The Lascar's Dagger (10 page)

“Those Primordial fanatics don’t like city women,” the fellow said. He eyed Saker up and down, and his gaze settled on his witan’s medallion. “Might not be over fond of you, either. Watch your step.” He took another bite of the pie he was holding, and turned his attention back to the fight.

Saker drew his sword and picked up a wooden stool in his other hand. “Enough!” he roared, addressing the men with the staves. “Is this any way to behave?”

Their apparent leader, a thin man with long tousled hair and the intense gaze of a zealot, scowled at him. “Keep your witan nose out of our business lest you want it bloodied,” he said, and swung his stave at Gerelda’s ankles. She jumped over it with ease.

“Three men harassing one woman?” Saker rejoined. “Where is Shenat chivalry? Leave her be, or answer to me!”

“Blister your tongue,” Gerelda said disgustedly. “When did I ever need saving by a witan?”

One of the other men stepped towards Saker, waving his stave. “Witan of Va! Befouler of true Shenat faith! Begone from the heart of Shenat country, you perverter of our ancient—”

Saker threw the stool at him.

The man ducked, his stave dipping. Saker leapt forward to stamp hard on the wood. Unbalanced, the fellow let it go.

Saker raised his sword and his opponent backed off. Gerelda leapt down from the table to pink the neck of the leader while his attention was diverted. The third fellow, a young lad who looked vaguely familiar to Saker, retreated towards the door with an appalled expression.

“Take your men and go,” Saker told the leader. “Believe what you will, and naught will be said, but if you can’t live peaceably with your neighbours, you’ll find yourself in trouble with both Va and the earthly followers of the Faith.”

The leader snatched up his stave and headed towards the door. “Stone-lover! Street swain! Cobble-fancier! Your chapels will fall to rotted ruin, mark my words.”

As the three disappeared outside, the patrons of the inn drifted back to their tables and the potboy began to clean up the mess.

“Street swain?” Saker asked, raising an incredulous eyebrow at Gerelda Brantheld. “
Cobble
-fancier?”

“They hate town-dwellers. Primordials have brains pickled in vinegar.” She shook her head in a gesture of disgust and thrust her sword into its scabbard. “Hello, Saker.”

He righted a couple of stools and offered her one. “Good to see you again, Gerelda. Sit down and I’ll buy you a drink. I had heard there was a resurgence of Primordial idiocy, but I didn’t know it was a problem around here.”

“Ah, there’s always some Shenat hothead who decides Va doesn’t exist and our interpretation of the Way is wrong, so we should all return to the purity of the bucolic paradise of a thousand years ago. Va preserve us from that, and a pox on the Pontifect for asking me to investigate.” She sat down opposite him.

He blinked. “The
Pontifect
? I thought you were a lawyer.”

“Yes. I’m her roving legal proctor, didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t.” He hadn’t seen her since their university days. She’d read law while he studied Va-Faith, but they’d conducted a passionate affair when they’d both been seventeen or so. It had flamed brightly, then burned out just as fast as it had flared.

The tapboy passed by bearing ale, and she snagged a couple of brimming mugs from his tray. “I’m not paying for this,” she growled at the hapless lad. “Fat lot of help you were when those giddy hedgepigs attacked me.” She pushed a mug over to Saker as the boy flushed and fled.

“The Pontifect sent you – a Lowmian – to deal with that lot?” he asked, disbelieving.

“Not exactly. I was in Twite to solve a legal matter, but her reverence suggested I sound out the Primordials if I came across any on the way back. It was just my luck to meet one who thought any woman not dressed like a farmer’s wife offensive.” She grimaced. “You’re from around here somewhere, aren’t you? No wonder you skedaddled young! Was that one of your loving family there?”

“Huh? Who?”

“The youngster of the three stavemen. His name’s Rampion too. Gromwell Rampion.”

“Fobbing damn. That’s my half-brother.”

“And you didn’t recognise him?”

“Haven’t seen him in eight years. He was just a boy in a smock when I left.”

“If you’re going to see your family, you might try to straighten him out. Primordials worry the Pontifect.”

“Probably because Prime Valerian Fox might hang them for apostasy. They’re misguided idiots, not evil men.”

She looked at him over the rim of her mug as she sipped the ale. “Is it family that brought you back here?”

