“Did you understand?” Micah tried.
He sighed. “More than you imagine. Your chocolate is getting cold.”
Micah loved the chocolate at the Inkpot. The boy glanced back at his mug, blinked as though surprised to see it there, and finished the last of it in a single gulp of quiet ecstasy.
“Don’t you want yours?” Micah asked.
Rafe pushed his mug toward Micah with the hand not occupied by his head. The Duke Tremontaine had good chocolate, he thought. Lately, it had been as good as anything Rafe’s own father had been able to procure. Better than anything save the concoctions he had drunk at the feast of the Balam. That kind of chocolate was a tonic to the body and the spirit. The chocolate at the Inkpot, however, was an overpriced abomination, only fit to fuel late night arguments and hungover mornings. Rafe missed good chocolate. He missed, though he hated to admit it, the man who served it to him. Tremontaine. Will.
He hadn’t seen Will for more than a passing moment in days. Rafe didn’t think the duchess had guessed the precise nature of his relationship with her husband, but neither did she trust him. And the feeling was mutual. She was an abomination, that woman, a small golden dagger with a poisoned hilt. Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, ran the entire household like a giant clock and had made of Will a clockwork duke, trotting out at the designated hours to do her bidding. The latest occasion had been some kind of discussion of arcane corners of tax import policy. Will had attempted to explain its importance to him, but the explanation had necessitated a distinct overuse of the word “Diane.” Rafe had much preferred to kiss him, and one thing had led to another. Instead of working, they had enjoyed an afternoon romp on his secretary’s desk. Papers were ruined. Rafe had no regrets—or he shouldn’t have. But he had now passed three days without the duke’s company, and he felt like his friend Thaddeus had looked a week into a cleansing regimen prescribed by some quack physician from Uru—haggard, snappish, held together with shoestring and spite.
“Will,” he sighed, and his head fell from his hand to the table.
“Are you sick?” Micah asked.
“He’s wasting his head-spirit,” said Kaab Balam, finally returning with the popped maize and beer that recommended the Inkpot to budding natural philosophers far more than its insipid chocolate. “Look out, friend Rafe. If you aren’t careful, it might escape you.”
Rafe popped open an eye. “Escape me? My soul? What, are you planning to kill me with that fearsome black dagger of yours?”
She shook her head and sucked in her lips, which he had learned generally meant she was trying to find a way of explaining a difficult concept from her country to him. “You don’t have a soul,” she said, finally. “You have three. One of them is in your head—it is your power and your heat—and you waste it with such an un . . . an un—out of bounds? Out of normal behavior?”
“Unseemly?” he tried.
She brightened. “Yes! That! You waste it on an unseemly passion.” Kaab settled back in her seat, nodded with ample self-satisfaction, and quaffed deeply from a tankard of the beer that she had very nearly spit on the floor the first time they’d come here.
“My perspicacious Kinwiinik princess,” he said, pricked into raising his head, “are you speaking to me, by any chance, or to a mirror?”
“I . . .” She trailed off, choked by a visible internal struggle. “I am learning to moderate my excesses,” she said stiffly.
“Pride chief among them!” Rafe plucked a sweet-salty maize kernel and tossed it into his mouth. He grinned. Kaab’s scowl could have curdled fresh milk. He blew her a kiss.
“Rafe,” Micah said, sounding puzzled. “Are you two arguing again?”
“Whyever would you think that, Micah? By the by, have you tried this popped maize? It’s delicious.”
“So glad we have something you approve of,” Kaab said. “Go on, taste it, Micah. It’s good!”
Micah picked up a puffy white kernel and split it open with his fingernail. He peered at the dried golden-brown lining, nibbled a corner, and looked suspiciously at Kaab.
“This isn’t maize. We feed maize to the hogs.”
“Hogs!” Kaab nearly spat out her beer. “Hogs? You don’t feed this to hogs, Micah.” Rafe watched, amused, as she suppressed her indignation. “Well, maybe you do. An inferior grade.”
