Not an unlikely prospect, Marick decided. In the early days of the city, or so Garet had droned on about, there had been feuds over many issues: trading rights in certain Wards, the chance to lead lucrative caravans to the east and west, and even how much a pound weighed, if one could believe it. Knowing the stupidity of his fellow citizens all too well, Marick had decided he could.
Across from these commercial fortresses, three story tenements were lined up along the east wall. Here lived the workers who labored for those trading houses. These men and women lived in cramped conditions and ate poor food, but they lived. Some had been born in the Ward and expected no better, though many had come because of bad luck in their home Wards. A debt that couldn’t be repaid, a brawl that left another badly injured, even a broken heart could send one here to work in a warehouse or scrub as a servant for a rich trader’s clan.
Marick shuddered. It was too much like the city of his birth, Old Torrick, situated at the top of the Falls on the River Ar. The Ward Lords there had grown wealthy by squeezing the trade moving from the rich Midlands to the other cities of the South. They had treated the whole population as their servants, and only now, with demons in the Midlands and an iron-willed Hallmaster named Corix as their conscience, had the Lords of Old Torrick reformed themselves.
He paused to let a pack of thin children run from the corner of one tenement to another, chasing a ball made of scraps of cloth. Before killing his first demon and being scooped up by the Torrick Banehall, Marick had been a thief and beggar, living on the streets after his mother died. He knew first hand how gnawing hunger could be when you saw the rich eat like pigs.
No, Marick did not like this Ward.
“Make way! Move, you brat!”
Marick jumped aside as a cart’s wheel missed him by inches. There was a snap, and pain crackled across his back. He looked up to see a drover with a cart full of men and women turn his whip back to the horses. Fire danced in the Bane’s mind, and he began to devise a suitable revenge when he caught sight of someone he recognized. One of the men in the cart was a Duelist, or an ex-Duelist, for all knew that group no longer existed. The man had a long face and a scar across his prominent nose, making him easy to place.
Marick followed the cart, careful to keep himself hidden in the shadow of buildings or behind taller workers carrying goods back and forth. The cart soon came to the outer edge of the Ward. Here, large warehouses lay in the same irritating order. These held the goods meant to travel outside the city in Bane-protected caravans, and the cart should have stopped there, but it didn’t.
This was interesting. The Twelfth Ward had little in the way of fields and orchards outside the wall, preferring to make their profit from trade and buy their food with coin. Marick wondered where the bully with the whip intended to take these people, who might all be ex-Duelists and, perhaps, the mysterious mask wearers he wanted to find.
There was, of course, only one way to find out.
The cart went through the gates and out into the fields surrounding Shirath. When Marick tried to follow, the guards stopped him. The oldest, a woman with thin lips and a cold eye, blocked his way with the butt of her spear.
“Where do you think you’re going, beggar?”
In another Ward, Marick might have played that part and tried to whine his way through, but the Twelfth Ward outlawed all forms of begging, and those who tried ended up in the warehouses, working for bread and water.
He straightened and pulled out a piece of paper from deep within his tunic.
“Trader Fairlock sent me to take this note to the Thirteenth Ward. It’s a long walk to the other gate, so I want to go through here,” he told the guard.
Drawn to his full height, he barely made her shoulder, but confidence made the lie believable. She took a cursory look at the note and tossed it back to him.
“Go on then, and stop bothering us,” she said.
Marick strode out, ostentatiously placing the paper in his tunic, well, actually in a vest of many pockets he wore next to his skin. The paper had been torn from one of Dorict’s books, something he hadn’t discovered yet, and Marick trusted to the fact that guards were rarely literate. He stuffed it back in its pocket and checked to see if his other tools were still there. Thin knife for windows, lockpicks for the rare locked door in Shirath, cloth mask, coil of rope, ah, and there, a piece of bread and a crumb of cheese he had filched from the kitchens that morning.
Chewing as he walked, he found a drainage ditch, bone dry, that he could use to keep parallel to the cart. There were many in the fields today, using the dry weather to prepare the quiltwork of plots for planting or cleaning up after winter storms. Marick pulled up the hood of his cloak, lest someone call out to him and reveal his presence to those in the cart.
After much walking and occasionally jumping up to make sure he hadn’t lost them, they came to the edge of the orchards. The newly-leafed trees made it easier to escape detection, save that he still had to bend down to catch sight of the wheels.
The groves were not as wide as the fields, so Marick was only breathing moderately hard when they came to the wood lots that were the last sign of habitation surrounding Shirath, save for the river road. He expected them to stop for some secret meeting, but they continued on, deep into the woods. Now Marick had to make sure he lost not just the cart, but himself as well, for the trees were set in identical rows in all directions, leaving no landmark save the road he needed to avoid. At last, he was forced to let the cart pass out of sight and then follow it on the track as it rumbled deeper into the woods.
He was footsore and thirsty when he heard voices calling ahead. He slipped into the trees, just beside the road, and made his way forward as quietly as possible. Being Marick, that was very quiet indeed.
There were wooden walls ahead, thick poles fixed upright together to protect a logging station, one of many that lay scattered through these woods. This was a small one, and should have been deserted at this time of year while all turned their attentions to the fields. Winter was the time for cutting and trimming, or so Dorict had told him, and he should know, since his family were all loggers save him.
This station was humming with activity. The cart was emptied of its human cargo plus bags and casks of supplies that must have lain at their feet during the trip. None wore masks, and there was no taste of demon fear, which meant the stolen jewels were not here, unless they were safely locked in silkstone boxes somewhere nearby.
