CHAPTER EIGHT

Vengeancer

About the time that Deor was serving out toasted cheese sandwiches, Aloê Oaij was peering into the eyes of a corpse.

After Morlock and Deor left Tower Ambrose for the lockhouse and points unknown, she returned to her bed and lay there for a while on Morlock’s side, thinking about one thing or another, but not really trying to get to sleep.

A gravedigger and a healer—that was what she needed. And time. Time that was passing as she lay there.

Eventually she got back up, took a run through the rain room, and dressed for the road: clean but well-worn clothes of black and brown, and a weather-faded red cloak she rarely used anymore. She left, telling the lock not to expect her back for a day or two.

The stable opened politely at her approach, and she went in to saddle her red palfrey, Raudhfax. She seemed glad to get some exercise, and no more inclined to sleep than Aloê was.

Aloê rode her first to the Chamber of the Graith. There were only two thains on guard at the front; she recognized neither, but they evidently knew her, standing aside to let her enter without a word being spoken.

Inside the dome she saw Bleys and a few others—Guardians cloaked red and gray, and a couple of black-robed savants—huddling around the wreckage of the Witness Stone. Well, if anyone could heal the Stone, it would be Bleys.

But Aloê wasn’t here to deal with the stone. She proceeded to the Arch of Tidings, one of several little rooms running around the base of the dome that formed the great central chamber. It held a number of message socks in identity with various fixed points in the Wardlands.

The thain on duty there gave her pen, ink, and a palimpsest to write on. She also seemed inclined to chat. Aloê dismissed her with a single lifted eyebrow and sat down to dash off a message to the Lokh of Necrophors at New Moorhope. Then she slipped it in the sock for New Moorhope and hoped someone was on night watch in the message room there.

The Lokh of Necrophors was a voluntary order of gravediggers and morticians. Aloê knew she would need help in studying the body of the murdered Summoner Earno, and she hoped the Lokharch could send her a necrophor experienced in handling murder victims.

She was prepared to wait hours for an answer, and perhaps leave in the morning without one, but to her surprise, as soon as she withdrew her palimpsest from the message sock she saw that the reverse had been inscribed with a response.

Vocate Aloê: Greetings from New Moorhope. I am Gramart of Tren, a necrophor of the third degree. I happen to be on watch here; we junior necrophors often take the late shifts. I venture to write you to say: a necrophor was dispatched to the site of Earno’s most-to-be-mourned murder at the request of his family. She is Oluma Cyning, an experienced sifter of strange deaths. She knows to expect a vocate at Big Rock House, although she does not yet know it will be you. Good fortune to you, and bad luck forever to the murderer: Earno was a good man.

Aloê scribbled Many thanks! A.O. beneath this and returned it to the sock.

She stopped for a moment or two to chat with the thain outside the message room. She felt a little guilty about brushing her off earlier. She felt less guilty when it turned out that the girl was excited to discuss the “fit of madness” that had caused Morlock to destroy the Witness Stone. Aloê walked away while the burbling thain was in mid-word.

There was a Well of Healing not so far from here; she recovered Raudhfax from the watch-thains outside and rode her along the old wall-road until she came to Wall-Well.

The Skein of Healers always dug a well outside their hostels of healing. Aloê had no idea why, although she had studied with them off and on over the years. But she was grateful for herself and for Raudhfax tonight: she was suddenly dry as a summer street—thirsty enough to drink straight from the well bucket. And Raudhfax drank as deeply after Aloê filled the trough beside the well.

The door to the healing hostel was open and unguarded; they always were. She walked in to find two yellow-robed healers playing a game with word tiles.

“Yes, Vocate?” said one of the healers, with a supercilious air.

“Your throat bothering you?” asked the other, who either had a quick eye for bruises or had attended the aftermath of the day’s Station.

“No, thanks,” she said to the second healer, ignoring the first. “I’m headed north to investigate the death of Summoner Earno and I was hoping one of your order could come and assist me with the gorier details.”

