Strife's Bane Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For my mother, Joanne

  Dramatis Personae

  The Shadari

  ALKESH, a Red Guard

  ANAKTHALISA, ANI, an asha

  BIMA, a widow

  BINIT, an agitator

  DARYAN, the daimon

  DRAMASH, a boy with asha powers

  FALIT, son of Erdesh

  HAROTHA, Eofar’s lover, mother of Oshi, deceased

  HESH, a resurrectionist

  JEMMA, daughter of Shemoth, an asha

  LEM, a Red Guard, Daryan’s bodyguard

  MEENA, Daryan’s aunt, deceased

  OMIR, Captain of the Red Guard

  SEDENA, a wealthy Shadari woman

  SHAIRAV, an asha, Daryan’s uncle, deceased

  SHEMOTH, an asha, deceased

  TAL, Daryan’s chief steward

  TALBAK, a farmer

  TAMIN, Lieutenant, a Red Guard

  TESSA, a laundrywoman

  VEYASH, a Red Guard

  ZAMAR, a Red Guard

  The Norlanders

  CYRRIN, a healer

  EOFAR EOTAN, King of Norland

  FALKAR, a lieutenant

  FREA EOTAN/THE WHITE WOLF, Eofar’s sister, deceased

  ISA EOTAN, Eofar’s sister

  LAHLIL EOTAN, Eofar’s sister, formerly known as the Mongrel

  OSHI EOTAN, Eofar and Harotha’s son

  RHO ARREGADOR, a former soldier

  TARA PELTRAN, head of the Imperial garrison at Prol Irat

  TREY ARREGADOR, Rho’s brother, deceased

  The Nomas

  BEHR, Jachad’s wagonmaster

  CALLIA, Nomas queen-in-waiting

  GRENTHA, first mate of the Argent

  HELA, a sailor on the Argent

  JACHAD NISHARAN, JACHI, King of the Nomas

  MAIRI, a healer

  MALA, a sailor on the Argent

  NISHA, Queen of the Nomas

  SABINA, second mate on the Argent

  Others

  ALLACK, a member of the Mongrel’s crew

  ARNO, an Iratian fisherman

  CLARE, a young woman

  DIDI, a barmaid

  DREDGE, a member of the Mongrel’s crew

  FELLIX, a strider

  KILS THE RELIABLE, an urchin

  NAV, Clare’s friend

  NEVIE, a member of the Mongrel’s crew, deceased

  SAVION, a strider

  Chapter 1

  Unlike the rest of the ferry passengers, Lahlil didn’t lift her boots when the water sloshed to their side of the boat. She was too busy reminding herself that ordinary people did not threaten to impale ferrymen when they wanted them to pick up the pace.

  The woman with the tousled hair sighed and wriggled out of her jacket, revealing a patched chemise and delicate shoulders. The rest of the passengers had already stripped down as far as conventional modesty would allow, but Lahlil didn’t want to expose her mismatched eyes or her scarred forearm, so she had to content herself with tugging her collar away from her neck.

  “Last winter ’twas warm, but it ain’t ever been this warm afore the harbor fes’val,” said the woman, fanning herself with her hat.

  “We usually have snow up in the hills long before now,” said the young man with the wolfish smile. The way he kept touching the heavy purse around his waist, it might as well have had the words “Steal Me” stitched on the front.

  The mother paused picking at a knot in the collar string of her little boy’s shirt to wave her hand at the water. “It’s the fog I don’t like: day and night, it’s been. Look out there. We should be able to see the watchtower at Bodun by now. Daybreak, but you’d never know it.”

  Daybreak. Once again the sunrise had come without Lahlil knowing. More than a decade of blood-boiling pain had given way not to peace, but to emptiness. The Nomas sun god Shof and the moon goddess Amai had finally stopped squabbling over their claim, so either Jachad had brokered an accord on her behalf, or they’d realized the treasure they’d been fighting over had been nothing but dross all along. She wouldn’t know until she found him again.

  “’Tis unnatural, that’s what’is,” said the old man to Lahlil’s right, the elided cadence of the outer islands making his words a drawl. His grown daughter lifted her hand from the basket of limp vegetables to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “This plague out’a Norland—all o’ them soldiers cut loose, makin’ trouble: the signs’r’all there, for them who c’n read’m. S’goin’ t’get worse afore’t gets better.”

  The mother shot father and daughter a dark glance as the child, a tiny thing with a mane of ginger curls, pressed back against her knees.

  “It’s like you was saying, Clare,” the girl at the far end of the bench broke in. She and her friend were both decked out in enough cheap finery to pass for idols in the market square. “About the plague—you said it all along, din’t you? Something unnatural allus comes out’a the empire. Remember?”

