Read Online The Mark of Ran by Paul Kearney - Free Book Online Page A

his eyes had caught the steel glitter and his legs had halted of their own accord before the import even registered with his brain. Now he crouched and studied intently the second’s glimpse that had brought him up short. Two wires strung across the passageway at shin and neck height. He followed them to the walls and found they were wound about iron hooks set into the crumbling masonry. Before they reached the hooks, their steely length was hung with a row of small silvery bells.
    Rol breathed out slowly. After a moment he mustered up the courage to move between the wires, and continue on his way—more slowly now, his eyes scanning the very air in front of him.
    The passageway opened out onto a gallery that ran all the way round the walls of a long chamber, some ten feet from the ground. The wood of the gallery was crooked and worm-eaten, and Rol dropped to his belly and crawled out upon it gingerly. Finally he was able to look down on the space below.
    A fire burned there on the stone floor of the chamber, the only illumination in the room, and the smoke of it smarted Rol’s eyes. About it a tatterdemalion band of strange figures were warming their hands and passing an earthenware jug between them. They were clad in rags and oddments of leather byrnies, oilskin cloaks, even the tattered remnants of women’s skirts. Some wore caps, others had grubby scarves tied about their heads, but all had feathers jutting from their headgear. Their faces were black with filth, eyes white in the midst of it, mouths like red laughing holes. They were jabbering to one another in a language Rol did not understand, but as he listened, he thought that now and again he caught a gist of the meaning behind it—as though it was not an entirely foreign language but a debasement or dialect of one he knew. Gascarese was the common tongue of the Seven Isles, and this was an offshoot, or a corruption of it.
    The men’s talk died away as Psellos and Quare entered the chamber by a ground-level door. Rol shrank back into the shadows, and the rotten wood of the gallery creaked under him.
    Psellos held up one empty hand in greeting, though his rapier was naked in the other. The lantern was shaking in Quare’s fist, and the bodyservant’s face was white as old ivory, ashine with sweat. Psellos appeared wholly at ease, except for the concentrated glitter of his eyes.
    The raggedly caparisoned figures about the fire spread out at once, and from hidden places in their clothing they drew out knives and hammers. Psellos grinned.
    “Canker! Is this the way to greet an old friend?”
    One of the ragged men stepped forward. He had a mouth full of yellow teeth and his feathered cap was set at a jaunty angle on the back of his head. He held a long, slim knife.
    “Well, well,” he said in accented Gascarese, “the lordship himself. To what do we owe this honor?”
    “You have something of mine here, Canker. An entire night was not in the deal.”
    Canker smiled, and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What can I say, my lord? We are bewitched, enthralled. And not all of us have had a turn yet.”
    Psellos looked about the chamber, as if counting heads. A flicker of distaste passed his countenance and was gone. He sheathed his sword. “Tell me you have some decent drink in this louse-hole.”
    Canker laughed, and the men in the chamber seemed to relax, their weapons sinking by their sides.
    “The King of Thieves may be many things, but he is no barbarian. There is Bionese here, for those of discernment. If one so grand will deign to drink with the dregs of this world.”
    “I’ve drunk with worse,” Psellos said, and stepped forward.
    From somewhere a silver goblet inlaid with gold and set with lapis lazuli was produced. Canker waved a filthy hand and one of his subordinates filled it from a bulging wineskin. Psellos studied the proffered goblet with a connoisseur’s eye, and drank deeply.
    “Exquisite,” he said. “The vintage of the