Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (42 page)

His challengers laughed, and the leader said, “It is not enough that you take our goods, but the word is you also take our arms. I think you have much to answer for. And we will not wait upon the councils of justice to put things right.”

The man placed his sack of oats in the wagon bed and spoke softly to his ward. “Be calm. I will talk with them. If it comes to conflict, remember your training. You are young but practiced. Have confidence.”

Despite his words, the sun-worn man did not want to see the youth—barely in his thirteenth year—tested on the road of Solencia. He approached his challengers, his weapons still sheathed.

He glared at each one, being sure they saw the look in his eye—something he knew a wise fighter could use to gauge what would follow. “You are not the first to call me out so that you might earn your reputations by putting me down. But if you persist, I promise you, you will not be the last.”

The lead man looked back evenly, deploying his men to encircle the traveler. “Your reputation is known, both for prowess and betrayal. And now for crimes against the innocent. For all these reasons we will not heed your threats.”

“Don’t be a fool,” the man replied. “We need not shed blood this night. But I will not ask again. We are packed and ready to leave.”

The traveler could see immediately that his words had fallen on deaf ears. He cursed the circumstances that made another man’s ambition of him. There were always those who sought to claim they had slain the outcast. But this many years into his isolation, it had less to do with the
reasons
for his isolation, and more to do with the notoriety killing him might win a man.

And down those years, the skill and refinement of his combat gifts had sent more men to their earth than he could count. Nor did he lament a single one.

“Prepare yourself,” the challenger said into the cool night air.

With that, the weathered man’s blood cooled and he set himself.

The attack came fast, but predictable. A knife shot out from the lead challenger’s left hand, meant to put the outcast off balance while his sword arm brought down a hammer stroke that could end the contest before it began.

The man dodged the knife and in a fluid motion stepped to the side, unsheathing his own sword as easily as he drew a breath. He removed the challenger’s arm in token of the offense with which they’d charged him, then put his sword through his heart. A scream shot out across Solencia.

But it did not issue from the throat of his attacker. The man pivoted around in time to see the two accomplices fall upon his ward, who blocked one stroke, but took one in the belly from the other man.

He rushed to the boy’s aid, howling defiance to distract them as he went. But they seemed not to hear, as they each raised their blades against his ward. The lad ducked and rolled, grimacing with the pain of his wound. The boy brought his blade up to deflect another strike and thrust, sticking one of his attackers. His sword hung in the flesh of the man, and as he fought to pull it back, the other smiled wickedly and used both hands in his final swing.

“No!” the outcast cried, now a mere stride away.

But he was too late, and the blade of the second man tore out the boy’s throat. The lad’s eyes showed awful surprise at his own death, followed fast by a look like a longing for home that the weathered man would never forget.

Then the boy fell back, his head striking the edge of the wagon bed before he landed on the hard earth.

In fury, the outcast laid into the killer. With a single raging stroke, he took the man’s head from his body. He followed the momentum of his sword, doing a complete turn, and brought it around on the other man, ripping his throat out as his cohort had the outcast’s young companion’s.

The challengers fell almost simultaneously, their heavy bodies thudding against the road and bleeding out. The man dropped to his knees. He had a few precious seconds to hold the lad and look some comfort into his eyes before the light there went out forever.

It was once again quiet, and terribly still, as he sat alone on the road of Solencia, holding a child he had been entrusted to protect. He mourned his ward, dead because prideful men had sought the outcast’s death to bolster their own esteem.

It struck him yet again, as it had so often before, that no matter where he went, he never escaped his condemnation, which would spread with the death of this lad. The poor boy, dead so young. His heart ached at the sight of him, while growing yet harder and more rancorous.

Something fundamental had to change.

The land of men could not endure with such pettiness, such selfishness as had banished him into the desert to begin with, and now threatened him and those he safeguarded … even when merely buying a bag of oats.

He had his own set of sins, he knew. But they were long in the past, and more than atoned for, to his mind.

No, something fundamental had to change.

The weathered man picked up the lad’s still body and gently placed him in the wagon, covering him with one of the blankets he’d just purchased. He should not have brought his ward. The dangers of traveling with the outcast were more than ordinary. He knew it too well. Alone, he could have killed all three contenders. Instead, the hopeful life of this stripling lad had been snuffed out before his bright contributions to the world could be made. The man hung his head over the boy’s body. His every breath became a painful, conscious act of grief.

The dark irony in it all came when he realized that even this purest of human emotions added to the rest of the stains on his life and made his heart stonier.

Then he ascended the few steps to the store again. He stepped up to the counter and looked across at the shopkeep, to whom this time he would have to speak his order. The thought in his mind was heresy. But he had reached a final outpost in the land of his heart, and he might be the only one, given such a vantage, to consider such impossibilities.

For what he contemplated might well be impossible.

But the act alone would ease his troubled mind.

“Parchment,” the weathered man said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Emblems

Wendra slept restlessly in the presence of Jastail and his comrades. She had been unwilling to sing at her fire after their conversation ended, and so was left without the calming benefit it might have brought her. But it was less her own circumstances than those of Penit and Tahn that caused her to struggle with sleep. Though one was much younger than the other, neither had grown past the age of melura, and both were fatherless and now lost to her. She tried to focus on memories of Balatin, and on the vision of the elderly gentleman in the white robe who had visited her the night before in her fever. But she could hold none of them in her mind. The soft whir of crickets and the stream nearby did nothing to improve her mood. She lay silently until dawn, hoping her unspoken pact with Jastail would not prove foolish.

