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“Temar.”
“What is it?” He looked up.
“It’s from Gla
“Any trace of the Elietimm?” demanded Casuel.
I shook my head. “No sign of any strangers at all.”
“That’s no proof,” snapped Casuel. “They use Artifice to conceal themselves.”
“You can see all the Eldritch-men you want if you stare into a chimney corner long enough,” I retorted, “but they’ll still only be the shadows from the lamp stands.”
Temar looked at Casuel and then to me. “So what does that tell us?”
“That we know no more than we did when we left Bremilayne.” I didn’t bother concealing my own a
Temar returned to his list and Casuel started leafing through his books, marking places with slips of paper and stacking the volumes in front of Temar. “These are significant events in the a
I opened my third letter: good-weight paper precisely addressed in an elegant hand using sloping Lescari script in regular lines and faintly perfumed with something my memory told me was expensive. “Will you excuse me, Esquire D’Alse
“What?” demanded Casuel.
I hesitated; best not to raise Temar’s hopes until I knew if this speculation had paid off. “A lady I know is visiting the city.”
Casuel sniffed with censure but Temar laughed. “Can I come?”
“Not this time.” I winked at him.
“Well, you can hardly read these things for me, so by all means call on the lady.” Temar shrugged a little unconvincingly.
“Then I’ll see what I can do with your list.” Temar’s expression lightened at that thought so I left him to his studies, abandoning Casuel to his disapproval.
Once outside, I looked both ways along the road before leaving the broad portico sheltering the wide steps of the building. The D’Olbriot archive is housed in one of the Name’s many ancestral possessions scattered throughout the city. While the nobility have long since left the lower town to tradesmen and hereabouts to worse, the archive has stayed put. The contents are just too unwieldy to move to more salubrious surroundings and, valuable though the yellowing parchments are to advocates preparing their interminable deliberations, they’re reckoned safe enough here. Thieves prefer real gold more readily spent and the clerks are backed by watchmen big enough to deter casual destruction or fire setting. I tossed a copper to an old man sitting on the steps with two shock-headed puppets dancing lifelike at his deft command. He’d been there for years and always alerted the Archivist to anyone threatening his pitch.
The close-packed houses all around had been long since broken up into squalid lodgings, four or five families now cramped beneath roofs sheltering one household in better days. The crumble-edged yellow stone was marred by stains of water and filth poured from narrow mullions below old-fashioned steep gables. Here and there intricate oriel windows stood out below the vanity of the little turrets that had been so desirable in the days of Tor Inshol, their conical caps of ochre tiles broken and patched.
A gaunt girl staggered out of a nearby alley, green-tainted eyes vacant. I could smell the sickly sweet sweat of the tahn enslaving her clean across the street. I ignored her outstretched hand and hurried on, clapping a hand over my mouth and nose as I passed a dead dog motionless but for the seething of maggots. Even with the sun riding high, shadows were held captive by tall buildings three and four stories high, and I kept an eye out for anyone lurking in hopes of cutting a purse to pay for whatever vice had them in its claws.
I was heading for the tongue of higher land that forms the northern side of Toremal Bay. When I’d first come to the city, little older than Temar and proud of my newly sworn status, it wasn’t a district D’Olbriot’s men would go to in anything less that threes, daylight or no. Any Name with property thereabouts balanced the rents they might collect against the blood it would cost them, and most reckoned the game not worth the candle. Then a new storm had blown up in Lescar’s interminable wars and the ebb and flow of battle washed fresh flotsam up on to Tormalin shores. This was the only place the dispossessed wretches could get a foothold, and they’d dug in their heels, refusing to be knocked on their arses again. It’s easy to despise the Lescari, to mock their dogged persistence over claim and counterclaim, their obsession with land title and vengeance, but there’s no denying that single-mindedness serves them well at times.
I walked along streets where broken shutters had been replaced with new wood, bright with paint. The children might be grubby from playing in the dust but had started their day with clean if patched clothes and lovingly brushed hair. The clack and creak of working looms floated out of open windows high above, and women chatting as they kept an eye on their offspring sat on balconies with distaffs busy in their hands. The Lescari may have arrived without half a lead Mark in their pockets but they had skills in their hands and knowledge in their heads. These days more than half the noble dwellings in the upper city have North Bay tapestries gracing their walls.
I pulled the perfumed letter from my jerkin and realised I had missed a turn. Retracing my steps, I found the narrow flight of stone stairs. Counting doors along the soiled walls, I saw I wanted the one marked by an earthenware pot bright with scarlet flagflowers. I knocked, wondering how long the brilliant splash of colour would last before some drunken reveller kicked the blooms down the steps, either from accident or exuberant desire to see how far they might fly.
The door opened a scant hand’s breadth and I saw a shadowy figure within. “Yes?”
“Ryshad Tathel.” I held up the note. “For my lady Alaric.”
The door closed as the wedge securing it was kicked aside. It opened to reveal a gawky youth whose nervous energy kept his hands in constant motion. He was no stripling though, much my height and with shoulders broad enough to promise strength when he filled out. He wiped sweat from his forehead before ru
“This way,” the lad said curtly. Tormalin was much his mother tongue as my own so some earlier brush with Lescar’s recurrent catastrophes must have swept his wretched forebears here.
I followed him up uncarpeted stairs dimly lit by an inadequate skylight. The lady I had come to visit proved to rent the entire first floor. A demure maid in an expensive silk dress sat on the landing and rose to greet me.
“I’ll let my lady know you’re here.” Her accent was unmistakably Relshazri, seldom heard in Toremal for all the trade plied across the benign waters of the Gulf that separates the two great cities.
She disappeared and the lad clattered noisily down the stairs to his ke
“My lady bids you welcome.” The maid ushered me into the front room. I swept a bow fit for the Imperial presence.
“Good day to you, Master Tathel.” The woman seated serenely on a richly brocaded daybed gestured me to equally costly cushions gracing an immaculately polished settle.