Call of the Colossus: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles Book 2) (28 page)

That he called them barring cuffs confirmed her guess about their purpose. “Like a barring hood, then, for people without the ability to Mindstream.”

“They don’t work quite like the barring hood, but they help keep our country’s secrets from falling into enemy hands.”

“And Dominee Ibsa created those cuffs?”

“Not the cuffs themselves, of course,” said Elder Gastone, “but she inscribes them with the symbols, yes. Or, rather, she has that ability. The cuffs are reused and passed on from king and queen to prince and princess, from cabinet minister to successor. She herself has created one that I’m aware of, when the Ministry of Government was divided into the two Ministries of Foreign Matters and Domestic Matters.”

“Has the Spirit Stone or Sundancer taught you anything of the scripture?” Elder Devarla asked.

“No,” Jora said, “but I didn’t have a chance to read Elder Kassyl’s book in its entirety before it was taken from me.” She tried not to sound bitter, but there was no denying the facts. “How does someone become a scribe?”

“It’s a lifelong devotion requiring much sacrifice,” Elder Devarla said. “We’d hoped that perhaps being Gatekeeper had instilled you with those powers as well.”

Why would they hope that?
Jora was about to ask, when Elder Alton waved his hand, drawing everyone’s attention.

“’Tis no matter,” he said. “Should she acquire the skill of scripture, I’m sure she’ll let us know. I’m more curious about the types of creatures you have at your disposal and their abilities. Is there a limit to the number you can command?”

She spent the next two hours answering their questions, many of them the same questions the Minister of War had asked.

Chapter 18

In her room, Jora sat on the reclining chair with her book in her lap, gazing out the window and thinking about Arc. Hopefully he was tucked away in his shop and not getting into trouble or drawing too much attention to himself. Sooner or later, someone was going to notice the missing statue and start making inquiries. A big man like him would not go unnoticed, especially with hair trailing down his back. Hopefully he would pass himself off as a visitor from Noossmor. At times, she questioned her decision to let him walk free. Were she in his place, she would rather sit alone in an empty shop than know she was being frozen into stone every night. If something happened to her, he’d be trapped there until the next Gatekeeper came along. She didn’t fault him for wanting to live.

With two hours left before supper, she considered visiting Arc again. He needed her help learning to talk like a modern man, but she also had an obligation to Rivva to continue investigating the smuggling. With a resigned sigh, she closed her eyes, opened the Mindstream, and got started.

She found the thread she’d last explored, that of the woman Patch when she handed off the bags of money to someone named Hammer.

“Well, they’d better hope it goes no further,” Hammer said. “Two ignorant boys running off at the mouth could easily become a dozen dead boys delivered to their wives in shrouds. Or more.” He mounted his horse and started off, riding at a canter to the west. Jora sped forward along his thread and slowed to the natural flow when he arrived at a Legion base. Judging from the bandaged soldiers hobbling about on crutches or canes and the large tents they came and went from, it was a hospital.

Hammer dismounted and handed his reins to the stable master, then unstrapped the saddle bags and took them into a log building marked
Command
. There he met privately with a shaven headed man he called Razor with three stripes on his sleeve—a commander.

“We’re short one bag,” Hammer said, setting the bags on the commander’s desk. “Southeast crew was attacked by a pair of boys who fancied themselves heroes.”

“Turounce’s company?”

“Right.”

Razor pulled open a bag and emptied its contents into his palm. They were gold coins but not of Serocia. One side had a five-bladed leaf with jagged edges, and the other was the profile of a man’s head. The commander pulled a scale from a cabinet and set it on the desk, then emptied each bag of coins onto one of the two plates. When all were empty and the scale was tipped fully on one side, he set a cylindrical piece of metal on the other side. The scale with the coins was visibly lighter than the counterweight. “An entire shipment’s worth is missing.”

“Yah. We only delivered eleven, though,” Hammer said.

“Captain’s not going to like this.”

“We know, but there’s nothing to be done now.”

“Oh, there’s something to be done all right. Turounce can make up the difference from his own pocket.”

Jora scowled. That wasn’t exactly fair, though she didn’t truly care. It did explain why he’d been so upset with Boden and Korlan, though.

Hammer shrugged. “That’s your business not mine. I’ve done my part.”

The commander opened a drawer and withdrew a small bag. It jingled when he dropped it into Hammer’s outstretched palm.

Hammer picked up his empty saddlebags. “See you tomorrow.”

Jora jumped to the commander’s thread and followed him outside. He snapped his fingers a couple of times to get the attention of a young soldier, then went back into his office. The boy entered and saluted. Razor dispatched the boy to fetch another soldier. While he waited, he loaded the coins into a larger bag that was mostly full and set it into a box.

A sergeant entered, and after a brief exchange, the commander told him about the light shipment.

“Be sure to tell the captain what happened. Turounce is going to have to answer for it.”

The sergeant took the box, tucking it under one arm, saluted, and left.

Jora jumped to his thread, hoping she would soon find out who was receiving all these gold coins. She suspected they were being melted down and minted as Serocian currency. What else would they do with foreign coins?

“Stupid boys,” the sergeant whispered under his breath. “Going to get your foolish selves killed. Twice.”

