Their vessel moored up on a narrow jetty reaching out into a natural harbour on the south shore of this island. The woman named it as Ulpenna, easternmost of the Twelve Sisters, the islands that formed the broken bridge between the continents. He followed her along the jetty to a sizeable town of wooden buildings. In contrast to the ramshackle slave market at the Volarian riverbank, this jungle town displayed an elegance and age indicating many years of settled occupation. The houses were mostly two-storey affairs with ornate wooden statues on every veranda, each one different.
“Each house has its own god,” the woman explained, once again reading his thoughts. “Each family its own guardian.”
They stopped at a tavern and ate a meal of heavily spiced chicken stew, the woman striking up a conversation with the man who served them. Frentis’s Alpiran remained poor but he picked out the words “law” and “house” amongst the babble.
“No guards,” the woman commented when they were alone. “A trusting fellow this magistrate. Popular too, by all accounts. Not what you’d expect for a lawmaker.”
They lingered at the tavern until late afternoon then took the only road, a track of dry red clay trailing out of town and upwards into the jungled slopes of the mountain. They followed the road for another hour before the woman led him onto a side track, through the dense jungle until they came to a large house. It was an impressive three-floored structure built on a ledge in the mountainside, shuttered windows open to the evening breeze coming in off the sea.
“Just the magistrate,” the woman told Frentis as he stripped down to his trews, taking off his boots and smearing earth over his exposed flesh. “Apparently there’s a wife and three children, but you don’t have to concern yourself with them.” She tweaked his nose a little. “Isn’t that kind of me? Now off with you, my love.”
The information from the tavern had been correct, there were no guards. A servant tended the small garden at the rear of the house and another lit lamps on the porch. Frentis approached through the thick undergrowth at a crawl, lying still when he got to within twenty feet of the south-facing wall. He lay against the carpet of vegetation until nightfall then crept forward to the wall. It was an easy climb, the ornamentation favoured by house-builders here provided plentiful handholds.
He hauled himself onto the top-floor veranda, finding an open door. Inside a child was sleeping in a large bed, a small dim shape in the bedcovers. He moved through the room on silent feet and into the hallway beyond finding two other rooms on this floor, each occupied by sleeping children, before making his way downstairs. There were two more rooms here, one a book-filled space he took as a study, empty of any readers, the other a bedroom, the covers on the bed neatly pulled back in readiness. He returned to the landing, hearing the sound of voices from the ground floor.
The staircase creaked as he descended to the hallway, but his step was too light to draw any attention. The voices came from a room at the front of the house, a man and a woman talking on the other side of a closed door. Frentis found a shadowed corner, crouched and waited.
He fancied the itch had grown worse today, building steadily to a true irritation. The binding was loose enough to let him scratch at it, although this seemed to have no effect at all, and once again his fingers revealed a change in the texture of the scar, more smooth flesh amongst the damaged tissue . . .
His head snapped up as the door opened, a woman emerging, glancing back to say something, face lit by the glow of the room. She was somewhere past her fortieth year, a handsome woman dressed in pale blue silks with bound-up hair and an easy smile. A male voice came from the open door and she gave a small laugh then turned away, walking to the staircase and ascending, oblivious to Frentis’s presence.
He waited until he heard her enter the bedroom above then went to the door. The woman had left it slightly ajar and he could see the man inside. He was seated at a desk, facing a window affording a fine view of the sea, humming to himself as he read a scroll. He was of middling height, portly and balding, more grey in his hair than black. Frentis wondered what his name was as he pulled the dagger from the sheath at the small of his back.
? ? ?
“A single thrust,” the woman said as they made their way up the mountain. They had sat in the jungle until morning, watching the house and waiting for the screams. They began to climb accompanied by the grief-filled cries of the magistrate’s wife, moving away from the road and the town where people were like to start asking questions about new arrivals when news of the murder became known. “Neat and quick,” the woman continued, climbing without any obvious strain. “Aren’t you going to thank me for letting you give him an easy death?”
Frentis kept climbing, saying nothing.
They came to the summit as the sun climbed to its apex, the woman turned towards the west, arms wide. “The Twelve Sisters in all their glory.”
