“If I may,” Shindall went on. “Your mission, though I would never dare ask its object, is it complete? Do we finally draw near our deliverance?”
Reva gave a bland smile. “I need to find the High Keep. The priest told me you had charge of seeing pilgrims safely there.”
“Of course,” he breathed. “Of course you would want to undertake the pilgrimage, whilst time remains.” He rose and went to a corner of the room, the one least favoured by the lamplight, bending down to lift a brick from the base and extract something from the space behind.
“Drawn on silk,” he said, placing a rectangle of material in front of her, no more than six inches across. “Easy to hide, or swallow should you need to.”
It was a map, simply drawn but clear enough to follow, a line stretching from a cluster of icons she took to be the village, winding its way past mountain and river until it ended at a black symbol shaped like a spear-point.
“Six days’ travel from here,” Shindall told her. “Not so many pilgrims these days so the way should be clear. There are friends of ours there, playing the role of beggars in need of shelter.”
“It’s not garrisoned?” she asked in surprise. She had been considering various notions of how best to sneak into the keep under the nose of the Fief Lord’s guards.
“Not since the Trueblade fell. The drunken whore-chaser in Alltor seems happy to let it fall to ruin.”
Reva finished her meal, draining the rest of the ale. “I’ll need a room for tonight,” she said. “And a stable for my horse.” She offered him payment which he refused, leading her to a room on the upper floor. It was small and not especially clean but the sight of the narrow bed, the first she had seen since leaving the Darkblade’s house, dispelled any misgivings.
“I met him once,” Shindall said, lingering at the door, eyes still fixed on her face. “The Trueblade. It was not long after the Father had saved him from the outlaw’s arrow, the scar was still fresh, red like a ruby, bright in the morning air when he stood up to speak. And his words . . . so much truth to hear in the space of a few moments. I knew then I had heard the Father’s call in those words.” His gaze was intense and the thickness in his voice reminded her of the swordsmith in Varinshold when he said, “You have his eyes.”
Reva placed her cloak and sword on the bed. “Do the Realm Guard patrol the peaks?”
Shindall blinked, then shook his head. “The lowland roads only, most likely places for outlaws. Don’t get ’em in the mountains, too cold I expect.” He placed a lit candle on the room’s only table and went to the door. “Earliest bell’s at the fifth hour.”
“I’ll be gone by then. My thanks for your diligence.”
He gave her a final glance before leaving the room, swallowing before he said, “Seeing your face is the only thanks I’ll ever need.”
She had never been to the Greypeaks before and found the sheerness of the mountains disconcerting, unassailable cliffs rising on all sides to ever-greater heights the deeper she went. The air held a perennial chill made worse by frequent drizzle or descending mist. The road ended at a broad, swift-running river tracking away towards the east. She began to follow it, the silk map having told her it provided the most direct route to the keep, the grey hunter snorting in protest as she guided him over the rock-strewn bank.
“Snorter,” she said, smoothing a hand along his neck. “That’s what I’ll call you.”
A clacking scatter of stone made her turn in the saddle, seeing another rider arriving at the road’s end. Reva sat and waited for him to catch up, a large boy on a small horse.
“Did you steal that?” she asked as Arken drew level.
“The brothers’ coin,” he said, coughing then fidgeting in his too-small saddle.
Reva sat in silence, watching him blush and cough some more.
“I stay with them one more day and I’ll kill him,” he said eventually. “And I owe you a debt.”
A faint rumble of thunder sounded overhead and Reva looked up to find a dark bank of cloud approaching from the west. “We’d best move back a ways from the river,” she said, kicking Snorter forward. “It’s like to flood when it rains.”
“He was just a wheelwright,” Arken said. “Skilled and a little more learned and Faithful than most men in the town, but still just a wheelwright. Then one day the Aspect of the Second Order came to visit the mission house and father went to her for catechism. After that, everything changed.”
They had found shelter from the rain in a narrow crack in a cliff face. It kept the worst of the deluge off but was still too damp for a fire, obliging them to huddle in their cloaks, warmed only by the breath of the horses.
“Every spare hour spent speaking to any who would listen,” Arken went on. “Every spare coin gone to pay the blocker to print his tracts, handed out for free to any who’d take them, me and my sister standing in the street hour after hour whilst he droned on. The worst thing was some people actually stopped to listen. I hated them for that. If no-one had listened, he might have given it up, and the Fourth Order might have left us alone. Your god has no Orders, does he?”
“This world was made by the will of one Father,” she said. “So we might know his love. One world, one Father, one church.” Venal and corrupt though it is.
Arken nodded then sneezed, a bead of water lingering on the tip of his nose.
“Will they look for you?” Reva asked.
His face became downcast. “I doubt it. Words were said.”
“Words are not arrows, they can be taken back.”
“He ordered us to do nothing!” Arken’s jaw clenched, his fists balled beneath his cloak. “Just sat there when they came riding out of the woods, whispering his catechisms. What kind of man does that?”
A faithful man, she thought. “What did he have to say that angered them so much?”
“That the Faith had lost its way. That we were guilty of a great error, that the Red Hand had twisted our souls, made us hate when we should have loved. Made us kill where we should have saved. That the persecution of the unfaithful had raised a wall between our souls and the Departed. One day a brother from the Fourth came to the house with a letter from his Aspect. It was polite but firm: stop speaking. Father ripped it up in his face. Two days later the shop burned down.”
Snorter began stomping the rock with his fore-hoof, head jerking in impatience. She was starting to understand his moods, and inactivity was not something he appreciated. She got up, taking a carrot from the saddlebag and holding it to his mouth as he chomped. “You don’t owe me any debt,” she told Arken. “And travelling with me could prove . . . dangerous.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “About the debt. And I don’t care about any danger.”
His gaze was full of earnest intent, and something more, which was a shame. Still just a boy, she thought. Despite all his troubles. “I’m looking for something,” she told him. “Help me find it and the debt between us is settled. After that, you go your way.”
He nodded, smiling a little. “As you wish.”
She took something from the saddlebag and tossed it to him. “Your father forgot to check the Ranter for weapons.”
He turned the knife over in his hands, pulling the blade free of the scabbard. It was a long-bladed weapon of good steel, well balanced, the ebony hilt cross-etched for a strong grip. “I don’t know how to use it. Father wouldn’t even let me have a wooden sword when I was younger.”
She peered out at the rain, seeing it was starting to dwindle into a light drizzle, and took hold of Snorter’s reins to lead him from the crack. “I’ll teach you.”
It was like playing with a child, a child half a foot taller and twice the bulk of her, but a child nonetheless. He’s so slow, she wondered as Arken stumbled past, his sheathed knife missing by an arm’s length as she dodged away. She leapt onto his back and put her own knife to his throat. “Try again,” she said, jumping clear.