10
Merrygold cut her eyes to the door as the dead man entered. She nodded slightly, almost but not quite in time to the harpist’s music.
Brys leaned back in his chair so that the girl on his knee did not block his view, let his eyes fall halfway closed, and studied his target behind the mask of a lazy smile.
He was an unremarkable man in a wine-stained velvet tunic, not small but not broad enough in the chest and shoulders to be an archer or an ironlord. Greasy brown hair fell across his forehead, obscuring small eyes and a reddened nose. He walked with the swaggering precision of the half-drunk, and other than a long-handled knife at his belt, he wore no weapons Brys could see. He didn’t seem to know he was dead yet, but men like that never did.
Brys felt a twinge of disappointment. There was no way this man could be a Baozite. Everything about him spoke of weakness and dissipation, and while the ironlords could be as dissipated as anyone, they were never weak.
Still, this man had betrayed good people to them, and for that he had to die. Brys patted the rump of the girl on his knee. She was soft and pretty and he’d already forgotten her name. “Get up. I need to go out the back way.”
She pouted at him. She’d been talking about something, Brys realized belatedly; he hadn’t been listening while watching the dead man. “What makes you think there’s a back way?”
“There’s always a back way.” Even the meanest brothel had a side door to let patrons slip out quietly when creditors or wives came looking; Merrygold’s house probably had two or three.
“Fine,” she huffed, flouncing off his knee. “Follow me.”
She led him up the stairs and through the hall with its sandalwood-screened doors. Laughter drifted through some of the pierced doors, music or soft cries from others. All the happiness money could buy.
“You could stay,” the girl offered, unlocking a door at the hall’s end. She flashed a coquettish smile over her shoulder. “It’d be well worth your while.”
“I have other business tonight.” He stepped past her into the room. It was smaller than the one Merrygold had shown him. A divan covered in crimson silk stood near one wall, flanked by folding screens of brush-painted silk and pierced sandalwood. The screens, he guessed, were there to temporarily conceal guests who weren’t sure they wanted to leave yet. Or perhaps they had some use that he didn’t know about in love-play. Having met Veladi, Brys was quite willing to concede there were vast areas of bedroom practice that were completely foreign to him. And could stay that way.
At the far side of the room was a door designed to be easily overlooked, if not precisely hidden. It was nestled into the wall and shared the same patterning, although a thin frame of red-lacquered wood marked out where it stood. “That’s the back way?”
The girl nodded. “There’s a ladder. I’ll pull it up behind you.”
“Thank you.” He pressed three solis into her palm. “Stay out of sight for as long as that’ll buy. As far as anyone needs to know, I’m with you.”
She took the money but pouted again. “If Mistress Merrygold asks—”
“Merrygold won’t ask.” Brys opened the door. The cold hit him like a slap in the face, rousing wits that had been dulled by the brothel’s comfort. The ladder was tucked into a niche near the door. It was a woven contraption of rope and some hollow, ridged yellow wood he did not recognize. Iron pegs in the doorframe held its top loops anchored to the floor.
Brys tested the top of the ladder to make sure it was secure, then tossed the rest into the darkness. As soon as it fell he was climbing; he hit the ground before the last rung stopped moving. For a moment he could see the door open above him, a window into a world of golden warmth. Then the girl closed it and Brys was alone in the night.
A few years ago, he thought, walking to the empty rain barrel where he’d hidden his weapons, he might have taken her up on her offer. She had a nice smile and plump breasts and there was probably time for a quick tumble before his target came out of the brothel. But after Veladi, she couldn’t compare. The girl in the brothel lacked her edge.
Brys thought about Veladi as he waited and sharpened his knives. Brilliant, beautiful, ruthless. One of the Spider’s favorite students, until she’d turned apostate and the Spider had ordered her killed.
He’d tried to kill her too. Hadn’t quite worked out.
Brys tested the edge of a blade against his thumbnail and, finding it sharp enough, moved on to another. The knives didn’t really need honing, but it was something to do while he waited for his target to come out and die.
That was a bad winter. One of the worst. Ang’arta had marched on Thelyand that fall, driving back King Merovas’ armies and steadily conquering his land. Desperate for swords to hold back their onslaught, Merovas opened his coffers to any mercenary who’d sign with him. Brys’ company had been quick to take his terms.
It seemed like fair money at the time, and the first few campaigns went well. Baozites were bastards to fight, but they relied on muscle and steel like any other soldiers. They were better trained than most, and the breaking pits gave them the savagery of starved dogs, but they were men and they could be beaten.
