It had been sheer madness to return to Sanctuary, to the origin of the curse, despite the assurances of the Purple Mage's protection. Madness! The S'danzo felt him coming. The Purple Mage, the one person Walegrin trusted to unravel the spell, had disappeared long before he and his men arrived in town. And now the Enlibrite potter and Runo were dead by some unknown hand. How much longer could he afford to stay? True, there were many magicians here, and any could be bought, but they all had their petty loyalties. If they could reconstruct the shard's inscription, they certainly could not be trusted to keep quiet about it. If Illyra did not provide the answers at midnight, Walegrin resolved to take his men somewhere far from this accursed town.
He would have continued his litany of dislike had he not been brought to alertness by the distress call of a mountain hawk: a bird never seen or heard within the walls of Sanctuary. The call was the alarm signal amongst his men. He left a few coins on the table and departed the Unicorn without undue notice.
A second call led him down a passageway too narrow to be called an alley, much less a street. Moving with stealth and caution, Walegrin eased around forgotten doorways suspecting ambush with every step. Only a third call and the appearance of a familiar face in the shadows quickened his pace.
'Malm, what is it?' he asked, stepping over some soft, stinking mass without looking down.
'See for yourself.'
A weak shaft of light made its way through the jutting roofs of a half-dozen buildings to illuminate a pair of corpses. One was the information broker who had just left Walegrin's company, a makeshift knife still protruding from his neck. The other was the beggar to whom he'd given the silver coin. The latter bore the cleaner mark of the accomplished killer.
'I see,' Walegrin replied dully.
'The ragged one, he followed the other away from the Unicorn. I'd been following the broker since we found out about Runo, so I began to follow them both. When the broker caught on that he was being followed, he lit up this cul-de-sac - by mistake, I'd guess - and the beggar followed him. I found the broker like this and killed the beggar myself.'
Two more deaths for the curse. Walegrin stared at the bodies, then praised Malm's diligence and sent him back to the garrison barracks to prepare for Illyra's visit. He left the corpses in the cul-de-sac where they might never be found. This pair he would not enter into the garrison roster.
Walegrin paced the length of the town, providing the inhibiting impression of a garrison officer actually on duty, though if a murder had occurred at his feet he would not have noticed. Twice he passed the entrance of the bazaar, twice hesitated, and twice continued on his way. Sunset found him by the Promise of Heaven as the priests withdrew into their temples and the Red Lanterns women made their first promenade. By full darkness he was on the Wideway, hungry and close in spirit to the fifteen-year-old who had swum the harbour and stowed away in the hold of an outbound ship one horrible night many years ago.
In the moonless night that memory returned to him with palpable force. In the grip of his depravities and obsessed by the imagined infidelity of his mistress, his father had tortured and killed her. Walegrin could recall that much. After the murder he had run from the barracks to the harbour. He knew the end of the story from campfire tales after he'd joined the army himself. Unsatisfied with murder, his father had dismembered her body, throwing the head and organs into the palace sewer-stream and the rest into the garrison stewpot.
Sanctuary boasted no criers to shout out the hours of the night. When there was a moon its progress gave approximate time, but in its absence night was an eternity, and midnight that moment when your joints grew stiff from sitting on the damp stone pilings of the Wideway and dark memories threatened the periphery of your vision. Walegrin bought a torch from the cadaverous watchman at the charnel house and entered the quiet bazaar.
Illyra emerged from the blacksmith's stall the second time Walegrin used the mountain hawk cry. She had concealed herself in a dark cloak which she held tightly around herself. Her movements betrayed her fears. Walegrin led the way in hurried silence. He took her arm at the elbow when they came into sight of the barracks. She hesitated, then continued without his urging.
Walegrin's men were nowhere to be seen in the common room that separated the men's and officers' quarters. Illyra paced the room like a caged animal, remembering.
'You'll need a table, candles, and what else?' he asked, eager to be on with the night's activity and suddenly mindful that he had brought her back to this place.
'It's so much smaller than I remember it,' she said, then added, 'just the table and candles, I've brought the rest myself.'
Walegrin pulled a table closer to the hearth. While he gathered up candles she unfastened her cloak and placed it over the table. She wore sombre woollens appropriate for a modest woman from the better part of town instead of the gaudy layers of the S'danzo costume. Walegrin wondered from whom she had borrowed them and if she had told her husband after all. It mattered little so long as she could pierce the spell over his shard.
'Shall I leave you alone?' Walegrin asked after removing the pottery fragment from the pouch and placing it on the table.
'No, I don't want to be alone in here.' Illyra shuffled her fortune cards, dropping several in her nervousness, then set the deck back on the table and asked, 'Is it too much to ask for some wine and information about what I'm supposed to be looking for?' A trace of the bazaar scrappiness returned to her voice and she was less lost within the room.
'My man Thrusher wanted to lay in an orgy feast when I told him I'd require the common room tonight. Then I told him I only wanted the men out - but it's a poor barracks without a flask in it, poorer than Sanctuary.' He found a half-filled wineskin behind a sideboard, squirted some into his mouth, and swallowed with a rare smile. 'Not the best vintage, but passable. You'll have to drink from the skin...' He handed it to her.
'I drank from a skin before I'd seen a cup. It's a trick you never forget.' Illyra took the wineskin from him and caught a mouthful of wine without splattering a drop. 'Now, Walegrin,' she began, emboldened by the musty wine, 'Walegrin, I can't get either your pottery nor Haakon's oranges out of my mind. What is the connection?'
'If this Haakon peddles Enlibar oranges, then it's simple. I got the shard in Enlibar, in the ruins of the armoury there. We searched three days and found only this. But, if anyone's got a greater piece he knows not what he has, else there'd be an army massing somewhere that'd have the Empire quaking.'
Illyra's eyes widened. 'All from a piece of cheap red clay?'
'Not the pottery, my dear sister. The armourer put the formula for Enlibar steel on a clay tablet and had a wizard spell the glaze to conceal it. I sensed the spell, but I cannot break it.'
'But this might only be a small piece.' Illyra ran her finger along the fragment's worn edges. 'Maybe not even a vital part.'
'Your S'danzo gifts are heedless of time, are they not?'
'Well, yes - the past and future are clear to us.'
'Then you should be able to scry back to when the glaze was applied and glimpse the entire tablet.'
Illyra shifted uneasily. 'Yes, perhaps, I could glimpse it but, Walegrin, I don't "read",' she shrugged and grinned with the wine.