“I’m on my way to Throssel to tutor the King’s offspring.”

“Sounds hideously boring.” She was silent for several moments, fiddling with her mug handle. “Saker, you know me. About as imaginative as a hunk of wood, right? Remember how I used to fall asleep at university theatricals?”

He nodded. “You said you couldn’t think of the actors as being anyone other than your fellow students.”

“That’s me. So when I tell you there’s something nasty going on in the Va-cherished Hemisphere, you’ll know I’m not seeing things that don’t exist.”

“Like what?”

She didn’t answer directly. “People are suddenly anxious about the future. People talk to us lawyers when they’re scrambling to secure their money, or their property.”

“What’s making them anxious?”

“Well, that’s just it. With one man it might be fear of this Primordial resurgence. With another, it’s fear of war with Lowmeer. Over in Lowmeer, it’s the Horned Death, or evil twins. Rumours, gossip, superstition. It’s coming from twenty different directions, and yet…”

He waited, not prompting her.

In the end she just shrugged. “Forget it. Maybe I am finally fanciful after all.”

“You think it has a common origin.”
A’Va?

“Ridiculous, huh?”

“Perhaps. Haven’t folk always worried?”

“Yes. But not like this. This – this
intensity
, it’s new.” She made no attempt to hide her anxiety.

He resisted a sudden desire to put a comforting arm around her shoulders. “I did hear strange whispers about twins in Lowmeer recently,” he admitted.

“Sweet Va, you too?” Words came tumbling out, rushed, as if she didn’t want to give him time to think about them. “You know it was Lowmian law a couple of hundred years ago that twins were killed at birth, along with their mothers? They’re supposed to be evil. They call them devil-kin. I’ve heard it still goes on, drowning them at birth, like unwanted puppies.”

“Codswaddle, that’s – that’s
sick
!” He stared at her, appalled.

“What did you hear, Saker?”

“People linking twins to the Horned Death.”

“The devil is supposed to have horns, isn’t he? Devil-kin. A’Va, the devil, always trying to bring Va low.”

“It’s the victims who have the horns, not twins. All superstitious nonsense anyway.” But nauseating nonetheless.

“If twin murder continues, it’s hidden and illegal,” she said. “What worries the Pontifect is the lack of overt condemnation on the part of Regal Vilmar Vollendorn. By all reports, he’s a pragmatic ruler, not a superstitious one. Yet on this matter, he and his royal guards appear to turn a blind eye to murder.”

“I’m glad it’s not an Ardronese problem. Killing
babies
? I don’t remember hearing anyone doing that when we were students in Lowmeer. Do you?”

She shook her head, smiling faintly. “But then we had other things on our minds.”

“They were good times, that year we spent in Grundorp.”

“They were indeed.”

“Tomorrow we go our separate ways. Tonight, though – are you up for some nostalgic revisiting of the past?”

“They say it’s a mistake to go back.” But she was still smiling as she added, “I have a room upstairs.”

An hour later, sated and relaxed with Gerelda curled into his side, he remarked, “You’ve learned a lot since we last did this.” He traced a finger idly over her breast to her thigh, appreciating the hardness of her muscles as much as he admired the femininity of her curves.

She laughed softly. “So have you.”

“And I don’t remember you being as … um, so
strong
. Do lawyers always carry swords?”

“I don’t recall you having all those muscles, either. Would you be more than just a witan, by any chance?”

They exchanged a glance and said as one, “Fritillary Reedling.”

“She employs the damnedest people,” Gerelda said. “Be careful in Throssel, Saker. The Ardronese Prime makes my fingers curl and my skin crawl. I met him when Fritillary sent me to solve some legal problems about religious taxes. He was as polite as can be, yet…” She shrugged. “He won’t like your strong adherence to the Way of the Oak.”

“His family is Shenat, surely? He has an oak-and-field name.”

She propped herself up on one elbow. “Being from a Shenat family doesn’t guarantee love of the Way of the Oak. His father was Harrier Fox, Ardronese Ambassador to Lowmeer, and his mother was Lowmian, so he was brought up in Ustgrind. At court. I doubt he’s ever been to the Shenat Hills.”

“Didn’t I hear his mother committed suicide when he was young?”

“Yes, but his father stayed on in Lowmeer. He’s dead now too, leaving Prime Valerian Fox huge estates in every country of the Hemisphere, a rich man who favours chapels over shrines.”

