The Eighth Warden Bk. 02 Ch. 25-26

Chapter 25

Constables escorted a line of gang members down the street toward the city center, past a row of jeering citizens. Razai stood amongst the crowd in her Vash-like disguise, grinning widely at any of the thugs who looked her way. She'd had nothing to do with their arrests, but if they were set free, she wanted them to come for her rather than the divers.

As the last of them passed, she saw a flash of a familiar face through a window across the street. Renny Senshall—and if the girl had known in advance where the raid was taking place, that could only mean one thing.

Razai ducked into an alley, shedding her disguise when no one was watching. It drew too much attention. Wearing her own face, she entered the teahouse and stepped over to where the concubine was still looking out the window.

"How'd you manage it?"

Renny jumped, startled. Stavo and the other bodyguard jerked around too, reaching for their weapons. They stopped once they recognized Razai.

"Gentlemen," Renny said to her guards, "the lady and I have some business to discuss. Would you please excuse us?"

Stavo nodded and dragged his partner away.

Once they were out of earshot, Renny said, "One of my closest friends warms the seneschal's bed. It just required some nudging."

"Then why did it take so damned long?" Speaking like that to a member of one of the most powerful families in the city was dangerous, but the words came out before Razai could stop them.

Renny frowned and looked down. "When Talai's bodyguard was killed, I complained again. Before that, the deaths had been seaborn and thugs, and the constabulary doesn't see much difference between the two. But with another death, Kirla was able to convince Seneschal Ollis to force them to take it seriously."

Razai rolled her eyes. It sounded like politics, and she hated politics. "Why did you bother making a deal with the seaborn anyway? You're sleeping with one of the richest men in the city. I've seen the numbers—after your expenses, you can't be making any more profit than a shopkeeper. One with a very small shop."

"I didn't do it for the money," Renny said, "though it's good to know I can make a living on my own if I have to. I did it to prove to Varsin that I'm capable enough to help him with his business. Besides, I still had my share of my bond price, and I needed something to do with my time. It turns out that having servants do everything for you isn't as fun as it sounds."

This was only the third time Razai had spoken to Renny directly, but the concubine wasn't quite what she'd expected. Still silly and naive, for sure, but perhaps smarter than Razai had assumed.

"You got Kahlvin, but Dallo got away, and some of his men," Razai said.

"Those are the names of the gang leaders?" the girl asked.

"Yes."

"I thought there were three."

Razai hid a smirk. "The third ended his association with them weeks ago. He's been selling off his holdings in the docks."

"Well, the other one—Dallo?—may have gotten away, but I don't believe he'll be able to start up his operation again. The constabulary will be keeping a closer watch on things from now on. I understand Ollis was quite...emphatic when he spoke to the Chief Constable the second time. Kirla can be very persuasive when she needs to be. Besides, the investigation discovered that the gangs had started to put pressure on the port tax authority, and the constabulary never should have allowed that to happen. Duke Voss is involved now, and he's informed the king. There'll likely be a new Chief Constable soon."

Razai couldn't help glancing around the room, just to make sure the duke hadn't decided to spy on the proceedings himself. A whispered word to a bedmate could make its way to the king? The Senshall girl lived in a different world.

"I should leave," Razai said. "Lanii's crew will be surfacing in an hour, and I need to tell her the news."

"A moment, before you go?"

Razai stopped. "I have some time."

"If the seaborn decide they no longer need your services, Senshall Trading Company would like to hire you and your friends—Vash and that stormborn fellow. I don't recall his name."

"Senshall doesn't hire demonborn," Razai said, narrowing her gaze. Vash had told her that.

"In the past, maybe, but Varsin is in charge of hiring guardsmen. I recommended you, and he's willing to give it a try."

Give it a try. As if demonborn couldn't be trusted as a group, and only one or two were worthy of receiving scraps from the humans' table. It would be pointless to take her annoyance out on Renny, though—the girl was trying to do them a favor. And, in truth, Razai would probably be looking for employment before the week was out. The bodyguards' wages had been cutting deep into the divers' profits. If they were no longer needed, they'd be let loose.

"Vash is more than just a caravan guard," Razai pointed out. "He's run his own caravans before."

