Watcher of the Dead (5 page)

“No more.â€

The Phage

WHEN HEW MALLIN came for him in the
morning Bram was ready. It was an hour before dawn but he had already
been awake for hours. He wasn’t certain he’d slept, and
he was sure that if he had slept he hadn’t enjoyed it or found
it restful.

A night in an enemy clan was not
conducive to rest.

“Plans change,â€

In the Guidehouse at Clan Gray

THEY CARRIED THE body in on a stretcher
woven from reeds. It was uncovered and it was clear from its pallid
nakedness that it had been pulled from the water. Two Graywomen sang
a death song, ululating like marsh birds. The clan guide had grayed
his face, smearing it with a mask of mud and leaving it to dry. As he
walked beside the body, he dropped tiny gold skullcap seeds in its
wake.

Effie stood on the stairs above the
Salamander Hall and watched. The corpse’s long red hair spilled
over the edge of the stretcher and whipped in the air like flames.
Flora, not named for a queen. Effie knew she wasn’t to blame
for the the girl’s death, but she also knew she should have
told someone about the girl sitting alone on the northern dock. An
adult had been needed, someone motherly enough to wake Flora from her
daydreams. Or someone strong enough to pick her up and carry her in
the house.

Instead they had needed to haul her
from the water. She had been found after sunrise by a woman in one of
the reed-clearing boats. No one had mentioned how she died.

And no one seemed surprised.

Feeling a little flutter of worry,
Effie glanced upstairs, toward Chedd’s room. She had tried to
see him again earlier but had been refused. Bruises were forming
around the rebuttal. She’d rebutted the guard quite a bit. Now
she had to wait until the guard was changed to try her new, improved
strategy on someone who didn’t know she was trouble.

She had managed to learn that Chedd had
slept through most of the night. She took this as a good
sign—sleeping through the night seemed a healthy thing to
do—and she held onto this fact. Tight.

Spying the Croser girl making her way
toward the kitchen, Effie thought she might as well go and speak to
her. Flora’s words from last night were still on her mind. And
besides, she was hungry and it wouldn’t hurt to get some food.

The mourners who had gathered to watch
the body being transferred to the guidehouse were dispersing. Effie
could hear the skullcap seeds popping under their boots. It sounded
like shots being fired.

No one questioned her as she walked to
the kitchens. Between Flora’s death and Chedd’s sickness
she supposed they didn’t have time to worry that the roundhouse
was sinking and no one was manning the pumps. Happily they didn’t
appear to have time for food either and the kitchen was close to
empty. Effie glanced out of the room’s only window, an x-shaped
opening in the clinker-and-timber wall. It was a few hours after
midday.

“You never told me your name,â€

An Uninvited Guest

ANGUS LOK LEFT his room in the Crater,
taking his very few possessions with him. He hadn’t yet decided
whether or not he would return, but his policy was the same either
way. Be ready.

The room was acceptable to him in all
essential ways. It was in a private lodging house, not an inn,
located at the front of the building with a window looking down on
the street. It had a bed, a washstand and a chamber pot, nothing
else. Its landlord catered discreetly to men and women who were
taking the Holy Cure; a middle-aged, hopeful, soft-bodied clientele
with just enough money to finance a trip to the city for the required
twenty-nine days of the cure. Angus could imagine the Phage looking
for him in many, many places, but in a house filled with mildly
religious, gout-ridden invalids stinking of sulfur he felt relatively
safe.

If they found him they would strike him
down.

You never left the Phage.

You never killed the Phage.

And you never interfered with their
plans.

That was three and counting. For a
certainty they were on his trail. He knew how they operated. He had
lived this life from the other side. He had been the tracker, the one
quietly making inquiries at inns and alehouses, blacksmiths and feed
stores, slipping into stables at night and checking the boxes,
swapping stories with local whores. When necessary he had done more
than track. Stay alive in the Phage long enough and sooner or later
you’d find blood on your hands.

