The God-Touched Man

by Melissa McShane

  “Let us hope they are not also looking out for Hodestis,” Piercy said, and urged the horses onward.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lights began appearing before they entered the town itself, spell-lights lashed just above head-height to posts lining the road. Piercy was grateful for their guidance because thin clouds were drifting across the face of the moon, turning the night blacker than Cath’s heart and as chilly as the cell they’d left behind.

  “Do you think we’ll be lucky, and Hodestis stopped here for the night?” Ayane said.

  “I think he would have passed this place around two or three o’clock. That would be too early for him to end his travels.” Piercy tried not to think of a hot meal, a warm bed, possibly a bath and, if the Gods truly loved him, a razor. Time enough for that when they had Hodestis’s trail.

  The town was surrounded by a stone wall, more a token than a real effort to keep invaders out, and when Piercy called out to the gate guards they opened the wooden gates without question. The doors weren’t sturdy enough to keep out a determined attacker, Piercy observed as they passed them, barely three inches thick and studded rather than banded with iron. They must be returning to civilization at last.

  The thought vanished with his first real look at the city. Despite the modern spell-lights, the city had probably been old when the Yanceter Monastery was built. Wattle and daub or wooden houses, their timbers gray and splintered or painted bright blue in defiance of the passing years, leaned toward each other, turning the already narrow main street into a canyon that would be permanently in shade when the sun was up. The lower windows were all shuttered against the night air; more spell-lights burned in the upper windows, and the sounds of people enjoying themselves drifted from some of the wooden galleries.

  There were stone walls at intervals, all of them crooked and short on mortar, that looked as though they were just waiting for their moment to collapse on someone. “This is the oddest town I have ever seen,” he murmured to Ayane, for at that moment a handful of merry townspeople passed their carriage and he didn’t want them to hear him criticize their town. He’d expected them to look as rustic as the town did, but they were all dressed in modern, if slightly provincial, frock coats and gowns. Odd indeed.

  “So if Hodestis came here, what would he be after, if not lodging?” Ayane said.

  “Food, probably. Something for himself and eventually the Lady High Chamberlain, since I am certain he wants her in perfect condition and she might starve to death if he keeps her in the grip of desini cucurri.” Piercy scanned their surroundings. “There is an inn. We can ask there.”

  “There look to be a lot of inns along this road, Piercy. We could be doing this for a while.”

  “Then we should begin immediately, yes?”

  He left her holding the reins and hopped down to push his way through the crowd of people who were all having a much better evening than he was. The noise and light buffeted him after the cool quiet of the moors, leaving him momentarily disoriented. A few minutes’ inquiry revealed Hodestis hadn’t stopped there. Piercy handed over a coin in thanks and left. Fortunate those guards had augmented his supply of money, because he would probably have to repeat the transaction a dozen times before their search here was over.

  Ayane and the carriage were gone when he returned.

  Panicked, he cast about up and down the street and saw the cherry-red contraption stopped a few dozen yards up the street at another inn. He cursed and strode off after it. The woman was completely…well, not unreliable, of course, but unpredictable, certainly, and she was going to be the death of him eventually if only because his nerves could only take so much abuse.

  Panic rose up again when he reached the carriage and didn’t see Ayane anywhere. Dolobeka was still in the carriage, looking as dour and forbidding as ever. “Where is Ayane?” Piercy demanded.

  “Inside that inn,” Dolobeka said, shifting himself more upright and grimacing. “She said nothing to me except ‘wait here.’ I refuse to be taunted.”

  “I am certain she meant no such thing. Why did she come here?”

  “Who knows why that woman does what she does. Were it not for her appearance I would think her no lady, because noble women do not behave so.”

  “Insult her again, and injury or no, you and I will have more than words,” Piercy said. “Wait here.” He turned his back on Dolobeka’s sputtering outrage and waited somewhat impatiently for a man and woman to exit through the narrow door of the inn. More noise, the sounds of laughter and conversation, washed over him, and he pressed forward through the crowd.

