Evening darkened; the low overcast horizon to the west glowed deep pink and orange. The water lost its chop, the troughs shallowing and the wind dropping. The Kestral and the Wanderer, just visible as a smear to the north, were swinging over to a southward heading. Despite the wind that drove knives of ice across Kyle's back, he remained on deck. The closed rankness below churned his stomach. To the stern the glow of a pipe revealed the old saboteur Stoop sitting wrapped in a blanket. Kyle made his way sternward hand over hand by ratlines to stand next to him.
Stoop examined the pipe, tamped the bowl with his thumb, pushed it back into his mouth. ‘You can relax, lad. Be more at ease. You're home now.’
‘Home?’
‘Certainly! You're of the Guard now, son.’
‘Am I?’
‘Aye. Swore you in m'self.’
‘What about you? Where's your home?’
An impatient snort. ‘The soldier's home is his or her company, lad. You should know that by now. Sure, there's always gonna be longing an’ drippy honey memories of the places we've left behind but what happens to us when we go back to those places, hey?’ The old saboteur didn't wait for an answer, ‘We find out something we don't want to know – that they ain't home no more. No one there recognizes us no more. We don't fit in. No one understands. An’ after a while you realize that you made a mistake. You can't go back.’
The saboteur sighed, pulled the horse-blanket tighter. ‘No, those of us who take to soldiering, our home is the Guard, or the brigade, or whichever. That's our true home. An’ there's those who'd sneer at what I'm sayin’ and dismiss it all as maudlin, sayin’ they'd heard it all before so many times – but that don't change the truth of it for us, do it?’
Kyle couldn't help smiling at the saboteur's pet conviction – how they're all brothers and sisters in the Guard. ‘No. I suppose not.’ He looked down at the old veteran, his veined red eyes, grey-shot ragged beard, seamed sun-burnished face. ‘You've been with the Guard for a long time then?’
A broad smile. ‘I've seen about a hundred and sixty years of battle. All of them under this Duke and his father and grandfather afore him.’
Kyle stared, unable to breathe. ‘You're Avowed?’
‘Aye.’ He drew hard on the pipe. ‘You should've been there, lad. Some six hundred swords were raised that evening under a clear sky, and six hundred voices spoke as one. We vowed eternal loyalty and servitude to our Duke so long as he should live and the Empire stand. And he still lives, somewhere.’ The saboteur examined his pipe, pushed it back into the corner of his mouth. The Duke, now he was a man to follow. We stopped them for a time, you know. The only ones that ever did. Skinner fought Dassem, the Sword of the Empire, to a standstill. But it broke us. We were tired, so tired. And the Duke disappeared soon after that. So we divided into companies and went our separate ways.’
‘And now the wandering's over,’ Kyle said, his voice tight, and he felt a searing anger burning in his chest. ‘Then why? Why the contracts? Why come to Bael lands?’ Why … Spur?
Stoop sighed. ‘Aye. The Diaspora's ended. We're going back to reclaim our land. We weren't just wandering though. We searched everywhere – for the Duke. We didn't find him. But maybe one of the other companies … I don't know.’
They remained side by side in silence for a time. Kurzan sailors clambered around them, raising sail. The embers of Stoop's pipe died. The saboteur roused himself, stood. ‘I don't know about you but I'm freezing my arse out here.’ He pulled the blanket higher and went below.
Kyle stayed for a while longer on the deck, watching the waves without really seeing them. His thoughts kept returning to Stoop's words that day on the Spur, ‘We knew someone was up here …’
The next day the storm broke and the Kestral made better time. Word came down from the deck that contact had been lost with all but the Wanderer. Talk went around of wrecks, the Riders and sea monsters, and Slate offered to read Kyle's future from the Dragons deck.
Kyle lay in his berth, sick from the storm-cursed crossing. He was a tribesman, for Hood's sake! What was he doing in a damned ship? Earlier in the voyage he'd laughed at the fat mercenary and his readings but now he welcomed any distraction, no matter how ridiculous. Slate was pleased, he'd done all the other men more times than he could count. Kyle was his last chance for something new.
