The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1)

by Larke, Glenda

  I felt all the old stirrings of jealousy; dark, murky feelings that always shamed me, but which I could never quite control. Sylvmagic. Damn it. Damn her.

  As I returned to my room and reopened the shutters, I stopped feeling and concentrated on thinking again. Firstly, I could have sworn she hadn’t known that young man before she’d entered the taproom. Secondly, if she had sylvmagic, she must have known immediately that he was the unfortunate recipient of a dunmagic spell, even before he knew. Practitioners of sylvmagic had no ability to see dunmagic as I had, but they were more skilled at sensing the physical damage done by it. And so my next thought was: if it had been neither a previous acquaintance nor coincidence that had sent her to the seat next to that young man, then it must have been an acknowledgement of his need of her healing magic, his need of her protection. I decided the Cirkasian was as foolhardy as she was beautiful. A dunmaster could not sense from afar the annulment of one of his spells, but if he saw his victim again he could hardly fail to notice that he was alive and well. And a thwarted dunmaster tended to be a vengeful one.

  And the Stragglerman? His swift assessment of what he’d seen in the young man’s room and his subsequent remark seemed to indicate that he, like me, had Awareness.

  I stood at the window, looking down on the now deserted wharves, only half noticing the sea-mewlers as they squabbled over the fish remains, their normally pristine feathers bloodied with offal, their serrated beaks jabbing and slashing bad-temperedly at one another. I was thinking that the last thing I wanted to do was involve myself in affairs of magic; being Aware gave me protection against the magic itself, but those who practised dunmagic loathed both the Aware and sylvs. A wise possessor of Awareness, or a wise sylvtalent, kept their ability hidden around a dunmaster. There were many non-magical ways to die, after all.

  I felt a sick fear. I had a nasty feeling that magic, in the person of the Cirkasian, was mixed up in my affairs already. It seemed too much of a coincidence that, just when I was looking for a Cirkasian slave, this woman should turn up. Cirkasian women were rare enough outside the shores of the Cirkase Islands at the best of times; to find two on Gorthan Spit at any one time, without a connection between them, would have been quite a coincidence. I was after a particular slave girl and I was fairly sure she was on the Spit; I was even more certain that this could not be her—yet I felt there must be some connection. But what? It was puzzling. And worrying.

  My thoughts were swimming around in fruitless circles like pet fish in a jar, when a furtive movement from below caught my interest. The tapboy had sneaked out of the back door of the kitchen and was scuttling between the drying racks on the wharf. When a fishermen walked by carrying a lobster pot, the lad hid under some nets until he was gone. I watched, fascinated. It was like attending the theatre back in The Hub, the Keeper capital, and looking down on the stage from the balcony at one of those awful melodramas. I always used to laugh in all the wrong places… But this drama was real, especially intriguing since everything that I’d noted about the boy while he was serving in the inn had indicated that he was a halfwit. He didn’t move like a halfwit now. He disappeared behind a stack of rotting fish boxes that had seen better days and emerged a moment later with something in his arms. He sat down on the wharf, surrounded by boxes. At a guess, the only place he would be visible from was my bedroom window.

  It was a dog he held, a mangy bundle with an oversized tail and huge feet. He fed it, played with it for a while, then shoved it behind the boxes once more. A few minutes later he was back in the kitchen.

  Even tapboys had their secrets on Gorthan Spit.

  ###

  When I woke up from a second short nap, the worst of the heat had gone from the day and a breeze was beginning to rattle the shutters.

  Everything was quiet in the room next to mine.

  I found the drudge and, by means of a coin, persuaded her to get me some ordinary skin unguent. When she returned with some, I added some dried herbs that were supposed to be good for skin ailments, then went downstairs to the kitchen and persuaded the cook—also for a price—to give me some seaweed bread and fish paste. Finally I strolled out onto the fishermen’s wharf. It was still deserted, although the strong smell of fish offal remained and there were people working on the boats tied up there, rebaiting fishing lines. One of them raised his eyes, grinned and seemed about to say something—until he spotted the hilt of my sword poking out of the sheath on my back and thought better of it.