Master Snide said snidely, “Binder Denynê was dispatched some days ago and is awaiting a vocate at Big Rock House.”

“Don’t mind him,” said the other healer. “He hates nightwork and he’s losing at Wordweave and these things make him grumpy.”

“Thanks for your courtesy,” she said to him, “and good luck in your game. All night long.”

She spun about and strode out the open door.

It was a long way to Big Rock, but the Road was clear, the moons were bright, Raudhfax was game, there was no way that she was going to sleep tonight.

“Let’s go!” she said, leaping into her palfrey’s saddle. Raudhfax snorted and clattered away up the street. She needed only a word or two in Westhold horser dialect to turn west and then north to find the great Road.

They were not far north of the city when she felt rather than saw three shadows pass between her and the moons. She was conscious of the ill omen, but she would not let it keep her from her work. She would not let anything do that.

They arrived in the hour before dawn at the inn at Big Rock. There was only the one, built into the side of the gigantic boulder that gave the little town its name. The ostler and the cook were already up, so she kissed Raudhfax’s nose and told her she was a champion and then went in to consume as much egg-pie and smoked fish as the pantry could conveniently yield.

“Your healer and gravedigger friends are both already here,” the cook explained when she no longer felt Aloê was going to die from hunger or thirst. “The householder put you all in the big room in the front of the house—there are three beds in there.”

“Do you suppose I can sneak in there and grab a few hours’ sleep without waking them?” Aloê asked wistfully.

“The door is very quiet, Vocate—I’m sure you won’t disturb them.”

The door was quiet on its hinges and opened with hardly a sound; Aloê did not in fact disturb them. But they weren’t sleeping. They were wriggling around on one of the beds with their heads lodged between each other’s legs. Aloê closed the door as quietly as she had opened it and went back down to the kitchen.

“Another room, possibly?” she asked.

With a thousand apologies and a face burning with shame, the cook took her up the back stairs and admitted her to paradise. Paradise was a drafty, closetlike room in a corner of the attic; at its center was a bed that was softer than clouds in a summer sky. Aloê muttered incoherent but utterly sincere thanks, fell into the bed fully clothed, and slept most of the day.

When she awoke and crawled out of her closet paradise, she found it was midafternoon. Wandering around the upper floors of the inn, Aloê found nothing like a privy or a rain room. There was an empty room with a tub and a pump, but Aloê guessed it must be some sort of laundry: the coarse brushes and bitter, stinking soap on the bare, water-stained board beside the tub could not have been meant for use on people.

She descended the back stairs to the kitchen, where she found a woman in a blue gown eagerly discussing food with the cook while a thin-faced, apricot-colored woman in yellow watched enviously, perched on a nearby stool.

“Vocate Aloê!” cried the cook—with a certain relief, Aloê thought. “Here are Necrophor Oluma Cyning and Binder Denynê from the Skein of Healing.” And now they’re you’re problem, her pointed glance seemed to add.

“Necrophor—Binder—good day,” Aloê said.

Blue-gowned Oluma jumped across the kitchen and slapped both sides of Aloê’s right hand in greeting. “Good morrow, Vocate! Or close to evening now. I trust you had a good ride up last night? I saw your horse this morning; she’s a beauty. Do you want to look at my seconding papers? I’ve got them up in our room. We’ve got a great room at the front of the house; I don’t know why they didn’t show it to you this morning. When—”

“Be glad to look at your seconding presently,” Aloê said hastily, “but I’ve been asleep all day—”

“And you’re hungry!”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Thirsty, too, I bet! Lundê, what have you got for a midafternoon breakfast?”

“I have an even more urgent need, though,” Aloê said, while the cook (Lundê, it seemed) considered the question put to her. “And I couldn’t find a privy upstairs,” she added, when no one seemed to get it.

The cook slapped her forehead. “Fate on a pitchfork! The little cubbyhole you’re in probably doesn’t have a honeygourd in it?”