The two other men left after endfast and returned with three horses evidently tethered close by. Jastail helped her onto his own horse and they followed the stream northeast all day. Toward nightfall, it turned southeast through a series of steep hills, where rills out of several small canyons joined the stream, enlargening it. They soon came through a pass, and unexpectedly, in the valley below, the stream merged with a large river that flowed south from the other side of one low mountain. The river stretched nearly a hundred strides wide.

Several hours into the night, as they followed the river, they came in sight of a huge wooden dock. Jastail moved them into the cover of nearby trees where, for a time, they waited and watched. Resting on pilings that rose like dark columns from the water, thick, uneven cross timbers formed the landing on the riverbank. Wendra looked out over the flow, noting for the first time its beauty, a thousand ripples shining with moonlight, and the low musical hum of the vast passage of water.

Jastail gestured, and the first man rode to the dock’s end and lit a torch fastened to the last piling. The torchlight bounced harshly on the water, unable to completely dispel the darkness from the black timber of the dock. The first rider returned, and together from the cloak of the trees, they again watched the river and dock, now with the torch burning its lone flame from the end of the pier.

Distantly, a sound like geese honking floated across the water. Jastail looked north. Soon a large riverboat, multiple torches flaming from its runners, rounded a bend in the river. The sound of laughter came more clearly now, still sounding something like geese, and the boat angled toward the torch on the dock. The parting of water around its hull whispered with the clamor of voices. Wendra looked on in amazement at the sheer size of the watercraft. Several buildings rose from the deck, with second and third stories. At the rear, a team of oxen had been yoked to a thick crossbar fastened to a revolving post. As the animals walked a never-ending circle, the slow-spinning post turned a set of large wooden gears that powered the rear paddle wheel.

Men appeared on deck with ropes in hand, some guiding the vessel to a deft stop beside the dock. The sailors, six men in all, then brandished long knives. One extinguished the torch. Jastail seemed to take this as a signal. He spurred his horse from the cover of the trees and led them all to the pier’s end.

The clop of hooves on the wooden planks drowned out the sound of the river, but not the jollity streaming from the brightly lit middle deck of the boat. The incessant chatter reminded Wendra of Northsun Festival back home: animated laughter, punctuated shouts, and an occasional remonstration.

Jastail brought them to a stop before the men who’d lashed the riverboat to the dock. He lifted his hand in greeting, but folded one finger down.

“Name it,” said the deckhand who had doused the torch.

“Defiera,” Jastail said, and the men relaxed the angle of their daggers.

“What is wanted?” the other asked.

“Passage downriver to Pelan,” Jastail said. “We’ve business there.” His head turned slightly, and Wendra had the impression Jastail was indicating her.

The sailor, his face lost behind a protuberant nose, shifted and peered around Jastail at Wendra. He nodded appreciatively, then sized up the two men who kept them company.

“And these?” the sailor added.

“Hirelings,” Jastail replied. “Honest enough if they’re paid. Sullen enough on an empty gullet.”

At that the sailor laughed, joined by a number of the other deckhands.

“Three horses, three men, one woman”—the sailor leered at Wendra—“a handcoin, no less, and a stem for each man here so that their lips are occupied when asked about the business our new fares have in a place such as Pelan. Putting in there is hazard enough. You’ll not want the captain poking into your merchandise.”

Raucous laughter fell hard upon the wooden dock.

Jastail did not join them, but reached inside his cloak and pulled out a handful of coins. The sailor came forward and greedily reached for them. Jastail pulled back his fistful of money. “I’ve ridden your vessel before, Sireh, and find that I tend to … lose things. I will pay you for boarding, but the rest I will give when we are safely upon the dock near Pelan. If I am complete at that time, twice your price will you have. If I am not, then all the money will I give to but one of you without a word to the others. You may then share the money as you see fit.”

The sailor glowered at Jastail, who dropped a single silver coin. The man snatched it from the air with a quick hand and walked away muttering under his breath.

“Why do you spar with them?” Wendra asked. “They outnumber you, and you’ve no place to hide on the boat.”

“Ah, lady, it is good that we paired together in this enterprise,” Jastail said as the other sailors stood aside to let them pass. “Unwise is the buyer who pays his fee in advance. And with rivermen there are precautions to be taken. I have made this deal for your safety. These men are without consideration of what belongs to another man, let alone the proper treatment of a woman. They may well take us to Pelan, and hold their tongues about our particular transactions. But it is the time between then and now that I have purchased, the safety and assurance of our property and well-being. They will think three times before stealing what is ours, because I would then give all the tongue-money to one man among them. The distrust and danger created when each believes the other is holding money that belongs to him will insure us against pilfering while we travel. Rivermen are as greedy as the river is cold. The one I would pay would never share it with the others. The result would be that each of them becomes a target for the daggers of the others while he sleeps. They are as predictable as the rise of the sun.”

They boarded the great ship and passed into a building used for stabling horses. There they dismounted, unsaddled their horses, and walked through a door into the glare of the middle deck.

*   *   *

Wendra followed Jastail around odd tables that held sunken pits bottomed with slate. Between those standing around the tables, she caught glimpses of grids drawn across the slate with different numbers marked in soapstone in each square. Men and women moved colored markers in a flurry of hands until a man in a bright yellow shirt cast several triangular rods into the recessed area of the table. He then quickly counted the numbers scrawled on the stained surfaces of the rods.