“Hardly worth the popping,” Rafe added helpfully. She glared at him, so he took pity and explained, “This is special maize, Micah, newly brought from the same place as the chocolate. It costs more, but University students love it, and it’s very fashionable right now.” He took another handful.
Micah nodded. “Well, that’s all right, then. Thank you, Rafe, but it tastes funny to me. Also, I need you to understand what’s wrong with these tables.”
“Arkenvelt isn’t where it’s supposed to be, you said.”
“Not unless you use one of the corrections. But I recalculated the chart so we wouldn’t need corrections! I thought the chart was wrong because I needed to use artificial numbers for it, but I did that and it still doesn’t come out right. So now I think it must be something else, too.”
“Why do the numbers have to be wrong at all?”
“Oh, they are! I explained before—”
“No, wait, never mind. What else must be wrong then?”
Micah scrunched his nose. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you might have an idea. Or Kaab, since her people travel so much.”
The two of them turned to look at Kaab, busy studying her reflection in the bottom of her beer mug.
“I told you both already,” she muttered, so low they had to lean in to hear, “I don’t know much—anything—about the ways of navigation. They don’t teach that to women.”
“That’s all right, Kaab. I don’t need to know all about navigation,” Micah said. “I just need to know, well, what does the earth look like? How do you move across it? I’ve been thinking about straight lines, Rafe.” The young mathematician leaned in, so he could speak just inches from Kaab and Rafe. He looked at once panicked and excited. “I think that straight lines must be wrong.”
Rafe stared at Micah’s innocent brown eyes and tried to make sense of what he had just heard. “Straight lines? Good god, Micah, are you mad? Have you been eating too many tomato pies? No, it’s this terrible chocolate. Inkpot chocolate, ruining your judgment as well as your palate!”
“It is terrible chocolate,” Kaab agreed. “And of course straight lines exist. How else would we make buildings or roads or . . . anything?”
“No, not straight lines for normal things. Straight lines on spheres! Remember the problem in Doctor Volney’s class? The one that was very wrong?”
“Volney didn’t think so! He kicked you out for having the gall to contradict him.”
Micah winced, as though the memory still hurt him. “But he was wrong, Rafe. They can’t possibly be the same distance apart in three dimensions as on a plane. It’s just not logical.”
Rafe was about to object again when his eye caught on the mug Micah was drinking from.
“A straight line,” he said slowly, imagining one traversing two arbitrary points on the glass, “on a curved three-dimensional surface.”
Micah nodded vigorously. “Yes! Rafe, don’t you see?”
“They’re not straight. I’m not sure exactly how, but they must be . . . longer?”
“Yes!” Micah jumped a little in his chair. “I’m not sure exactly how either. I think the calculations might be difficult. But this seems clear to me.”
Rafe felt dizzy. His hands tingled, and he could hardly feel the rest of his body. If Micah was right, then navigation required a complete change in the general understanding of geometry. At the very least, it would give him something worth arguing in his fellowship examinations!
“But in that case, the trouble is the earth,” Rafe said. “Is it a sphere, as Rastin claims?”
“I don’t know. Kaab said—” Micah glanced over at the foreign trader, who regarded
them with a look so dark and inscrutable that Rafe scooted backward.
Micah hung his head. “I know you said not to tell.”
Rafe gaped at Kaab. “Not to tell? Gods, I knew you were holding out on us! But you tell Micah, and not me? What is it?”
“You are . . . impossible to deal with . . . very frustrating . . . in—in—”
“Insufferable?”
Kaab nodded grimly. “I told Micah that I had seen some charts, maps of the stars and the earth for use by our navigators. My uncle has them.”
“Why, Kaab! If your uncle has them, then surely you can just remove them for a few hours and let us look. In the spirit of the free exchange of knowledge. What harm could come of that?”
Rafe did know that, depending on what he and Micah could learn from the Kinwiinik star charts, a great deal of harm could come of it—at least, from the Kinwiinik traders’ perspective. If traders from the Land, like his father, could adjust their navigational tables so that they were accurate, what would stop them from heading to Uru or Cham or the land of the Kinwiinik themselves and negotiating fairer prices at port? He felt a twinge of guilt at this, but excitement overrode his finer instincts.
