Chapter 10 – Hunters on the Trail #4
There was nothing suspicious about this reply.
Like most things the duchess said, it was polite, noncommittal, and deflective, shifting the attention of the conversation away from herself.
But alerted by keen, predatory social instincts, Mionet was watching as something flashed through the duchess’s doll face, so quick she would have missed it if she blinked.
Something worse than sadness. Something that was not longing for her absent husband.
It was an emotion that Lady Mionet Verr knew so well, she recognized it in a single glance.
Despair.
Like a bloodhound, Mionet scented a trail.
* * *
The knock on his door came as Justenin was sitting down to his luncheon.
“My lady,” he said when he opened it to find the duchess standing there, with Leonin and Davi standing at a discreet distance.
“I hope I’m not bothering you,” she said apologetically. “I came for that book you mentioned? About hallow knights?”
The matter of hallows had been much on her mind since Brother Oleare had arrived, and she and Justenin had discussed the oath several times already, analyzing the words for all possible shades of meaning.
Or rather, he had analyzed it, and she had listened, with the abstracted little frown that meant she had not contemplated it sufficiently to voice an opinion .
“Certainly,” he said, and left his door open as he went to fetch the book from the shelves that covered the entire rear wall of his cottage.
Justenin was a meticulous man by nature, and he had made Remin a promise, so even as he carefully located the half-dozen relevant passages, he studied her, identifying the fault lines of weakness and frailty with the force of long habit.
There were many. Youth, na?veté, and timidity were the most obvious, but Mionet was not the only one that suspected there were darker secrets behind those guileless eyes.
It was tempting to poke at her and see what might come shambling out of the corners.
But the purity of her intellect restrained him.
He had never met anyone whose mind was so uncolored by the world; a child prisoner who knew nothing beyond the walls of the place she had grown up, and a young woman almost entirely lacking in preconception.
He did not want to interfere with that unless he had no choice.
Though if the shadows under her eyes got any darker, he was going to have to interfere just a little.
“—and this one,” he said, finding the last relevant passage. “You should note the variations in the wording of the oath as well. Some of it is regional, some of it is simple evolution of the language, but it seems to me that much of the oath of a hallow is what the two parties make of it.”
“Thank you,” she said, marking the places with her fingers. Bidding him farewell, she returned to her not-yet-hallowed guardsmen and left Justenin to get back to his own work.
It was his habit to address his correspondence over luncheon, and Justenin took his seat at a small table under the window, slipping on the pair of spectacles he wore when he was reading.
He was young to need such things, but his eyes had never been the same after the hungry winter in Iverlach.
And somehow, that felt right. At thirty-one, he felt he had already lived two lives, and had many yet to go.
That was the work before him now, the machine he had begun building long before Sir Darrigault of Ghis ever went to the capital.
A construct of people and information, built by humble people with very great grievances, and Justenin had been laying its foundations for long, patient years.
He had Remin’s blessing for this work, but though the Duke of Andelin would be its greatest beneficiary, he had no notion how deep a game his spymaster was playing.
One day, the Duke of Andelin would be the wealthiest and most powerful man in the Empire. And with his rise would come a vengeance so lasting and terrible, it would crack the Empire in two.
And then, perhaps, Justenin would have peace.
Quietly, his quill moved over the page, writing instructions in careful code.
He had no one in position to act—yet—and there was little action to be taken, all those miles away in Segoile.
But the time to build so terrible a machine was not the moment that it was needed.
The Emperor was not content to leave his enemies alone, building their strength on the edge of his Empire.
And so Justenin would labor against him, using every lever at his command.
Beginning with the scholars.
He had settled them comfortably in one of the new townhouses by the market, with the single precious copy of Duchess Andelin’s treatise and a quantity of ink and paper that made Edemir grumble.
The scholars had made profligate use of both when Justenin arrived shortly after sunset to escort them to the wall.
“The palisade tonight, I hope?” Master Forgess said pointedly, buckling a heavy toolbelt around his ample middle.
