Terricel held himself very still under the covers, hardly daring to breathe, lest the movement catapult him into full waking. The slats of sunlight that penetrated the shutters hadn’t reached his eyelids yet. He still had a little more time. On most mornings, he clambered out of bed as soon as he woke, no matter where the sunlight touched his pillow. Today he lingered, waiting for that half-magical moment when time assumed a strangely liquid substance and its ripples could carry him in any direction he wished.
The Ranger woman yesterday had stirred up memories of the night his sister left for good. He’d lain in this very bed, a boy of nine, in this same almost-dreaming state, staring up at the walls that were not yet the dark, depressing blue as they were today, but eggshell color, like all the rest — his mother’s choice. He always wondered why she’d let him choose his own color.
On that day, he’d waited for the house to grow quiet after the visitors left, the ones from faraway places with exotic names, the ones he must never, never interrupt.
Ripple — here was the moment he crept downstairs when, instead of the usual night hush and the quiet patter of the rain, he’d heard Aviyya and Esmelda screaming at each other.
Ripple — here he’d crouched in his favorite hiding place at the base of the bannister, listening.
“What does it take to make you see?” Aviyya’s back was to him and raindrops quivered from the ends of her tangled black hair. “Maybe you just stepped into your own mother’s place without a fight. Maybe that’s exactly what you wanted all along. But I’m not you! I can’t live with your secrets! I’ve got to have my own life!”
A heartbeat pause and then, from the shadows of the living room, his mother’s voice: “We none of us have our own lives.”
“I’ve sworn your gods-forsaken oath and I’ll keep it, damn you!” Avi rushed on. “You talk about family pride and honor and the balance of all Harth — don’t you think I care about those things, too? But that’s all — ”
“Keep your voice down!” Esmelda’s voice came like the slither of a hunting snake. “The boy might hear.”
Ripple — here he’d lain awake in his room, listening to the rain thrashing on the roof. The storm had worsened, thunder crashing in the distance. The air smelled of wet grass and lightning. Minutes passed, hours maybe. His door opened slowly and the bed creaked as Aviyya sat beside him. She was fully dressed, an oiled-wool cloak over one arm.
“This is good-bye, baby brother. I’m going to miss you, but I can’t let her do this to me.”
“What if something happens to you?”
She’d laughed, then smothered the sound with one hand. “I hope something does happen to me. Otherwise it would be a waste, running away. I intend to have lots and lots of things happen to me. Wild things, wonderful things. Like we used to play, only real.”
Despite Aviyya being seven years older, she’d been an excellent playfellow. She never fussed about her clothes and she never ran out of pretend adventures. Together they’d turned the living room into a norther tundra swept by bitter winds and blood-thirsty raiders, turned the glass-walled solarium with its masses of potted greenery into a forest south of the great Inland Sea. The staircase had become a terraced eastern steppe, and the polished bannister the perfect stake to which to tie the victim for the nomads’ mystical rites.
“Take me with you!”
She’d rumpled his hair and sighed. “Oh, baby brother, if only I could.”
Years later, Terricel discovered that Aviyya had joined the Rangers. Esmelda had always known, as she knew so many other things that happened all over Harth, not just in Laurea, and she’d never told him. Pateros had received Avi’s oath, but Terricel never blamed him for keeping her secret safe, as he had so many others.
Ripple — and here was that other woman Ranger now, knife strapped to her leg and looking crazy enough to try anything. Terricel wondered — if he met Aviyya today, would she be like that, too? Would he even recognize her?
He thought of all the stories she’d told him about their father — so many and so vivid that surely she must have made some of them up. But he’d never questioned her. He’d needed to believe in them as much as she did — how their father had taken her to his weaving studio, taught her to tie knots, use a camp knife, catch dragonspiders, how he’d danced with her and sung songs from his own childhood.
Sometimes Terricel could hear those songs echoing through his own dreams. Once, when he was four or five, he’d heard Esmelda singing a country ballad as she arranged the flowers Annelys had brought in from the garden. As soon as she realized he was crouched behind the bannister, listening, she broke off. Without a word, she’d taken him into her arms and held him, rocking him gently.
Finally the morning ripples died down, their substance bleached away by the morning light. There was no denying he was awake and it was today instead of yesterday, and he’d seen Pateros, the Guardian of Laurea, Gatekeeper of the South and a dozen other archaic titles, knifed down in the open plaza and lying bloodstained at his feet.