“And who prefers chapel clerics over shrine-keepers. Perhaps because a three-hundred-year-old shrine-keeper can be remarkably recalcitrant.” He respected shrine-keepers, but had no illusions about them. He began to trace out patterns around her nipple.

“Last week in Twite,” she continued, “I was told he’s been raising money from merchants and landsmen to build chapels. Not, mind you, in towns, but in places where previously everyone went to the local shrine.”

“Va above!” He was genuinely shocked. Shrines and their unseen guardians and keepers were the protection for waters and things wild, for fields and forests, for crops and livestock. It was one thing to have stone chapels in towns, quite another to replace age-old shrines in the countryside. “The Pontifect knows this?”

“Not yet.”

“Why would the King appoint such a man to be Prime?”

She had no answer to that. “Just be careful,” she warned. “I wouldn’t like to make an enemy of Fox.”

“I’m not likely to do that. I’m just a lowly tutor, after all.”

She snorted in disbelief, sounding much like Fritillary Reedling. “You? If there’s a beehive, you’d kick it just to see what’ll happen.” Leaning into him once more, she asked, “Shall we try for another bout of nostalgia?”

When he woke the next morning, she’d packed and gone, leaving behind a note written on the linen paper she used for legal documents. If that extravagance was supposed to impress him with the importance of the words, it succeeded.

Not a mistake after all, was it? Thank you for the nostalgia. But beware, Saker. I fear the menace that threatens is greater than us all.

He destroyed the note, but coming from her, it left him with a sick anxiety in his gut, made worse by how nebulous it was. How could he be wary of something no one could even put a name to?

By noon he was riding up to the farmhouse where he’d been born. The double-storeyed stone house was shabbier than he remembered, the vegetable garden more unkempt, the flower garden dead. The once busy farmyard drooped in the midday heat. Even the hens seemed unkempt and cowed. The prosperous farm had fallen on hard times.

His father emerged from the stables when he rode up. Even he seemed smaller, less imposing than the tall, handsome man Saker remembered. His growth of whiskers was greying and untrimmed. There was no sign of anyone else about, although Saker could see several men working in one of the distant fields. His half-brothers?

“Hello, Father,” he said.

Robin Rampion stared, frowning, before his eyes finally widened in recognition. “
Saker?
What’re
you
doing here? Never thought I’d see you again.”

“Just passing through. Don’t worry, I’ve no intention of staying, or asserting any rights I might have.” He dismounted, but kept his hold on the reins.

“You’ve
no
rights here.”

“Debatable. But I want nothing from you except information. I want to know more about my mother.”

A tiny pause stayed him, then he growled, “She was a whore. What else is there to know?”

“She was my mother. I have a right to know about her, and her family, and how she died. Where was she from? Who were the Sedges?”

“Who cares? Though if names are so important to you, I’ll tell you this. I’ve always doubted you had a right to mine.”

He digested that. It made sense. If his father had suspicions about his first wife’s fidelity, it was no wonder he’d refused to allow her name to be mentioned. “I see. Well, I wouldn’t regard the loss of your name as any great tragedy.”

His father shrugged. “You think I care?”

“What’s the secret? Why won’t you tell me about her?”

His father glared at him in silence.

“What was her relationship to Arbiter, now Pontifect, Fritillary Reedling?”

“Ah, so that’s it, is it?” He grinned, revealing several missing teeth. “Now you’re a cleric wearing your pretty medallion, you want to know how cosy you can get with the Pontifect on the top of the heap, eh?”

“Don’t bother to tell me lies.”

“Oh, I’ll not do that. She’d have my guts on her platter if I told you what I know.”

“She? Fritillary Reedling?”

“Bitch made me swear I’d never utter a word. Not to you, nor anyone else. And that’s the way it’s going to be. You don’t mess with the bull in the herd, and she’s the snorting bull in this case, for all that she lacks a pizzle. Forget it, Saker. You’re never going to find out about your dam from me.”

Fritillary
had forced his father’s silence, not the other way around? He stared, trying to decide who to believe.
Fritillary, of course. When was your da ever honest with you?

Before he could say anything, his father added, “Your ma left you, you know. Ran off and left you here with me. That’s how much she cared. And then word came she was dead.” He laughed.