The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (34 page)

Please don’t let anything happen to them
, he thought. It would tear him to pieces. A ternion wasn’t a group of three; it was a union of three. If one died, they would all shatter. They were family.

As he greeted them, Fritillary came over with Barden, who was almost hidden behind the expanse of an unfolded map in his hands. “Is that bird of yours ready yet?” she asked in a tone that suggested she was chiding him for tardiness.

“Half an hour,” he said equably. “It’s feeding.”

“Come,” she said, heading for the large table in the guild’s dining room and waving Gerelda and Peregrine over to join them. “Postpone your journey north, Proctor,” she ordered. “We may need you.”

Saker rescued the map from Barden, who needed at least one hand to lean on his staff.

An ostentatious fountain sat in the centre of the table, reaching high into the domed ceiling. It held no water now, but was still impressive as an exuberant ceramic confection.

“Giddy-brained Lowmians,” Fritillary muttered under her breath so only he could hear. “Take them out of Lowmeer and they forget all about the austerity of their culture and order falderals like this. On guild money, too.” He thought her exasperation was more that of a fond mother than the censure of authority.

She gathered them around one end of the table, well away from the fountain, and asked Saker to spread the map in front of him. It showed the northern routes from Vavala to Enstrom in Valance, and to Peith in Muntdorn. As he did so, a subtle change occurred in the sunlight entering the room, as if the shadow of a cloud had passed across the building. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it except
that the floor shivered subtly at the same time. He looked around at the others, to find them all wearing startled expressions.

Except for Fritillary.

“The shrine of the Great Oak is shifting through time towards the present,” she said. “We are close enough here to feel it. As soon as Valerian dies, or when he leaves the city, we will bring the shrine out of hiding altogether.” She gave Saker a shrewd look. “Where will you tackle him? You’ll only get one chance.”

“In the palace,” he said. “If we can. Too many unpredictable possibilities if he leaves. He’d be surrounded by Grey Lancers all the time then, and he could steal or use the power of any number of his sons. Whereas Perie says there is only one son in Vavala at the moment.”

“Our problem is how to kill him, not where,” Ardhi agreed. “Do you know just how he sucks the life out of others for himself?”

“We know a little,” Fritillary said. “He can’t hurt those with witcheries. His victims all seem to be either children or his own sons. That’s either because they offer him the most power, or because they are easier to kill. We know he can coerce anyone he can see, but to gain their longevity, we believe the victim has to be close by, possibly even within his physical grip. What do you know about how
we
can kill
him
?”

“Chenderawasi legends and history tell us that it was…” he groped for the right words “… a blending together that brought victory. Witcheries,
sakti
, artefacts, people, all interwoven and focused.”

“So?” she asked.

It was Sorrel who answered. “We have Ardhi’s kris and his climbing witchery. A small piece of a tail plume, nothing like as powerful as breast feathers. There’s Saker’s command over birds. My glamour witchery. Pitifully little, in fact.”

“It’s not what we have,” Ardhi said, reaching out to cover her hand with his. “It’s how we combine them that counts.”

“There are many local people with witcheries who can’t be coerced,” Gerelda said. “Can you use them too?”

“Not directly against Valerian,” Ardhi said in flat denial. “They aren’t powerful enough. Believe me.”

“Then it’s just us. The ternion,” Saker said.

“And that’s all?” Gerelda asked. She sounded dismayed.

“There’s me,” said Barden.

They looked at him, blank-faced, then at one another in fidgeting embarrassment.

It was Fritillary who broke the silence. “He could just be right,” she said slowly. “Barden has no Shenat blood, yet the Great Shrine-oak of Vavala gave him his staff, made from its own wood, contrary to all custom. The staff can make decisions and attack by itself, just as you’ve said your Va-forsaken dagger can.”

“The kris is not Va-forsaken,” Sorrel said quietly.

