Quillifer

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

"In Quillifer, Williams has presented us with a picaresque novel in the grand tradition of Fielding's Tom Jones, big as life and three times as amazing and affecting." ( Locus Magazine) From New York Times best-selling and award-winning author Walter Jon Williams comes an adventurous epic fantasy about a man who is forced to leave his comfortable life and find his fortune among goddesses, pirates, war, and dragons. Quillifer is young, serially in love, studying law, and living each day keenly aware that his beloved homeport of Ethlebight risks closure due to silting of the harbor. His concerns for the future become much more immediate when he returns from a summery assignation to find his city attacked by Aekoi pirates, leading to brigands in the streets and his family and friends in chains. First he has to survive the night. Then he has to leave his home behind and venture forth into the wider world of Duisland, where he can find friends and allies to help avenge his losses and restore Ethlebight to glory. His determination will rock kingdoms, shatter the political structure of Duisland, and change the country forever.

Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Print pages: 544

Sample

Quillifer

CHAPTER ONE

can hear the waters of the Dordelle chuckling against the hull of our boat, see the silver moonlight glow on the rim of our little window, taste the warm night air. Your lilac scent floats in my senses. By the light of the moon I can see your open eyes, fixed on the dark corner of my cabin, but in truth staring into your future. For you are beginning a new life, a life apart from everything you knew, and you are anxious on that account.

I would help you sleep. I have begun life over more than once, and perhaps I can ease your concern by narrating my own tale. So, come back to bed, my heart, and rest your head on my shoulder, and I will stroke your hair and tell you how I came to become what I am.

I fear that my life may reveal more folly than wisdom. I will begin with an act of folly, then, as I hang upside down three storeys above the street, and reflect on the workings of Fate. The wheel had come full circle, and all in a flash: naught but two minutes ago, I had been sharing a warm feather bed with Annabel Greyson, the surveyor’s daughter; and now I was outside the house, three storeys above the street, hanging near-naked in a brisk wind, while Annabel’s father raged within, seeking the villain who had debauched his child.

Who, of course, was me.

This is amusing now, and you laugh, but it was no laughing matter to be thus caught up in some moralist’s tale. I resolved to avoid the moralist’s last scene, which would almost certainly involve judgment, whips, and the pillory.

What is it about fathers, and brothers too, that sets them so firmly against the course of true love?

The Greyson house was like most houses in Ethlebight, narrow and deep, with the ground floor built of solid masonry, and the upper half-timber floors projecting over the street. From the topmost gable a roof beam extended, and on the end of the beam was a large black iron hook, used to help lift furniture or supplies to the upper storeys.

I hung from the beam with the iron hook a few inches from my face, and hoped I would not find myself hanging from the hook itself within the next twenty minutes.

The beam was slick with pigeon droppings. I tried to claw my fingers into the beam like a badger digging after a burrowing rabbit.

I made my exasperated-bailiff face. All because she asked me to adjust her Mermaid costume. I had complied out of a spirit of pure chivalry—I had complied with all Annabel’s requests—and now I found myself in this doleful condition, hanging above a shadowy abyss.

It has to be said that Annabel’s generous nature had surprised me. I had been paying more attention to Bethany Driver, another of the Mermaids, but Annabel had broken a lace and asked for aid, and my fate had lurched onto a new path.

Some hours earlier, I had entered the house via this same gable, to avoid the groom that slept by the door. Annabel had assured me that her father and his apprentices were away on a survey, her mother was visiting relatives in Amberstone, and the only servant besides the groom was the deaf old lady who lit the fires in the morning.

Perhaps the old lady wasn’t as deaf as she seemed. Someone, at any rate, had to have sent a message to Anthony Greyson the surveyor, who must have ridden half the night to show up at his own door just as the dawn was beginning to brighten the eastern sky. The city gates wouldn’t even have opened yet; Greyson must have bribed his way past the guards.

