The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) Read Free Page A

into now? This man was impossible, but it was just possible that he was what Sam needed – a man to put the horse under his lawmakers.
    “Go,” he said.
    Ulric stood. He smiled. “See you tomorrow, Chief,” he said. He left the room.
    Sam sat back and wished he had a hot cup of jaro to drink. The idea of a commissary suddenly seemed like a good one. So many of the things Ulric said seemed like good ideas – except Chief . That would never catch on.
    He was thinking about ranks and uniforms when Gilan poked his head round the door again.
    “Death man’s here, Chief,” he said.

Four – The Death Man
    Sam found the man standing in the yard behind the law house. He was a head taller than Sam and about the same weight, which was remarkable because Sam thought of himself as unhealthily thin. The death man was a stick. The stick was dressed in black, which was what all death men wore. That was tradition.
    The black clad stick was peering down at the corpse in the back of the wagon.
    “Do you need a hand?” Sam asked.
    The death man turned and looked at him. “I need a place to work, somewhere to put my table. I need water.”
    Sam saw that there was a hand cart drawn up beyond his wagon. “There’s a well just over there,” he said, pointing, “and you can have the room just inside the door on the right. It has a decent sized window.”
    The death man nodded. “Help me with this,” he said. Together they carried his table into the law house. It was a trestle table, legs hinged beneath it and the top thickly varnished. They set it up in the middle of the room with space to move on all sides.
    “I can manage the rest,” the death man said.
    Sam watched as he filled a bucket at the well, fetched a box from his wagon and finally took the body into the house. He carried the corpse gently, as though it mattered, and laid it out on the table with straight limbs and the head tilted back. Sam had seen enough. He wandered back to his office. He sat for a while looking out of the window, remembering Gulltown. He had a small room in the old town now, just a few streets away. It was no more than a bed, a chair, a table. He’d had a house in Gulltown, a small warehouse, a boat, a life. This was different, but it wasn’t better.
    Sometimes he wished he’d had children. His wife had been barren, or he was, he didn’t know which of them to blame, but it didn’t matter because she was dead, and her brother, and her parents – all dead in the violence that had gripped Gulltown after the Faer Karan went. Even Sam had been imprisoned, beaten. He’d be dead, too, if it wasn’t for Hagar Del.
    That had been strange: an island of luck in a sea of trouble. Del was a man who’d worked on his boat from time to time. He wouldn’t have called him a friend, but they got on well enough. It had been Del who brought a kind of rough order to the chaos. He’d organised Gulltown, crushed those who opposed him, and rescued Sam from his prison. For some reason he’d trusted Sam, listened to his advice, sent him to meet the Mage Lord’s men outside the city before the battle of Samara Plain.
    Now Del sat on the city council with Ella Saine and Sam was lawkeeper.
    “Chief?”
    He turned from the window to see Gilan there again. He wondered how Ulric had persuaded the man to start calling him chief.
    “What?”
    “Death man says he finished.”
    “Right.”
    “He wants to talk to you.”
    “To me?”
    Gilan shrugged. “You said you weren’t busy.”
    Sam left his office again and went back to the room next to the yard where he’d left the death man. The man was still there, and it was evident that he’d worked on the boy. The corpse was clean, the hair tidied and shining; the skin looked refreshed as though he was just sleeping. Sam was impressed.
    “One silver coin,” the death man said. “If you want me to do the burial or a burning it will be two.”
    “That’s fair,” Sam said. “Ask Gilan. He’ll pay you.”
    “If