by Warhammer
Ariel did not know what to say. She reached across the table and poured wine for them both. It was sparkling yellow white: Lustrian.
Marya walked her to the Genevieve."Fornan, her master, runs a tight ship, everything just so. Not like Helseher. I told him you were an experienced hand. Don't let me down. And don't ask any questions, just keep that pouch out of sight and your knife handy."
Ariel touched the knife, remembered their talk of Escribano, and Khorne the Blood God. She reached out and took the sailor's hand. "Goodbye, Marya."
"Until we meet again. Something tells me we will."
On the fifth day at sea, when she was stripping off her sodden shirt to wash it as best she could in a bucket of scummy water, one of the crew saw the newly healed scar across her ribs.
"Who came off worst?"
She paused, remembering the blood, the way he had screamed. "He died."
After that, the crew left her alone. She began to brood. In her nightmares, the figure who spurted blood under her knife was Bel. She would wake and think of Bel laughing and shuddering with pleasure as the olla seeped into her bloodstream. She could have stopped her, if she had not been olla-dreaming herself.
If Captain Fornan had allowed rum on his ship, she would have drunk herself insensible during the hot lonely hours of the night. Instead, she thought about the stranger. Then she thought about Jorge, and fingered her knife.
On a moonless night almost three weeks after leaving Brionne, Fornan gave the order to heave to. All lights were extinguished. Without the hiss and sputter of lamps or the flap of sail, the toll of Bilbali's great bronze bell rolled clearly across the water.
A light blinked in the distance. Fornan, using a shuttered lamp, answered. He gave a few low-voiced orders and there was a bustle of activity. The bell tolled again. As the sound died away, Ariel heard the splash of oars. A boat bumped alongside and the crew started loading it with small casks and bolts of cloth until it rode low in the water.
Fornan whispered to the men below, then motioned Ariel over.
"There's room on that boat for you. They'll be landing three or four miles north of Bilbali. You can walk the rest of the way. Watch your step when you get there - the Bilbalis don't like private vengeance. Or private enterprise." His teeth gleamed white in the darkness.
She let herself down the ladder, hand over hand. The shadowy figures in the boat nodded to her as she crouched against the gunwale. It was so dark she could not tell if they were women or men. But they could not see her either.
They came ashore on a rocky beach.
"Bilbali," one of them said in a heavy Estalian accent, and pointed south and west.
"Thank you."
As she picked her way up the cliff side the lap and foam of waves breaking against the beach grew fainter. It felt strange to be wearing sandals again. At the top of the cliff she stopped and breathed deep. The grass was springy under her feet and the air was sweet with rock rose. She looked down at the sea, then inland towards Bilbali. With nothing except her knife and her money pouch, tucked inside her shirt out of sight, she started walking.
The outskirts of the city were closed and dark. In the flat light of dawn, the smell of the Estalian limegrass which hung in baskets outside many of the shuttered houses cut sharp and green through the dust. Ariel took her sandals off; she did not want to be heard and stared at at this hour. With her cropped hair and sailors' clothes, she doubted she would be taken for a servant hurrying through the street on some errand.
The streets narrowed and the smell of limegrass and dust was replaced by humanity and all its filth. After so long at sea, the stench made Ariel feel ill. She put her sandals back on and picked her way through the sewage and refuse. Here, people were awake and moving.
The smell of rotting fish led her to the wharf where the calls of fish sellers screeched through the air like bright, exotic birds. Feeling pale and insubstantial next to the dark-haired and colourfully clothed Bilbalis, she stood in the middle of the noise and bustle, battered by their harsh and unintelligible cries.
She began to tremble: long slow shudders as though someone had hold of her ribs and was shaking her. Her hands and feet went cold and her heart began to thump up against her ribcage so hard she felt she might fly apart. She was alone. There was nowhere to hide.
"You're sick?"
A middle-aged woman with a sun-wrinkled face peered at her from behind her stall.
