Northgate
Winter 216
It is said that a sword remembers.
It will remember when long forgotten are the seas and the mountains and the works of men — when forgotten is the forest — when forgotten are the songs and the smells of home.
His were hands which had known the sword. His were hands which have known the weight of its heft and the caress of oil-slicked leather — of a handle worn and tinged by time and touch. His were hands which had known the rake and the pick and the rope and the reins, and too in time they had come to know the sword. It was a sword made for killing men.
It is said that a sword remembers, for a sword cannot kill the past.
There came a murmuring of voices beyond the oak of heavy doors and heard so easily by those who cannot see. The noise spilled into the room and splashed against the quiet staccato of heeled boots and haste on the wooden floor and the cold anger of a woman before which the frost on the stained glass of colored windows seemed somehow warmer.
The weight of cuirass and pauldron hatched by blade and pike and bound by leather straps burdened the cross of a mannequin, and on a broad wooden table lay the mail of hauberk and the rounded steel of vambrace and gauntlets.
There too rested a sword, its handle wrapped and worn and its blade as black as glass made within the mountain and shaped by stone, a sword as black as one other blade — a sword that remembered — and beside them all an armet helm fashioned in the likeness of a wolf’s snarling visage.
He was attended by a number of servants which saw to the buckles and the hinges and made order of the many things, and though they saw-not with the pale milk of empty eyes, their work was made still by her arrival.
The cloth bandages which wrapped his face and head were all but finished and changed, and onto his shoulders he pulled a linen shirt with only a brief glimpse of the scars new and old which marked the skin of a man who seemed, had he been human, half her age and not a quarter her station. “Inquisitor,” he said in a voice only in part veiled by the bandages, while he adjust the sleeve at his wrist.
“It is Grand Inquisitor I’ll remind you, and your harem of cripples can leave us. We are to have words,” said the woman with a smile that bore nothing in the way of joy nor fondness and made fine rivers of the crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, her hair which had once been so entirely black threaded now with the silver of knowing and her trousers and coat no grayer nor darker than her mood, save the golden swan embroidered at the collar.
The gesture of his hand was small and the sound only the slightest scratch of fabric against his skin, but the men and the women each abandoned their work without a word and gave the noble woman a wide berth as they departed the room to the sound of the heavy doors being drawn closed.
The woman was lean and the features of her face made sharper still by the slight raising of her chin and slow shift of her posture to favor one leg a bit more than the other, before the drop of eyes blue as robin’s egg fell to the back of her own hand, the nails of which she seemed to examine — clean, polished, cared-for. “I believe you know my purpose in coming to this frozen latrine at the ass-end of the world, as well as that with which I am charged, so imagine — if you will — my tremendous delight when I departed my wildly underwhelming accommodations this morning to see the boy Frey dangling from a rope in the city square.”
He tended a fold at the hem of his linen shirt, before arms made broad by the weight of wood and metal crossed over his stomach and he drummed his fingers in an anxious gesture against his own side. “The boy’s name was Gar —”
The step that closed the distance between the two was shift and easy and for it he took a step back, the table behind him complaining as its leg scraped against the floor and the items upon it rattled at the disturbance, before his hands moved and grabbed the edge of it behind him. The Grand Inquisitor stood close enough that they might had touched, close enough it was clear he stood a foot taller than she, and her voice was a knife across her lips, “I told you to bring them to me.”
The apple at the front of his throat was a thing well defined and it moved when he swallowed and it moved then, the breath of his voice caught there in the coil of the room as a cord want to snap. “It was a message to the —”
“You are pathetic,” she said with the slightest lean forward that her face seemed to fit into a waiting place beside his jaw. “I don’t care if you’re her favorite dog. I don’t care about your ailment nor your affliction. I don’t care about your family and whatever idiocy you think that entitles you to. I don’t care what gifts she has wasted on you—you and Kelwin and the all rest of you fucking disappointments.
You think she loves you? You are her greatest failure—if you disobey me again I will end you and find someone else who is less a disastrous impulsive child to do your job.”
The Grand Inquisitor canted her head and studied him a moment longer, before she turned and stepped toward the table. She tucked a single finger beneath the blade-scratched steel of the wolf-helmet and lifted the face-plate by its hinge to the squeak of metal, before letting it drop closed again with a rattle—she turned and began toward the door.
“Find them.”
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