by Warhammer
She cackled on. And after a few seconds, wonder of wonders, Eladriel's face creased into a smile. "She's right. You've got the better of me, haven't you? Go on. Get out."
"What?"
"Get out!" he roared, laughing. "Before I change my mind."
I got.
"...and that's why," Sam Warble finished, "I'm off gambling. Okay?" And he downed the last of his ale.
Tarquin was rubbing his chin. "Not a bad yarn, I suppose, but it doesn't quite tie up. What's it got to do with the ring?"
Sam looked surprised. "Why, isn't it obvious? I took the fragments of Lora's bottle and had them set in gold, as soon as I could afford it. Just a little souvenir." And he stroked the ring tenderly.
Tarquin shook his head and stood up. "No. That's too glib, Sam. Good try. Listen, do you want to come for some food down the Admiral's Galley?"
Sam smiled. "Not tonight. Leave me with my memories. I'll be all right."
Tarquin laughed. "Suit yourself."
The others stood and pulled their coats closed. Maximilian picked up his cards. "Give you a tip, Sam."
"What's that?"
"You kept me with you until you got to the ogre. I just couldn't swallow that bit. I mean, who would stake something as unique as a collection of Giant Bat droppings on a pathetic pair of Dragonkin? I ask you." Shaking his head, he followed the rest.
Sam, left alone, shrugged and studied his ring for a few minutes. Then he blew gently over the inset glass. The shards chimed as if with a hundred tiny voices, and fragments of words could be heard. ...snowflake melts... laughter of children...
Jasper came to the table to collect the discarded tankards. "So no one believes your tall stories, eh, Sam?"
Sam smiled. "They saw right through me, didn't they? I'll just have to try harder. Oh, Jasper - listen, do you know anyone interested in a collection of Giant Bat droppings? Price negotiable..."
THE VOYAGE SOUTH
by Nicola Griffith
The night was thick and hot, glossy foliage twined dense and motionless over the waterway; all Ariel could hear was the soft plash of oars and the steady creak as she and her sister leaned forward then back, pulling their boat deeper into the trees. It was the first time she had rowed a boat since she and Isabel were young enough to run wild on the de Courtivron family estates. She could see nothing. The air was heavy with evening heat and the drifting perfume of forest orchids. There was a storm coming.
"Here."
The boat scraped along the overgrown jetty. Among the trees, there was a crumbling statue. It was strange, half man and half woman. One of the arms was missing. The features were still beautifully clear and fine.
They climbed out; Isabel looped the rope through an iron ring Ariel had not seen.
"This way. There's a path."
This was not the first time Isabel had been here, then. The realization changed things. Ariel was not used to knowing less than her younger sister.
She stopped to adjust her beltpouch then followed Isabel along the path. Rotting leaves deadened her footfalls.
Ariel recognized only one person: the red-haired younger son of a family who, like the de Courtivrons, were summering in the higher ground by the forest, away from the heat and stink of bustling Quenelles. Isabel seemed to know everyone.
Separated from her sister, Ariel wandered around the clearing. Someone offered her a pipe: Stardust. The druids of the old religion used it, she knew that much. The smoke was rich and satisfying; as it snaked down her throat, she imagined it turning different colours, curling pink and mauve through her lungs. She drank some wine but ate nothing; by now, the food looked too beautiful to eat. She smoked some more.
The people looked beautiful, too. Torchlight made their eyes glitter like stars, cold and far off. Their clothes had become gauzy and insubstantial, like her own. She rubbed her shift; it ran between her thumb and forefinger like milk. She smiled.
"Ari." Torchlight turned Isabel's hair into a shimmer of hot gold. "Come on," she held out her hand, "it's beginning."
The clearing was full of people and torches. Shadow licked and fluttered across bare arms and legs, across faces that were all turned in one direction. On the far side of the clearing stood another statue. This one was whole, and splendid. The right arm, the woman's arm, held a jewelled sceptre. The right breast, a woman's breast, was bared. The nails of both hands and both feet were gilded.
