Maenalle’s courier said, ‘The caithdein of Tysan asks. She said you were the only spirit in Athera who would know where to seek the Shadow Master.’
Sethvir hooked an ink-stained knuckle through his beard. For a moment he appeared to forget himself, as well as the anxious emissary down below. His gaze encompassed the deepening arch of the heavens as if the answers to unwritten riddles could be read in the white ice of cirrus clouds.
Deferential to the ways of great mages, the courier waited, while his pony dropped its head and cropped the weeds that grew wild over the tower’s sole door sill.
Presently, Sethvir answered. ‘I’ll commit the Lady Maenalle’s message to a parchment inscribed to Arithon s’Ffalenn. But tell her: the scroll will be delivered at the time of my choosing.’
The courier eased in relief. ‘She will be satisfied.’ He gathered up his pony’s reins, prepared to mount and ride immediately.
Sethvir’s eyebrows arched at the lapse implied in his hospitality. ‘No need to rush off. I have oats for your horse in the barn. It’s a very long road back to Camris, and tomorrow will be wretched with rain. You’d do better to weather the storm here. Have a bath, and a bed, and whatever you can scrounge from my larder. Certainly there’s plenty of good tea.’
While the clanborn courier hung poised between uncertainty and blind courage, Sethvir withdrew from the casement, his voice a diminishing echo from the unlighted cavern of the library. ‘Bide there. I’ll be down to unfasten the gates.’
He moved on at sharp speed that belied his dreamer’s appearance; take the stairs too slowly, and the courier would be mounted and gone at a pace his road-weary pony did not deserve. The company of a Fellowship sorcerer had harmed no man; but legend told of many who had emerged changed from the experience. Whether Maenalle’s appointed courier would prove exempt from fate’s handling was a fine point Sethvir was loath to promise.
Eviction
After the confiscated brown gelding, Faery-toes, kicked his stall doors to slivers, bit every groom within reach and knocked the head ostler off his feet, the alderman of Jaelot’s under-secretary at last seized the initiative to set seal to a writ to dispatch the beast to the knacker’s. He grumbled as he waited for the wax to harden. Horse hide, glue and dogmeat were not in high demand; the proceeds from the slaughter of one swaybacked head of stock could scarcely defray all the damages.
The head ostler narrowed his eyes and nursed his bruises. ‘Keep the beast, then, and rack up more costs in wrecked boards.’
The writ was slapped into his hands with the official seal still warm, while in the next room, voices of higher authority heated and flared into argument. The difficulties posed by the horse’s last owner, the fat prisoner consigned by city justice to suffer forced labour until solstice, were never as simply arranged. While the ostler retreated with the horse’s death warrant, invective assailed the secretary’s headache through the shut panels of the doorway, as it had without cease for a week: Dakar took ill in the draughty shacks where the convicts were housed. Poor food made him sick unto misery. His feet swelled from chilblains until he could not arise in the mornings without loud-voiced, piteous complaint.
His fellow inmates used their fists to stop his whining. His moans and his mewling as he languished from their beating disturbed what little sleep they could scrounge after days of backbreaking labour in the mason’s yard, dressing stone blocks for the sea walls that storms crumbled down every spring. With both eyes puffed shut with bruises, Dakar could not see to swing his mallet. Stone chips flew on wild tangents. A guardsman was home with a badly gashed face and an overseer limped on smashed toes.
Packed off to solitary confinement, Dakar passed his hours of punishment with singing. Even cold sober, he had no ear for pitch. The yawling echoes created by his ballads made the prison sentries grit their teeth, then brawl among themselves in driven fits of frustration. A gag was attempted. Dakar somehow ingested the cloth. The coarse fibres gave him a bellyache, but otherwise seemed not to faze him.
The healer dispatched to examine him emerged from the depths of Jaelot’s dungeon, his tongue clicking in amazement behind the scented kerchief he carried to mask the stench. ‘The man’s crazed,’ he said in a nasal twang. He removed the linen and spat into it. After eyeing the sputum with the reflexive habit of his profession, he treated the head warden’s sallow complexion to the same disconcerting regard. ‘Thinks he’s immortal, your prisoner. Insisted he could survive a straight draught of deadly nightshade, and then offered to show me, the mad fool. Keep him chained on a diet of herb broth. Then if you take my advice, send him on to the crazy house run by the Brothers of Ath’s Initiates.’
Cocooned in fur vests to ease a chest cold, the head warder shrugged his exasperation. ‘That would be a frank relief, to be rid of him. But the judiciary’s adamant. It’s the work team for Dakar till the advent of summer, and naught short of death will shift the sentence.’
‘Well, let him lie,’ the healer said, repacking his satchel in sour humour. ‘He might get pox, or perish of rat bite. At least, by Daelion’s justice, he should catch your cough and lose his voice. Does your wife brew cailcallow tea?’
The glum warden shook his head. ‘No wife.’
‘Ah, too bad.’ The healer departed, whistling; and whatever sort of ills beset Dakar’s jailers, the prisoner proved maddeningly immune. He carolled himself hoarse in the darkness, then rasped on in a blithe and froggy baritone, while his guardsmen wore mufflers tied about their ears in an effort to dampen the dissonance.
At mid-spring, with the hemp cloth smock worn by the condemned sagged like empty sacking over his depleted belly, and skin turned mushroom pale, the Mad Prophet informed the man sent down to fetch him that he had never stayed sober for more than a fortnight, even as a babe at his mother’s knee. Three months was a lifetime record, Dakar insisted, as if astounded to still be alive.
Nobody succoured him with beer. He was prodded from his lair in the pits of Jaelot’s dungeon. The blocks shaped at the mason’s throughout the winter were now being loaded onto flat ox-wains and rolled in slow rounds to the headland. There, a team of men at arms in leather brigandines raised their bull voices to harry on a wretched line of workers. Scoured by salt-spray and the white-laced surge of high tide, bleeding from barnacle grazes and stone cuts, Jaelot’s convict labour team bent their backs to restore the torn bulkheads and jetty.
Their work was cruel and dangerous; where currents had undercut the sea wall, the granite might shift and slide. A man could break his hands or his legs, caught in an unlucky place. Incoming waves could crest and slam down without warning, and a seething froth of brine would tumble the huge blocks like knucklebones stewed in a cauldron. Men died pinched like insects, or dragged under to drown in the weight of their fetters and chain.
Dakar had no wish to end ground in shreds to be picked by the bay’s hordes of scavenger crabs.
While the wains were pulled up for unloading, he stole a moment while the watch was diverted, and behind the move of blowing on chapped hands, cast a sharp eye across the waves. His month in the dungeon had left him more time than he liked for uninterrupted concentration; his eyesight was clear as a sailor’s.
A gruff voice shouted behind him, ‘You!’ A pikestaff hit Dakar across the shoulders. ‘Back to work! And hurry on about it.’
The Mad Prophet stumbled forward, caught short of a trip as he ploughed shoulder down into the stone block in process of being jockeyed from the wagon bed
