Robin Hobb - City of Dragons

The tillerman shrugged a big shoulder. “When we first arrived. Then she left for Trehaug, and I thought she’d go all the way back to Bingtown. Looks like someone sent a bird and hired her to follow us.”

Leftrin eyed the boat with dismay. She had good lines for a river barge, and her crew appeared strong and disciplined. “And there might be more of them?”

“Almost certainly. There are some, even among the Traders, who say that liveships have strangled trade on the river. The Bingtown and Rain Wild Councils gave permission for the impervious boats to make the attempt. The owners are aggressive, and they will be hungry to find a way to pay back their investment. If they were in Trehaug when we left…”

“There would have been plenty of folk willing to hire them to try to follow us.”

“There would have been plenty of money, too,” Reyn added sourly.

Leftrin stared aft, thinking of what all such ships would mean, not just to Kelsingra, but to trade on the river and its settlements if river traffic became heavier and more affordable. He wondered if the Traders who were backing the venture knew that they would be ending a way of life.

As he watched, the blue ship began to close the gap between them. “They’ll keep pace with us easily. Our only hope to lose them will be to travel more by night.” He shook his head and glanced at his tillerman. Swarge, with a determined look on his face, nodded.

“And you think we can lose them?” Reyn sounded anxious.

“I think we can try. Maybe put more distance between us. We can at least hope to reach Kelsingra before they do rather than at the same time,” Leftrin replied grimly.

Reyn nodded. The downpour suddenly became a deluge, the rain hissing like quenched iron as it struck the water. It curtained their pursuers from sight. Reyn spoke quietly. “You know that eventually, they will come, Captain. In large enough numbers that they’ll get what they came for. You know that.”

“I know they’ll come,” Leftrin agreed. He turned to meet Reyn’s eyes and a wolfish smile came over his face. “But they think all they’ll face is a band of half-grown kids and some crippled dragons. But when they reach Kelsingra, what they’ll get may not be at all what they were expecting.”

Five bodies lay on the floor of the Stone Way Chamber. The Duke of Chalced looked down on them with annoyance. It had been an exhausting morning. Each man had insisted on his right to tell his story to the fullest before judgment fell upon him. Each had endeavored to spin out his life’s thread a bit longer. What fools they were. They had failed and they knew it, and they knew they would die for it. They had only come back to report in the foolish hope that perhaps their families would be spared.

They would not. What good would it do to keep the seed of failed men alive, to let them inherit their fathers’ lands and possessions? They would only breed more weaklings to disappoint in the future. Better to cleanse the ranks of his nobles and soldiers of weakness before it could spread through them and undermine the ancestral might of Chalced. His chancellor was looking at him, waiting. The Duke looked once more at the sprawling dismembered bodies. “Clean the room. And clean their houses,” he gave the order.

The chancellor bowed deeply, turned, and relayed the command. At the rear of the hall, six commanders turned to their chosen squads of men. Sixty spears thumped the floor in unison, the heavy wooden doors swung open, and the troops departed. Once the soldiers had exited, a very different squad entered. Crawling on their bellies, dragging their sacks, a ragged swarm of death-men scrabbled into the chamber and advanced on the bodies. No one looked at them. They were disgusting, born to wallow in filth and carrion, forever beneath notice of real men. But they had their place in Chalcedean society. They would carry off the body parts, scouring the floor with their rags before they departed. Whatever valuable items remained on the bodies became their possessions, as did the clothing of the dead and the meat from their bones. There would be little that was worth anything. These men had all known they were going to die; doubtless they had rid themselves of anything of value before they came, selling off rings and armbands to pay for one final visit to the whores, one final meal in the bazaar.

The smell of the spilled blood was thick and unpleasant and the scuttling of the supine men disgusting. He looked at his chancellor. “I wish to be in the Sheltered Garden. Chilled wine should await me there.”

“Of course, my lord. I am certain that you will find it is so. Let us go.” The chancellor turned and signaled the bearers to approach the throne with the palanquin. The Duke studied their careful pace; they were allowing time for his order to precede him so that when he arrived in the Sheltered Garden, chilled wine and a freshly blanketed and cushioned divan would await him. There were days when the pain and the shortness of breath made him so foul tempered that he would deliberately order the men to move more quickly. Then he would lash out at them for jostling him, and when he arrived at the garden before it had been prepared for his every whim, he could berate the chancellor and send all the servants off for punishment. Yes. There were times when the pain prompted him to such pettiness.

But not today.

They transferred him gently from his throne to the palanquin. He gritted his teeth against a moan. So little flesh remained to cushion his bones. His joints ground against one another when he moved his limbs. Sores afflicted his body from his long periods of stillness, growing deep over the jut of bone. In his pole chair, he sat curled and hunched, a humped caterpillar of a man. When the curtains closed around him, he was glad to be able to grimace privately and try to shift away from the worst of his bedsores.

Trouble was brewing. He smelled it and tasted it. He was no fool. He saw how the eyes of the men shifted, how they conferred silently with one another before obeying his commands. Chalced was slipping from his grip. Once he had been a powerful warrior, a man mighty of body as well as lineage. Once he had been like a crouching tiger, ready to leap from his throne and slash to ribbons any who doubted his authority. Those days were gone. He could no longer cow men with his physical presence.

But he was not a fool. And never had been one. He had never thought that his physical strength alone would let him hold his power. If he had been a fool, he would not have survived for so many years among the shifting dunes of political power in Chalced. As a young man, he had been ruthless in acquiring power and keeping it. His dearth of living sons demonstrated that. He had no illusions about the men who surrounded him or the greedy heirs anxious to supplant him. Others would be just as ruthless as he had been in securing their share of the spoils once he died. And some would not wait for it to happen naturally.

The pole chair swayed as the bearers paced through the hallways of his palace. He counted his friends and his enemies and knew that some he counted belonged on both lists. His dear, loyal chancellor was one. And his loving, viperous vixen of a daughter was another. Thrice he had married Chassim off, hoping to be rid of her. Her first husband had left her a widow at fourteen. Barely three weeks after the sumptuous wedding, the man had slipped coming out of his bath and broken his neck. Or so all surmised at the time. There had been no witnesses to the accident. And his young widow, sallow-faced and hollow-eyed, had seemed appropriately mournful when his family had returned her to her father’s home.

Her next husband had been a much younger man, scarcely thirty years older than his bride. He had lasted six months, succumbing to a stomach ailment that gave him debilitating cramps and bloody bowels. Again, the girl had been returned to the palace, and he had seen her silent and seething at her fate.