by Dale Lucas
“If we’ve got the lantern,” Rem asked, “what are these torches for?” He pointed to the three pitch-smelling sticks in the scabbard slung across his back.
“Emergencies,” Torval said, and picked up a last piece of gear in his free hand. It was a maul—a long steel shaft with a hammerhead on one side and a nasty-looking spike on the other. Lantern in one hand, maul in the other, Torval led Rem into the streets outside the watchkeep.
Since he did not remember being brought to the watchkeep in the first place, Rem studied his surroundings carefully upon emerging. Night had fallen, but the square just outside the keep was still lively and full of people. The centerpiece of the square was a fountain built around a weatherworn marble statue of some ancient dictator on a rearing horse. Some of the people milling about the square came to collect water from the fountain, others took it from the well that stood nearby. Many more lingered, standing on the flagstones surrounding the fountain or in the muddy streets that led away from it. Already the air was cool, a wan fog crept up from the waterfront, and a lone flamebearer made his rounds in the square, lighting the post lamps that ringed it.
Rem quickened his pace, since Torval was already halfway across the square. Opposite the watchkeep Rem saw a glowering gray temple with stone columns carved to look like trees and a high pitched roof covered in iron-gray slate. Rem recognized the gloomy edifice as a temple to the Gods of the Mount, the gloomy, ancient deities of fire, ice, stone, and storms worshipped by most of the barbarian sorts from Kosterland to the Ironwall Mountains.
Squatting beside it was a sporting house, appropriately marked by a little red lantern out front, complete with scantily clad men and women shimmying on its terrace, while the sound of lute music tinkled within. As he crossed the square and the wind changed, he smelled fresh-baked bread, then hay and horseshit.
“What is this place?” Rem asked the dwarf when he caught up to him.
“Sygar’s Square,” Torval said, cocking his head toward the statue atop the fountain.
Rem studied the statue again. “That’s Sygar?”
“Sygar the Dynast,” Torval said, as though repeating a tiresome lesson he’d been required to cover before. “Succeeded Decicus the Bloody, almost thirteen hundred years ago. Couple decades back, some rich twat decided Yenara needed to be reminded of its bravest and boldest forebears and commissioned statues for every ward.”
“It’s a lively spot,” Rem noted. “And at least there’s bread and water nearby.”
“Yeah, whores and horseshit, too,” Torval added. “Convenient. So, what’s your name, longshanks? What do the soft-haired ladies of the north call you?” He led Rem out of the square, marching evenly and with purpose, broad little shoulders swinging.
“Rem. Short for Remeck. How did you know I was from up north?”
“Think I can’t hear the lilt of the north in your speech? Rem’ll do,” the dwarf answered. “What brings you to our fair city?”
Rem shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what brought him; it was, rather, that he hadn’t worked out a suitable answer yet for the curious who asked him. “Change of scenery, I suppose.”
Torval hawked and spat a wad of phlegm onto the muddy street. “No fair meadows and rolling hills hereabouts,” Torval growled.
“Well, the city’s got her own charms,” Rem countered.
Torval shrugged. “Some say so.”
In the distance, Rem heard bells ringing. They were sonorous and groaning and they sounded at regular intervals. Those would be the hourly bells from the Great Temple of Aemon, toward city center. Rem had grown accustomed to them since his arrival. Every hour, regular as the turning of a wheel, they clanged mournfully to keep Yenarans apprised of the progress of their days and nights. This time, Rem counted nineteen alarums. It was an hour past sunset. The workday was done and the city’s nightly revelry was just under way.
From the muddy street that curved out of the square, the dwarf led them onto a broad, winding cobblestoned avenue. Rem’s memory of the night before returned slowly, clearer and brighter, and he realized that he recognized this path. He knew, for instance, that there was a long line of mummeries and minstrel halls behind them, and ahead on their right, they would pass a tavern that he now recalled—the Knobby Gobby, sporting a colorful shingle of a goblin with a knotty head and crossed eyes. Rem had snickered at that shingle the night before. Beyond the tavern, he knew they would find an intersection of several streets ringed with post lamps and more alehouses, the five streets that met there all unraveling in different directions, like the far-flung points of a star. The widest avenue of that pentangle square would empty onto one of the several stone footbridges that spanned the North Canal. From there, the main paved avenue would lead them down toward the waterfront.
