The City of Trials

MADISON

Haze. The day before the new moon. Eighty-four days to midsummer.

Two hundred people had already been sent down the cliff that morning, and the sergeant at the top was still counting.

The Salt Stair went up in four hundred steps cut for a race with shorter legs, and every fifth step had a name scratched into it by someone who had stopped there. Drop your cask and you went down. Set it on a step and you went down. The sergeant leaned on the rail far above and called the numbers off without looking, ninety-one, out, and someone below them would start the long climb back with nothing on their shoulders.

The cask hung between two poles. Puli had the front left, Tyba the front right, because Tyba could carry a horse; Madison had the back left and a stranger had the back right, a lean man with a dueling scar and a pawn tag still tied to the guard of his sword. Seawater sloshed in the cask with every step and the poles bit into their shoulders on the slosh. Below them the whole of Haze lay smoking in the morning, and above them, a long way above, a sergeant in red leaned on the rail and did not look down.

At the hundred-and-fortieth step Puli's foot went on a wet stone, and the cask swung, and the lean man let go of his pole and put the flat of his hand on Puli's chest.

"Go home, fisherboy," he said, quite pleasantly. "One less to share the pass with."

Madison set her end down on the step, which nobody was meant to do, and went round the cask and put him on his back on the stone. He took her bandaged hand on the way down and squeezed it till she felt the cut open end to end under the cloth, hot and wet. So she put her forehead into his nose.

He sat up laughing through the blood.

"Vask," he said, and spat red on a dead man's name. "There goes my advance."

"Hundred and forty!" The sergeant's voice came down the cliff, a dropped stone. "Cask on the step. Out, the lot of you."

Madison looked at the cask. It sat on the step. There was no arguing with that; it was sitting there, sloshing.

Vask got up. He wiped his nose on his wrist, put his face up to the rail two hundred feet above, and called, in a voice of perfect injured honesty, "It never touched, sergeant! The island girl had it on her knee the whole time. I'd swear to it on my mother, if I had one."

A long pause from the top. Then: "Move."

Vask picked up the back pole. "You owe me," he said to Madison, "a nose."

They carried it the rest of the way with nobody speaking, and set it down at the top in front of the sergeant, who looked at the dry step-mark on its bottom and at Vask's nose and wrote something down.

At the top a tall boy with leaves in his braid took her split palm in his without asking, and closed it with a smell of cut grass, and then sat down suddenly on the flagstones holding his own hand, where the same line had opened.

"Juvar," he said, white round the mouth. "Don't tell anyone. It has to go somewhere."

That night, her first in the recruits' barracks, on a pallet with sixty snoring strangers and her back against the wall, she untied her mother's knot.

It came away at one pull, as it was made to. Inside the oilcloth was a single sheet, gone soft at the folds, with a brown ring on one corner where a cup had stood on it. A Council order, in a clerk's round hand.

A red drake sighted over the hills. Colonel Maximo will take his company to Southport, hold the harbor, and destroy the drake.

Three signatures at the foot. The third had a long tail that ran off the end of the stroke like a gutting knife that slips.

She sat with it until the candle stub guttered. Thorne had carried this home in the saddlebag with the sword. Her mother had found it. Her mother had kept it two years, somewhere Madison had never looked, and had tied it into the bag herself with the door shut, under the bread, where her daughter would find it after the boat and not before.

Eyes open.

She folded it back along its own creases and put it inside her shirt, against her ribs, with the pension letter.

The new moon.

They called her last. She'd seen Lanz read her name off his list that morning and move it to the bottom with his thumb, without a word, the way a fishwife moves the best fish to the back of the slab.

"Madison of Jul."

A stir went round the gallery. The colonel's girl. She'd been the colonel's girl on Jul for two years. Here it came with a price on it.