  It looked so much like the taproom of the place in the past where Ayane had been hailed as a princess Piercy suffered another brief disorientation. Low beams painted black contrasted with the pale blue of the plaster of the ceiling and walls, though Piercy had trouble seeing through the crowd to see much more than that. The faint smell of boiling mutton drifted to his nostrils occasionally, but mostly the room smelled of warm ale and sweat, and only the modern frock coats and gowns of the patrons told him he was still in his own time and hadn’t walked through yet another portal.

  Everyone in the place had his or her attention directed toward the bar, at something Piercy couldn’t see despite his being taller than most of the people there. As he stood looking for a way through the crowd, the noise surged into a cheer, and laughter, the sort of sound people might make if they were encouraging someone. Arm-wrestling, perhaps? Not dog fighting; he would have heard the growling, and it was illegal in any case, so unlikely to be featured in the front room of an inn on the main street of this city.

  He began to press forward, but then the crowd opened, and Ayane emerged at a near-run. “Good,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “You have to see this.”

  “Is there any point to me remonstrating with you about abandoning me without a word?”

  “No. Did you really want to spend the whole night asking at inns by yourself? It made more sense for us to work independently. Besides—” She drew him into an open area at the front of the crowd, next to the bar. “Look at what I found.”

  She pointed at a man leaning against the bar, placing an order. He had longish dark hair and wore a frock coat in a strange shade of green rucked up under his arms. Piercy was about to say something sarcastic to Ayane about the mundanity of her find when he realized, first, the man was leaning at a very odd angle; second, both his arms were bent at the elbow and his hands were level with his face, the fingers curled as if gripping an invisible bar; and third, his head was turned and his mouth open, but neither were moving. Desini cucurri. “By the Gods,” Piercy said. Then the man blinked at him, and the crowd shouted approval. “He’s conscious.”

  “I know,” Ayane said, “but they won’t let me help him. I gather they have a betting pool as to how long he’ll stay like this. Or which of his limbs will unstick first.”

  “That could take most of an hour.”

  “Hey!” Someone grabbed Piercy’s shoulder. “Get out of the way!”

  Piercy gripped the man’s hand and forced his fingers open, making him yelp. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “We are strangers to this town and had no idea baiting helpless men was your idea of sport.”

  The man looked away. “It doesn’t hurt him,” he said. “And it’s a spell, so it’s not like we could do anything about it.”

  “Massaging his limbs will help him recover more quickly,” Piercy said in a loud voice.

  “Don’t interfere,” said a scrawny woman in an elegant full-skirted gown more appropriate to the opera than a tap room. “I’ve got hard money on his left leg.”

  “But—” Piercy began, then allowed the frown wrinkling his brow to give way to an expression of cheerful enlightenment. “Of course!” he exclaimed in a clear, carrying voice that dimmed the noise of the crowd somewhat. “I confess I was a trifle confused by your carrying out this man’s punishment in such an ad hoc manner, but I see now he must have committed some minor crime. You a
re wise to use public humiliation to control your miscreants. Truly inspired.”

  Now the crowd was entirely silent. “Joss is a good man,” said the man who’d tried to move Piercy. “He’s not a criminal.”

  “No? Then he’s insulted one of you in some way. Or possibly all of you. Tell me, who is the magician who cast the spell? He caught him in a perfectly humiliating position. I think he should be congratulated.”

  More silence. “The magician left,” the same man said. “We…couldn’t stop him….”

  Piercy translated this as We were too afraid to stop him and said, “So, not someone you know? Then I’m confused again. A strange magician comes into town, casts desini cucurri on a good man, runs away, and your response is to make a game out of your friend’s recovery? I fail to see how this benefits anyone involved. Except possibly those who will profit from the wagering. But no doubt Joss will understand, when he recovers.”

