The Dragon’s Path (13 page)

Klin smiled. “Is it buried, or have you smuggled it out?”

“I don’t know what you mean, my lord,” Magister Imaniel said.

“You wouldn’t object to my factor auditing your books, then?”

“Of course not. We are pleased that Antea has taken the authority that rightly belonged to it, and look forward to doing business in a more friendly and ordered city.”

“And access to your house?”

“Of course.”

Klin nodded. “You understand that I will have to hold you until I find the truth of all this? Whatever money your bank holds here is now subject to Antean review.”

“I expected as much,” Magister Imaniel said, “but I trust you won’t take offense that I had hoped for better.”

“It’s a fallen world. We do what we must,” Klin said, and then to the captain of the guard at Geder’s left, “Take him to the public gaol. Put him on the lower level, where everyone can see him. If anyone tries to talk with him, take note of what they say and detain them.”

Geder watched as the small man was led away. He wasn’t sure whether he was intended to follow along or not. But Klin wasn’t glaring at him, so perhaps he’d been meant to stay after all.

“Did you follow that, Palliako?” Klin asked when the banker and guards had gone.

“The bank had less money than expected?” Geder said.

Klin laughed in a way that left Geder unsure whether he was being mocked.

“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “Somewhere. And from what the prince said, there was quite a bit of it. Enough to pay the mercenary forces to outlast a siege. Enough to buy the Maccian forces twice over. Maybe more than that.”

“But he kept it from his prince,” Geder said.

“Not out of loyalty to us,” Klin said. “Bankers answer to no throne. But if they drowned the money, someone will have helped cart it to a canal. If it’s buried, someone held the spade. If it’s smuggled, someone arranged it. And when that person sees the head of the bank in gaol, they may panic and try to buy their way free.”

“Ah,” Geder said.

“You’re the man associated with the arrest, so you’ll need
to be available these next few days,” Klin said. “Approachable. And whatever you hear, you bring to me.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Excellent,” Klin said. The silence between them stretched, and Geder realized that he’d been dismissed.

He walked back out to the square, found a stone bench under a black-barked tree almost bare of its leaves, and sat. His leg ached, but there was no coolness on his thigh where fresh blood or pus had leaked. Across the street, a group of youths—Firstblood and Timzinae mixing together as if the races were at perfect ease—pretended not to watch him. A flock of crows conversed among themselves in the branches of the trees and then rose like winged smoke into the air. Geder tapped his walking stick against the pavement, the little shock against his fingers oddly reassuring.

For the next few days, he was bait on a hook. He understood that. Perhaps the banker’s conspirators would take the chance to buy themselves the good opinion of Antea. Or perhaps they’d stay quiet. Or, quite possibly, they’d arrange an accident for the man most associated with the problem. Klin had put him in danger without so much as making the threat he was under explicit.

And still, it was a handful of days that Geder could make his way through the streets and markets and call it Klin’s order. His squire had brought him rumor of a bookseller in the southern quarter. He could make his way there at last. And if he had to go armed and under guard, at least he could go.

For two days Geder wandered the streets and cafés and beer halls of Vanai, but carefully. In church, with the voices of the choir spiraling in the wide air above him, he was still careful not to let anyone sit too near him in the pew. At the fresh market, he picked through the half-rotten volumes in
a bookseller’s cart, but with a soldier at his back. Then on the third day, a carter named Olfreed came to his rooms with talk of a caravan organized by a well-known ally of the Medean bank called Master Will.

For the first time, Geder heard the name Marcus Wester.

D
istracted by the rigors of her disguise and the wealth hidden in her cart, Cithrin had not been careful.

“What were you
thinking,
boy?” the caravan master demanded. Cithrin looked at his feet, her cheeks burning and her throat thick with shame. The red dust of the caravanserai’s yard caked their boots, and fallen leaves rimed with frost littered the ground.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the cold turning her words white.

“They’re mules,” the caravan master said. “They need caring for. How long has this been going on?”

“A few days,” she said, her lips hardly moving.

“Speak up, boy! How long?”

“A few days,” she said.

A pause.

“All right. The feed cart can get by with three on the team. You tie the sick one to a tree out there, and I’ll bring you one to take its place.”

“But if we leave him, he’ll die,” Cithrin said.

“That’s the thought, yes.”

“But it’s not his fault. You can’t just leave him to die all by himself.”

“All right. I’ll bring you a knife, and you can bleed him out.”

Cithrin’s outraged silence was eloquence enough. The
caravan master’s clear interior eyelids slid closed and open again, blinking without looking away from her.

“If you’d rather drop out of the ’van, you’re welcome,” he said. “We’re going too slow already. I’m not going to stop everything because you can’t keep your team. You let me know what you decide.”

“I won’t leave him,” she said, surprised by her own words. Horrified that she meant them. She couldn’t drop out of the ’van.

“He’s a
mule.
”

“I won’t leave him.” The words felt better that time.

“Then you’re an idiot.”

The caravan master turned, spat, and walked away. Cithrin watched him as he stalked back to the stone walls and thin-thatched roof of the shelter. When it became clear he wasn’t coming back, she went back to the stable. The larger of her mules stood in his stall, his head lowered. His breath was thick and ragged. Cithrin stepped in beside him, her hand stroking his thick, wiry coat. The mule raised his head, flicked an ear, and sagged down again.

She tried to picture herself tying the animal to a tree and leaving him there for sickness and snow to kill. She tried to imagine slitting his warm, fuzzy throat. How would she get the money to Carse now?

“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said. “I’m not really a carter. I didn’t know.”