They dressed it up, of course, wrapped
themselves in cloth-of-gold. They were the Brotherhood of the Long
Watch and they pushed back against the darkness, taking the long
view, identifying threats, consolidating strengths, moving in ways
subtle and unsubtle to remake and prepare the world.

The question was, who watched the
Phage?

Angus wished them harm, every one of
them. And they wished him that harm right back.

He was careful as he made his way north
through the Crater. It was God’s Day and the streets were
quiet. In Morning Star any copper coins exposed to daylight today
were God’s due. It meant business went inside and candles and
lamps were lit early so that coins could be exchanged in man’s
light, not daylight, and God could be denied his piece. The barter
market was open by the river but Angus avoided that particular noisy
busyness and instead took a route that followed the city’s west
wall.

Chapel houses were open and the low and
monotonous bellow of horns urged people to come and pray. It was
still early and the light was golden as it cut along the streets.
Apart from a brief excursion for food Angus had not left the lodging
house in three days and he experienced the morning and the city as
separate from him. Waiting was not a thing he did well, but in this
he had little choice. All normal avenues were closed in this city.
People he would typically use for information could not be trusted.
The Phage was one conversation away from them all.

His best chance of finding the Maiden
was through her hands. This was her city and she had lived, secreted
within it, for many years. Angus could only imagine what duplicities
she practiced to keep herself hidden in plain sight. She was the
Crouching Maiden and that was what she was known for: staying still,
keeping low, letting the shadows gather around her mutable female
form. Describing her to strangers was impossible: no two people
looking straight at her saw the same thing. That was why the hands
were so important. She could not work her magic on the imperfect
substance of burned flesh.

And she was hurting. Somewhere the
Maiden was hurting and in pain and somewhere a doctor was treating
her. Her hands were the tools of her trade and she would not entrust
them to some backstreet drunken healer. Mobility could not be lost.
Lose her grip on a knife and she was dead. She would have no choice
but to seek out a fine surgeon, and Angus’ instincts told him
she would do so in Morning Star. This was a city with hundreds of
doctors to choose from. This was her home.

Even on God’s Day, Spice Gate
broadcast its location for all to detect and Angus turned east, away
from the wall, when he smelled the odors of pepper and garlic. His
intention was to approach the surgeon’s street from a different
direction than his last visit. Caution ruled the game this morning.
He could not dismiss the possibility that the woman in the
moneylender’s had passed along word of his arrival to the
Phage. Nor could he dismiss the fact that by simply inquiring about a
woman with burned hands, the surgeon’s apprentice had drawn the
attention of Magdalena Crouch herself. Burned or unburned the Maiden
was the most dangerous assassin in the North.

Angus Lok moved through the city’s
northwestern corner like a specter, gray-coated, toeing the shadows,
avoiding open spaces. He scribed a quarter-league circle around the
surgeon’s house and moved no closer until he had circumvented
it. A six-story building with a dovecote open to the sky was the
tallest structure in the area and he looked at it closely, but kept
walking. He rejected the second tallest structure—a tower manse
with a roof of domed copper—and settled on the third tallest, a
four-storied timbered house with windows looking across to the
surgeon’s building and street. Angus entered the building’s
back courtyard and tried the door.

It opened into a kitchen. A pretty maid
with blond hair barely contained by a white cap turned to face him.
“They all out?â€

Heart Fires of the Sull

ASH MOUNTAIN BORN rode in formation
with Mal Naysayer and Mors Stormwielder across forested headland. The
trail was wide and clear, formed from soft gray clay and gravel
freighted with quartz. No saplings or ferns grew on it though the
forest was feet away. The sun was high and in the west and a haze of
cloud silvered it, anticipating the full moon.

Ash rode at the head of the formation.
It did not seem an honor as much as a right. The two Sull warriors
rode at her shoulders, their recurve longbows strung and ready on
their saddle horns, their longswords cross-harnessed against their
backs. Ash knew they were ready to defend her. She knew she needed
defending. Lan Fallstar was one Sull who wanted her dead. Chances
were there would be more.