They stretched away into the mist-shrouded distance, a line of eleven jungle-clad islands rising from the sea. “For centuries not even the bravest soul would dare to live here,” the woman went on. “It’s said there was a great cataclysm, great enough to shatter the land-bridge joining our continent with what is now the mainland of the Alpiran Empire. What caused it none can say, though legend offers a thousand explanations. The Alpirans say the gods battled the nameless and their wrath was such the earth shook with enough fury to drown the bridge. The tribes to the south have it that a fiery globe fell from the sky bringing destruction in its wake. There’s even an old story in Volarian about a mighty but foolish sorcerer who summoned something he couldn’t control, something that ravaged the land before dragging him screaming back to the void. Whatever it was, when it was done the land-bridge had become what you see now, twelve islands. Wild stories abounded of the great evils and magics still lurking here in the aftermath of the shattering, beasts that could talk like men, men that were more like beasts. It must have been a shock to the first Alpiran explorers who dared to come ashore, finding nothing but stinking jungle.”
She started down the western slope. “No time to enjoy the view, beloved. We’d best be off this rock by nightfall. You can swim, can’t you?”
? ? ?
The channel between Ulpenna and its nearest neighbour was at least five miles wide at it narrowest point. The woman had him fashion a small raft for their pack from the light wood that littered the beach, lashed together with vines hacked from the jungle. He pushed it ahead of him with both arms, legs pumping. He had always been a strong swimmer, but that had been in the stretch of the Brinewash curving around the walls of the Order House. This was very different, the ceaseless swell of the sea and the darkness of the water as the sun began to descend conjured fresh images of the great red-striped shark as it devoured the whale.
The woman laughed, turning onto her back, leg kicking lazily in the water, completely at ease. “Don’t worry. We’re far too meagre a meal for a red shark to bother with. He does have smaller cousins though.” She laughed again and swam ahead as his fear lurched to an even higher pitch.
They made it to the far shore without undue incident, though Frentis could swear something rough and scaly had brushed his leg beneath the waves. He gathered driftwood and stacked it in a crude cone. The woman held her hand to it, grunting in pain and delight as the flame lashed out to ignite the timber, a line of blood appearing beneath her nose almost immediately. She wiped it away with a casual flick of her thumb, but he took note of the way she flexed her hand as the flames subsided, and the shudder of suppressed agony in her shoulders. There’s always a price to pay, my love.
They sat by the fire to dry off as the darkness deepened and a half-moon rose high above.
“Can you sing?” the woman asked. “I’ve always had a yen to hear my lover sing to me beneath a moonlit sky.”
For once Frentis was happy to reply without any encouragement. “No.”
She frowned at him. “I can make you, you know that.”
Frentis stared into the fire, saying nothing.
“You’re wondering who he was,” she said. “Why his name was on our list.”
The itch flared anew, almost burning now. He fought down the impulse to wince and kept his hands resting on his knees. If she knew of his discomfort, the woman gave no sign, tossing dry twigs into the fire as she spoke on, “I’m sorry to tell you he wasn’t a bad man, quite the opposite from what I could gather. A fair and learned judge, immune to influence or bribery. The kind of man who is trusted by all, rich and poor. The kind of man people look to in a crisis.” She tossed a final twig into the fire, offering Frentis a sad smile. “That’s why he was on the list. His worthiness killed him, not you. You are merely the instrument of a long-planned enterprise.”
She rose, moving to sit at his side, wrapping her hands around his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He knew they must have made a pretty picture, young lovers huddled together on a moonlit beach, but her voice held no vestige of prettiness when she began to speak again. It was a harsh, sibilant whisper, barely controlled, the voice of a madwoman.
“I know this pains you,” she said. “I remember that pain, my love. Though it was many lifetimes ago. You think me cruel, but what do you know of true cruelty? Is the tiger cruel when it takes the antelope? Or the red shark when it claims the whale? Was your mad king cruel when he sent you off to fight your hopeless war? You mistake purpose for cruelty, and I have always had a purpose. I am not mindless. When we are done with this list I promise you we’ll write one of our own, and then there will be no pain when you strike off a name, only joy.”