“Stop it,” Torval barked. He tucked his maul under the arm that held the lantern.
“Stop what?” Rem asked.
“Admiring the scenery,” Torval said, shaking one thick sausagelike finger in Rem’s face. “Your gob’s hanging open and your eyes are everywhere but where they should be.”
“Where should they be?” Rem asked.
Torval cuffed him a good one behind his left ear.
“Ow!”
“Watch the street,” Torval snarled. “Don’t gawk and window-shop. You’re looking for criminal enterprise, domestic disturbance, and sundry upsets to the well-being of this district in our fair city. Got that?”
“You didn’t have to hit me,” Rem said, trying to maintain some sort of dignity.
With lightning speed, the dwarf gave him another cuff—this one on the right side. They were quick like that, dwarves. Deceptively so, considering their bulky construction and short stature. Rem supposed he should be glad Torval didn’t use the lamp he held as a bludgeon.
Torval leveled a finger in Rem’s face. “There,” he said. “I just hit you again. The question is, why? Why was I able to smack you twice headwise when you’re supposed to be a watchwarden on duty? When you’re supposed to have your eyes peeled and your gob shut? Where’s your ugly stick, anyway?”
Rem brandished the stick, gripped in his right hand, swinging at his side. Despite his failure to use it to defend himself, Rem was about to give Torval a perfectly good explanation for why he’d been admiring the scenery—he was reconstructing the night before—when Torval’s left hand struck once more, whistling toward Rem’s cheek for an openhanded strike. Rem caught the hand in midair and stared down into Torval’s burning gaze.
The glare of condescension never left the dwarf’s eyes. “There now,” he said, “the Bonny Prince is learning.”
“I’m not a prince,” Rem spat back. “And I don’t care to be called one.”
“And what would you like to be called, boy? Longshanks? Freckles? Gingersnap?”
Rem considered his answers carefully. “Rem will do, you obstreperous pickmonkey.”
He expected another strike. Dwarves didn’t generally care to be called pickmonkeys—just like orcs didn’t care to be called huffers or mudknuckles and elves didn’t care to be called fauneys or gawkylumbers. But it was a measured response: Rem had to see if this unpleasant little fellow really was hostile, or if he was just trying to bait him. If he was truly hostile, then he’d strike again, proving he could dish it out but couldn’t take it.
But Torval didn’t strike. His eyes finally started smiling, even though his mouth didn’t move. He took his maul back in hand again and nodded approvingly. “That’s better,” the dwarf said. “No more of this wide-eyed country mouse in the big city cack. Come on, then.”
Torval turned and kept walking. Rem followed, shocked that his ploy had worked.
“You know I didn’t mean it,” Rem said. “That ‘pickmonkey’ thing.”
Torval waved him off. “Sure you didn’t,” he said. “That’s the attitude you need hereabouts, though. Cultivate it. And just so you know, I haven’t hoisted a pick in years. Not since you were a wee lad, most like.”
“You’ve been here that long?” Rem asked. It really was unusual. Dwarves who came down out of the mountains, leaving behind their clans and guilds and smithies for city life were few and far between—or so Rem assumed.
“Aye,” Torval answered. “Tired of the mines. Tired of the whole bloody mess.”
Rem caught something in Torval’s voice. Regret, perhaps a little sadness. For just a moment, Rem considered pressing for more information. Then he decided he had neither the right nor had he earned the respect of this dwarf to go digging into his past. Thus, he simply nodded and kept pace beside him. Soon they crossed the canal.