Kaab was shaking her head slowly back and forth. “I don’t think . . . I don’t know . . .” She looked between her two companions and then back at her drink, and blinked to find it empty. She swallowed. “I might be able to. Just for a very short time. We could meet here again in a few days?”
Micah grinned and rocked a little in his chair. “Oh, Kaab!” he said. “This is very exciting! First we have to decide how to calculate the distances, Rafe. But after that I can do the tables again. I might be done in a month or two.”
Rafe grinned. “And by then, I’ll have figured some way out of this trouble with my committee—this new spherical approach to geometry might dazzle even de Bertel—and I’ll be capable of promoting our theory among all scholars who now pretend to the study of natural philosophy!”
He grabbed an empty mug and clinked it with Kaab’s and Micah’s.
“This calls for a celebration,” Rafe said, making a decision. “And I will leave you to it.”
“Are you going somewhere, Rafe?” Micah asked.
Kaab raised an eyebrow, looking once again like her comfortable, competent self. “He returns to his duke. And he defies the duchess.”
Kaab could sometimes be uncanny like that, knowing his thoughts a moment after he did. But right now he did not care at all. Rafe stood. He felt like spinning.
“I want,” Rafe said, “very good chocolate.”
Lying on the filthy cobbles of the Old Market, tripped by her dishonorable opponent, Kaab gasped like a fish pulled from a net. Some cold liquid, thankfully unidentifiable, seeped through her vest and tunic onto her lower back. Her sword, that unwieldy, overlong, beautiful, hateful weapon, had fallen from her numb and sweaty grip. All that remained was the dagger. She might get one chance, even at this extreme, to do her opponent enough damage to make him leave her alone. The alternative was to lie here and wait to be speared like a war captive on a foreign altar. Had she survived Tultenco only to die beside the trash-filled fountain of the Old Market on the dirty knife of a dishonorable warrior? And Tess had been almost sure that no one would try to kill her.
She heard the beautiful forger now, screaming. “Help her, you gaping idiots!”
Her opponent glanced around, startled. He took a slight step forward. Within striking range. She continued to gasp, though she had regained control of her breathing. From her position on the ground, she had a clear view of his dirty boots, cracked with mud and smelling of shit. Those would be tough to pierce. But his calf was merely covered by breeches, with none of the cotton padding that warriors from her lands used to protect themselves. It would be easy for her to lunge for that soft spot behind his knee, where there stretched a certain ligament that it would hurt him to lose.
She did not take more than a second to consider and make her decision. She was distantly aware of the surging crowd, the commotion and shouting outside the ring, but she did not take it into account. This was her fight, and she would finish it. The man growled an oath she didn’t understand, something about a god of horns, and pivoted toward her with his sword raised. She rolled and lunged with the speed of a lifetime of training. Her blade went unerringly to his knee—
And she missed.
Momentum threw Kaab forward, and she caught herself with her hand. She had nicked the other man’s skin, but no more. Certainly not the incapacitating blow that she had planned. Indignant, sweaty, and bruised, she heaved herself to her feet. A green-eyed man held her erstwhile opponent’s arms behind his back. Tess stood right behind him, clutching her bag.
“Kaab, are you all right?” Tess looked furious and terrified, ready to slug her or kiss her. Her cheeks were nearly as red as her hair.
Suddenly, her exhaustion and bruises and near brush with death did not matter so much. Kaab grinned. “Quite well,” she said, and bent to retrieve her fallen sword. “Even if I do have to fight cowards instead of honorable men.”
The green-eyed man, who had been watching Kaab’s performance since the beginning, pulled the swordsman’s arms a little more firmly behind him. His captive yelped.
“Horned God’s balls, Applethorpe, you bastard, let me go! This little bitch nearly hamstrung me!”
The green-eyed man, though the slighter of the two, did not seem preoccupied with the other man’s struggles. He had an air of violence about him, honed to the edge of a fighting blade. He would know his own strength to the feather-weight. He would know how to exploit another man’s weakness.