  The crowd was not only silent, it was edging away from him. No one seemed inclined to meet anyone else’s eyes, least of all Piercy’s. Piercy kept a carefully neutral expression on his face and let his words do the whipping for him. Ayane had moved a few steps to his rear, on his left side, preparing to defend both of them if the crowd turned ugly. He let out a slow breath and waited for a count of fifteen, then said, “If you help him now, he should be fully recovered in about twenty minutes. Left alone, it will take an hour. In case that matters to anyone.”

  He began counting again. He’d reached seven when the scrawny woman said, “Let’s get him up on the bar. Maybe we can make it less than twenty.” A few others came to help lift Joss to lie crookedly on his back on the smooth slab of oak, then more stepped forward to rub the man’s legs and arms and neck.

  Piercy made his way to the far side of the room and leaned against the wall, watching. He itched all over, and the smell of hot water from the back room where someone was washing up after supper made the dream of a bath seem finally within his grasp. But time enough for that when they’d found out what Joss had seen.

  “I can’t believe you managed that,” Ayane said. She leaned against the wall next to him. “You truly have a silver tongue.”

  Piercy shrugged. “These are men and women of my own class,” he said in a low voice. “They are intelligent, socially aware, and quick to do anything that will assuage feelings of guilt. It helped that they consider Joss one of their own and therefore could be swayed to imagine themselves in his position. Will you wait and watch Joss? I intend to help Lord Dolobeka inside and find someone to care for the horses and carriage, then I will return.”

  “I’ll make sure Joss doesn’t go anywhere. Piercy,” Ayane said, stopping him with a hand on his arm when he would have moved on. “I…” She drew in a deep breath. “We’re going to succeed, I know it,” she said.

  “Well, if we fail, we will be in the best of company,” he responded with a smile. She didn’t smile back, and as he left the room, he wondered what she’d actually meant to say.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It took a few minutes to get Dolobeka out of the carriage, with a great deal of swearing on the Santerran’s part, and a few more minutes to maneuver him through the narrow door, which prompted more swearing, Dolobeka’s audible and Piercy’s silent.

  Piercy took a moment to ask the innkeeper, who turned out to be the man who’d accosted him, where they could find a surgeon who could bind Dolobeka’s leg properly. The man, still shamefaced, volunteered to send someone not for a surgeon, but for a magician-healer, and Piercy thanked him without saying anything about the misunderstanding. Everyone made mistakes; he hoped the Gods would be as forgiving of his.

  He returned from handing the carriage over to an ostler built like one of the stone walls, if sturdier, to find Ayane sitting on a bar stool next to the mostly-recovered Joss. He held a tankard in hands that quivered.

  “Piercy, it was definitely Hodestis,” she said. “Joss, tell him what you told me.”

  Joss nodded. He’d unbuttoned his frock coat, his dark hair was unkempt, and his eyes wouldn’t settle on anything for more than a second. “It was my day off,” he said, his voice as shaky as his hands. “I’m a constable. But the wagon was parked in front of this inn, just standing there with the horses tied to a lamppost. That’s against the law and it’s unsafe.”

  He took a long drink that seemed to calm him. “But I wasn’t on duty. So I went and looked under the canvas covering the wagon, to see if the owner had some legitimate business that would make it all right. And I saw…I saw the body of a woman. She was just lying there. I was so shocked I didn’t move right at first, then I heard someone coming and turned my head, and this little fellow with really large eyes was standing right there looking as shocked as me. Then he raised his hands, and the next thing I remember is leaning up against the bar with everyone laughing.” He drank again. “I can’t believe they laughed.”

  “People sometimes do foolish things I am certain they regret later,” Piercy said. “Now, about the woman.”

  “I really don’t want to answer any more questions.”

  “We are on the trail of the magician who paralyzed you. We only have a few questions, and your information might mean the difference between our success and failure. Please, sir.”

  Joss sighed. “All right. What about the woman?”

  “Are you certain she was dead? Might she not have been paralyzed?”

  “She looked dead to me, but I didn’t touch her to see if she was still breathing. So it’s possible.”