After a few moments of silence, Torval spoke. “Tell me about the brawl,” he said. “Were they really both bigger than you?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Rem told Torval the story, as best he could remember it. In the telling, it seemed to reconstruct itself. He remembered that he had been in a tavern—the Pickled Albatross—to meet a young lady whom he’d noticed at the market earlier that afternoon. He’d struck up conversation with her among the greengrocers’ and costermongers’ stalls and asked where he could meet her, and the girl had told him—with a little embarrassment, but no attempt at a bald-faced lie—that she was slinging ale most nights at the Pickled Albatross. Her name was Indilen, and his short but pleasant conversation with her in the market had told him that she was far too polished and well-spoken to be just a barmaid.
“I’m actually trying to get scrivener’s work,” she had explained, brandishing a leather case hanging from a strap at her side—a beautifully tooled secretary set, adorned with an elegant silver seal. “It’s not easy, though. People don’t seem to see the purpose or value in a lettered woman trying to make a living.”
When Rem had simply stared, not understanding what a fine leather purse would have to do with scrivener’s work, Indilen had undone the binding buckle and opened the satchel so that he could see its contents. There was a lacquered writing board, some scraps of blank parchment, a few bottles of ink, even a lovely wooden box—which he assumed contained a writing stylus and various high-quality ink nibs—stained dark cherry and bearing inlaid silver filigree and what Rem recognized as both the stylized first letter of Indilen’s name as well as an ancient family sigil of some sort. Clearly, the girl had been given the scrivener’s set as a gift, meant for her and her alone.
She continued with her lament. “No one who needs a steady pen and good letters seems to believe I can do it,” she said, shrugging and closing the satchel again. “They all want to get free work out of me, just to see what I’m capable of, but then they never ask for me to work again. Can’t seem to countenance paying me at all, let alone paying me the same wage as a lettered young man.”
Rem was truly taken aback by that. While he’d met a number of lettered ladies in his twenty-odd years—the kind who were taught simply as a matter of course, because noble husbands didn’t want illiterate wives—he’d never met a working-class one. As they meandered among the stalls, Rem questioned Indilen further and learned that she was from a moneyed merchant family in Wothris, one of Yenara’s sister city-states, farther south. As was custom, her elder brother would inherit control of the family’s mercantile interests, and her sisters—being of a more provincial stripe—were content to be married off to other well-coined, trade guild–affiliated sons with their own fine villas and cash allowances.
“But not you?” Rem asked, an admiring grin on his face. “The thought of that sort of life—comfort, ease, to be well cared for—doesn’t appeal to you?”
Indilen had turned and studied him with a curious look then, eyes narrowed, mouth half smiling, half smirking. She seemed to have something to say to him, but in the end she did not say it. She only shrugged. “Perhaps after I’ve been out in the world a bit, seen what there is to see and grown weary of it.”
“A little intimidating, isn’t it?” Rem added. “Traveling to a new place? Being all alone? I know I feel so—sometimes, anyway.”
She nodded and studied the wares in the market stalls around them, playfully refusing to look at him again. They were engaged in a bit of a game now—Rem knew the rules well enough—and he was rather enjoying himself. “Perilous, certainly, but I’d like to think I’m reasonable and cautious. I came here with a pilgrim’s caravan, just to make sure I arrived in one piece.”
She punctuated the statement with a coy look thrown back over her shoulder. “But if strange men in the market keep harassing me, I might just have to hie homeward.”
Rem decided to challenge her. “Say the word, miss. I’ll leave you be.”
Indilen shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing, sir. However shabby you might appear, I’m sure you’re keeping the groundlings away. I’ll keep you close so long as you’re useful.”
Rem couldn’t resist. He smiled. “I can be very useful.”
Indilen gave him that strange, crooked grin again. “No doubt—a man with soft hands and courtly speech and fine manners like yourself? Let me guess: you’re also a fine rider and handy with a sword?”
That question caught Rem off guard. He felt his hopeful smile flag slightly. She continued.
“If I weren’t mistaken, sir,” she said, “I might assume I weren’t the only well-raised runaway slumming it in this great, grimy city.”
For a moment—just a moment—Rem was certain that he’d lost her; that her astute reading of him meant that she was done with him and ready to be shut of his company.
But no. She kept smiling. Kept staring. She wanted an answer.