"I'll see what I can do. We have enough caravan masters at the moment, but perhaps he could work his way up. I'd have to ask Varsin what the rules are."

"And me?"

Renny hesitated. "I have a job for you if you want it, and if you can keep a secret. Five silver pieces a day."

"Five?" That was a lot of money.

"Senshall offers three silver for specialist pay, and you're a wizard on top of it."

Why did people always assume mages were wizards?

"What's the job?" Razai asked.

"I want to know if Varsin's brothers are abusing their concubines."

#

Bobo sighed as he checked the translation. This was yet another section he'd barely skimmed over before. While it described the author's journey, it didn't actually detail which part of the journey, and it didn't mention any distinguishing landmarks. But the translator Ellerie had assigned to these pages was the worst of the bunch, providing the gist of the passage but getting even the simplest of words wrong, so Bobo had no choice but to go through it line by line.

It was easier to rewrite the entire section than to correct the other translator's work. Double-checking the diacritical marks, he replaced The sun warmed the field with The morning sun shone over the meadow. Then he stretched, rubbing at a kink in his neck. Translating was tedious work, especially without a desk, but it was part of the deal he'd struck with Ellerie to be allowed access to the book again. Unfortunately, he hadn't learned anything useful yet.

Going on an adventure of his own hadn't turned out quite the way he'd expected. His grandfather's stories never mentioned the cold, the fatigue, or the terror of waiting to be attacked by monsters. The stories skipped over that sort of thing, going straight ahead to the exciting parts. Of course, now that he'd experienced the exciting parts for himself, Bobo rather thought he preferred the boring parts.

Ellerie had shown him the tunnel she'd found the night before, but after peering down into it, he'd opted to stay on the surface. The others could trudge around in musty caverns—he'd join them if they found anything interesting. In the meantime, there was plenty to explore above ground. Whenever his eyes needed a break, he went outside to examine another of the stone structures. He'd looked through a dozen buildings the day before, and already five today, sketching out a map for himself. When he returned to Snow Crown, he planned to compare his map to the one the stormborn kept, and read up on what they'd been able to learn about each structure, to see how closely it matched his own deductions.

He'd started to get a sense of how the city was laid out. Despite the numerous buildings that remained, it was clear that even more were missing. Either the stones used to build them had been carried off at some point in the distant past, or the first peoples had done much of their construction work with wood after all, and that wood had gradually rotted away over the thousands of years in which the city had stood uninhabited. If there hadn't been so much snow on the ground, he suspected he'd be able to see foundations or other groundwork where the missing buildings had once stood. For now, it would have to remain another question for the stormborn.

Imagining the city full of life, Bobo found it easy to agree with Ellerie's belief that it was one of the capitals of the first peoples' empire—or empires. Despite the common language, it had always been unclear whether the wide-ranging civilization had been united under a single government or whether each Tir was the capital of an independent nation.

The next line in the book caught his eye.

Winged snakes cavort in the air above the meadow, darting hither and yon.

Winged snakes. Something about that tickled Bobo's memory. Where had he seen it before?

He grabbed the book Shavala had bought in Tyrsall, Karsin's Guide to Rare Wildlife, from his pack and thumbed through it until he found the page he wanted.

Then he shot to his feet. He had to find Ellerie.

#

Corec sneezed. "I think there's mold down here."

"Probably," Boktar said, kicking at the dust and dirt lining the floor. "I saw water marks along the tunnel walls. This area must have flooded over and over again."

"Flooded how? Snowmelt? Or the hot springs overflowing their channels? I haven't seen any other water down here."

"Probably heavy rainstorms," Sarette said. "They cause flooding throughout the mountains in the spring. Sometimes entire slopes wash away." She'd accompanied them for their second day of searching the underground tunnels.

"This one's just like the others," Ellerie said, peering around the room. "I think they're living quarters. Why else would there be so many of them?" They'd spent all morning searching through one set of rooms after another, all connected to a series of parallel corridors branching off the main tunnel, half a mile south from where she'd fallen through a day earlier.

Corec nodded. "The main chamber and three sleeping chambers. The smallest rooms could have been for storage, or bathing, or an indoor privy."

