Chapter 4 Harrowgate

You smell Harrowgate before you see it.

We came over the last rise on the ninth morning, which made it five days since I'd stamped on the barn floor and walked off down the track, and the wind turned and brought it to us. Chimney smoke first, thousands of chimneys. Then dung, horse and cow and pig and people, all mixed in together. Then river mud, thick and brown and rich, the kind that sticks to the inside of your nose and stays.

"There she is," said Fen, with real love in his voice. "Stinks, doesn't she?"

Then the road came round the shoulder of the hill and I saw it.

I'd thought Thornfell was a town. I'd been to Ellsby once as a kid and thought that was a city. Harrowgate sat on both banks of a wide brown river and kept going, out and out, until the edges went blue in the haze. There were more roofs than I'd seen in my whole life put together. Smoke hung over all of it like a lid.

It had three walls, one inside the other. The outer one was grey stone and ran on for miles. The second was white. The third was a pale gold that caught the morning sun, and inside it, on the highest ground, was the palace.

I'd heard about the palace. Grandad said it had a hundred towers. I'd thought he was exaggerating, the way Grandad did, but I counted fifty before I gave up and I wasn't halfway. They were all different heights and they all had little flags on, and the whole thing looked like a birthday cake somebody had put too many candles in.

"Well?" said Fen.

"It's big," I said.

He laughed so hard the mules looked round.

* * *

The queue at the outer gate went back half a mile. Carts, wagons, people on foot with bundles, a man driving geese, a woman with a goat on a string. It took us most of the morning to get to the front, and by then I'd learned more about the wool trade than I'd ever wanted to.

The gate guard had a list and a lot of opinions. He charged Fen for the wagon and the wool, and Fen paid without arguing, which told me it was the usual. Then he looked at me.

"Gate tax. One silver a head."

I paid it.

He looked at my back. "What's that?"

"Cleaver."

"Let's see."

I unwrapped the sacking. He looked at the blade for a long while.

"That's a weapon," he said.

"It's a butcher's cleaver."

"It's a butcher's cleaver the size of my leg. Weapon tax. Another silver."

"I've had it since I was nine," I said. "I use it for cooking."

"Then you can cook with it inside the walls for one silver," he said, and held out his hand.

I paid that too. He wrote something on his list and waved us on.

"Bloody beer money," Fen muttered, once we were through. "It goes straight in his pocket, that second one. There's no weapon tax. There's never been a weapon tax."

Two silver gone before I'd set foot on a city street. I did the sum in my head and didn't enjoy it.

* * *

Fen dropped me off at the bottom of a street that climbed towards the second wall. He was going on to the wool exchange and the Ram's Head, and he'd be there till the end of autumn, he said, if I ever wanted a mutton chop or a talk.

"I'll come and find you," I said. "Thanks for the lift."

"Thanks for not letting me get shot." He sat there with the reins in his hands and didn't drive off. He looked worried, which didn't suit his face.

"Tobin," he said. "People here aren't what they look like. You understand? They'll smile at you and pick your pocket. They'll shake your hand and sell your house. You be careful."

"I'll be careful."

"That's not what worries me, though." He looked at the cleaver on my back, then at me, and seemed about to say something else. Then he shook his head and clicked his tongue at the mules and drove off.

I stood there for a bit wondering what he'd meant.

Then a girl appeared at my elbow with a tray of maps.

* * *

She was thirteen, maybe fourteen, skinny, with brown hair cut short like somebody had done it with a knife in a hurry. She had a tray of folded papers hanging off a string round her neck and a gap where one of her front teeth should have been.

"Map of the city," she said. "Two copper. Every street, every gate, every inn. Very accurate."

"No thanks."

"You're new. You've got hay in your hair. You need a map."

I felt my hair. She was right.

"I'm all right," I said. "I'm looking for the Guild."

"Up the hill." She pointed without looking. "Green dome. Can't miss it. That's one copper."

"For what?"

"For pointing."

NovelPhoenix's website carries this chapter from its author, yet the text here was reproduced without permission.

