Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind (23 page)

Litasse decided she need not ask for details. Hamare always said men such as himself saved their masters and mistresses from petty concerns.

'I will have to go to Marlier,' she said at length. 'You must come and find me there, when you've concluded your business in Relshaz.'

Chapter Fifteen

Karn

Relshaz,

40th of For-Winter

He would have to choose his words carefully when he returned to Litasse. It was better not to lie outright, just to be sparing with the whole truth. Master Hamare had been adept at such skilful evasions and for the first time, Karn was really appreciating his teacher's artistry. If it was no great task to let Iruvain deceive himself, Litasse was as shrewd as she was beautiful.

Karn must see to it that she didn't know what could hurt her. Whatever he did was in a just cause. He owed it to Master Hamare's memory to see Litasse happily settled and mistress of her own destiny.

Whereas Iruvain had betrayed Hamare by mocking everything that the intelligencer had discovered about these Vanam plotters. Karn had long since decided he owed Triolle's duke no more loyalty. If the opportunity presented itself, he might as well cut Iruvain's throat, he decided. Though he wouldn't distress Litasse with such uncomfortable knowledge, given she always shied away from an opportunity to voice her undoubted desire for her husband's death.

Karn stepped over a man sprawled across the entrance to an alleyway. The addict was drooling and mumbling in the thrall of the tahn berries he had eaten. Illusions would keep him warm until the cold night killed him.

Litasse's tender conscience amused Karn, even if he didn't understand it, any more than he understood the genuine love that she and Hamare had appeared to share. Karn accepted such passions were real. They just weren't for him.

His unerring path took him past numerous workshops and manufactories. The Relshazri didn't merely buy and sell all manner of goods brought down from Ensaimin, Caladhria and Dalasor. They made plenty more coin by turning wood and leather into furniture, and brass and steel into weapons. Weavers blended linen thread from the north with Aldabreshin silk before handing their fine fabrics to tailors, upholsterers and other craftsmen.

He may have loved someone once, Karn mused. His mother perhaps, in that peasant childhood he could barely recall, before warfare had destroyed it and his father had sought to kill them all, to save them from slower starvation.

The old fool hadn't even managed that, leaving Karn alive in a ditch of corpses. Since then he'd had no use for love and little enough for friendship. If such emptiness left him free to kill without concern, that was all well and good.

The scent of the sea grew stronger as the white plastered walls grew higher. He had reached the merchants' compounds where exotic luxuries and narcotic spices from the Aldabreshin Archipelago were stored. Guards watched from their gatehouse cubbyholes and upper windows glowed where sharp-eyed men and women were totting up their profits.

Karn briefly considered robbing a counting house. Without swords to back him, though, without taking the time to gauge his victim's comings and goings, it would be hideously risky. The Relshazri paid their dues to the Magistracy to maintain an inconveniently astute and persistent Watch.

No. The Magistracy reserved an inconveniently unpleasant fate for thieves, and besides, Litasse would have no one to call on at all if he was captured here. There were other ways to get coin and she need not be troubled with those details either.

He was passing an unbroken high wall topped with vicious shards of glass. A long building within loomed black against the Lesser Moon, so nearly full, and the waxing half of the Greater. Karn heard faint coughing and sobbing drifting out through the barred windows along with the stench of soiled straw.

More fool them for being caught, or for being fool enough to protest their innocence instead of running as fast as they could. Anyone with any sense knew what passed for Relshazri justice was more concerned with profit than proof.

Leaving the lock-up behind, Karn crossed a wide paved expanse where sturdy wooden pens stood empty in the moonlight. A few scraps of cloth had been tied around the posts. Did anyone ever come looking, in search of some pathetic token left by husband or son, wife or daughter?

What good did that do, when such debtors and defaulters, thieves and deceivers had already been sold off to some Aldabreshi warlord, to live out their days as slaves in his domain, never to be seen again?

He did wonder how those condemned to that new life brought such rags and tatters as they were herded into these enclosures. The Magistracy's jailers stripped and washed all such merchandise before market so the purchasers could see just what their coin was buying. The sales of nubile girls were always popular with male spectators.

Karn walked across to the warehouses on the slave market's far side. The reek of human misery seeped from beneath their doors. Stealthy, he listened carefully at each entrance for the shuffles and murmurs of those condemned within finding some transient release in sleep.

At the far corner of the market he found a building left open to the cleansing breeze. Karn walked cautiously inside, alert for any hint of a presence within the barred cages. Nothing stirred, not even a rat.

Everything had been swept bare, and recently. That posed some interesting questions. Some of the answers he could think of might prove more interesting still.

His eyes soon grew accustomed to the shadows with the moonlight filtering through the high barred windows. He picked out a wooden stair drawing a sloping line across the darkness to the rear. Karn climbed it without a sound.

Once at the top, he pressed an ear to the tight-fitted door and listened for a long moment. His searching fingers found the brass plate of a skilfully crafted lock. It was doubtless one of the finest that money could buy in this wealthiest of cities. He could probably defeat it but that would take time and he begrudged every moment just now.

He retreated silently down the stairs, past the slave cages and out through the arched doorway. Moving more swiftly now, he went to the rear of the building. With every finger-width of river mud so precious to the Relshazri, he had to sidle along the narrow alley dividing it from the one behind.

Good. Karn pressed his back against that building and pressed his hands and booted feet flat against the ruddy bricks in front of him. Shifting, twisting, his limbs always braced to stop himself falling, he climbed slowly but surely upwards. Invisible in the deep shadow between the buildings, the only sound he let slip was a faint scuff now and again.