Hearing the pounding and roaring at the front door, I reacted in an instant—I must admit that I was not a complete stranger to these sorts of emergencies. I dashed up the stairs and left the house by the same route I’d entered, though without all my clothing. In the dash up the stairs, I’d been able to tug on only my shirt. My shoes hung around my neck by their laces, and I held my belt and leather purse in my teeth. On my head was the cap, black velvet with the red piping and the brim turned up all around, that marked me as an apprentice lawyer. My hose, doublet, and tunic were clutched in my hands or piled in a disorderly bundle on my chest.

My situation was made worse by the fact that two of Greyson’s apprentices sat on their horses directly below me. I did not wish to fumble my belongings and make the two men wonder why it had suddenly begun to rain clothing. Nor could I stay where I was: Greyson had only to look out the window to see me hanging there, presenting to the viewer the most unflattering view imaginable.

Carefully, I sorted through my possessions, and threw my loose clothes over the beam in hopes they would remain there for the next few minutes. I looked down and saw the broad hats of the apprentices below, then rolled myself, as silently as I could, atop the beam. Pigeon droppings smeared my front, and my hair, which I keep long because you ladies find it so pleasing, fell in my face. The coins in my purse rang, as loud as an alarm bell at such close range. I made my screaming-infant face, froze in place, and tried to look down without actually moving my head.

If anyone had heard the pennies sing, apparently they hadn’t thought to look up. Shuddering with cold—or possibly terror—I managed to rise to hands and knees.

My pulse crashed in my head like a bowling ball thundering into an array of pins. Father Greyson continued his roaring progress through his house, accompanied by the pleas of his daughter and the toothless jabbering of the old woman. I decided it was probably time to leave my perch, and looked around me.

The Greyson house had a tile roof. I had managed to cross it in reasonable quiet earlier, but if I accidentally kicked a tile to the street, I would alert the waiting apprentices.

The house across the street, however, was thatched, and since both houses had been built to jetty out over the street, the jump was perfectly possible. It wouldn’t be completely silent, but it would be quieter than a clattering tile, and once I landed, I’d be invisible to anyone below.

The difficulty would be that the opposite house was a bit taller than the Greyson place, and the jump would have to be made with great care and sure footing to avoid falling short.

Yet the leap was feasible. I am tall and big-framed and, after spending much of my youth on my father’s killing floor, strong even for my size.

I considered whether or not to draw on my clothing before making the leap, and decided at least to belt on my purse. I was finishing this task when I heard a bang behind me, and suddenly I was illuminated with pale light as a lantern moved into the gable room.

A surge of alarm brought me upright, loose clothing in my arms and my bare feet planted on the beam slippery with pigeon droppings.

I heard a cry from behind me as Greyson glimpsed me through the window, and I launched myself for the roof across the street. My foot slipped in the droppings, and fear clutched my vitals as I realized I was going to fall a little short. I threw my long arms out wide to seize as much of the thatch as possible, and I landed with a great crackle and thump as my clothes spilled from my grasp. My legs kicked out over the abyss, and I grabbed great fistfuls of straw to keep from plummeting to the brick lane below.

“Thief! Thief!” Greyson’s voice boomed out into the street, roaring the word that was most likely to bring the neighbors awake—if he’d shouted “Seducer!,” the result might have been laughter, plus of course the besmirching of his daughter’s name. Greyson was at the window, pointing at my bare legs and buttocks visible in the light of his lantern. There were cries from the apprentices below, the sound of clattering hooves as they wrenched their horses about.

I had lost my clothing. I considered myself fortunate that Greyson was unlikely to recognize my backside, heaved myself to safety, rose to my feet, and ran.

“Catch him!” Greyson bawled. “Break his ribs! Then bring him to me!”

I took flight. By the time the apprentices’ horses jangled into life, I had vaulted to another building and sprawled on tiles with a clatter. Heart leaping in my chest like a mad animal, I scrambled to my feet and ran over the ridgepole to the next roof. Jumping from one roof to another was a sport I’d enjoyed when I was younger—I would race across rooftops with my friends, trying first to reach the gun platform on the North Gate, or ring the bell on the roof of the Pilgrim’s monastery, and all without setting foot on the ground.

Though it had to be admitted, I’d always done this in full daylight, and that I was long out of practice. I’d let my rooftop adventures lapse after I’d become apprentice to Lawyer Dacket—it wouldn’t do for a lawyer’s apprentice to be taken for trespass.

