The Lascar's Dagger (50 page)

Va-damn, Fritillary, I’m glad it’s you and not me who has to make the hard decisions about Va-Faith and twin murder.

That morning, he’d told Prelate Loach he was returning to Vavala to report to the Pontifect, said his goodbyes to Witan Shanny Ide and proceeded to the port to make arrangements to catch a flat-boat up the Ardmeer estuary. Yet once he was dockside, he hesitated. For reasons he couldn’t define, he didn’t want to leave. Hints of unfinished business lingered at the edges of his mind, skittering away from definition when he tried to focus on them. All he knew for certain was that he wanted to remain in Ustgrind.

That fobbing kris
. It had to be at the heart of his unease, of course.
Pox on you, Ardhi. Why in all Va’s hemisphere did you choose
me
to throw your dagger at?

He took a room in a sailors’ doss house, dressed himself in his most nondescript clothing, and ventured out to wander around the docks. Habit made him take note of all he observed: the cargoes being loaded and unloaded, the names of the ships, the flags they flew to indicate their owners and home ports.

When he came to the part of the quayside that had a view of Ustgrind Castle, he stopped to stare. The castle loomed over river and town, a cold, grim bastion. Jackdaws wheeled around weather-scarred ramparts, their yapping calls ricocheting from the stonework to be caught on the wind. He already knew the castle was accessed only through the town, where huge wooden gates built of logs and iron were guarded by armed men of the Regal’s Watch. The rear wall of the keep was flush with the cliffs of the Ust river gorge, just before it opened up into the wider Ust estuary.

Saker shivered.
A prison, or a palace?
It certainly had the appearance of the former. And somewhere inside was Mathilda, Princess of Ardrone. Who had been prepared to see him dead without a qualm.
We all failed you, Mathilda, but by the Oak, you were remorseless in your revenge.

Since he’d arrived in Lowmeer, almost the only thing he’d heard about her was that she was expecting a child. The Lowmians were ecstatic. He just tried not to think about it. When he did, the result was a strange mix of shame, forgiveness, grief and fury.

He wondered if that Celandine woman was with her in the palace, or whether she had chosen to go her own way. Celandine – or Sorrel? A murderess with her own reasons for serving the Princess? But then, she had a witchery.

And she saved your life
. First at his trial, and then at the Chervil Moors’ shrine. She’d ridden across the land several days alone, dressed as a man. Because Mathilda had asked her, or because she’d pitied him? He preferred not to think about that either, preferred not to dwell on his stupidity. Va above, though, Celandine had the courage of half a dozen men.

Don’t think about the past. It’s done
.
All three of us have different roads to travel, different burdens to carry.

He ripped his gaze away from the cold heap of stone and battlements and thought instead of Ardhi. Alive and well, of course he was. The man was still linked to him by the power
of the Chenderawasi kris.

Pausing at the edge of a wooden wharf, he drew the weapon. The hilt was warm to his touch and the blade slithered sinuously out from its sheath, alive, a silvered snake.

Alive.
His heart turned over, beat faster.

In the sunlight it slowly lost its fluidity and sank back into solid metal, sparkling with gold. Just a dagger once more.

Rot it, what was it? What fuelled it?

Gulls rose from the boardwalk, squawking and screaming, overwhelming him with their squabbling, with their blatant desire for food, with their warnings about him, the intruder into their world. He glared at them. More witchery, just as alien, yet Va-granted. More he didn’t understand. More to turn his skin cold and his bowels to water.

“Oh, Va,” he muttered in heartfelt prayer, “if you had to gift me a witchery, why this one? And if I had to bump into a lascar, why one with a bewitched blade?”

The dagger slithered across his hand, and it was all he could do to hold himself still. All he could do not to drop it and flee. Teeth clenched, he waited. The kris spun on his palm until it pointed towards a side alley. Then it stilled.

The blade had spoken.

Sighing, he resisted the temptation to toss it into the sea, and turned down the alley instead. With a sense of fatalistic destiny, he knew this was what he had been waiting for. He and Ardhi were coming together again.

The alley opened out on to another arm of the portside quays. An ornate two-storey building dominated this wharf, with a painted sign proclaiming it to be the Lowmian Spicerie Trading Company. The wrought-iron sign swinging in the stiff breeze displayed the company’s sigils for those who could not read: a clove and a sliced-open nutmeg. The wooden building next door was the office of the Kesleer Trading Company.

