The Red wolf conspiracy

Turnstile

9 Vaqrin 941

The old admiral had sent word: he wanted little fuss about his boarding. This was quite unlike the Eberzam Isiq of old, who returned from battles on half-ruined warships to a thunder of guns and a throng of well-wishers filling the Plaza of the Palmeries. To the reporter from the Etherhorde Mariner, a dumpy little man in a top hat with a bedraggled bow, it was all very suspicious. Why were there no public announcements? he demanded, beetling toward the ship at Isiq's elbow. Why was Chathrand outfitted in Sorrophran? Where were the banners, the podiums, the Imperial orchestra?

"There are trumpets on the quarterdeck," growled Isiq. "And more than enough sightseers."

"Not half the usual number," countered the reporter. "Why, you might as well be stealing away in the dead of night!"

"With this morning's Mariner announcing it to the whole city?"

"We barely learned of it in time! Your Excellency, a moment, I beg you. We have it reliably that a man was killed last night in your garden. Ah! Your face admits the truth! Who was he-a cutthroat? An assassin?"

Isiq plowed forward, scowling. "A common tramp. He should not have been killed, but he made blundering advances toward Lady Thasha. Our dogs brought him down, and the house guard put an arrow in his chest. That is all."

"Your house guard refused to speak to us, Excellency. Was it the Emperor himself who demanded such secrecy? There are rumors to the effect."

"Of course there are. Your readers survive on a diet of little else. Good day, sir."

Sightseers were indeed packing the waterfront, and more hurried into the Plaza by the minute. High above on the Chathrand, the crew stood at rigid attention. The trumpeters played an old naval song, chosen specially by Uskins because it had been popular thirty years ago in the Sugar War, when he guessed Admiral Isiq's sailing days had begun (he was quite right, but the memories the tune evoked were of scurvy and insects and boot-rotted feet).

A lizard's tongue of red carpet shot down the gangway. The admiral looked as if he would rather kick it aside. But up he tottered; and holding his arm was Syrarys, chin high, smiling ambiguously, in a sheer white dress that magnified the luster of her dark skin. From the deck Mr. Fiffengurt took one look at her and thought, This will be a hazardous trip.

Behind them came Thasha, with two books (a Mzithrini grammar and The Merchant's Polylex) in her arms and a venomous scowl on her face. Around the quay people pointed, murmuring: "There she is, the Treaty Bride, the Emperor's gift to the savages. Getting married! Poor pretty thing! She has to marry so there'll be no more war."

"Lady Thasha!"

It was the Mariner reporter. Thasha turned him an irritated glance. I won't go through with it! she was tempted to shout. I'll run off with pirates before I'll marry a coffin worshipper! Print that!

The reporter kept his voice low, one nervous eye on Eberzam Isiq. "The man in your garden, the man they killed. Who was he? What did he say to you?"

Her father would be annoyed at her for speaking, she thought. It was an incentive.

"He didn't have a chance to say much before they killed him."

So true: Jorl had closed on the wild, starved-looking man, who had risen from the ash pit in the corner of the garden and rushed at her like a sooty phantom, before he was halfway to her. It was dawn. Thasha, rising from a third sleepless night since Isiq announced her betrothal, had just stumbled into the yard, rubbing her eyes. She saw the sprinting man, his eyes fixed on her with the fire of murder or ecstatic prayer, for only an instant: the next he fell under the snarling boulder of the dog. Instead of fear, pity: Jorl had the man's whole black-bearded throat in his mouth. Thasha knew he would not kill unless the man pulled a knife-her dogs were very well trained. But so was she, in thojmйlй fighting, bought with a thousand bruises from Hercуl. She would not lose this moment, any moment, to the paralysis of surprise. She dashed forward and caught the man's hair in her hand.

"Was he a foreigner, m'lady?" asked the man from the Mariner.

No doubt about that. He had looked at her and squealed something in a tongue unlike any she had ever heard. He was out of his head-but with fear, not drink. There was no hint of alcohol on his breath.

"Yes, a foreigner," she said. "Now you'd better go."

"What did he tell you-before they shot him?"

She looked at the reporter, but it was that ash-covered face she saw. The same words, over and over. Her name, and-

"Mighra cror, mighra cror," she muttered aloud.

