The Barrow (51 page)

Erim glanced up the valley, tracing through the veil of rain and fog the routes of walls and keeps up into the distance. She could see patches of bright green high up the valley where the sun had cast its light. “The sun's come out again over there,” she said. “Is the weather always like this over here in the Danias?”

“Oh, that's right, you've never been this far west,” Stjepan said. “Well, pretty much so. My mother would have said it's because the old gods and goddesses of the earth and the sky are still welcome here. It rains a lot in the spring and early summer, but not necessarily huge downpours, so yeah, this is typical: some rain, some sun, some wind, sometimes even a little snow, repeat the next day. That's why it's so much greener over here than in Atallica and Auria, we just get a lot more rain over here.”

He turned as Arduin rode up at the head of his household troop, the coach bringing up the rear. “Ah, this is Erid More, then?” asked Arduin, peering out from beneath his hood. His cloak was fringed with gold embroidery but was waterproofed against the rain, an expensive travel accessory. Stjepan noted with a wince that the embroidery included the heraldry of Arduin's family, the shield and auroch horns that marked him as of the line of Wain Far-Strider, shield-thane of King Orfewain. He was tempted to ask Arduin to exchange the cloak for another, but he suspected the knight's pride would overrule his good sense; an hour of argument had been required to get Arduin's knights to remove their sigils back on the docks of Vesslos.
The clothes make the man, and without their badges of honor they feel like they are nothing
, he thought. At least the heraldic emblems were only one small part of the design, and could easily escape notice except perhaps from a sharp-eyed herald trained to know a sigil at a glance.

“Yes, my Lord,” said Stjepan. “There will be two tolls, one for each bridge. Erim and I will handle the payments, and if anyone asks we'll say that we are the servants of Master Owen Urwed of the merchant house of the Three Rings of Therapoli, newly ensconced in Orliac to do business with its new Earl, escorting his daughter to Westmark with armed guard.” They'd been stopped and questioned by knights or yeoman archers at several points along the valley road, but Stjepan had always been quick enough with ready answers to allow them passage, the details changing a bit as they went along, first claiming Nop and points further south as their origin point when they were higher up the valley, and then finally saying Orliac as they reached far enough west for that to make sense.

“And if they've actually met Master Urwed or his daughter?” asked Arduin.

“No such persons, my Lord, so that won't be possible,” said Stjepan. “And the Three Rings is large enough that there
could
be someone named Master Owen Urwed amongst its many traders and merchants, but it's unlikely that the gate guards at Erid More will know definitively. Just let our coins and calm demeanor do the rest.”

Arduin grimaced. He wondered at men for whom lying and deceit came so easily; Stjepan and his brother Harvald were so very similar, almost like stage actors or entertainers for whom artifice and illusion were their stock-in-trade. Arduin thought of himself as a man of action, and as a man of action,
you are what you do
.
If you run from a battle or shirk from a fight, then you're a coward. If you stand upright and true, then you are a man of honor.
But Stjepan and Harvald were, or had been in the case of his brother, men of words, and like actors and diplomats, poets and bards, they could conjure things that sounded like truths out of thin air. Having spent so long at Court he had grown up surrounded by men of words; but at the Court there was, he thought, an expectation of truth and honor amongst its clerks and courtiers, a sense of propriety and an understanding of their place in the grand order of things that he found sorely missing in Stjepan, or Master Erim, or Master Gilgwyr and the disgraced enchanter. This was the first time he'd had to place his own safety in the hands of a man of words, and it was giving him a close-up view of how men with the right gift could work their illusions upon the world when they wished to.

And he definitely didn't like it.

“Certainly,” said Arduin with a tight-lipped smile. “Let us hope we can pass through without incident.”

“Business with the new Earl, then, for your Master?” the guard said to Stjepan, as he eyed the armed and armored men escorting the coach off the Reinbrae bridge and in through the barbican. A clerk was casually counting horses and wheels to total their entry costs into the walled town. Arduin's knights and squires were looking decidedly grungy after several days of hard travel on the road, and the rain didn't help matters any. Almost all of them sported grizzled growth on chin and cheek, with dirt and mud splattered on horses and boots, their armor tarnished where it was visible at all under cloaks and tabards. Dark circles under their eyes and a slight look of hunger and wariness completed their appearance, leaving them looking to all the world as proper mercenary knights would look. Except perhaps Arduin, who comported himself with a back so straight and a spine so rigid that he could pass for a statue; luckily the arched ceiling of the barbican entryway was quite high, else Stjepan might have feared for Arduin's safety. But given the hard times even a noble-born knight might find himself a free lance, jousting and fighting for coin.

“Aye,” said Stjepan. “With Porloss now in the hills and Sir Kyrick elevated to the seat of Orliac, the commerce houses and merchants in Therapoli are all eager at the prospect of new business arrangements.” The guard raised his eyebrow at the use of the honorific
Sir
for Kyrick, rather than Earl; technically accurate, as Kyrick Ross had been a knight sworn to the Lord of Nop before being chosen as the new Earl of Orliac, but it could be read several ways. What Stjepan said was indeed true on the face of it; with Porloss and his household and many of his chief retainers (including the aforementioned Lord of Nop) now fled into the hills, merchant princes from far and wide had been sending representatives to Orliac in the hopes of persuading the new Earl and his new men to grant new contracts on trade and transport, while those who did business with the old Earl were busy trying to convince him to keep the old contracts in place.