"I don't know. I..."
"Well, move out of the way. You're blocking my stall."
Ariel stood there, shaking.
"Move. You think people will buy my fish if some sick foreigner is breathing all over them?" She came out from behind her stall. "Go on, move." Several people were looking. The woman raised her voice, enjoying the attention. "You foreigners think you can get away with anything. Well, things are changing around here." She nodded towards the waterfront where two huge ships lay moored. "And the Magrittans will be sending more soon enough. They're making the water safe from pirates like you." A murmur went round the crowd. "And then you won't be striding around here like lordlings."
"And the cost of fish will come down!" shouted someone from the crowd.
"And wheat," shrilled another.
To stop them shaking, Ariel hooked one hand in her belt, laid the other on her knife.
"I am not a pirate. I'm looking for a particular man. His name..." Her voice caught. She took a deep breath and said firmly, "his name is Capitano Jorge Martinez Castelltort."
Someone threw a cabbage. It hit her arm and she stepped back. The crowd stepped forward. She looked around, searching for an escape route.
From behind the crowd came the jingle of armed soldiers trotting on the double. Several of the crowd turned. Ariel ran, pushing aside bystanders, using her elbows where necessary. One of them caught her on the side of her jaw with a wild punch. She did not stop. Behind her she heard the crowd shouting to the soldiers:
" - and she said she was here for Capitano Castelltort."
" - drew her knife, she did."
" - said she was going to kill him."
" - ran off that way."
She tried to think as she ran, but the streets grew more and more narrow and the sounds of pursuit increased behind her. She ran round a corner into an alley of top-heavy houses, and cursed. The end was a blank wall. She ran to it and leaped. She was too tired: it was too high even to get a fingertip over the top. She tried the nearest house door. Locked. And the next. The shouting was getting louder. Desperate, she ran to the next door.
The figure in the doorway clapped one hand over her mouth and the other around her waist, pinning her arms. Two soldiers trotted into the alley.
"Don't struggle," he whispered, "unless you want them to catch you."
The hand over her mouth was long and calloused; she did not struggle. A cloak of cold air dropped over her shoulders and something flickered and surged past her. The two soldiers stopped mid-stride, turned, and left the alley. Refusing to think about what had just happened, she allowed herself to be pulled back into the house.
"Lock the door."
She turned the key, then took it out of the door and tucked it inside her shirt. Across the room, the strange man was running his hands over a blank wall. With a click, it opened. Ariel followed him through a brick-lined passage. They came out into a garden warmed by early morning sun. From somewhere inside the high walls a bird sang.
"Where are we?"
"The elf quarter." He pulled off his hat. Ariel looked but said nothing. Tiredly, she wondered if he expected her to be surprised. They walked into the house.
"Wait here."
Sunlight streamed through the open shutters, throwing leaf shadow onto the wooden floor. The room was empty but for a plain bench and table of light, sanded oak. Tired and thirsty, she sat down. What had happened out there?
She closed her eyes. She was too tired to think.
He was gone a long time but when he returned he brought food:
bread, fruit and a flagon of water. He put them on the table. They ate together.
"You'll have to stay here," he said.
Ariel cut a slice from her apple. "How long for?"
"Several weeks at least."
She shook her head. "No."
"You don't have a choice. If you go back out there, your life is at risk. If you stay here in my house, you do as I say."
"There are other houses in the elf quarter."
"In this matter, they listen to me."
Ariel pondered that. "Tell me why. I don't even know your name."
"You don't need to know."
"If I'm to stay here, what harm could it do? And, if I knew what was going on I might be more reasonable."
"My name is Senduiuiel Cortengren." It sounded like glass in his mouth. "You will find it easier to call me Send."
"You have followed me all the way from Quenelles to Bilbali. Why?"
"We travelled the same route, no more."
"Why did you have to sneak me in to the elf quarter instead of doing it openly? Elven trade used to be too valuable for humans to risk squabbling over the whereabouts of one female." She looked up at him. "But that's no longer true, is it?"
