The Broken Tower--A Novel, page 11
“Oil for his hair,” Cleric said, nodding at Lukash. “The Morgeni are secretly a very vain people.”
“You have clearly never been to Morgou,” Lukash said, lightly. Judah said nothing about the smell, or the dead boy, because what could she have said? And she sensed a tension underneath their banter that had never been there in the Ghostwood. When they went downstairs to eat she saw the way both of the men’s eyes darted around the room and realized that their tension was with Black Lake, not each other. The innkeeper gave them bowls of rice and greens, with rosy slices of fish and a dark, spicy sauce to pour over the top. Cleric ordered wine, Lukash ale. Judah asked for water—after her experience at the winemaker’s, she wasn’t interested in being drunk—but the innkeeper frowned and one of the men kicked her under the table. So instead, she asked for ale, and ignored it when it came.
“I hate lowlander towns,” Cleric said, and poked at his rice. “What’s the point of rice, anyway? It tastes like nothing.”
“Fills a belly,” Lukash said.
“It’s better than those damn mushrooms,” said Judah, who was actually enjoying the meal immensely. The fish she knew was dry and strong and oily. This was delicate and fresh. “What was that building in the town square, with the blue tree painted over the door and the man sweeping out front?”
“It’s not a tree,” Cleric said, grimly stabbing at a knot of greens. “It’s a scourge.”
“They don’t have Elenesian Refuges in Highfall?” Lukash asked, and when she shook her head, he said, “They’re healers.”
“Among other things,” Cleric said, “and the reason you don’t have Elenesian Refuges in Highfall is because somebody who lived there was wise enough to banish them.” He nodded at Lukash. “The Morgeni were the same way.”
“The Morgeni have their own healers,” Lukash said.
“Why would Highfall kick out a guild of healers?”
Cleric’s mouth did something strange, as if he were both smiling and wincing at the same time and trying to suppress both. “Because they’re also zealots. The Elenesians believe that the god Eleni sends us the life we’re meant to have. If it’s winter, we’re meant to feel the cold. If it’s raining, we’re meant to be wet. If we catch fire, we’re meant to burn.”
“Is that what happened to your hand?” she said.
Cleric put his hand under the table and didn’t answer. Lukash said, “The Elenesians run Refuges in nearly every town west of the Barriers, and many towns east of them. They’re good healers, and they’ll heal anyone who needs it.”
“Their healing comes with a price,” Cleric said. “A hearty dose of godswill for everyone that walks through the door.”
She frowned. “You told me the godswill saved my life.”
“It kept you from dying. There is a distinct difference. God’s will, you understand? It’s Eleni’s will that you’re hurt, or sick. It’s His will that you feel pain. Any other healer, the Slonimi or the Apothecary Guild or any common herbwife from any common village, they’ll give you opium or willow bark or whiskey first thing to stop the pain. But the Elenesians want you to feel it. Doesn’t matter if you have a broken leg or you’ve been speared through, they think if it happened, the god Eleni meant for you to feel every moment of it. Your brain might want to pass out, shut down. But the Elenesians won’t let that happen.” Cleric shook his head. “Godswill keeps your brain and your body together, whether they should be or not. That poor wretch in front of the Refuge back in the square? Maybe he came into the Refuge with a broken arm. Or—there’s this tiny organ in your body, like a finger off your gut. It doesn’t do anything, but sometimes it gets infected. Any healer with basic surgical training can go in and take it out. But only the Elenesians will make sure you’re conscious and feeling while they do it. And if it breaks you—if it sends you mad, like that poor man with the broom—guess what they call that?”
“God’s will,” Judah said, horrified. “I see.”
“You don’t see,” Cleric said, his tone glacial. “You can’t see, until you’ve experienced a pain so terrible that you would rather die—that you should die—rather than feel it. Until you’ve begged to be allowed to die, and the people taking care of you patted your head and chastised you for not being appropriately grateful for the suffering Eleni has given you.” Then he clamped his mouth shut, as if there were further words inside him, and they needed to be bitten back. Judah could see his jaw muscles working. Then he stood up. “I’ll see you in the morning. Leave the room unlocked, eh?”
