"Oh, forget it."
Rather than the clapboard slums typical of city fringes, the upper slopes of Wending were dominated by green lawns and isolated villas. Crooked trees grew at deliberate intervals, their crabbed branches trimmed. Even in the early hour, men with pikes stood on the front stoops, backs straight, eyes watchful. The houses they guarded had been modeled after the farms on the hills: sprawling ground floors and terraced upper floors with stepped towers standing five and six stories high. The curved eaves gave the roofs a tentlike look. Next to every manor, a golden pole jutted fifty feet into the sky, isolated in a circle of gravel raked into alternating spokes of white and black.
"What the hell is that?" Blays said. "I mean, besides a big old pole?"
Fann shot him a distressed look. "A temple."
"It looks like a very sickly tree."
"These people come from ancient lines of traders. In olden days, they planted brass-capped poles at crossroads where the gleaming metal would attract the eye. Even the most ephemeral bazaars took on the air of sanctuary. Few use the poles in that way now, however. Across Gallador, they've become houses of worship."
"Not much of a temple if everyone's got one," Dante said.
Fann shook his head briskly. "Quite the contrary! These were nomads, remember. In modern times, services are held at a different swappole every week. Some of the larger orders may not meet at the same pole more than once a year. By the way, don't approach one without flipping a coin at its base."
"Why not?" Blays said.
"It's considered akin to shitting in the well."
"So should I not do that either?"
Fann sighed. The poles all but disappeared as they entered the city proper and its smells of manure, lake-mud, and the savory tea sold from carts and teahouses in every single plaza. The corners of roofs swooped and curved. Squat, short-legged horses trundled through the streets, carts strapped to their thick bodies. Men and women wore bright, skirtlike things slit to the knees.
It was like they'd crossed the mountains into another world. Yet at the same time, Wending was nothing more than another major city, with the same wood and stone and pressing flesh of all the others. Fann led them to the ferries, stabled the horses at the massive barn beside the docks, and hired a man with a rowboat and a sibilant accent. Two heavy-shouldered men paddled them across the cold, deep waters to Bolling Island, a sharp ridge of rock a few hundred feet long and less than a hundred across. Stairs climbed from its jetty. There, Fann hired a waiting porter to help with the luggage and escort them to the house of Lord Lolligan, where they were to stay.
A servant let them in to the foyer of the five-layered house, where they waited in a receiving-hall insulated against the lake's chill by lush carpets. Padded benches and paintings of sloops on misty lakes furnished the room. Lolligan emerged shortly, a thin, avian old man with a pointed white beard and light brown skin.
"You may as well sit," he said, eyes creasing with a smile. "Unless you plan to stand for the next three days."
"I don't take your meaning," Dante said.
"Because it was deliberately unclear. In less obscure language, the man you want to see is named Jocubs, and he won't see you for three days."
"We'll see about that," Blays said. "We've got places to be."
Lolligan tipped back his chin. "That's precisely the problem. So does everyone else."
Nevertheless, he let them down to his private pier, where two of his servants rowed Dante and Blays to another island a fraction of a mile further out on the lake. There, they called on a terraced house much like Lolligan's, if a little older and statelier, and were brought to a closed-off deck overhanging the lake. Jocubs was not in. They were met instead by Brilla, a woman who was unobtrusive in appearance but whose cool command made clear she was used to speaking for the household.
"I'm afraid Lord Jocubs is not available to see you," she said. "I am sure he'll be pleased to hear you came to announce your arrival in person."
Dante leaned forward on his padded green bench. "We're pressed for time. Our meeting with Lord Jocubs will only take a few minutes."
"A few minutes Lord Jocubs does not currently possess."
"What if we wait here?" Blays said.
"Then you will be waiting for three days, which I assure you would be more comfortably passed at Lord Lolligan's."
Dante rubbed his mouth. "Perhaps he can squeeze us in at the end of the day."
Brilla tented her hands. "Regrettably, the end of the day is already accounted for."
"Is every second of his time blocked out?"
"Of course not. That would be ridiculous."
