t make them any worse.

It was his own fault, really – he should not have stayed so long. Somehow there was always one more thing to talk about, and the conversation was so enthralling that he’d lost all track of time, never even heard the bell ring out the hour. Now it was past Second and he should have been abed hours ago. He was going to be so tired in the morning.

Blast it, the rain was getting heavier. Darin turned up his collar and jogged through the woods at the perimeter of the property. The trees provided some shelter, but they also provided fat drops that dripped from the branches straight onto his head. Now he was starting to feel cold, and he hated the cold. He definitely should have brought a coat.

Unfortunately, the kitchen wall was a few inches too tall. Darin tried to jump up, and missed three times, not even able to get his fingertips over the top. His hands slipped on the wet stone and he barked his palms on the way back down. He sucked on the bloodiest graze to try to take away the sting. Not the kitchen wall, then. Where else could he try? Of course: the leper’s gate, behind the chapel, where the unfortunates had come to be shriven, out of sight of the rest of the congregation. Under Church law, a leper’s gate could never be locked, except in times of direst emergency, for the blessing of Eador could not be denied to even the most pitiful and pestilential of Her flock.

Happier now, Darin set a brisk pace through the darkness round to the chapel on the east side, running his fingertips along the wall beside him to keep from straying too far into the woods. Rain was falling fast by the time he glimpsed the chapel windows, dark except for the glowing coal of the sanctuary lamp, and there was the gate, an unadorned wooden thing barely higher than his shoulders. He felt its edge for the latch. Nothing. Anxiety speeding his fingers, he tried again, feeling all around the edge from the hinge-straps to the sodden grass at the foot, but he couldn’t feel a latch. How was he going to get in now?

Darin’s heart began to knock against his ribs, beating a counterpoint to the cold rain drumming on his head and down the back of his neck. How could he open the door? If he pounded long and hard Father Verenas might hear him, and perhaps he’d be charitable enough to leave his bed to find out the cause of it, but that would mean someone knew he was stuck outside in the rain because he couldn’t bring himself to say good night to his new
friend. That was no good at all. There must be a latch or something, or how else could the lepers have come for their absolution?

Ha. Lepers! Honestly, why didn’t he think of that before? Darin began sweeping his hands back and forth across the blackened wood, trusting touch rather than his eyes. Lepers might not have fingers, so a conventional latch would be beyond them. It’d have to be a very simple mechanism, one that could be operated without much dexterity. His hand bumped something that swung away from him; he caught it on the backswing. A mechanism that could be operated without the need for any limbs at all. In a pinch, just teeth would do.

Grinning, Darin pulled on the rope and heard the clunk of the wooden latch on the inside. Then he put his shoulder to the gate and eased it open. The hinges had been kept greased so there was barely a sound heard above the patter of the rain in the yard. He closed the gate behind him, lowering the latch back into place, then crept off to his bed with purpose fizzing like fireworks in his brain.

Two days south of Fleet, the rain began. By the time Masen changed ships at Mesarild, there hadn’t been a break in the clouds for a week and the Great River was a turbid brown with flood-water. Yelda came and went through a series of shimmering silver veils that swept across the sodden landscape under louring skies. Further south, the river broke its banks, inundating the fields and pastures on either side. Dripping livestock huddled in water up to their knees. Uprooted trees rolled ponderously in the current, forcing the bargee to reduce sail and slow the pace to a crawl, for fear of ramming one of them. In the villages, Masen saw more than one family being rescued from their upstairs windows by neighbours in boats.

By the time the river reached the outskirts of the Havens, whole villages stood empty. Nothing moved but flotsam on the flood.
The only animals in the fields were corpses, bloated black in death. Not even carrion-birds remained, their prodigious appetites finally sated. Foetid brown water stretched from horizon to horizon, and still the rain fell.

Masen wrapped his cloak more tightly around his shoulders and stared out over the bow. The cloak made little difference. Stout Belisthan wool could withstand most weather, but not the downpour it had endured on the journey south. He was already damp through to his smallclothes; even his boots were leaking, and if there was one thing he loathed, loathed even more than spinach greens, it was wearing wet socks.

He was in a foul mood. He’d tried to hail the Order’s agent in Fleet, but with no trace of their colours anywhere within ten miles of the city, he’d taken the next trade barge south, reasoning that he could just as easily make contact with the Mesarild agent instead. After all, the capital was only three days further downriver by boat. Except in Mesarild the safe house had burned to the ground. Masen had found the housekeeper disconsolately picking over the sodden ashes. She’d gone to visit her sister, she’d told him. When she’d returned the next day, this was what she’d found. Oh the poor master, and his wife! And the lovely children – so sad, so very sad!