“I did not see one,” Aloê said truthfully, not adding that she would not know one if she did see it.

“It’s smell it you’d’ve done, if there were one in there,” Oluma said cheerfully. In response to Aloê’s baffled look she added, “They call it a honeygourd because it’s anything but sweet, you see?”

“I think so,” Aloê said thoughtfully. A honeygourd must be some kind of chamber pot. Well, she had roughed it on the road often enough. But a house without indoor plumbing? She hadn’t seen a thing like that in decades. “So, where . . . ?”

“There’s an earth closet out back,” said Lundê, nodding at a doorway. But she kept an amused eye on Aloê for her reaction.

Aloê realized that she could not afford to play the white-gloved, effete citydweller. “Thanks, Lundê! Ignore any earthquakes or thunder you hear from that direction.”

Lundê gagged theatrically, and Denynê’s face scrunched up in distaste, looking somewhat like a dried apricot, and Oluma laughed and slapped Aloê on the back, sending dangerous shockwaves through her bladder.

“Back in a time,” Aloê said, before the worst happened, and fled out the door, and up a well-worn path through the weedy side garden toward a rickety outbuilding whose purpose was tolerably obvious.

Once she was inside with the door shut, she confronted a saddle-like seat that she was apparently supposed to plant herself on. She hung her cloak of office on a nearby peg, skinned off her riding pants and underwear and hung them alongside it, then squatted over the seat. The wood there, unlike the rest of the building, was polished and oiled from contact with many behinds. She could not bring herself to touch it, but managed to hover over it. She waited for the moment of release.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij,” said a thin voice weaseling its way through the thin door.

“This is not a good time,” she said with absolute sincerity.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij, I am Binder Denynê of the Skein of Healers. I did not have a chance to introduce myself to you earlier.”

“I’m not giving you the chance now. Go away.”

“I don’t know what you saw this morning, or what you thought you saw—”

“GO AWAY!” roared Aloê.

Little miffed-sounding footsteps receded into the distance, and Aloê heard off in the dim afternoon Oluma’s painfully jovial voice cry, “I told you to leave her alone!”

Later, a much-relieved Aloê sponged herself off in the tub room (which was indeed intended for human occupants, it seemed) and changed her clothes, returning to the kitchen to find dinner being served and a new occupant at the kitchen table, a tall woman with orange hair and black eyebrows.

The newcomer stood as soon as Aloê entered. “Guardian,” she said stiffly. “I’m the Arbiter of the Peace in Big Rock and roundabouts. I brought a couple of horses for your seconds so that you can ride out to the murder scene.”

“Thanks, Arbiter!” said Aloê, and would have said more, but the Arbiter walked out of the room.

Aloê shrugged and sat beside her seconds.

“She’s a pretty good sort,” said Oluma in a worried tone, “but I think the last vocate through here sort of high-handed her. You’ll like her better when we get a few drinks into her tonight.”

Oluma was more worried about it than Aloê was, and Denynê was worried about something else. They had their secondings with them, though: witnessed documents that they accepted the authority of Aloê for the purposes of the investigation into Earno’s death. Without them, her orders to these Guarded would put her in danger of exile under the First Decree. With them, she could order them around like thains—but she would not, of course. That was no way to get skilled work out of someone.

Aloê tucked the secondings into her sleeve and then ate a quick dinner of seared landfish and earthapple crisps alongside her seconds.

“What’s to do for the rest of the evening?” asked Oluma. “Do we show you around Big Rock and introduce you, or—”

“Let’s ride out and look at the body,” Aloê said.

“A night exhumation!” Oluma said. “I love them! Although, strictly speaking, the body hasn’t been inhumated yet. Still, it should be equally creepy, don’t you think?”

“Let’s hope so.”

Oluma ran off to get her bag of tricks, and Denynê took the opportunity to say urgently to Aloê, “Vocate Aloê, I don’t know what you saw or what you thought you saw this morning, but. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Aloê met her orangey-brown eye. “Yes?”

