“As it will,” Baster-kin answers confidently. “For you yourself have told me that you know the secret to making it thus disappear. And make it vanish you shall — shall, that is, if you wish your children and yourself to escape the inferno that will soon engulf this district.”
And with another shudder of recognition, Isadora realizes that she has been, at least for the moment, outwitted, and that Rendulic Baster-kin has at long last gained the upper hand he longed for as a youth.
“None of these are propositions or notions that you can attempt to address now, my lady,” Baster-kin says, turning to signal the very curious Radelfer, and ordering him to bring the litter they arrived in to the spot where he stands. “And so, wait. We have both, it seems, cast our dice on gambits of extraordinary stakes — results over the next few days, or even weeks, alone will allow us, and particularly you, to come to any heartfelt decisions. Bearing that in mind”—as his litter bearers and his seneschal rush to where he stands, Baster-kin notices a new, stronger element of doubt creeping into Isadora’s features—“we shall, indeed, wait …” Pulling back the curtains of his litter, Rendulic smiles in a manner that Isadora has not seen since he was a youth. “But as you wait, think of this — your husband is a great soldier, who was perhaps always destined to die in the field, one day, campaigning against Broken’s enemies. And, should that death have already come, or were it to come now, would you truly have wished or wish now that your children perish amid what is a necessary and unstoppable change within this city? Is your loyalty to the squalor where you spent your own childhood really so extreme that you would allow that? I leave you with those questions, my lady — and with a quick demonstration, soon to come, of the God-King’s deep commitment to not only remaking Davon Wood, but to restructuring the Fifth District. My thanks for your guidance, and for your explanation of what is, I have no doubt, causing the deaths within the city walls.” He turns to his seneschal, who had expected that, by now, his master would be overcome by frustration, rather than strangely calm, even serene. “We go,” Baster-kin declares. “And Radelfer will maintain contact with you, my lady, in the event that you should require anything during the days to come — although that contact will have to be initiated, of course, by way of the city walls.”
“The city walls …?” Isadora says, increasingly confused.
“My meaning will become clear very soon,” the Merchant Lord replies. “Good night, my lady.” Baster-kin then vanishes into his litter, leaving Isadora none of the defiant — almost naïvely defiant, it seems now — satisfaction that she had thought the statements with which she had first presented her onetime patient would bring.
Radelfer turns to Isadora briefly, as confounded as she that he finds no expression of quiet triumph upon her face. Although he cannot say the words aloud, being too close to his lordly master, Radelfer would ask Isadora why this is so: why do her features not reflect the same expression that he had already perceived in Kriksex’s, the silent pledge that, When next we meet, we shall be on the same side of the storm that rises …?
Given this strange aspect upon Lady Arnem’s face, when Radelfer turns and sees Kriksex offering a final and distant salute of comradeship, the seneschal, suspecting that the kind of devious manipulation of which he knows Rendulic Baster-kin to be a master is at work, can only return the gesture half-heartedly. Then he suddenly begins to bark harsh orders at his household guards, who move at a near-run in order to get their master safely back out of the squalor of the Fifth District. But the seneschal does not move so quickly that he fails to notice that Kriksex’s men keep their blades drawn, as the Merchant Lord’s party passes: suspicion yet reigns — indeed, has been heightened — between the two groups of veterans, although neither can say why …
“And so, my lord,” Radelfer murmurs quietly, attempting a gambit of his own, “did my Lady Isadora fulfill your expectations?”
“Not yet,” comes Baster-kin’s surprisingly friendly reply. “But she is close.”
“Indeed, my lord?” Radelfer answers quickly. “Close to abandoning both the district of her birth and the husband of her children?”
“I realize that you may have thought as much impossible, Radelfer,” his lordship says. “But here is a fact that life has never taught you: set any obstacle between a mother and the safety of her young, and you will always gain an advantage — even if that obstacle be her own husband’s fate.” He glances briefly outside the curtains of the litter. “Are we passing back through the district wall at the head of the Path of Shame?”
“Aye, lord,” Radelfer says, suddenly less confused than he is worried.
“And all the elements that I called for are in place?”
“The crews and their masters are assembled, along with detachments of your Guard to oversee their labor; which, I presumed, was to take place in the Fifth—”
“I know what you presumed, Radelfer. But now know my order: they are to close and seal the gateway.”
“My Lord? I do not understand—”
“Nor need you, Seneschal. For my part, I must go to the High Temple at once, and assure the Grand Layzin that what was planned begins to take shape.” Baster-kin sighs heavily: with weariness, to be sure, but to an even greater extent with satisfaction …
At the base of the southwestern wall, meanwhile, as soon as Baster-kin’s litter has disappeared, Isadora feels her legs go a bit weak; and from somewhere in the alleyway, her eldest son rapidly appears to support her. “Mother!” he calls. “Are you unwell?”
His mother makes no reply, at first, but takes a few silent moments to control the rate of her breathing, knowing that if it races as quickly as her heart, she will likely faint. In this state does Kriksex find her, as he rejoins mother and son; and his face, too, fills with concern. “Lady Arnem!” he calls out, struggling with his crutch as quickly as he can. “What has taken place? All seemed to go just as you had planned!”
“Just so, Kriksex — it seemed to,” Isadora gasps. “But I have ever been able to sense the soul of that man, and the conclusion was too abrupt, his departure too swift and sure — no, he has not done with us, this night …”
The woman Berthe, having observed her ladyship’s distress, has rushed to fetch a small, well-worn chair from a friend’s nearby house. “My lady!” she calls, as she stumbles out the doorway of the house with the stick of furniture; she also exhibits the self-possession to immediately dispatch her eldest daughter with a pitcher to the wells at the head of the Path of Shame, where the girl can fetch clean water for the brave woman who seems to have brought the beginnings of dignity to the Fifth District.
Meanwhile, as Lady Arnem waits for this relief, Kriksex stands over one of her shoulders, having guessed that negotiations with Lord Baster-kin will be protracted and producing a rough map of the manner in which he intends to deploy the main body of their veterans during the coming interval. Dagobert looks over his mother’s other shoulder at the scrap of parchment, while the rest of the men who have guarded Lady Arnem’s party hold their torches aloft in a semicircle, to illuminate the study and the subsequent discussion that takes place—
And then the moment that had seemed, to all save Isadora, to offer some kind of hope, is shattered by a child’s voice: it is Berthe’s daughter, who screams in alarm …
Down the alleyway the girl comes, followed, strangely, by the bulger guards, Bohemer and Jerej, whose expressions are not altogether devoid of the horror that fills the young girl’s face; and as the three draw closer to the group beneath the wall, the child’s words become distinct, although they seem to make little sense: