Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind (20 page)

In between the waterside and the warehouses, the Rope Walk cut an undeviating line. It had been laid out to provide the longest unbroken cables that the lay of the land would allow. The shallow roof sheltered the endless lengths of hemp yarn laid out by the prentice lads, while the open sides let the breeze carry the equally endless dust away. The chill didn't bother rope-makers sweating over the spinning handles that drove the whirling gears that twisted rope from countertwist strands.

As long as no one hampered their work, the rope-makers were content to allow passers-by to pause beneath the long roof. Such visitors brought them news from all the rest of the docks. Prudent craftsmen and tradesmen took their breaks here, sheltered from summer sun or winter sleet and too far from their workshops to be too readily called back to work.

No one looked twice at Branca in her dowdy gown and cheap frieze cloak, just another wife or daughter running some errand.

'Mistress.' Tecaul was a lean man, not so much aged as cured like a Derrice ham by the salt and wind off the sea.

'Good day.' Branca smiled and handed him a packet wrapped in oiled cloth along with a discreet purse.

The evening tide would see another consignment of freshly printed broadsheets cross the Gulf. Once they reached Relshaz, curiosity about events in Lescar would be satisfied according to Charoleia's wishes. Branca had already dispatched a subtly different package to a ship heading for Derrice and the other west-facing ports of Tormalin.

As Tecaul departed, she took a last clean breath of the breeze and steeled herself for the stink of courier dove dung. That was a necessary evil when she escorted the crates of courier birds delivered by ships from Talagrin only knew where. She took them to the silent old man tending his loft in a backstreet. He knew Charoleia as Mistress Lanagyre and occasionally betrayed a secretive smile when he handed Branca a bag of the silver message holders that fastened to the birds' legs.

'
Are you alone?'

'Kerith?' Taken unawares, Branca spoke aloud. She looked around but thankfully no one had noticed.

'
Have you spoken to Aremil?'

He was sitting in the Carluse chamberlain's office at Aremil's desk. Always stern-faced, Kerith looked more dour than ever.

His inexplicable dread stabbed Branca like a knife.

'Wait a moment.'

She made her way to the remote end of the Rope Walk, where empty seats were scattered for the women who secured the ropes' ends with needle and twine. Branca sat in a chair wrought from a half-barrel.

'Not for a day or so.' Now she had a firm hold on her Artifice, she could reply without actually talking. She opened her shabby reticule, as if she were searching inside for something.

Kerith hesitated, worrying her still more. '
He has been taken ill.'

'At Satheron Manor?' Branca felt the chill wind cut right through her.

Aremil had seemed unusually distant when they had exchanged what little they'd learned since their last conversation, but she had thought that was her own fault, for keeping him at arm's length for so long. She'd tried to persuade herself it was for the best. But if he had been concealing some illness--

'
He has a high fever and a putrid cough and since he collapsed, Failla cannot rouse him.'

Branca caught a glimpse of some other sickbed, where an old woman gasped her last for lack of coin to buy her medicine. Was that Failla's recollection or Kerith's?

'Does Lord Cullough have a household physician?' demanded Branca. 'Or a skilled apothecary to call on?'

'
Failla wants to bring him back to Master Welgren.'

Branca was cruelly torn. There was no one she would rather trust to care for Aremil, but how dangerously might he suffer on such a journey through the worsening weather?

'Is that wise?'

As she silently voiced her concern, she felt the full force of Kerith's own doubts. But there was something more.

'Sorgrad? You want magecraft to bring him back?'

Wouldn't that fall foul of the Archmage's edict? Branca shivered. She had no wish to encounter Jilseth again, Planir the Black's merciless mouthpiece, whom Sorgrad had so blatantly defied in the nightmare of Adel Castle.

'
I have talked to Master Welgren, and he thinks it could be safely done by slow stages, if Failla sees him warmly wrapped and sustained with honeyed water and soup--'

'Kerith!' Branca tried to curb her fears. 'What are you not telling me?'

'
There may be something more.'

She heard Kerith's voice as if from a great distance. All around, the bustle of the dockyard continued, oblivious to her distress

'
I sought Tathrin through the aether when I couldn't find Aremil. He told me something strange. Jettin knew that Aremil had fallen ill before any of the rest of us.'

Branca didn't understand his apprehension. 'We've suspected Jettin of spying on us all.'

'
But I'm utterly unable to find Aremil. Even when someone is sleeping you know Artifice can touch them!'

In her mind's eye, Branca saw Kerith pacing around the chamberlain's room.

'How hard have you tried?'

'
You think I should force him? Break down his defences?'

Kerith's fury stung like a slap to her face. Branca was shaken by a sudden vision of the pillared hall so integral to Aremil's Artifice. Stained glass lay in shards on the floor and a double door at one end had been smashed to kindling. Windswept darkness lay beyond.

'
Didn't you hear me? I can't even find him!'

'Forgive me!'

Branca knew how utterly Kerith detested what he had done to Failla, forcing her to confess she had betrayed their conspiracy to Duchess Litasse's spy. But surely this was different?

'If you think you can find him, if you wish to try rousing him through Artifice--'

In a searing instant, Branca saw Kerith knew all her fears. How she dared not venture so deeply into Aremil's sleeping thoughts. Then he would see completely into her self-loathing over her part in the spy Pelletria's death.

With a gasp, Branca recoiled, wrapping every veil of Artifice she could around her innermost self.

Why had no one warned them of this unwanted intimacy? How many other secrets were kept by Vanam's scholars, supposedly so adept with Aetheric lore?

She caught an echo of such thoughts from Kerith, but subtly different.

'Jettin? What makes you think he knows something of this?'

