“That isn’t fair,” Dallin defended. He was flailing, and they both knew it. Dallin was edging on deep chagrin over it all, but Wil seemed ridiculously entertained.
“I was working from the accounts of others,” Dallin furthered with a scowl, “and you wouldn’t tell me what really happened. You wouldn’t tell me anything.”
Wil opened a hand, waved it. “You’re right,” he conceded. “It was forever ago, and we were different people then.”
Dallin frowned over that. It did seem like forever ago, and Wil certainly seemed like a different person, but Dallin felt pretty much the same as ever. Except perhaps more tired.
Wil tapped at the books. He was still smiling, but his gaze was more interested than snarky now. “So, what d’you want to know about the old gods? And how come?”
A deliberate change of subject, but Dallin was more than willing to go along with it. “I want to know everything I can find out,” he answered, flipping open the first book. He rested his head in his hand, put the strange, discomfited embarrassment aside, and started scanning through the pages.
Eorðbúgigend—god of the earth. That was simple enough.
Wil waited for a quiet moment, but when Dallin didn’t go on, he slid his elbows to the table, folded his arms and laid his chin atop them. “How come?” he repeated.
Dallin sighed. “Because I keep dreaming about them.”
He waved a hand. “Well, not dreaming about them, exactly—more like dreaming about people asking me about them and me not knowing the answers.”
“Having all the answers is very important to you, isn’t it?” Wil stretched an arm out on the table and traced little invisible symbols into its slick surface.
Dallin shrugged, turned back to the book. “It’s my job,” was all he said.
“You want to tell me your dream?” Wil’s voice was quieter than it had been, fingers still tracing, his eyes following his own movements, but distant. All the humor of a moment ago was gone, but he didn’t seem anxious or distressed.
“Why would you want to hear about my dreams?”
Dallin flipped some more pages. This Eorðbúgigend fellow was actually a little boring, apparently spending all his time delving and avoiding everyone, including his fellow deities. “Don’t you get enough of all that on your own?” Dallin asked mildly. Ah, now this Díepe seemed a bit more promising—the goddess of water, coaxing the hapless into her depths and having her way with them then spitting them back out, sometimes alive, if they pleased her well enough.
“I can probably tell you what it means, at least.”
Dallin snapped his glance up. Wil was still tracing his little patterns, almost stretched out across the table. To another, he might look relaxed, even bored. To Dallin, he looked pensive.
“I thought you didn’t know how… well, how… things worked.”
Wil shrugged. “Well, no one actually told me, but it’s… I’ve been doing it a long time, y’know.” He turned his head, laid it to the crook of his elbow and peered at Dallin, that little smirk back again. “And I’m smarter than I look.”
Dallin smiled back, drawn. It was quite an offer, considering. And extraordinarily heartening that Wil would even make it. And to him. Dallin thought about it for only a mere span of seconds.
“People—people in my dreams, I mean—they keep asking me to sing them the songs of the old gods, and when I can’t…” Dallin paused. “Well, bad things happen.”
“Hm,” Wil hummed. “That’s not much to go on. Is that all you remember?”
“…No.” Dallin sighed.
He sat back, carded through the various dreams and their possible effects on Wil, and chose the one he thought least likely to disturb him. If Wil could indeed discern something in them that squeaked some sense out of it all, Dallin would have to confess the other, the one he knew would be somewhat upsetting, and he’d have to do that eventually anyway, but he was loath to do it here, with that bitter-boned librarian looking on. Strange—all of this ‘putting it off ’til a better time’ was getting to look more and more embarrassingly like stalling. And yet still, Dallin couldn’t seem to bring himself to broach it.
“I’m in the Army,” he said. “Colonel Mancy is there, the one who more-or-less arranged my promotion, and at first he’s telling my commander how he thinks I won’t be satisfied until I hack my way into the Dominion and through the Guild’s ramparts. He actually did say that, I heard it, so it’s likely just a memory or something.”