Out of practice I may have been, but pursuit lent me inspiration. Hurling myself over lanes and alleys, landing on my feet or hands and knees or flat on my belly, I outpaced my pursuers until I came to Royall Street, a grand thoroughfare too wide to leap. There, a shadow behind another shadow, I took shelter behind an elaborate carved brick chimney, caught my breath, quelled my hammering heart, and listened for the sounds of pursuit.

I heard horses gallop through the streets, and then the sound of hoofbeats slowed as the pursuit failed to find its quarry. One horse came trotting down Royall Street, but I stayed motionless behind the chimney, and the horse passed on its way. Eventually, the sound of pursuit died away altogether.

The rising sun began to gild the chimneys and rooftops of the city, and I again considered my situation. There was vast Scarcroft Square and too many wide, un-jumpable streets between me and my father’s house, and at least some time on the ground was inevitable. And if I had to descend, it was best to do it now, before it was full daylight.

Three sonorous strokes on a bell sounded through the still air. The Dawn Bell from the Harbor Gatehouse, the signal for Ethlebight’s gates to open.

There was little time to lose. I plotted a route that involved the least amount of time on the ground, rose from my hiding place, and made two leaps across narrow streets, leaps that were much easier in the dawn light. Making the second leap, I dislodged a colony of kitlings that had been perched on the eaves. You have perhaps not heard of these, as they have but recently flown over from the Land of Chimerae, but they are plump, furry, and winged creatures that have appeared in Ethlebight in just the last few years. They are a little larger than rats, and they like to perch above the street until they observe a mouse, a bird, or some other small animal below, and then they glide down on their furry wings and pounce.

The name “kitling” is misleading, as the creatures best resemble a large dormouse, but they kill vermin as cats do, which may account for the name. As they are small and useful, we have made no effort to eradicate them, but we are wary. I am told that dragons too start small.

As I made my leap, I heard Greyson’s call of “Thief! Thief!”—the surveyor had waited silently in the street below, hoping to see me flying overhead, and the pack of dislodged kitlings had warned him to look up, so there was another mad scramble over the roofs until pursuit again died away.

By now it was full daylight. The only advantage of the sunrise was that the wan autumn sun was warmer than the chill autumn night, and I placed myself against the eastern side of a chimney, where the sun might warm me, while I recovered my breath and my wits.

At least Greyson was chasing me through the city, and not at home thrashing his daughter. I preferred not to think of Annabel trapped at home with the old roaring tyrant.

Soon there would be people on the streets, and to blend with those people, I would need clothing. I decided to make a search, leaped to a large building, landed in a rattle of roof tiles, and looked down into a courtyard. No laundry waved in the shadowed court, so I jumped to another building, rose in a cloud of straw dust, and then saw my opportunity below: laundry strung on lines, an empty washtub lying on its side in a pool of water, and no laundress visible.

Employing fingers and toes, I used a crow-stepped gable, a cornice, a soffit, a bull’s-eye window, an architrave, and a trellis to lower myself to the ground. Shaking a cramp from my fingers, I walked barefoot across crumbling old brick and plucked a tunic, hose, and a doublet from the lines. I pulled on the hose, and was about to draw the tunic over my head when I considered the state of my shirt. There was nothing wrong with it, other than its being soiled by sweat, chimney soot, straw dust, and pigeon droppings, but its condition would have degraded my new wardrobe, so I exchanged it for a clean shirt from the line.

I would find a way to pay for the clothes. Stealing, I reassured myself, was beneath me.

Renewed, I began to walk toward the large gate that opened onto a lane behind the house, but stopped when I saw I was observed by a boy-child who stared at me from a door. The boy was dressed in a dirty smock and a single stocking on the left foot, and he gazed at me with vast blue eyes. I approached him.

“Who is your mistress?” I asked.

The child wiped his streaming nose on his sleeve. “Mum’s name is Prunk.” At least to my ears it sounded like Prunk.

I opened my purse and did some calculation. The hose were worth sixpence when new, and the shirt perhaps a whole crown, save that I’d exchanged my own shirt, which was of finer cloth. The doublet was battered, the tunic worn thin in places. And then of course there was the trouble I’d put the household to. Say a crown.