"What does that mean?" asked the reporter.

She had wondered the same thing. "Speak Arquali!" she'd begged. Over the growls of the mastiffs (Suzyt had arrived and joined the fray), the horrified man had still managed to comply.

"Death, is death, death!" he wheezed in broken Arquali. "Yours, ours, all people together!"

"Death? Whose death? How?"

"Mighra cror-"

"What on earth is that?"

But another voice had ended it all: Syrarys, on the garden balcony, was shrieking, "Kill him! Shoot him now!"

And someone obeyed. The arrow lanced down from the garden wall and struck with the neatness of a tailor's button-stitch, one inch from Jorl's paw, in the man's heart. Thasha's eyes raced back along the flight path: a shadow among oak-leaves, a man leaping into the neighbor's yard. Ten minutes later the constables were rushing the body away.

Was that shadowy marksman one of these big, sweaty warriors behind her-the honor guard the Emperor had insisted on bestowing? She might never find out. Worse, she would never learn who the stranger was, a man who had thrown his life away for the chance to speak to her. She only knew that her father was wrong: the man was much more than a common tramp.

She was on the gangway, leaving the frustrated reporter hopping below. On an impulse she turned to him and said: "If it all goes wrong-if something terrible happens to us-ask the Mother Prohibitor of the Lorg School about this 'mighra cror.?"

On deck, a grim Captain Rose bowed to the ambassador and Lady Syrarys, his red beard and blue Merchant Service ribbons fluttering in the breeze. The Chathrand's senior officers stood in a file behind him, ramrod-straight. Thasha supposed they would fall like ninepins at a nudge.

After the guest of honor, the first-class passengers came aboard. They were some two dozen in all: families making west to the Crownless Lands, for pleasure or profit, men with sea-caps and tailored coats, women in summer gowns, children prancing about them like tethered imps. Lady Lapadolma's niece Pacu was there, almond-eyed and lovely, in neat, buttoned-up riding clothes ("Where's your pony, love?" called someone gaily). On her heels came a thin man with white gloves, slicked-down bangs, and a pet sloth clinging to his neck like a hairy baby. This was Latzlo, the animal-seller, who meant to continue his pursuit of Pacu alongside a few months' trade in wild creatures. Listening to his excited chatter about snowlarks and walrus hides was Mr. Ket, the soap merchant recently disembarked from a little ship called the Eniel. He never interrupted Latzlo, only chuckled quietly, a hand on his ragged scarf.

It fell to the officers to greet the noble-born, Captain Rose having disappeared below with Isiq and Syrarys. Mr. Uskins, always impressed by wealth and "good breeding," shook the men's arms like pump handles. The bosun, a short, heavy, hunched-over man named Swellows, grinned and minced around the ladies in a dance of servility. Mr. Teggatz offered scones.

The passengers took their time, marveling at their first glimpse of the topdeck, while six hundred sailors waited in silence. Finally the last lace parasol vanished below, and the crew relaxed their shoulders and returned to work. Now it was the servants' turn to board. These outnumbered their masters two to one, but they moved more swiftly. They did not have the strength to dawdle, for besides their own small valises they carried armloads of their masters' favorite shoes or cloaks or liquor bottles (the ones too precious to be crated), tugged their dogs, in some cases bore their swaddled infants. Among them came Hercуl with Jorl and Suzyt, whining pitifully at their separation from Thasha but still inspiring the other boarders to keep a respectful distance.

Longshoremen, next. There were last supplies to be taken on: beer, salt, gunpowder, spare chain and cordage, a bone saw for Dr. Rain. All the goods the merchants hoped to sell in the west, the boots and broadcloths and calico, had to be loaded, too. And of course there were Latzlo's animals: white macaws and sable horn-bills, gingham geese, six-legged proboscam bats, green Ulluprid monkeys. Eight men hefted a Red River hog that bellowed and bashed its tusks against the cage. Stacks of smaller crates were too dark and tight for the contents to be seen.