Despite the reassurance, Wil’s eyes narrowed and he tensed just a little. Dallin paused, worried Wil might take it as yet another sign that Dallin was a danger—Wil used to live inside the Guild’s walls, after all—but Wil merely sat up, rested his chin in his hand and peered at Dallin steadily. “Go on,” he said.
Dallin blew out another sigh. “Well, then he asks me the words to the songs of the old gods, and when I tell him I don’t know them, he turns into Manning—my old tutor—and he keeps shoving books at me, but they’re written in a language I don’t understand. He tells me I have to decode them, except when I tell him I don’t have the key to the code, he tells me my father’s going to die. I tell him my father’s already dead, but then he turns into one of the children from Kenley and tells me I’ve forgotten my name.” He paused, thinking, trying to eke details out of the murk. “The skeleton has Clan-marks on its cheek,” he added after a moment. “And it’s pointing at me like I’m the one who killed it.” He shrugged, grimacing a little. Now that he’d said it, gave it ordinary words as its frame, it sounded a little bit silly.
Wil didn’t seem like he thought it was silly; he was pondering it seriously. His fingers went back to their invisible scribbling, gaze following.
“Singing generally means happiness,” he said slowly.
“But you don’t look very happy.” He flicked a look up at Dallin, penetrating, then shrugged it away. Dallin had nothing intelligent to offer, so he kept silent. “The songs are the key,” Wil went on. “The code is whatever you find inside them that will get you to whatever goal it is you’ve got you eye on. Something that will mean something to you, help you figure out where to look for the pieces of your puzzle and understand who you are.”
Dallin rolled his eyes, slumped a little. “I know who I am,” he argued, rubbing his brow. “Let’s don’t go back to this again—please, I’m begging you.”
“I’m not,” Wil told him with a slight roll of his eyes.
“I’m not saying anything like that. For pity’s sake, I sleep while you’re walking watch with a loaded gun five paces away from me; doesn’t that tell you anything?”
It told Dallin plenty; he only wondered if the reverse told Wil as much.
“You’re a Linder who was taken from Lind when he was a boy,” Wil continued quietly. Dallin was somewhat taken aback by the soft authority in his tone. “You are what you’ve made of yourself, but there are parts of you that you can’t possibly know—you didn’t even know there was such thing as a Guardian. How much more d’you think there is to you that you don’t know?”
Dallin had to concede the point. “My father died before he could teach me the songs of my name,” he murmured.
“There you are.” Wil opened a hand. “P’raps the songs of the old gods will help you understand your own.”
“Which would be very helpful if I could find the bloody songs,” Dallin muttered tiredly, flipped open the second book, and began to scan the pages. “These only seem to be tales of the gods themselves, and there’s not much of even that. A few paragraphs for each one, mixed with a bunch of other mythology that has nothing to do with anything.”
Wil sat back in his chair with a brooding frown. “You’re a very interesting, very confusing man,” he told Dallin softly, peered up from beneath his lashes, measuring.
“You’re forever asking questions, seeking answers, but you sometimes miss the most obvious questions, and sometimes the answers are right in front of you and you can’t see them.” A small
smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “You only take one foot at a time from out your quick-mud.”
“That’s…” Dallin frowned, tilted his head. “That’s an odd thing to say.” He closed the book, hands resting loosely atop it. “You think I’m missing something obvious, then.” He didn’t phrase it as a question; it was all too apparent that Wil was attempting to wend his way around to something, and perhaps didn’t know how to just come out with it. In Dallin’s observations thus far, Wil hardly ever ‘just came out’ with anything, unless he was fairly pissed off at the time, so patience now would probably be advisable. If they were talking about a crime scene or witness statement, Dallin likely would have taken sincere offence at the contention that he was stumbling blind. Since they were actually talking about dreams and were therefore in Wil’s element, so to speak, the allegation wasn’t too far off the mark. “You say the answers are right in front of me.” Dallin turned his hands over, palms-up on the table. “Will you tell me?”
Wil’s smile spread just a touch wider, but it twitched ever so slightly, dipped wry. “Ah, see, there’s the obvious question.” He looked down at his lap again, shrugged a little, fiddling with the slight fray of linen on the wrappings about his hand. “I can do better than tell you,” he furthered quietly, peered up to gauge Dallin’s reaction.
