“Not had my supper, yet,” Syhle explained. The innkeeper dug into her own plate with marked gusto and somewhat surprised Telriy by not speaking again until the girl had finished eating.
“Where are you from, child?”
Telriy edged backwards slightly from the table. “What do you mean?” Her hand slid down to where her staff leaned against the table.
“Well, you’re not from the town. I know everybody and half of them are kin of one sort or other.” She gestured at Telriy’s attire.
“Even if I didn’t know everyone here abouts, I don’t often see women or girls in walking boots and trousers. That alone’d tell me you’ve come from somewhere else. Travelers on the coast road come by coach or horse and one of my grandsons watches for potential customers. I’d have known ahead of time it you had come by the road.”
Without rising, Syhle began tidying the table. She raked the scraps, what little there was, onto one plate, slid it onto the other, and then stacked the silverware on top. She pulled a soiled cloth from a pocket of her apron and wiped the tabletop. It was clear that she was not pressing the question.
Telriy named a village five leagues from her home. “Orhel.”
The kindly woman’s eyes widened slightly. “Eh. That’s a good walk. You running to a man or from one?”
“Neither.”
Syhle shrugged. “None of my business. But I’ll say this – the world’s a lot rougher place than you might be used to. A young woman alone is a target, now that’s just the plain truth. Whatever problems you have back home won’t be nothing compared to those you’re likely to find. I’d suggest you head back to your family.”
Telriy believed that the woman meant well, but telling the truth was not an option. She showed a bit of hesitation then said, “I’ve no family to return to. My husband’s land reverted to his family when he died.” Telriy paused, knowing it fit well with the next lie. “I’m barren and there’s no other man that would take me.”
Telriy saw the sympathy cross the other woman’s face and knew she had judged rightly.
Syhle put down her rag and reached across the table to pat her hand. “I’m sorry to hear that, child. Sorrier still to say that I’ve heard the same tale or one like it often enough. The Clans have made land pass through the male line for the last thousand years and I doubt even this new Prince and his new laws can change that.”
Syhle sat back and regarded Telriy for a moment. “But I’ll stick to what I said. Traveling alone, you’ll be robbed or worse. Where are you headed? If you’re going around to Pyrmh, I can probably find someone in town that’s going that way that will take you along. Like I said, most folks in town are kin to me, or owe me, or both. There’ll be someone who can get you there safely.”
Telriy thought quickly. She needed information and this seemed an opportunity to gain it with little risk.
“No, I’m leaving Gh’emhoa. I’ve a letter and a Surety Note from a factor in Mhajhkaei. It’s an old Note – something my grandmother had – but it has a Prince’s seal and everybody says that the Principate will guarantee it.”
Telriy stopped and watched as Syhle’s imagination filled in the rest.
“Well,” Syhle offered, “they say that those Mhajhkaeirii merchants are always good for their debts. You’ve a letter you say? I’ll not ask what’s in it. I can guess well enough. It’s not often you see men do right for their stray get – no offense intended.”
Telriy smiled slightly to show that she was not offended. The innkeeper had readily picked up the implication that Telriy was the offspring of some merchant sailor’s dalliance. Many children grew up on Gh’emhoa with the pitch-black hair of the fishers of the High Fiords or the maroon eyes of the coastal Irhfeii.
“That’s better than five hundred leagues, child. Gods only know what possessed a --“Syhle shook her head. “Not that it matters. I should know well enough that men and women will manage to get together regardless of how unlikely it may be. I know that right well myself.” Syhle sighed.
“But five hundred leagues is still a long way to go to make a claim on a man that’s likely dead.”
“It’s all that I have left,” Telriy told Syhle earnestly. Lying came easily. She had had plenty of practice.
Syhle shook her head but said, “Yes, I can see that. Doesn’t make it any safer.” The innkeeper stood abruptly and began gathering the dirty dishes.
“Do you know if there’s a ship that sails from here to Mhajhkaei?” Telriy asked. It seemed unlikely, but it might be possible.