He halted, taking it all in. A vessel was tied up at the quayside, a ship not yet completed. He guessed it had been recently launched, then towed from the shipyards. It was now undergoing the interior carpentry, the fitting of spars, the running of the rigging. Seamen and workmen swarmed over it, hammering, sawing, shouting orders. In all the noisy frenzy, he was unnoticed.

Even he could see the differences between Juster’s galleon and this ship. Juster’s had more gun ports, but the divergence was more in the subtle variations in shape, in the position of the masts.

A fluyt, he guessed. A ship designed for long journeys, big cargoes and smaller crews than usual. Part of Uthen Kesleer’s new fleet, intended for the spice trade. He looked for any sign of the lascar, any lascar, but the artisans and sailors were all fair-skinned.

Seeking more information, he left the wharf to find a tavern. He didn’t have to go far. Two tankards of beer and the heel of a crusty loaf later, and he’d ascertained from a ship’s chandler and fellow customer that the return of the
Spice Dragon
from the Spicerie had been followed, six months later, by two more spice-laden Kesleer ships.

All had been badly infested with shipworm. The
Spice Dragon
had required a substantial overhaul and the other two had subsequently been scrapped. Three new fluyts had been constructed to make a fleet of four ships that would head for the Summer Seas again, under the protection of one of the Regal’s fighting galleons as escort. “Have to give them Ardronese privateers a taste of their own grapeshot,” the chandler explained. Nothing had yet been heard of the previous fleet; there were rumours that it might have been sunk by jealous Pashali traders or lost in a storm, but the chandler dismissed those as premature. “True, the ships are overdue, but that could just mean they took longer to set up their factor houses in the Spicerie than they anticipated.”

“Factor houses?” Saker asked, feigning ignorance.

“Buildings for the company men who stay behind in the islands to trade.”

“Mynster Uthen Kesleer’s riding high,” the tavern-keeper said, overhearing their conversation. “Some say he’ll be made a lord if his fleet comes back, an’ who ever heard of a shipping merchant lord? But then, if he’s bringing back them spices, why not?”

“The new ships’ll sail soon,” the chandler said. “The orders for casks are already being filled.”

“I heared them letters of marque are already gived out,” the tavern-keeper said. “They can plunder an’ sink any Ardronese they come across.”

Saker winced. The Pontifect wouldn’t like it. “They’re boys,” she’d fumed when he’d told her about King Edwayn’s letters of marque to Lord Juster, “playing at games of pillage when it really is men’s lives at stake. And on what excuse? Because they want to draw imaginary lines on a map and say that whole oceans are their private playground for plunder. They’ll be lucky if this doesn’t lead to outright war.”

He wondered if the Pontifect was concerned because sea routes to the Va-forsaken Hemisphere would mean a loss in profits to the northern Principalities, where the traditional Pashali caravanner trade terminated.

At the close of the day,
Saker thought with weary cynicism,
it’s all about money.
“Tell me,” he asked the tavern-keeper, “have you ever seen one of those brown-skinned seamen in the port? The ones they call lascars?”

“Oh, ay. There’s one of them fellows teaching his heathenish tongue to ship’s officers. Came in on the
Spice Dragon
, I believe.”

Taken aback at the idea that Ardhi, after robbing Kesleer, might have then gone to
work
for him, he thought back to the morning they’d broken into the warehouse. The light had been dim, the merchants might not have seen the kris, or realised what it was even if they had, and later the guard outside had called the supposedly dead lascar a dark-skinned Pashali.

Saker recalled the cheerful mischievousness of Ardhi’s smile.
Confound the man. That was exactly the sort of brazen thing he would do
. And then,
I wonder if I can risk going to see Kesleer? Dannis Kesleer was the only person who saw me properly, and he was a child.
Two years had passed since he’d broken into the warehouse, and in all probability the thing Dannis would remember most clearly was that he’d been a cleric. Well, he was a cleric no longer. There was no medallion around his neck.

After paying for his food and drink, he stepped back into the alley. He paused for a moment to reconsider, then shrugged and pulled out the kris. “This,” he growled at it, “is your last chance. Take me to Ardhi, or I’ll throw you away again. Into the most stinking midden I can find, what’s more.”