I looked at her. She looked back at me with complete confidence.

I gave her a copper. It seemed like the kind of thing that'd be cheaper in the long run.

"I'm Pip," she said, and pocketed it so fast I barely saw it go. "I've got eleven jobs. Maps is one. Directions is another. I also do messages, queue-standing, finding things, carrying, and lodgings. You need lodgings?"

"I do."

"How much have you got?"

"Not much."

"Widow Ostry's," she said at once. "Candle Lane, second ring. One silver a night with breakfast. She's strict but she's clean, and she doesn't let anyone rob you but herself. Tell her Pip sent you and she'll charge you the same as everyone else." She grinned with the gap in her teeth. "I'm going to be rich by twenty."

"Good luck with it."

"I don't need luck. I've got a system."

My purse was under the sling, so I unhooked the cleaver and leaned it against a hitching post while I went in after another copper. I don't know why. I suppose I'd decided I liked her.

"I'll carry that for you," Pip said. "To Candle Lane. Two copper."

"You won't manage it."

"I carry stuff all day." She grabbed the handle with both hands and lifted.

The cleaver stayed where it was. Pip didn't. She'd put her whole weight into it, and when it didn't come up she ended up hanging off the handle with her feet off the ground, kicking, like a kid on a gate.

She let go and dropped back onto the cobbles. She looked at the cleaver. She looked at me.

"It's heavy," I said. "You get used to it."

I picked it up and slung it back on.

Pip didn't say anything. She just stood there with her lips moving very slightly, the way some people do when they're adding up a long column of numbers in their head.

"Keep the copper," I said, and gave it to her anyway, and she took it without looking at it. She was still doing sums when I turned the corner.

* * *

Widow Ostry was a tall, thin woman of sixty with grey hair scraped back so tight it pulled her eyebrows up. Her house was narrow and four storeys high and scrubbed so clean the front step shone. She looked at me, and at the cleaver, and at the hay in my hair, which I hadn't got all of.

"Pip sent you," she said.

"How'd you know?"

"Pip sends me everyone who looks like you." She held up a finger. "Rules. Boots off at the door. No cooking in the rooms. No guests, of any kind, at any hour. Breakfast at the seventh bell and not a minute after. Weapons stay in your room, and nothing with a blade comes to my table. Rent in advance. Break anything, you pay for it twice."

"Twice?"

"Once for the thing and once for my nerves."

That seemed fair. I paid for a week. Seven silver.

The room was at the top of four flights of stairs, under the roof. It had a washstand and a chair and a little window looking out over a lot of other roofs, and a bed. The bed was clean and the blanket was good. It was also a hand too short, which I found out when I lay down on it and my feet went over the end.

I lay there a while with my feet hanging off and looked at the ceiling and did the sums.

Twenty-two gold, counting the chit. Less two silver at the gate, and seven for the room, and two copper for Pip. Call it twenty-one.

A hundred and seventy-nine to go.

* * *

I went up to the Guild in the afternoon, just to look.

The streets in the second ring were narrower than the ones below and twice as busy. Everyone walked fast, like they were late for something, and nobody looked at anybody. I stopped to read a sign over a cookshop and a carter behind me leaned on his bell.

"Get out of the fucking road, you great lump!"

I got out of the road. He went past without looking at me, which seemed to be how it was done.

The sign said MEAT PIES, FOUR COPPER. Four copper. The Black Hound does a pie for one, with better gravy, and they'll give you the end of the jug for nothing if you're polite. I stood there a while, offended on the Hound's behalf, and then kept walking. I wasn't going to be spending four copper on a pie. Not with the tax hanging over me.

Pip was right, you couldn't miss it. It sat on top of a hill in the second ring, a big square hall of yellow stone with a dome on top that had gone green the way copper does. There were people going in and out, more people with swords than I'd ever seen in one place. Big men in mail, a woman with two axes, a skinny bloke in a robe with things hanging off his belt that clinked. They all looked like they knew what they were doing.