Lukash nodded. Cleric turned to Judah. “There’s a vial for you on the windowsill upstairs. Take it before you go to sleep.” Then, as bitter and nasty as the elixir itself, he added, “It’s god’s will.”
He left. “I guess I shouldn’t have asked,” Judah said.
Lukash took a long pull on his ale. “He would have gone out anyway. Whenever we find civilization, he goes in search of trouble. Are you done eating?”
She looked down at her fish. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”
“Pass it over,” he said, and finished it off in three big bites. Then he said, “You were dying. The godswill was the best chance you had. Just because the Elenesians use it in an evil way doesn’t make it inherently evil.”
Right then, the innkeeper approached, holding one of the bulbous things. It looked like a very small, odd samovar, with the flame on top, and, on the bottom—where the flame should be—a glass bowl of what looked like blue peppercorns. The whole thing was framed in brass, with loops on the outside holding tongs and delicate, long-stemmed glass bulbs. “Glory?” the innkeeper said. His smile was friendly, satisfied, as if they shared a secret.
“Thank you,” Lukash said, before Judah could say anything, “but no. We’re tired.”
“Glory will help you sleep,” the innkeeper said.
“We’ve been on the road for nearly a month. I don’t believe we’ll have any trouble.” Lukash stood, and looked at Judah. “Shall we go upstairs?”
The innkeeper’s gaze was decidedly unfriendly now. Judah nodded.
Their room was small, with a bed pushed against each of the three walls. One was a trundle bed the innkeeper had pulled from underneath one of the others. Lukash dropped to sit on the smaller of the two cots and had his boots nearly all the way off before he noticed that she was still standing. “Take whichever bed you like. By the time Cleric comes back he won’t care where he sleeps.” He peeled off a woolen sock. His toes were long, and the one in the middle was missing.
Tentatively, Judah sat down on the largest bed. “What’s glory? Bad?”
He curled his long toes tightly, spread them out again, and shrugged. “It’s like godswill. Not inherently evil, but the cartel uses it in evil ways.”
“So glad you brought me here, then.”
“The next closest town was a month’s travel away,” he said, with a wry, tired grin. “Do you like us that much?”
“I feel like I can safely say that I like you both better than anyone else I’ve met this side of the Barriers.” As she took off her own boots, the bed rustled and compacted under her, but not very much. Straw, or sheep clippings. Still better than a forest floor. Lukash stretched out, his eyes closed and his hands laced together on his stomach. She could smell that faint herbal aroma again, the same one in the dead boy’s memory. She was almost certain that it had been Lukash’s arm that snapped the boy’s neck the night he died, but she wasn’t afraid. If Lukash—or Cleric, for that matter—had wanted to hurt her, they would have, long before now. And for all she knew, the dead boy was a vestige of the godswill, or the near-death state they’d found her in, or some weird echo of those watching multitudes she’d sensed in her contact with Gavin. “So what should I say tomorrow when I go to this evil cartel for help?”
“Will anybody in Highfall pay to have you back?”
Gavin, I brought food.
Gavin wasn’t in Highfall. But she was quite sure the Seneschal was. “Not that I want to see.”
“Then lie,” he said, eyes still closed. “Say you don’t remember anything. Tell them you were hit in the head and we rescued you.”
“Does Cleric use glory?”
“Alcohol is cheaper.” He was silent for a moment. She wondered if he’d fallen asleep. But then he said, “Something builds up in him. Enough pebbles make a rockslide. Been that way as long as I’ve known him.”
“How long is that?”
Lukash considered. “Five years? Maybe more. I met him in the north. He was cheating at cards.”
“So naturally you befriended him.”
“I was cheating at cards, too. The other men we were playing with objected. We discovered that we fight well together. I’m going to sleep now.”