“I can teach you.”
Dallin had already been itching to get back on the road as soon as possible. Between their ‘greeting’ at the gates and the figure that might or might not have been his imagination across the street from the Library, the urge to take care of the rest of their business and be gone had worked at his nerves like an itch he couldn’t reach between his shoulder-blades. Now, he was on fire with it.
He’d almost wanted to insist Wil teach him those songs right then and there, but didn’t like the idea of doing it while that pinch-mouthed biddy was looking on.
“All right,” he said to Wil as they stepped back out onto the Library’s steps, eyes sweeping habitually, but pausing to linger on the spot where he’d seen— thought he’d seen—the man earlier. Nothing there to see now. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed. “We’ve got to get back toward the square for the auction. Once that’s done, we can head back out.” A quick look at the position of the sun told him they still had plenty of time yet; they hadn’t been nearly as long in the Library as he’d thought they might. He started down the steps. “We should have smooth walking, at least today and tomorrow morning.
Things’ll get a little more—” He stopped, narrowed his eyes, shot his arm out to keep Wil from loping down the steps behind him. “Hold on a moment.” Unease buzzed all over him, like a ghost was chiseling right into his backbone, and he had to work really hard to suppress the shudders.
Wil halted without protest, but peered a question up at Dallin. Something in Dallin’s eyes must have been a bit too obvious. Wil’s expression changed instantly, eyes flicking from one end of the street to the other. The hardness was back, gaze wary and narrow, and his shoulders were just beginning their defensive inward stoop. Whatever Wil had seen in Dallin’s expression that had triggered the change, Dallin couldn’t have hidden it had he tried. He’d never felt anything like it: urgent foreboding, a feeling of something impending, something unpleasant. It was crawling all over him.
“What?” Wil asked—nearly whispered it.
Dallin shook his head, his own gaze never resting, scanning the people milling about on the street, looking for anything suspicious, anything at all. A lingering look or even a deliberate not-look, a telltale bulge of a weapon, a hulking shape that looked too much like him…
“Nothing, I guess.” Dallin’s voice was quiet, and his tone probably not at all convincing. “I thought…”
He shook his head, eyes still moving, troubled. “I don’t know— some thing.” He turned to Wil. “Don’t you feel it?”
It felt like Wil should feel it. It felt like anyone within a hundred paces of Dallin should feel it, like it had physical shapes and he just couldn’t see them.
“C’mon,” Wil said anxiously, tugged at Dallin’s elbow and tried to drag him down the steps. “Let’s go.” Between his teeth this time, and quietly uneasy. Whatever was thrumming through Dallin was now leaking out onto Wil.
He tugged again; this time, Dallin let himself be moved.
His right hand went automatically to the revolver strapped to his thigh, flipped the fastenings and rested his fingers lightly to the butt; his left hand reached for Wil’s arm, latched on. “Put your hat back on,” he told Wil, angling them down the steps as Wil complied. Dallin turned them back down the little side lane from which they’d come. “Back to the alleys,” he muttered, eyes trying to look everywhere at once, words from dreams haunting— the Watcher is watched—yammering through his head like a sinister mantra, except he couldn’t bloody see anything. No one lurked, no one stalked; everywhere he looked, he only saw ordinary people going about their ordinary business on an ordinary Market Day.
He pulled up short when they reached a crisscross pattern of lanes leading off in six different directions.
Almost unbearably on-edge now, Dallin pulled Wil over toward a stand of bushes ringing a dooryard behind an ageing heap of stone that likely used to be the very impressive home of some prosperous citizen but was now rundown and depressing in its dilapidated gloom. He had to stop a moment and get himself together. There was no good reason for the absurd anxiety, and all he was doing was ramping up Wil’s already unpredictable state of being. Except Dallin couldn’t find that cool reserve, that remove that normally walked him through tense situations.
The Watcher is watched.
And yet there was nothing—no one—there. Anywhere.