“Not from here. We get fishing boats and little trading sloops. The prince has a galley that makes a turn once a year. That’s all.” Syhle paused in thought.
“You’ll need to talk to my uncle,” she pronounced, balancing the pitcher and classes in one hand and moving toward the kitchen. “He was a seaman. Been everywhere and done everything, or so he’s glad to tell anyone that will sit still, listening or not. He can tell you the best way to get to Mhajhkaei. Wait here. He’ll be around before lights out.”
With that, Syhle spun away, swept by the table with the family to drop a smile and a quick word, and then vanished into the kitchen.
Shortly after that, the place became busy. The family and the farmers departed, but their place was taken by several bands of younger men, fishermen and farmhands, who talked and jested a great deal but drank barely enough to keep a keen-eyed Syhle from evicting them.
Telriy retreated to a rocking chair by the fireplace as the evening crowd settled in. The chair would not accommodate her satchel, so she slipped the strap from her shoulders and placed it on the floor beside her feet. She leaned the staff against the mantle within easy reach. Her hand drifted to it from time to time, gripped it a moment, and then released it.
Not more than half an hour later, an old man with a shaved head and a thin white chin-beard strolled through the double entry. He walked with a casual saunter and hardly awarded Telriy a glance as he passed by her, but something in his attitude told her that he had been summoned. Another daughter appeared and handed him a brimming mug as he settled into the chair facing Telriy’s.
The man took a long drink and then eyed Telriy speculatively. “Hard for a young girl to be traveling the Silver Sea alone. You’d better find you something here on Gh’emhoa.” The man had a thin, reedy voice with a slightly irritating quality.
“You’re Syhle’s uncle?” Telriy asked squarely, deflecting the unwanted advice. She did not need this man’s sympathy, just his knowledge.
“Aye.” He took another drink and waited.
“She told me you could tell me how to get to Mhajhkaei.”
“As far as I know, there’re no ships that go directly. Most of the trade hereabouts is southward board. Down to Aehrfhaen and back along the coast towards Bhelaen, Kh’ordhif, and the Lh’aefhii Gulf. To find northbound traffic, you’ll have to make your way over to Peld –I’ve a nephew that sails a sloop that makes that run -- and from there to Ghaefh. I’ve heard that northbound trade passes through there. They cut scented woods from the deep jungles and ship it to Plydyre. From there you can work up the Archipelago to the mainland and pick up a coaster out of Mhevyr or Zlhahv that will bring you west to The Greatest City in All the World.”
Telriy listened intently, memorizing the names. Except for Mhajhkaei and Aehrfhaen, she had never heard of any of them.
Then, because her need for the information was great, she asked a question that she knew would sound out of place. “The Empire had a library at Mhajhkaei. Have they maintained it?”
Syhle’s uncle frowned over his mug. He looked at her oddly. “Library? I’d imagine they have one, but if you’re asking if its got books from the old Empire, then the answer to that’d be no.”
Telriy tried to keep the disappointment from her face, but realized from the man’s expression that she had not fully succeeded.
The uncle took another drink. “Now, if it’s an imperial library that you’re looking for, then you’ll ha
ve to go up to Khalar.”
“Where’s that and why should I go there?”
“I only know myself because I lost a bet in a tavern on – but that’s another story. They call Khalar the Imperial City. Still bow to the old emperor and all that. Sounds like they’re all addled to me. Khalar’s out in the middle of nowhere, way north of Mhajhkaei. They still have an imperial library there, never stopped having one. Odd as it sounds, they have the largest store of books in the entire world.”
FOUR
Mar sat on the highest vantage in all the Waste City, a tiny ledge at the top of a section of broken stair that was no more than a double manheight off the ground, and stared out into the starlit dark. The hummocks and hills of the city spread out before him in the twilight, scarred here and there by the irregular shadows thrust out by forsaken piles of excavated stone. His eyes were centered on a pinpoint of light in the middle distance that was Waleck's fire.
