“This is nicer than most of the places in Amenozume,” Mata murmured to Silas in a low voice as they selected a table. “How can a village like this support such a place?”
Silas shook his head and shrugged in agreement with her surprise as the quality of the accommodations. They ordered a bottle of wine, which was very good, and devoured a fresh and wholesome meal, enjoying the music as they rested and let some of the tension from their long journey drain away.
Afterwards, they returned to the inn, and slept soundly throughout the night. The next morning, a lady at the front desk of the inn offered them small, fluffy loaves of bread to enjoy for breakfast as they were leaving, and they savored the delightful treats as they walked out of the village and past well-tended farms along the road. The air was warmer than it had been in the mountains, but still held just a hint of the winter season.
“What is this nation like?” Mata asked Silas as they set on their way to the capital city of Faralag.
“I was told that Faralag was a wild and lawless land, with a weak king,” Silas replied doubtfully.
“If this is lawless, I don’t know what Amenozume should be called,” Mata challenged the description, as farmers in their fields politely tipped their hats in greeting to the travelers on the road.
“It’s nothing like what I expected,” Silas agreed.
By midday, they saw the city of Faralag on the horizon. The center of the city rose from the ground, with buildings that sprouted vertically upward, far, far taller than any buildings Silas had ever seen before, and as the pair got closer to the city, and among more traffic that was travelling into or outward from there, he even noticed that there were bridges built between buildings, connecting their upper floors. A central tower seemed larger than all the others and had numbers of the connections that radiated outward from it to the other tall buildings which were nearby.
“Silas! Look!” Mata shouted a moment after he had lowered his gaze from the towers, so that he could look at the road once again. She grabbed his shoulder and pointed.
Silas saw what had amazed her, and the sight was so remarkable that they both stopped walking, and simply stared in amazement, while other travelers on the road politely stepped around the two rubber-necking visitors, discreet smiles on their faces as they passed.
A flat-bottomed platform, like the deck of a ship – with a railing all around it – but without a hull, was rising straight upward in the air next to the tallest building. A crowd of people stood calmly on the deck as it rose, people who treated the inexplicable activity as if they truly were on an everyday ship’s deck, sailing through the sky instead of the sea.
The deck continued to elevate while it remained within just a matter of inches, perhaps a foot or two, from the exterior of the building. And then its progression slowed noticeably, and came to a stop halfway up the building, perhaps a hundred feet off the ground, at the same level from which many of the enclosed bridges connected the building to the shorter structures around it. The dark openings in the building that Silas had thought were windows suddenly opened as doorways, and gangplanks slid out of the building to the deck, allowing many of the people who had ridden the platform to calmly disembark. Within seconds, the traffic flow ceased as many exited and a few stepped the other way, then the platform rose again, and went up to nearly the top of the building, perhaps another eighty feet higher, and the exchange of passengers occurred again.
When all the activity had finished, the platform began to gently drop downward, until it disappeared from view behind the other buildings in the city.
“Did you see that? What was it?” Mata asked in astonishment.
“I’ve never seen anything like it!” Silas was completely lost.
“Can we go into the city and see it?” Mata tightened her grip on Silas.
“We have to,” Silas agreed breathlessly. “It’s the first thing we’ll do,” he paused. “And I’m not even sure what the second thing is, but let’s go see that.”
They began walking again, joining the traffic pattern that smoothly flowed towards the city. Minutes later they queued in line at the gate, and soon passed by the observant guards as they entered Faralag city.
Silas held Mata’s hand as he led them through the crowds in the streets.
“Silas, this is all so clean and orderly,” she leaned forward and said in a low voice as they proceeded in the direction of the great tower. The buildings along the city street were tidy, well built, mortared, painted, and seemed prosperous in every way.
“It’s the complete opposite of everything I’ve ever heard,” Silas agreed, puzzled in the extreme by all he saw.
The roadway grew more crowded, but the people and vehicles flowed in an orderly fashion when they reached the city center, where several of the very tall buildings were tightly clustered together, and their pace of passage only slowed when they turned a corner and finally saw the base of the great tower, the center of the city, where a pair of well-ordered lines waited at a docking space for the floating platform to descend from the heights.
There were two lines waiting – one for those who wanted to step onto the platform, and one for those who had carts of various kinds, ready to bring a small amount of cargo to the upper reaches of the structures. Mata and Silas stepped back against a building wall and observed in astonishment as the platform smoothly closed the distance to the street, then delicately settled into place within a fenced square.
As soon as it arrived and settled, gates opened, and the few people riding on the deck left, while others waiting in the lines stepped onto the deck.
Silas examined the scene with intense scrutiny, looking for cables or ropes or some signs of physical connection that provided the means of mobilizing the deck, but nothing was in sight. He watched a mother take three small children onto the deck, calmly and without a moment’s pause.
The line stopped moving as the deck appeared to fill up, and the gates started to close.
Just before the gate of the railing around the deck latched closed, one of the mother’s toddlers bolted through the opening.
“Emma! You get back here!” the mother turned from the child she was attending to and saw her daughter off the deck.