“Well, I. I just. I just want to assure you. That I would never. I would never ever. That is, never again.”

“Never what?”

“Oluma seduced me, is what it is. We were waiting, and I was bored, and she is agreeable—don’t you think she is?”

“I do. I’m glad for you.”

Denynê drew back, appalled, as if the small distance between their two chairs had become a deep chasm spouting fire. “What do you mean? I assure you that I am a person devoted to my craft of healing and to the Skein of Healers.”

“What does screwing Oluma have to do with that?”

“We were not screwing!”

“Boinking? Cleaning the carpet? Kissing the fish? Diving for pearls?”

Lundê squawked out a laugh and hurriedly stepped out the side door.

“Why do you have to be so offensive?” Denynê said plaintively. “I won’t do it again!”

“It’s nothing to me whether you do or you don’t,” Aloê assured her.

“But you . . . you wouldn’t. . . .”

“Engage in sex with my partner in a task for my order? But I do so. Constantly. I’m married to a Guardian, Denynê.”

“But before you were married. You wouldn’t have. You wouldn’t have. . . .”

“I did though,” said Aloê, smiling as she remembered a few wonderful moments from long ago, and some horrible ones, too—all equally pleasing somehow from this distance. “But I think I know what you mean at last,” she said, remembering her concern about whether Morlock and she would be able to work together after they started messing around. “I would say: don’t worry about a problem until it is a problem.”

“And if it is?”

“We’ll talk then.”

These matters, once so puzzling to the young Aloê, did not trouble her much anymore. The mystery to her in this situation was what Oluma saw in the dried-up apricot named Denynê. But that was not a mystery she had to solve, unlike the death of Earno.

She and Denynê stood and walked toward the front of the house. Oluma was standing with her bag just outside the door of the kitchen, shifting nervously from foot to foot; clearly she had overheard at least part of the conversation.

They went to get their horses from the stable. She was glad to see that her seconds were both capable horse handlers. Aloê hadn’t exactly grown up with horses herself, but knowing how to ride and tend to the beasts was a useful skill that she had been compelled to learn . . . and that certain males who lived with her had never learned very well. She smiled as she saddled up Raudhfax, wondering how they were doing.

As they rode out into the brisk spring evening, they passed by a big house in the shadow of the Big Rock. The Arbiter was standing in its arched doorway, but she turned aside as Aloê and her seconds passed.

“I can’t imagine what’s gotten into the Arbiter!” fretted Oluma. “It’s almost as if she dislikes you.”

Aloê slipped this matter into her mental pocket containing all the mysteries she didn’t have time to solve, and rode away to the field where her dead friend lay waiting for her.

The pale golden sun was gone from the gray field beside the quiet little brook; it was nearly gone from the sky. Earno’s body lay on its back in a private pool of sunlight, staring at the cool blue-edged clouds with empty eyes. The anchors of the stasis spell, seventeen of them, ringed the body with their pointed faces turned inward, like pale chipmunks standing at attention.

“Is this how you found him, Vocate?” Oluma asked.

“No—that’s not how it was at all.” Aloê thought back to that terrible day. “He was alive when we came in sight of him. We were riding up from the south, Morlock and I. The others were beyond the stream, shepherding the Khnauronts toward it. Earno was on horseback—and Deor, he is never on horseback if he can help it. Noreê was walking next to him, talking about something. I’d never seen them so close together by choice. Deor hates her.

“Earno saw us and smiled. He rode his horse across the stream. When he was in the middle of it, that great wound opened up in his throat and he fell down dead in the stream. He was dead when we pulled him out of the water.”

“How quickly did you set up the stasis field?” asked Denynê.

“Almost as soon as we realized he was dead. Though there was some dispute about it.”

“Oh?”