Fritillary nodded. “Right. You’re right. I’m sorry. That is an expression born of unthinking arrogance and I must remember not to use it. Anyway, the staff is another weapon we can use.”

Ardhi’s face had lit up as she was speaking. “Made from an oak tree of great venerability,” he said, “containing
sakti
, wielded by a man of great wisdom – yes! A weapon worthy of this battle. That gives me another idea. What about smearing the sap of an oak shrine on our blades? Would Fox find that… unpleasant?”

“Worth a try,” Barden said. “A tiny wedge in a pie of weaponry. Who knows which slice he’ll find lethal?”

“Who’s going to use your staff?” Gerelda asked.

Barden’s rheumy eyes glared at her. “I go where my staff goes,” he said. “Naturally.”

“And I’m going with you,” Fritillary said. When Saker opened his mouth to protest, she held up her hand. “Not just because I’m the true Pontifect, either. Listen. Just before Valerian launched his attack on Vavala, forcing us to flee, there was a black smutch in the sky, evidently some kind of sign to his scattered forces. An extravagant gesture that must have expended much of his power, when he could surely have used an easier, more ordinary way.”

“Vaunting his power,” Saker said. “Just like him.” He touched his cheek in memory, fingers catching on the roughness of the skin that he could feel but no one could see.

“My point is what happened next,” she said. “While we were watching the smutch, I touched Deremer, he winced and I felt as if my fingers had been stung. I looked at them and they were glowing, even though I wasn’t consciously using my witchery. At the time, I thought it was something about Deremer. Now, I think I had it wrong.
Sir Herelt winced because my witchery flared as it reacted to that smutch.”

Saker was interested now; they all were.

“I think there’s an added layer to my witchery. Once, when Fox tried to coerce me in the Pontifect’s palace, something unsettled him. I felt then as if I was sucking his horrible smutch into my body. And on that day of the sky smutch, just possibly my witchery reacted to the overwhelming amount of sorcery by trying to change it to a harmless witchery glow. There was too much of course,
but something did alter.
We have to think of a way to exploit that.”

“You’re our Pontifect. You may die if you face Valerian as if you were a – a combatant,” Gerelda said.

She snorted. “So? I’m not indispensable.”

“My people believe the Chenderawasi sorcery was just too much witchery in the wrong hands,” Ardhi said.

“Sorcery and
sakti
are not so different then?” Fritillary asked. “Now that is worth thinking about.”

“What about our first problem?” Sorrel asked. “How do we get anywhere near Fox without him knowing?”

“Especially,” Fritillary said, husky-voiced, “as we have indications that he has boosted his power through the murders of children.”

Saker, trying to thrust that image out of his mind, stared at the fountain. He imagined water trickling down from the top, splashing into the numerous flamboyantly decorated bowls on every level before spilling over into the next through flutes and channels. When it was in operation, the sound of the water would have drowned conversation, and the cascades would have obscured anyone sitting opposite.
Such a stupid ornament
…

“How do we get into the palace this time?” Sorrel asked. “They’ve increased the number of guards tenfold.”

Fritillary looked around the table. “Any ideas?”

“Divert attention away from what you want to hide, to something else,” Gerelda said.

“That’s where other witchery folk may be just the thing,” Barden said. “Diversions.”

“Water witcheries,” Saker said suddenly, ideas cascading. “Your Reverence, do we have Lowmian Way of the Flow folk?”

“Of course. What do you have in mind? No, wait. Can we get your eagle into the air again first? I want to make sure that everything is proceeding as I had hoped in the north.”

Saker sat still, with his hand on the map and his eyes closed as the eagle launched itself from its perch. He was linking to it, rather than twinning. The bird found a funnel of hot air rising over the ovens in Baker Lane, and spiralled effortlessly upwards, happy to follow Saker’s gentle nudging since it involved little energy. When it was high enough, he encouraged it into lazy circles over the northern end of the city while he watched through its eyes.