And then the deck began to rise.
“Mama!” the small girl looked at her mother’s stricken face as a gulf began to grow between them.
“Stop the platform!” the mother cried. “My baby is down there!”
“Emma!” one of the other children on the rising platform saw his stranded sister, and he leaned out to look down at the girl, even as the elevation of the deck grew from ten feet to twenty feet to thirty feet and more.
And then, somehow, the latch on the gate of the platform failed, and the gate swung free, and the little boy began to fall.
Silas watched the whole tragedy begin to unfold.
“Oh no!” Mata groaned sadly as she also saw the child plummeting.
“I can save him!” something made Silas say. A memory of lifting Mata and himself out of the avalanche flashed through his mind, and he barked out, “Float down!” as he reached a hand out in the direction of the child.
There were shrieks and cries coming from the crowd on the ground, when suddenly the small person’s uncontrolled plunge slowed dramatically, and the little boy wafted the last few feet down to the pavement below at a gentle speed; he landed on his feet and ran to his sister. The two toddlers embraced in an awkward hug as the crowd around then cheered.
“Thank you, Mover! Well done,” a voice called from the crowd, and there was a renewed round of cheers.
“It wasn’t me,” a voice spoke from the same side of the street Silas and Mata were standing on. Silas searched for the source of the reply, and saw a young woman sitting on a chair that was raised on a platform above the street level, directly across the street from where the flying platform had been situated.
The woman was wearing a light blue robe, and though she shouted an answer to the voice from the crowd, her head an
d her gaze remained affixed upward, as she stared at the platform that was docked in the middle of the building, exchanging its passengers with the upper stories of the building hub.
“You’ve got a volunteer somewhere in the crowd,” the woman in the chair continued. “Thank her, or him.”
A man in a guard’s uniform was taking the two small children by the hand and moving them to the edge of the landing area, keeping them safe until their mother could return to pick them up.
“You did that, didn’t you?” Mata asked. “You used that tele-thing to save the baby!” she smiled at him.
“Let’s move away from here,” Silas said in reply, feeling a strange sensation of being observed. “Let’s go someplace where we can figure out what to do next,” he took her hand without waiting for an answer and led her around a corner and away from the great building’s lifting space.
“You saved that baby, just like you saved us, and like in the tavern,” Mata repeated her claim as they walked away. “Is that what’s making that deck move too? Are there other people like you?” she asked.
“Let’s go in here,” he opened a door to a tavern and stepped inside. The interior was bright and clean, unlike any tavern he had seen in any other city, but the pair sat at a small table and ordered drinks.
“Yes, I think you’re right,” Silas finally answered. “There was a woman using telekinesis to control the motions of the deck.”
“The lady wearing the blue robe?” Mata asked to confirm.
“But didn’t you say,” Mata asked after Silas nodded in agreement, “didn’t you say that nobody has used telekinesis,” she pronounced the word slowly, “in hundreds of years?”
“That’s what we were taught at the Academy,” Silas agreed. “It never seemed possible for people to consider that we’d see it again.”
“What are you going to do?” Mata asked. “What are we supposed to do,” she emphasized the word ‘we’, “now that we’re here?”
Silas rubbed his hand over his face as their drinks arrived. “You’ve got such unusual eyes. They’re quite lovely,” the serving maid commented as she set their drinks down.
“We need to find out who Erick and Petre were bringing us to meet,” Silas said. “It must have been part of the same network of traders that Burr, and Prima, and Hamilton were all part of,” he reasoned. It was a new, thought-provoking realization that there might be some sort of network, some secret collection of traders who shared some unknown connection. But he knew Prima and trusted the trader; he wouldn’t be involved in anything unethical.
“So, should we go to where the traders are? How do we find the right one?” Mata continued to press questions between sips of her drink.
“Mata, I don’t know,” Silas answered wearily. He wished there was something with certainty, something that would simplify their current state of affairs. Instead, everything was a question, a problem to be solved.
“Let’s go to the harbor and see if we can find anyone who knows Prima,” he suggested. “Then we can work out everything else from there, if we have someone we can trust.”
They finished their drinks, asked for directions to the harbor front, then left the tavern. Their journey across the town took nearly an hour, one in which Silas, reminded by the tavern servant’s comment about his eyes, kept his head down and his face averted from passersby as much as possible.
The harbor turned out to be walled off from the city, with a thick, well-guarded wall that was more imposing that the wall that protected the city from the countryside. And the wall proved to be more consequential than the main city wall as well.
The harborside portion of the city had an entirely different character from the city proper. There was little traffic waiting to pass through the gate to enter the city, and the guards seemed to scrutinize closely those who sought to enter. The streets were unevenly paved and littered with dirt. The buildings were dinghy, and poorly constructed.
The harbor was nearly empty, with only two small ships at the piers, being loaded with goods to send out by sea.
“There’s not much here,” Mata said. “When I think of all that happened in the Amenozume harbor, this seems unreal. How do they trade with the rest of the world?”