The cart started back to town. From behind a stout tree, Marick glared at the driver as he passed. He would leave that man, and his whip, for a more appropriate time. The gates of the station closed, and Marick creeped closer. Scaling the wall was a possibility, but there was a Bane’s tower in the centre of the station, built up above the level of the walls. If it was occupied by a watcher, any attempt to get over the wall in daylight would lead to capture, or worse. If Shirin was there, she might try cutting his throat again, and she would have plenty of help this time.
He found a crack between the timbers of the gate and looked within. The tower stood in the middle of the square. There was a gap between the loggers’ barracks at each corner. The gate Marick peeked through stood in one. Directly across from him, the far gap held a well. The people from the cart, and others, stood near the gap to his right, a space hidden from view at this angle. In all, about thirty people stood in the square, all of them crowded near that corner, save for one inconveniently still in the tower. They had tossed aside the clothes they wore from the city to reveal close-fitting black garments. A path of sorts had been laid out with whitewashed rocks. Marick could not see where it led, but every person in the station was looking in that direction, and they all wore stone masks.
Marick smiled at his luck then flinched. Something had tweaked his muscles, invisible claws that entered his body to pluck and pull at them. When he got his eye back to the crack, he saw a masked woman backing out of the hidden corner, spear in one hand and a small, open box in the other. She kept going until she stood behind the first three of the other Masks. When she spoke, Marick heard her voice quite clearly.
“You feel it still, don’t you? Well, the silkstone doesn’t block it all out, just enough so that we can stand it, as long as you face towards the demon.”
One of the three raised a finger to her ear to flick the unlucky word away, but Shirin, for Marick thought it must be her, slapped the hand down.
“Don’t do that! We make our own luck here. Now, advance, just as if you were dueling. The trick is to keep in mind what you want to do. You want to kill demons, right? You want those clawed Banes to eat dust, don’t you? Hold those thoughts like a fire between you and the fear. Build that fire, stoke it with hate, and you’ll get close enough to put a spear in some demon’s throat.”
Marick frowned. He didn’t care to admit it, but Shirin was right. Most Banes held a counter-thought to the fear. His own was imagining the anger of the demon when it realized Marick had tricked it. He held that image of them choking on their frustration in front of him now, so that the fear he felt in his bones loosened enough so that he could act. That was how he had killed the Rat Demon that made him a Bane and how he had dealt with his enemies forever after.
This was interesting, he decided. If Shirin had discovered a way to help these clawed Duelists actually kill demons, maybe they should make a pact with them. He fingered the scar below his neck. It came from the knife Shirin once held against his throat. Well, maybe not allies, he thought. And who knew if the city would be big enough for both Banes and Masks?
The first three advanced and backed up several times before Shirin released them. Now archers stepped up. Keeping their faces pointing directly forward, they loosed arrows towards the source of the fear, though some went wide of the mark and hit the nearby buildings.
Shirin stepped forward and took a bow, nocking an arrow and pulling the string back to her stone-covered cheek.
“Here’s where breathing is most important,” she told them. “Don’t try to see everything, just the centre of the target, the spot on the demon you’re aiming at. Then breathe normally, in and out as if you were walking down a street with not a care in the world. Focus on one spot and breathe. When you’re ready, hold the in-breath and release.”
The string twanged, and there was a solid thunk as the arrow hit the hidden target. The others took up their bows again and improved under her guidance. Then three more took the bows, then another group, until all had tried, and Marick began to suffer from boredom. He considered his next move.
Well, if it’s all archery practice from now on, I’ll learn nothing new, but I’m sure Branet and Andarack want to recover the silkstone, so telling them about this will get me into their good graces, even the King’s, and wipe away a multitude of present and future sins!
Perhaps he should have been thinking of his retreat rather than imagining his triumph, for he failed to notice Shirin walk out of sight with the box in her hand. The thrill of fear vanished, and all the trainees took off their masks, including the man in the tower who began to scan his surroundings in a depressingly thorough way.
Claws! Better to run than think, so remember that next time. Claws and jaws both! Some are coming to the gate. Time to find a hole to hide in!
Running around the wall would get him no closer to safety with that man in the tower, but a drying shed was nearby. He jumped across a saw-pit and managed to squeeze between the stacks of green lumber before the gate opened and disgorged a group of unmasked Masks.
“That was tough,” a woman said. She was answered by a deep voiced man.
“It gets easier. I nearly wet myself the first time, now it’s nothing to split open a demon’s skull with this axe!”
The voices paused near the entrance to the drying shed.
“That was closed when we came in the cart,” the woman said.
“Get the others,” said the man.
The door Marick had squeezed through, and not quite closed, creaked wide. A huge figure stood there, a man of prodigious proportions who held a large axe in one hand. His face was as blunt as stone, with heavy brows, a chin like a ship’s prow, and small eyes that raked the stacks of boards and drying beams.
Marick eased back, trying to find a gap in the piles to slip into when disaster struck. His foot came down on something that snapped, and an avalanche of lathing slid down the stack to come to rest at the feet of the searcher. Others came running up behind him, the first bearing a bow.
“Something or someone’s in here,” the giant said. “It’s no demon, so find it and kill it.”
Marick tried stepping backwards again, but the pile shifted alarmingly. He took a deep breath and kicked out. The boards flew towards the door, sending his pursuers scuttling to safety. Marick climbed spider-like up the next pile, then the next, trying to reach the rear of the shed. Something cut the air next to his ear and an arrow slapped between the roof supports to knock down a shingle. The light shone right upon Marick as he crouched beneath, trying to pull slivers out of his hands. He gave up and returned to climbing and cursing as quickly as he could. More arrows followed, but the lumber that had given him away now protected him. The big man picked up the archer nearest him and threw him up up onto the stacks.