And people were queuing before a man who held a small clay pot.
"Olla milk," Isabel breathed, "all the way from Araby." Her eyes were round, brilliant blue. "It costs more than a princess' dowry."
Ariel hardly heard her; she drifted in her own private dream. Then she was standing before the man. Like the statue, his chest was bared on the right side. She watched muscle move smoothly under his skin as he raised the bowl, dipped his fingertips, touched them to her lips, the inside of her wrists. Numbness spread across her face, up her arms. Colours writhed. Waves of silver washed through her head. She wandered off into the trees.
The moss was cool. She pushed her fingers past it and deep into the loam. The earth was a soft-breathed beast who held her fingers in its mouth. She lay on her back. It was so dark that she could not see where the tops of the trees met the sky. Thunder grumbled; she was sticky with sweat. Music wound thin and light between the trunks.
Voices. She turned her head slowly. The red-haired man and a woman slipped through the trees; Ariel recognized Isabel. She watched, invisible.
Isabel's clothes fell to the ground one by one, like butterflies. From the folds of his tunic, the man produced a small pot. He held it in his palm. Isabel shivered as he dug out a glob of the olla milk.
"The cost..."
"I've found a source that's cheap, Isabel, cheap. Imagine being able to do this every week," he smeared the white stuff over her neck, "every day."
Isabel moaned.
"Imagine: every night Isabel." He dug more out of the pot, smoothed it between her breasts, down over her stomach. He knelt. Isabel sagged against him as he rubbed more into the pale skin on the inside of her thighs.
Ariel turned away. Her cheek was wet; she let herself drift away from the here and the now.
Whimpering and the sound of retching dragged her back. She turned her head. The red-haired man was crouched on the moss, wiping his mouth.
"Isabel?" he panted, then heaved again. Nothing came up but milky drool. "Isabel?"
He levered himself to his feet, shook her. "Oh, gods."
He swayed, then staggered off into the trees. Ariel listened to his crashing progress fade. She went to her sister.
Isabel lay on her back. Her mouth was stretched open, her feet and hands twisted inward. She was locked in a frozen muscle spasm. The pot, almost empty, nestled by her hip.
"Nuh," she said.
Ariel concentrated on her own breathing, the way her chest filled out and her stomach rounded when she took a particularly deep breath.
"Isabel? Bel?"
Isabel's eyes were open. Ariel waved her hand in front of them. Nothing. She picked up the pot, sniffed it, put it in her beltpouch. Light and thunder cracked across the sky sending shadow flickering across Isabel's face, like a smile. The first raindrop fell on Isabel's thigh and Ariel watched it trickle over the tiny white hairs on the pale skin, then fall onto the moss.
"Nuh," Isabel said again.
"Yes, baby, I know." She picked up the shift, began to untangle it. "I won't let you get wet." The front was moss-stained. "Put your hands in here." She tried to pull Isabel's arm straight, pushed it through the sleeve. "And the other one." She buttoned up the front. "Where are your sandals?"
Rain sheeted down. Ariel could not fit the sandals over her sister's twisted feet, so she took them off and put them carefully down on the moss, side by side. Rain dripped from her nose, her chin. Isabel choked.
"On your side." Ariel pushed her onto her side; rainwater poured from her open mouth and she began to breathe again.
&nbs
p; "We've got to get you home, Bel."
Then the storm hit.
Later, she never really knew how she managed to take Isabel under her armpits and haul her upright. Wind punched through the forest roof, beating branches against trunks and leaves against branches; rain plastered the hair to her head and washed over the forest floor, endless as a waterfall. Isabel's heels left two neat tracks in the mud as Ariel dragged her backwards down the path.
There was no other way to get Isabel into the boat than to tumble her in and climb in after. The waterway, swollen by the rain, pulled the boat to the limits of its restraining rope. In the distance, the river roared.