The pit was a sunken ring of sand in the middle of the Field of Banners, ten feet down and stone-walled, with a gallery above where guild officers in red and gold sat among townsfolk who'd paid a copper to watch somebody get hurt. In the center of the gallery, on a plain wooden chair, an old man in a gray coat sat with his hands folded on a black cane. The seats on either side of him were empty.

She climbed down. The sand was hot through her boots. Her left hand had stiffened in the hours of waiting, and she'd spent them working it open and shut under her arm. Now it would only close halfway round the hilt, Juvar's half, and the cut under the bandage pulled at every heartbeat, a hook set in it.

Juvar caught her eye from the rail and held up the pink seam on his palm, and beside him Vask touched his swollen nose and gave her a small ironic bow.

Puli had already been down: two arrows, two sand wolves in cinders. Tyba had hit a cart-wheel beetle once on the crown with his cooper's maul and climbed out looking embarrassed.

She drew the sword, and felt the thrum begin in her wrists.

Lanz, the shaven-headed man in the red coat, looked at the sword. Then he lifted his eyes to the gray coat in the gallery. The gray coat didn't move. Lanz said a word, longer than the ones he had used for the others, and the sand at the far end of the pit went pale.

What came up out of it was made of the Field's own dead. Horse skulls and the long bones of three hundred years of failed trials came up out of the sand and found each other, clicking, and what held them together was harness: cart-traces and girth straps and rotten rope, wound round and round the joints, knotted through eye-sockets, pulled tight. It stood four-legged, twice her height, with a mule's jaw for a face, and in the cage of its ribs, wrapped in the rope like a catch in a fouled net, was a trial banner, red and gold.

"Bring out the banner," said Lanz. "That's all."

It charged.

She went sideways, because Thorne had beaten that into her on the harbor stones. She swung at its foreleg, and the blade hit bone and jarred her to the shoulders, and the bone chipped and the thing didn't care. You couldn't hurt it. There was nothing in it to hurt. A foreleg took her across the hip and threw her into the wall, and the gallery made a greedy indrawn oh.

And the sword remembered.

It wasn't the pit any more. It was the boat slip at Southport under its hill of black rock, and a head the size of a cart coming down out of smoke, an eye like a lamp of yellow glass, and thock, thock, thock from the wardens behind him, into the shield slung on his back, three, and both hands driving up. Her arms came up to drive the point at an eye that wasn't there. The bone-thing's jaw was coming at her ribs in the real sand, and she couldn't tell which was which.

She put her back against the wall and shut her eyes, which was mad. Loosen your grip, Thorne said in her head. She did. The memory had less to hold, and slid, and took all the calm she'd walked down with.

She opened her eyes and looked at the beast as she'd look at a net brought up fouled on the rocks at dawn, with the tide coming and her fingers cold.

You never fight a fouled net. You find the knot that's taking the strain.

It was at the shoulder, where every trace in the thing crossed: one fat knot of old harness, pulled so hard it had gone black and shiny. She let the beast come. She went under the jaw, close in, where it couldn't swing at her, with its ribs creaking over her head and the smell of old leather and grave-dirt in her mouth. She didn't cut at bone. She laid the edge of the sword against the knot and drew it, once, the way you draw a knife through a fouled mesh, and felt every strand part.

The beast came apart round her, a dropped armful of firewood. Skulls rolled. Ribs fell in a clatter on the sand, and the rope went slack and slithered, and the banner fell out of the ribs onto her boots.

She picked it up.

She sheathed the sword. It took three tries to find the scabbard's mouth, because her hands were still on a boat slip two years ago. When she climbed out, there was blood in the hilt-wire. Juvar's seam had opened again under the bandage, end to end, and the calm she'd walked down with didn't come back that day, or that night. The gallery came up roaring, and she kept her eyes on Lanz, who turned his face up to the gray coat and gave one short nod.

That afternoon, with the sand still in her boots, she went to the Council registry. The clerk had ink on his cuffs and a smile he took off and put on like spectacles, and when Madison laid the pension letter on his counter, he put it on.