I gave the child a crown. “Give this to your mother,” I said. I added a halfpenny. “And this is for you.”

The child stared at the silver in his palm. “Apple-squire,” he said, and wiped his nose.

I had been called thief, which I was not, and now I had been called a pimp by an infant. I decided I’d had quite enough abuse for the day. “For your mother,” I said with finality, and walked briskly to the gate, oaken-beamed and twelve feet tall. I climbed it easily and rolled over the top, then dropped down into the lane.

In two minutes I was in Royall Street, walking at my ease.

* * *

As I walked along I gloried in my home city of Ethlebight, the great jewel at the mouth of the River Ostra. The houses were built on the same pattern, with upper floors jettied out over the street. Gables were crow-stepped, or rose in gentle curves to pediments or wooden towers or belfries. Bull’s-eye windows or narrow leaded glass panes glittered in the rising sun. Half-timber beams were carved in the shapes of jesters, acrobats, gods, and fanciful animals, or with the solemn, respectable faces of the burgesses who owned the buildings. The city was built on the soft ground of the delta, and the houses tended to tilt or lean against one another, or rear up over the street like a bear about to fall upon its prey.

By now, the city had come fully alive. Sailors surged up the road as if carried on a tide, legs spread wide, straddling the pavements as if walking along the heaving deck of a ship. Knife sharpeners, sellers of whelks and oysters, rag-and-bone men, pie and chestnut sellers, all moved along the streets behind their handcarts, each giving out the distinctive, high-pitched cry peculiar to their trade. Monks in undyed wool, servants of the Pilgrim, walked in disciplined silence on rope sandals. Servants bustled on errands, the wealthy bustled in chairs or coaches, children bustled to school, and apprentices bustled to the nearest source of ale. Dogs and pigs, which devoured the waste, wandered freely; while cats perched on high gables and viewed all from a position of superiority. Drunken men sang, drunken women screeched, drunken children darted underfoot. Carters rode in the press, their wagons piled high with goods, surging along like galleons in the human flood.

My long legs carried me easily through the throng. I delighted in the familiar sights of my city, not to mention the fact that I’d survived the night unscathed. My black velvet apprentice cap had remained on my head through all the night’s adventures. The tunic I’d acquired, striped in faded green and thinning white, was stretched to the limit by my big shoulders; and the quilted doublet, originally the deep red color called cramoisie, was a pale ghost of its original self. I was beginning to think I had overpaid for my new clothes.

Still, having survived pursuit, I was in charity with all: I walked with a smile, greeted friends and acquaintances, while with practiced skill I dodged small children, pigs, and filth.

I paused by the shop of Crook, the printer and bookseller, but the door was closed. Inspired perhaps by the bound verse that he imported from the capital, Crook the businessman kept poet’s hours. I would try to visit later in the day.

“Hoy! Quillifer!”

I turned at the cry, and saw the urgent signal of Mrs. Vayne, the greengrocer. I avoided the rumbling handcart of an oyster-seller and crossed the street to join her.

Mrs. Vayne was a large woman in a starched white apron and a boxy hat that covered her ears. Her cheeks were red as the baskets of pippins piled about her feet. I saw at once the distinctive white-green apples nested in straw, and I felt my mouth water.

“Pearmains!”

The grocer smiled with crooked teeth. “Ay, the first pearmains have come down the river. And you know how your mother dotes on them.”

“Can you send two baskets to the house?”

Mrs. Vayne nodded. “I’ve already set them aside.”

I leaned over a tub of cresses and kissed Mrs. Vayne’s cheek. She drew back in mock surprise.

“A forward creature you are,” she said. “But for all that, you may have a forelle.”

I picked the spotted pear from the greengrocer’s hand and took a generous bite. I chewed with great pleasure and dabbed at my lips with the faded sleeve of my doublet.

“Best send a basket of these as well.” I took another bite, and my free hand snaked a pearmain from its den of straw. Mrs. Vayne saw and pursed her lips in disapproval. I made my wheedling-infant face, and the greengrocer shrugged.

“The gages should come in two or three days,” she said.

