“And what of what really happened there, Adjunct? Do we abandon pursuit? Do we resign ourselves to never knowing exactly what happened, or why? Or is it simply me who is to be abandoned?”
“Lieutenant, this is a trail we must not follow too closely, but follow it we shall, and you will be central to the effort. I have assumed-perhaps in error-that you would wish to see it through, to be witness when the time for vengeance finally arrives. Was I wrong? Perhaps you've seen enough and seek only a return to normality.”
He closed his eyes. “Adjunct, I would be there when the time came.”
She was silent and he knew without opening his eyes that she was studying him, gauging his worth. He was beyond unease and beyond caring. He'd stated his desire; the decision was hers.
“We proceed slowly. Your reassignment will take effect in a few days time. In the meanwhile, go home to your father's estate. Get some rest.”
He opened his eyes and rose to his feet. As he reached the doorway she spoke again. “Lieutenant, I trust you won't repeat the scene in the Hall.”
“I doubt it'd earn as many laughs the second time around, Adjunct.”
As he reached the stairs he heard what might have been a cough from the room behind him. It was hard to imagine that it could have been any
As he led his horse through the streets of Unta he felt numb inside. The familiar sights, the teeming, interminable crowds, the voices and clash of languages all struck Paran as something strange, something altered, not before his eyes but in that unknowable place between his eyes and his thoughts. The change was his alone, and it made him feel shorn, outcast. Yet the place was the same: the scenes before him were as they always had been and even in watching it pass by all around him, nothing had changed. It was the gift of noble blood that kept the world at a distance, to be observed from a position unsullied, unjostled by the commonry.
Gift: and curse.
Now, however, Paran walked among them without the family guards.
The power of blood was gone, and all he possessed by way of armour was the uniform he now wore. Not a craftsman, not a hawker, not a merchant, but a soldier. A weapon of the Empire, and the Empire had those in the tens of thousands.
He passed through Toll Ramp Gate and made his way along Marble Slope Road, where the first merchant estates appeared, pushed back from the cobbled street, half hidden by courtyard walls. The foliage of gardens joined their lively colours with brightly painted walls; the crowds diminished and private guards were visible outside arching gates.
The sweltering air lost its reek of sewage and rotting food, slipping cooler across unseen fountains and carrying into the avenue the fragrance of blossoms.
Smells of childhood.
The estates spread out as he led his horse deeper into the Noble District. Breathing-space purchased by history and ancient coin. The Empire seemed to melt away, a distant, mundane concern. Here, families traced their lines back seven centuries to those tribal horsemen who had first come to this land from the east. In blood and fire, as was always the way, they had conquered and subdued the cousins of the Kanese who'd built villages along this coast. From warrior horsemen to horsebreeders to merchants of wine, beer and cloth. An ancient nobility of the blade, now a nobility of hoarded gold, trade agreements, subtle manoeuvrings and hidden corruptions in gilded rooms and oil-lit corridors.
Paran had imagined himself acquiring trappings that closed a circle, a return to the blade from which his family had emerged, strong and savage, all those centuries ago. For his choice, his father had condemned him.
He came to a familiar postern, a single high door along one side wall and facing an alley that in another part of the city would be a wide street.
There was no guard here, just a thin bell-chain, which he pulled twice.
Alone in the alley, Paran waited.
A bar clanked on the other side, a voice growled a curse as the door swung back on protesting hinges.
Paran found himself staring down at an unfamiliar face. The man was old, scarred and wearing much-mended chain-mail that ended raggedly around his knees. His pot-helm was uneven with hammered-out dents, yet polished bright.
The man eyed Paran up and down with watery grey eyes, then grunted, “The tapestry lives.”
“Excuse me?”
The guardsman swung the door wide. “Older now, of course, but it's all the same by the lines. Good artist, to capture the way of standing, the expression and all. Welcome home, Ganoes.”
Paran led his horse through the narrow doorway. The path between two outbuildings of the estate, showing sky overhead.
“I don't know you, soldier,” Paran said. “But it seems my portrait has been well studied by the guards. Is it now a throw-rug in your barracks?”