"Widows' petitions are the third window, miss." He glanced at the date on it. "Though I'd hurry. The pension review closes at the new moon."

"That's today."

"Then it closes at sunset." The smile, again.

"I'll petition. After you tell me something." She kept her hand on the paper. The registry hall was cold marble and whispering, with high windows and long benches of people holding papers like hurt hands. "I want to know whose signature that is. The last one. With the tail."

He looked at it. The smile stayed where it was, but his pen stopped moving.

"Signatures aren't a public matter."

"It's on a letter to my mother. That makes it fairly public in our house."

"Then your mother may write to request clarification, through the third window, in the proper form." He reached, pleasantly, for the letter. "I can file it for her now. Save you the trip."

Madison took it back. Her bandaged hand was clumsy and the paper creased. Under her shirt the other paper lay against her ribs, the one her mother had tied into the bag. She had meant to show him that too. She looked at his hand, still open on the counter where the letter had been, and didn't.

"Another question, then. A squire. Ostin. Farrier's son, Colonel Maximo's company. Is he on your rolls?"

The clerk wrote something down, which she didn't like, and went into the back, which she liked less. When he came back, a second man came with him: middle-aged, neat, in an under-secretary's black with a mourning ribbon at the shoulder. He carried a slim folder, already tied with tape, and he set it on the counter and untied it without hurrying.

"Ostin," he read. "Struck from the rolls. Deserted the week before Southport."

The order against her ribs was dated five days before Southport. Five days wasn't a week. A week was a better word for a deserter. It gave a man time to plan it.

The under-secretary turned a page and read on without looking up.

"Madison. Daughter of the late Colonel. Jul. Harrow Lane, the blue door, halfway up the hill. Mother Elane, widow, keeps a glass-and-lamp shop on Front Street." He tied the tape again in a neat bow. "There's a debt to a ship-supply man, I see. Ossery. Due at midsummer."

The folder had been on his desk before she walked in. It took her a moment to understand that, and then she couldn't stop understanding it.

"Where are you lodging in Haze, Miss Madison? So the Council can write to you about your mother's matter."

"With friends," said Madison.

"Of course." He smiled exactly as wide as the clerk.

"One more. Hal Dunmore. He ate at our table every midwinter when I was small and let me wear his hat. He keeps stores here now, for the guard. I'd like to see him."

The under-secretary didn't open the folder again. "There's no Dunmore on the stores roll."

"He was my father's quartermaster for twenty years."

"Then I'm sorry for your loss," he said, "of both of them," and it took her a moment to hear that he'd said both. "Haze is a big city. Easy to get lost in. Do look after yourself."

At the third window there was a line of black dresses, and a form on a chain, and she read it standing. Name of claimant. Lodging of claimant. Name and lodging of the widow. Witness to the officer's last service. Every line of it went into a folder like the one with the tape. Her mother's name, again, under the blue door. Ostin's, if she was honest about the witness.

Four silver, back pay. Ossery twice over. The whole reason for the boat.

She put the pen back in its groove and stepped out of the line, and a woman in black stepped into her place without looking at her.

She walked out. She didn't run. She went down the long marble steps into the noise and stink of Registry Square with the two papers in her shirt and his voice in her ear, the blue door, halfway up the hill, and only when she'd turned two corners did she put her hand against a wall and find it was shaking. Behind her, over the roofs, the registry bell rang the hour. The third window would shut its book at sunset, and the pension that would have paid Ossery with it. She had let it go. That was the part she'd have to tell her mother.

Thorne was on a bollard at the end of the street with his bad leg out, eating a fried fish out of a paper cone.

"They had a folder," she said. "With the blue door in it."

Thorne stopped chewing. He looked up the street toward the registry, then at the sword on her back, and his mouth went thin.

"Then you don't ask them anything else as a girl from Jul," he said. "They can lose a girl from Jul. A guildsman has a name on a roll and an officer who notices when she's missing." He folded the paper over the rest of the fish. "Ask your questions in a uniform."