‘The Field, or Realm, as some call it, can be divided into four parts,’ Slate began, brushing off the square of wood. Kyle knelt opposite him on one knee. A lantern hung above swinging wildly as the ship bucked and heaved. The fat Guardsman wore a felt shirt, its lacing open at the front revealing numerous scars and a thick mat of black hair. He took out the cards. These were tied by white silk ribbon and wrapped in black leather. Kyle knew that the corporal carried them in a thin wood box rolled into his blanket. Claimed they'd been in his family for generations.
Slate searched through the deck. ‘Right now I'm using what we call the “short deck”. These four cards, the Houses, rule the Field.’ He held them up, one after the other. ‘Light, Dark, Life and Death.’ He then held up one other. ‘But when I was young this new House appeared: Shadow.’ He laid the five cards down and began taking out others as he explained them. ‘Each of the four old Houses possess their High Attendants: King, Queen, Knight or Champion, and Low Attendants, or Servants. In some they're known as Herald, Magi, Soldier, Seamstress, Mason and Wife an’ such. Shadow has its own attendant cards: King, Queen, Knight, Assassin – some say Rope – Priest or Magi, and Hound. In some spreads the Houses each have assigned quarters, or directions, where their influence is greatest. Shadow has no such allocation. It can appear anywhere at any time.’
‘There are also these six cards.’ Slate sorted through them. ‘These serve no House: Oponn, signifying chance or odds; Obelisk, meaning the past or future; and these four: Crown, Sceptre, Orb and Throne.’
‘And the rest?’ Kyle asked, looking at the cards still in Slate's hands.
The mercenary grimaced. ‘These are new additions – they go with a house that appeared just recently. New powers, striving influences, these come and go all the time … don't know if these'll last any longer.’ He laid down a card very different from the others. Like those of Shadow House, it differed in manufacture – the rest were obviously a set, cut after the same pattern, painted by the same hand. The Shadow cards were cut from slightly thicker wood, but smoothed now from much handling. Their faces were smoky dark, black almost, hinting at vague shapes and movement. This new card wasn't even squared like the others. Ragged-edged, its plain unfinished wood face bore a design that had obviously been scored there by a knife-blade. It was of a hut or a shack, some sort of shabby dwelling, and it struck Kyle as a kind of mockery of what Slate had named the others, Houses.
‘This new presence is called the House of Chains,’ Slate continued. ‘So far, it supports these Attendants: King, Consort, Reaver, Knight, The Seven, Cripple, Leper and Fool.’
While Slate talked Kyle eyed the card signifying the King of House of Chains. Like its House card, it was of an unfinished wood. Gouged on its face – perhaps by Slate's amateur hand – was a high-backed heavy seat, a throne. Drying, the wood of the card had shrunk, cracking from top to bottom through the solid, imposing chair. Compared to the richly varnished and detailed deck, these additions struck Kyle as ridiculous. Yet he could not deny that the clumsy image held a certain strange menace. The splitting wood was blood-red beneath its bleached surface, giving the appearance of streams of blood running down the surface of the throne. Somehow, Kyle would have felt much more at ease had the throne been occupied; at least then he would know where its occupant was. The face of the card appeared to shift and blur in the swinging lantern light; its uneven grain suggested to Kyle blowing dust, such as over the dune fields one can encounter on the steppes. The throne appeared closer now, dominating much more of the face. No, it was as if he or it were moving together, drawing closer, the dunes blurred by speed.
A hand interposed itself, turned over the card. Kyle pulled his gaze up to Slate's close, gleaming face, the man's eyes hooded. A chilling sweat was clammy on his back and arms and he felt strangely dizzy.
‘Ain't good, starin’ like that,’ Slate said, his voice low and tight. He appeared to want to say more, but collected the cards instead, looking down at them. ‘Maybe we'll give this a try later.’ The Talent's thick hands shook as he tucked the cards away.