Outside one of the hospital tents, a wagon was being loaded with dead soldiers, their bodies wrapped in pale white shrouds. Just as she could see and hear in the Mindstream, so could she smell, and the stench of death was strong. The sergeant didn’t seem to notice. The bodies weren’t placed delicately but rather tossed into the wagon’s bed like sacks of grain.

The sergeant climbed up onto the wagon and set the box in the compartment beneath his seat, then fluffed a pillow and set it into place before sitting on it.

Flies buzzed everywhere, and the sergeant waved his hand to shoo them away.

“All loaded, Sergeant,” one man said. And with that, the sergeant picked up the reins and started off.

Now following the sergeant’s thread, Jora advanced through the day and into the next as he drove the wagon to Jolver. The man talked to himself a lot, mostly in a whisper under his breath, and sometimes talked to the dead in the back of his wagon. He avoided the subject of the gold coins he was carrying, but he struck Jora as a man who liked to chatter. If he had no one to talk to, he provided his own company. She learned about his wife and child, now deceased, and his mother, who hobbled around with one peg leg after an accident felling a tree.

He pulled around the back of the Legion headquarters and was met by two men from the stable. They checked the tags tied around the dead men’s toes and wrote their names down. While it broke Jora’s heart to think that her elder brother Tosh had once been one of the men delivered this way, she knew she had to stay focused. She followed the sergeant into the building.

Though he waved to the older fellow at the desk, he got no response. “Good afternoon to you, Sergeant,” he whispered as he climbed the stairs. “How was the journey? Boring as usual?” he whispered to himself, to which he replied, “You know it. Wouldn’t be so bad if I had someone to talk to besides dead boys.”

To her dismay, the sergeant went to an office where the sign on the door read
Capt. Isak Kyear
.

The man who’d wanted her dead.

Jora tamped down her anger and watched the exchange. The sergeant explained what happened to the last day’s shipment and assured him that the commander had weighed the coins. “Only the one bag is missing. Southeast crew’s paid shipment was divided up between the other five crews, so they got the godfruit they paid for.”

“All right,” Kyear said. “I’ll handle the two soldiers. Make sure all the shipments are delivered by the other crews until we get one to take over at the southeast pick-up location.”

“Yes, sir. How’s everything here in Jolver? Did you get any of that storm that hit the coast down south?”

Kyear looked up with an impatient expression. “If there are no pressing matters, Sergeant, I’ve got work to do.”

The sergeant pressed his lips together and ducked his head. “Yes, sir. Understood.” As he walked to the door, Jora took the opportunity to jump to Kyear’s thread.

The captain tucked the bag of gold coins into a canvas satchel and left his office. He stopped by the front desk and told the old man he was going for a shave. Kyear walked around to the stable and talked with the stable master about the dead soldiers while one of the hands got his horse ready. Jora advanced his thread quickly forward, slowing to the normal pace of the stream after he rode up the thoroughfare past the temple to the market district. He dismounted in front of a barbery only one street over from Arc’s shop on Tipping and went inside.

He was greeted by two barbers who were in the process of shaving a pair of customers. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Captain,” one of them said.

“Sure. Mind if I use your pot?” the captain asked.

“Not at all. Just through the first curtain there and past the blue one on the left.”

Kyear stepped past the first curtain and peeked around the blue curtain. There was a chamber pot there and little else. Next, he set the satchel on a table and swapped the bag of coins with an empty coin bag from the table’s drawer. From the table, he picked up a half-full cup of water and poured it from waist height into the chamber pot behind the blue curtain. He then took his satchel and returned to the barbery, where he waited for his shave.

Jora was eager now to see who claimed the money. She wasn’t surprised that the Legion was involved, but she had to admit that she’d expected it to stop there, at the feet of this morals-poor officer—an officer who was distantly related to her on her father’s side. The fact that Elder Sonnis knew about it meant that the Justice Bureau was involved to some extent, but who else besides her former elder could have sold his honor?

If she’d had to guess, she’d have named Dominee Ibsa. She’d been there to bestow upon Adept Sonnis the title of Elder the very day Elder Kassyl’s death had been discovered. They’d spent a good deal of time in each other’s company, and the dominee most certainly distrusted and disliked Jora.

She advanced the captain’s stream through his shave and watched him leave. He was no longer of interest to her, and so she jumped to the barber’s thread and followed him into the back room. He withdrew the bag of money, peeked inside, and then put it back and closed the drawer. She waited for a time, expecting to see one of the monks of the temple come in for a shave and leave with a bag of coins. Every time the door opened, she held her breath, wondering if this was the man. Nothing could have prepared her for the man who entered about two hours later: the palace’s head steward, Behrendt.

No
, she thought, feeling the blood drain from her face.
It can
’
t be.

She watched over his left shoulder as he took the bag from the barber, put it into his shoulder bag, and returned to his waiting carriage, not bothering to sit for a shave. From there, he went directly to the palace, waving nonchalantly at the armsman at the guard post, and through the courtyard to the front door. All the while, Jora watched in dispirited incredulity as he strode into the palace and up the stairs to deliver the gold coins into the waiting hands of Quirza, the Serocian Minister of Finance.