Chapter 198 Bait and Switch

Corin's crew had been living one day as two for a long stretch, sleep pinched to the minimum. Only in these two days before the move did they sleep their fill at the depot.

When Armand and Shawn came storing their fifty great crates in, the whole crew breathed easy.

Corin went winding this way and that, and slipped into a room standing half open — Shawn and Armand inside, smiles breaking over both faces. Corin said:

"I was afraid you'd never make the date. The collecting went all right?"

"We were burning too, watching Old Waite come home each day with his few little crates — unhurried as a sheep dropping its pellets — terrified the count wouldn't be met come the hour.

The lord told him to go down to Southmarch and buy it in one sweep; no — scattered buying, he says, buys cheaper. I said, if it's cheap you're after, why not pave the bottom with pebbles — and the man read me a lecture!" Armand had a bellyful of grievances.

"And who told him to? Pebbles down there, and the fraud's caught before the crates ever see the palace." Shawn rapped him once on the head:

"You remember the meat and forget the stick, every time. It was just that little cleverness of yours that handed Lady Venn her excuse to run."

Corin looked the room over, picked up a flatbread off the table, and bit into it. A sound at the door — a middle-aged man in a depot keeper's garb, furtive, poking his head in.

Corin waved him in at once: "Brother Gower — this room, this one. Come in, come in."

The keeper Gower, seeing Corin, slipped inside fast. He passed the little glass vial in his hand to Corin, and brought a key out of his breast:

"Their goods are in — laid in the same warehouse as yours, partition wall between. Their crate-sign is an F; yours is an E. The two letters are all but twins on paper — one short stroke apart, no more. A touch of the ink in this vial adds that stroke. When your goods go out, I peel the sign-tags off myself — twins like those, nobody marks the difference.

This is the key to the partition door. When you come to collect, there'll be one more keeper out front keeping watch with me. Move quick — if he takes alarm and cries out, every head on this ground rolls."

Gower had run the stores of the depot for years, a man the innkeeper trusted deep.

His family kept a house near the Eastern Inn — wife and children, garden plots front and back, a few chickens, some weaving-work taken in: a family living easy at small plenty.

Then those Grey Wolf men had carried off his old mother, his wife, and two children — where to, he couldn't say — and Gower had had no road but in. Well, the silver they gave was fat enough — but an exchange-bill, redeemable at no counter short of a Yorvik vault.

Only after his hand was in did Corin tell him: his mother, wife, and children had been sent on to Highgarden in Yorvik.

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What was left for him to say? He would wait out the morning, see their goods off, and ride hard for the Eastern Capital — then north, all north, running his family down.

Goldwater had gone into the city to wait on Joss Wray. One day yet to the presentation.

Toward evening came a crew of house-retainers, their leader a man with a face like a demon out of a doom-painting. He went in, had a look through the stores — and then his whole crew put up at the Eastern Inn and did not go away.

Corin sat on an oxcart, picking his teeth with a grass stem, watching the retainers patrol back and forth at a distance.

"A shame, though — eighty-odd crates, and we take but fifty. Me, I say the gold and silver in there is squeezed-out greed as well; we should have switched the lot." Nansen lay beside him, hands pillowed behind his head.

Corin spat the grass stem and grunted: "Are we short of gold? The lord says switch fifty, we switch fifty."

"Corin — you trust that lord of yours so whole? He's never once looked at us straight."

Corin smiled a little: "The young lady trusts him — that says the man has the power. And I, Askar Corin, can borrow that power too — to put our people back on the grasslands."

Nansen leapt up, face all astonishment: "Corin — so you never forgot! We thought you'd gone soft over a pretty face, gone fond of the Heartlands..."

"And you slack off the moment I say learn your letters — is Corin a man that shallow?" It was the first time Corin had said it to Nansen: "That Sherwin they've got sitting over Yorvik hasn't half the ability. The chair under his backside will be mine sooner or later."

He had followed the young lady the whole road, watching. The little one's heart was already knotted to Leon — and Leon, time after time, had shown himself no mud that wouldn't stick to the wall.

Help the man to the throne, and Corin would be a king-maker — ask the Yorvik marcher-dukedom for his fee, and no one could call it overreaching.

The Empire's north was the home his heart kept returning to. Some day, backed by the Empire, he would ride back onto the grasslands and take them again.

If Leon used her well, good. If she was unhappy — he would carry her off any hour he pleased, and let her run loose on the great grasslands, galloping and singing her heart out.

The last pig-iron run had brought Askar clansmen with it.

They said Highgarden was already changing its face: Mother led them breaking ground and planting, fencing grass and keeping sheep, digging coal and burning it — and every day the whole household prayed for the young lady's long life.

She had given the Askar, driven to the road's end, a second life.

Corin had made his resolve: this life, to its last hour, he would see her happy.

Today the Odenheim train had gone past the Eastern Inn. Corin sat up on the wall, saw the carriage he knew, saw Morn and Suluk walking beside it — but not the one who was forever at his heels, egging him on to court the young lady: Ray.

Left behind at the Lohenheim house, most like.

That night, no sleep for city or outskirts. At the third peal of the matin bell, Augustburg's waking bells rolled out one after another, plain to the ear outside the walls.

From the hour the gates opened, the Eastern Inn began its day of goods in and out.

Corin, driving an oxcart, brought sixteen carts and a few dozen men, trailing after Shawn, come to collect. They wore the livery of the Eastern Capital Trading Company — freight porters, taking and hauling goods for hire.

"Fifty-six crates under E. Surrender the token at the gate as you leave — in you go." Gower checked Shawn's collection token, and the keeper at his side checked it over too.

Armand passed both keepers a pouch of betel nuts. Gower took one, tossed it in his mouth, and chewed.

The other keeper, seeing Gower take one, made no ceremony — rummaged in the pouch, picking and choosing. Armand, seeing it, pushed the whole pouch into his hands:

"The carts that brought us in were running empty another road, with freight of their own to haul — no help from them. It's all on you two, finding us this ox-train; and if two empty carts cost us a little extra, we're not out of pocket."

"The depot took its broker's fee — as was right, as was right."

Armand pointed at the nuts the keeper had picked: "Brother — a Far South man? You know good betel from bad at a glance; you must chew it steady."

The man nodded, smiling: "Just so. Far South folk take betel in place of wine, against the miasma — and there it's easy come by. Up here in the capital, betel's a rarity; us small folk can hardly afford the habit."

While the talk ran, Corin carried the first crate out. Gower peeled the sign-tag off it, flipped it face-down, and dropped it in the wooden box at his side.

The other keeper watched too — but it was barely the dawn hour, the sky not yet light, and the lanterns and torches under the eaves wavered in the thin cold of the morning wind.

It seemed — or perhaps — or maybe — to be the sign E.

Gower had set the tally box down at his own side; the other keeper, standing opposite, could hardly go flipping through the tags.

Besides, Armand was a man who knew how to make himself welcome. Gower had told him the keeper's tastes beforehand; this pouch of betel they had hunted up in the city through the third lord. The two of them traded a word or two now and then, and got on pleasantly.

And so, before any man marked it, the fifty-six crates had their beams swapped for pillars and passed clean out of the warehouse.

Corin and his men were about to drive the ox-train off when a hoarse voice said:

"Hold!"