The Mark of Ran (18 page)

Rol straightened, retrieved Fleam, and stabbed the bright blade double-handed between Psellos’s shoulders. The blood jetted out smoking and black and Fleam trembled in his hands. A kind of charge went through the weapon, transmitting itself to Rol’s loins in a momentary flash of ecstasy. He groaned, closing his eyes.

When he opened them again the fire in the hearth was obscenely bright, and what was in there seemed shapeless as a hewn log. Rowen was sprawled on the floor with her hair a matted curtain around her shoulders. Beyond the bodies that littered the room Canker sat with his back leaning against the door, his face bloodless and gleaming.

Rol straightened. His foot clicked against the spindle of the scroll Psellos had been reading. He picked it up, but the parchment was blank. Something curled itself about the toe of his boot. Psellos’s tongue, still writhing feebly. Disgusted, he transfixed it with Fleam’s smeared point and it joined the Master’s carcass in the fire.

There was blood in Rol’s mouth. His precious blood, worth so much. He spat it hissing into the fire, his head burning where Psellos’s tongue had stripped the skin from his temple. Rowen raised her head, and he saw the blood pooling behind her back as she sat. But her eyes were clear. She looked up at him and smiled one bright, unclouded smile of pure joy. He wished, then and later, that he could have smiled back.

Twelve

THE KEY

THEY HAD TO HEAL THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, WITH
the help of time and the resilience of their own bodies. The Tower was emptied of its entire staff except for Gibble, who flatly refused to leave when he saw their state, and the fat little cook tended their wounds as one by one Rol, Rowen, and the King of Thieves descended into raving fevers. Some poison had entered them through their injuries and it festered and fed upon their spirits for days, whilst beyond the walls, Ascari descended into chaos.

Rol remained lucid longest, and he helped Gibble tie his companions down on their beds whilst the sweat coursed down their stark faces and their eyes glared sightlessly and they screamed gibberish at the tops of their hoarse voices. He felt the fever rise in him like the nausea of an evil memory but was able to secure the postern against the roaming gangs outside and leave Gibble orders that the upper levels were to be left undisturbed. They had piled the bodies in Psellos’s study and nailed shut the door, but not before Rol had prised a key out of the Master’s black, melted flesh.

The key remained clenched in his fist for the next eleven days as Rol fought the raging fever that Psellos’s venom had kindled within him. He shouted and raged and wept and was tied to the bed in his turn as all reason left him and his mind became a howling wilderness. Gibble’s exhausted and frightened face was the only recurring image in the succession of nightmares that trooped through his brain.

At last, however, another face appeared in his vision, and it seemed to be not some shrieking travesty, but something reassuring and beloved. A white face framed by hair dark as a raven’s wing, a cool hand on his forehead. The foul sweat was wiped from his eyes. He was thirsty and was given water to drink, and he slept a real sleep without the torment of dreams.

There was a pain in his hand. He brought it in front of his face and opened his creaking fist and a key fell out. It had carved a purple divot in his palm.

He sat up and the tall candleflames that lit the room stabbed pain into his aching head.

“Welcome back,” a voice said, and he turned to see Rowen sitting wrapped in a rug near the foot of his bed. At the far wall a shape snored soundly in another, mounded in blankets.

“Canker?”

“His fever broke yesterday, mine the day before. But we are all as weak as half-drowned kittens. I sent Gibble off to get some rest. He’s not had more than a few hours’ sleep in the last fortnight.”

“It’s been that long?”

“We almost died. Psellos was pure poison, or the spell he read had made him so.”

“The scroll, of course. But the thing he became—”

“That was no spell, it was the nature of the Blood in him coming out.”

She stood up, naked under the rug she had pulled about herself, and joined him on the sodden bed.

“Your wounds?” Rol asked. There had been a lot of blood, and his recollection of her hurts was hazy.

“Gibble stitched them up for me. He has had much practice.” She took his hand, her fingers cool and sure. The long fever had pared away every scrap of spare flesh and her face was gaunt, the tendons standing out on her neck like cords.

He kissed her chapped lips. “It’s over.”

“The worst is, yes. But Ascari without a Thief-King is an unpredictable place. Canker has been off the streets too long. I think he will not find it so easy to come back from the dead. Psellos’s reputation is the only thing that has kept the looting mobs from the door.”

“The Feathermen can’t be the only glue that holds the city together.”

“They were the most effective one. The Watch has disintegrated, except where some of the richer Mercanters have hired a company here and there. The militia was chased out of the lower city like pike-bearing rabbits. Another Thief-King should have been elected by now, but Psellos’s bought Feathermen are unaware of his death and are holding things up. So the Feathermen are now fighting amongst themselves like all the rest of the rabble. Gibble has been out for supplies once or twice—the rumor is that Canoval’s mercenary fleet is already at sea, and will be here soon to restore order, whilst inland the council sits and drafts troops from the ranks of the smallholders. Ascari may yet become a battleground.”

“So it was all for nothing.”

“Yes.”

He had murdered a man in his bed for no good reason, left a wife lying asleep beside her husband’s corpse.

“No more training, Rowen. No more knives in the dark and blades in the back. From now on when I fight a man it shall be face-to-face and fair and square.”

