Kings of the North (9 page)

“One last pain, Jori,” Oktar said, bending close to him. Dorrin could not tell if Jori heard it. “We’re easing it as much as we can. Be brave now.”

They lifted him off the spikes, and more blood poured out. He did not make a sound or move, as limp as if already dead, and Dorrin hoped he was.

They laid him on the floor outside, the whole front of his body soaked with blood. Dorrin knelt beside him, along with the Marshals. No breath, no pulse, no sense of life.

“His suffering’s over—poor man—” the Marshal-General said.

“He was just trying to help,” Dorrin said. “They—my people—were afraid to do anything on their own when I came, and I’ve tried to encourage them. Now this—”

Oktar put a hand on her shoulder. “My lord, you did not build this trap, and you did not tell him to rush in. He knew there was evil magery in this house. It was his folly, not yours.”

“I’ll send for the grange burial guild,” Marshal Tamis said. He took the cloth Eddes handed him and wiped Jori’s blood from his hands.

“Burial guild?” Dorrin asked. She had not heard of such a thing.

“They prepare the bodies and mount vigil until they’re buried. Though he was not Girdish, he died bravely, and with your permission we will give him what honors we can; he can be buried in the grange burial ground. You have no one trained in such, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Dorrin said. One more responsibility she had not thought of. “Thank you.”

“I’ll tell one of your people upstairs to take a message to the grange—and to the city militia. They won’t make any difficulty, not with the Marshal-Judicar here.”

Oktar nodded. “Their only concern will be sickness; burial must take place before midday tomorrow.”

J
ori’s death delayed their investigation of the cellars. When the four members of the burial guild arrived, they put Jori’s body on a burial board and carried it upstairs. Their grave demeanor reassured her; they handled the body as if it were precious.

“If we delay now,” the Marshal-General said when they had disappeared upstairs, “whatever evil power is here will have more time to defend itself.”

“You can trust the burial guild,” Marshal Tamis said, touching Dorrin’s arm. “They will prepare him for burial with all due respect and ceremony. Let us go on with the work.”

Alert for more traps, they explored the cellars, a warren of alcoves and rooms, a maze impossible to clear quickly. They found Liart’s Horned Chain on every wall: graven, painted, or an actual chain. Two small rooms had clearly been used as cells; the doors had tiny barred windows, and shackles hung from the walls. An alcove between them held an array of torturers’ implements. In one of the rooms, they found signs of recent occupation: a bed with rumpled bedclothes, a pitcher with a little water in the bottom, and the end of a loaf of bread, now hard and dry. Under the bed was a red leather mask.

“A priest’s lair,” Oktar said, grimacing as he held the mask gingerly. “And here until a few days ago. May have fled when you moved in, my lord.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t attack her,” the Marshal-General said.

Oktar shook his head. “That’s not how they’ve operated in Vérella, Marshal-General. We found last winter that they’d sooner live under a respectable house, never bothering the inhabitants, who knew nothing of them. When the new Duke moved in, he’d bide his time.”

“Could he be somewhere else in here?” Dorrin asked. Although
they had sent upstairs several times for more lamps, the pools of lamplight scarcely lightened the shadows.

“Could be, but again, it’s their habit to flee when their lairs are opened and attempt a flank attack. We never found a connection to this house and, despite the former Duke’s reputation for arrogance and temper, never suspected that he was actually a Liartian until the assassinations.” Oktar shook the mask he held. “That priest will be missing this. Costume’s the way they terrify people. Without a mask, people can identify him.” Oktar grinned at the Marshal-General. “Maybe we can trap him. He might come back for it.”

Dorrin felt a cold chill down her back. “Unless it’s a trap for us.”

“What?”

She nodded at it. “When I was a child, one of the times I was being punished, they hung such a mask on the cell wall and told me the priest could see me through the eyes of the mask. Maybe that was a tale to frighten a child, but it seemed that it talked to me. Were I you, I’d destroy it.”