When he had first climbed to the top of the stair and settled on the sheared-off landing, that yellow, earth-bound star had been visible only as a rose-tinted column of gray smoke climbing through the angled rays of the setting sun. His eyes had strayed from it seldom during the hour or so he had been seated here.
The people of Khalar called it Sun Sickness. The nomadic tribes of the western slopes of the Mheckel Mountains called it something unpronounceable that translated as "sand warped." Both were speaking of the same ailment, that tendency of men too long in the Waste to lose their senses without prior warning -- one moment to all outward appearances normal, the next struck by a dreadful malady of the mind that left them wild-eyed and reasonless.
Mar shifted slightly on his perch, shivering from the chill of a night breeze, and tucked himself deeper into the scant shelter of a decapitated balustrade.
He had never seen the sickness himself, only heard of its effects. The stories were commonly touted and disputed, certain to surface in any idle tavern conversation. Details of the more popular tales varied, but generally all agreed upon the nature of the symptoms: irrationality, incoherence, and erratic behavior of an increasingly violent character.
Waleck had certainly been irrational, more than a little incoherent, and not exactly peaceful.
But Mar could not – would not -- accept that. The thought that the old man had lost his reason struck him as no less than absurd. In these past months, Waleck had impressed him as a man whose grip on sanity was as unshakable as the purported will of the Forty-Nine Gods. No adversity or mishap unsettled him. No mistake or accident angered him. His reactions were always subdued and his comments thoughtful. He seldom raised his voice, offered harsh criticism, or expressed himself in less than utter clarity. Through all his temper remained even and his ingenuity sure.
But why had the old man bolted? And what was the real significance of the text?
Mar had tied possibilities and conjectures together in tail-swallowing strings for hours, but had found no rational explanation. He had hidden here, unwilling to return to the camp, avoiding what he believed to be an inevitable confrontation. But he could not escape the one single fact that he was sure of – if he wanted answers, he would have to face Waleck and demand them.
And this was something that he most decidedly did not want to do.
Mar had followed Waleck into the Great Waste in Waxing Fortnight, Third Wintermoon, some five months gone. What had begun as a cold association of necessity had thawed in a few short fortnights – to Mar’s complete amazement -- into a comfortable camaraderie.
That was not to say that he and Waleck were friends. Mar had no friends. He knew many people in Khalar: other thieves and street people with whom he did business of a sort, patrons of taverns he frequented with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, and sellers in the markets from whom he frequently bought meals or other necessities. But none of these people had been close to him in any way and he had trusted none of them. Most of them knew him only by a false name or none at all.
Even Sihmal had not been his friend. Mar had been acquainted with the thin, nervous pickpocket most of seven years, had grown up with him on the streets, had fled the Guard with him, and only Sihmal had known both his true name and his profession. But Mar would not have trusted Sihmal with a single iron penny. Sihmal had been clumsy and careless and Mar had avoided him at every opportunity.
And Sihmal was dead at the hands of the Guard these many months.
Yet Mar now found himself subject to a strange and alien emotion: loyalty. The old scrapper, whether he fully realized it or not, had rescued him from almost certain capture and execution. This feeling of obligation was contrary to every tenet of his personal survival code, and though he felt disgusted with himself, he was unable, for some reason he could not divine, to leave the old man’s service until Waleck gave him leave to do so.
Mar was a good thief – he knew he should run. It would be easy to slip his pony from the shed behind their camp, and he remembered the trail well enough, he was sure, to return to Khalar without mishap. By morning, he could put too many leagues behind him for Waleck to catch him.
But he could not leave. Not yet.
Stretching stiff limbs, he rose from the cold stone and turned to negotiate the precarious climb down the crumbling steps. He could think of no reason to delay any longer and circumstances compelled him to return to the camp. The only food, water, and transport within many leagues lay there. No matter the outcome of his next meeting with the old man, he could not flee without provisions and a horse.