He hadn’t known about the Thorns then. No one had. There’d been rumors about the eastern witch that Aedhras the Golden had taken to wife, and about the speed with which he’d risen through Ang’arta’s ranks to seize the Whispering Throne, but no one knew what the Spider could do or why he had gone so far afield to find her.
At Thelyand Ford, they found out. That was supposed to be the battle that drove the Baozites back to Ang’arta. It was supposed to be the end of the war. The tide was turning, or so they’d thought. They’d been winning victories against the ironlords, retaking King Merovas’ lost land.
That all ended at Thelyand Ford, when the Thornlords took the field.
Three years later, the memory still made Brys grit his teeth. Good men had died there—died and risen again as monsters, tearing apart companions too astonished to fight back. Bloodmist rolled across the riverbanks in a hellish fog, staining the sun red and killing everything it touched. Shadows took on the shapes of fiends, ripping soldiers limb from limb as if their chain mail was made of paper. Thelyand Ford was a nightmare from which there was no waking.
They’d killed one of the Thorns. One. Against hundreds—thousands—of their own dead. Once the Thorns had crushed Merovas’ vanguard and thrown the rear units into disarray, they had fallen back and the Baozites poured across the ford like iron ants.
It wasn’t even a fight after that. Sporadic battles dragged on through the winter, but the war ended at Thelyand Ford. In the spring Merovas sent his heralds to ratify what everyone on the ground already knew: Ang’arta had won the war. The ironlords annexed a third of Merovas’ kingdom, and Thelyand’s court retreated to lick its wounds in the west.
By then Brys was long gone. The Blackhorn Company had shattered on the blood-soaked riverbanks. There wasn’t enough left of it to regroup. He and a few other penniless survivors had gone to the tiny village of Asen Falls, trying to scratch out a living with every friend they’d had in the world dead or scattered and the ironlords tightening their stranglehold on Thelyand.
It was there, during one of the bleakest periods in his life, that he’d met Veladi.
The people of Asen Falls—all five or six that survived the fighting in their village and the subsequent influx of every hiresword and cutthroat left stranded when their masters died or were ruined on Thelyand Ford—thought there was a voras lur haunting the rivers and sunken mass graves nearby. According to local folklore, the thing was some sort of undead soul-stealer; they thought the Thorns had summoned or made it and set it to prey on them. They’d hired the battered remnants of the Blackhorn Company to deal with it.
Brys hadn’t been much interested in facing another of the Thorns’ monsters, but he needed the money, and he was reasonably sure the voras lur didn’t actually exist. He hadn’t seen anything like it at Thelyand Ford, and none of the other soldiers he’d talked to had heard of such a thing, so he assumed the creature wasn’t real and the villagers had simply been frightened by feral dogs or wolves that had grown bold feeding on the armies’ half-dead stragglers.
He was wrong. The voras lur did exist, and the Thorns had created it. It was no undead monster, though. It was Veladi, newly escaped from the Tower of Thorns.
She’d fought at Thelyand Ford, as he had, and the carnage had broken something in her too. Veladi fled under the cover of chaos, stealing a dead man’s face to disguise herself from her own kind. She didn’t have a plan, didn’t have much of anything beyond determination, cunning and the beginnings of magic that a new goddess granted her.
It didn’t take long for the Spider to realize that Veladi had survived, and to send Thorns after her apostate student. But Brys found her first.
He wondered, as he had often wondered in the years since, why he hadn’t killed Veladi when he had the chance. He’d planned to, at first. Apostasy hadn’t stopped or even slowed her sins; Veladi was a cold-blooded murderer when she was in the Tower of Thorns and she remained one after she left. All she’d done was change her allegiance from one dark goddess to another. Brys had no illusions about any of that. For all the killing he’d done, he was saintly as a Blessed next to her.
Yet he had not only spared her life but saved it twice. Then, when it was clear that they’d find no safety in Asen Falls, he had smuggled her to Merrygold. The courtesan had seen her safely to Calantyr, where the Spider could not reach her and Veladi could live freely under her own face. She was probably still murdering people there. In a city as big as Aluvair or Cailan, she’d never run short of prey.
Why had he done it?
Two reasons. Maybe three. First, because keeping Veladi alive meant spitting in the Spider’s eye; second, because she was a fighter and a survivor and Brys respected that. Third, because she fascinated him.