"Is every minute?"
"All the important ones," she said.
Dante's brow lowered. "Then perhaps we can intrude on some of his unimportant minutes."
"Impossible." Her dark hair swung as she shook her head. "That would make them important minutes."
"And thus accounted for?"
"You can see the bind I'm in."
"So he can stay up late!" Blays thundered. "Taim's sagging ass! Our rider beat us here by a week at least to set this up in advance. We're here to stop a war and your lord is too busy counting tea leaves to spare us fifteen minutes?"
Brilla gave him a look that could have withered all Tantonnen. "I'm not stopping you from seeing him. I'm just explaining to you why you can't."
"Oh yeah? Then what would you do if I ran upstairs and kicked in his bedroom door?"
"Obviously I would stop you."
"You're lying like a rug that's very tired," Blays said. "Either that, or you honestly don't understand—"
Dante cut in. "There are issues at stake much closer to Lord Jocubs' interests than any conflict. Dunden Pass, for instance."
Brilla's gaze snapped away from Blays. "What about it?"
"Narashtovik continues to be concerned about reprisals from Mallon about the last war," Dante lied. "We believe the pass may need to be restricted. Possibly even shut down."
"You can't do that."
"Nevertheless, we may. We had hoped to kill two birds by bringing the matter to Lord Jocubs, but if we have to move on before he's free—"
Brilla held up her fine-fingered hands. "I'll let him know. That's the best I can do."
"I'm sure that's true," Blays said. "I'd hate to be anywhere near when you show off your worst."
Her lips compressed into a tight line, but she fared them well at the door. Lolligan's boatmen rowed them back to Bolling Island. Lolligan sat in his receiving-hall holding a lively conversation with Fann and Mourn. He looked up with a cheerful smile.
"How did it go?"
"I have no gods damn idea," Dante said.
"Well, you'll find out soon enough," the old man said. "Or not."
"What, are you related to Brilla?" Blays said. "You both equivocate like you were born into it. Like you had to convince your moms to have you in the first place."
Lolligan laughed, dry yet cheerful. "Do you know what Galladites are most often compared to?"
"Mossy stones," Fann said.
"And why is that?"
"Because your people live in close proximity to a great many rocks?" Mourn said.
Fann shook his head. "Because they're so slippery."
"Indeed," Lolligan smiled. "What good is a contract you can't wriggle out of? What good is it to want something if everyone knows about that want? That is how business survives when everything else perishes."
Dante narrowed his eyes. "You seem awfully upfront in your desire to help us."
"Oh, that's because I'm more gambler than businessman. And I see Narashtovik—more specifically, the man who runs it—as the sneakiest bet to hitch my wagon to."
A servant coughed from the doorway. It was time for dinner. The lake shimmered pinkly through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The meal was a bevy of trout found nowhere but the lake, seasoned with black and red peppers and a savory tea-based sauce. Lolligan made no rituals before it was served.
> A letter arrived from Jocubs before dessert. The lord would see them tomorrow afternoon.
* * *
Jocubs received them on the same enclosed balcony where Brilla had given them the verbal run-around. Jocubs was elderly, stately, with winglike gray eyebrows that turned up at the ends. His bald head was as shiny as the lake and he moved with the slow confidence of a man who's always known a servant would catch him before he fell. For all that, Dante liked him: he smiled readily, and insisted they forget his title.
"I'm puzzled why Callimandicus would be worried about the pass at this juncture," Jocubs said. "It's been what, six years since your little squabble with Mallon? If it takes them that long to respond, surely they're not much of a threat, eh?"
"The thing is, Callimandicus is very old." Blays reached for his lake-chilled champagne. "It makes him prone to forget that everyone younger has better things to do than stew about the past."
"I'm sure I don't have to mention we find that pass very useful. It would be a shame to have to run a new road through the southern mountains. Which would run closer to Wending, of course, but why tip a rolling cart?"
Dante smiled. "I think we can talk him down. But we wanted to be certain you still had a use for the pass if Callimandicus does wind up its steward."