"Who would want to live underground, though?" Treya asked. "There are no windows, and there's no chimney for a cooking fire or stove."

"Living underground isn't so bad," Boktar said. "I did it for half my life. And if there isn't a place to cook, there might have been a communal meal area nearby. That's how we do it in Stone Home, at least for those of us who stay underhill."

"Sarette, what do your people say these tunnels were used for?" Ellerie asked.

"I'd always heard that most of the tunnels we'd discovered were either blocked with rubble and too dangerous to excavate, or were aqueducts for the hot springs. I'm not sure my people have seen this spot yet. Look." She bent down to pick up a heavily tarnished spoon that had lain half uncovered in the detritus. "They'd have found this when they were searching, unless it washed through from somewhere else."

"Which it may have, since there aren't any doors in this section," Boktar said.

"They must have been wooden," Corec said. After thousands of years, and with wet conditions, almost anything not made of stone or metal would have rotted away.

"I didn't see any hinges either. I think the rings on either side of the doorways are for hanging curtains across the opening. We do that in Stone Home too."

Ellerie raised an eyebrow. "You think the Ancients were stoneborn?"

"If so, the ceilings are a lot higher than they need to be." He pointed to the spoon. "Can I see that?" Sarette handed it to him.

Ellerie said, "Whatever these rooms are, they're all the same and they're all empty. Should we give up on this section and try another direction?"

"What if we follow this corridor to the end, but skip past all the living quarters?" Corec suggested. "Just to make sure we're not missing anything else before we double back."

Everyone seemed agreeable to that. Moving much faster now, they reached the end of the corridor in less than ten minutes. They'd passed by two junctions, but left exploring the cross tunnels for another time.

"This is different," Treya said.

They gathered around her in front of a large archway leading into a cavernous room. Their lights only extended part of the way in, so Ellerie cast another mage light spell. It appeared ahead of them, illuminating the area around it.

"It looks like they left some things behind this time," Boktar said. There were dark shadows and mounds of debris throughout the room.

Ellerie said, "If there's anything significant in there, we'll need to catalog it for the historians back in Snow Crown. They want to know the location of any object, and if it's too large to bring back with us, they also requested a detailed description of the item and the condition it's in."

"What about the spoon?" Sarette asked.

"The museum has a number of spoons already, so I don't know if they'll consider it significant, but we'll take it back to them anyway. I already made a note of which room we found it in."

Sarette nodded, and the group went through the archway, splitting up to explore.

Corec found a curved pry bar lying on the ground twenty paces to the right of the entrance. He wiped the grime from the straight end, and found the metal itself to be unblemished.

"Check this out," he said, handing it to Boktar.

"I wish I knew what sort of metal this was," the dwarf replied, looking it over. Then he passed Corec a long metal bar, partly rusted through. "But they didn't use it for everything. This one looks like iron, though I don't think iron would have lasted this long. Can't tell what it was used for."

"There are a lot of wood fragments left in here too," Ellerie said. "Either this room stayed very dry until recently, or the Ancients had some way of treating wood to make it last longer. I can't tell for sure what it was, but the pieces I can see remind me of furniture. Could this have been the communal meal room Boktar suggested?"

"I don't see any sign of a kitchen," Treya said. "And no chimneys."

"There are metal hooks all along the back wall," Sarette said. "Two rows of them, high and low. Maybe for clothing, but I've seen hooks like that used to hang crossbows."

"I think it was for the crossbows," Boktar said, stooping down. When he stood back up, he was holding a bodkin-point arrowhead.

"Why?" Ellerie started as she followed his gaze. "Oh."

The arrowhead shone under the mage lights, the unknown metal still gleaming after the thousands of years since the city had been abandoned.

"There are arrowheads like that in the museum," Sarette said. "The one I found was a broadhead, but they used both types."

"Look over here," Treya said. She was shining her lantern on the left wall, where half a dozen weapons were mounted.

Boktar whistled. "Why did they leave all that? They took everything else interesting."

"Not always," Sarette said. "We've found other weapons here. Not many, but in a city this size, some things were left behind. Armor, too. Pots and pans. Anything made of metal."