Terricel rummaged in the pile of clothing on the floor of his closet and extracted a shirt and trousers that looked reasonably clean. In the washing alcove adjacent to his bedroom, he bent over the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He wet his hair and ran his fingers through it, not that it would make much difference in the way the cowlick swirled out from the back of his head. These ordinary tasks, usually performed without thought, now felt unnatural, as if some part of him comprehended that life went on, but some other part could not.
Downstairs, the house lay quiet, undisturbed. Although there was no sign of Annelys, the house steward, Terricel caught the aroma of her breakfast bread. She was probably tending to the opal-eyed house snakes, rounding up the mated pair. They were turned loose each night to forage for rats and cockroaches. Their world of hunter and prey remained untouched by yesterday’s events.
Esmelda’s everyday cloak of gray wool still hung on its peg by the front door. Terricel took an apple from the bowl on the table and made his way down the corridor.
He cracked open the door. Inside, directly beneath Esmelda’s bedroom, lay the cave of a room that served as her home office. Behind the overflowing bookshelves lay walls that were once a soft peach color, the sole relic of the time before she’d painted everything eggshell white. Years of candle smoke had darkened them.
Candles, beeswax candles, as costly as steel — the corners of the room reeked of them, even though Esmelda rarely actually burned them any more. The smell always made Terricel uneasy, as if some inarticulate longing within him, roused by memory, stirred fitfully in its sleep.
Esmelda, on the other hand, drew the smoky darkness of the room around her like a protective cloak. She sat at the desk, its blotter-covered surface piled with history books, notes, and a tray of bread and ripened cheese. Ashes smoldered in the ceramic crucible she used to burn letters. She’d turned her chair toward the uncurtained windows, and when Terricel entered, she was gazing over the garden, pen raised in mid-stroke.
“Orelia says the dagger was norther.” She put the pen down and jabbed a forefinger at a sheet of yellow message paper.
“Norther...” Terricel repeated. Saying the word aloud brought a shock of its own. He remembered Esmelda’s words from the day before: “...only the beginning...”
But no, she hadn’t said the dagger was norther, she’d said Orelia said it was. He tilted his head, one eyebrow lifted questioningly.
She got to her feet. “Let’s have a look at it.”
Terricel took a slice of bread, smeared it with the soft cheese, and followed his mother down the corridor. She lifted her cloak from its peg and settled it around her shoulders. The heavy woolen folds enveloped her, leaving her looking shrunken, frail.
For a moment Terricel’s vision shifted. He saw her as he’d so often imagined her — for he’d been an infant at the time — standing on a dais in the plaza where she gave her famous speech. Her shoulders were thin and angular under her cloak of purple mourning, her eyes half-feverish as she studied the anxious faces below. She seemed more desolate and yet more resolute than he’d ever seen her. Rain slicked her black hair to her skull, as if leading the city through the epidemic had pared her to the core.
Give us hope, they cried to her in his vision. Give us strength.
“It will be our measure as a nation how we conduct ourselves in the days to come. It is not enough to merely survive.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard her speak those words or only imagined what she’d said.
“We must remember who we are.”
He blinked and saw her again, one image overlaid on the next, past, present and future blurring together. Again she stood on a dais, again bare-headed, but now in sunshine so clear and bright it turned her hair to silver-white. She wore green, with the Guardian’s medallion around her neck. The people cheered as she raised her hands.
It was all nonsense, all childish yearnings, these pictures he painted in his mind.
Then he saw himself, standing at her side, still raw with the realization that he would be Guardian after her. He felt no sense of triumph or pleasure. Instead, the distant flowering trees pressed in on him like perfumed walls, closer and closer until he could no longer breathe.
Orelia’s office would have been put to better use as a conference room. It was too big for any sense of intimacy, with its empty bookshelves and massive table of cheap grayish wood, polished to a high gloss. There were no outside windows, only a double panel of solar-battery lights along the ceiling. When Esmelda and Terricel arrived, the City Guards chief sat in an armchair at the far end, facing Montborne and Cherida. Standing along the wall behind Montborne was the grim-faced officer who went everywhere with him. Terricel had never heard the man’s name; the story was that Montborne had saved his life at Brassaford.
“Esme. Come in, sit down,” Orelia said. Her eyes slid past Terricel. “Can I offer you anything? Tisane, juice?”
“Thank you, no.” Esmelda shook her head, a movement that sent the muscles in her neck jumping like plucked strings. Montborne nodded to her as she pulled up a chair and sat down.
