Lessek's Key

CASKS ON THE QUAY

On the north bank of the Medera River, where it spilled out into Orindale Harbour, there was an alehouse, bigger than most along the waterfront, catering to a mixed clientele of sailors, stevedores and merchants, and even a few Malakasian soldiers. It was a positive hive of revelry, from early morning until late each night, with fights tending to be little more than angry shoving matches as no one wanted to bring the full scrutiny of the local occupation force onto the establishment. Going too far would raise concern among the officers, and risk them closing the tavern, or, worse, having it burned to the ground.

Periodically someone would drink too much, talk too much, grope too much, or spout one too many unwise remarks about Prince Malagon, the occupation generals or even the wife or mistress of a good friend, and fists would grasp knives, blood would spill and bodies would be carried out a side entrance and unobtrusively tossed into the river.

The tavern owner kept a massive barrel filled with sawdust and it was the scullery boy’s job to scamper across the floor, dodging kicks and comatose drinkers, and ladle a few scoops onto whatever was pooled on the stained planks underfoot. The process generally took a few moments, and then noise level would rise again and things would return to normal.

In the predawn avens, violence was overcome by sex – or at least what might pass for sex in the grey time before sunrise. Sailors on leave, often just returned from long Twinmoons at sea, would spend the early part of the evening puffing out their chests shouting bold, if idiotic, platitudes about bravery and the sea, and fighting one another. By the middlenight aven, their thoughts turned as they grew desperate to find a warm woman in a warm bed. There were rare nights when full-on sex could be had on a table, behind the bar, or on a burlap sack out the back, and there were nights when a woman or two – periodically, even a bright young man – would take a knee and in front of the gods of the Northern Forest offer oral entertainments.

But with relatively few women willing to kneel down and service a crowd of healthy, if dog-piss-drunk sailors, the men were left to get creative, or to rely on the grippers, those females (generally), not all of them whores, who would make the late rounds, collecting coins and leaving a trail of comparatively satisfied young men in their wake, often while chatting with companions or enjoying a beer themselves. Evenings when the beer had flowed particularly deep and when women were particularly scarce, some men, desperate as they were, would come to agreeable terms and perform the service for one another.

And in the moments before dawn, to the sound of heavy boots shuffling over patches of sawdust, the place would empty.

The alehouse was less than a stone’s throw from the bridge that spanned the Medera, connecting Orindale’s northern and southern districts. It was here that Garec and Steven had first spotted the Prince Marek. Most harbour traffic passed over its narrow span, and the bridge provided an excellent vantage point from which to assess local activity.

During the morning aven, anyone standing on the bridge would have been able to watch as the tavern’s scullery boy made several trips out of the side entrance with a wooden bucket. From the bridge, one could observe as the boy scooped sawdust from a huge wooden barrel that could easily have accommodated him and a handful of his friends to boot. The cask was filled with fine brown sawdust, and there was no reason to believe the seven or eight other barrels arranged in a confused pattern along the riverside held anything else.

Yet one did.

While the bridge provided an unobstructed view of the alehouse, and the unsavoury (usually unmoving) characters periodically disgorged into the river, the haphazard maze of barrels was perhaps the best place in the city from which to observe traffic across the bridge, and provided the perfect cover for one observer’s stealthy comings and goings.

The morning visitor to Orindale’s harbour bridge would not have seen the cowled inhabitant of the cask forest, no matter how closely he observed, as daylight was time for sleeping, for eating whatever had been scavenged the previous evening, or for watching platoons of soldiers, Seron, or merchants with carts and wagons.

A thin peephole, broken through one of the cask slats with an awl, was also invisible from the bridge, and it was through this fracture that the creature took in Orindale’s rhythms and patterns: who came and went? Which merchants received shipments and at which piers? Who might be addled enough to leave part of their cargo unprotected, or, even better, sparsely guarded on one of the piers overnight?

The creature was always hungry, but death was more important: countless numbers of the black and gold soldiers had fallen, and no one had been able to ascertain more than the fact that he worked alone, stalking his victims, two or three at a time, slashing them to death. If they cared, it was always a near-perfect display of hand-to-hand skills.

He had even killed several of the Seron monsters; they had put up a far greater fight and the hooded assassin had learned that if he failed to strike the fatal blow with his first lunge, his life was in very grave danger. The Seron were strong and conscienceless; killing one of them was more akin to taking out a grettan: dangerous and exhilarating all at once.

He had fading recollections of a Seron in the Blackstone Mountains. That one was different, tame, almost – more like a broad-shouldered farm animal than a soulless Malakasian killer. But this was the Seron who had thrown something at him, a rock, maybe, or a log: it had shattered his shoulder, forcing Sallax to throw himself onto a rock in an effort to set the joint aright. He couldn’t recall how he knew to try that, but it hadn’t worked, and now he seethed with hatred for the Seron, all Seron, most of all every time he was forced to hunch over to alleviate the throbbing pain.