The muscles around his eyes tightened. "You think you know so much."
"But I'm not wrong so far." She leaned forward. "I could help you. By being out there and visible, I could draw attention away from you. If I knew what questions not to ask."
"Why?"
"I have to know why that olla was contaminated. I think you stand a better chance of finding that out than I do. We could both benefit."
He contemplated her with flat, alien eyes. "Eat. Then get some rest. We'll leave tonight."
They travelled on an elven ship. Ariel was glad that she was not expected to crew: everything aboard felt alien, even the ropes were coiled the wrong way round.
There was none of the sweating and cursing, none of the sheer brute struggle to force the ship through the waves she had witnessed aboard the Rosamund or the Genevieve. Standing on deck, her cropped hair shining white in the sun, her arms and legs brown and corded with muscle, Ariel watched the way the elves sailed their ship and understood why they were the best mariners in the world: the elves knew the sea and loved it. There was no fear.
Send, wearing neither his cap nor the clothes padded to disguise his slenderness, was unmistakably an elf. But it seemed to Ariel that he took care to avoid the other elves.
"Will we be harbouring in the Magrittan elf quarter?" she asked him.
"No. That option is no longer open to us." He looked out across the ocean. "For years we have sailed these waters carrying goods from the New World to Erengrad, from the southern tip of Lustria to far Cathay, and all we asked in return was our own area in each port to trade from, to govern as we saw fit." He contemplated the horizon. "In Magritta they think they no longer need us: the elf quarter had been declared Magrittan territory; their militia march through it at will and they demand a tithe of everything we trade."
She was shocked. The Magrittans had ignored etiquette centuries old. If the elves withdrew their trade Marienburg, L'Anguille, Brionne, Magritta itself, Luccini... all the major ports of the Old World would be devastated.
She thought back to the way the crowd in the Bilbali fish market had spoken of foreigners, the Magrittan ships in their harbour. "Why are they doing this? They can't sustain it. Surely they don't have the ships or crew to bottle up every shipping lane and every harbour."
"That's what I need to find out."
There was a lot he was not telling her. Aboard the Rosamund he had told her he had been working on this for months. She would find out, one way or another.
They sailed out into the Great Western Ocean in a vast loop to avoid the Estalian coastline as much as possible, and it was after mid-summer when Ariel and Send made their way ashore at night carrying enough food and water for the three-day walk east to the deep water harbour of Magritta.
Ariel, wearing a shift and with her short hair dulled with dust, sat in the room at the back of the shop and watched Pilar work. She tried not to worry about how she looked: Send had told her foreign-born slaves were not uncommon in the city. Although it was only two hours after dawn and the sun had not yet turned the air outside to a roaring furnace that dried sweat to salt on the skin, inside it was viciously hot. Sweat rolled down Pilar's meaty forearms as she lifted a fibrous mass from a bucket and spread it over a wire frame which hung by the fire. She took a second frame down and scooped the whitish fibres off onto a solid wooden board. They rustled like hay.
"Now you chop it, and that's carenna flour?"
"Si. Chop then roll. First I put on my scarf." The woman tied a square of bright cloth across her nose and mouth and began to chop. After a while, she laid down the heavy knife and rubbed a little of the carenna between her thumb and forefinger. She chopped some more, then checked the consistency again. Ariel could see a fine white dust rising from the board.
"What happens if you breathe the dust?"
"First time, nothing. Second time, nothing. Sometimes lots of times and nothing. But if the carenna isn't soaked enough times..." She shrugged. "All kinds of things happen. I've seen people who always have to be near the flour. When they're too old to work making the pastries anymore, they shiver, they can't eat, they cry like babies until they can come back and breathe the white dust. But not me." She examined the carenna critically. It was done. She took her scarf off.
"And now you roll it?"