“Quiet, Alaric,” he said mildly. “Or I’ll let the lady finish what she started.”
Alaric went very still.
“So,” the green-eyed man asked Kaab, “where did you learn to fight so well with a dagger and so badly with a sword?”
“I learned the obsidian blade in my home in Binkiinha. And the sword I began on the ship here.” She scowled at the object in her right hand. “It is a weapon more elegant to admire than to wield.”
He laughed. “That depends on the wielder.”
She acknowledged that with a wry grimace. This intriguing man might be the one they had hoped to flush out with this public display. Not a protector, as she had proclaimed from the beginning, but a murderer. Ben’s murderer. Which meant that she and Tess needed to cast the bait.
Kaab glanced at Tess and nodded very slightly. Tess’s wide lips quirked a little at the corners, and she reached casually into her bag.
“Oh no!” she said, not quite a shout, but with a quality to her voice that projected across the square. “They’re gone! My drawings are gone! Someone must have taken them!” She spread the bag open for effect, empty but for a shawl.
“Did you drop them?” Kaab asked.
Tess raised an eyebrow. “They call me Tess the Hand and you think I’d lose track of a job?” But she took the hint and went back to where she had been standing beneath a portico, with a good view of the rest of the square. The curious and ghoulish crowded around her while she spun an elaborate tale of the very special forgery and the drawings she had made of it, as insurance against a dangerous client.
Kaab kept an eye on Alaric and the green-eyed man, but they were busy negotiating the terms of Alaric’s release, speaking in low voices peppered like avocado soup with expletives and exhortations to their gods. They weren’t paying the slightest attention to Tess. Not definitive proof, perhaps, but Kaab decided to trust her instincts and continue the hunt elsewhere.
She turned to the green-eyed man. “Will he kill me?” she asked.
He looked down speculatively. “I think the poison’s out of him.”
“Then let him go. I need a beer.”
“I admire your priorities. I’m Vincent Applethorpe, at your service.”
Kaab bowed, distracted by Tess’s relatively subtle but persistent gestures for her to hurry up and move through the crowd.
“Ixkaab Balam,” she said.
He nodded. “Be good, Alaric,” he said, and released the man with a push. Alaric cursed and rubbed his shoulders. He tried to retrieve his weapons from the ground, but Applethorpe stopped him with a wagging finger.
“At the Fancy,” he said, in the tone of a reminder, “a day hence. I promise to return them. You don’t attack an opponent who has yielded, friend. And all the swordsmen will have heard of this by the end of day. I do this to spare you worse.”
“You’re a smug Southern pimp, you know that, Applethorpe?”
“Better than being a flaccid Northern boor. Now mosey on.”
Alaric spat and hurried away in the direction of the Maiden’s Fancy.
“Thank you for stopping him,” Kaab said.
Applethorpe twirled Alaric’s confiscated knife. “A matter of honor,” he said. “Also, I’ve a mind to challenge you myself, and I needed you whole to do it.”
At the thought, Kaab felt a strange exhilaration. This man would give her the fight of her life. But she had something to attend to first.
“Beer,” Kaab said. “And rest. But then you may have your fight.”
And she hurried into the crowd before he could respond, leaving him staring after her with bemusement and something else she couldn’t quite name.
70 hours earlier
Kaab judged that she had played that quite well. The right amount of reticence and discomfort, a generous dollop of ignorance, and a sprinkling of devil-may-care recklessness, and she felt sure that she had pulled herself from the near disaster of that conversation in the Inkpot.
If she’d had any idea before how close Rafe and Micah were to a major discovery, she never would have so much as admitted to the location of the north star in the night sky. The idea that the safety of her family—and quite possibly of the Kinwiinik triple alliance itself—depended on her convincing a pair of provincial Locals that the earth was shaped more like an egg than a ball would have been a grand joke in other circumstances. That it had instead become a deadly serious game of wits made Kaab pull her hood over her head against the endless icy drizzle and hurry toward Riverside. Toward Tess.
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 20
