This time Iminor raised his cup, and we all followed—just as Amien arrived. The air around him rippled with arcane presence. His black eyes saw me, perhaps truly, certainly in a way no one else had in years. He surveyed the table, cast a long look over me, then nodded and took up the seat opposite mine. By the time he settled, the barmaid was there with another cup. Nuad slid the bottle back to me, and I poured for the wizard.
“Another one of these,” I said to the barmaid. “And some pies—Meat pies?” I asked Amien. “Or stew.”
“Pies,” Amien said, nodding. We all picked up our cups again.
“Manannan a Boind,” Iminor said. “More years as a champion, and a member of the Guard, than everyone else put together.”
We drank; we slammed down our cups. People at other tables glanced at us.
“Sláinte,” I said again, and began pouring the next round. Nuad picked up where I left off. The barmaid brought two trays of steaming meat-pies, which smelled delicious. Nuad raised his cup this time.
“Manannan a Boind,” he said. A strange smile played over his lips, then crumpled. “My teacher. My friend.”
Again we drank; again we slammed.
“Sláinte!” Ogma said at the same time I did; Letitia laughed, whether at Ogma or at something inside her own head I wasn’t certain. The mundane world receded a good distance, though I could still feel the power of the old gods humming around the edges of my brain.
“Meat pies,” Tuiri said, as if it were a revelation. We slid the trays up and down the length of the tables so everyone could reach. This proved more amusing than anyone had expected. The pie tasted as good as only uisquebae can make tavern food seem.
“We have an airship,” Iminor said gravely to Amien.
“Yes,” the wizard said. “In the morning.”
“How big is this thing?”
“Big enough for twelve,” Amien said in a satisfied tone.
“Twelve people?” Iminor asked with the same grave courtesy and achingly precise diction. “Or twelve horses and riders?”
“Um,” Amien said. “Fouzh. Yes, I had meant to…” He shook his head; unexpectedly I spotted a solution to my problem.
“Ni hanasa,” I said; a catch-phrase harpists and wizards, and all men of learning, share: Not hard. It is what one says when called upon to explain something terribly complex, and it must be delivered without irony. Why it sprang to my lips I couldn’t have said; but it made a kind of sense to me tonight that it never had except when I had stood in Amien’s workshop, mind wider than the room with the presence of magic.
“I am the mora’s ground crew,” I said, and though something in me hurt at what I knew I must say, I smiled. “I’ll get the horses to stable until you need them back—after all, you won’t need them at Aballo.”
Amien frowned, nodding. All the Tanaan except Iminor looked as if I had delivered terrible news. Easca visibly swallowed a protest; I couldn’t look at Letitia. Iminor was still too controlled to allow the satisfaction in his eyes to manifest in his face, but the habitual tension went out of his body. I made a point of not noticing.
“And I’ll get word to… your friend at the inn,” I said.
The wizard gave me a long, silent look, as if he saw through my pretense of a smile to the things I couldn’t afford to say.
“And we will meet again at the Fair,” he said finally, black gaze fixed on mine.
“Fouzh,” I said without thinking.
“Ellion,” Amien said, layers of meaning in that one word. I looked at the hand I’d smashed again; he reached out and poured more uisquebae into my cup. I picked it up and slammed it back; he poured more for both of us, and we drank again.
“Bastard,” I said. “Don’t you understand that’s the last place—”
“Don’t you understand I need you there?”
“Bollocks!” I snapped. “That’s why you’ve got Sanglin!”
“Try thinking with the other head!” Amien spat.
“Gentlemen,” Letitia said in Tanaan, which made me realize we’d wandered into Ilesian; then she spoiled the effect by seeming to forget what she had planned to say. I reached for another meat pie; Amien poured the last of the uisquebae into my cup, and the barmaid turned up with the next bottle and another tray of pies.
“Praise—gods be thanked,” Amien said, and began pouring for everyone he could reach.
“But is the Eridanus the River Cainte?” one of the men at the table beside us said to the other. “Or did the author mean the Arnemetia, in Finias?”
Immediately my ears seized on their discussion: I’d heard a hundred variations on the debate, in taverns up and down the Ruillin. The men at that table were sailors, probably captains; they were engaged in the endless, seemingly hopeless, effort to reconstruct a sailing route to Hy-Breasaíl. Every profession has its variation of the impossible search for that lost paradise: the sailors’ is the most direct, but in some ways the most esoteric, because they are among the few who actually try to base their forays on old texts and quantifiable facts. I would be lost if left in command of a ship, of course; but the maps and texts, mutually contradictory things they are, I knew intimately.
“Gullion suggests there may actually be two rivers Eridanus,” the other man said.
The first man made a dismissive noise. “That only proves he couldn’t read a chart!”
My mind lit with remembering the ancient maps, imagining the lands to which these men would sail if they only knew how. Tonight their goal looked like Ilunmore in my mind: but an Ilunmore untouched by the wrath of a goddess, one that hummed with powers like I kept feeling at Goibniu. After a moment I realized I still sat in an inn, but the power humming around me was real, and the uisquebae in my cup was warming under the grip of my hand. I returned my attention to my own table and made another attempt at drowning desires I couldn’t seem to escape; Amien met my eyes.