Veladi knew more about the Thorns and the inner workings of Ang’arta than anyone alive outside their Tower. The first time he spoke to her, Brys had grasped the enormity of her knowledge and why, exactly, the Spider wanted her dead so badly. Killing that wealth of information would have been criminally stupid. Anyway, he liked spiting Ang’arta. It was half the reason he was keeping Wistan alive now. That the Baozites wanted someone dead was reason enough for Brys to get in their way.
Maybe that was a mistake, but life was full of mistakes and there was no use regretting them all. Surviving them was good enough.
The last of his knives was sharp enough to split a mayfly’s tongue. Brys tucked them away and crouched in the darkness, waiting for the traitor to come. He had no doubt that the man would come. If he didn’t, Brys would go into the brothel after him, and Merrygold wouldn’t have that. No matter how drunk the dead man got tonight, he’d be thrown out the door before morning.
He seemed determined to wring out every drop of pleasure until then, though. It was well past midnight, almost to the small hours of the dawn, when the man finally came staggering down the street. Most of Tarne Crossing’s torches had burned out hours ago—the town was neither rich nor crowded enough to keep lanterns burning expensive oil all night—so the man stumbled through inky darkness softened only by cloudy glimpses of the moon.
Even if there had been torches blazing every step of the way, the man would have been good as blind; he was that drunk. Brys slipped out silently behind him, punched him in the head with a knife hilt in his fist, and caught the man as he slumped. The wine did more to drop him than the blow did.
Brys dragged the man down alleys and side streets to a blacksmith’s shop. He’d given the smith a handful of silver yesterday to leave his smithy unlocked and his home empty tonight, and it looked like the man had complied. The house was dark and quiet, the smithy’s forges cold.
Good. That gave him more room to work. Drunk as the man was, he might need it. Brys nudged open the smithy door with a foot and hauled his unresisting captive inside. The moonlight illumined a cavernous space that smelled of smoke and coal. Standing in the doorway so that he could see, Brys struck a small light.
The little flame showed him a freshly swept floor, full barrels of clean water, tools arrayed precisely on their racks. The blacksmith kept his workspace neat. Brys was glad for that; it made it easier to find the things he needed.
He spilled a generous handful of coal into one of the firepots, lighting it with the burning splint. When the fire had taken, he set a handful of chisels on the nearest anvil. Two of them, which he judged able to withstand heat better than the others, he tilted over the forge’s firepot. Then he checked his captive for brands, found none, and splashed a handful of water from the quenching barrel in his face.
The man spluttered and shook the water away. He froze when he saw Brys watching him. “Who’re you? What do you want?” His accent was Langmyrne.
“Someone you tried to kill. I want to know everything you do about what happened in Willowfield.”
“What? Willowfield? I don’t know anything about—”
Brys slapped him. It was an open-handed blow, meant to insult rather than hurt. “Don’t lie to me. I know who you are and what you did. Let me tell you how this is going to work. You answer my questions. If you lie, or hold anything back, I’ll cut off one of your fingers. Don’t worry, you won’t bleed to death; I’ve got irons in the fire to cauterize them. If you’re a slow learner and we go over ten lies, I might have to start getting creative … so it’s a good thing I’ve got those irons in the fire. Now: Who hired you?”
“I don’t have a name. I don’t,” the man repeated, eyes widening as Brys pulled his hand onto the anvil and pressed his fingers apart. “I swear I don’t. Tall man, maybe five, ten years older than you. Sounded like an Oakharne—could’ve been a knight or a noble. Looked like a fighting man, but he wasn’t wearing no device. He had brown hair, longer’n yours, and a scar along his chin, like so.” With his free hand, the man drew a finger in a slantwise gesture along the left side of his jaw. “Long-faced fellow. Grim.”
Brys kept his face expressionless, but inwardly he was stunned. He knew that man. “Who was with him?”
“Better part of a company. Maybe a dozen, maybe twenty or thereabouts. Didn’t like to look at them long enough to count.”
“Branded?”
The drunkard nodded, avoiding Brys’ gaze. “Never saw it myself, but … aye, they were. Had to have been.”
“Who was their Thorn?” Which disciple the Spider sent might tell him something about their purpose. They had different specialties; Veladi had explained it to him once. Malentir was her most trusted lieutenant and the most powerful in open battle. Cirephel came close behind him, but specialized in interrogation rather than raw force. Istarlis was a researcher and creator of monsters, while Dyonae was a pure torturer who clung to sanity by her cracked fingernails.