He pulled his toe from the last scrap of a step, skipped down a small dune, and stooped to gather the tools he had leaned against the ruptured curb of a twisted fountain. He took a moment to arrange them carefully across his shoulders. Silence was his way of life; even in the middle of nowhere, an inadvertent clang of shovel against pick was unacceptable. Then, with the lightest of treads, he began to pick his way through the maze of fractured walls, buckled streets, and encroaching sand.
Their camp lay in a sunken field on the western periphery of the Waste City, the remnant of a long ago plaza altered by the sediments of centuries into a bowl-shaped basin. In places, the huge paving blocks were still visible amongst the patches of hardy weeds that clung to a pitiful life on the dry soil, but the majority of it looked little different from similar shallow depressions scattered across the Waste -- sand and splintered rock and more of the same. Nevertheless, it was an ideal campsite, sheltered by squat knolls on its rim from the desert winds and their burdens of cutting sand. In decades past, salvage company caravans had sometimes fought over it. In years past, Waleck had shared it more or less peacefully with other recalcitrant loners such as himself. Now it was his alone.
The idle hours from hundreds of annual expeditions had been turned to the improving of it. Most of the structures built for whatever purpose were succumbing to the wastefulness of abandonment, but the small section claimed by Waleck remained comfortably habitable. Roughly a hundred paces square, it was bounded on the north by a manheight company compound wall of intricate dry stonework, on the south by heaps of waste stone, and open to both east and west. At the west end, Waleck had constructed two sheds, one for men and one for animals, using brick and stone salvaged from the City and poles and slate trekked from Khalar. The sheds were of a construction peculiar to the Waste, after the example of the tribes who haunted the fringes of the region along the foothills of the Mheckel Range. With sand packed between an inner and outer layer of brick, the walls formed a buffer against the heat more than an armlength thick. Additionally, berms of sand stabilized with rubble had been piled midway up each exterior side and the floors dug three steps below the surrounding ground. The high peaked roofs had been fashioned with extensive overhangs so that the sun struck the exposed upper half of the walls for only a fraction of the day. In the late afternoon, while not precisely cool, the sheds did provide shelter from the merciless heat. Behind the sheds, the old man had dug a large cistern and a painstaking network of ditches and embankment
s to catch the priceless water dropped by the infrequent winter storms. A work area with stone benches and a large fire pit sunk deep through the paving stones lay in the small common area in front of the sheds.
A line of columns, all of which had been melted or seared off at the same height above their bases by some titanic fire, guarded the eastern approach. It was full dark now, and as Mar's path led him from the shadow of these, the wavering glow of the fire splashed against him. The contrast near blinded him, but he hesitated only a moment before marching down the gentle grade toward the leaping flames.
The fire was a dozen times larger than their normal rationed blaze, and Waleck must have used most all of their carefully hoarded stock of wood to fuel it. The fire threw wild, darting shadows across the ancient square, making it a confused landscape of flickering visions. Mar failed to see the old man sitting at his accustomed place to the side of the fire pit until he was almost upon him.
Startled, but determined, Mar rounded the fire, the outrush of heat blushing his night-cooled skin, without breaking his stride or glancing at the old man. He entered the larger shed and methodically racked the tools he carried, successfully overcoming an urge to simply cast them down in a heap. Waleck, cradling the cylinder almost reverently in his hands as he sat on his wicker campstool, remained mute.
When he finished, Mar returned to the fire without pause, dropping warily into his own place, an equally battered stool. As he scanned the common area furtively, to assure himself that the old man had not prepared some sort of trap or attack (the tales described those with Sun Sickness as doing such things) he saw his bowl sitting on the warming stone beside the fire. Their almost daily diet of thin stew filled it.
Mar had a simple rule concerning food – eat when it was available, regardless. Rising again, he fetched his spoon from the shelf where he kept his meager store of loaned possessions. The spoon was a rustless wonder of white metal, neither silver nor brass, unearthed in the City a dozen years before and retained because no smith or founder could smelt it. Taking his bowl, he sat a second time and began to eat, wondering if this would be the last such meal he ate.
Key to Magic 01 Orphan Page 4
