Rob Scott - Lessek_s Key

‘He’s dead, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘The almor killed him at Seer’s Peak.’ Sallax seemed certain he knew what had happened.

Brexan was about to correct him and then decided against it: there was nothing to be gained by confusing his memories. She felt a chill thinking of Versen, though, and was embarrassed that she had been diving into bed with a stranger for the past several days. She knew he would have laughed, but she was still embarrassed that he might be watching her, checking in from the Northern Forest.

‘He talked about you all the time,’ Brexan said.

‘He and Sallax are good friends.’

‘He said you emptied out his house when he turned two hundred Twinmoons.’

‘We set everything up outside, exactly as it had been inside, everything but one boot. That we left in the middle of the floor. Then we hid in the woods to watch. Versen was very angry.’

‘You said we.’ She didn’t want to push him, but this was the slip she had been hoping to hear. ‘Sallax?’

‘Yes. Garec, Brynne, Mika, Jerond, Sallax, and the old man,’ he said. ‘We emptied out his house.’

‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sallax.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Yes, you did,’ Brexan sighed. It wasn’t much, but it felt like progress. She didn’t know how to treat him. His physical health was returning, and when his shoulder healed, he would be nearly as fit and as strong as before the initial fracture, but his mental health was not much better than when she first saw him, when he had dragged her into the sunlit ferns.

‘He’s dead now, like the others?’

‘Versen is dead, yes.’

‘The almor killed him at Seer’s Peak.’

‘Sallax,’ Brexan decided to take another risk, ‘do you remember the fat man from the warehouse?’

At that, the big Ronan’s countenance changed. His body tensed and his mouth split into a wicked grin. ‘Yes, he almost killed Brynne, a long time ago. She was sick for many Twinmoons. Ren was the boy who led her to him.’

‘Ren?’

‘I killed him.’

There it was again. ‘You did?’

‘Sallax did, yes. I used a dirk, slipped it right in. He died in the street in Estrad, but I never found the fat man. He will be alive when Brynne gets here. Brynne will kill him slowly.’

It sounded like the fat man had raped Brynne when she was just a child. Brexan shuddered. ‘I have my own account with the fat man as well. His name is Carpello Jax, and I know where he lives. I know which ships are his and which warehouses he uses to store his cargoes. He runs ships up and down the Ravenian Sea, from Strandson across to Pellia. I’m not sure what he’s shipping or why, but he serves Prince Malagon. He often moors here in Orindale – maybe he has some arrangement with the customs officers down on that southern wharf. I’ve watched him while you’ve been asleep. He has cut his hair, grown a beard, lost some weight, and sliced the mole off his nose, but it’s still him, the bloated whoreson.’

‘Did you kill him?’ Sallax was obviously agitated at the possibility that Brynne wouldn’t be the one to torture and kill the man.

‘No, just watching. It’s easy to move through this city unseen; you learned that.’

Sallax nodded, recalling a huge overturned wine cask outside a rowdy tavern.

‘I wasn’t very good in the beginning,’ Brexan told him. ‘I would be dead if you hadn’t been watching that first night, but I’ve learned a lot. Unless Carpello ships out again – which I doubt, he’s not much of a seaman – he’ll be here when we find Brynne. But Sallax, I need you to think about Gilmour and Brynne, and Garec and the two foreigners. Where were they going after they lost Versen? Welstar Palace?’

‘Brynne will kill Carpello.’

‘Yes, we can all do it together, but we have to find them first.’ Brexan had found no sign of them in Orindale, but she knew Jacrys hadn’t either; maybe they’d moved further north – or if they survived the wraith attack in the Blackstones, perhaps they went back down south, to Strandson or one of the port villages in western Rona. The longer she spent in Orindale, the more she thought the odds of finding them were slimming to nothing. ‘Sallax, can you remember anything about where they were going?’

‘Orindale,’ he said simply. If he did know anything else, it was lost in his damaged mind.

‘You rest now,’ Brexan said. ‘We’ll get some food after the midday aven. I’m going to check on Carpello now – I want to know what he’s doing today.’

‘Don’t kill him.’

‘I won’t. We’ll wait for Brynne.’

That night, while Sallax slept Brexan sat staring into the glass, watching her reflection through tired eyes. By the flicker of the bedside candle she strained to make out her shorn hair and drawn features. Perhaps it was better that there was little light.

It had been a productive day: Brexan was encouraged that Sallax had spoken of himself in the first person for the first time: saying I was a huge step forward. She knew nothing about mental health, but she was all he had. She wouldn’t press him to remember anything painful – rushing his recovery wouldn’t help.

She had made friends with some of the stevedores working the southern docks; though none of them had seen anyone resembling the partisans, a few copper Mareks had elicited a lot of information about Carpello’s business dealings, routines and schedules.

Once she’d followed the fat merchant to a brothel in a nice part of the city – at first she thought he had been calling on friends, or business associates, but the parade of well-dressed men going in and out at regular intervals gave the game away. As she stood watching the windows, she thought of Brynne, a child taken against her will, and nausea hit her hard. She was very much looking forward to killing Carpello. It was taking all her willpower to keep from breaking into the whorehouse, kicking down the fat man’s door and chopping him up right there on top of whatever trollop had been coerced into servicing him.

When he left, his frilly tunic askew, she followed him back to his apartments. She could have finished him quickly and quietly, right there in the stairwell of his own home, but instead, she let him live another day.

As the unbearable need for revenge washed over Brexan again, she turned from the glass and began undressing. She nearly leaped out of her skin when she saw Sallax materialise out of the darkness behind her.

‘Good rutting Pragans!’ she shrieked, grabbing her tunic to cover herself, somewhat inadequately. ‘You aren’t supposed to see me like this!’

Sallax loomed over her, a look of pensive concentration on his face.

Brexan backed away. ‘Get back to bed, Sallax – just because I’m out of my clothes you can’t-’

He reached out to grip her wrist.

‘Ow!’ She tried to twist out of his grasp. ‘Sallax, please, don’t do this.’ All of a sudden she was a little scared, but Sallax didn’t do anything more, he simply stared at her muscular, outstretched arm.

Finally he said, ‘Where did you get this?’

‘What? Get what?’ Brexan’s heart was still pounding nineteen to the dozen. ‘This.’ He turned her wrist back, exposing the strange bit of jewellery she had taken from the corpse on the salt flats. It had cleaned up nicely and she’d worn it buckled about her wrist ever since. Sallax must have seen it hundreds of times over the past few days; she didn’t understand why it caught his attention now.

‘I found it.’ She hesitated, not really wanting to admit that she had purloined it from a dead body.

‘Where?’

‘On the marsh, north of the harbour. I was out there looking for you one day last Twinmoon when I found it – it was so beautiful, and so unusual. I thought I’d find a jeweller in the city to tell me what it was, but I never had the chance to show it to anyone.’ Brexan was embarrassed: she had been caught, a thief flaunting her stolen goods. She had not imagined for a moment that Sallax would recognise the small circular bracelet.