The pub was busy. It was dinner hour and the dining room was filled with laughter and the sizzle of steak and the aroma of cold brew. Candles flickered on the walls.
“I don’t know you well, Jon,” said Silas, “so I hope you won’t take this personally.” He looked at Chaka. “You hired him to take a look, right?”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled.
“Was it a flat rate? Or did he get more money if he brought back a positive answer?”
Her features darkened. “He wouldn’t lie. But yes, it was a flat rate.”
Silas nodded. “Good. So what do you propose to do now?”
She looked surprised. “I’m going after it,” she said.
“On the strength of a few marked trees.”
“It’s a chance. But it’s a good chance.” Her eyes blazed. “Listen, Silas, the truth about what happened to my brother is out there somewhere.”
“I hate to put it this way, Chaka. But what does it matter? He’s dead. And Karik’s dead. What’s the point?”
Across the room, someone cheered. They were celebrating a birthday.
“I think the truth is worth something, don’t you?” She fixed him with her blue gaze. “Anyway, Haven might be at the end of the road.”
Silas looked from her to the dark-skinned giant. “I’m sixty years old. I’m not really in condition for taking off on a wild chase. Especially not one that’s already killed a substantial number of people.”
Disappointment clouded her features. “Okay. I thought you’d be the first to want to go. There’ll be others.”
“I doubt it.”
Shannon was studying the ceiling.
“How about you?” Silas asked him. “Are you going?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because Haven doesn’t mean anything to me. Because I don’t believe it exists. Because you—” he was gazing at Chaka now, “—and anyone who goes with you, will most certainly fail, and possibly lose your lives.”
Silas turned back to Chaka. “I think he makes sense.”
Their meals arrived. The menu at the Lost Hope was fairly limited. It consisted of either beef or chicken, depending on the chef’s mood, and the vegetable du jour, and bread. On this occasion, the chef’s mood called for chicken, and the vegetable was cabbage.
“I think we all need to be reasonable,” Silas said.
Chaka sat back with her arms folded, stared at Silas for a few moments, picked up a knife, and sliced a strip of meat from the breast. “Haven doesn’t mean anything to Jon,” she said. “What does it mean to you? Ten years from now you’ll be seventy. You want to look back on this and know there was a chance you might have found the entire body of Mark Twain’s work, and who knows what else, but you didn’t bother? Because it was dangerous?”
Illyrian women caught in compromising situations lost their reputations, prospects, and often their incomes. (Men, as usual, operated on a somewhat different standard.) No decent person would associate openly with a woman who’d become entangled in scandal. She was no longer welcome at her place of employment; her customers disappeared; and she could expect to be turned out by her family.
The risks for unmarried women were intensified by a lack of reliable contraceptive devices. Various ointments and oils, if applied prior to sexual activity, were supposed to prevent conception. But it was hard to determine their efficacy. No one kept statistics, and everybody lied about sex. Chaka concluded, as did most women, that the potential consequences outweighed the game. And so virtue reigned in Illyria.
This state of affairs had, to a degree, evolved from a line of emperors and kings who believed that the stability of the city required a solid family tradition, which they had enforced with the power of the priesthood and a series of laws prohibiting divorce and confining sexual activity within the marriage bond. Violators were subject to a range of criminal penalties which, for a time under Aspik III and Mogan the Wise, included burning at the stake.
In the Republic, such laws were considered barbaric. Nevertheless, the moral code from which they had sprung was alive and well, and if offending women could no longer be deprived of their physical existence, they could lose virtually everything else.
Chaka was not a virgin, but she rarely strayed across the line, and had not done so at all within the recent past. Tonight, though, as she returned from her frustrating meeting with Silas Glote, she needed to talk with Raney, to be with him, to accept whatever comfort he might provide. For that reason, she had declined Jon Shannon’s offer to escort her home. (“What will you do now?” Shannon had asked as she’d departed, and she’d replied that she would follow the trail, that she had friends, that there were plenty of people who would join her to look for Haven. And his lips had lightened and he’d warned her to forget it. “But if you must go,” he’d added, “take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life. Because that’s how it’ll be.”)
Raney lived alone in a small farmhouse outside Epton Village, about two miles northwest of the city. She left through the northern gate and rode out on the Cumbersak Trail. Travel was relatively safe within a few miles of Illyria. The roads were heavily patrolled now that the wars had stopped, and the old-time bandits who had once owned the highways after sundown were either dead or in hiding. Nonetheless, she always carried a gun when she traveled at night.
The moon was high and it was late when she rode through the hedges that surrounded Raney’s wood frame house. His dog. Clip, barked at her approach, and Raney appeared in his doorway.
“Didn’t expect to see you tonight,” he said. “How’d the meeting go?”
She tossed him her reins and climbed down. “Could have been better.”
“Glote wasn’t impressed?”
“You could say that.”
He looked at her. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Not your fault.” A cold wind was blowing in across the river.
They walked Piper toward the barn.
“What did he say?”
She told him. Raney nodded in the right places, and pulled the saddle off the roan. “To be honest,” he said, “I thought it was a little thin, too.”
It was hard to see his face in the dark. The air smelled of horses and barley and old wood.
“Of course it’s a little thin,” she snapped. “Don’t you think I know that? It’s a thread. But that’s probably all we’ll ever have. And maybe it’s all we’ll need.”
Raney put some water out for Piper. “Let’s go inside,” he said.
They strolled across the hard ground, not saying anything. It was as if a wall had gone up between them. Raney wasn’t wearing a jacket, so he should have been cold. But he took his time anyhow, walking with his hands pushed into his back pockets. When they got to the house, he filled the teapot with water, hung it on the bar, and swung the bar over the fire. Then he tossed on another log.
“Dolian is still trying to get his nephew appointed as an auditor,” he said, trying to steer them to a new subject. He talked for a while, and Chaka half listened. The water boiled and he prepared the tea and served it in two large steaming vessels. “Imported from Argon,” he said. He sat down beside her. “I’m glad you came.”
Chaka decided to let hers cool. “I think Shannon might change his mind,” she said.
Raney frowned. “Change his mind? About what?”
“When we’re ready to go, I believe he’ll come with us.”
She listened to him breathe. “Chaka, if Silas doesn’t think it’s worthwhile, it’s not worthwhile.” He looked casually at her, as if his point were too obvious to dispute.
“I don’t care what Silas thinks,” she said harshly. “I want to know what happened to my brother.”
She listened to him sigh. He tasted the tea, and commented that it was pretty good.
“Raney,” she said, “I’m going to do this.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” He spoke softly, in the tone he used when he was trying to be authoritative. His eyes were round and tentative and worried.
