looked blue-black in the night, and Pagette mostly saw the creature by the faint phosphorescent glow of its yellow, cupola eyes. Size was not a reliable determinant of age among the frogmen, and this little one did not seem young.
“Greetings,” Pagette said in Daulic as he stopped and steadied himself on the bobbing boards. The wug chirped neutrally. So much for small talk.
From a jacket pocket Pagette produced a missive he had just written in Zantish in his shop, then sealed in a water-tight tube made of tin, the two ends of which screwed together in the middle. He held it out toward the wug.
“You know where to find him?” Pagette asked before handing it over. The wug made a rumble from low in its belly, then a flute-like whistle that billowed out fleshy pouches where its throat would be if it had a neck. Together the two sounds meant that the wug was not an idiot.
Pagette gave it the scroll tube and the wug deftly used its webbed hands and long fingers ending in round suction pads to place it into a small pouch bound across its torso. The wug wrapped a long trailing strap many times around the pouch, then cinched the harness tight.
“Swim swiftly,” Pagette said, and the wugs glowing eyes turned on him. It made a series of croaks, ribbits, and slaps of its hands that roughly translated as, What in the green hell would you know about fast swimming, pink thing? Mind your business.
With that, the wug slipped off the dock and into the dark water with hardly a ripple, leaving Pagette alone.
He made his way back to land, then up the path to street and pier level. Rather than returning immediately to his shop Pagette stepped out on the pier some little distance, went to the railing, and fished his pipe and a clever little steel-and-wheel lighter from his coat pockets. He smoked, looking up the river to the north, and his eyes eventually drifted to the right, up to the sharp shapes of the Ducal castle high on the hills.
“Apologies, your Graces,” Pagette said around the stem of his pipe. “The money was just too good. And I, less so.”
Chapter Twenty
After more than two weeks walking the long road from Souterm to Galdeez, Phin Phoarty felt better than he had in years.
The first week, admittedly, had been rough. Phin had awakened every morning with his feet, knees, and hips aching. It took until the noon stop for a quick meal before all the soreness worked through then in the afternoon his legs started to feel tremulous, like a new-born bird’s. The discomfort was exacerbated by sleeping on the ground out of doors, which was something Phin had never done in his life.
The Imperial Post Road crossed the whole of the Empire from Souterm north through Doon and over the Girding Mountains at the Rhuunish Gap, then through Tull, the western Beoshore, and across the ancient, defunct lands of Gyle and Telina to a port on the Cold Sea called, with typical Codian efficiency but a lack of originality, Norterm. The northern terminus of the Imperial Post Road. All along the Road’s great length tidy “King’s Inns” were erected a good day’s march apart, or half that by coach or horse. The five travelers stopped at one each night but only the woman with the lovely Zantish name of Nesha-tari took a room. Phin, Zebulon, Amatesu and Uriako Shikashe camped for a copper piece in fenced fields across from the inns, which at least all had wells and fire pits. The Far Westerners had two small pup tents but Phin shared a third with Zeb despite the fact that the Minauan man had a tendency to roll over in his sleep and elbow Phin in the throat, or even more alarmingly, to nuzzle the back of Phin’s neck with his nose.
Nocturnal groping aside, Zebulon was a decent traveling companion full of soldier’s stories and old minstrel tales he related on the march while pushing the baggage cart, never asking Phin to take a turn. In the second week Phin was feeling stronger and offered to take some turns at the barrow on his own. After a tenday of exercise in the clean air Phin started to feel good. He now wore wool trousers and a Doonish shirt and cape the Far Western woman Amatesu had bought at an inn after saying flatly that altering any of Zebulon’s clothes to fit Phin’s long frame was beyond her abilities. As Phin walked along in the easy peasant garb he began to remember that he was still a young man, a fact that he had forgotten over his ten years at Abverwar. He started to lose his stoop and recalled that he was a tall man as well, and that he did not need always to lean on a staff, glaring at people.
Phin glared at no one now, but he had taken to staring at Nesha-tari who always walked out ahead of the group with Uriako Shikashe closest to her, Zeb and Phin trailed behind with the barrow, and Amatesu walked either with them or with the samurai, depending on how off-color a tavern tale Zeb happened to be telling at any given time. The Far Western woman was friendly enough, the samurai was an aloof ox, but the woman Nesha-tari was a complete mystery. She kept her distance and her own counsel, and when Phin asked Zebulon anything about her she seemed to be the one topic Zeb was not happy to discourse upon at great length. The few times Phin pressed him a little Zeb became a bit surly, and the wizard suspected the Minauan was carrying a torch for her, which was ridiculous. Phin had yet to see any more of the woman than an alabaster wrist between glove and sleeve or a lock of shining blonde hair blown back from under her hood, but he could tell that she was a woman of standing, and quality. Far above the reach of the bawdy axe-man from Wakminau in the Riven Kingdoms.
As the party drew closer to Red Galdeez and even as Phin felt as physically good as he ever had, the fact that he had still hardly had a look at Nesha-tari began to trouble him. He hoped she was not in some way scarred or misshapen, for that would just be tragic, but he did not think that could be the case. Though she went about covered there was nothing retiring or timid about the way she walked, with a stride that was at once graceful and with great purpose. After Galdeez when they traveled on Shugak roads through the Red Hills on the Vod Wild side of the river, surely then the whole group would have to march closer together. And as there were not going to be any inns in the Wilds they would all be camping in the evenings. Phin started to daydream about it even before Galdeez was in sight.
Phin rose early in the mornings to meditate on his spells, which he could then cast with a word and a gesture at any time during the day. Since leaving Souterm he had taken to preparing only the one bit of magic that seemed likely to have any utility if there was some trouble on the road, the spell of Sleep. Phin’s meditation was deep as he was away in a part of his own mind that was a realm of symbol and signs, but it was generally quite brief as Sleep was not a complicated spell. Each morning it began to take longer however, and Phin was alarmed to find that even in the mental place that allowed him to wield magic the idea of Nesha-tari was somehow still present. Nothing quite like that had ever happened to Phin before, and it made him think something very strange was going on in his head.
If Phin had lived a different life he might have thought he was falling in love for the first time. But Phin had lived his own life, and he knew magic when he smelled it.
The last night before they were to reach Galdeez, Phin waited until Zebulon was asleep and then slowly slipped out of the tent. Amatesu’s cooking fire in the pit had gone to ash, and the night was chilly. Phin stirred the embers until little yellow glimmers winked from the blackened wood, wrapped his bedding blanket around his shoulders and sat cross-legged before the pit staring into the embers until his eyes lost focus and his breathing stilled. In half an hour he blinked, and could see that the last sparks had faded out. He had memorized one Sleep spell, and a stronger than usual version of the divination spell referred to in the verbal shorthand of Abverwar as Know History.
Phin crept away from the camp before putting on his soft boots and walking across the Post Road for the nearby King’s Inn. He wondered absently why the places were called that for there were no Kings in the Codian Empire, and resolved to ask Zebulon tomorrow if he thought of it. That was the trivial sort of information Zeb seemed to have in abundance.
It was late and the inn kitchen was closed, the common room empty. A man appeared behind a desk from a curtained doorway as Phin’s entry jingled a chime above the front door. The clerk was a young Doonish local in a clean tunic of light blue cloth, the breast embroidered with a simplified version of the Codian Book-from-the-Water design as an upright rectangle in a circle. Phin told the fellow he was a member of the Madame Nesha-tari’s party, and needed her room number. The desk clerk did not know the name but recognized Phin’s description of the
