The Doom of Kings_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [19]
They didn’t. She left Sentinel Tower and walked out into the city of Karrlakton.
There was little to reveal at first that she had left the tower, aside from open sky and crooked streets instead of straight passages. The area outside the gate was all but an extension of the area inside, bustling with evening trade. There was a sense of greater freedom out of the tower, though, a more relaxed tone in the voices of traders and carters who dealt with the great house but didn’t serve it. The farther she went from the tower and the more evening slid into night, the lighter the traffic in the streets became. The tension between Ashi’s shoulders eased a bit more.
It was impossible to escape Deneith entirely, however. The House didn’t rule in Karrlakton, but it certainly dominated every aspect of the city. As vast as Sentinel Tower was, Deneith’s activities spilled out of it. Training grounds and barracks, workshops and warehouses, even ordinary houses—every third building that Ashi passed bore the crest of Deneith. The roots of Deneith went even deeper, Ashi knew. Warlords who carried the Mark of Sentinel had ruled the area of what would become Karrlakton before the founding of the ancient kingdom of Karrnath, even before the creation of House Deneith proper. The city had grown under the gaze of the House. Parts of it were as old as parts of Sentinel Tower. For many centuries, Deneith money had built roads, walls, and shrines.
Ashi turned toward one of the oldest sections of the city. The sense of history appealed to her. It was soothing to be among things that had stood for centuries, unchanged and unaffected by the small frustrations of everyday life. When she was gone—when Vounn was gone—they would still be there. As old as Sentinel Tower was, she couldn’t feel the same thing there. Everything was too busy, too imprinted with the ordinary. The oldest areas of the tower were forbidden to all but the most senior members of the House, as if the stones held some dreadful secret. The only peace she had found was in the archives, where books replaced stone, and if they weren’t quite as permanent and unchanging, they had even more fascinating stories to tell as her ability to read grew.
She had found her grandfather in the archives. All she’d known of him before she met Singe was that his name had been Kagan and that the hunters of the Bonetree had found him in the Shadow Marches, badly injured and clutching his fine sword. Too deeply wounded ever to fight again, he had been brought into the clan and had fathered many children for the Bonetree over several years—until he’d gone mad and murdered all of them save one, who had become Ashi’s father, before taking his own life.
In the archives of Sentinel Tower, she’d discovered a different man, a hero of the Sentinel Marshals. He had been awarded an honor blade, the same bright sword that rode her hip, for bringing to justice a pair of notorious murderers. The archive’s record ended with his final assignment: the pursuit of one of the pair after her escape. To the best knowledge of House Deneith, neither he nor his quarry had ever been seen again.
After reading the record of Kagan, Ashi had promised herself that she would become a Sentinel Marshal. She’d mentioned the idea to Vounn. The lady seneschal had answered her with a silence that spoke louder than words. Ashi carried the Siberys Mark of Sentinel. She was too valuable to be allowed to roam far from the reach of the House.
She clenched her teeth as she reached Karrlakton’s old quarter. Anger rose in her again, replacing the calm she should have felt in the shadow of the ancient buildings. She was more than her dragonmark, no matter what people might think, whether they were people like Vounn who expected her to use the mark for the profit