“Then I shall return in two or three days.” I kissed her again, and she wiped pear juice from her cheek.

“You’re not dressed for Dacket’s office,” she said.

“It’s a sea dog I am today. I’m going sailing.”

Mrs. Vayne crooked an eyebrow. “Does your master know?”

“I am on my master’s business. Which I should no longer delay.” I raised the stolen pearmain, inspected it, and took a bite of the white-green apple. I crunched the pearmain happily, smiled, and said, “Best make it three baskets sent to my mother.”

“They will keep all winter,” said the pleased grocer. “Provided you keep them in a cool room.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw a pair of broad-shouldered men striding through the crowd. Was it Greyson livery they wore? And were they bearing cudgels?

It was time to depart. I gave a wave, kicked away a pig that was investigating the beetroots, and continued my walk, eating from either hand as the fancy took me.

Royall Street opened into Scarcroft Square, with its fountain surrounded by marble allegories, and the glory of Ethlebight brickwork shone bright in the clear morning sun.

Ethlebight, sitting on its swampy delta, had an excess of clay, with more delivered every spring by the flooding river; and the merchants of the town had made the most of this bounty. The city produced bricks, millions every year—plain red brick for plain buildings, but also bricks of mellow gold, of blue and purple, of black and brown. Some bricks were glazed with bright colors, pinks and yellows and green.

Scarcroft Square was a fantasia of masonry, all built of the brick that formed the town’s main industry. The ivy-covered town hall, the guild halls, the grand mansions of the burgesses and the local lords, the Fane, the Court of the Teazel Bird, the New Castle, the Grand Monastery of the Seven Words of the Pilgrim . . . all blazed in the morning sun with color and light, red bricks and gold, black bricks and blue, pink bricks and green, all the glazed, bright hues. These colored bricks were laid in patterns, rose in spirals to support upper storeys, or twisted high to hold aloft the chimney pots. The square itself was paved in brick, set with spirals, quincunx patterns, or pictures of fabulous animals—mosaic done in enormous scale, with bricks instead of tiny tesserae.

We also produced glass, and the glazier’s art was fully displayed: leaded glass, glass stained to produce triumphalist pictures of the city’s history, glass cut into cabochons or faceted like gems, glass opalescent, etched, and enameled. The result was a square that glittered in the morning sun and winked sunlight from a thousand faceted eyes.

A temporary theater was being built on the square, to support the players during the Autumn Festival, and it was the only wooden structure in sight.

Another impermanent structure was the effigy of our much-married King Stilwell. His statue stood on a plinth, and he wore armor and carried a sword, looking like the young warrior that had triumphed in his wars against Loretto.

It was a tribute to the city’s burgesses, who counted every penny, that the King’s statue had been made of some kind of plaster, then painted to look like marble. There was no point in cutting a figure in stone, or casting it in bronze, when the King would sooner or later die and the image be replaced by that of the next monarch. I had to admire the canny sense of thrift displayed by our aldermen.

In fact, I delighted in everything I saw. I felt my chest expand at the sight of the square, straining the fabric of the borrowed tunic. I had spent all my eighteen years in Ethlebight, with only a few trips to other cities, and I adored the city that had raised me, and also admired the bustling inhabitants who lived within its walls.

Scarcroft Square was magnificent, but I knew I was seeing it at its height. The city was fading, doomed by slow strangulation as silt choked its harbor. I pictured it fifty years hence: the grand houses empty, windows empty, roofs sagging, colors faded, the square filled with windblown trash . . .

It could not be prevented. Best not to think about it.

I tossed the remains of my pear and my apple onto the street for the pigs, then crossed the square to a tall, narrow building with a crow-stepped gable. The glass in the tall, arched windows was stained with figures of a warrior battling a dragon, this representing Lord Baldwine, an ancestor of the current Duke of Roundsilver, who owns the building. Roundsilver is a wealthy peer, and owns a great many buildings around the city, as well as his own grand house on the square. He spends little time there, devoting his time to being at court along with all the other great nobles.

I admired the stained glass, with Baldwine holding up the severed dragon’s head, and went up a tall, narrow stair to a cramped office that smelled of paper, dust, ink, and vellum.