Then he rolled over, and did just that. It took a long time for Judah’s muscles to relax so she could follow his example.
* * *
She was jerked awake in the middle of the night by a loud crash. The candle was out and for a moment she was too confused to do more than stare into the darkness. She sensed movement, heard voices, and scrambled across the bed, head swimming, to throw open the wooden window shutters and let in the light of the streetlamp outside.
Lukash was holding Cleric upright, one of the Northerner’s long arms draped over his shoulders. The healer didn’t seem able to stand on his own, lurching from side to side as if the room was a ship and the waters were stormy. The innkeeper scowled in the doorway. Quickly, Judah went to Cleric’s other side and took his free arm. The smell of alcohol—not anything as refined as ale but cheap, rotgut whiskey, the kind Gavin used to buy from the guards before he discovered wine—was so strong that Judah’s eyes stung. “Bed,” Lukash said, and they carried him the three steps it took to drop him down onto the thin mattress Judah had just vacated.
Cleric cried out. Lukash lit the candle, and Judah saw that Cleric had been beaten. His jaw was distended and his nose bloodied. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut. But it was his chest he clutched at, moaning.
“Too much noise,” the innkeeper said. “If he’s hurt, take him to the Elenesians.”
Quickly, Judah pulled her satchel out from under the bed and found one of the coins she’d taken from the winemaker. “He’ll be quiet for the rest of the night. Take this for your trouble,” she said, trying to sound as much like a courtier as possible as she passed it to the innkeeper.
The innkeeper looked reluctantly at the coin, and then at the man writhing on the bed. Lukash was trying to pull Cleric’s shirt over his head so he could see the injury. Cleric fought him. “You’ll leave in the morning,” the innkeeper said.
Judah wondered how disapproving the innkeeper would be if Cleric was off his head on the inn’s gloryseed. “Most assuredly.” She nudged the man out the door, then closed the door behind him and locked it for good measure. Meanwhile, Lukash had successfully removed Cleric’s shirt. Judah drew in a harsh breath. The left side of his chest was covered by a huge purple-red mark, and the rest of his torso was dotted with smaller bruises that looked, to Judah, exactly like boot prints.
Cleric pushed Lukash away. “’S just a broken rib,” he said, slurring, and letting himself slump down onto his side. “L’keep ’til morning.”
“I hope it was worth it,” Lukash said.
Cleric’s eyes were already closed. He smiled dreamily. “So worth it,” he mumbled, or something that sounded like it. A moment later he was snoring.
Lukash yawned and turned back to his own cot. Judah stared at him. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”
“I did do something. I made sure he hadn’t been stabbed. Go back to sleep. He’ll be sober in the morning.” Lukash blew out the candle. Judah curled up on the trundle. Cleric’s snoring was loud. When she finally slept again, it was thin and restless.
* * *
As Lukash had predicted, Cleric was sober in the morning. He was also in a terrible mood. When Judah woke, he was sitting shirtless on the edge of the bed, wrapping a long strip of cloth around his bruised chest. “You’re staring,” he said.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“I feel even better.” He stood up, gingerly. As he turned around to pick his shirt up from the bed, she saw that his back was crossed with long scars reaching diagonally down from each shoulder. They looked old. At some point in his life, Cleric had been whipped, or caned. She had been caned, too. Before she realized what she was doing, her hand lifted, touched the place on the back of her shoulder where the tip of her own scars should have been.
“Where’s Lukash?” she said.
“Downstairs eating breakfast,” Cleric said, trying to work his arms into his shirt. “More delicious rice, no doubt.”
“Here.” Judah stood up to help him. He flinched when her fingers made contact with his skin, but let her guide his shirt over his scarred shoulders. His apothecary box lay open on the bed, its contents scattered across the blanket. When his shirt was on, and buttoned, he leaned down stiffly to pack it up again. Judah moved to help again and he pushed her hand away.
“I can do it,” he said, crossly. “Lukash said you paid off the innkeeper last night to keep him from sending me to the Refuge.”