Well, house fires happened, didn’t they? Someone left a candle lit with a window open, the curtain knocked the candle over, then smoke blackened the sky. Masen scowled at the water. How very unfortunate that it should have been that particular house, on that particular street. He’d had a decision to make then: hire a horse and go out to the nearest town with an agent, two days’ ride east, or push on south to Yelda. Yelda seemed to be the logical choice; the Syfrian capital was the crossroads of the Empire, a hub for trade, and half a day west of it there was a certain quietly prosperous manor house which found a lot of work for farm-hands and domestics but otherwise attracted no attention from its neighbours. How strange, then, that Squire Matterson, his family and
his entire staff and tenantry should have been struck down by breakbone fever at the harvest festival. The whole village had been in mourning, according to the mayor. The Squire was well liked in those parts, very well liked. It was such a shame.

A less suspicious man than Masen would have seen only tragic coincidence. One agent missing, a house fire, an outbreak of sickness: all so very, very sad; all about as much of a coincidence as the ground getting wet when it rained. Murder had been done there, and in Mesarild as well; he’d stake his stones on it. Probably in Fleet too, and he had an unpleasant crawling sensation at the base of his spine that said he’d find a similar story in the White Havens.

Not for the first time, Masen wished he had a stronger talent for hailing. The task of Gatekeeper was a solitary one at the best of times, and that suited him; he did not need to be at the centre of a network of agents like a spider on its web, feet outstretched to catch the slightest vibration. It had been enough to know that there were others he could call upon, should he need them, with a few days’ riding at worst. That was no real hardship; his arse was surely accustomed to the saddle. Now he wished he had not put off training an apprentice. If he hadn’t, he might not be having to make this journey, and the Order could have been warned weeks ago.

The northside docks were eerily quiet. Only a few barges and river-craft were moored there, and better than half of those were listing, with broken masts and splintered timbers. The stevedores on the dockside were busy shovelling a thick layer of mud from the quay, and the waterside stores and taverns were stained dark to halfway up their ground-floor windows.

The bargee pulled his kerchief down from his nose. ‘Be lucky to find a ship now,’ he said, easing the tiller to pass a half-submerged oak tree. ‘Doubt there’s a seaworthy hull left in the whole of Haven-port.’

‘I’ll find something,’ Masen sighed. ‘Damn it, I’ll build a raft if I have to.’

‘Plenty of lumber to be had, so long as you don’t mind it green!’ Cackling, the bargee adjusted his kerchief again.

Masen doubted it did much to cut the stench, a mix of stagnant pond and open grave. After two days he had more or less stopped noticing it, but he suspected it would take a week of hot baths and burning every stitch he wore before he would feel clean again.

A murky twilight descended as the barge tied up at a near-deserted wharf in the glovers’ quarter. Masen was generous when he paid for his passage; there would be little enough profit for the bargee on this trip. Then he shouldered his pack and crossed the sodden boards to the Scarlet Feather. Lit cressets either side of the door said the tavern was open for business, despite the two-foot-high band of grime across the plaster, but the tables inside were mostly empty.

The landlord barely glanced up from an old broadsheet on the counter when he heard footsteps. ‘Cellar’s flooded. What you see behind me is all I have.’

‘Brandy then, and a bed for the night if you have one. What happened here? A little late in the year for a storm, eh?’

The landlord grunted. ‘Had nothing but storms for the last month,’ he said as he poured. ‘One after another, straight in off the sea. Rain, floods, hundred square miles of good pastureland turned to swamp. Southern Syfria will go hungry this winter, if the water-fever doesn’t carry us all off first.’

Masen pushed a shilling across the counter, then followed it with another. ‘Pour for yourself as well, goodman, whatever best pleases your throat. I was hoping to find a ship that could take me further west.’

‘Be lucky if you do.’ The landlord poured himself a brandy and threw it straight down his gullet. ‘Most of the merchantmen let slip for deeper waters as soon as the first storm drew in. Those that didn’t foundered on the surge. We’re on high ground here,
missed the worst of it, but I hear it travelled eighteen miles upriver.’

Masen sipped his drink. The brandy was no goldwine, but it was passable, and potent enough to start warming him from the inside despite his sodden clothes. ‘I saw flooding as far north as Yelda,’ he said, flicking another pair of shillings onto the counter. ‘Syfria’s been hit hard.’