The registration hall was shut till the eighth bell tomorrow. But outside the main door there was a big wooden board with papers nailed all over it, and people were standing round reading them, so I went and read too.

It was jobs. Escort a merchant to Ellsby, Iron rank, twelve gold. Clear a nest of something called ghouls out of a cellar in the Lower Weir, Silver rank, forty gold. Find a lost dog, Copper rank, five silver, reward negotiable if the dog's alive.

In the middle of the board, bigger than the rest, with a red seal on it, was one that said: RUIN WYRM. Calamity class. Sighted in the east. Extremely dangerous. 400 GOLD. Gold rank minimum. Party of six required. Do not engage alone.

I read that one twice. Four hundred gold. That'd pay the tax twice over.

I had no idea what a Ruin Wyrm was. A wyrm's a sort of dragon, I was fairly sure, from Grandad's stories. Gold rank and a party of six and do not engage alone. Whatever it was, it was well out of my league, so I moved on to the dog.

* * *

I was walking back down towards Candle Lane when the crowd started.

It came from nowhere. One minute the street was ordinary, and the next people were pressing in from both sides, standing on steps and doorsills, holding kids up on their shoulders. A man near me said, "It's him, it's Sir Gareth," and a woman next to him actually squealed.

Then the parade came round the corner.

There were trumpeters first, and men in blue and silver walking in step, and behind them, on a white horse, was a man in white and gold armour who could only be Sir Gareth Vantrell. He was everything the song had said, from what I'd heard of it. Tall, broad, with golden hair and a jaw you could have split kindling on. His armour shone. He smiled and waved and the crowd went mad.

The horse was the finest animal I'd ever seen. It was pure white, tall, with a long arched neck, and it moved like water.

Right up until it drew level with me.

Then it stopped dead in the middle of the street.

Sir Gareth nearly went over its neck. The horse stood there trembling all over, its ears flat back, its nostrils wide, and it stared straight at me. Not at the crowd. At me. Its eyes were rolling white.

Then it started backing up.

It went back into the trumpeters and scattered them. One of them dropped his trumpet. Sir Gareth was hauling on the reins with his smile gone, and the horse was dancing sideways, half rearing, making a noise I'd only ever heard a horse make once, the night Biscuit kicked his way out of our paddock.

People round me were starting to look at me.

I knew what it was, of course. I'd carried smoked rat tail in my pack most of the way here, and I'd been butchering rat before that, and it gets into your clothes. Hal's coat probably reeked of it. Horses have good noses. Biscuit never liked the smell either.

I stepped back into a doorway to get out of its line.

Sir Gareth got the horse under control. He sat there breathing hard, with a red flush coming up his neck, and he looked round for what had spooked it. He found me in the doorway. His eyes went over me, slowly, from the hay in my hair to the oilskin coat to the boots, and his lip curled. It was like watching a man find something on his shoe.

Then he spurred the horse on, and it went, gladly, at a fast trot, and the trumpeters had to run to catch up.

The crowd drifted off. A few of them were still looking at me.

* * *

I didn't sleep much that night.

The bed was short and the city was loud. Dogs barked, carts rattled, somebody sang in the street below until somebody else threw something at him. Through it all the itch between my shoulders kept going, steady and nagging, worse than it had been on the road.

About midnight I got up and fetched the cleaver from where I'd stood it in the corner, and laid it on the floor next to the bed where I could reach it. I put my hand on the handle.

The itch stopped.

I lay there in the dark with my feet hanging off the end of the bed and my hand on Grandad's cleaver and thought about the horse.

The rat smell. It was obvious. Horses don't like strange meat smells, and they don't come much stranger than rat. Sir Gareth's horse had a fine nose, being a fine horse. That was all.

It's not complicated, I told myself.

It wasn't. I was a long way from home and I'd had a funny few days, that was all, and tomorrow I'd go up the hill and sign my name and get to work.

A hundred and seventy-nine gold. I could do this.

I went to sleep eventually, with my hand still on the handle.