She took the order out of her shirt to show him the date, and the light off the harbor came through the paper from behind, and she saw what she'd taken by candlelight for a crease. Pencil, on the back, so faint it was almost a fold. O. — gray — N. at once.

Thorne wiped his fingers on his coat before he'd touch it. Then he didn't touch it after all. He looked, and something went out of his face.

"Hal," he said. "That's Hal Dunmore's hand. The colonel's quartermaster, twenty years. He does his capitals like that, square, like he was fencing a field." One cracked fingernail hovered over the letters. "O's Ostin. The squire. Gray's the horse. North, at once. Hal put the boy on a horse the day this came and sent him off with something." He sat back and said nothing else.

He got down off the bollard, and she put the order away, and they walked back across the city without talking, the fish going cold in his fist. At the foot of the Field of Banners road he stopped where the carts were turning. He'd waited to see her through the pit. That was all he'd stayed for.

"Tide's at four. If I hang about the Field asking after the colonel's girl, they'll have a folder on me by supper." He took her bandaged hand and turned it over and looked at the strip of her mother's apron, gray now with harbor dirt. "I'll tell her you're through, whatever the tower says. I'll leave out the thing made of dead horses."

"Tell her something else." Madison held on to his hand. "Tell her to sleep at yours till I write. Tell her not to open the blue door to anyone with ink on his cuffs and a folder. Not for the pension, not for anything."

"She won't go."

"Tell her I asked. She'll go if I asked." She let go of him. "And I'll write through you."

He looked at her a moment longer, and nodded once, and went down the hill against the crowd, slow on the bad knee. A brewer's dray came between them, and when it had passed, he was gone.

At sunset they read sixty-one names off the tower. Puli. Tyba. Vask. Juvar. Madison of Jul, last. All four from their cask, and Juvar, out of thirteen hundred.

She didn't sleep. Near midnight a slight woman in dark leathers sat down on the end of her pallet without a sound and said, "Hegal wants you. Bring it."

The tower was dark but for one lantern on the top platform. The old man in the gray coat sat beside it on a camp stool with his cane across his knees, facing the palace on its height. The woman stopped at the head of the ladder.

"Thank you, Nocta," said Hegal, without turning. "Sit, Madison."

Madison sat on the boards. He let the quiet go on until she'd stopped expecting him to speak.

"You knew what he'd summon," she said. "You let him."

"I did. To see what you'd do when it remembered in front of a crowd." He held out his hand. It was dry and spotted and steady, a clerk's hand. "May I? Your father let me, once."

She thought of the under-secretary tying his neat bow of tape. She thought of Lanz looking up at the gallery for permission, and her own palm, split on the stair and closed again, halfway.

"No," she said. "But you can look at this."

She took the order out of her shirt and unfolded it on the boards in the lantern light, and put her finger under the long looping tail of the last signature.

"Whose is that?"

Hegal looked at it. He didn't touch it. Then he read the date at the head of the order, and something in his face went still, like water just before it freezes.

"That man was dead a month before this was signed," he said.

Madison took out the pension letter too, and laid it beside the order. The same tail ran off the same stroke. "Signed last spring," she said.

"Then somebody has been signing for him for a long time." He leaned down with his cane braced and turned the paper face down with one finger. "Not on my roof," he said. "And not in your shirt, if you want your mother left alone behind her blue door."

"Whose name was it?"

"Not from me." He didn't look away from the palace. "The day you know that name, you'll say it out loud, in a registry or a tavern or a pit, because you're his daughter and you can't help it. And a week later somebody with a folder will knock on a blue door halfway up a hill on Jul. Your father went asking for that name. Look where it put him."

She folded the order back into her shirt. Hegal watched it go.

"Your father came up this ladder the night that order came," he said, "with the same paper, and asked me the same question." He looked out at the palace on its height, all its windows lit. "I told him I didn't know. Five days later he was in Southport."

End of Chapter 4