'
We thought we would learn so much about Artifice by using it across these distances, in service of this honourable endeavour. At least we have proved the old adage: there are none so truly foolish as the wise.'

Kerith's abiding wrath at Jettin's betrayal was now tainted by fear that the younger scholar had mastered some truly dangerous Artifice. In the next instant, Branca saw what Jettin had done to Tathrin in that Carifate tavern. Like Kerith, she had no notion what enchantments the younger adept had worked to bewilder Tathrin like that.

'
If I had known where this path would take us, I would never have set foot outside Vanam.'

His bitter chagrin was painfully close to her own treacherous thoughts in the blackest watches of the night. But Kerith's thoughts also rang with defiant anxiety.

'
This betrayal may not all be Jettin's fault. He has spent so much time in Reniack's company. He was always the one to reach him with Artifice when Reniack was apart from the rest of us.
'

'Perhaps.' Branca wouldn't have entertained this notion in Vanam, understanding more theory of Artifice than its practice. But now? 'But he has still betrayed us, spied for Reniack and attempted worse.'

'
Because he's been unduly influenced by the man's ideas. You know the force of his personality!
'

She felt Kerith's obstinate conviction that some excuse could be found for Jettin and did her best to curb her own anger. Though if the young adept had done something to hurt Aremil--

'We should talk to Sorgrad and Gren about these Mountain Artificers, the
sheltya
. Perhaps their tales will offer some clue.' She knotted her fingers in her lap. 'In the meantime, I will see if I can find Aremil.'

'
Very well.'

The brusqueness of Kerith's departure couldn't hide his lingering shame. The scholar felt both responsible for Jettin's perfidy, and guilty that he had somehow failed the younger man.

Branca pressed her lips tight together. Let him fret. She had graver concerns. What had happened to Aremil?

She made certain no one was watching her. No, mid-morning's labours were still in full flow.

'
Al daera sa Aremil sast elarmin as feorel.'

But the lyrical syllables of the enchantment didn't take her to that empty hall. Instead, she stood outside looking at a smoothly crafted wall of grey stone. The dark oak of a double door bristled with iron studs. Boards had been crudely nailed across it. She saw crescent-moon dimples where hammer blows had dented the wood.

Kerith had only imagined windswept darkness beyond this door. There seemed to be sunlight for her, filtered through the watery overcast of winter.

What was behind her? Branca's scalp prickled beneath the linen cap she wore despite Charoleia's objections.

She withdrew sufficient of her consciousness from this eerie Artifice to remind herself that she was safe in Solland. She still sat on the barrel chair in the shelter of the Rope Walk. No one had spared her a second glance.

Returning her full attention to Aremil's hall, Branca forced herself to turn around. She saw only emptiness ahead. The milky sky reached down to an unknowable horizon where it met the flat ground. Pale gravel stretched in all directions.

Branca swiftly turned to consider the hall again. It was more modest than it seemed from within; plainly built without aisles or porches, with a steeply tiled roof.

She knew something of Lescari architecture, after all the manors and towns and castles she'd seen on her travels through the summer and autumn. This didn't look familiar. Was it some recollection of the Draximal mansion where Aremil had spent his early childhood?

Was there any other entrance? Or something to be seen from the far side? She took a step and her booted foot crunched on the gravel to break the oppressive silence.

Branca checked herself. Walk widdershins around a shrine and the Eldritch Kin would see you and follow you home. That's what the old tales said. Attract their curiosity and you'd live to rue the day. That's if you were lucky. If you weren't . . .

'Nonsense,' she said aloud.

This place wrought of Artifice was hardly the realm of those shadowy folk, encountered by those bold, foolish or unlucky enough to step through the arc of a rainbow or to stumble through a tear in the twilight.

All the same, she turned to go the other way.

'What's nonsense?' Jettin asked with interest.

'What are you doing here?' Branca was shrill with shock.

'The same as you, I imagine.' Jettin contemplated the outside of the hall. 'Where is our ailing friend?'

'Don't you know?' Branca asked before she could help it.

'Don't you?' Jettin looked at her with interest.

'I know what you did to Tathrin.' She glared at him.

'Do you?' Jettin folded his arms across his chest.

She noted he was dressed for winter travel, wearing a heavy cloak over a long-sleeved leather jerkin with a thick flannel shirt beneath. His buff breeches and iron-braced boots were splashed with mud.

'Do you know
how
I did it?' He challenged her with a cold smile.

Branca was perturbed by the hardness in his gaze. Back in Vanam, his eyes had been so lively with merriment.

'Have you mastered such enchantments?' She couldn't hide her desire to know that much. 'Or was that attack some collision of luck and instinct?'

Jettin shook his head, his black curls shorn. 'That's for me to know and you to find out.'

Irritation drove out Branca's unease. 'We're swapping taunts like brats in a dame school? Is that the scholarship you learned from Mentor Tonin?'

'Mentor Tonin doesn't share half that he knows,' snapped Jettin. 'Why should I share what I've learned with him?'

'Where did you find this supposed lore?' Branca coloured her question with scepticism just short of disbelief.

Jettin succumbed to her lure. 'Parnilesse.'

'Parnilesse?' Branca was incredulous.

Jettin thrust his jaw forwards, darkly stubbled. 'It's just over the river from Tormalin. Emperor Tadriol has been searching out aetheric lore lurking in noble archives, in search of a magic not subject to the Archmage's writ.'

Branca uneasily recalled Mentor Tonin saying much the same. She nodded but did not speak, hoping to tempt Jettin further.

He nodded, satisfied by her apparent capitulation. 'Duke Orlin was no fool, for all he was a murderous brute. He was paying his own spies to steal lore from Tormalin. We found some interesting tomes when we took possession of Parnilesse Castle.'