Warautumn (7 page)

One less whisker on the Ninth Face
, she chuckled to herself, then continued drunkenly on. And Fate was not merely with her tonight, He was courting her, it seemed. For not only had the guard disposed of his own body, he had also knocked the poison dart free. It glittered on the stones where he had stood, visible courtesy of particularly cooperative moonlight. Tyrill ground it to dust beneath her heel, wondering why she felt so little remorse about killing that man; wondering, more to the point, who should be next to taste the scorpion’s sting.

Tyrill was not the only person haunting the smoky shadows of Tir-Eron that night. Her senior squire, Lynee, was also busy, but much farther down the River Walk, where the private estates of the less prosperous members of High Clan septs began to give way to those of rising status in Common Clan. Granted, a third of the buildings facing the pavement were still businesses or small holds, and a third were state-run apartments
given over mostly to clanless folk—and now, refugees from South Gorge and Half. But a third were also the holds of private citizens or families; most walled, and far enough from the heart of the city that the turmoil that had marred Mask Night had reached there but sporadically. Only one had been torched, and that in error. And while the Ninth Face had dutifully made their sweeps in search of High Clan chiefs they could disempower, they had found no one home—in large part because those chiefs were already sheltering in disguise with trusted, but less politically visible, neighbors.

Lynee’s family owned a candle shop farther west, but one of their primary customers had long been an increasingly affluent Common Clan family, and it was that estate she was approaching now—like Tyrill, in the guise of an unsteady drunk.

She was not drunk, however, when she knocked a certain cadence on a certain gate and was summarily admitted—not to the estate itself, at this time of night; but into the gate-warden’s quarters, where waited another member of the former Council of Chiefs.

It was hard not to bow to the man who rose to meet her from where he’d been reading in the gate-warden’s common hall. One
usually
bowed to Clan- and Craft-Chiefs, and certainly to ones as renowned as this one, for Lynee had come to meet Ilfon syn Kanai, former Craft-Chief of Lore, who—happily for him—had been absent from Tir-Eron during the uprising: a fact about which Priest-Clan was known to be deeply concerned, since Lore, with Smith, War, and Stone, was among the most powerful clans.

In any case, Ilfon was not one to stand on more than minimal ceremony, and merely grinned wryly at Lynee’s amazement—which made her blush furiously, to her chagrin.
But how could she not?
Even in a nation of handsome men and beautiful women, Ilfon surpassed the norm. Though not as tall as many, his features—like Strynn’s—were absolutely symmetrical in a way that had been studied, in particular, by Paint,
but by the sculptors in Smith and Stone as well. Like Strynn, too, no one feature tipped the balance toward perfection, but again like her, the consensus was that Ilfon’s face achieved some “finer synthesis” of all elements deemed, by the beauty-obsessed Eronese, to be desirable.

That had been … before. Now, he was dirty by design, had dyed his hair a nondescript brown, and cut it roughly. Finally, he’d managed to convince one of his squires that it was in the best interest of all involved to break his nose—which indeed served as a very admirable disguise—especially as the swelling and bruising had not entirely abated.

But it was not Ilfon’s looks that concerned Lynee now; it was what he might have to tell her.

“I’ve little time,” Ilfon said, motioning Lynee to the other seat, then glancing up to see if their nominal host had departed.

“Nor have I,” Lynee replied, though she accepted his offer. “Tyrill’s abroad tonight, doing who-knows-what, though I suspect.”

“What?”

“I will only say that if any of the Face are found dead under mysterious causes, they might be less mysterious to Tyrill. Beyond that—”

Ilfon grinned again. “I’m used to wait-and-see.”

Lynee shifted restlessly. “Lord … have you learned—?”

Ilfon nodded in turn. “Most of what Tyrill desired. Unless things have changed in the last two hands, the King’s heir is, indeed, safe, as is the heir’s foster-one-mother.”

“You found Evvion?”

