Iss dead. It made no sense. Who could have slain him? Marafice watched the retreating forces gain momentum, accelerating from walk to trot to gallop, rushing to get back to the city and stake their claim. A surlord was dead. A new one would be made. Me, Marafice thought. Me.
He looked at Andrew Perish, stared straight into his occluded eyes. "I will not leave the field until His work is finished," Perish said, "and I have a thousand men here who'll back me."
The believers and fanatics. About two hundred of them were Rive Watch, Marafice reckoned.
Perish did not wait for a response. Extending his Rive Blade forward he cried solemnly, "For His glory!" and joined the charge for the gate. Others followed. Marafice didn't blame them. Victory was so close you could smell it. It smelled like a broken door.
Scanning the motley remains of his army—the mercenaries, machinists, foot soldiers, drummers, retired brothers-in-the-watch, and walking wounded-Marafice wondered what to do. He, Marafice Eye, should be the one rushing back to Spire Vanis. The surlordship was his. The whole point of being here was to secure that one glittering jewel.
Yet he could not leave men unsupported on the field. He was not Garric Hews. If Perish was right and he did indeed intend to lead a thousand into the roundhouse, then that would be a thousand men at grave risk. Marafice glanced at the one remaining door. A great chunk of fossil stone had broken off, revealing plain old oak beneath. Marafice thought of the clansmen, and the darkcloaks, and Garric Hews. Nodding softly to himself he made a decision.
"We take the house as planned."
Even as he spoke, the unfamiliar horn sounded from the woods directly behind die roundhouse. Whoever they were, they had arrived.
TEN Parley in the Thief's House
Crope moved with as much stealth as he could manage. It wasn't much—seven years in the mines had turned his joints to creaky doors-but it was enough to sneak up on the fly. It was a big one. A biter. Most people called them black flies, but if you looked real close you see they were really brown. This one had landed on the wall next to the strange shiny stain that smelled of snails. It was the perfect position from which to launch an attack upon the figure on the bed … and that wouldn't do. Crope dove forward and snatched it into his fist. That wouldn't do at all.
The fly bit the tender center of his palm as he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Crope couldn't really blame it, but it did hurt, and he decided to release the fly in the hallway and let it find its own way out. The house had four stories and he was standing on the topmost floor. "Fly down," he advised as the insect buzzed away.
Crope took a moment then just to settle his mind. It wasn't that he was upset or anything… just things got a bit much from time to time. The light in the hallway helped. Late-afternoon sun shone red and golden, warping floorboards and stirring dust. Quill said that the man who had originally built the house had been a sea captain who'd once plied the trade routes between the Seahold and the Far South. "Missed the ocean, he did," Quill had reported. "So he built himself a ship." With its round windows and plank decking the house did look a bit like a boat, but mostly it just looked like a house.
It wasn't home, though. Crope couldn't guess how long he would have to hide out in the cold and stony city at the base of a mountain. It made no difference: it would never be his home.
Quietly, he let himself back into the sleeping chamber. Entering the cool, low-ceilinged dimness was like passing into a cave. His lord could not bear bright light. Even in his sleep he shied away from it, screaming from his fever dreams that it burned. Boiled-wool curtains, dyed black and double-lined, concealed the chamber's only window, yet some portion of light still got through. Crope used this to navigate the room as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark.
His lord was still sleeping. Baralis' slight, misshapen body lay curled in a fetal position on the bed. The sour, grassy scent of fresh urine was leaking from the mattress and Crope fretted over whether it was better to let his lord sleep or waken him and strip down the sheets. Crope was not good with choices. Choices could lead to mistakes. Dimwit, Halfwit, Nowit. Couldn't pluck a half-bald chicken. The bad voice was like an itch inside his head and he tried very hard to ignore it. His lord was sleeping quietly, at rest in his mind. Perhaps it was best to let him be. Crope could not recall many hours where his lord had simply slept. Mostly he shook and clawed the sheets and repeated the same word over and over again in different ways. No. No.
No.
Crope shivered, though the room was warm. Not hot, not cold. Lukewarm. His lord could bear no other temperature on his skin. His lord was broken and needed mending. Crope had experience with mending. He'd fixed chickens and dogs and squirrels before but there was so much profoundly wrong with his lord that he wasn't sure it could ever be made right.
But it would not stop Crope from trying. Silently he crossed the room to where the driftwood table with the charred legs stood. The water he'd fetched earlier had now reached the same temperature as the room and he soaked some of it up in a heavy cloth. Cupping his free hand beneath the cloth to catch the drips, Crope moved toward his lord. As always when he neared him, Crope felt the anger knot in his chest. He did not understand how one man could have done this to another. During his first year at the tin mines he had pulled a digger from the rubble of a collapsed seam. The man had been smashed by falling stone, his body torn and punctured in a dozen places by sharp edges of quartz. A fluke upward shearing of rock had punched out his eye and replaced it with a shiny chunk of tin. His left leg had been disjointed at the hip and the tendons in both his feet had snapped. Unable to inflate his lungs, he had lived for about an hour. Crope thought of the digger's broken body whenever he saw his lord.
Crushed, that was the word. And it was one thing for a lode-bearing seam of tin to do that to a man. Another thing entirely for someone to do it to someone else. It was evil, and Crope lived with the real and secret fear that even though he had killed the man who had harmed his lord the evil that had been created still lived on.
Crope was gentle as he dripped water on his lord's brow. Baralis' eyes were almost destroyed, the corneas folded inward, the whites scarred and crisscrossed with strange veins. Even the lids were scarred, Crope noticed as he washed his lord's race.
"You are with me," he murmured softly as Baralis stirred, "and you are safe."
Eighteen days had passed since he'd rescued his lord; Crope knew this to be so because Quill kept an account. Quillan Moxley was a friend and thief. He was also a man of business, and Crope worried about the cost of hiding out in his house. Eighteen days of food, medicine and shelter added up—especially, Crope conceded rather sheepishly, when it was him doing the eating. Quill had asked for no reckoning, but Crope knew how these things worked. Obligation had been created, and obligation meant debt.
Still, Crope respected Quill. He was a man of his word. He'd promised to help Crope free his lord from the chasm below the pointy tower and had gone ahead and done just that. And Quill would never run to the bailiffs to settle a grievance. Men who enforced laws in this or any other city were not friends of Quill, and that suited Crope fine. Just the thought of bailiffs was enough to make Crope scan the room for likely escape routes. When a bailiff locked you up you never got out.
Jangly music rose through the floorboards as the girls in the floor below began to prepare themselves for the night's work. Crope worried about the girls. Some of them wore too little and might catch chills-Others drank too much and Crope would find them passed out on the flairs in the morning. Quill called them prostitutes though the girls never used that name themselves. He rented out the two middle floors to them in return for a portion of their take. Crope was shy around the girls. They reminded him of wounded animals who needed mending, but he knew It wasn't his place to try and fix them.