  It didn’t take me a moment to find the dog; it was much more of a problem persuading it to trust me. Gorthan Spit curs learned a thing or two about trust and survival, none of it good, very early in life. Eventually some of the bread spread with fish paste made him decide I couldn’t be all bad and he allowed me to rub him with the salve I had concocted. His initial growls turned to ingratiating whines and then to slobbering licks.

  I hadn’t expected to have the good luck to be caught at what I was doing, but that was what happened.

  The tapboy found me.

  He stood there gaping for a while, not believing what he saw. I guessed him to be about twelve, or perhaps an undersized fourteen. He’d been fair-headed once, if the freckles were anything to go by, but he was so dirty it was hard to tell. He had no ear tattoo that I could see. In the taproom he had looked at me with dulled, unintelligent eyes; there was nothing stupid about the way he looked at me now.

  ‘No lad,’ I said as he turned to run off. ‘There’s no need to be frightened. I won’t harm you, or your dog.’ I held out the jar of salve. ‘Here, take this. Rub the animal with it once a day and he’ll soon be rid of that mange. You won’t know him once he has a proper coat of hair.’

  He stepped forward as gingerly as a cat in snow and took the jar, while the dog thumped its tail in happy acknowledgement of his presence. ‘What do you call it?’ I asked.

  I had to ask him to repeat the barely decipherable mumble, and finally grasped that he’d said, ‘Seeker’. An interesting choice of name; perhaps there was much more to the boy than I’d hoped. I fumbled in my purse for some coppers. ‘See these? They are yours if you will try to answer some questions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the answers to some of them; you just say so. Understand?’

  He backed off a little. He guessed now that the help I’d given his pet wasn’t prompted by just the kindness of my heart, and he was wary.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Tunn,’ he said and then added doubtfully, ‘haply.’ I wasn’t too sure whether he meant his name was Tunn Haply, or that he was, perhaps, called Tunn but he wasn’t sure; however, I didn’t pursue that question any further. Instead I asked him if he knew a man called Niamor the Negotiator.

  He nodded.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  That was when I discovered we had a problem. Tunn evidently spoke so rarely that he had just about forgotten how—if he had ever known. He could understand all right, his speech was about as articulate as the chatter of a retarded parrot. He wanted to be obliging, but the tangle of sounds that came out of his mouth could hardly be called words. His first effort, as far as I could determine, was something like: ‘N’mor gudly tulk. Him sy summat…rightful allus. Bilif itn.’ I managed to translate this as: ‘Niamor talks good. If he says something, it’s always true. You can believe him.’

  He wasn’t unintelligent: he knew much more than he could say. I felt a momentary anger at a world in which no one bothered to spend the time to teach a child to speak, but I wasted no time with that fruitless emotion. Instead, with a lot of persistence and many carefully worded questions, I managed to find out that Niamor had been on Gorthan Spit for as long as Tunn could remember. A rumour—which I now vaguely recalled having heard on my last visit—said that the Quillerman had been involved in a daring but disastrously unsuccessful embezzlement back on his home islandom, the uncovering of which had necessitated his exile. Now, from what Tunn said, it seemed he was not an embezzler any more than he w
as a slaver; he was more a go-between. An entrepreneur, although the lad did not know the word. Because Niamor had a reputation for being absolutely trustworthy in all his dealings, he was trusted. That did not, of course, make him entirely honest. He was as capable of making a self-serving deal in stolen goods as the next Spitter, but if he told you something, you could believe it. And in the dark world of slavers, thieves and pirates, a go-between who would faithfully deliver a message or undertake a negotiation was very much in demand. Niamor never double-crossed, and therefore kept his head on his shoulders even though the game he played was a dangerous one.

  It seemed he was now a useful man to know. He had obviously honed his skills since my last visit to the Spit; I certainly didn’t remember him then being such a prominent figure in the murky business world of the Docks.

  Once I had all I wanted on Niamor, I turned to some of the others who interested me. ‘Do you know the name of the tall Stragglerman wearing black?’ I asked. ‘The man who sat by himself in the taproom at lunch?’ And who, unless I was very much mistaken, was one of the Awarefolk.