  “What else can you tell us about the wagon?” Ayane said.

  “It was a wagon. Not new, not old. Solid sides and not slats, something you’d haul small loads in. Not a farm wagon. One horse.”

  “Was there anything inside other than the La—the woman?” Piercy said.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Please think. Anything would help.”

  Joss scratched his chin. “She was wrapped in a heavy cloak and I think she was lying on top of a few others. I remember because it was far too warm for this weather. And there was a bundled-up tent. I don’t know how big it was. That’s really everything I remember. I didn’t have much time for a closer look.”

  “Thank you,” Piercy said. “May I buy you another drink? You look as if you need it.” He motioned to the bartender, laid down a couple of coins, and drew Ayane to one side. “Heavy cloaks,” he said.

  “And a tent. Do you suppose he’s planning to go to another time again?”

  “If we can believe him, he has no more power to open a portal. And I think he told the truth about that. Almost everything he told us was true, if misleading.”

  “I’m too tired to think. We have to sleep soon, even if it means falling behind. No one seems to know where he went.”

  “I have been listening to their conversations. Apparently Hodestis is now a nine-foot-tall villain with blazing green eyes whom everyone was suspicious of immediately. I imagine the reality is he entered this establishment, negotiated for a meal he could take with him, and surprised the hapless Joss and the few others who witnessed the desini cucurri. This city is fortunate he did not use more powerful spells.” Piercy’s jaw popped as he yawned. “I will wait for the magician-healer. Will you rent us rooms? And inquire after their bathing facilities?”

  “I don’t understand why no one’s made a fuss over us foreigners. I got little more reaction than a blink from the crowd when I came in. Granted, they were all looking mostly at Joss, but you’d think they’d at least have made some comment.”

  “We are back in civilization. Santerran traders are not terribly uncommon here. And my social class is relentlessly trained in polite behavior, which includes not staring at those visibly different. Had I money to spare, I would wager that were you and Lord Dolobeka to leave the tap room, these conversations would take a decided turn toward speculation as to your identities and reason for being here.”

  “Don’t you dare make up any stories I’d have to
kick you for later.”

  “I had intended to claim you and Lord Dolobeka were newlyweds escaping your father’s wrath for eloping with half his fortune, but your warning has dissuaded me.”

  “Very funny. I’ll be back shortly.”

  She was gone for much longer than that. Piercy sat with Dolobeka, who declined the offer of beer, and waited for the healer, who arrived half an hour later and helped Piercy carry the injured Santerran into a private dining room, then shooed Piercy away.

  Piercy went back to the taproom and had another beer. He’d relaxed enough to start nodding off, despite how uncomfortable the chair was, when the healer came back followed by Dolobeka, who was still using the crutch but was moving more easily.

  “Vertiri leaves the affected part whole but weakened,” she said. “You’ll need to explain to your friend it will be a week or more before he’s truly recovered, and if he exerts himself too much, he may injure himself again. I don’t speak Santerran.” She laughed, a dry sound at odds with her round, rosy face. “It’s probably just as well I don’t, because I think most of what he said to me was profanity.”

  “Thank you. What do we owe you?”

  She waved it off. “Hemneter is paying for it,” she said, indicating the innkeeper. “Good fortune to you.”

  “I think her foul magic has injured me further,” Dolobeka growled. “I still cannot walk on this leg.”

  “She said if you exert yourself, the magic will work its way into your body and cause more pain until you heed the warning,” Piercy lied. “But if you are patient, you will be fully well in a week.”

  “I am grateful Santerrans do not depend on magic. We are strong enough to overcome any physical challenge.”

  Piercy refrained from prodding him in the newly-healed leg. “Ayane was supposed to have returned with information about rooms,” he said. “Let us ask the innkeeper where she went.”

  “I forgot,” Hemneter said when Piercy cornered him. He looked as embarrassed about it as he had everything else Piercy had asked of him. “I rented her two rooms and told her I’d let you know. She went to the baths.”