He reached the narrow louvered window he had seen from the ground. Bracing his legs still more securely, he slid one hand between the slats and the frame and then drew his dagger with the other, to lift the catch inside and twitch the shutter open.

Something scraped in the darkness within; furniture on bare boards. White light flared and died. Someone was squeezing a spark-maker, trying to light a lamp.

Karn launched himself headfirst through the window. He rolled lithe as a playhouse tumbler, back on his feet before the lamplight swelled. Before the man cowering in the bed's quilts could yell for help, Karn had the dagger at his throat.

'Hush.' Karn smiled. Though this hadn't been much of a gamble. Any slaver living above his own pens was unlikely to be married, and the whores who plied this trade didn't linger with customers when they could be selling their bodies elsewhere.

'Please,' the man begged, shivering.

Karn knew his smile was doing little to ease the wretched man's terror. These days his face was so drawn, he looked more like a death's-head.

It would take half a year of good food and rest to restore the handsome looks that he'd used so effectively in Master Hamare's service, to cozen and seduce men and women alike. There were so many situations when violence didn't answer in the search for information.

In the meantime, he would use the fear that his gaunt visage prompted to best advantage.

'I have some business that's best done discreetly.' Sitting on the end of the bed, Karn sheathed his knife with ostentatious care.

'What?' Sitting straight-backed, his empty hands prudently spread, the man didn't waste time on pointless questions.

Karn nodded downwards. 'I see you've sold all your stock, and recently too, from the stink still fading there. That's some achievement in the middle of winter. None too many Aldabreshin galleys risk the open seas at this time of year.'

'A good merchant can always find a market.' The slaver relaxed a little, tugging a quilt up around his shoulders.

'I like to deal with shrewd men.' Karn nodded sagely. 'Would you be interested in more stock?'

'I might be.' The man's dark eyes narrowed. The lamplight showed he had the copper skin of mingled Archipelagan and mainland blood. 'What can you offer?'

Karn smiled. 'I would need to know your market, so I can make sure to find you what you need.'

'You're not Caladhrian, by your accent,' the slaver said warily.

Karn shook his head. 'No, and I'm not concerned where my customers come from, as long as their coin is sound.'

He was already beginning to suspect what the man was going to say next.

'So you wouldn't be overly troubled by dealings with corsairs?' The slaver folded his hands slowly, still not wanting to provoke this unexpected visitor.

Karn's smile broadened. 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

'They'll take any walking, breathing body to chain to their galleys' oars.' The slaver stumbled over his words, breathless with relief. 'They don't pay much but they wear them down to shark bait fast enough. So they're soon back looking for more, even in the depths of winter.' He grinned. 'Buy up whatever other dealers are left with, after the Aldabreshin have stopped sailing, and a shrewd man can still make a handsome profit.'

'What about women?' asked Karn. 'Children?'

The slaver looked more eager. 'I get a better price for those, as long as they're not diseased.'

Karn drummed his fingers on his scabbarded dagger. As the movement and noise drew the slaver's eye, he didn't see the blade Karn had palmed from its sheath up his other sleeve.

He swept a fold of the heavy quilt up and over the slaver's face. The man struggled, frantically fighting back. But Karn was on his feet, bearing down with all his weight. The padded fabric fatally hampered the desperate man's efforts.

Karn clamped one hand over the slaver's mouth and nose to smother him. The dagger in his other hand finished the job. He stabbed down hard, unerring, the razor-edged steel slicing through cloth and wadding to bite deep into the slaver's neck and chest.

The man went limp beneath him. Karn waited a few more moments to be quite certain his victim was dead, then stood back to contemplate his handiwork. These were the killings he preferred: swift and silent, with no risk of blood on his clothes to betray him. There was always the Relshazri Watch to consider and he still had a great many things to do.

Picking up the lamp from the bedside table, he knelt and looked under the bed. No strongbox there, which was hardly a surprise. He swiftly searched the bedchamber, and after that the windowless living room with its locked door to the warehouse stair.

No, nothing. He came back into the bedchamber and searched more slowly, more methodically. His patience was rewarded by finding a hidey-hole underneath a clothes chest.

Karn contemplated the lock but decided against taking the time to pick it. Fetching a brass candlestick from the inner room and a quilt from the dead man's bed, he smashed through the hinges, using the cloth to muffle the noise.

He lifted a strongbox out from among the splinters. It was pleasingly heavy and he shook it to be further rewarded with the solid clink of coin.

That suited him very well. Aldabreshin gemstones would be worth more but coin spent far more easily. With the corsairs raiding the Caladhrian coasts as far north as the Gulf of Peorle, he'd wager this would all be good gold and untainted silver.

That would pay his would-be slavers enough to keep their mouths shut until they had left for Caladhria and Marlier. Once they began raiding the farms and hamlets, Karn would soon see which ones he could trust, who had the stomach for slave-raiding, and who would need a timely knife in the back to keep this particular secret secure.

Karn found the dead man's keys and pocketed them. Returning to the living room, he ate meat and bread left in a wire mesh box to foil Relshaz's ever-present flies. Seeing half a glass of wine left in a wide-necked flagon, he savoured that as well. Picking up the money chest, he let himself out, carefully locking the door behind him.

Testing the weight of the strongbox again, he hid it beneath his cloak and went out into the night. He might even have enough coin to hire a few honest swords, which would give him something useful to tell Litasse.

Karn strode away, well satisfied. If one slaver was profiting by trading with corsairs there would be others doing the same. He could sell the homeless and dispossessed that his recruits rounded up and make sure such slaving was blamed on the exiles and rebels.