  Tunn nodded. ‘Tor Ryder.’

  The name meant nothing to me. Further questioning told me Tunn didn’t know anything about him either, except that he had arrived a week back on a two-masted trader coming in from one of the Middling Islands and that he had a room at The Drunken Plaice.

  The young man, the one who had been given the dunmagic sore, had arrived two days earlier than Ryder on a fishing vessel, although he was no fisherman. Tunn couldn’t make him out at all. He’d given his name as Noviss, but Tunn was sure that wasn’t his real name. He didn’t do anything except sit around looking as tense as a sand-plover nesting on an exposed stretch of beach.

  ‘And the Cirkasian?’ I asked.

  He rolled his eyes eloquently. ‘Cum yesty.’

  ‘She came yesterday? There was only one ship in yesterday—the slaver from Cirkase.’ I’d checked that out already.

  He shrugged.

  In other matters, Tunn was even less helpful. He didn’t know anything about a Cirkasian slave woman—or why a whole slaver ship’s crew and its captain, as devious a load of ocean-going rats as ever I’d laid eyes on, had told me earlier that morning that they had never seen any female Cirkasian, never had one on board, wouldn’t know anything about one. They’d said their whole cargo was male and they’d had no passengers at all, and not even the offer of a bribe had changed the story one whit. But then, they’d also denied being slavers: their story was that they carried indentured servants on their way to Souther employers.

  When I was sure I had extracted all the information I could from Tunn, I gave him the coppers and sent him back to the inn.

  I took another look at that pet of his before I put the animal back behind the boxes. He had rounded ears that seemed far too small for such a sizable beast, and oddly slitted nostrils. His red coat, at least in the areas where there was no mange, was short and thick. There was a look in his eyes that belied his appearance: a shrewd calculation that had nothing to do with being a mongrel born on the docks. I’d seen that look before in lurgers, the hunting water-canines of Fen Island, but they were never red-haired and had much shorter legs. Following a hunch, I picked up one of Seeker’s oversized front paws and spread out the toes. They were webbed. I almost laughed at the irony—he was part dog, part lurger; a Fen Island halfbreed, just as I was.

  Aware that he had my attention, he thumped his heavy tail with more enthusiasm than good sense, whacking it against the fish boxes like a cudgel. He whined, grovelled and then slurped at my face. Fortunately I was quick enough to dodge this time, but saliva went flying in all directions. I ordered him back behind the boxes and he went meekly enough. In spite of his size, he was hardly more than a puppy.

  I went on my way into the heart of Gorthan Docks with a certain reluctance.

  The more I found out, the more convinced I was that I had stepped into something that was way beyond what I could cope with: there were countless plots inside every intrigue in Gorthan Spit, numerous eddies within every wave, and in my search for a Cirkasian slave, I felt I was somehow placing myself right in the middle of waters that I knew nothing about—and there was a good chance I’d be drowned.

  ###

  Early afternoons on Gorthan Spit were usually hot and still. The glare from the white sands dazzled unbearably; even the harsh glitter of the sea was hard on the eyes. It was at this time of the day that the smells of the Docks were at their worst too, saturating the air, making every breath an unpleasant effort. All those who could afford to do so went indoors, closed their shutters, and slept as I had done. Even the stray dogs dozed, sprawling in the shade, with their heads and tails wilting.

  By the time I left Tunn’s pet, late in the afternoon, things were beginning to come alive again. It was then the phenomenon that resident Docksiders called ‘the Doctor’ came to revive the port with its ministrations. The Doctor was a breeze that swept in from the ocean, bringing cooling moisture with it to banish the heat and alleviate the stench. It was then that the night fishing boats put out to sea, tacking their way out of the harbour against the wind, and it was then that the town itself shook off its lethargy. Shopkeepers threw open their wooden shutters, hawkers cajoled passers-by, beggars dragged their diseased bodies on to the busiest corners, dogs loped along on the lookout for whatever they could steal. The contrast to the torpidity of the earlier part of the afternoon was startling, but it never lasted, I knew; as soon as night fell, the atmosphere would change again as the shops closed and the bars and brothels opened. The bustle and legitimacy of the afternoon trading soon degenerated into the quieter and more menacing stealth of the business of the night; a stealth punctuated by the rowdiness of drunken violence, or worse, by the kind of noises that were best not investigated: it was a rare night without a murder or two.