“That would explain one thing that cost two lives, back in winter,” Oktar said, and crumpled the mask in his fists. “Especially if it could also act as the priest’s remote ears. Well, not this one. Marshal-General, shall we see?”

“Indeed.”

Dorrin watched as all the Marshals prayed over the mask; it began to smoke and finally burst into flame, filling the chamber with the stench of burning leather. Dorrin felt a lessening of the pressure she associated with evil presence.

“How did he get away?” she said when they had followed every passage to its end, explored every alcove and room. “We have found no exit.”

“Could he have escaped upstairs, as you came in the front?”

“Certainly,” Dorrin said. “It’s a large house—he might have climbed out onto the stable roof from one of the back windows, for all that.”

“Or we haven’t yet found the entrance to Vérella’s underworld,” Oktar said. “He would have more than one way out, and the underground entrances to this house are the ones we must find before we rest. Though we tried to eliminate all the Liartian priests and their
followers, we knew that might not be possible. Marshal Veksin, you found several of those in that house over on Old Market Square, didn’t you?”

“Yes—we’ll need to tap floors and walls both. Even the interior walls. There was one instance in which the interior cellar wall was more than an armspan thick and contained a hidden staircase.”

Soon the cellar resounded with the tapping of staves and dagger pommels. Dorrin went upstairs briefly. In the front room, Jori’s body lay on the board, now resting between two chairs, swathed snugly in wrappings of white cloth except for his head. His eyes were closed under a blue strip of cloth; a blue pall lay over the white wrappings, and the older woman stood, staff in hand, at the foot. In the fireplace, a small pot smoked; the sharp fragrance of some herb competing with the faint stench of blood and death.

“The others are in the stableyard, cleaning up,” the woman said.

“Thank you for your service,” Dorrin said. “He deserves all honor.”

“He died saving you?”

“He died trying to serve—he was hasty, but I had not warned him—he rushed past us and fell.”

“His wounds were deep. Whatever your rituals at home, by city rule he must be buried quickly to avoid disease.”

“I understand,” Dorrin said. “Marshal Tamis offered to grant him a place in the grange burial ground.” She paused, then asked, “May I ask your name and those of your guild?”

“I am Kosa,” the woman said. “And you will find Sef, Pedar, and Gath in your yard.”

“I am Dorrin Verrakai,” Dorrin said. “And again, thank you.”

On the way to the back of the house, she smelled the chickens in the oven and decided to let Efla back in the kitchen to finish preparing a meal. Out in the yard, the older man and younger ones from the burial guild were scrubbing at something in a bucket; laid out on a cloth on the cobbles were a few tools. Jaim squatted near the gate, looking sick; Efla stood by him. Perin had tied one of the horses in the yard and was brushing its tail.

They all looked up when she came out; Perin looked grim but went on brushing. Efla had the blank look of someone not sure what
she felt. Dorrin walked over to the yeomen, who had put aside their blue tabards and rolled up sleeves and trousers. “I came to thank you,” she said. “Which of you is Sef?”

“I am,” the older man said, standing up. “And these are Pedar and Gath. It’s their first.”

The young men indeed looked like soldiers who had just seen violent death for the first time.

“Your people were upset,” Sef said quietly. “I suggested they go back to work, but the boy—”

“I’ll speak to him,” Dorrin said. “Thank you.” She walked over to the gate. “Efla, we think it’s safe for you to return to the kitchen—can you do that?”

“Yes, m’lord. Jaim—”

“I’m not going in there,” Jaim said. His voice shook. “There’s a dead man in there! I heard him scream!”

“Jaim!” Efla said, scowling. “Be a man!”

“Go on, Efla. I’ll deal with this.” Efla moved away, turning her back on Jaim. Dorrin turned to him. “Now, Jaim. Sitting here scared won’t help you,” she said in the voice that had unfrozen many a recruit. “If you can’t go inside, you must help with the horses.”