“First time in Goibniu?” he said quietly.
“Fouzh, this place hums,” I said, then realized I was treading the edge of the uisquebae-soaked zone in which a man’s mouth develops a will of its own.
Something lit in Amien’s eyes, and I knew he understood, as no one else here would.
“Have you considered the idea that the smith-god Goibniu might be an aspect of Par?” he said.
A short laugh escaped me: I’d heard that sort of sophistry before. The energies rumbling beneath the stones here had nothing whatsoever to do with Par or any other of the true gods.
“Whatever lets you sleep,” I said.
His mouth twisted, and he turned away.
“Letitia, annu,” he said to her; the term of affection told me he was nearly as drunk as I. “We still have one more task tonight, you and I—”
I knew what he meant: he needed to rebuild her personal wards again. If I were he, I’d be wondering what it meant that the power of a sacred pool dedicated to an old goddess could knock out wards drawn on the new.
Meanwhile the sailors at the next table were still going round over an entirely peripheral problem. “But if you match the Hy-Breasaíl amber trade with the frankincense route, then it’s the Uxellian Penninsula—” said the one to my right.
“Isn’t the route traders took irrelevant in the end?” I said to him.
Both sailors looked at me, astonished; Amien shot me a quelling look.
“Pirtanien records that the ships sailed from Hy-Breasaíl into the setting sun after the Fall,” I continued, “and landed at the mouth of the Riga.”
“Ellion,” Amien said, warning. As if it might be possible for us to be inconspicuous here, as if we might somehow pass through this place without leaving a trail of tavern gossip behind us.
“Who’s the fool now?” I retorted, shooting a glance at the Tanaan and meeting his eyes again. The way we spoke and dressed, even the fact that our shirts buttoned rather than laced, marked us out: as foreign, as wealthy, as loyalists, as most likely noble. And the Tanaan were beyond conspicuous. How could a conversat
ion with sailors that would fade into everyone’s blurred hangover recollections change anything? The things people would remember were enough to expose us ten times over.
“So aren’t you looking for an oceanic route?” I said to the sailors. “Something to the east?”
“The sailing routes from Finias lie to the east,” the first man said. “Which means the Arnemetia—”
“Oh, you’re missing the point,” I said. “The Tanaan realms aren’t Hy-Breasaíl!”
Both men looked past me, at the table full of Tanaan I occupied. Amien shot me another look.
“Letitia,” he said. “While I can still stand, if you please?”
And suddenly the working he meant to perform roared through me, breathtaking and inescapable. Kneeling at her feet as she stood there unclothed, shot through with her gentle power as I raised sparkling delicious power of my own: to enclose her lean feet and legs; to trace the spare curves of her hips and the moons both great and small; to stretch up her sinuous spine and court the wonders of her breasts, delicate clavicles, and long white neck; to enclose all of her, up to her crown, in energies that would lend me constant awareness of her. But that would be only the beginning, because there would be ample opportunity to caress her along the way; to feel the silk of her skin under my hands, to touch her in ways that would raise shivers and quickened breaths and sweet unplanned sounds; to embrace her, love her, blend her magic and mine into something never before seen.
She glanced at me as she rose, and all my desires suddenly condensed into a very physical ache. My head whirled with need; I was on the verge of saying something monumentally stupid. If I had any ethics whatsoever, I would walk out of here now and never come back. All their lives would be longer if I did.
I glanced at the staring sailors and shrugged.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said, and climbed to my feet. As Letitia and Amien walked towards the stairs, I strode out of the main room and into the street. The moons cast pale illumination over half-lit buildings; ground-floor shops all stood dark, but lights played in the windows on the floors above. Fewer men crawled the streets now, but their drunken shouting more than made up the difference.
I walked. I knew what I sought, but not where to find it, and I strolled rather than striding: studying the businesses I passed, gazing at the moons and the stars spilling across the sky while the fiery fog of uisquebae rolled around my brain, gradually admitting to myself that I had been right to never come here, and I would have been righter still to avoid this place tonight.
Farther south on the Ruillin, the gambling halls come in two varieties: the ones in which the stakes are fantastically high and yet the games are no more than amusements—and the ones in which the risk of the thrill outweighs the thrill of the risk, where men will cheat and attack one another for it. Goibniu is full of the latter. The former is the best of all possible places to find the sort of woman I sought: one who does not change the natural color of her hair unless it is to hide a bit of grey, and whose scarves, should she wear such adornments, are all meticulously finished and black. No one calls those women night butterflies; most men are unaware they exist at all. But there were no gambling halls of the right sort in Goibniu, nor a good tea-house or even a solid, reputable brothel.
But eventually, at the edge of the circle of lamplight outside a gambling hall, I found a woman who would do: a slender creature with hair as scarlet as Letitia’s cloak and a blue scarf patterned with green. Her perfume carried the scent of sweet musk-rose, and it raced straight through my nose to my brain.
“Well, now, that is mighty fine,” she said, looking me up and down with belladonna eyes that were probably blue when the drug wore off.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, and stepped closer.
