'There's an execution in the square,' Samlor said, glancing at his cuff. But it was unmarked, and even his boot had been too dusty for overt sign where the severed fingertip had touched it. 'Oh,' he said in embarrassment. 'Oh.' He raised his eyes to the S'danzo's. 'Life can be hard, lady... and there are matters of honour. Not my honour since I went into trade -' his lip quirked in a wormwood grimace - 'but of the family, of the House ofKodrix, yes. I've found little enough that brings me pleasure. But not that, not slaughter. Life is hard, that's all.'
Illyra released his palm. The silver clung to her fingers in what was almost a sleight of hand, professional in that, though the reading was no longer simply professional or simple at all. 'Tell me about the child,' the S'danzo said.
'Yes,' the stocky man agreed slowly. Little enough of pleasure, and none at all in some memories. 'My sister Samlane was ...' he said, and he paused, 'not a slut, I suppose, because she didn't bed just anybody, and the decision was always hers. And not a whore, except as a lark, as little coin as there was to be had in our House ... She had a disdain for trade that did credit to the noble House of Kodrix. Our parents were proud of her, I think, as they never were of me after I found an honest way to buy their food - and replenish their wine cellar.' The grimace again, calling attention to a joke that bit the teller like a shark.
The woman was quiet, as cool as the shells that whispered in the door curtain.
'But she was very - experimental. So we shouldn't have been surprised,' Samlor continued, 'that she'd whelped a bastard before her marriage, while she still lived in Cirdon. Samlane's personal effects were sent back after she, she died ' Six inches of steel, her brother's boot knife, were buried in her womb, and vision as clear in Samlor's mind as the edge of the knife with which he had replaced that one. 'I think Regli wanted to pretend she'd never been born. Alum won't hide stretch marks, but she'd passed for a virgin with Regli. I guess Rankan nobles are even stupider than I'd thought. The tramp! Gods! The worthless tramp!'
'Go on,' Illyra said with unexpected gentleness, as if she heard the pain and tortured love beneath the curses.
'The story was there in a diary, enough of it,' Samlor continued. He was deliberately opening his hands, which had clenched in fury at nothing material. 'The child was a girl, fostered with a maid of Samlane's, Reia. I probably saw her myself -' he swallowed '-playing in the halls with the other servants' brats. You could get lost in the house, a whole wing could crumble over you and you'd never be found.' The hands clenched again. 'My parents tell me they never knew about the child, about Samlane, in that big house. Pray god I never learn otherwise, or I'll have their hearts out though they are my parents.'
The S'danzo touched his hands, relaxing them again. He continued, 'She's four years old by now. She has a birthmark on the front of her scalp, so the hair is streaked white on the black curls. They called her Star, my sister did and the maid. And I came back to Sanctuary -' Samlor raised his eyes and his voice, neither angry but as hard and certain as a sword's edge'- to this hell-hole, to find my niece. Reia had married here, a guardsman, and she'd stayed after the after what happened when my sister died. And she'd kept Star like one of her own, she told me, until a month ago, and the child disappeared, no one to say where.
'That's how late I was, lady,' the Cirdonian went on in a wondering voice. 'Just a month. But I will find Star. And I'll find any one or any thing that's harmed the child before then.'
'You've brought something of the girl's for me to touch, then?' said Illyra. Professional calm had reasserted itself in her voice as she approached her task. This was the crystalline core on which all the mummery, all the 'dark strangers' and 'far journeys' were based.
'Yes,' said Samlor, calm again himself. With his right hand, his knife hand, he held out a medallion like the one around his own neck. 'It's a custom with us in Cirdon, the birth-token consecrating the newborn to Heqt's bounty. This was Star's. It was found in the mews of the barracks where she lived. Another child picked it up, a friend, so she brought it to Reia instead of keeping it herself.'
Illyra's hand cupped the grinning face of Heqt, but her eyes glanced over the ends of the thong that had suspended the medallion. The surface of the leather was dark with years of sweat and body oils, but its core at the ends was a clear yellow. 'Yes,' Samlor said, 'it had been cut off her, not stretched and broken. Help me find Star, lady.'
The S'danzo nodded. Her eyes had slipped .off into a waking trance already.
Illyra's gaze stayed empty for seconds that seemed minutes. Her • fingers were brown and capable and heavy with rings. They worked the surface of the medallion they held, reporting the sensations not to the woman's mind but to her soul.
Then, like a castaway flailing herself up from the sea, the S'danzo spluttered again to conscious alertness. Her thin lips formed a brief rictus, not a smile, at the memory of things she had just seen. Samlor had let his own breath out in a rush that reminded him that he had not breathed since Illyra entered her trance.
'I wish,' said the woman softly, 'that I had better news for you, or at least more. No -' for Samlor's face had stiffened to the preternatural calmness of a grave stele'- not dead. And I can't tell you who, master -' the honorific professional as habit reasserted itself'- or even where. But I think I have seen why.'
With one hand Illyra returned the medal as carefully as if it were the child herself. With the fingers of the other hand, she touched her own kerchief-bound hair. 'The mark that you call the "star" is the "porta" to some of the Beysib. A sea-beast with tentacles ... a god, to some of them.'
Samlor turned his eyes towards the curtain that hid the execution, as within him his heart turned to murder. 'That one?' Nodding, his voice as neutral as if all the fury at Lord Tudhaliya were not foaming over his mind as he spoke.
'No, not the rulers,' Illyra said positively. 'Not the Burek clan at all, the horsemen. But the fisher-folk and boatwrights who brought the Burek here, the Setmur - and not all of them.' The woman smiled at the trace of a memory so grim that its fullness wiped her face with loathing an instant later. 'There was,' she explained, looking away from the caravan-master, 'a cult of Dyareela in Sanctuary in the - recent past. The Porta cult is like that. Only a few, and those hidden because it's sacrilege and treason to worship other than the Imperial gods.'
'The Beysib have closed the temples here?' Samlor asked. Her last statement had jarred him into the interjection.
'Only to human beings,' Illyra said. 'And the Setmur are human, even to the Burek.' She smiled again and this time held the expression. 'We S'danzo are accustomed to being animals, master. Even in cities Ranke conquered as long ago as she did Cirdon.'
'Go on,' said Samlor evenly. 'Do these Beysib think to sacrifice Star to their ' he shrugged '- octopus, their squid?'
The S'danzo woman laughed. 'Master - Samlor,' she demanded, 'is Heqt a giant toad that you might find near the right pond?' The man touched his medallion, and his eyes narrowed at the blasphemy. Illyra went on, 'Porta is a god, or an idea - if there's a difference. A fisher-folk idea. Some of them have always had images, little carvings on stone or shells, hidden deep in their ships where the nobles never venture for the stink ... And now they have something else to bring them closer to their god. They have -' and she looked from the child's medal, which had told her much, to the Cirdonian's eyes, which in this had told her even more '- the girl you call your niece.'