Terricel slid into the next seat, wondering what Montborne was doing here. He’d always thought Orelia was jealous of the general’s popularity. And Cherida...he’d known her since he was a child. She was one of Esmelda’s few personal friends; they’d been students together at the University. She’d known his father. Terricel had never seen her as shaken as she was now. She looked as if she’d gone a week without sleep, wearing the same pale green medician’s smock. Tendrils of her hair had pulled free from her usually tight braids, encircling her head with a fuzzy red halo. The skin around her mouth was waxy pale.
Terricel forced the air smoothly and slowly through his lungs, keeping his belly muscles unknotted as he’d learned to do in years at the Starhall. Calmness pulsed through him. His eyes flickered to his mother’s face and he saw himself mirrored there for an instant. He’d never told her what he felt in the Starhall, never asked if she’d felt the same.
Blinking, Terricel realized he’d missed a beat of the conversation.
“...does have a bearing on the autopsy,” Orelia was saying.
“He didn’t die of the stab wound.” Cherida’s mouth hardly moved as she spoke, her lips as wooden as a ventriloquist’s. “I’m still looking for the cause of death. But nobody outside my lab knows that.”
Terricel’s jaw dropped a fraction before he controlled his reaction. Esmelda sat very still.
“I don’t understand,” Montborne said. His fingertips traced the pattern of the wood, curving and looping in a hypnotic spiral. “I was there — I caught him as he fell. My hands were covered with his blood. I saw it happen — the dagger went right in.”
“But it missed all the vital organs. No major arteries were severed. The liver capsule wasn’t perforated, so there was no internal hemorrhage, just some local bleeding that any intern could have controlled. Infection would have been our chief concern, and we could easily have prevented that. He shouldn’t have died from that wound.”
“What then?” Montborne demanded, his voice gone sharp. “Are you saying he died of an incredibly coincidental heart attack? At his age?”
Cherida held up her hands, fingers rigid. She’d bitten several nails down to the quick. “I’m still investigating.”
“It was the dagger, all right,” Orelia said. “Hold on, I’ll show you.”
She got up and opened the side door. An older man wearing the black uniform of the City Guards entered the room, carrying a bundle wrapped in densely woven canvas. The officer behind Montborne moved forward, tense and alert.
Terricel stared at the Guard’s face, at the same time fascinated and repulsed. One eye socket was little more than a pleated mass of scars that ran diagonally upward, slashing through the eyebrow and dividing it with a shiny gap, then continuing downward through the substance of the cheek in a deeply puckered chasm. The socket itself was hollow, the flesh twisted into a knot.
Terricel had never seen a deformity like that before. In his junior-level courses, he knew a student who’d had a leg amputated because of bone cancer, but the wooden prosthesis was always covered by his clothing.
Why doesn’t he do something about that eye — get a glass one or have the scars fixed? He could at least cover it...
Wearing gloves of supple black leather, the weapons specialist laid the bundle in the center of the table and slowly unwrapped it.
“Ah!” Cherida cried, and Montborne leaned forward, his indrawn breath a hiss.
In the center of the cloth lay a dagger. Like most weapons, it used a minimal amount of metal. The guards, handle, and reinforcing strips were carved bone. The pointed tip and ribs running the blade’s length were pig-steel of the type originally made in Laurea and then re-worked in the cruder norther smithies. The northers were said to be expert at assassination and sneak attacks on enemy camps, slipping their narrow blades beneath a victim’s ribs in a quick, silent thrust to the heart.
Terricel’s mouth went dry. For a terrible moment, the rest of the room faded. Nothing mattered, nothing existed except the dagger. This thing killed Pateros.
Orelia’s weapons expert smoothed the folds of the canvas, carefully avoiding touching the blade. The man’s face was grim with concentration. Suddenly Terricel was ashamed of his own lack of compassion.
He must have fought the northers, perhaps at Brassaford. He lost an eye to keep us safe.
“Superficially,” the man said, “this appears to be an ordinary norther weapon, adorned here and here,” he indicated the hilt and guards, again avoiding any direct contact with them, “with their distinctive motifs. However, closer examination of the base of the hilt has revealed something new in their arsenal. If you will observe the pin hidden there, undetectable to casual inspection...”
He pressed the pin and a sliver of ornamented metal slid aside to reveal a tiny cup lined with a gummy residue. His mouth drew downward at the corners, except for where the scar twisted his lip.
“We have also discovered, by virtue of magnified examination, a minute tube leading from this reservoir to an opening in the tip of the dagger.”