The rope was wet, difficult to handle. She pulled and pushed, pulled again carefully, worrying at it methodically until the knot began to loosen. She unshipped the oars and tugged sharply at the rope.
The river took them in its fist.
High up, the window was open and sunshine dappled the whitewashed walls of the sickroom. A servant stood by the window, fanning the bed. Ariel listened to the trees rustling below. The draught blew a strand of golden hair across her sister's eyes but Isabel did not blink; Ariel leaned over and brushed the hair away. For the first few days after the accident, she had refused to leave Bel's bedside, frightened she would miss some movement, some sign that Bel was waking up, getting better.
"Ari." Michel, her brother, stood by the door. "Dr Gauthier is here."
She stood. "Dr Gauthier."
"Ariel." He nodded to her, then moved to the bedside. He took Isabel's pulse, looked in her eyes, palpated the tendons along her arm.
"Help me turn her over."
He tapped her back and drew his finger along the soles of her feet. There was no response. Using what looked like a wooden horn, he listened to her breathing. He straightened.
"She's getting worse, isn't she?"
"Yes. I'm sorry."
She stared out of the window, listening to the trees. "The olla was contaminated?"
"Yes."
She turned to face him. "What with?"
"Does it matter, child?"
"Doctor, I have not been a child for several years. And it matters very much to me what was in that ointment and where it came from and why."
She looked down at the trees again, did not look up until he left.
Ariel handed the tiny glass vial to the apothecary. The woman unscrewed the top and sniffed.
"Olla milk," she said. She looked at Ariel who was cloaked and hooded, even in the heat. "But that's not all you wanted to know."
"It's contaminated."
"Ah."
"I want to know what with and where the extra ingredients came from."
"This is all you have?"
"Others have tried. That's all that's left. Can you do it?"
"Maybe."
The funeral was held in Quenelles itself. The de Courtivron funeral barge, draped in black with the family crest gleaming dully in the river haze, was followed by others crowded with representatives from all the important families. The town, a jumble of grey stone and wood and red tile, stretched along both sides of the river. On the right bank, its cold blank walls shouldering above the smaller merchants' houses, stood the de Courtivron mansion, where Monsieur de Courtivron would return to the business of trade as soon as was fitting. The river stank.
Ariel stood straight. Her mourning dress was stiff and her hands sweated inside their gloves. She felt cold and numb. She remembered one of the nights, years ago, when Bel had sneaked into her bedroom in the middle of the night and they watched the river, mysterious with lights and its all-night docking and loading, until their feet got cold on the stone floor. Then they jumped into bed top to tail and, while she scared them both to death with a story about dead fishermen rising from the river, rubbed each other's feet warm.
It did not seem like the same river. It would never be the same river.
Again, Ariel went cloaked and hooded. The apothecary was waiting for her.
"Whoever sold you this should be guillotined." She looked grim. "Do you know what it can do?"
Ariel said nothing. She refused to remember Bel lying on the forest floor. The woman motioned for her to sit.
"The olla milk is contaminated with ground carenna pod."
"As in Estalian carenna flour?"
The woman nodded. "Usually, the pods are soaked and dried and soaked and dried over and over to leach out all the poisons before being ground into flour." She tapped the vial. "This was deliberate: olla flowers grow in Araby, the carenna comes from Estalia. And I tell you something else, the carenna was added while it was still fresh. The olla isn't discoloured, which it would be if the pods had been picked more than a few hours before being added to it."
"So the carenna was added in Estalia," Ariel said slowly. She stood up. "Thank you."
Madame de Courtivron raised her goblet of thick, Tilean glass and sipped at the light wine the family always drank with lunch during the summer. Ariel watched a servant fill the glass. Without Isabel at the table, this would be the first time she, Michel and her mother would not need a second bottle opening. She was tempted to drink more than usual, so that another bottle would be needed and the ritual maintained.
"I've not seen much of you these past few days," her mother said.
Ariel finished her mouthful. "No."
"You've been busy, I hear. In Quenelles."