“With the stipulation that you may bring only one journeyman each, and all of you must stay within the ring of torchlight,” Justenin replied, dismounting his horse.
The scholars had been complaining for days that they could hardly observe the devils from the height of the city wall, and in the interests of furthering House Andelin’s relations with the Tower, Justenin had taken their part in the argument.
Which meant he got to play nursemaid every other night, to make sure they didn’t get themselves or anyone else killed in the excess of their enthusiasm.
“We thank you for your efforts, sir knight,” Master Torigne said, beckoning to one of the four journeymen. “Do you think we will have a better look at the creatures from the north wall?”
“As well as any other direction,” Justenin replied, leading the way up the road on foot.
Purple twilight stretched across the sky overhead and the fire of sunset was fading behind them as they made their way along footpaths to the wall, through one of the as-yet-untamed stretches of forest within Tresingale.
It was an eerie place in the twilight, especially with devils calling from beyond the wall.
“Strangler,” he said aloud, as another clicking chirp sounded, a noise that could almost be mistaken for a bird. “They always call at dusk.”
“Perhaps communicating with each other?” Master Forgess was first as they approached the palisade, heaving himself up the ladder.
The north palisade was fifteen feet high at its tallest point, and the long ladders creaked and shook as each man ascended.
Justenin turned immediately to haul it up after him, handing it down the line to be hooked under the rough platform.
He had stood enough watches that the thought of leaving a ladder at his back made his skin crawl.
Especially when there were already three ghouls on the outside of the palisade, working at its timbers like beavers.
“Thought you’d like to see ’em, master,” said one of the nearby guards, his lips curling. “Cracking all their teeth apart, the stupid buggers.”
“Do they really? You have observed damaged teeth?” Master Forgess immediately bent over the side of the low wall, making Justenin inwardly hiss and move to grab for him if necessary.
“Black blood on the wood, and missing teeth on some of the carcasses,” he replied. “We always thought ghouls the stupidest of the devils, but it is interesting to see the lengths they will go to kill us.”
“No sense of self-preservation? How fascinating,” Master Torigne murmured, and Juste glanced at him, one eyebrow lifting.
“No,” was all he said aloud, shifting aside to leave them to their speculation.
He had forgotten how dull it was, standing a watch.
As the sky darkened, the pitch of the conversation lowered, and Justenin paced back and forth along the same twenty feet of platform, a restless habit.
Night watch was dull, but also fraught, for the guards had to remain alert for stranglers slinking through the slightest shadow, and a moment’s inattention could mean a human corpse by morning.
The scholars were not making it any easier.
“I must ask you to keep your voices down,” Justenin repeated, with great patience.
“You wished to observe the devils; observe them. If you have questions that cannot wait, please address me rather than the guards. That is not a wolf demon. You would know it by its eyes before you saw anything else at this distance. ”
With Juste’s poor eyesight, he could not have discerned anything more than that poisonous green glow.
All that night, he found himself remembering sections of Ophele’s treatise, from her descriptions of the devils’ calls to her speculations about their function.
Master Forgess hunched behind the low wall like a hunter at a blind and Master Torigne bent periodically to murmur to him, exciting exclamations that forced Justenin to hiss at them again to be quiet.
If they were frustrated that there were so few devils to be seen, they could only blame themselves.
It was just lucky for everyone that a strangler decided to try its luck further down the wall a few hours before dawn. A shout, a hissing shriek, and then a sudden cacophony of thuds, clangs, and swearing as the nearest guards all lunged together to subdue the creature.
“Stars, is that one of them?” Master Forgess leaped to his feet and would have raced off down the wall at once if Justenin hadn’t yanked him back. “We need to see it, tell them not to ki—”
There was another garbled shriek, abruptly terminated.
“I will not,” Juste said, low. “It is not worth the risk. Often, one strangler will serve as a distraction for the others, and everyone must be doubly on their guard, or it might be you that finds one of them coming through your window some moonless night. I will take you to examine the corpse once everyone is back at their posts.”