“Not me, miss,” Rem said, letting his grin widen. “I’m just a humble groom’s son from the north.”
Indilen raised one thin eyebrow. “That would have been my first guess, certainly.”
But, of course, she did not mean that. Rem saw it plainly in her level gaze, her droll, understated half smile: she saw right through his adopted persona and knew well that he was just as out of place—and delighted to be so—on Yenara’s streets as she.
That had clinched it. He needed to see Indilen again. And when she finally said that she must be going, she only had an hour before she was expected at work, Rem assured her that he’d be at the Pickled Albatross that evening. When they parted, she seemed happy with that arrangement.
But then, curiously, when he’d come to the tavern that night, she’d been nowhere in sight. He asked about her and everyone had a different answer: no, they hadn’t seen her; yes, they’d seen her and she’d been sent on an errand; yes, she’d come in, sold her cunny to a sailor, and was probably in some alleyway, getting poked up against a splintery old fence. Rem decided that all he could do was to wait, and give Indilen a fair chance to show herself. It was possible she didn’t want his attention and would avoid the place tonight to keep him from glomming onto her, but it hadn’t felt that way at the market. So, he spent a few brasses—nearly his last—on a heel of bread, some salt pork, and a mug of ale, then sat himself down at a corner table to wait.
The longshoremen came after his fifth or sixth mug. Rem was determined to wait all night if need be, but in retrospect, he probably should have paced his guzzling. He’d been getting all warm and fuzzy inside, bleary-eyed, and found himself vaguely annoyed by the whole situation, when those two stevedores sidled up to the table and asked if he’d like to play a round of Roll-the-Bones. It was more fun with three, after all.
Rem accepted their invitation, knowing well that they probably took his relatively clean jerkin and trimmed hair as a sign that he was a toff with coin ripe to be lost. He didn’t even mind losing a little coin to them—though he hoped he might win some, seeing as his reserves were getting low. But, truth be told, the main reason he accepted their invitation was that he was bored. He needed to get his mind off Indilen before he lost his patience and left altogether.
“Hopeless,” Torval said, interrupting his story yet again. The tale unfolded in episodes as they patrolled the near waterfront—an area just on the far side of the great canal that
cut the Fifth Ward in half. Barely two hours into their patrol, Rem felt he had already had a lifetime’s education imparted to him. As they meandered through fog-choked, half-lit streets, past grogshops and peculiar dealers, they broke up street brawls, chased a would-be burglar from an alley behind a customs warehouse, stopped two pickpockets and one purse-snatcher, cited a priest of Nasca for proselytizing without a license, and levied an indecency fine from one troubled fellow who’d attempted to hold conjugal congress with a stray goat.
Torval collected all the coin and collateral, for when those cited and fined could not pay, he would gladly accept an item from their person of sufficient value: a torque, a cuff, a ring, or the like. This was Torval’s way of educating Rem—showing him how to approach two men (a catcatcher and a dogcatcher) who seemed to be beating up a third (a ratcatcher); how to chase whores and their jacks out of back alleys (because whoring wasn’t a crime, but getting tupped in public was, so they needed to go find a room or a darker, more deserted alley); and how to mark a man leading a horse and decide when the horse was too good for the man riding it (muddy breeks and disintegrating shoes bound up with rags were a good indicator), and then, how to challenge that man and make him prove the horse was his.
Most of these stops had yielded neither coin nor crime, but Rem knew what Torval was on about and let him do as he saw fit. He was the veteran, after all, and Rem the student. It wasn’t Rem’s job to question the lessons Torval thought pertinent.
But, at the moment, Torval was calling horseshit on Rem’s insistence that he had been willing to wait in the Pickled Albatross all night, if need be, for the chance to see Indilen again.
“You were really going to sit there from dusk ’til dawn, waiting for this lettered little bint to show herself?” Torval asked. “She made that deep of an impression on you?”
“She did,” Rem insisted. “You should’ve seen her, Torval. Auburn hair. Big brown eyes. And well-spoken, too. I can’t tell you what a turnoff a dull-witted woman is.”