There were good things about the pain, though: generally it was steady, but when it grew excruciating, as if the tissues were tearing anew, the rolling socket joint forcing its crooked way forward, driving his upper arm nearly around behind his back, then his thoughts left him alone. When the pain exploded, his mind went blank, abandoning any attempt to bring foggy memories of past Twinmoons into focus. Then, things fell away and any thoughts of Sallax Farro of Estrad were lost in a flare of white fire. That was when things were easy. Hunting made sense; eating anything he could find became second nature and living in an empty barrel was not an inconvenience at all.

This evening, Sallax was hungry. He had eaten the last of the dog before crawling from his cask in the pre-dawn aven. It had been good meat, but after three days it was growing rancid. He needed to find another source of food – he had hoped for another stray, for they often hung around the warehouses on the southern wharf – and he would have found one if it had not been for that woman. She had called him Sallax, as if she knew him. He was unsettled at the memory of her reprimanding him – him! He could snap her neck with two fingers.

He had dragged her from the mud. It had been cold there, and the fern bed was dry, and warm in the morning sun. She ought to have thanked him, but instead she had been angry. That had interrupted his plans; instead, distracted, he had wandered through the side streets, where he at least found some discarded bread, a half-full bottle of beer and some mouldy cheese thrown through a window. Why they didn’t want it he couldn’t imagine.

Now he kept an eye on the bridge, lit by torches in sconces. He would hunt again this night, and perhaps take another Seron – the monsters were particularly on his mind. Something to do with that woman? She had called him Sallax. But he was hungry and wanted real food, another dog – or maybe even a gansel, or a beef tenderloin, something cooked, or something he could hastily char over one of the fires the lost men kindled down alongside the river.

Sallax had been hesitant to leave his barrel this evening; his foggy mind was in turmoil. The woman was no threat to him; there was no need to kill her – so why was he panting here like a rutting dog after a bitch? He could kill her if he chose, or he might let her live

… but that wasn’t what was causing his chest to tighten.

She had known Sallax… she had known him. Was she the one to help him? Could she wrench his shoulder back into place? Maybe she could flesh out the half-seen images in his memory. Perhaps he might even speak with her about them, these people, the old man especially. He knew they were strong, and committed, and he wanted to see them – but they stayed at the back of his mind, the rutters, and he couldn’t see their faces.

His shoulder ached and he growled in fury, slamming against the side of the barrel until he was sure it would topple into the Medera River.

Hearing that name, his name, that morning had changed things. She – the barefoot, muddy woman – hadn’t come by, she hadn’t crossed the bridge. She was still in the southern part of the city, so that’s where he would go. It would be cold, but that was fine; the cold soothed his shoulder, cleared his head.

The cowled killer that had haunted the Orindale waterfront for the past Twinmoon slipped without a sound from inside his hiding place and moved into the shadows of the alehouse just as the side door flew open with a crash. Three men emerged, two in the unmistakable black and gold livery of the Malakasian Army, between them a drunk, sopping wet, sporting a breastplate of regurgitated supper and cheap wine.

‘You seem a nice enough fellow,’ said the taller soldier, ‘and I’m about sure you’d have no problem making the swim to shore, even as drunk as you are. So, let’s complicate things a bit, shall we?’ He turned to his colleague, who drew a dirk and slid it into the drunk’s belly.

Blood spurted from the deep puncture wound. The drunk screamed, and cried out again as they tossed his body into the water.

The hooded man lurking in the shadows frowned when he heard the cry and the splash. It was not that he cared that these soldiers executed a drunk, but he was surprised that he couldn’t hear the victim’s shouts from beneath the surface of the water.

‘Have a nice swim, boy,’ the tall soldier shouted, then, clapping a hand on his compatriot’s shoulder, said, ‘Come on, Reg, I’ll buy you a beer.’

‘Hold on.’ Reg paused and peered between the barrels.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. You need a gripper?’

‘Sure. You?’

‘Back here. Let’s be quick about it.’

With a grin, a wraith shrouded in death was upon them, materialising out of the shadows. He would find the woman, he thought as he hacked viciously at the soldiers until their bodies lay twitching in a puddle of congealing blood. She would help him. He cleaned off the knife he had taken from her. And if the pain grew too great, he would give up and kill her as well. He pulled the lid from the cask nearest the door and poured several shovelfuls of sawdust over the bodies. One, still fighting for life, coughed, then fell silent.

Sallax was already gone.