The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(84)

“Ten pennies for ten minutes?” Rego says. “Good work if you can get it.”

Herse says, “If Ject could get half a coin for the women he jails, he’d be on the Council himself. Ah, there we are.”

Three large wagons crawl up the street. The canvas covering their cargo mounds reveals fragments of the Shield’s logo on blond crates of various sizes. The soldiers at the gate normally stop wagons and ask about their cargo. These they wave through.

The horn sounds twice. People leave the tavern, many furious. A carpenter heads for the gate.

The lead driver appears on top of the tower.

Rego says, “Any trouble, Sergeant?”

“No,” he says. “We brought all the weapons. Had to leave behind some shields. We didn’t have another wagon.”

“We’ll manage,” Herse says.

Rego says, “From what I saw when spreading the word, most supporters are already armed in a makeshift way.”

Now the carpenter appears.

“Corporal,” Rego says.

“The two men who just entered the tavern, they said if there’s a war, wages will be docked eight pennies for every whole coin to pay for it. People are outraged.”

“That can’t be true,” Rego says. “It’d be two at most.”

“One to start,” Herse says.

The horn sounds three times. Patrons are pushed out of the tavern, which has to close. They continue arguing in the street.

Herse says, “Fortunately, we have a more encouraging message. Birming, you brought the blue chest?”

“First thing loaded, as you requested,” the sergeant says.

“Then we have the only weapon we really need.”

The gates creak closed. The bars slide into place. The woman bounds from the alley. The stevedore laughs as she pounds on the gate, trying to get inside the city. She looks up at Herse pleadingly.

He shakes his head and turns away. She curses him with an athlete’s creativity.

“Someday soon,” Herse says to Rego. “Very soon.”

Chelson pushes between two soft pink drapes into his daughter’s inner room. The walls are lined with wardrobes, mirrors, and scores of shelves on which sit hundreds of tiny dolls. Each has been carefully ranked by Tristaban since she was a child, and she still moves them around occasionally as great or terrible things happen in their complex lives. Their heads swivel as one and look at him, it seems.

“My men will find the barrowman,” he tells them, “and whoever hired him.” Was it Eles or Blue Island? Thick as thieves, those two. No interest in war, only in rents and fees and regular routes. They did not claim. They collected. Would they really go so far to sway him and his allies on the Council to not call for war? If so, they miscalculated. War must have its sacrifices. And he must cut his losses.

The doll Chelson had made to resemble his daughter is not on top. It never is. He admires that. She’s a striver. She wouldn’t lose her will to climb like so many of the dolls on the middle shelves. The doll’s currently third after two others. He can’t remember their names.

He picks up the top doll. He ordered it for her from the Dawn Lands. Its face is red porcelain with a tiny black smile. Its dress is silk, the colors obeying no Hanoshi code. He smashes it on the tile floor between two rugs.

Whoever took Tristaban will pay, he thinks. No one steals from him.

The new number one is made of fine gray wool wrapped around cotton wadding and wood. The eyes are coming loose. She used to sleep with this one, he thinks. He rips off an eye, worms a finger into the torn wool beneath, and tears the fabric open. He strips off the wool like a glove from a finger, plucks away the cotton, and drops the remains. The bones clatter on the tiles.

The barrowman will be lucky to get off as easy as this doll after Holestar finds him.

Chelson picks up the Tristaban doll. She was seven when it was made. An engineer came, measured her features with calipers, and sketched her from every angle. She loves the doll, but hated standing naked and cold for so long. He shakes the doll’s head. Something rattles inside. He reaches under its dress to grab its skinny thighs and whacks the head against a wardrobe. The articulated body sways, its arms flail, until the head shatters. A penny falls out.

By the time he’s finished with all the dolls, the clocks are chiming four. Servants have come and gone from Tristaban’s outer room, they’ve come and gone again, and now they’re hiding in petty tasks, waiting to be told to retire.

Chelson leaves the room. He closes the drapes and presses their ends together. Sometimes ventures fail, he thinks. You just have to start again. So he’ll make a new one. He’s making a war. He’s making an army. But why do all that to make a fortune if no one will maintain it after he’s gone?

He remembers something. Back in her inner room, down on his knees, Chelson claws through broken bodies and scrapes away tattered clothes until he finds it. The penny. He pockets it.

An hour before dawn, Livion hears footsteps outside his hell. He flattens himself against the thick wooden door. A shadow blocks the knife-edge of light slipping between the wicket’s hinges. He bangs on the door. “Just tell me if she’s safe.”

The shadow passes.

Deep beneath the Upper City, he doesn’t hear a screeching come across the sky. It envelops the city and skitters the horses, but no one can pinpoint its origin.