“It wasn’t hard. You know how she hates ceremony? Well, she hates revelry more. She therefore tries to find some reason to absent herself from Tir-Eron on Mask Night. And frankly—and to her benefit now—she’s been so unobtrusive for so long that people tend to forget she exists. She’s like a shadow. You don’t think of her as real—not since her husband
died—Avall and Merryn’s father. Before that, you should’ve seen her. Then again, you should’ve seen him. You know he and I were bond-brothers?”

“I did not,” Lynee confessed. “It never occurred to me to wonder, much less ask. In any case, Evvion is … where?”

“With what remains of Eemon’s elite in one of Stone’s summer holds down near the coast.”

“I thought Evvion was Criff.”

“There
is
no Criff anymore, not really. Certainly not since almost fifty of them were poisoned on Mask Night, including the top ten chiefs at one sitting. But long before that Criff—Clay—was part of Stone, and Stone had already effectively reabsorbed it through necessity after the plague. In any case, Evvion has Averryn and between them and these wretched usurpers lies what is supposed to be the most unassailable clanhold in the Kingdom, save those that belong to War. Oh, Priest can dig them out—or starve them out in time. But it will
take
time. Right now, they’re counting on chaos in Tir-Eron and the absence of the royal levies to cement them into power. That and Common Clan support, which, as you can see, is not universally in favor of the Face—and clanless, which is mostly concentrated here and south of here, where the war did the most damage.

“The problem is,” Ilfon went on, “those people are used to appealing to Priest-Clan when times get hard, and Priest has suddenly found its resources at a low ebb when demand is at its highest.”

“So you think they may fall?”

Ilfon shrugged. “I have no idea. The Kingdom has at least four aspects right now. There’s the army, to start with, and whatever they’re up to at Gem. They might return soon and they might not, and if they do, I wouldn’t want to be Priest-Clan.

“Then there are the northern two gorges, in which, so we are told, affairs are much as they were before the war, since they couldn’t get involved in it because of the weather. Their
best soldiers are off with the King, of course. But their leadership is, we believe, mostly intact, so it’s quite possible that Avall might start a government-in-exile in, say, Mid-Gorge, then work south to retake Tir-Eron.”

“Which leaves the south,” Lynee said.

Ilfon nodded. “Which leaves the south. It has its own problems, because most of the war was fought there. A lot of the High Clansmen there were in Tir-Eron for the summer, coordinating rebuilding with their Chiefs, or else sourcing supplies. A lot of
them
bore the brunt of Mask Night, so there are whole clan-septs down south with no one in charge—which means that the crafty among Common Clan are moving into the positions they’ve vacated, which makes them Royalists by default because they won’t want to lose what they’ve so lately acquired. But there are a lot of homeless people down there as well, and Priest is having to send its more traditional, least political, and most altruistic folks there to try to placate more hungry people than we’ve ever had, while trying to shift the blame away from themselves. It’s a neat little dance—to watch, but not, I imagine, to be involved in.”

“And Tir-Eron?” Lynee dared.

“It all meets here,” Ilfon sighed. “And now I must depart. You have what you came for and more. Tell Tyrill I appreciate her efforts, but to be careful. But tell her also that Avall’s heir still lives.”

“He’s Eddyn’s child,” Lynee corrected automatically.

“Avall’s heir,” Ilfon repeated.

And on that small note of tension, Lynee withdrew.

Dawn found both Lynee and Tyrill in bed, and Ilfon a dozen shots downriver.

“Lord Regent?”

Vorinn was awake by the time the second word began and alert before it concluded. He prided himself on that trait, though it had been born into him, not ingrained through training, and was therefore not so much an achievement as it otherwise might have been.

In spite of the formal address, one hand sought the dagger beneath his bed pad even as he squinted into the gloom of his tent. The voice belonged to one of Avall’s former Guardsmen, a man named Ravian, whom he did not know well. He wore full war gear, however, which meant that he was fresh from the front, where the army kept watch in shifts, day and night. He also carried a small lantern, the light of which obscured a lean and fine-boned face.