“The barracks are a mess,” he said, surprised. “The roof has fallen in by the look of it, and most of the walls have toppled. Can’t have happened very long ago because folk are still pulling people out of the rubble. Most look to be dead.”

Fritillary nodded complacently. “Our woodworkers concentrated their witcheries on bringing down the main beam that supported the lancers’ sleeping quarters. Our healers gave the barrack servants soporifics to put in the evening hotpot so the lancers would sleep well.”

The eagle began to edge out over the expanse of Ardwater, but Saker prompted it to circle back because he’d caught sight of something else interesting. “There’s a disturbance at the lancers’ stables. People arguing outside.”

“That will be about what happened to the horse tackle last night. A plague of rats and mice. I imagine they chewed through every piece of leather in the place.” There was more than a hint of amusement in Fritillary’s answer.

As the eagle flew on, he could only marvel at the ingenuity of those who had been in the hidden shrines for so many months, inventing and perfecting methods to use their witcheries in unaccustomed ways. The previous afternoon he’d heard about Fox family ships springing leaks and sinking at their moorings, while Lowmian clerics had used the Way of the Flow to divert a small stream to flood Fox’s gunpowder warehouse. Vavala’s Faith House, used as the living quarters for Fox’s clerics, was plagued by mould that rotted everything from shoes to the food. He assumed that was the work
of a plant healer whose usual task was to control mildew and fungus in stored grain.

The eagle left Vavala behind and followed the river northwards, and Saker opened his eyes to show the others at the table where it was on the map.

The Ard was navigable only as far as Vavala. After that it began to narrow, and bridges linked the Principalities of Valance and Staravale.

“First bridge now,” he told his listeners. “The eagle is not keen to go farther.”

“What can you see?” Fritillary asked.

“Grey Lancers on this side of the bridge.”

“How many?”

“Birds can’t count. It’s more worried about leaving the open water behind.”

He was battling the bird’s instincts and the detail on the ground was obscured because it wouldn’t concentrate. “I’m guessing there’s well over a thousand Grey Lancers on our side of the Ard. On the other side… I don’t think there’s more than a couple of hundred men – Deremer’s, I assume. They’ve built some earthworks as protection. They aren’t trying to cross.”

“Move to the next bridge.”

The view there told the same story. Many Grey Lancers on the east bank, a few soldiers on the west. Where was the bulk of Deremer’s army?

“Fly on,” Fritillary ordered.

The eagle resisted and he had no way of insisting. Instead he hinted it go higher, and it obliged.

“I can see the beginnings of the border country,” he said. From there on, the valley was steep and the river swift. No one could have brought an army across the water, not easily. And then he saw what he’d almost missed.

He laughed and let the eagle fly free to return to Ardwater.

“Ice,” he said and jabbed at the map. “Here. Deremer has got his water witchery folk to build a bridge of ice. At this time of the year! That’s crazy. How did they do that? They are already on our side of the river, readying themselves to attack the Grey Lancers from behind.”

“Deremer always was a very smart man,” Fritillary remarked. “Way
of the Flow witchery folk can do many things with water. And what, after all, is ice but frozen water?”

Ardhi smiled across the table at Sorrel. His kris had thought of ice too.

G
uided by Ardhi, they spent the best part of the next day weaving ideas into a focused strategy. Ardhi relentlessly hammered the central concept: action based on a combination of
sakti
and witchery and artefact, with cooperation the key. Finally, they had a plan.

Early the following morning Sorrel donned clothes that gave her the most freedom of movement – sailor’s breeks, tunic and shoes, a cloth belt with a dagger thrust through the waist. She completed her outfit by weaving her hair back at the nape and tying the end.

Ardhi was taking a different route to the palace, so she said goodbye, knowing that before the day was through one of them – or both – might be dead.

And then what will happen to Piper?