“Poison,” Cherida said, nodding. She gestured toward it, and Terricel saw that her hand trembled. “The dagger administers a poison so deadly that only a small amount is needed. It must be brought down to the tip by capillary motion, like the fang system of a venomous snake.
“I want a sample of that residue sent to my labs right away,” she said. “If there are traces of it in Pateros’s tissues, I’ll find them, even if I have to thin-section his entire central nervous system. My guess, by the speed of its action, is we’re looking for a neurotoxin.”
“I will see that it’s done,” said Orelia.
The weapons specialist rewrapped the dagger and carried it from the room.
“I knew it would come to this,” Montborne said grimly. “Those gaea-priests have kept our hands tied year after year, while the northers are free to develop that!” He gestured at the empty table where the dagger had lain. “Who knows what else they’ve got by now? They don’t have anybody yammering away at them about not ‘disrupting the ecosystem’!”
Orelia laced her fingers together and touched her forehead to them. When she looked up, her face was gray. “If they can make something like this, if they can infiltrate an assassin this deep into Laurea, they’re capable of anything. This means they’re getting ready for something big... We’re looking at another Brassaford, aren’t we?”
Terricel stared at the dagger. If Cherida were right, the thing was deadly even in the hands of an amateur. His eyes traced the convoluted figures on its bone handle and the pig-steel blade.
Pig-steel... Something went click! in his mind.
He cleared his throat. “The northers can’t even make their own steel. How could they come up with something like this?”
“That’s just it,” Orelia explained. “This dagger means they’ve now developed that capability. We’re no longer dealing with the assassination of a single man. Even Pateros, may Harth grant him grace, can be replaced.”
“No, it still doesn’t make sense,” Terricel said. “If they had a weapon like this and they could sneak it into the city, why would they pick Pateros? We’d only replace him with someone else, and he was a lot less belligerent toward them than another Guardian might be. Why not go for General Montborne and really knock out our defenses?” He glanced at the general, who was listening, eyes narrowed slightly. “I don’t mean any ill wishes toward you, sir, it’s just that I can’t understand the logic of it...”
“Pateros and Montborne were root and branch of the same living tree,” Cherida said slowly, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the general. “Like the old proverb about power and wisdom. The boy’s right, Montborne. You would be their logical target.”
Montborne brushed aside her warning as if his personal safety were a threat he had long since laid to rest. “I’m afraid you give the northers too much credit, lad,” he said to Terricel. “That’s the kind of logic a civilized person would use. These savages seize whatever they can, whenever they can get it. They mean to demoralize us, to take away our will to fight.”
Terricel knew when he was being politely dismissed. Clearly, Montborne had his own unshakable vision of the northers. And who had more experience fighting them than the Hero of Brassaford?
“You see how touchy the political implications are.” Orelia looked over at Esmelda. “We don’t want to do anything that could be...that could cause panic, destroy public confidence, that sort of thing.”
“I understand what you’re getting at,” Esmelda said evenly. “These are difficult times, to be sure. We must move cautiously. We’ll have enough of a mess on our hands, just straightening out the line of succession. If only Pateros had left us an heir. But the worst thing we can do now is to create a norther scare before we have incontrovertible proof.”
Orelia raised one eyebrow as if to say, You think it could be otherwise?
“Initial appearances are often misleading,” Esmelda went on. “Someone with your experience knows better than anyone how the truth can turn out to be something quite different.”
“I suppose there might be other possibilities...”
“The fact is,” Esmelda said, “we have a single assassin, a dagger of apparent norther design — and nothing else.”
“Who else could be responsible?” Cherida sounded genuinely puzzled.
“There’s no way we can keep the dagger secret,” Montborne said. “Besides, the people are going to draw their own conclusions. They aren’t stupid. They all know what the northers can do. If we’re too cautious in what we tell them, they’ll think we’re lying or covering up something worse.”
“Most people will indeed think whatever they want to,” Esmelda said, ignoring his oblique barb. “If they want to see a norther conspiracy, then the truth won’t stop them.” She jabbed one index finger at the cheap gray wood in front of her. “Maybe the northers are responsible. But maybe they’re not. Maybe somebody would like us to believe they are.”
For a long moment, no one said anything. Then one of Orelia’s junior officers brought the residue specimen for Cherida.
“Who else would want Pateros dead?” Cherida asked again.
“To begin with, the Archipelago chieftains, the Cathyne merchant cartel, a madman,” Esmelda said. “Even a leader who’s loved has enemies.”