He laid the weapon on his palm, and the blade crawled across his hand, pointing. He allowed it to lead him up to the front door of the Lowmian Spicerie Trading Company.

He slipped it back into its sheath and stepped inside. There was no sign of Ardhi. “My name is Reed Heron,” he told the clerk at the desk, making the name up on the spot. “Might I see Mynster Kesleer on a matter pertaining to the language of commerce in the Spicerie? I may be of assistance.”

Uthen Kesleer filled the space around him with the potency of his personality, the way the aroma of a spice expanded to fill a room. He dominated simply by being himself.

“And you say Prelate Loach will vouch for you?” the merchant asked, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers over his rotund stomach. The gesture reeked of belief in his superiority. The wealth in the heavy gold rings he wore on both hands would have supported Saker for years.

“Yes, Mynster. We come from the same village north of Rutt,” he lied. “The Prelate was acquainted with my father and gave me a job working on the books at the seminary.” And with a little luck, Kesleer would not check with Loach before he had time to warn the prelate he had renamed himself.

Face to face, Saker began to doubt his temerity in coming to see Kesleer. He’d heard the rumours. The merchant, backed by the Regal, ruled all Lowmian commerce. A flick of Kesleer’s fingers and an enemy could disappear.
He was not only the richest man in Lowmeer; he was a merchant who treated the Regal as if they were equals.

“I have no need of another clerk.” Kesleer’s shrewd eyes lacked laughter lines and he made no attempt to conceal his contempt. “You told my chief clerk you had expertise that might aid me?”

“Yes. I am not offering myself as a clerk, but as a teacher of language.”

“The only language that interests me is that of the Spicerie.” Kesleer tapped the bulbous growth on the side of his nose. Another man might have been embarrassed by it; he drew attention to it, thus rendering it arresting, rather than ugly.

Clever
, Saker thought. “I have it on good authority that there is not one language of the lascars, but many. There is, however, one tongue that all coastal traders and port officials understand.”
And Iska, I hope you were telling me the truth
.

“And that is the tongue you speak, I suppose?” Kesleer’s sarcastic tone made it clear he doubted Saker’s assertion.

“It is, mynster. Pashali.”

There was a long silence. When Kesleer spoke again, his tone was more neutral. “That’s interesting. Who told you?”

“A lascar tar. I suppose he might have been lying, although he had no reason to do so.”

“So you’re telling me the language my lascar is teaching my company factors may be useless, and they should be learning Pashali?”

“I’ve heard your first two fleets to the Summer Seas brought Pashali interpreters from Javenka to negotiate the purchase of spices in the islands. They doubtless cheated your factors. They have reason to want you to pay high prices.”

“In all probability. Which is why my lascar is teaching my factors and ship’s officers the language of the Spicerie.”

“Of the Spicerie – or of his own island?”

There was another long silence.

Kesleer rang the bell on his desk, and when a clerk entered, he asked the man to fetch “that bastard of a lascar”.

“How good is your Pashali?” Kesleer asked as they waited.

“Fluent. I spent some time with Pashali caravanners,” he added. A statement as vague as it was true.

A moment later Ardhi stepped into the room.

There was little left of the man Saker had first seen in the warehouse. His long hair was now cut level with his ears in the Lowmian style. He wore the black garb of a clerk, with detachable white collar and cuffs. A broad length of leather was belted around his waist with a cheap tin buckle. His feet were thrust into wooden clogs. He wore the outfit with an odd combination of dignity and discomfort that, to Saker’s heightened senses, reeked of protest.

When they’d first met, Saker had thought him little more than a lad. Eighteen or nineteen, perhaps. Now, nearly two years later, he seemed to have aged more than those years warranted. Two years in a strange land, speaking a strange tongue, eating strange food, always the outsider, the exotic stranger to be stared at.
Va above
,
it can’t have been easy.

The only sign he gave that he recognised Saker was a slight narrowing of his eyes, followed by the faintest of quirks to the edge of his lips, as if to say:
Well, I won’t give you away, if you don’t betray me.
“Mynster?” he asked with a bow to Kesleer. “I am at your service.” Both his accent and his delivery had improved.