Ariel wondered how word had reached her mother and how much she knew. "Mother, I need to know what happened."
"We know what happened. Your sister was greedier than usual, only this time she died from it. We know all we need to. Asking questions only means others are finding out about how she died." She put her knife down, reached for a fresh bread roll. "Or is it that you want all the other families in Bretonnia to know what your sister was?"
Ariel went white.
Michel darted a look at his sister, then his mother. "Mother..."
His mother ignored him. "Well, Ariel?"
Ariel leaned back in her chair, wiped her lips with a napkin. "You may be sure," she said distinctly, shaping each word with care, "that any further questions I ask will be discreet." She dropped her napkin on the table. "And now, if you will excuse me."
In her room, Ariel leaned her forehead against the cool plaster. She had to think.
Her brother tapped on her door. "Ari?"
"Go away."
He pushed the door open. "She didn't mean it, Ari."
"She did. We both know that." She strode over to the window. Today there was no breeze to make the trees whisper. "Michel, if you're coming in then come in, don't hover by the door."
Michel sat on the bed.
"I'm going to find out," she said.
"How?"
"That red-haired man might know something. Will you help me?"
Ariel took off her jewellery and bundled up her hair in an old piece of blue serge as she had seen the servants do. The old cotton shift she had stolen from the servants' chest was a little too big. She checked herself in a mirror. The headscarf made her eyes look a deeper, darker blue than usual.
Sunlight bounced off the water, making her squint as she pulled the boat into Quenelles. The red-haired man had told her brother that the contaminated olla had come from a native of the Estalian city of Magritta who called himself Jorge. She was here to find out more. The sixty francs in her pouch should loosen enough tongues, one way or another.
After the bright sunlight, the tavern was dark. The low room smelled of sharp new wine and stale sweat. It was almost empty: most of the customers were outside, in the courtyard. A man was mopping at a puddle of wine on one of the rough wooden tables.
"M'sieur?"
"Wine's six francs a jug or one franc a cup," he said without looking up.
"No, m'sieur. I don't want wine. I'm looking for someone, a man."
"We already have one girl working here, and she doesn't have much trade. Try the waterfront."
He moved over to another table and began t
o clean it.
"M'sieur, I'm not looking for work but for a particular man, a Magrittan. Called Jorge."
He straightened. "Jorge? What do you want him for?"
"Do you know him?"
"No." He grinned at his own joke. "Got yourself in trouble by him, eh?"
Ariel looked at the floor and tried to remember how the servants spoke when they wanted something.
"Please, M'sieur, you look like a knowledgeable man." She raised her eyes to his. "If you know where I might find him I would be most grateful." She wondered if her servants ever despised her as much as she did this man.
He considered. "Sailor, is he?"
"Very possibly, m'sieur."
"Well then, do like I first said, try the waterfront." He leered at her. "And if you want to show your gratitude after you've found him, I'm always here."
As she picked her way through the filthy streets to the waterfront, she felt uneasy. Every so often, she glanced over her shoulder but saw nothing.
It was the middle of the day and the waterfront seethed with people: sailors free for a day while one cargo was offloaded and another brought on board; rope menders swearing at those who stood in their light; fish sellers trying to out-shout each other; women buying vegetables.
A woman in the coarse cotton and canvas of a sailor was sitting on the cobbles, leaning against a wall, her eyes closed. Ariel stepped over the woman's carry sack and stood in front of her.
"M'selle."
No response.
"M'selle?" She tapped her on the shoulder.
The sailor exploded off the ground and grabbed both her wrists. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was tall, taller than Ariel.
"Can't you see I was sleeping!" the woman roared in a thick Empire accent.
"Drunk more like," Ariel said. She was surprised that the beating of her heart did not make her voice wobble. "Let go of my arms."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I will break your legs."
The woman's face went stiff as a mask. Her hard brown hands tightened on Ariel's wrists, then let go.
"Be careful who you make such threats to." She bent to pick up her sack.
"No, wait."