She’d thought at first that the slowness of her cart was her own fault, that the gap that opened in the afternoons between her and the cart before hers meant she wasn’t pushing the team when she should, or that some fine point of negotiating turns was beyond her. It was only when the larger mule had coughed—a wet, phlegmy sound—that she realized he was ill. Magister Imaniel had kept a religious
household, but Cithrin prayed that the animal would recover on his own.

He hadn’t.

The caravanserai—a ruin barely maintained by those who passed through it—was on the side of a wide, sloping hill, the first foothill of the high, snow-peaked mountain range that marked the end of the Free Cities and the beginning of Birancour. Even now, distance-blued peaks rose from the horizon. The pass through them marked the shortest path between Vanai and Carse.

Carse. The word itself had taken on almost religious significance for her. Carse, the great city of Northcoast overlooking the peaceful sea. The home of white towers above chalk cliffs, of the Council of Eventide, of the Grave of Dragons. The seat of the Medean bank, and the end of her career as a smuggler and refugee. She had never been there, but her longing for it was like wanting to go home.

She could go alone. She’d have to. Only she didn’t know the way. Or how to nurse a sick mule back to health. Or what she’d do if another bandit crew stepped out of the forest. The mule heaved in a huge breath and then coughed: deep, wet, and rasping. Cithrin stepped forward and rubbed his wide, soft ears.

“We can find a way,” she said as much to herself as the animal. “It’ll be all right.”

“Probably, it will,” a man’s voice said.

The cunning man, Master Kit, stood at the stable door, the woman called Opal at his side. Cithrin moved half a step in toward her mule, her arm around its sloping neck as if to protect it. Or be protected by it. An anxious thrill quickened her breath.

“This is the poor thing, then?” Opal said, pushing past the cunning man. “Tired-looking, ain’t he?”

Cithrin nodded, looking down to avoid their eyes. Opal slipped into the stall, walked around the mule once, pausing to press her ear to the beast’s side. Then, singing a low song in words Cithrin didn’t recognize, she knelt before its head and gently pried open its lips.

“Opal takes care of our team, when we have one,” Master Kit said. “I’ve come to put my trust in her when it comes to things with hooves.”

Cithrin nodded, torn between a rush of gratitude and discomfort at being so close to the guardsmen. Opal rose and sniffed carefully at the mule’s ears.

“Tag, is it?” she said, and Cithrin nodded. “Well, Tag, can you tell me if the old boy was listing to one side? Did you have to correct him?”

Cithrin tried to remember, then shook her head no.

“That’s something,” Opal said, and then over her shoulder to Master Kit, “I don’t think it’s in his ears, so that’s for the best. He’s wheezing, but he doesn’t have water in his lungs. At a guess, keep him warm a couple of days, he’ll stand true as sticks. Needs more blankets, though.”

“Two days,” Master Kit said. “I would be surprised if Captain Wester were comfortable with that.”

The mule’s labored breath and the murmur of the morning breeze through the boughs roughened the silence. Cithrin felt the knot in her belly tightening into something like nausea.

“One fewer guard won’t make any damn difference,” Opal said. “I’ll stay with Tag, and when the old boy’s well enough, we’ll catch you up. Won’t be more than a day or two, and one cart with a good team moves faster than a full ’van.”

The cunning man crossed his arms, considering. Cithrin felt a rush of hope.

“Can you do that?” Master Kit asked her. His eyes were gentle, his voice as soft as old flannel.

“I can, sir,” Cithrin said, keeping her voice low and masculine. The cunning man nodded.

“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in suggesting it,” he said. “But perhaps you would allow
me
to approach them, Tag?”

She nodded, and the old man smiled. He turned and walked back toward the quarters, leaving Cithrin, Opal, and the animals to themselves.

The relief took the edge off her fear. And perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing, in its way. With Opal dressing in her leathers and Cithrin disguised as a man, they weren’t likely to arouse suspicion. It would be a few days away from the greater company, so she would only have to avoid discovery by Opal. And their supposedly different sexes would give a plausible excuse for privacy.

And yet the fear didn’t entirely fade. It came, she told herself, from knowing more than the people around her. She could almost hear Magister Imaniel now, sitting at the evening meal with Cam and Besel, dissecting exactly how a merchant or prelate had behaved differently than expected, and what it implied that they had. Cithrin knew that Tag the Carter carried enough wealth to buy a small army, but no one else did. The risk of lagging behind the body of the ’van was no more than she would have faced if she’d truly carried a load of undyed wool. Her chances only seemed worse because she knew the stakes of the bet were high. She was undiscovered. No one was searching for her or what she carried, the mule would be made well, and she wouldn’t face a journey to Carse by herself. Everything would be fine.

“First time out?” Opal said.

Cithrin glanced at her and nodded.

“Well, don’t let it worry you, dear,” the guard said. “We take care of our own.”

It didn’t occur to Cithrin for hours to wonder exactly why a mercenary guard would include a semi-competent carter in
our own,
and by then the plan was set and the caravan with Captain Wester and Master Kit was gone down the road to the mountains and to Carse.

They passed the day in caring for the sick beast: warming the stable, rubbing down the mule, forcing an odd concoction that smelled of tar and licorice into its mouth. By nightfall, the mule held its head higher and its cough seemed less violent. That night, Cithrin and Opal slept in the stables, wrapped in thin blankets. An ancient iron brazier between them threw off enough heat to keep the room from freezing, but only just. In the darkness outside, something shrieked once and then not again. Cithrin closed her eyes, resting her head on one arm, and willed herself to sleep. She envied Opal’s slow, even breath. Her own body tensed and shivered, her mind jumped from one fear to another, conjuring a hundred possible disasters. The bandits who had attacked the ’van before might arrive in the night, rape and murder them both, and make off with the bank’s money. Opal might discover her secret and, mad with avarice, slit her throat. The mule might relapse and leave her stranded in the autumn cold.