  “You look like you came from up north,” said Clare, turning around to face Lahlil. Her eyes, dark and challenging, rested on the silver triffons on the hilt of Lahlil’s sword.

  “A while back,” she muttered, speaking Iratian with the blunt accent of the mercenaries she had known from that region. “Afore the quarantine.”

  “Well, o’ course,” said Clare. “I couldn’t’ve meant after, could I?”

  “You could’ve,” put in her friend. “They let in those with coin, I bet. Like with errything. Coin buys errything these days.”

  “Tain’t right,” the old man declared, stomping his foot and splashing salt water over all of their feet as the other passengers voiced their agreement.

  “So, did’y’see it? The plague?” asked Clare. She dropped her voice to a dramatic whisper mid-sentence when the mother made a sharp clicking sound in her direction.

  “No.”

  “You sure?” Clare pressed. Her face was taut with the thrill of someone who had never experienced real danger. “I hear it sends you mad afore you die, sets you tearin’ at erryone. Like a beast, I hear. And then blood comes out’a your eyes and you fall down dead—just like that!”

  “Clare!” hissed her friend.

  “Oh hush, Nav. I’m not sayin’ ennything people don’t know already.”

  Lahlil had seen plague victims dripping silver pus from their eyes and mouths. She’d packed snow into their wounds until the cold killed the infection. Those people she’d managed to cure, but these, sweating through their light clothes, would have no chance if her brother Eofar’s quarantine failed to stop the plague from spreading past Norland’s borders. Just one splinter or scrape would turn that woman with the tousled hair, the old man, the little boy,
into monsters. She knew exactly how they would look as they screamed in pain, how their limbs would twist as they clawed at themselves and each other, spreading the infection …

  said Rho Arregador. A few of the other passengers glanced up. She’d warned Rho not to assume the islanders wouldn’t be able to hear him speaking Norlander, but as usual he hadn’t listened. He shifted a little in his corner; from the greenish hue of his skin, he was going to be sick—again—and she really didn’t want a second look at the sausages they’d eaten on the last quay.

 

  he snapped, but he was too much on edge for his sarcasm to bite. It was always like this when they approached the next new place, bracing themselves for news neither one of them, even on their best days, expected to be good. Every creaking boat, jolting cart and muddy trudge brought them a little closer, but she could feel time sputtering like a lamp sucking up the last few drops of oil, with no way of knowing when the light would snuff out for good.

  “Fog’s getting thicker,” the ferryman grumbled.

  The boat crawled down the inlet to the west side of the island, vying for space with the other small crafts trying to navigate through the increasing murk. The ramshackle pier gradually took shape, followed by the usual boxy silhouettes of taverns, brothels, moneylenders and jails. Five ships bobbed in the deep bay. The wind wasn’t strong enough to lift their flags, but one look was enough to tell her that the Argent wasn’t there. Lahlil could taste the sourness of Rho’s disappointment as strongly as her own.

  “Papers,” an official bellowed as he settled his bulk at the top of the gangway, scratching his beard. The ferryman held out a tattered card; the official grunted and gestured the passengers out. “Come on, come on, let’s be ’aving you.”

  Lahlil followed the two girls up the gangway. The inspector’s glance dipped under her wide-brimmed hat without interest but lingered on the heavily tarnished hilt of Strife’s Bane. She hunched her shoulders a little and sulked while she waited: another cheap mercenary washing up like garbage in these backwater islands. Finally he waved her up the slimy gangplank. The old man and his daughter came behind, followed by the wolfish man, the mother and son and finally the woman in the chemise.

  “You! Norlander! You stay there.”

  Rho. Of course. Every time.

  “No Norlanders get in without a pass. You got a pass or not?”

  she translated for Rho, in case he hadn’t understood. She made sure to keep her shoulders at the same indolent angle and crossed her arms in front of her as if her sword was the last thing on her mind.

  “You two together, then?” the inspector asked her.

  A jerk of her shoulder, noncommittal. “Headed in the same direction.”

  “Yeah, and where’s that?”

  “Prol.”

  “So you ain’t staying here?” the official asked, producing a little cheat-glass to take a closer look at the stamp on the damp paper Rho took from his pocket. Clare’s friend was right about one thing: a fistful of coin could get you just about anything, including a forged stamp saying you were already in the islands before Norland closed its ports. “Hm.”

