Lora of Two Worlds

The other keeper had gone in to walk the stores, come out again, and locked the door, meaning to leave with Gower.

Then came the hoarse ”Hold!” He turned — and there stood the crew that had come that day to take over the birth-tribute, their leader the man with the face like a demon out of a doom-painting.

Not that he could help the ugliness — he wore the full beard to bury the two knife-scars on his face, the scar-tissue standing up out of the skin; it only made him the fiercer to look at.

They were retainers Joss Wray kept — fed well, housed well, against the hour when they must be useful.

Today was the ninth of the tenth month. The pickup was appointed for this same hour tomorrow: in at the Thornsgate, straight to the Crown Granary west of the Great Palace.

Scarface Locke had picked himself a guest room overlooking the warehouse that held the birth-tribute.

He rose early by lifelong habit, meaning to go out and work his fists on the open ground — and there was a crowd of men round the warehouse, moving crates.

His heart jumped — then he looked again, and it was the warehouse next door to the birth-tribute’s.

He called the others over, and they stood at the window counting: fifty-six crates carried out — thirty-odd fewer than their own. Common crates look alike, sure enough; only great houses with grandeur to show off have painting done on theirs.

”Brother Locke, you worry too much. This is the vice-minister’s freight — if the Eastern Inn dared mislay it, the vice-minister would tear the roof off the place.”

”The birth-tribute is no small matter. Better to watch it close.”

Scarface Locke, when he came to the depot yesterday, had walked the stores and verified the goods himself: eighty-nine crates, not one over, not one under. The fifty-six next door, he’d heard, had arrived a day earlier.

Next door?

It came back to him all at once: the storeys of these depots sometimes ran through whole — they walled off the pillars for different clients, but the partition walls left doors in them, for great clients who took a whole storey and moved about inside it.

Scarface Locke flung up a hand: ”We go down. We check the stores.”

Corin, stopped in his tracks, glanced once at Shawn — everyone was frozen by the man. He smiled:

”And what would this lord have of us? We’re for Lohenheim — any later, and we’ll miss the next station.”

”Hmph! Keeper — we want to check the stores.”

A guest might check his stores at any hour — depot rule. Gower and the other keeper traded one look; on their key-chains hung the key to the next-door stores too.

Gower turned to the little servant boy holding the tally box: ”Go — tell the innkeeper to enter a stores-check on the F sign. Gann and I will open up.”

The boy ran off with the tally box in his arms. Gower said:

”Bring out your manifest and tags, and of course you may check. Only — two men inside, no more. Else, if anything goes missing, whose account does it fall on — yours, or the depot’s?”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

A fair asking. Scarface Locke turned to the county lieutenant Neil, whom Goldwater had left behind:

”Give them theirs. You come in with me.”

Neil pulled the tags and the manifest out of his breast in a hurry, opened them, and passed them to Gower.

Gower took them. The manifest was upside down. He gave Neil one look: So the man can’t read? He folded the sheet and handed it back: ”Gann, open up.”

Now this county lieutenant Neil — he had been born Cornelius: ”corn in the barn, and the heart at ease.” His ma and pa had hoped that with him in the world, the whole family, old and young, would never know hunger again.

Cornelius couldn’t read so much as one character. His brother-in-law Goldwater had made county justice, and he had wangled himself a military post — county lieutenant — at the shire court.

In the shire court, a man at least has to write his own name — and he’d found ”Cornelius” a thicket of letters, too many by half. So he’d gone and renamed himself Neil. Much easier now.

Scarface Locke walked into the stores, and the first thing he went for was the partition wall. A door stood in it — locked, and the lock hung on the far side.

”Lieutenant Neil — count.”

Scarface Locke swept the crates one look over: stacked neat and square, ten to a row, nine rows fore and aft — no counting needed, the eye did the arithmetic. What he wanted was Neil walking the back rows, seeing nothing sat wrong with the crates behind.

Neil’s finger pointed along the crates, his mouth keeping the count — few letters in his head, but numbers gave him no trouble.

The tags hung at every crate’s lock, and Neil looked hard at the letters on them: all one and the same.

”Eighty-nine crates. Not one missing.”

He had been over-nervous all along — his neighbor’s goods go out, and he suspects the man of stealing his crates. Neil laughed inside: a hired retainer, carrying a chicken feather as though it were the royal warrant.

He waved a hand at the two depot keepers:

”Let those people go. Can’t have it said we lean on our standing to crowd the small folk.”

Corin cracked his whip: ”Move out! Home to Lohenheim!”

The train rolled slowly forward. A mile east or less, it turned off a branch road and bore north — and only two empty carts went on east.

At the fork, in the harvested wheat field, a crew of men came out from behind the straw stacks: with wooden forks they pitched the straw onto the empty carts, and others followed the northbound train with branches, sweeping the wheel-tracks out of the road.

And so the fifty-six crates never went far away at all — they sat down in Greyling town, on the north bank of the Weaver.

The Silver Shield kept eighteen garrisons, and Greyling was not one of them — yet a thousand-man force was posted there, and no mistake.

Jingmere and Sanford, hard by Greyling, held the royal sepulchres; and this unit, on the Silver Shield’s books but doing no Silver Shield garrison duty, was the Royal Sepulchre Guard.

The court had marked out farmland at Greyling for these thousand men: they farmed it themselves, and every day they sent men riding patrol among the sepulchres.

The Guard’s commander was Matt Cunliffe. At the turn of the year he had been the Silver Shield’s Flying Steed Envoy, forever at the King’s elbow.

In the day of the King’s great rage — when Voss would have sent soldiers to butcher out the Duke of Zahn’s and Chancellor Sidney’s households entire — it was Cunliffe who stood out against it, and stood on the King’s handing the matter of the treason to the outer-court chancellors for deliberation.

That was what opened the way for Lord Darcy and his party to plead the two men’s cause — and the executions came down to exile.

Cunliffe’s own road afterward was no smooth one. He had asked for the posting himself — come out to Greyling, to guard the sepulchres.

Once the swap of the birth-tribute was resolved on, Leon had quietly sent Linn to find Cunliffe. This move aimed at Voss’s crew and no one else, and Cunliffe had given his hand to it quickly.

No place was safer than a Silver Shield sepulchre garrison’s camp. Ten leagues north of Augustburg, the gold and silver ingots and the copper coin set up their temporary home.

Back at the Eastern Inn, Joss Wray’s retainers had gone back to their rooms.

There was still a day to run. The stores behind the depot had their own watch — in or out by goods-token only — and slipping in was no easy thing.

These hired blades off the rivers and lakes, not one of whom would bow to the next — Wray had put Scarface Locke over them, and the rest would gladly watch him stumble:

”All this torment for nothing! Does he think himself one of the great officers — up at the dawn bell for morning court? Calls a man out of bed before the sky’s light.”

”The job goes well, and the credit’s his alone. The job goes wrong, and not one of us runs clear.”

”And how could it go wrong? Half a mile off the city, under the palace wall — robbed there, and our luck would be rotten past rotten. Short of the Luck-God himself sweeping down to carry off the stakes — could these heavy crates all melt into earth?”

They all burst out laughing.