A number of the first-class guests were moving, not traveling, and their thousand-and-one possessions were dragged up the gangway next, or raised by the cargo crane. Most important of these were the ambassador's personal effects. All the old or valuable furniture was sealed in giant crates: Eberzam Isiq's desk, Syrarys' wardrobe, Thasha's baby cradle and the huge canopy bed where the old man spent as much time as possible with his consort.

The crates were stuffed with cedar shavings, then nailed tight as coffins and the seams plastered over: fair protection against the damp, but none at all against the ixchel. Three hundred had raided the bed-crate the night before, sawn a hole with more than surgical neatness, wriggled in and glued the round plug of wood back into place so perfectly that even the fastidious butler sensed nothing amiss. Before dawn the crate was riddled with airholes smaller than fleas, and Talag Tammaruk ap Ixhxchr, mastermind of the assault on the Great Ship, lay back in the center of the ambassador's bed and fell asleep.

The crowd on the quay paid no attention as half the population of Ixphir House was lowered into the hold. Cargo bored them, unless it was obviously priceless, or kicked and snorted like Mr. Latzlo's animals. As the morning wore on, they began to drift about the square, buying fried kelp or scallops at the pushcarts, greeting friends. But they kept one eye on the Chathrand, and when four Trading Family officials dragged an iron turnstile to the foot of the gangway, they all rushed back to watch.

The turnstile was painted rooster-red. It had revolving arms that allowed one person at a time to pass through onto the gangway, and could be frozen at the turn of a key. When the Company officials had tested the device, they nodded at Fiffengurt, up on deck. The quartermaster hailed a sailor on the maintop. The sailor, in turn, pulled a yellow kerchief from around his head and waved it high.

Nearly a mile down the quay, hidden from the Emperor's splendid keep, squatted a large, low warehouse. Two Company men stationed at the heavy door saw the kerchief and put their shoulders to the bolt. The door swung wide. And from the black mouth of the building rushed a mob.

They were six hundred strong, laden with sacks and bundles and crates and children, some barefoot, many in little more than rags. But they ran, now and then dropping a sausage or a bag of sea biscuits, never stopping, for what good was spare food if you didn't make it aboard? These were the steerage passengers, third class. Among them were Ipulians and Uturphans, returning from seasons of labor in the Etherhorde clothing mills, often no richer, always more battered than they came. It was a diverse group. Peasants from dry East Arqual, hoping to reach Urnsfich before the tea harvest. Young couples forbidden to marry and rushing west to do just that, women whose men had disappeared. Petty criminals. Minor enemies of the crown. Refugees from the violence on Pulduraj, arrived just months ago only to find the slums of the Imperial capital more dangerous than an island at war. They had all paid in advance, and in greater numbers than the Chathrand could actually carry (the rest would wait days or weeks for another ship), and had spent the night on the bare warehouse floor, locked in, where the sight of them would not trouble the wealthy pas sengers.

The sightseers, however, had come for just this spectacle: the blind rush of whole families, like cattle driven to stampede. Gentlemen lifted well-dressed boys to their shoulders. They cheered and laughed, placed bets on which paupers would reach them first.

The mob ignored them entirely. It had been a cold, damp, miserable night, and all of them knew it was better than what awaited them aboard Chathrand: signs in third-class compartments read A LIGHTED MATCH IS SABOTAGE. SABOTAGE IS DEATH. Still they ran, to seize the best few square feet of floor they could in the darkness of the orlop deck. Except for a few hours a day in calm seas they would not breathe fresh air or feel the sun again for the length of their voyage.

No one noticed the exhausted reporter from the Mariner, jotting furiously in his notebook in the mouth of an alley past which the poor had flowed. Nor did anyone observe the four men who came upon him from behind, calmly, one with a taut wire between his hands.

At the gangway, the turnstile clicked and clicked: each click a parent, a child, a tidy sum. Waving, shouting them on ("To the ladderway, follow my man, down you go and swiftly please!"), Mr. Fiffengurt wondered if any of these wretches knew that they actually paid more, inch for inch, than the first-class passengers. Double, maybe, for they all but sat on each other's heads. No, it wouldn't do to speak of such things, even if he could make someone believe.

When the count reached four hundred, the Company officers locked the turnstile with a snap. A man looked back at his father, stopped behind him on the quay: Go on, said the old man's eyes.