Joel Shepherd - Tracato

He walked up the cramped stairs, edging past customers and working girls. At the room, he rapped on the door. It swung open. Errollyn was fairly certain such doors were supposed to be locked. He pushed it wide, a hand straying to his belt knife-the walls were too close for swords, he could barely spread his elbows. On the bed he found a naked man, face down and unmoving. The sheets beneath his upper body were soaked in blood. Somehow, Errollyn was not entirely surprised.

The windows were closed, but the small room had a closet. Errollyn flung open the closet doors. Within huddled a girl, dressed like the others. Her hands were flecked with blood. Errollyn grabbed her, and slammed her against the wall.

“That’s the captain of the Duchess Teresa , yes?” The girl remained mute, eyes flicking back to the bed. “Why kill him? What was the Duchess Teresa doing in Voscoraine Port?”

The girl tried to drive a knee into his groin, but Errollyn had played rough games with a far more dangerous girl than this. He blocked her with his leg, and slammed her harder back against the wall.

“An honourable serrin gentleman wouldn’t hurt a girl, surely?” she taunted him. Errollyn was getting tired of humans who thought behavioural codes could excuse all evils, and hit her in the face. He picked her back up, her nose bloody, and slammed her back against the wall.

“Murderers don’t get to plead delicacy,” he told her. “Why kill him?” Her stare was defiant.

“Family Renine aren’t playing fair,” Aemon had told him. There had been a courier on the Duchess Teresa , heading for Voscoraine Port, bearing the Renine Family seal.

“There was someone on the ship, wasn’t there? Someone carrying letters for people in Telesia?”

The nobility of Algrasse? Algrasse was an ally of Larosa, they had stood with the Regent Arrosh when he had been but a lord of Larosa, and assisted him in his rise to regent of all the Bacosh. Their position was strong, there was no chance they’d be scheming with the Renines against their sworn feudal lord. Which left just one serious option. “Lady Renine is negotiating with Regent Arosh, isn’t she? Behind the Council’s back?”

“I’ll not say anything to foulblood scum like you!” the girl hissed. “Murderer!” she screamed. “Murderer, come quick! Save me!”

Shouts came from the neighbouring rooms. Then a scuffling under the bed itself. Errollyn spun, and saw a man scrambling from beneath the mattress, and cursed himself for a fool.

The door crashed in, and Errollyn flung the girl hard across the room. A man rushed him, knife in hand-a house guard, protection for the girls. Errollyn caught the man’s thrusting arm, broke it, and threw him back into the face of the second guard. Behind him the windows crashed open and the man from under the bed leaped out. Errollyn sheathed his knife and leaned out the window. Below was a canvas awning, protecting the brothel’s rear entry in a narrow lane. Beneath the awning, the jumping man was scrambling to his feet.

Errollyn got a foot out for leverage, and jumped. Somewhat heavier than the first man, he hit the awning hard and it tore…he crashed to the ground in a tangle of canvas, scrambling to extricate himself while thankful it had at least broken his fall.

Finally up, he ran after the other man in time to see him vanish around a corner. Errollyn dashed around it, struggling against the stiffness of a bruised thigh. Down the next lane, past an unloading cart and tethered horses, he saw the man run into a crowded main street.

Errollyn followed, sunlight suddenly bright to a serrin’s sensitive vision. Errollyn shielded his eyes and peered up the street. Was that him? He had spots in his eyes, and nothing was clear. There were crowds around him, some looking at him, others evidently startled by the recent passage of a sprinting man. Even if he caught the man, what could he do, in this crowd? These were feudalists, some of them even royalists, or restorationists, or whatever fancy term the clever scholars in the Tol’rhen liked to apply. Serrin were welcome so long as they did not swim against the stream. A serrin accosting a local in the street would be mobbed.

Errollyn took a deep breath, wincing as the bruises from his fall began to hurt.

“Everything okay there, sir?” a local man asked him.

Errollyn shook his head. “A murder in the Fletcher Street brothel,” he said loudly enough for others to hear. “The captain of the Duchess Teresa , a man of a noble family.” He pointed after the escaped runner. “That man cut his throat. Pass the word and have him caught, I can’t do it myself. Reninesen shendevan soni Reninesen shendevan. Renine’s Town business is Renine’s Town business,” that was, in Rhodaani.

The local nodded warily, and rushed to tell others. Soon, the Blackboots would be summoned. Errollyn turned and walked down to the docks, figuring he could do little more here, and satisfied that whatever Family Renine thought to gain by killing the captain, they could lose in having killed one of their own.

Soon he found one of the few people in Renine’s Town he could trust to give him a straight answer.

“Captain Aimer was a renowned drunk and gambler,” a red-coat drily informed him, sipping tea outside his customs house. “Frankly I’m not surprised he’s dead. In a brothel, did you say?”

Errollyn nodded.

The red-coat shrugged. “I’ve heard he was in debt, then out of debt, then in debt again. Possibly someone got tired of constantly bailing him out. Then again, he also had a very big mouth, which is never a good thing.”

Errollyn recalled his conversation with the quartermaster at the inn, and the sailor who had risen from the table to go and talk to a “friend.” Had that been the same man as had been hiding under the bed? He hadn’t got a close enough look. Either way, he thought it reasonably clear what was going on.

“Thank you, sir,” he told the red-coat. “I have to head back to the Mahl’rhen.”

“What do you think is going on?” the red-coat asked him.

“Noble games, my friend,” said Errollyn.

“Those are the least entertaining kind,” the red-coat said, and sipped his tea.

When Errollyn returned to the Tol’rhen, he found Civid Sein rallies being held upon the square. Leading them were Tol’rhen Ulenshaals, black robed and shouting, to massed cries from the thousands-strong crowd. If the philosophies of his people spoke of anything, it was the supremacy of one person’s rightness to think alone. Here on the square, before the walls of the institution dedicated to the teaching of serrin thought, thousands of individual minds concentrated as one, and yelled in unison. They yelled for justice, yet it was emotion that spoke, not reason.

He left the square before some well-meaning fool spotted him and tried to make him a part of their dangerous game. Tracato was supposed to be above such human nonsense, yet here he could feel it slipping toward a precipice. His own people were supposed to embody the final word in enlightened thought yet, too often, in their own gentle way, behaved just like the mobs outside.

He found Sasha in the training courtyard, blade in hand and covered in sweat. Spirits, she was beautiful. He watched her for a moment, the shapes her body and blade made in the air. To watch Sasha train was to observe the primal and the civilised, the thinking and the unthought, the beautiful and the ugly, all in one.

She was so human, and in her humanity, described a world he recognised far more intimately than his own people had ever managed.

He saw something else, too.

“Sasha!” he called at a pause in her strokes. She turned to him, and her eyes lit up. Even now, his heart leapt. “Something’s bothering you?”