Saker had tried to cheer her, saying Prince Ryce already thought of Piper as his niece, and no matter what happened to the ternion, the child would be cared for, but Sorrel found that knowledge more unsettling than consoling. It was just another warning that Piper was not hers to rear. A hint that she was going to lose her second daughter.

The thought cut deep, bleeding grief into her bones.

She’s not Heather. She’s alive and well. She has a future. Be grateful.

She left Proctor House with the others, to find the streets already thronged with city folk going about their daily routines. An early morning service at the stone chapel was the first stop for some; others called at the open market to buy foodstuff brought into the city at first light from nearby farms, while a few headed to the docks to haggle over seafood sold by the night fishermen.

Gerelda had grumbled, saying that she hated elaborate plans. “So many more things can go wrong. And if you ask me, there are far
too many people involved in this. Which means infinitely more mistakes are possible.”

“Too late to change anything now,” Saker replied, smiling in a way that told Sorrel much about his affection for the proctor.

Gerelda sighed. “I know. Trouble is I’ve got used to it being just me and Perie. But today we’ve witchery folk involved that neither you nor I have ever met. Rainmakers, woodworkers, animal charmers… There are just too many unknowns.”

“Spoken like a true writ-wright fact-chaser,” he said cheerfully.

“Oh, muzzle it. It’s fine for you lot. I’m the only non-witchery-endowed person involved here today. I feel like a moulting goose in a herd of thoroughbred warhorses.”

When they reached the meeting place, a shadowed laneway pinched between two overhung buildings, Sorrel looked around the rest of the armed group gathering there, and realised Gerelda was right. Even Barden had a witchery of sorts, with his oaken staff. The others had all been chosen by Fritillary on the basis of their witchery talents. Most of them she did not know.

Someone was distributing pieces of sacking and gave her one. “What’s that for?” she asked.

“To keep the worst of the rain off,” the man replied.

It wasn’t raining then, but a storm was part of the plan.

No one spoke much. Now and then Gerelda would look at Peregrine with a raised eyebrow. Every time he shook his head, meaning he sensed no lancers, and no sorcerers other than the two men in the palace. “A large black spider sitting in the middle of his web,” he said, “with his son scuttling about on the edge.”

“So confoundedly arrogant,” Fritillary muttered. “So sure his hold on the eastern lands is secure that he thinks to destroy the Dire Sweepers and Lowmian strength in one great battle. He believes it possible to destroy all opposition from the Va-cherished Hemisphere with the fell broom of war.” She and Barden were disguised as beggars, and her ragged clothing, stinking like a knacker’s yard, did not match the eloquence of her pronouncement.

Perie, screwing up his nose, asked, “Did you roll in the fish midden down on the docks? ’Cause that’s what you reek like.”

“No better way to stop people looking too close,” she replied.
“Barden and I have faces half of the city would recognise, if they cared to glance our way, so this seemed to be the best chance of making sure they
didn’t
look.”

Just then one of her clerics came hurrying up the street. “They’re on their way. The driver and two men, as usual.”

Fritillary gave a nod, and most of the group melted away into the surrounding alleys. Although all were bound for the main gates of the palace, they split up to take different streets and back lanes to get there. Fritillary, Barden, Perie, Gerelda, Sorrel and Saker remained, as did four others, all well-armed witchery folk.

Saker glanced across at Sorrel. “Sure you can manage a horse and cart?”

“I was a farmer’s daughter, remember?”

She peeked around the corner of the building in the direction of the market. A couple of housewives with laden baskets stood chatting on a corner, some apprentice artisans hurried along to their workshops and two schoolboys dawdled on their way to dame school, pushing and shoving each other as they went.

When the cart approached with two cook’s assistants walking behind, Fritillary and Barden stepped out into the middle of the roadway, arguing. Sorrel hugged the wall and studied the driver. A man of fifty, greying stubbly beard, rotund pot belly, thin face with sunken cheeks, black coat stuck with bits of spilled food, filthy trousers tied over the bulge of his stomach with a piece of frayed cord… Easy to glamour all that as long as she didn’t have to make herself smell as malodorous as it looked.