“Yes: Deor wanted his body incinerated and the ashes decently buried. Dwarves are like that about people they care for. But Noreê and Morlock ignored us and started setting up the stasis spell. That was funny, too, because—” She didn’t finish.

“They hate each other,” Oluma finished. “That’s what people say, anyway.”

“Yes, but they agreed on this without even talking. Perhaps that’s the only way they could agree on anything.”

Aloê circled the body slowly, looking for details.

“I’ve never seen a body in stasis before,” admitted Oluma. “It’s amazing! You can still see the water droplets in his hair and on his skin! His clothes are heavy with it. His eyes are as clear as if he were still alive.”

It was remarkable, and that fact helped Aloê keep her patience. “What else do you see?” she asked.

“I would have expected more blood,” Denynê remarked. “But perhaps the stream washed it away.”

“Yes!” Oluma agreed. “The lips of the wound are—they are almost dry and . . . and crumbly.”

Aloê nodded in agreement. She had seen the same thing, but it was so odd she wanted to know that the others saw it, too.

“I’m going to counter-inscribe the spell,” she told her seconds. “Stand a few paces away, please.”

They stepped back into the ring of shadow surrounding the shining corpse. Aloê took a diamond-tipped stylus from her pocket and crouched down by one of the spell-anchors. She carefully inscribed an eversion rune on its outer face. She felt the emotional bite of the spell taking hold, but it was a thin whisper against the silent roar of the stasis spell. In the end, she had to inscribe variations on each of the anchors before the light faded and Earno’s face fell sideways, giving the wound in his throat an unpleasant likeness to a wry mouth.

She used a coldlight, a mirror, and a magnifying lens to examine the final image in the summoner’s dead eyes. It was, as she had feared, nothing useful—the sky, apparently, seen through a layer of water.

Aloê breathed through her mouth during most of this process because of the stench rising from the open wound.

“I think this stasis spell must have failed,” Oluma remarked, kneeling beside her and following her technique with interest.

“Hm?” Aloê murmured.

“That stink!” Oluma said cheerfully. She was not breathing through her mouth. “That’s from a body that’s been dead a few days.”

“I can’t see either Morlock Ambrosius or Noreê Darkslayer making such a mistake,” remarked Denynê dryly from well outside the stink zone.

“Not separately,” Oluma agreed. “But perhaps together? Maybe they were working at cross-purposes. Maybe that’s where the error crept in.”

“Possibly,” said Aloê, driven into speech, “but not probably. You must consider that Earno was murdered before his death—perhaps some days before.”

“Uh? Oh! I forgot about that part.”

Aloê would never forget about that part. She said next something that she knew she must but had dreaded since the moment she undertook this task: “Let’s look at that wound.”

“Yes!” cried Oluma, as if her best-beloved had asked her to dance at the festival of Harps.

“Gleh,” Aloê replied indistinctly.

She held the dead man’s head steady while Oluma probed the wound with a thin, faintly glowing scrutator and a polished speculum on a long stem. The edges of the wound were gray as a piece of moldy bread, and they were almost serrated in appearance.

“Never seen anything like it,” Oluma admitted. “Denynê, honey, could you have a look here?”

“Don’t call me that!” hissed the healer.

“Denynê?” Oluma asked, bewildered. “I thought—”

“Never mind!” Denynê hissed, and bent over the corpse. “Eeuuuccch.”

“You’re being disrespectful to the dead, dear.”

“He’ll never know it!” snapped the healer. “Hm. Hm. I’ve never seen anything like this either. Severed blood vessels the proximate cause of death, of course. The throat wound looks almost as if it were sutured, and the sutures were somehow removed, and the process of decay hastened. Oluma—”

“Sweetheart?”

“Shut. Up. With. That.”

“I’m only—”

“Only do this: put that scrutator next to the severed jugular.”

“Which one is the—?”

“Any of the big blood vessels that have been cut through. Please. If you don’t mind.”