  With my sword within easy reach in its back sheath and keeping one hand clamped to the purse on my money belt (the Docks’ pickpockets were notoriously skilled and I could ill afford to lose what little money I had), I went to find an acquaintance who had been helpful on my last visit to the town.

  I didn’t find him. The shop he had owned didn’t exist any more. It, and the rest of the street, had been burned to the ground, not an infrequent occurrence in a place where most buildings were built of wood and thatched with seaweed, and an unusually large number of the inhabitants were either crazed or habitually drunk, or both. No one could tell me what had happened to the shopkeeper. Gorthan Spit was like that: people came and went, they died or disappeared, and no one cared.

  I stopped in a nearby fish-and-swillie bar, all seafood again, of course. This time I settled for a cheap dish of seaweed and rayfish. Staying at The Drunken Plaice was an extravagance; I had to economise somewhere.

  I was just finishing the food when I heard my name bellowed from across the room. My hand automatically dropped to my sword (now resting across my knees) before I realised there was no need. The bellow was one of pleasure, not anger, and the voice belonged to Addie Leks, a woman I had inadvertently helped on my very first trip to the Spit. I’d been twenty-three then, and Addie about the same age. I was hunting a man, a renegade sylv, who had a price on his head—a substantial bounty that I coveted—and she’d been that man’s lover. In those days she was an attractive and much abused woman wanting to escape a relationship that contained nothing but pain and violence, and I’d been only too glad to relieve her of the cause. (That part had been easy; it was getting the bastard back to the Keeper Isles to collect the reward that had given me problems. He knew he was going to die if he reached The Hub, and he’d done his level best not to arrive, preferably by killing me along the way. I’d finally handed him over, minus several fingers I’d severed during one of his many escape attempts, but it was the hardest deliveries I’d ever made.)

  Addie wasn’t quite as attractive now. She worked in the kitchen of the fish-and-swillie place and she’d grown fat. Her skin had reddened a
nd coarsened. She flopped down in the seat opposite me and launched into a new tale of marital woe; it seemed that although she’d grown older, she hadn’t grown any wiser in her choice of men. With surprise, I realised that she was hinting that I help her out of her present relationship as well. I’m not too sure what she had in mind, because I didn’t give her a chance to tell me. I changed the subject and asked her about Niamor instead.

  She said very much the same things that Tunn had, adding, ‘Nice fellow, Niamor. Always good for a laugh and a bit of fun. No more morals that a bitch cur on heat, of course, but he doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Kind-hearted, is Niamor, as long as it doesn’t cause him any trouble.’ It was a view of the Quillerman that agreed with my first impression of him.

  ‘You should remember him,’ she added. ‘He was around that last time you was here. Shacked up with that sylvtalent woman. You must remember her: she was exiled from the Keeper Isles for misuse of power—some said she’d used her talent illegally to help her nonsylv lover become rich. What was her name again?’

  ‘Oh. Samiat. Yes, I remember now. What happened to her?’

  ‘The Keepers forgave her. Took her back into the fold when they thought she’d learned her lesson.’

  That figured. The Keepers were always loath to lose one of their own.

  Addie sighed. ‘I thought she and Niamor made a lovely pair. So refined, the both of them. Yet when the time came, she left him without a backward glance…’ She sighed again, caught up in fantasy even though Niamor was the most unlikely candidate for a hero. He was about as romantic as Blaze Halfbreed… ‘He was broken-hearted, I could tell. Hasn’t looked at anyone, not serious like, since. Reckon that’s why he can’t settle on just one—’

  I just stopped myself from snorting.

  She leaned towards me conspiratorially, resting her elbows on the table. The fat of her forearms wobbled as she clasped her hands. ‘People say he came from a princely Quiller family. That he actually has a title. D’you think that’s true? Could he be noble? Thrown out for some youthful indiscretion perhaps… Or even a son of the Quillerlord, d’you think? He has such nice manners.’