Alone with his annoyance in the vestibule, Lysaer cursed softly, then started as somebody answered out of the empty air.
‘If you want your half-brother, he’s not here.’
‘Kharadmon, I suppose,’ Lysaer snapped: the morning’s dicey diplomacy had exhausted his tolerance for ghosts in dim corners who surprised him. ‘Why not be helpful by telling me where else he isn’t.’
Equably, the discorporate sorcerer said, ‘I’ll take you, unless you’d rather charge about swearing at empty rooms.’
‘It’s unfair,’ Lysaer conceded, ‘but I’m not in the mood to apologize. Help find my pirate bastard of a half- brother, and that might improve my manners.’
Kharadmon obliged by providing an address that turned out to be located in the most dismal section of the poor quarter.
‘You don’t seem concerned about assassins,’ Lysaer noted, his crossness now equally due to worry.
‘Should I?’ Kharadmon chuckled. ‘You may have a point, at that. It’s Luhaine’s turn for royal guard-duty.’ Etarra’s back-district alleys looped across themselves like a botched mesh of crochetwork. The paving was slimy and frost-heaved. Lysaer ruined his best pair of boots splashing through sewage and spotted his doublet on the dubious fluids that dripped from a brothel’s rotted balconies. He lost his way twice. The street of the horse knackers where he arrived at last reeked unbearably of rancid tallow and of the waste from unwholesome carcasses.
He wanted to kick the next beggar who solicited him for coins; he had already given all he had and against his promise to Kharadmon his temper had done nothing but deterioriate.
Blackly annoyed for having volunteered responsibility for this errand, he stalked around the next corner.
Laughter lilted off the lichen-stained fronts of the warehouses, as incongruous in that dank, filthy alley as the chime of carillon bells.
The sound stopped Lysaer short. The joy he recognized for Arithon’s, as joltingly out of character for the man as this unlikely, dreary setting.
Pique replaced by curiosity, Lysaer edged forward. Past the bend, under the gloom of close-set walls, he saw a band of raggedy waifs, his errant half-brother among them. The prince of Rathain had spurned fine clothes for what looked like a ragpicker’s dress. The elegant presence of yesterday had been shed as if by a spell, leaving him noisome as his company, whose unwashed, cynical faces were enraptured by something that transpired on the ground.
Lysaer stepped cautiously around a maggot-crawling dump of gristle and tendons. His step disturbed older bones. Flies buzzed up in a cloud and his eyes watered at the stink. He covered his nose with his sleeve, just as a brigantine fashioned of shadows scudded out from between one child’s bare legs. Of unknown sex under its rags and tangled hair, the creature screamed in delight, while the ship caught an imaginary gust in her sails and heeled, lee-rail down, through a gutter of reeking brown run-off.
But the smell was forgotten as Lysaer, also, became entranced.
The little vessel cleared the shoals of a clogged culvert, rounded and curtseyed over imaginary waves. Banners flying, she executed a saucy jibe and with the breeze now full astern, surged on a run straight for the mouth of the alley.
Lysaer’s presence blocked her course. Caught by surprise, Arithon lost his grip on the complex assemblage of shadows that fashioned her planking and sails. His beautiful little vessel unravelled in a muddied smear of colours that dissolved half a second before impact.
Heartsick to have spoiled the illusion, Lysaer looked up.
To the children, his silks and fine velvets had already marked him for a figure of upper-crust authority. Huge eyes in gaunt faces glowered at him in accusation. Arithon showed a flat lack of expression. The moment’s overheard laughter now seemed passing fancy, a dream put to rout by abrupt and unnecessary awakening. Had Lysaer not sensed the entreaty most desperately masked behind each hostile expression, he might have felt physically threatened.
One of the taller figures in a tatterdemalion blanket sidled away into shadow. A second later, running footsteps fled splashing through a side alley too narrow to be seen from Lysaer’s vantage.
Trapped in the role of despoiler, he gave way to irritation. Although Arithon had not spoken to inquire what brought him, his opening came out acerbic. ‘Do you know I’ve been smoothing over your absence from the governor’s council all morning? The guild ministers here are slippery as sharks, and just as quick to turn. The commander of the guard and his captain would wind your guts on a pole for mere sport. There cannot be a kingdom where now there is discord if you don’t show them a prince!’
‘Such affairs are your passion, not mine,’ Arithon said in desperate, forced neutrality. Several more children bolted despite his denouncement. ‘Why ever didn’t you stay there?’
He had not denied his origins.
The accusing stares of his audience were quick to transfer to him. The girl nearest his side recoiled in betrayal, that the man who had thrilled with his marvels was other than the beggar he appeared. Arithon reached out and cupped her cheek. His attempt at reassurance was pure instinct; and remarkable for its tenderness since every other sinew in his body was pitched taut in unwished-for challenge.
Rebuked by such care for the feelings of a vermin-infested urchin, Lysaer relented. ‘Arithon, these governors are your subjects, as difficult in their way to love as thieving children are to the wealthy whose pockets they pick. Show the councilmen even half the understanding you’ve lavished here and you’ll escape getting knifed by paid assassins.’
Arithon abandoned his effort to hold his audience: their fragile trust had been broken and one by one they slipped off. Deserted in his squalid clothes amid a welter of stinking refuse, Arithon’s reply came mild. ‘This bunch steals out of need.’
‘You feel the governor’s lackeys don’t? That’s shallow! You’re capable of truer perception.’ Lysaer shut his eyes, reaching deep for tact and patience. ‘Arithon, these merchants see in you an anathema made real. Records left from the uprising have been passed down grossly distorted. Etarrans are convinced the Fellowship sorcerers mean to give them an eye for an eye, cast them from their homes and expose their daughters to be forced by barbarians.