“Lower that so I can see you,” Vorinn yawned, rising up on an elbow and scraping the hair out of his face one-handed. “You have a message, I assume?”

Ravian nodded. “The Ninth Face is moving. We can’t tell much in the dark, sir, but there’s activity on the galleries
and
behind their palisade.”

“Activity?”

“As I said, we can’t see much in the dark—unfortunately. And the enemy isn’t using torches.”

Vorinn was already reaching for his clothes as he slid upright. “Has Tryffon been informed?”

“We came to you first, as is proper. But word should be reaching him and the rest of your Council even now.”

Another yawn. “What time is it?”

“A hand before sunrise, more or less.”

“So Zeff does intend to enforce the deadline,” Vorinn muttered, mostly to himself.

“He intends to do something,” Ravian agreed. “We should know what very quickly.”

“Not soon enough, probably,” Vorinn snorted. Scowling, he snared his leather war-trews from the stand beside his cot and began to draw them on. “Send in my squire and tell the Council I’ll meet them behind our palisade in half a hand. Faster, if they can manage.”

Ravian sketched a bow, then backed toward the entrance flap. “You have but to say, Lord Regent.” And with that he ducked out. Vorinn heard the squire fumbling around in the outer room, but didn’t wait on him to continue dressing. He preferred to manage that on his own, anyway; but squires
were
useful for things like adjustments and buckles.

One finger later, fully armed down to war-cloak and helm, with a sleepy-eyed squire and a pair of anxious-faced guards in tow, he was striding uphill toward the palisade that ringed his own camp, angling toward the gate that would admit them to the corral in which their warhorses were lodged, ever at ready—in case.

Tryffon bustled up to join him, along with two other subchiefs from War. “Preedor’s coming,” Tryffon grumbled. “He moves slowly in the morning, but he’s moving.”

“As is Zeff,” Vorinn replied tersely. “Is there any more news?”

“Movement and more movement is all I know,” Tryffon replied through an unsuppressed yawn.

“I guess we’ll know by dawn,” Vorinn retorted, gazing east, to where the sky was quickly brightening. The peaks of the Spine were crowned with red fire where the ice on their summits caught the first light, but pink was spreading down their slopes, dispersing midnight blue and purple and banishing black to the shadows where it belonged.

Someone had possessed the foresight to get their horses ready, and Vorinn mounted handsome black Iron with the same casual ease with which he donned his boots. It was mostly for effect, he conceded; he couldn’t imagine that Zeff would press for battle now, given that he had lost two major bargaining points. But Zeff was wily, and the game of feint and parry barely begun. Vorinn would have preferred to fight—perhaps single combat. But he also knew that combat was not—yet—an option.

The gate swung open before them as they exited the camp and entered the slope that ringed the vale. Fires burned everywhere, if small ones: one to every eight soldiers, two of which number changed every hand. They waited there in the predawn gloom: good soldiers from all the clans and crafts, their heraldry like springtime flowers, though Warcraft’s red predominated—entire or quartered with the colors of other clans and crafts.

Nor had discipline lapsed even slightly since the events of the previous day, though speculation and unease had surely increased, as it would have had to among soldiers. But the army, Vorinn sensed, was still strong and perfectly controlled.

They rose as they saw him, saluting him as he and his party advanced toward the centermost siege tower.

Which, he supposed, was marginally safer now that Zeff had lost his principal weapon. No lightning would blast this tower today. But even as he advanced, Vorinn’s gaze scanned the second palisade that draped the vale: the one before him, a quarter shot beyond the first wall of royal shields. There was indeed movement there, but he could not tell more, save that people seemed to be flooding out into the field between Zeff’s
palisade and the hold proper, but under cover of dark blankets or other fabric, so that it was impossible to make out what they were doing with any degree of certainty.