Lawyer Dacket, my master, stood in the center of the room, a paper in either hand. Dacket was a spare man with a pointed beard, a melancholy, lined face, and the black fur-trimmed robe of his profession. He wore a velvet hat like mine, but with gold tape and a gold pompon to show that he practiced before the bar.

“Pearmains are in!” I said in joy.

My pleasure seemed only to deepen Dacket’s gloom. “That would account for the juice on your chin,” he said. I hastily wiped it with my sleeve.

“Mrs. Vayne was generous with her samples,” I said.

“You are dressed for holiday,” observed Dacket. “I wish you joy of it, and of your apples.” The planes of his face shifted slightly. “May this office then hope you shall not return?”

I put on my learnèd-advocate face. “Loath though I am, sir, to stand in an abnegative posture and contradict my learnèd colleague in any way,” I said, “I desire the jury to observe, inicio, that while your humble apprentice shall be absent today, that he is not in absencia, for though my mind may be absent, my corpus shall absent be on the business of the court, videlicet, preventing Sir Stanley Mattingly from being absent at the Assizes, and that absent evidence of jurisdiction, I pray the jury to declare evidence of dereliction absent, and the Crown nolle prosequi.”

This is an example of what my father would call “flaunting my knowledge like a vainglorious peacock,” forgetting that peacocks have no knowledge to flaunt, vainglorious or otherwise. Yet I find that I must continually remind people of my gifts, for they are inclined to forget my education and acuity. I expect it’s because I am not impressive in my person: granted that I am tall and have broad shoulders, and long dark hair admired by the ladies, but I am not handsome like my schoolfriend Theophrastus Hastings, or as rich as the Duke of Roundsilver, or possessed of any degree of fame like the Emperor Cornelianus when he was called to the throne. My father is a Butcher, which causes some people to discount me. And of course, I am young and have not the authority that comes with age, like that of Judge Travers.

And so I must offer my gifts to the people, and offer them continually, and without cease, so that I may be something other than a nullity in their eyes.

My master, Dacket, listened impassively to my appeal. “The plea would receive a better hearing were there not apple skin between your teeth,” he said. “And what is this of Sir Stanley?”

Dacket’s office had been pursuing Sir Stanley Mattingly in an attempt to serve him with a writ to bring him to the Autumn Assizes, which would begin in two days. But Sir Stanley was not to be found at his town house, or at his house in the country; and unless the writ were served, Lawyer Dacket would be unable to prosecute him on behalf of his client, Mr. Morton Trew.

“And yet,” I said, “Sir Stanley cannot be far away, as he stands as honorary master of the Guild of Distillers, and must ride on their float in the Autumn Festival that follows the Assizes.”

“You have found his bolt-hole?” Dacket inquired.

“I remembered that Sir Stanley’s sister is married to Denys Buthlaw, and—”

“Buthlaw is moved to the capital, and his house here is closed. There is no guest lodged there; we have investigated.”

I raised a hand. “But sir, Buthlaw has another house, on Mutton Island.”

Again the planes of Lawyer Dacket’s face shifted. “Is that so?” he murmured.

“Remember that Sir Stanley is known as a great hunter and is ever trampling the fields of his own tenants in pursuit of the fallow deer. And bear in mind also that Mutton Island is connected to the mainland at low tide, and that directly across the channel is the Forest of Ailey, in which Sir Stanley could ride and hunt to his heart’s content.”

A tenuous gleam appeared in Dacket’s eye. “You have evidence that Sir Stanley is on the island?”

“Nay, sir. But Mutton Island seems worth exploring, if you can but provide me with a writ and spare me for the day.”

All traces of pleasure vanished from Lawyer Dacket’s countenance. “Spare you for a day of sailing.”

“On Kevin Spellman’s boat. And I shall bring Kevin along to serve as a witness, should I find Sir Stanley.”

Dacket adopted an air of saturnine amusement. “I could do with a day on the sea. Perhaps I should venture to the island on Goodman Kevin’s boat.”

I acknowledged this possibility with a gracious nod. “The sea air would serve to balance the humors,” I said, “and bring an attractive pink flush to your e