Kyle went to his berth, clutched his sword and stared at the beads of moisture running down the tarred wood. He pulled the blade a handbreadth from its wood and leather sheath and rubbed at the symbols etched in its iron. Their depth, cut as if the tempered blade were wax, always surprised him. He breathed a short prayer to the Wind King, prayed trying to believe that somehow he was close and watching over him. But could that magus, or Ascendant, have been the one? It was too outrageous. His world had been turned upside down and with every month he saw how naive and impossible was the vow he swore upon the iron of this blade to somehow avenge what had occurred atop that jutting finger of stone.
That night he tried to dream of a woman's hand and a fountain that no doubt held the sweetest water he had ever tasted. If he succeeded, he couldn't remember.
* * *
Nait Simal ‘Ap Url, of the Untan harbour guard, sat in the warm afternoon light watching yet another wallowing merchantman loaded with the collected loot of an empire lumber its way from the wharf pulled along by oared launches. Stinking rats. He leaned forward to spit a red stream of kaff juice into the oily waves beneath the piers. Fat rats. They must smell something – not the Imperial rot we regular vermin smell all around – no, their noses must quiver after other scents shifting in the wind. The stink of influence; the perfume of power. Nait smiled, his lips a red smear. He liked that one. The perfume of power. The musk of money? He frowned. Well, no, maybe not that one.
But where could they expect safe refuge if not here in the capital? Malaz? He chuckled, almost gagged on the wad of leaves tucked into one cheek. Hood no! Maybe a small anchorage somewheres, an isolated bay. Out of the way. Maybe buy protection from the fortified harbours of Nap or Kartool …
Leaning back, he banged on the wall of the harbour guard shack. ‘Sarge?’
‘What?’
‘I was thinkin’—’
‘How many times I gotta tell you not to do that, son. Bad for your health.’
‘I was just thinkin’ that maybe we oughta charge an exit fee. You know, like a departure tax. Somethin’ fancy like that. There's a whole flock o’ sheep skippin’ out unsheared.’
‘You think those merchant houses aren't paid up already? You want a visit from the Claw?’
The Claw? What've they got to do with anything? We got our thing goin’ as do others. Everyone gets a piece of the pie, no one gets hurt. Always been that way.’
‘Some folks want to run the bakery,’ his sergeant said so low Nait barely caught it.
The gold afternoon light warming Nait was occluded. Squinting, he made out a pair of polished black leather boots that climbed all the way up to wide hips, ending under the canted weaponbelt and broad heavy bosom of the corporal of the guard, Hands.
‘You're chewin’ that outland filth again, Nait,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma'am.’
‘That's “sir” to you, skinny.’
‘Yes – sir.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘Aw, Hands—’
‘Sir!’
‘It cost me my last—’
‘I don't give a dead rat to Hood what you choose to waste your money on. You're on duty.’
‘That's right,’ came Sergeant Tinsmith's voice.
Scowling, Nait leaned forward opening his mouth wide and pushed out the wad with his tongue. It landed on the grey slats of the pier with a spray of red spit that dappled Hands’ boots.
‘Damn you to Fener!’
Nait wiped his sleeve across his mouth. ‘Sorry – sir’
Hands reached up to straighten the braid of auburn hair tucked down the back of her scaled hauberk. Raising her chin to the shack she said, low, ‘We'll talk later, soldier.’
As she walked away Nait blew a kiss.
‘Like I said, soldier,’ said his sergeant, ‘bad for your health.’
‘I'm not scared of her.’
‘You should be.’
Bending down again, Nait picked up the wet lump and shoved it back into his mouth. Ha! He could take her. Maybe that's what she's been holding out for all this time – for him to show her who was the boss. Nait smiled again. Then he frowned, puzzled. What the Abyss had that been? He peered out over the edge of the slats. Little pads, like leaves, floating out on the waves. Some appeared to hold copper coins, twists of ribbon, rice, fruit and the stubs of candles, a few still burning. They bobbed along together like some kind of flotilla. It was more of those damned offerings to that ruddy sea god cult. He'd been seeing more of that lately. He spat out a stream, upending a swath of the pads. Ha! Stupid superstitions for fearful times. He could understand such things out in the backwaters of Nap or Geni, but here in Unta? People were supposed to be sophisticated here. He shook his head. What was civilization coming to?
* * *