Jocubs' winged brows leapt. "Does he think that's likely, too? I must say I haven't heard one thing about this whole mess that doesn't smell like a buzzard's gut. I'm beginning to think we'll level out status quo."
"He disagrees, I'm afraid. I assume Wending has no interest in a war in the Territories?"
"Celeset, no. How do we ship tea to Mallon when there's a horde of damned soldiers clogging up the road?"
"Rolling carts and tipping hands, et cetera," Blays added.
The elderly man grinned. "You sound downright lakeborn."
"Narashtovik doesn't want war, either," Dante said. "We feel a certain paternal sympathy for the norren, for one. For another, I'm afraid Setteven may be misinterpreting the acts of a single clan for statewide unrest."
"It sounds like you need an audience with the Tradesman's Association."
"How do we make that happen?"
"Well, I could ask for one. I am the head of it." Jocubs chuckled, then leaned back on his bench and folded his hands across his modest belly. "I can schedule our meeting within, say, eight days."
"Eight days?" Dante said.
"Does time pass more slowly in Narashtovik?"
"It's just that we have other places to visit before we head home."
Jocubs lifted one thatchety brow. "And I've got to assemble a quorum of the Tradesman's Association of the Greater Valley of Gallador, some of the busiest men and women in the entire empire. Compared to that, putting the brakes on a war might be easier."
Dante laughed. "Fair enough. Please let us know when the time is confirmed."
He returned to Lolligan's home happy enough. Even with an eight-day wait, they'd remain slightly ahead of schedule. A schedule that was somewhat arbitrary to begin with. In truth, he and Cally had been expecting more movement out of Setteven by this point—aggression along the borders, tough talk, more levies. Instead, all fronts had been quiet. Perhaps King Moddegan felt no need to stomp out a few unruly bugs. Perhaps all their worries of war were just phantoms. Even if things were progressing behind the scenes, the movement was too slow and small to notice.
Lolligan agreed Jocubs' timeline sounded reasonable. "If anything, it's on the fast side. Everybody must have already dragged their fat asses back to town to cover them up before bad times hit."
"How do you think the negotiations will go?"
The old merchant snorted. "Heard anything about not rocking the boat yet? Tipping the cart?"
"What about shaking the baby?" Blays said.
"Surprised that one hasn't caught on yet." Lolligan gestured at the shimmering lake. "The men here, they like to keep things smooth. We have a fish here. The cadd. Pudgy things about the size of your thumb, with yellow spots and a mean little beak. By and large, cadd eat anything that's too small and too slow to get out of the way—snails, minnows, the bones of other fish. They won't look twice at something their own size. But once in a while, if something in the water's bleeding bad enough, or thrashing around just so? The entire lake flashes yellow with cadd swarming for a bite."
"So don't be a snail?" Blays said. "Words to live by."
"What I'm saying is they'll eat you alive if the opportunity looks tasty enough."
"I suspect that may be the chief rule of existence," Dante said.
"I think we're overlooking the crucial issue here," Blays said. "The chief concern, as far as I see it, is we have eight days ahead of us and zero things to fill them with."
Lolligan smiled, the sharp triangles of his mustache twitching. "I can occupy a few of those days. If you find it tragically boring, you can spend the rest of the week drinking away the memory."
"You should be a salesman!" Blays clapped his hands to his thighs and stood. "What are we going to see?"
"Nothing much. Just the most vital ingredient to a happy and healthy life."
* * *
A pink field stretched for a mile in all directions, flat and glittery as a pond, bowled on all sides by craggy brown hills. It was shockingly warm; Dante had already shed his cloak and was currently sweating through his doublet. A few yards away, women crouched and hacked at the field with short, sharp metal hoes, scuttling forward as soon as they loosened the soil. Boys dawdled after them, shoveling the crumbly pink dirt into wooden buckets. Lolligan grinned like a proud grandpa.
Blays sniffed. "Is this it?"
Lolligan whirled, gaping angrily. "Do you have any idea what you're looking at?"
"Dirt?"
"Dirt?"
"Pink dirt?"
