Black Salt

Black Salt - Chapter 15

 Nikias walked Sapog at sword point out of the house and down to the cove. He held him there until Kalliphas turned up at the prow of a rowing boat, ten armed guards under his command.

"I got your message," said Kalliphas, walking up the sandy beach.

"Really. I'm glad you told me that, because I was about to have you chained up in a rat hole for abandoning your post to go fishing."

Kalliphas blushed. "I let that ugly dwarf go back to Kleon's house, but I set two men to watch him."

Nikias smiled.

"Do you believe that he-"

"Have your men take this fellow back to the barracks. No one talks to him, no one talks about him. He's a ghost without a shadow."

"You can't do this," said Sapog.

"We will see. Kalliphas, you stay with me."

They tore the keeper's house apart. Working together, Nikias and Kalliphas searched every scroll in Sapog's study, and then smashed his desk to flinders in case it had a secret compartment. They stripped the sheets off his bed, checked them for sewn-in pockets, they ripped up his mattress, filling the air with duck's feathers, and then they cracked apart the frame. Nikias had seen men keep scrolls, gold, and even a rolled up army banner in the hollow leg of a bed. Sapog, it seemed, favoured other methods of concealing his secrets.

They explored the garden, stabbing the dirt at short intervals to check for shallow-buried boxes. They pried under the roots of the palm trees, and climbed them to check for anything hidden up in the hearts of the trees. Kalliphas slipped as he came down one tree, and twisted his ankle on a pebble. "Gods below! Nikias, this is useless. I don't know why you suspect the light keeper, of all people, but there's nothing here."

Nikias wiped sweat out of his eyes with the back of his arm. He'd grown so used to wearing the bracers that he only noticed them when he felt the warm leather against his brow. "I'm sure I had more endurance when I was your age," he said.

Kalliphas leaned against the tree, and rubbed his ankle. "It's been a week since the murders. Now Kleon's slave girl kills herself, and you immediately decide that she and the keeper were part of the plot?"

"She wasn't part of this plot, but she was working for Kleon. No, not as a mere fetch and heft slave! She was sleeping with the keeper, I know that. He's part of the circle, I know that, too."

Kalliphas put weight on his foot, and winced. "I think you're guessing. You're afraid that the king will lose patience, and start listening to Rathea. Go after Black Salt with the army. If it comes to that, we'll all be bathed in blood, one way or another."

Nikias sighed. "You've got me all summed up, Kalliphas. Shame I'm not behind Black Salt."

"If you were, I would be too."

Nikias had a strange feeling. He studied Kalliphas with narrow, searching eyes, but the young man revealed nothing unusual except discomfort when he walked on his hurt ankle.

"Get that bird," he said, pointing at Sapog's falcon.

"What? Why do you want that?"

"I'm hungry, and I want something tasty for supper."

"But-"

"Get the bird, and rest your ankle. I'll finish here."

He left Kalliphas in the garden. The skin itched on his healing wounds. The bracers had proved excellent at shielding his arms from further injury, but they trapped sweat, and irritated the knife slash. Just then, though, something else was making his skin itch. The sweat gave him an idea. He went to the kitchen, where Sapog had an earthenware oven. The room smelled of saffron, honey and raisins, and it had a tinge of salt.

Good. He wanted salt.

He went through the man's pots until he found the salt jar. He took off the lid and tipped it up, and made the salt cascade on the floor like snow. He shook the pot, and something else fell out, a little scrap of papyrus.

"I have you."