"First we drink a cup of limegrass tea." She looked Ariel up and down. "And you eat one of my pastries. You're too thin." She led her into the back room where it was even hotter. A kettle was simmering over the fires which burned under the three big iron ovens. Pilar busied herself. "How many did you say your mistress wanted? Two dozen?"
Ariel nodded and perched on a three-legged stool. Using the thin end of a long wooden paddle, Pilar opened one of the ovens. Hot air roared out. Ariel felt fresh sweat burst out all over her body and she wondered how Pilar stood it. With the other end of the paddle, Pilar scooped out the pastries.
"Why do you use carenna if it's so dangerous?"
"You must be new in Magritta?" Ariel nodded. "Um. Then you answer the question yourself after you've eaten one of my pastries. Choose."
They were golden brown, still singing with hot air. Each was fashioned into the shape of an animal. They smelled delicious. But it was carenna that had killed Isabel.
"Choose," Pilar said again.
Ariel reached for a delicate golden swallowtail.
"Eat," Pilar encouraged.
Ariel bit into it. The pastry crumbled and clung to her tongue like light mead. Pilar had used only a little fruit in each.
Pilar laughed at the look on her face. "So now you know why. Enjoy it while you can. I make the best carenna pastries in Magritta, and the Magrittans make the best pastries in Estalia. I doubt you'll ever afford to buy one." She handed her a cup of tea. "Unless you buy one of those foul cakes the government workers make on the side after they finish grinding carenna for the navy."
Ariel sipped at her tea, careful to keep her expression neutral. "Carenna for the navy?"
Pilar scowled. "They're fools, all of them. Listen to me girl, if some navy man comes up to you and offers to buy your freedom if you'll come and work for the government grinding carenna, say no."
"Is the work so bad it's worth refusing my freedom to avoid?"
"Worse. Whoever leaches their carenna does a sloppy job. If it weren't such a crazy idea, I'd say it was deliberate. There's no one worker there who could stay away from the white dust now. And," she looked bitter, "more than one person has gone down with twist disease."
Ariel put her cup down carefully. It did not rattle. "Tell me about twist disease." Her voice was cool, calm.
"I'll show you. Come."
Everything seemed very quiet and far away. She got to her feet and put one foot in front of the other. She felt light enough
to float as she followed Pilar up steps.
Pilar pushed open a door. The room was dark and cool after the hot iron smell of the ovens.
A man sat propped in a chair. His hands were curled up against his chest, almost tucked under his armpits, his feet were twisted inwards. He was dribbling.
"Nuh."
Ariel could not move.
At dusk, Ariel met Send on the eastern cliff. He was carrying a lantern. She knew now why Isabel had died.
"Did you know," she said conversationally, "that if carenna isn't washed properly it's addictive? In small quantities. If you put bad carenna in olla, then the olla becomes addictive. Start off selling it more cheaply than uncontaminated olla, which isn't addictive, and almost all olla users will buy the contaminated kind: they don't know it's dangerous." She stared out across the darkening sea. "Then when the price starts to climb, they have to keep buying whether they like it or not. The contaminators get very rich, the Magrittans get very rich. The only thing they didn't think of, Send" - the muscles in her neck were hard as pebbles but her voice was quiet - "the only thing they didn't think of was that some people in this world are greedy." She threw a clump of grass down towards the sea. A breeze caught it, pulling it away from the rock. It hit the water and floated. "Most of their customers will die before they spend enough money to make it worthwhile for the Magrittans. They made a mistake."
"Yes. In some ways."
Ariel stared at him. He knew. He had known all along.
"I doubt revenue was the only purpose," he continued. "Escribano likes to kill people, especially people who attend rituals dedicated to Slaanesh. Hence the olla. Khorne has... special enmity for Slaanesh."
Ariel heard the odd combination of bitterness and respect in his voice. She was too tired to care. She felt empty. "I wonder if he even knows she's dead," she murmured.
"I doubt it." He knelt on the grass and took tinder and flint from his pouch. He opened his lantern.