"These look like plaques," Ellerie said, peering at the wall. Near each of the weapons was a small, rectangular sheet of metal affixed to the wall, completely rusted over. Below each plaque, brownish red streaks ran down the wall. "No way to tell what they said, though."

"Can you read the big one?" Treya asked, pointing up.

Near the top of the wall was a much larger sign, and this one hadn't rusted. Symbols were etched onto it.

"Do you want me to go get Bobo?" Boktar asked Ellerie.

"Let me give it a try first," she replied. "I brought my translation dictionary." She pulled a book out of her coat pocket and flipped through the pages, looking back and forth between it and the wall.

While she did that, Corec said, "So, what do you think? An armory? They took their regular weapons with them, but left the decorative ones behind?"

"Not all of them," Boktar said, shining his lantern across the entire side of the room. There were additional mounts at various spots across the wall, along with more of the rusted metal plaques. "Either they took some of these too, or there was an earthquake that knocked them to the floor, and then they washed away when it flooded."

Corec grasped the hilt of a heavily pitted longsword. The rust from the crossguard had sealed itself over the mounting hooks. When he jiggled it, flakes fell off. He left it where it was. The stormborn historians probably wouldn't be happy if he broke something.

Ellerie said, "The top row says...tall knights?"

Sarette furrowed her brow. "How do you pronounce it in the original tongue?"

Ellerie told her.

"That sounds closer to our word for guard than our word for knights," the stormborn woman said.

"Your language is descended from theirs?" Ellerie asked.

Sarette shrugged. "Most languages are. Maybe not Elven."

"Tall guard," Ellerie said. "No, I've got the emphasis wrong. High Guard? Like your own people."

"Perhaps. Borrisur gifted us with bits of their knowledge. Some people think we modeled the High Guard after their armies."

"Does anyone know why the city was abandoned?"

Sarette hesitated, fidgeting with the strap on her coat. "We don't know what happened to the people who came before, but we know that when Borrisur led the first stormborn to Snow Crown, he went north. Some historians think this is where we started from, and that the people who lived here before had already fled. Borrisur created the stormborn to take their place, but we weren't strong enough yet to survive the storms, so we left the city too, and took most of what the others had left behind."

"Why would the Ancients build a city here if the storms were that bad?"

"I don't know. The storms are weaker now than they used to be. Maybe it goes in cycles."

Corec said, "If that blizzard was a weak storm, I don't blame them for running."

"The next word is Tir!" Ellerie suddenly exclaimed, after holding her mage light back up to the sign. "This is one of the Tirs!"

"Unless the sign is labeling the weapons of their vanquished foes," Boktar said with a wink. "The Tir that they conquered."

She rolled her eyes. "Very funny. Let me finish translating it."

"This one's in better shape than the others," Corec said, looking more closely at a massive greatsword hanging in the center of the wall. The blade appeared to be steel, rather than the same unknown metal as the arrowhead, but it was still free of rust or corrosion. There was no sheath, though metal bands on the ground below suggested there'd been one in the past.

"Is that real or ornamental?" Boktar asked. He reached out to touch the blade, but a green spark arced out and hit his hand. He jerked back. "Ah! What was that?"

"Are you hurt?" Ellerie asked.

He held his hand in front of his mage-light lantern to examine it. "It stung, but I'll be all right. It didn't leave a mark."

"Let me see your hand," Treya said.

"Maybe that's why they didn't take it with them," Ellerie said. She whispered the words to a spell, and her eyes grew white and filmy. She peered at the sword, then spun in a slow circle to look around the room. "It's enchanted, but it's the only magical aura in the room. Everything else is normal." She tentatively stretched a finger toward the blade, but it sparked green again and she drew her hand back, shaking it off. "That does sting."

"Why did you touch it?" Treya asked, dropping Boktar's hand and reaching for Ellerie's.

The elven woman shrugged. "Some warded items can be safely handled by mages. Not this one, apparently."

"We can't just leave it down here," Sarette said. "The historians will want to see it. What if we wrap it in something?"

Corec took off his cloak and wrapped it around his hand, then grasped the hilt of the sword, lifting it off the pegs the crossguard was resting on.