Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

He spent himself viciously in the girl whose white back strained below him. Psellos had recently brought in a whole new crop of maidservants, and every one was tall and slim and dark.

The Master knew of Rol’s infatuation, and it amused him.

Rol rolled the girl aside, wiping his forehead on the back of his arm. Arexa began dressing composedly. She was a placid girl, with a quick smile that lit up her face. How had she come to end up here? But Rol knew the answer to that question even as he asked it. Payment. Her father or her uncle or her brother would owe Psellos money, or a favor, or would want a certain deed done discreetly, and Arexa would go to the Tower to be subject to the whims therein. Rol felt suddenly ashamed, part of the machinery of Psellos’s intrigues. He handed Arexa her skirt. It was plain and homespun, but she had embroidered interlocking leaves of ivy about the hem. Like her, it smelled of lavender.

He sat on the bed with her slickness still upon him, while she dressed and tied up her hair. When she had finished she ran nimble fingers down his cheek.

“Sad tonight. What goes on in that head of yours?”

He sprang up, swung her into his arms as though she were a feather pillow, and kissed her soundly. “Apple wine and lavender and pretty girl’s thighs. Pay me no mind. And take something away with you so you may embroider more flowers about your ankles.” He set her down and fished in his bedside chest, came up with a silver minim. A week’s wages for a maid. Psellos tossed him a pouch of minims every month as a man will throw a bone to his dog, and he was told to spend it like a gentleman.

Rol dropped the coin between Arexa’s creamy breasts where they rose in the V of her blouse. Then he slapped her taut rump and told her with a grin to be on her way.

The grin winked out like a snuffed candle-match as the door closed behind her. Rol’s gaze was drawn inevitably to the sword on the wall. He crossed the small room in two strides and took it down. The curved blade was as long as his arm from fingertip to collarbone. He could not believe its lightness. It seemed to want to dance in his hand.

“What will I call you, then?” he asked it. How does one name a sword?

He thought of plunging the scimitar into Psellos’s sneering face, lopping off the aristocratic nose, putting out the eyes. The contemplation of killing dizzied him for a second. He tossed the sword onto the bed, frowning. And realizing that he was not going to make up a name for this sword, he was going to discover one.

He took to the streets in his journeyman attire. A shirt of unbleached wool, canvas breeches, high boots, and a comfortable sleeveless tunic of soft leather with large pockets. From his belt hung a stout hide purse, a double-edged dirk, and the scimitar in its ancient-looking scabbard. Over all he had thrown an oilskin cloak, black with age and long use. He would spend Psellos’s minims like a gentleman. He would get drunk and pick a fight and make a whore moan. Or pay her to moan at least. He would…

He would do whatever it took to stop thinking of Psellos and Rowen making the two-backed beast. And he would give ear to the comforting whispers of his new sword.

No-was he drunk already? Or not drunk enough. “Iron does not speak,” he said aloud, and for some reason the thought pleased him. He strode down the hilly streets of lamplit Ascari with the brisk pace of a man lucky in love.

Eight

He had been taught to be cautious in Ascari, to fade into the background. It had been part of his training. He and Rowen had slipped about a score of taverns and slop-houses up and down the city, their task to blend in, to remain so unnoticed that the other customers would not even spare them a comment on the weather. Rol had thought it an impossible feat, for Rowen was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he himself was not so unremarkable.

“We use disguises, then,” he had said to Rowen, “hooded cloaks and false beards and the like?”

“No. We go in as we are.”

“Then it’s impossible.”

“Watch me first.”

And she had glided into the Merry Leper, as quick and sure as an otter hunting eels. He had followed after, and the heads that had not turned at her passing now swiveled to regard him at once with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. No one drank in the Leper who was not a mariner or a longshoreman.

“How is it done?” he had asked her later, when she had extricated him from an ugly scene.

“It is in the mind, like a fence you put round yourself-or better yet, a veil of shadow. It blurs men’s minds, turns them aside like a buckler turning the point of a sword.”

“Yes, but how is it done?”

One of her priceless smiles. “That is something you will have to find out for yourself. It is enough to know that it can be done, that it is in you to do it.”

Well, he had done it, on occasion, or thought he had. It was a case of visualizing that veil of shadow, and then seeing men’s regard turn toward it like bright spears of interest. When that happened, the shadow hardened, and rebuffed them, and they slid away. Easier when the watchers were drunk, or when they came one and two at a time. What he had not yet mastered was the concentrated regard of an entire roomful of people turning to look at the latest incomer. All men did it; it was a habit of nature. The only way Rol could defend himself against that many eyes was to enter directly behind someone else, and let them take the brunt of the drinkers’ curiosity.

But tonight he did not give a rat’s behind how many men and women noted his coming and going. The sword was a comforting weight at his hip, and he could feel the eagerness in the blade, the hot desire to leave the scabbard. He laughed aloud for he knew not what, whilst the folk on the streets looked askance at the tall youth and his strange eyes, the black cloak rising in his wake.

A soft rain had come in off the sea so that the cobbles were shining at Rol’s feet, but the street traders merely moved beneath their striped and checkered canvas awnings and the rest of the traffic ignored it. Cartsway, the main thoroughfare, wound through the hills like a silken sash abandoned on a rumpled bed. At the main crossroads iron braziers were flaming with charcoal, and the City Watch stood yawning and grumbling among themselves. The Watch had just changed, and these were the Nightmen. Higher paid than the Daywatch, they were also of more dubious character, and it was best to steer clear of them. Their captain was in Psellos’s pay, but his hold over his subordinates was often tenuous.

They knew Rol, had been apprised of his identity by Psellos six months before. They watched him as he passed by, and Rol saw them spit, out of the corner of his eye. He smiled, the strange, fey mood still upon him.

He turned off Cartsway as the rain grew heavier. Crowds of cloaked, ill-smelling townsfolk jostled and cursed amid the narrower streets, all trying to steer clear of the open central drains which ran with ordure and were alive with rats. It was spring, and in the woods up in the foothills the primroses would be out, but here in the city the seasons counted for less. One could drink beer in the street in comfort if it was summer, and on the coldest winter nights many taverns charged an entrance fee for those desperate for warmth, but that was all.

A beggar, his eyes mere shriveled raisins in his head, held out a yellow-nailed hand in blind hope. Rol dropped a minim into it, and the beggar gaped, feeling the rare weight of silver. “Thanks to your honor! A blessing on your house!” He would be lucky not to be killed for it before the night was out.

Eastside, the lower quarter of the city that faced toward Dennifrey. Rowen had taken him here a few times, to let him grow accustomed to the brash streetlife, the insistent hawkers, the predatory gangs, the confidence tricksters. It seemed amazing sometimes that ordinary, honest traders and businessmen could operate in Ascari, but of course that was all down to the King of Thieves, and the price of his protection. A feather pinned above the doorway of a shop meant that no footpad or urchin would trouble the place. If he did, he would be found with a slit throat in short order. Some of the older establishments, such as inns, had been under the Thief-King’s protection so long that the feather had been carved in stone or wood, and was placed above the entrance as a badge of pride, a guarantee that no one within would be smothered in his bed. The Feathermen, as common folk often called those of the Guild of Thieves, could drink their way from hilltop to harbor (it was said) and never pay for a drop, such was the power of their patronage.