She gave a throaty laugh and linked her arm through mine in a practiced gesture that brushed my wrist against her breast, pulling me away from the lamplight.
“Your inn?” she said, looking up at me.
I shook my head.
“I know a place, but it’ll cost…” She shot me a sidelong, estimating glance.
“That sounds fine.”
Her place was around a corner, an inn of the sort at which rooms can be had for much less than a whole night. It was less clean than the inn I’d left behind. The fees, for the room and for her, were what I expected; her rules were the same as they always are, unless one pays much more. Not that I wanted to kiss her, anyway. I just needed to drive things I couldn’t touch out of my head and fill the space with things I could.
“What’s your name?” I said as we stepped into the room.
She cast me a coy glance. “You tell me.”
Oh, never mind, I thought. I smiled and shook my head, put the money on the table, stretched out a hand and let her bright sparkling red hair rustle through my fingers. Something inside me relaxed; the power under my feet and the power out on the water rushed in, swirling through my consciousness.
A laugh escaped me. “I’ll bet it’s Laverna.”
“How did you know?”
I smiled and unwound the scarf from her neck, realizing out of nowhere that a scarf was what Letitia needed to conceal her torc. I unlaced her dress, slipped my fingertips down her body—but the power I wanted humming beneath my fingertips wasn’t there, and of course I couldn’t allow myself to raise it. Out of the fog of uisquebae and swirling illicit powers arose the knowledge that I was wasting everyone’s time and meager sanity. That sex was the least of what I hungered for, and none of my cravings would be satisfied here. That I was the greatest fool in all of Goibniu, for that matter in any of the Beallan realms, and the one woman I wanted I would never have. I sighed and stepped back, bent to pick up the scarf. The color would highlight the emerald of Letitia’s eyes.
“Love?” said the woman who was, for the moment, named Laverna.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—” I didn’t even know how to express what I didn’t.
“You’ve already paid, though,” she said, an edge developing in her voice.
I nodded. “Give me the scarf and we’ll call it even.”
She gave me a look that clearly said I was both drunk and insane, and there was no disputing either point. But she could buy a dozen scarves with the money on that table. I nodded, smiling a little at my own idiocy, and walked out.
The lamp was still on in the room in which the Tana were lodged. The light shone around the edges of the flimsy door. I knocked; behind the door, Tru said, “Who is it?”
“Ellion,” I said: not loud, but certainly audible nevertheless. What a laughable excuse for security. I could put my fist right through that, too.
But then the door opened, and Tru stood looking at me with Easca behind her; and though they weren’t wearing swords, Tru’s was naked in her hand, and Easca stood with her hand on the hilt protruding from a scabbard on the table. Warmth washed through me.
“Locks are redundant with you two around,” I said, smiling.
“Come in,” Letitia said. She sat curled on the inadequate bed, back propped against the wall. A uisquebae fog still lay on her, but she held the book she’d brought along: Carina’s journal, I remembered. Sudden, blazing curiosity about the things the legendary heroine had troubled to record raced through me. But just as quickly it was pushed aside by awareness of the wards that now skated around Letitia’s flesh. I saw them only as a green glow at the edges of my vision, but the merest shift in focus would show me the physical net of the working.
I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to think about what Amien had done.
“How was your walk?” she said.
I grimaced. “I hope you get to see more of the Beallan realms than Goibniu. This place is dismal.”
Pain manifested in Letitia’s face. “Tru, Easca, could we have a few minutes?”
“I—” I began, stunned. It was true that Letitia need fear no attack with me in the room; but I feared for her reputation.
But Tr
u and Easca nodded with grave courtesy, as if a woman being alone with me were in no way untoward, and it came to me in a foggy flash: the rules among Tanaan are completely different. The women own the property; they rule the nation. Their lives do not depend upon the opinions of men. I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught about Tanaan society, including the received wisdom that no expectations of sexual fidelity exist among them; but I remembered how inconsequential my bedding Macha at Irisa had seemed: everyone knew by the next morning, but no one seemed to much care. And at Arian, when everyone assumed Easca and I had spent our time alone in the ruins dallying, more people had been amused than upset by it, and no one seemed to think any less of Easca afterward. In fact I now suspected the conquest had been considered hers rather than mine. Finally I saw how little I understood their ways.
“How do you say meat pies in the Beallan language?” Tru asked.
I told her.
“And tea?” Easca inquired.
I answered that question, too.
They nodded, satisfied, and left, closing the flimsy door behind them.
“I—brought you something,” I said lamely, crossed the room towards Letitia, and pulled the night butterfly’s scarf from my pocket.
“Ellion!” she said, as if I had brought her emeralds.
I shrugged. “It should be more comfortable than the cloak. Of course you won’t need it at Aballo, but even in an airship it will take a few days…” The pain in her eyes made my mouth run dry.
“This is it, then,” she said.
“I’ve got to handle the horses, and get word—”
“No lies,” she said. “Not now.”
I looked away. “No. Yes. This is where we part. You no longer need—”
“The undead absolutely can cross water,” she said flatly.
The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods) Page 34