Lolligan shut his eyes and forced the anger from his face. "That's salt. Just growing from the ground. Ripe for the plucking, if you have the right to pluck it. Which I do."
Dante knelt and touched the ground. Hard, solid, crystalline. Lightly gritty. "Can I taste it?"
"That depends on how much money's in your pocket." Lolligan smiled and gestured grandly. "Be my guest."
Dante touched his fingertips to his tongue and rolled the grains around his mouth, letting them dissolve. "It's different. Sharper. Almost a little sweet."
"Exactly. Sprinkle that on a steak, and you'll never again be able to pass a cow without taking a nibble off the flank."
The trip had taken the better part of three days. From Bolling Island, Lolligan had rigged up his flat-bottomed sailboat and cruised north across the lake to a gap carved straight through the hills. A shallow canal led them to another lake that was notably squatter than Gallador proper. From there, Lolligan docked at a busy little town, hired a pack of rugged, shorthaired horses with funny, pushed-in snouts, and led them beyond a craggy ridge. The land descended through a hellscape of sharp, broken rocks, steaming, sulfurous pits, and hot pools on top of bulbous yellow rock that looked like frozen snot. After another row of barren hills, they finally reached the salt flats, a pink sea even stranger than anything they passed along the way.
Lolligan passed the voyage telling them how he'd made his fortune as the first son of a wealthy tea merchant, he'd inherited enough wealth to last an era, then swiftly lost it through a series of bad investments and worse bets. After twelve years of living hand-to-mouth, including four years as a mate on a single-masted cog, he returned to Wending on Gallador, gambled all his savings on high-altitude plots the other tea-men had utterly failed to turn fruitful, and promptly sowed the soil with seeds picked up during his years at sea. The resulting tea leaves were scrawny, little larger than the last joint of your pinky. His friends feared he'd be ruined a second time.
But his tiny leaves made delicious tea. Since they were so small, supply was scarce. Demand soared—and prices with it. In the two decades between then and now, others had moved in with small-leafed brews of their own; that elevated him to the fringes
of respectability, but the politicking of the traditional tea-growers kept Lolligan excluded from the inner circles. Including the TAGVOG Jocubs ruled over. Lolligan seemed to regard this exclusion with equal parts "who needs 'em" humor and needling resentment.
"Not bad," Blays said there on the pink plain. He licked his fingers. "Salty."
"Where do you get your salt in Narashtovik?" Lolligan said.
"The sea?" Dante shrugged.
Blays wagged his head. "The salt fairy."
"The salt—?" Lolligan pressed his palms together, elbows splayed. "Look, why don't you take a box back with you? Narashtovik hasn't been much of a market for a long time, but I get the impression all that has changed."
He barked orders at a boy. The boy sprinted toward a wagon parked just past the flats, sandals flapping.
"Is this why you took us in?" Dante said. "To sell us salt?"
"It's a reason. I like to have more than one."
"I thought good traders didn't make their wants known."
"Except when they do. Such as when the product's quality speaks for itself." The boy returned with a small wooden box. Lolligan took it and gazed at the woman and children chipping and scooping the pink field. "Some people use norren, you know. They can sure haul their weight. Have a bad habit of dropping dead in the summer, though. I don't think they're built for this heat."
Blays blinked against the crystal-reflected sun. "We came all this way for salt?"
The trip back took just as long as the journey out. Dante wanted to be in top shape for the meeting with the TAGVOG, leaving a single night to peruse the city and take in a drink. At Lolligan's manor, Dante gathered up the team and took the boat into town. They passed one nondescript pub, then took up a bench in the second they found, a three-story watering hole with a tented roof. Its second floor rested on pilings above the lapping shore, open to the cool lakeside winds.
Blays demanded they try the local flavor, a murky white liquor called mullen that tasted nutty and earthy and mixed well with hot and sweetened tea. They drank from slender, square-bottomed glasses like fluted vases.
Fann turned his glass in a slow circle. "Talk, that immortal butterfly, made the rounds while you were out."
The Great Rift Page 28