With her eye on him, Jaim got up and slouched over to Perin, who handed him the brush and grinned across the yard at Dorrin. She watched a minute or two as Perin led out another horse and went to work on its hooves. When Gani came out of the stable with a cart of dirty straw and manure, she spoke to him.

“You and Perin make sure Jaim keeps his mind on his work. We’ll bury Jori in the morning; I expect everyone to attend.”

“Yes, m’lord. Come time, will we all go back inside tonight?”

“I’m not sure,” Dorrin said. “The Marshals are at work below; I hope—I expect—the house will be safer tonight than it’s been since we arrived. If you want to sleep in the stable instead, you can, but turn out clean, in uniform, for Jori’s burial.”

“Only, if those chickens are ruined, the Leaf Street Market closes in a glass or two.”

Efla, who had loitered nearby, added, “And if we’re feeding all them as is in the cellar, my lord, I’ll need more.”

Was nothing ever simple? Dorrin shook her head; she knew better than that. “Whose turn is it to go to market?”

“Inder’s, m’lord.”

“Well, then—Gani, you take Inder’s place out front and send him to market.” Dorrin fished coins from her belt-purse and handed them over.

“Stuffed rolls,” Efla said. “And a handbasket of redroots, and some greens, any kind, but they must be crisp.” She followed Gani into the house; Dorrin paused to speak to Perin about Jaim.

When Dorrin went back into the cellar, she found the Marshals clustered in one corner of the largest room.

“Do you sense anything?” Oktar asked.

Dorrin extended her hand. “It’s another Verrakai lock,” she said. She spoke the command words, and the invisible lock released. Slowly, the apparent stone faded into a stout wooden door heavily barred in iron. She pulled on the chain attached to a ring bolt, and the door tipped up. Under it, a ladder led into an underground passage.

“That’s one,” Oktar said. “We’ll find at least one more.”

By the time Inder came back from the market, they had found two more exits, one into the same underground passage but the other into a separate passage that appeared to lead westward.

“Do you think it goes under the street?” Dorrin said.

Oktar looked grim. “I think it leads under the palace grounds,” he said. “That’s how the assassins got in, I’ll wager. We followed every underground passage we knew of but never found one that ended within the palace walls.”

“We’ll take this one,” the palace guard sergeant said.

Dorrin and the Marshals went into the other one and edged forward carefully. After some time they came to five steps up and a door. They all felt something evil nearby, and the lamplight showed a pile of clothes: the red robe, gloves, and mask of a Liartian priest with the iron chain and the symbol lying on them.

The door itself, however, was untrapped, and they came out into an alley opening onto a street of shops in the cloth merchants’ district. The building was a warehouse belonging to the Cloth Merchants’ Guild, and inside it they found no sign of the door into the passage.

“They could hardly be unaware of a door on the side of their building,” Marshal Veksin grumbled.

“It’s behind that angle,” Marshal Tamis said. “Whoever built the
place wanted a secret entrance—the wall juts out just enough—it’s not obvious. And it may have had an innocent use originally.”

“Maybe, but it’s going to have no use now,” Veksin said. He went off to tackle the Guildmaster; she and the others returned to her house, rolling the priests’ habit into a tight bundle, mask innermost.

“I’ll take that away,” Oktar said. “We’ll deal with it elsewhere. What are you going to do about that trap?”

“Tear down the cell walls, dismantle the trap … Will the metal be useful for anything, or is it too saturated with evil?”

“You’ll have to ask a priest of Sertig about that,” Oktar said. “Or a dwarf. Depends how it’s forged, they say, and if it is imbued with evil, it will take someone who knows forge magery to undo it. All the smiths now operating here were cleared back when we had that trouble.”

“How should we secure these openings in the meantime?”

“We did it several ways before. If you take rubble from the cell walls, for instance—any that don’t reach the ceiling can’t be bearing walls—and pile it in that passage, then have a mason block the hole itself, it’ll be effective. Other than that, we can mortar some rocks in there, but someone could break through in time.”

“We need something for tonight,” Dorrin said.