“Maybe they don’t,” Silas was just as mystified. “Let’s see if we can find a trader who can tell us they know Prima or Burr,” he looked at the darkened doorways that faced the harbor. “There’s one door with a light,” he pointed.
The interior of the trading office appeared as slovenly as the whole harbor district in general.
“May I help you?” a young man’s voice sounded suddenly in the empty office, making Silas jump in surprise. He pulled his knife free and whirled around to see a plump, fair-haired man standing in a doorway in a dim corner.
“I knew a trader named Prima,” Silas said. “We are looking for him or for any of his trading partners in Faralag.”
“How did you get here? We haven’t had a ship arrive in the past ten days,” the young man said, stepping closer to Mata and Silas. He stared at them intently, his eyes particularly studying Silas’s eyes.
“Just a minute,” he spoke before they could answer, as he passed them and went around the counter, then turned up the light in the lamp and began to look through a file of papers.
“How did you say you got here?” he asked.
“We traveled south through the mountains, from Avaleen,” Mata spoke up.
The man studied them intently, without saying a word, then shuffled through several papers rapidly. He stopped his shuffling, then shuffled backwards and pulled a paper free. One hand absently reached out to the lamp and pulled it closer, so that he could study the writing.
“Alone?” he asked.
“No,” Silas didn’t see any point in denying it. “We traveled with a couple of other men.”
“What were their names?” the man asked.
“Do you know Prima or not?” Silas felt uncomfortable with the questioning, and the feeling that somehow the tables had been turned in a dangerous fashion.
“Put your knife away,” the man told him. “You’re in no danger here, from me, at the moment.
“Yes, I know Prima, and Ruten and, what’s her name?”
“Minneota?” Silas prompted.
The man grinned, and Silas realized he had been delicately tested.
“You’re Silas of course,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Your name though,” he looked at Mata, “is a mystery to me.”
“Who are you?” Silas held a hand up in front of Mata, cutting off her answer. “How do you know Prima?”
“My name is Adams,” the man replied. “I know Prima as a trade, just as Hamilton does, just as Burr did. Just as many people scattered about the continent know our far-ranging caravan leader.”
“What do you mean about Burr?” Silas asked.
“He was killed by soldiers from Ivaric,” Adams said simply.
“Oh! But he was alive when we left him,” Mata protested.
“The invasion was brutal. Burr was definitely killed, and some of his people were too. Some survived, and some are missing,” Adams told them.
“We were traveling with Petre and Erick,” Silas spoke up. “They guided us most of the way here but died in an avalanche when we were nearly in Faralag.”
“They were Burr’s two best men, and the two we weren’t sure about,” Adams answered.
“So, you’re alive, and now you’re in Faralag, of all places,” Adams shook his head. “Burr sent you all the way down here to safety. He must have thought you were as special as Prima does.”
“I delivered a note to him from Prima,” Silas affirmed.
“And so, who are you, and what’s your role in all this?” Adams asked Mata once again.
“My name is Mata,” the girl answered. “I’m Silas’s friend.”
“Ahh,” Adams murmured delicately.
“Could you tell us where we can find a place to stay?” Mata asked.
“And tell us about the platform that flies up into the sky by the tall buildings,” Silas added.
“Ah, you did come through the city, didn’t you?” Adams didn’t answer.
“And why is the city so clean and strong, while the harbor area is so dirty? I always heard that Faralag was a weak country,” Silas spoke up.
“There’s a lot to discuss,” Adams answered. “And I’m not sure where to begin. Let’s put you in an inn in the city, and I’ll meet you for dinner.” He picked up a pad of paper and scribbled on it for several seconds, then extended his hand to Silas.
“What is this?” Silas asked.
“It’s a pass you’ll need to show at the harbor gate to get back into the city. It tells the guard you’re a business acquaintance of mine, staying at the Esmire Inn, on the promenade. Show it to the attendant at the inn and they’ll put you in a room,” Adams quickly instructed. “Meet me at sunset at the Duck’s Beak Sitting Room for dinner, and I’ll answer some of your questions.”
Silas took the pass and studied it.
“And Silas, one more thing,” Adams spoke up. “Don’t use your Speaker powers just yet to let anyone know where you are. Let me consider what we’re going to do with you.
“Now get along with you and be on your way, while I tend to some work,” Adams brushed his fingers in the air to send the visitors away.
Silas and Mata waited to re-enter the city, and were subjected to scrutiny by the guards at the Harbor Gate, but passed through and found their way to the Esmire Inn on the promenade. The promenade, they found, was a long, tree-lined grassy park that stretched for a long distance through the city, providing a peaceful setting.
The man at the desk examined their slip of paper from Adams, then gave them the keys to a room on the second floor, in the back of the inn, with a small window that gave a view of an alley.
They rested on their bed and lay in silence for several minutes.
“I thought that when we got here, everything would be taken care of,” Mata spoke first. “But it doesn’t feel that way.”
“No,” Silas shook his head in agreement. He wanted to hear Adams explain why the pair had been sent to Faralag, and what they would do next, as well as reveal more about Prima and the others in the mysterious network of traders.
The Pearl Diver Page 14