The driver yelled at the arguing couple.“Shift your arses, ye layabouts! I’m on palace business!”

Neither of them moved and he was forced to halt the cart.

Perie ran to hold the horse’s head. Saker and Sorrel separated and approached the driver from different sides. Gerelda and the other men moved towards the assistants walking behind.

Saker pulled his dagger and leaned towards the driver. “We’re stealing the cart. Get off and we won’t hurt you.”

The man gaped at him, then down at the dagger pinking his ribs, his face a picture of disbelief. “We’re from the Pontifect’s palace! Are you beef-witted? He’ll see you dead in the wink of a gnat’s eye!”

Saker reached out and pulled him from his seat to the ground. Even as the man tumbled, arms flailing, Sorrel was climbing up on the other side into his vacated seat. By the time she’d gathered up the reins, she
was
that unattractive, pot-bellied fellow.

The man yelled for help at the top of his lungs. Saker drove a fist into his stomach, which promptly silenced him.

“We are going to tie you up,” Saker said in his ear as he doubled up on the ground. “I suggest that afterwards you disappear quietly. Don’t go back to the palace this morning.”

The assistant cooks took one look at the grim-faced armed men and allowed themselves to be frogmarched away into the alleyway by Gerelda and the witchery folk, where they were tied up.

Barden and Perie immediately set to pushing vegetables and goose carcasses from the back of the cart on to the ground. They left the heavier side of beef where it was. When there was enough space cleared, the two of Fritillary’s men who were woodworkers lay down on the boards, while Perie and Barden pulled sacking up over their supine bodies.

“Rot it, couldn’t you have got rid of the beef first?” one of them muttered.

By then, Saker had pulled the cart driver to his feet and was hustling him across the street to be tied up with the others. The man was pale, gasping as if he was about to faint, and he dragged Saker to a halt as he fell to his knees. “Can’t walk,” he whimpered.

Saker looked away from him, to Gerelda. “Give me a hand, will you?” he asked. As she came towards them, he bent to haul the carter to his feet with one hand. He still held his dagger unsheathed in the other.

The cart driver’s weakness was faked. He threw himself at Saker, reaching with both hands for his neck. Instinctively, Saker swung his dagger up. The driver’s impetus drove the blade into the base of his own midriff.

Saker swore, but it was too late to do anything about it. He pulled the knife out and blood and innards gushed.

Sorrel kept a tight hold on the reins, but the horse was apparently inured to the smell of blood. The street was now devoid of pedestrians. Far from coming to the aid of the carter, everyone had melted away.

It paid not to see anything in Fox’s Vavala.

“Blister it, Saker, did you have to make such a mess?” Gerelda said, hauling the dying man off into the alley while Fritillary muttered a hurried prayer for him.

When Sorrel flicked the reins to start the horse on its way once more, a forlorn pile of discarded fruit and vegetables and a pool of blood remained to tell the tale. Barden, Fritillary and Peregrine dropped behind to follow at a distance, the old man lurching, his crooked back and arthritic knees giving him a gait like a crab missing half its legs.

Saker, now walking beside Sorrel, rubbed at the red spatter on his clothing. Both he and Gerelda were wearing an approximation of servants’ livery in the hope that from a distance they would be able to fool the guards on the palace gate.

“That was messy,” Sorrel said.

“Unfortunate and unnecessary,” he said with a sigh.

“Put it out of your mind,” Gerelda said. “What’s the eagle seeing?”

“All quiet. No signs of alarm.”

“Your seagulls?”

“All in place. No one appears to have noticed there are hundreds lined up on the roofs. But then, most people never do notice birds.”