  Kill the inspector first, then the ferryman: two quick strokes, no noise; kick the bodies overboard. Someone sees from another boat, calls out, gets the attention of the people on the dock, so then you make a run for it, tell Rho to go a different direction, divide the pursuers. You’ll be surrounded before you get to the end of the pier. Fling off your hat and jacket, let everyone see your scars; someone shouts “It’s the Mongrel!” Good. Now they’re afraid. They’ll stay back. Then they haul Rho across the deck toward you. They’ve already started beating him bloody and they’re holding a knife to his throat, telling you to give yourself up.

  “You look like a soldier,” said the inspector, handing the pass back to Rho. “You a deserter? Someone coming to haul you back? We still have the garrison here. Don’t want that kind of trouble at my port.”

  “His garrison disbanded,” Lahlil supplied. “They closed the border before he made it back.”

  “He can answer for himself, can’t he?”

  “He can also spew all over you,” she warned. “Better you than me, Worthy.”

  The islander curled a protective hand over his beard and stepped back out of the way.

  Rho picked up his cloak and wobbled to the gangplank, bruising his shins on the benches as he went.

  said Lahlil. She picked out the filthiest tavern within sight and started toward it, weaving around the crates, boxes, barrels and nets piled up on the jetty. In the center of a pier stood a statue of a local goddess with a fish’s head and an impractical arrangement of tentacles. The locals had hung tributes of little bits of colored glass from her appendages.

  Rho told her, walking so close behind her he would likely bowl her over if she stopped suddenly.

 

  he said magnanimously, draping his cloak across his arm with a flourish.

  They stopped to let a man trundle by with a wheelbarrow full of coal.

  Rho stalked ahead as soon as their path was clear. Two fishmongers gaped at him, their expressions the same as the fish in their baskets, and a stevedore failed to notice he was about to tip over a stack of crates until one of his comrades cursed at him. She hadn’t wanted Rho tagging along; it was Eofar who had pointed out how much more damage he could do blundering around on his own. Not that she’d admit it, but the qualities that made Rho a lodestone for trouble meant very few people noticed her, which was just how she wanted it.

 

  Rho stopped in his tracks in front of the tavern door. Even if she hadn’t felt his emotions turn to a flat, hard white she would have noticed the blue flush on his throat.

  she warned him.

  Rho’s back remained rigid but he went up to the tavern and pulled open the door, holding it for her with mock civility.

  The Black Whale looked like every other dockside tavern she had ever been in, right down to the pair of old-timers blinking through a fog of bitter cigar smoke. Three drunken Iratian sailors slumped over a table, rolling a set of dice, while behind the square bar in the center of the room, a barmaid with a deformed ear drummed her fingers on the counter.

  “Beds upstairs, communal only, no baths and you slop for yourself,” the barmaid recited like a bored priestess. “Chops at midday, roast in’t evening, less it’s a feast-day, which it ain’t. Sausages anytime but I wouldn’t if I was you, Worthies.”

  “Just a drink,” said Lahlil, fishing out a coin and noting the need to obtain more money soon. Their plan to sail straight to Prol Irat had fallen apart when their Gemanese ship had been held for quarantine at the first port in the Broken Islands. Bribing their way island by island had ripped a sizeable hole in their purse.

  “So whatch’as want?” The barmaid yawned into the back of one hand and waved at a collection of brown glass jugs with the other. “Got jackwater here’ll burn your eyes right out’a your head.”

  “Ale.”

  said Rho.

  “Does this l
ook like the fecking Triumverate’s palace?” the barmaid answered straight back, scowling at Rho and pulling at her bad ear. “You’ll get the local stuff and like it. Or not. Feck if I care.”

  “He’ll take it.”

  The girl snagged a mug and a flagon, set them under different casks and flipped the taps, then swung both filled vessels onto the counter without spilling a drop. she asked Rho in Norlander. Her hungry leer revealed sharp little teeth and looked surprisingly good on her.

  Rho answered, lounging against the bar like a regular,

  said the girl, sliding the flagon toward him.

 

  The girl shrieked with laughter and Lahlil’s fingers tightened around the handle of the mug. This last as the door opened and half a dozen well-armed mercenaries came roaring into the tavern, laughing and hailing the barmaid by name as they tipped money on to the counter. They’d cleaned off the blood and grime but Lahlil saw the fresh cuts and bruises and recognized the post-mission joviality.

  Rho had already taken their drinks over to a table, leaving her the corner seat because he knew she would demand it anyway. he groaned, sinking down onto a stool with a pleasure that was almost obscene.

 

  He flipped the single word at her like a stone.

 

  said Rho.

  Lahlil’s first mouthful of ale slid over her tongue and down her throat.