“It was nothing.”
“Thanks for nothing, then.”
She sat down on the trundle and began to put her own boots on. “What happened last night, anyway? Who did that to you?”
“Where does your rich family live?” he said.
“I don’t have a rich family.”
“And nobody did anything to me.” He closed the apothecary box and slipped it into his satchel. “Isn’t sharing nice?”
Downstairs, the largest bowl on the table in front of Lukash was, in fact, filled with rice. But there was also bacon and boiled eggs and three tiny plates of dark red jam, each holding no more than a spoonful. “Eat,” Lukash said, by way of greeting. “We paid for it already. How are your ribs?”
This last was to Cleric, who only said, “They’ll heal.”
Judah saw a coffeepot on the table. The smell of it mixed with the bacon and eggs and it all smelled delightfully breakfastish. She hadn’t had coffee since before the coup in Highfall. It tasted burned without milk or sugar. After he’d picked at some bacon, Cleric reached into his pocket, pulled out a small flask and handed it to Judah. “Here. Enough godswill for a week. You’re at a half dose now. Keep that up for a day or two and then wean yourself off it. Gradually, mind you.”
She grimaced and pocketed the flask. “You’re not going with me to the town hall?”
“Nothing in it for us,” Cleric said. “There’s no reward. Highfall’s too far away.”
“We’ll walk you there, at least. After we’re done eating,” Lukash said. From the way he seemed determined to eat everything in the inn’s larder, that might be a while. His copper-colored eyes darted up to her and he seemed on the cusp of saying something else.
But then the door opened, and sun streamed in. Or would have, were it not blocked by six large human shapes. Men, as it turned out. Guards, as it further turned out, wearing Black Lake tunics. Cleric went silent. Across the table from her, Lukash stiffened. When the guards came straight to their table, she was the least surprised she had ever been.
“The Town Master has ordered you brought to the hall,” said the one in front, wearing the most heavily decorated uniform.
Neither of the men moved, so Judah didn’t, either. “What’s going on?” Cleric said, his voice once again as syrupy and pleasant as her earliest memories of it. “We’re just travelers. We’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Then you have nothing to fear,” the guard said.
* * *
The Town Hall was the building with three towers, opposite the main gate. They passed under the lintel—it was, somewhat incongruously, carved with three-petaled flowers—and were taken into a small room, the single door of which was locked from the outside. Their packs and satchels were taken away from them, as were their knives and the flask of godswill in Judah’s pocket. Then they were left alone.
“If you see an opportunity to save yourself,” Lukash said, “take it,” and Cleric nodded.
“Save myself?” Judah said, startled. “You think we’re in actual danger?”
“Almost certainly,” Lukash said, and then they said no more.
After an interminable amount of time, the guards came for them. The room where they were brought was wide and unfurnished except for a wooden desk, behind which sat a man wearing a velvet tunic and a heavy gold chain. He was older and clean-shaven, with hair thinned to almost nothing on the top of his head. When they entered, he ignored them. The guards merely waited, doing nothing to draw his attention. Judah realized that the room wasn’t unfurnished at all, but was being used exactly as intended: so that a crowd had plenty of room to stand in uncomfortable silence while waiting for this man—clearly the Town Master—to attend them. Which he was apparently in no rush to do. He was writing something on a piece of paper in front of him. Judah noticed that he had a faded tattoo of the same three-petaled flower from the lintel on his hand, in exactly the place where their two-day marks were. Sneaking a look to either side, she saw that the guards did, too.
On the desk in front of the Master, she saw a bottle of wine with Sevedra’s tag, Cleric’s apothecary box, her own satchel, and a piece of red cloth she knew had come from Lukash’s pack. Eventually, the Master put down the thin bone sliver he was writing with. “Well. A Morgeni, a Northerner, and a woman.”
“Town Master,” Cleric said, with a warm, ingratiating smile that seemed incongruous with his bruised face. “Surely there’s been—”