The horse plodded stoically on its way, needing neither guidance nor encouragement, unworried that its usual master had been replaced by a glamoured version. Sorrel looked up at the sky, overcast from horizon to horizon, which was fortunate because it meant the dark glower of the rain cloud now emptying its load of water immediately over the palace did not stand out as something inherently unnatural.

They felt the first few spatters just as they turned the corner into the stretch leading directly to the main entrance of the palace. The towers were almost hidden behind a falling wall of water. Rain lashed the gate and the two guards on duty outside huddled on either side, drenched and miserable.

She draped her piece of sacking over her head and shoulders like a cape.

“Is it one person doing that?” she asked Saker, nodding to the squalling rain. Control of water was specific to the Way of the Flow, and it was normally small-scale: a shower where a crop especially
needed it, or the opposite – pushing away rain from where it wasn’t wanted. But this? This was not a summer shower; it was a torrential storm.

“Four,” he said. “Lowmian witans, one on each side of the palace. They are taking water from the river to make the cloud.”

There was a simple brilliance to it: even if Fox did look out of his window, he would never see any of the glow of their witcheries through the rain.

The full blast of the water hit them when they were thirty paces short of the gate. The guards, obligingly, started to open it so they could drive straight through. Saker bent down to speak to the two woodworkers. “We’ll be in position in about a minute. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Just give the word, and don’t go over any bumps until you’re ready…”

“Did you hear that?” Saker asked her.

“No bumps.”

She waved a hand in thanks to the Grey Lancer sentries as the cart trundled through the gateway. Saker ducked his head to hide his face.

There were another six guards in the sentry hut immediately inside the gate. When she was level with the gate hinges, she pulled the horse to a halt and held tight to her seat.

Saker cried, “Now!”

From underneath the cart came the sharp crack of shattering wood. Sorrel’s seat slumped to one side. As it sagged, the weight shifted and there was another even louder crack. This time there was no doubt of what had happened. The axle had broken. Just as they’d planned, they were positioned so the gate could not be closed. Sorrel jumped down and glamoured herself to disappear. The two woodworkers leaped out at the same time.

The cart was tilted at a sick angle. The horse neighed and panicked as the shafts tugged uncomfortably at its shoulders. It bolted, dragging the remains of the load behind it, shedding pieces as the axle scraped the cobbles and the wheels broke away. The side of beef slithered to the ground.

Both Gerelda and Saker had killed a man before any guard had time to draw a weapon. Peregrine was the first of their company to
race in through the gateway from the outside, followed by Fritillary and then a slew of the other witchery folk. Within seconds, noise erupted through the driving rain: the clash of swords, the screams of men, the shouts of alarm.

Barden’s staff whirled into the attack, cracking a guard over the head. Fritillary, gripping Perie by the arm, started running for the stairs leading up to the terrace. Drenched by the rain, Sorrel and Saker followed, taking the steps two at a time. Sorrel abandoned her attempt at a glamour. At the top, she glanced back at the forecourt.

Pandemonium. Men fought. Seagulls swooped and screamed and clawed. Dogs, street curs urged inside by dog charmers, were yapping and leaping up at the guards spilling out from the building. A horde of rats scampered underfoot, running up the legs of guards to bite their hands and disappear inside their clothing. The rain continued its deluge, obscuring details, but she thought she glimpsed the main gate splintering, sending shards of wood through the air like arrows. A woodworker, standing with his hand on a gatepost, was grinning.

She couldn’t see Ardhi anywhere.

Ardhi had quarrelled with Sorrel the evening before, which upset him, but he’d refused to change his mind. He’d decided not to go with them through the main gate and nothing was going to budge him from that decision.

“When you steal a cobra’s eggs,” he told them as they sat around the fire in Proctor House, “it pays to have someone keep an eye on the mother snake. Much better I enter the palace my way, over the wall. Then if anything goes wrong I can divert Fox’s attention from the rest of you.”

“And what if we don’t meet up? If we come face to face with Fox without you?”