“I only saw her once.” Despite his bloodshot eyes and the reek of sour wine on his breath, the man sounded almost sober. His fingers trembled on the anvil. “Only once, from a distance. No one called her name.”
“What did she look like?”
The trembling in the traitor’s fingers worsened until he was tapping a palsied drumbeat on the hardened steel. His face had gone gray as ash. “Silver hair. Not white, not gray. Silver. Like a river of metal down the middle of her skull. One of her eyes is gone. She wears a blue jewel in its place, and that stone shines when there’s no light to strike it. Some of her fingers are bones. Bones and steel, or silver.”
Severine. One of the few good things about the Thorns was that their maimings made them so distinct. No one could mistake one for another, or for any normal person. Veladi had her crimson eyes and half-inked face, Malentir his bracelets of barbed steel. He didn’t remember much about Severine, but at least now he had a name. “What did they have you do?”
“They wanted a way across the river. A way that wasn’t Tarne Crossing nor none of the well-known fords. They wanted to know a village that had a chapel and wasn’t too close to Thistlestone nor anyone else with standing armsmen … and they wanted a quick guide from the first to the second. Then they wanted … they wanted someone to tell them when the Oakharne knight came near that village. When he’d be going there to pray.”
“Who made the requests?”
“The man. One with the scarred chin.”
“What did you get for your betrayal?”
“Money.” The drunkard shifted his weight, looking away again.
“Just money?”
“They said … they said they’d use my village if I didn’t do as they asked. My parents, my wife, my friends. She said that. I believed her.”
“You knew they were going to slaughter Willowfield. If you were afraid for your own kin, you knew.”
“I guessed,” the man admitted unhappily. He glanced up at Brys and, just as swiftly, back to the anvil. “What would you have done?”
I’d have killed them. And died doing it, no doubt, but it might have spared his kin. No point carrying out threats made to a dead man, especially since they’d have done so at the cost of their real goal. Brys didn’t bother answering aloud. “How much did they pay you?”
“Fifty silver solis and a gold rayel.”
Brys grunted in dour amusement. “Moranne the Gatekeeper.”
“Aye.”
Moranne the Gatekeeper was a child’s morality story, popular throughout the Sunfallen Kingdoms. Two thousand years ago, in the age of legends before the Godslayer’s War, King Cadarn Frosthand built a castle of ice in the north. The castle was enchanted: battering rams splintered like glass on its gates and boulders crumbled to powder upon striking its walls. No enemy could hope to take Icewall Castle by storm, yet the Baozites had marched on it all the same, for their god had granted them a vision of bloody victory.
For a full generation, the story said, the Baozites laid siege to Icewall Castle, winning nothing but frostbit death for their troubles. But the castle’s magic did not protect the countryside around it, so the Baozites raped and slaughtered the commonfolk because they couldn’t reach the king. Their predations were so vicious that scholars and princes gave up all their treasures to bribe their way into the safety of Icewall Castle.
Moranne the Gatekeeper was the one who profited by their pain. A venal man, he let in anyone who could pay his price and barred the door to anyone who could not. Neither mercy nor reason could sway him; silver was his only measure.
One fateful day, he let in three petitioners. The first paid him twenty pieces of silver. The second paid him thirty. The last one paid him a gold coin worth double all the rest. Moranne the Gatekeeper took their money and never looked at their faces, and so he never saw that the last man he admitted was Old Man Death.
Old Man Death laid the king’s guards low with a touch of his corpse-cold fingers. Then he threw the portcullis wide and let the Baozites rush in, streaming fire and blood. As the castle’s inhabitants fell under that steely hail, Old Man Death went back to the postern gate and invited Moranne to watch what he’d wrought. The story usually ended with Moranne weeping and clutching his worthless coins, and either the Baozites or Old Man Death finishing him off.
The payment of fifty silver solis and a gold rayel for Willowfield suggested the Thorn’s hand at work. The scarred man had to be Albric, one of the knights from Bulls’ March, and he didn’t have the black sense of humor or the profligacy needed to make that joke.
If Albric made the requests, but Severine held the purse strings, who was it that really wanted Galefrid dead? Clearly Galefrid had been the target; Willowfield was nothing more than a convenient place to kill him. But why?
Brys drew one of the chisels from the smoldering coals. The tip shone dirty gold. “When was the last time you saw them?”
“After … after they were done in the village. They made me stay and watch. Told me they’d do the same to mine if I betrayed them. They’d give my mother and my wife to the soldiers and burn the rest in their homes. Then they threw me the money and left. That was the end of it.”
“So you came here?”