“Is it gone?” Wil wanted to know, eyeing Dallin with trepidation and as close to dread as Dallin had seen him since they’d shown Dudley their backs.
It wasn’t gone. It was getting worse. The afternoon sun was whining in Dallin’s head with an insectile buzz that was drilling into his teeth, making his peripheral vision too bright and too sharp. They were being watched, and it wasn’t just in his head, it was real, he could feel it all the way to his bones.
Dallin didn’t answer, instead threw his glance about the spiderweb of alleyways, chose a random direction, and tugged Wil’s arm again. “This way,” he ordered.
Amazingly, Wil didn’t argue, didn’t even try to get loose from Dallin’s grip. He allowed himself to be pulled, following Dallin without objection or comment. They headed down a dirt lane, winding between squat, decrepit brick structures, the purpose of which Dallin didn’t pause to ponder. The atmosphere was growing seedier, the air taking on a rank smell of piss and dirt the farther they went.
The buildings crowded together, blocking most of the light. They passed doorways and niches carefully, Dallin edging around each one first, holding Wil back until he determined they were safe enough to pass by. One or two seemed to serve as living-quarters, ragged men lurking in their corners and growling balefully at them, but they cowered at the sight of Dallin, and even more so at the sight of the weapons. Dallin and Wil passed unmolested, until they came upon an alcove outside of what appeared to be a less-reputable hostel, its alleyway strewn with rubbish and the remnants of piss-pots emptied into the gutters and not washed away.
A haggard woman lurched up from her crouch in the hovel’s recess, staggered at Dallin, hands outstretched like she was greeting an old friend. She was thin as wire, dried up and wispy as a husk, eyes sunken and vague above a delicate, near-toothless grin. Her muscles twitched with uncontrollable tics, her breathing labored and rheumy.
There was a sour smell about her, over and above the pervasive stench of the alley, the clothes hanging off her thin frame rank with ages-old dirt and rot. She was dying, wasting into nothing—Dallin could smell it on her—and the soft, dreamy look all but beat the drum for it. She was this close to death from one thing or another—lung-sick, maybe, or blight, who could tell?—and that beatif
ic look of serene peace in her eyes told Dallin she truly didn’t care.
A leaf user.
“Exile!” she cried. “Ye’ve come! Bless. Bless.”
She reached for Dallin, her fingernails thick and yellowed beneath the layers of grime on her shaking hand.
Dallin stepped back to avoid the touch and knocked into Wil, who stood staring, horrified fascination inside grim surprise.
“I’ve watched, I have,” she murmured, her soft giggle all the more unnerving for its girlishness. She held her filthy hand out palm-up, waggled her taloned fingers. “Redeem your word and I shall redeem mine.”
Dallin almost brushed past her. Wil shouldn’t be seeing this, and the stiff posture, the inability to drag his revolted gaze away, told Dallin that Wil knew exactly what he was looking at. But something about what she’d said, or maybe just the way she’d said it, made Dallin stop. He stared down at her dirty hand, its meaning universal and very clear, gave Wil’s arm a light squeeze in apology.
“Remind me of my word, Miss,” Dallin said, reaching to his belt for his purse—slowly so her abstracted gaze could follow. “You’re not the only one watching, after all.”
“Ah!” she cried, giggled again and shook her finger.
“And I thought I was yer one and only.”
Mother’s mercy, the woman was trying to be coy. She was bloody flirting.
Dallin dragged a smile onto his face, made it as easy and pleasant as he could, and squeezed again when he felt a light shudder run through Wil. “Oh, but you are certainly my favorite,” Dallin told the woman, winked and broadened the smile when she giggled some more.
He shook the purse. “And what was our agreement?” he asked her with a lift of an eyebrow.
“Five gilders,” she told him, eyes sly and smile going a bit sideways.
Lying, of course. Whatever she’d agreed to do for this Exile and whatever price she’d agreed to do it for, it was likely more along the lines of a few billets. Nonetheless, Dallin made quite a business of taking the proper coins from the purse, turned around and handed the rest to Wil.
The Aisling Trilogy Page 42