The farther she got into Sull territory
the greater the risk. She was Jal Rakhar, the Reach, and the Sull
could not decide whether they wanted her alive or dead.

Ash glanced down at her hands as they
worked the reins. They looked like normal hands, with veins and
tendons and horse dirt beneath the nails, but they weren’t.
They were rakhar dan, and if they were chopped into pieces they could
kill the Unmade. So the question for the Sull was: Did they kill her
and divide her corpse, or keep her alive and farm her?

She didn’t much like the sound of
either of those and rejected both of them. Ash Mountain Born was
determined to decide her own fate.

A pair of blue herons flew over the
path, whooping as they beat their blade-shaped wings. Ash wondered if
they were close to water. She couldn’t see anything beyond the
massive, shaggy cedars and the fern gardens below them.

“Hear that?â€

Watcher of the Dead

THEY CARVED A large circle in the last
of the spring snow, trailing the scent that called the coven to
order, soundlessly tracing and retracing the circle, laying down the
old magic, waiting for the daughters to arrive.

“Up. Now.â€

Strike Upon the Weasel Camp

“HERE. LET ME dust your face with
this.â€

Floating on the Sull-Clan Border

RUFUS RIME’S RULES for traveling
in the Reed Way were: Don’t travel unless you know where you’re
going; take water; take a lamp; never go east.

Two out of four wasn’t bad.

Effie Sevrance had a lamp and water
waiting in the boat.

Now she had one final thing to fetch.

It was dusk as she walked from the dock
to the roundhouse. The sky was green and pink, like it could only get
over the marsh. The sun was a big blurry shape, no longer round.
Reeds were swaying like corn in a field and marsh birds were calling
for the night.

Effie entered the roundhouse and headed
straight for the kitchen. The Salamander Hall was quiet but people
had begun to gather in the kitchen for supper. Effie had to push past
them to get to Lissit.

The girl saw her coming and tried to
duck. Only she couldn’t, not really, as she was serving up some
sort of broth with chunks of fish in it, stirring and ladling it into
bowls. All she could do was sort of tuck her head low and train her
gaze upon the broth. As if that was going to help.

Effie walked straight up to the broth
pot and pushed her chest against the rim. “You’re coming
with me,â€

Watcher of the Damned

ANGUS LOK LAY in the stinking filth of
the drain culvert and watched the street. Men’s bodies were
pushed to either side of him, huddling for warmth in the darkest and
stillest hour of the night, the one before dawn. The men reeked of
urine and the sourness of unwashed flesh. One man was jerking
rhythmically, either insane or pleasuring himself. Maybe both. Angus
ignored him.

He was waiting as he had waited every
day and night for the past four days, watching the crossroad of two
streets, scanning for Sarcosa.

The surgeon’s rooms were located
in a house along the east-west-running street. Angus had arranged it
so that whenever the surgeon left his home he had no choice but to
move through this corner, which was to the east of his rooms. The way
to the west, the end of the street which led down to the river and
the water gardens, was flooded.

Angus dismantled small sections of the
city’s flood walls discreetly every night. It was the time that
caused him the most anxiety—not the crow-barring of masonry and
the resulting possibility of detection, but the fact that he was away
from his watch. Anything could happen at night. Surgeons were called
out for the dead, the dying, the sick, the hysterical, the seizing. A
call might come at any time, a messenger sent running to the
surgeon’s door. Come quick.

It was Angus’ greatest fear that
a call would come while he was maintaining the flood, and that call
came from the Maiden. Sarcosa would leave and go to her and he, Angus
Lok, would never know.

Angus lived to know. The Maiden was
hiding in this city and he needed to know where so he could send her
to hell. The woman who had slain his wife and daughters in cold blood
could not continue to live.