Rowen’s mouth twitched. “How very laudable of you. It’s as well the world is such a simple place.”

“I’m sick of murder. Great gods, the way Psellos died! Was he in any way human at all?”

“He was tainted; I never suspected how badly. Do you know what it means?”

“I knew there was something wrong there. That black tongue of his.” And as he saw the puzzlement on her face he asked: “You mean you never noticed it before?”

“Never.”

They looked at one another, both baffled.

“The way he appeared, at the end,” Rowen went on, “means that he could only have been of the folk of Cambrius Orr; the Fallen. If his tales of your background are true, then—”

“Then it must run in the family. There is a monster inside me also. Is that what you are saying?”

“No, you fool. Think. The taint that produced the Fallen came from interbreeding with Man, but your blood is astonishingly clean. You are almost pure Were.”

“So?” Rol was sullen. He wanted no more revelations.

“So your bloodline and Psellos’s must be very different.”

“He was my uncle, not my father.”

“Uncle by blood, he said, not marriage. Somewhere along the line, Psellos has lied to you, or at least not told you the whole truth.”

“You surprise me.”

She leaned back with some of her old hauteur. “Now is not the time, I see. But we should use that key of yours to hunt out a few secrets.”

“Very well. But after that we’re taking ship. Ascari can eat itself, for all I care.”

With a bath and a change of clothes, Canker was almost unrecognizable. His burly form was well muscled despite the wastage of the fever, and filled out one of the Master’s tunics to bursting point. When the filth had been scrubbed from his face it was possible to see that he was not out of his fourth decade. Only the black gleam of his eyes was unchanged, as cold as those of a serpent.

“The sooner I get out and about the better for the city,” he said through a mouthful of pickled fish. Reaching for the relish, he winced. Rol passed it to him wordlessly. Canker’s wound had touched the lung.

Rol, Rowen, and Gibble sat with the ex–King of Thieves at the kitchen table, wolfing down the choicest cuts in the pantry and washing them down with the Master’s wine. Since they had recovered their feet, the convalescents’ appetites had seemed bottomless.

“It’s a disaster out there, to be sure,” Gibble said. “Some of the big houses on Cartsway are burning, and they’re lynching nobles at the corner of Grescon Street, where they had the fish markets.”

Rowen, also, had braved the streets. “The nobles have withdrawn what militia has stayed with the colors, and have barricaded themselves in the hill districts. The lower city has been left to its own devices.”

“Civilization hangs by a more slender thread than we ever suspect,” Canker said. He seemed almost gratified that news of his death had produced such chaos.

“They are tearing the feathers down from over all the doors,” Rowen told him. “Your followers are too preoccupied with slitting one another’s throats to care.”

“What of those mercenaries?” Rol asked.

“A few days away. Or so they say, and they have been saying that for a week now.”

“Gascar always wore its government lightly,” said Canker. “Things will calm down in time.”

“When the city is looted to the bone maybe,” Gibble protested. “Begging your pardon, but your lordship had better do something. We may be all snug and safe in this here fortress, but the common folk is suffering something cruel. They’re leaving the city in hordes by the North Road. Another few weeks of this and Ascari will be nothing more than a bunch of footpads squatting in a ruin.”

“Then it will have returned to its origins,” Canker said sharply, and Gibble shut his mouth.

The next morning Canker took his leave. “I go to steal back a city,” he said with a grin, and he bowed to kiss Rowen’s hand. “Will you really leave this tower and all in it for the scavengers?”

“We have a little scavenging of our own to do first,” Rowen told him.

“Good luck, then.” He hesitated a second—rare for him—and then spoke with odd formality. “Since it is just possible I owe you my hide, or some portion thereof, I promise that this tower shall remain inviolate, in case you should ever return.”

“We will never return,” Rol said quickly.

“
Never
is a long time, lad, even to your kind. I will give this place my protection nonetheless.” And he left them without looking back.

“It is easy to give what one does not possess,” Rowen said, closing the postern gate behind him. “Still, he may survive.”

They packed bedrolls, tinderboxes, spare clothing, and weapons, anything light that might be of use on a journey. Braving the putrefactive charnel house of Psellos’s study once more, they discovered a cache of gold ryals and silver minims, enough to allow a king to travel in style. The Tower echoed darkly about them as they labored up and down within its entrails by the flicker of torchlight. Already it seemed a forsaken place, save down in the kitchens, where at night they ate and drank by a cheering fire and savored the best vintages of the Seven Isles and beyond, Gibble producing them from the depths of a cellar with the pride of a midwife who has delivered twins.

“It is all very well to have a key,” said Rol, “but what about the door it opens?”

“It must be on this level somewhere,” Rowen insisted. “Either that, or there is yet another level below us.”

“How many levels can a place have?”

She did not answer him, but raised the lantern and scanned the stone wall of the passageway yet again.

The stonework this far below the surface was different from that farther up. The usual conglomeration of construction styles, accumulated over the repairs and additions of centuries, had given way to stark oblong blocks set in perfect lines without mortar, not a chisel-mark to be seen upon them. The stones looked as though they had been laid down the week before, and their edges were sharp and clear as if they had been cut from clay, not hewn out of Gascarese basalt.

“These foundations are ancient,” Rowen said with something like awe in her voice.