Oluma shrugged and did as Denynê asked. “You see?” Denynê said to Aloê, genuinely excited. “The ends are frayed and somewhat grayish. What happened to the integument happened to them as well.”

“Excellent.” Aloê had drawn the same conclusion about the throat wound, but she hadn’t noticed the blood vessels. “There was never any suture, I think,” she added. “The force binding the wounds together was immaterial, a sealing spell not so very different from the stasis spell I just counter-inscribed.”

“What broke the seal?” asked Oluma. “Was it made to dispel after a certain stretch of time, or—”

“The stream!” said Denynê.

“Yes: that,” Aloê said. “Running water has a talic presence, almost like a living being. It can shatter certain types of spells. Earno was murdered some time before he died, several days’ travel up the Road, perhaps. Then the murderer put this seal upon their work and walked away, in the certain knowledge that Earno would come to grief before he reached A Thousand Towers.”

“Would such a spell require anchors, like the stasis spell?” asked Denynê.

“Yes.” Aloê traced her finger from one side of the wound up to the corpse’s jaw. “Do you see anything here?”

Denynê and Oluma both looked closely. Oluma tapped the blunt end of the scrutator several times and the light it shed increased markedly.

“The skin is very loose,” Oluma said. “Earno was a man of a certain age.”

“Loose . . . and fragile also,” Denynê said. “I see a line of disruption on the surface. It looked almost like an old scar for a second. But there is no scar—no gathering of tissue below the surface.”

“A stress mark from the spell, I think,” Aloê said. “There are others. We may find physical anchors at the end of the stresslines.”

“We will need to make incisions,” said Oluma with a certain satisfaction.

“Yes, but we will also need to follow the trail of the summoner back up the Road to find the scene of the actual murder. Are either of you gifted trackers?”

The healer and the gravedigger both looked a little blank in the scrutator’s pale light.

“Then,” Aloê said, “one of us should go back to ask for assistance from the Arbiter of the Peace.”

Oluma’s face was growing less bemused and more contented every moment. She would soon have the vocate to herself and have a chance to make up for previous missteps. So Aloê guessed, and she almost hated to say what she had to say next: “Oluma, you had better go.”

“Me?” cried the necrophor, startled. “Why me?”

“I expect you know the Arbiter better than Denynê does, and you certainly know her better than I do.”

“Er. Yes. There is that. I am a people person,” the gravedigger observed.

“Hurry back,” Aloê said.

Soon Oluma had mounted her steed and was clattering away in the night and Aloê and Denynê were undressing Earno’s dead body to cut him open.

“Oluma really would be better for this task, I think,” Denynê ventured to say, as she selected instruments from a rollup carrier.

“Possibly,” said Aloê. “But I don’t trust her.”

Denynê did not pretend to not understand what Aloê was talking about. “I think,” she said at last, “there is no malice in her. It is her sense of humor. I’m afraid. . . . Well, they tell me I don’t have one.”

“Nothing’s duller than someone who makes everything into a joke,” Aloê said. “Unless they’re actually good at it. I don’t think Oluma is.”

“Well, it was probably best to send her after the Arbiter. She knows Ulvana far better than I do, and they seem to get along well.”

Ulvana. Ulvana. The name struck a chord in Aloê’s memory. “Is this the Honorable Ulvana Claystreet, from A Thousand Towers?” she asked.

Denynê thought long before answering. “I don’t know her surname,” she said at last, “and, of course, Arbiters have to forswear all other ranks and associations, much like your own order. But I think she did move here from A Thousand Towers. Did you know her there?”

Aloê was listening in her mind to another voice, screaming, Love! You unspeakable trull! Don’t you see how he hates you? The voice was her voice, and she was trying hard to remember the face of the woman she had screamed at more than a century ago. It might be the same face as the Arbiter here in Big Rock. It might be.

“Not really,” said Aloê at last. “But I think we did meet at least once, long ago.”

Denynê nodded without much interest and stuck a thin bright blade into Earno’s dead white face.