The drunkard stared at the chisel’s glowing tip, hypnotized. “Thought it’d be easier for my family to believe I was dead. If I never went back, maybe the Baozites would think I didn’t care about them anymore. Then, if something like this happened … they’d have no reason to kill them.”
Brys believed about half of that. A man could drink himself to death faster and cheaper outside Mistress Merrygold’s house. Then again, there wasn’t any reason to pinch pennies before the end. “Where’s the rest of the money?”
The man fished a small, greasy leather pouch from inside his shirt and handed it over. Brys glanced inside. Ten solis, a handful of smaller coins. “This it?”
“Spent the rest. You going to kill me?”
Brys hesitated. He’d planned on it, but that was before he’d talked to the man and seen what a pitiful thing he was.
Still, he’d been willing to betray people to the Baozites once. He might well do it again, and Brys was disinclined to let them know he was alive and asking questions.
“Yes,” he decided, setting the hot iron aside, and snapped the traitor’s neck cleanly.
He scraped the unburnt coal out of the forge and left the rest to smolder out, let the chisels cool, and wiped the soot off of them before replacing them with the rest of the blacksmith’s tools. Then he slung the dead man over his shoulder, carried him to the river, and dropped him into the water with his pockets full of rocks. It wouldn’t deter a determined search, but Brys didn’t expect there to be a determined search. A man like that wouldn’t have many friends.
He was back at the inn before daybreak. Brys took a plate of cold roast chicken and day-old bread from the kitchen and went up to his room. Odosse lifted a sleep-tousled head from the pillow as he came in.
“Best if you go,” he said around a mouthful of chicken, tossing her the last of the traitor’s money. “Take this to get started.”
She opened it with shaking hands. After staring wordlessly at the coins for far longer than needed to count them, Odosse looked up. “Why? What happened?”
“Found our friend from Willowfield. We had a little talk. He gave me that present”—Brys jabbed in the pouch’s direction with a bone—“and then he told me who paid him. Happens that it involved a man I know.”
“Who?”
“Fellow named Albric, if he wasn’t lying to me. I don’t think he was. That means we’ve a problem. Albric’s a knight sworn to Bulls’ March.”
“That’s where Wistan’s from,” Odosse said, confused. She pushed the pouch and its coins away.
“It is. Smells like treachery, but I don’t know whose, and that worries me. Younger son’s the obvious guess, but Leferic never struck me as the murdering type. Spends all his days with his nose in a book; they say he faints at the sight of blood. Hard to match that up with using Thorns for a massacre likely to start a war … but it’s enough to make me think we don’t want to go to Bulls’ March, even if that is where Blessed Andalya’s gone.”
“Could it have been someone outside Bulls’ March?” Odosse suggested. “Or maybe this … Albric … was acting on his own. Wouldn’t a knight earn more glory in wartime?”
“Maybe,” Brys said, unconvinced. Albric wasn’t ambitious, as far as he knew, and he still wondered what role the Thorn had played. Why pay the traitor so lavishly if she was only a hireling herself? But why get involved if she wasn’t? The Thorns had no interest in Bulls’ March or Sir Galefrid that he could see. “We could sit here guessing until the snow melts and come no closer to the truth. I need to look around, ask a few more questions. In the meantime I think it’s best if you take the babies and go off on your own. Stay close, but not so close that anyone puts us together. If whoever hired that man is still watching, he might remember that I was with Galefrid in Willowfield, and he doesn’t need to know that you and the babies came from there too.”
“Where should I go?”
Brys shrugged. “Where would you have gone if you came here on your own?”
She didn’t like that answer, but she didn’t complain. “Are you going to leave us?”
“What?”
“You promised to take me to a town. You’ve done that, and . . . and I thank you for it.” Odosse swallowed. “I don’t have any right to ask more than what you promised, but …”
“Said I’d see you safely to a town. You’re not yet safe. None of us is. If you want to go, you’re free to. If you don’t, I’ll keep watching. From a distance, for a while, but I don’t intend to abandon you with Thorns involved in this.”
“Why not?” She fingered the greasy leather pouch. “You owe us no loyalty. Sir Galefrid was your lord, and—”
“Galefrid was an employer. A better man than some, worse than others, dead and gone either way. I swore to his service, but I never meant to stay longer than a year or two. Now that he’s dead, it’s done.”
“You’re a knight.”
“I am that.” He tossed the last chicken bone away and reclined on the pallet, lacing his fingers under his head. “So how can I leave a lady in trouble?”