Stjepan gambled and gave a shrug, as if to say,
what're you gonna do?
The guard chuckled. “Yeah, with a Ross now the Earl of Orliac, and a Ross now the Lord of Nop, I guess that makes for a family on the rise,” the guard said drily. “We seen a lot of new faces coming through here, and up at Reinvale, all eager to meet the new chief.”

“Aye, we came down through Reinvale,” Stjepan said with a nod. “Master Owen hired us on in Westmark to act as guides and scouts.”

“You lot up there got your own problems with the Erid King, eh?” the guard asked.

Stjepan shrugged. “Him and the City Council don't see eye-to-eye on all things, particularly in regard to how much tax is owed him,” said Stjepan. “Not too different, really, than the complaints of Earl Porloss. It's been ten years since the last time the Erid King laid siege to the city to get it to pay a tax, so we're probably overdue for another any time soon.”

“Yeah, well, best of luck with that,” the guard said as he noticed the clerk signaling that he had a total ready. “So how much?”

“Sixteen people, eighteen horses, and four wheels,” said the clerk. “So twenty-nine shillings and eight pennies for the men of the Three Rings commerce house.”

“Let's just call that thirty shillings, to make the additions easy for you,” the guard said with a grin.

“Ain't my money,” Stjepan said with a shrug; the bureaucrat in him was a bit annoyed at the casual extortion of a handful of pennies, but such small bits of corruption ultimately made his life easier and were simply part of the cost of doing business. The guard was meant to think that he meant the money belonged to the fictitious Master Owen Urwed, but of course technically it was Gilgwyr's money he was spending, as Gilgwyr was acting as the underwriter for their expedition at the moment. He counted over a gold crown and ten shillings and tapped his hat to the guard and clerk before heading over to where Erim waited with their horses.

“Close to thirty shillings, so it should be the same at the Eridbrae Bridge,” he said. Erim grunted and shook her head as they led their horses through the barbican and out into the neck, a walled road that meandered around the main keep and town wall, essentially a shooting gallery where attackers trying to force the road could be fired down upon by defenders on both the outer and inner walls. The neck followed the tight curve of the western wall of the town directly to the barbican for the Eridbrae Bridge. Stjepan had never been in Erid More before; ignoring the light rain, he ran a practiced eye up the walls to the keep and towers that hulked high above them and was suitably impressed by the sheer bulk of the castle. Midway between the two barbicans there was a large gatehouse built into the inner town wall that would take them into Erid More proper, and there the group ahead of them had stopped. Stjepan frowned.

“Why have you stopped?” he asked Arduin as he and Erim approached.

“It's late afternoon already, and everyone is tired of travel on the open road,” said Arduin from his perch atop his destrier. “Can we not stay within Erid More proper this night, perhaps at an inn?”

“We should at least cross the Eridbrae while we still have the light, Lord Arduin,” Stjepan said, careful of who was within earshot to hear the name and title. “There should be an inn on the other side, as well, though perhaps of simpler fare than we might find here.”

There was some grumbling amongst the nearby knights at that. “But your man Gilgwyr has already headed into the town itself,” Arduin protested. Stjepan's frown grew deeper and he craned his neck; sure enough, the coach's rumble seat was half-empty, with a sheepish-looking Leigh giving Stjepan a little wave. Stjepan's mind was filled with black thoughts, and Arduin actually pulled his horse back a step or two at the expression on Stjepan's face.

“Then even more reason to get across the river as fast as possible,” Stjepan said quietly. He turned to Erim, handing her a full purse. “Pay for the bridge crossing, yeah? And then let our Lord Arduin pick whatever inn he wants on the other side, preferably to the north.” He handed her the reins of his horse and stalked off into the city.

For a clerk, that man can look exceedingly well versed in murder
, thought Arduin, shaking his head with a snort. But then he remembered the rumors that had attached themselves to Stjepan during the troubles at the University years ago, and the fate of Rodrick Urgoar to which he had himself been a witness, and he stifled his laugh, and simply watched Stjepan's back recede into the darkness of the gatehouse.

“I'm so glad I found you, as I fear this is my only chance,” said Gilgwyr.

He was in a dark antechamber on the first floor of a house within the town proper of Erid More, above a cheese shop. The antechamber did not belong to the cheese shop below it on the ground floor, but rather to an alchemist and enchanter who had taken the first, second, and third floors of the building as his shop and home, and hung a discreet sign in front of the first floor window, that of a crudely drawn
vas hermeticum
, an egg-shaped vessel sometimes used in alchemy. Gilgwyr sat at a round ebony-wood table across from the alchemist in question, a short Danian man by the name of Sayle Lyradim, dressed in deep, dark indigo robes with gold embroidery at the sleeves and hems. The top of the man's head was bald, quite not on purpose, and he had grown a long and full salt-and-pepper beard to compensate. The hair of his eyebrows had practically disappeared, and his eyes appeared plaintive and unprotected as a result.

“Only chance at what?” asked the alchemist, studying Gilgwyr intently.

“My only chance to send a message, of course,” said Gilgwyr. “I . . . I had a terrible dream the other night. A veritable nightmare. It has made me . . . concerned about my loved ones back in Therapoli. I am traveling quickly to the west and do not know when I will next be in proper civilization, to send or receive a message by mundane means, and so it is to the high and hermetic arts that I must turn.”