“Oh right,” she said with the smallest of smiles that turned into something grimmer around the edges. “I’m supposed to be flattered. You can compliment me on my eyes because that’s classy, whereas to refer to my breasts would be crude.”
“But your eyes, er. show your personality,” I faltered.
“I might not know the theatre, but I’ve seen the poetry, Will. Eyes are just part of the catalogue. Eyes like crystal, isn’t it? Ruby lips and ivory skin. Then ankles, thighs, and so on, down the list. The composite woman. A collection of parts for your pleasure.”
“It’s not as if I’m not attracted to you as a person,” I said.
“Meaning what, Will? I pour nothing but derision on you all day, but if I came to your bed at night, you’d be all over me like sauce on one of your succulent entrees.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I lied.
“Oh, please.”
“Well, all right. Maybe so,” I confessed, trying to smile in a winningly flirtatious way. “So what?”
“So ‘as a person’ doesn’t extend beyond this body, which happens to fit all your little criteria?”
“Most of them,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Your nose is a little. ”
“Thanks, Will.” (That was sarcastic, in case you missed it.) “But at least you’re being honest, for once. Fortunately, I am feeling charitable and will refrain from going through the list of ways in which you, physically, don’t make the grade.”
That stung.
“What is your problem, exactly?” I said irritably. “What is it that got so stuck up you that you can’t get it out?”
“How apt.” She smiled. “I must have something stuck up me because it isn’t you. How like a man.”
I was, for once, speechless. She was quite calm, even amused, which was new for her. The worst part was that she was right. A million times I’d heard some oaf lumber back to his barroom mates and tell them that the girl who had just blown him off was “a right bitch” or “not that pretty when you got close” and I had always smiled knowingly to myself. Now I was the oaf, and there was no dark corner and group of friends to bring me solace. I felt like the fox scowling up at the grapes he couldn’t reach. What a bitch.
The upside, however, had been the ease-even the enjoyment-with which she had rejected my oafish advances. There had been no vitriolic screaming, no threats of evisceration, no torrents of frosty contempt, and when I had abandoned the chase she had actually smiled, as if it had been a kind of game we were playing and she had won a round. Later, when the others did show up to make plans for whatever new madness we were to embark upon, I caught her looking at me. When I turned my sulky face towards her, her grin had been so open and knowing that I found myself returning it.
Since we would learn nothing in the palace, we had decided to split the party and stay in inns scattered about the city. Lisha and Orgos would be in the Silversmith’s Arms, an upmarket place for traders and the local gentry. Garnet and Renthrette went to a middle-class tavern called the Bear’s Paw. I got the cheap end of town (surprise, surprise), and would spend the next night in the dubiously titled Swan with Two Necks, dodging cutthroats and pickpockets. The fact that I was sharing a room with Mithos didn’t especially cheer me up, since he tended to be a sort of portable storm cloud: largely dark and silent, occasionally brightening up to flash lightning and thunder at you. Still, maybe I’d get a game of cards.
Just before I left with Mithos, I made a point of examining Lisha’s black-shafted spear. I hadn’t forgotten that odd blue lightning flash. I was unsurprised to find that the silver metal of the spear’s fer-rule, where the shaft fit into the tip, was set with a large irregularly shaped blue stone. It didn’t make me feel any better.
SCENE XXXIV The Ritual
Mithos and I walked our horses down to the eastern edge of the city. Much of the second level, below the palace and public buildings, was a walled enclosure of public grazing land and private crop fields that were designed to keep the citadel going in times of hardship. Since the majority of the region’s agricultural produce came from Verneytha by road, this was going to be one of those times. Below the cobbled, narrow, and spiraling streets were vast water cisterns, cut out of the rock and fed by springs. If need be, this place could close its gates for a very long time.
The citadel made up in fortifications what it lost in military presence. Soldiers patrolled the walls, but there weren’t many of them for a city this size: just four hundred. Garnet and Renthrette had it all penciled out: half infantry, half local militia. The latter were mainly city police and would not be called upon in the event of a military confrontation. That was what Shale was for. Still, with fortifications like this, Greycoast didn’t need much to defend the place.
Our tavern lay up against the far eastern wall of the citadel in a maze of narrow streets with butchers’ shops on every corner. Greying meat was laid out on stone slabs in the sun where old women fanned at flies as they haggled over prices. Rabbits were suspended from poles, and cow heads, as yet unskinned or de-eyed, watched us from the gloomy interiors.
The Swan with Two Necks was the kind of hole you might have expected it to be, so I won’t waste time telling you about its various surprisingly unpleasant aromas and their close relationship with the clientele. It was the kind of place you went armed to and carried only as much as you intended to spend. Its menu was miserable but it had, as a house special, a dish intriguingly named after the tavern itself. We ordered this with cheerful expectation, but the “swan with two necks” turned out to be a scrawny chicken with two hopefully positioned blood sausages. Delightful.
“How long do we have to stay in this dump?” I wanted to know.
“A night or two,” said Mithos, pulling gristle balls from his teeth and pushing them to the side of his plate. “No more. We just have to ask around. See if anyone can tell us anything interesting.”
“Is that likely?” I asked, regarding the bar’s dodgy-looking patrons.
“No,” said Mithos shortly, “though I expect everyone has a theory.”
“Well, we’ll see,” I said, cheerfully producing a pack of cards.
Mithos gave me a look and said, “Be careful, Will. There aren’t enough of us to bail you out tonight.”
“Come now, Mithos,” I said, “Cautious Will?”
We spent the next two hours moving around the tavern individually, asking leading questions about raider attacks. Not subtle, I confess, but fairly safe, since it seemed that the inn was holding a Village Idiot convention. An eager young man told me that the raiders were a fiction created by a top-level group of conspirators whose motives were obliquely linked to a suppression of the lower social orders. The barmaid had it on good authority that they were ghost riders who vanished at dawn. One genius produced a matchbox from an inside pocket and confided that he only let the raiders out when his wife beat him for coming home drunk.
The less hopelessly moronic people that I spoke to presumed I was an adventurer wanting to hire myself out as a guard. A fur trader offered me fifty silvers to ride with him to the Hopetown market. I tried to get him to pay me in advance but he wasn’t that stupid. I made friends with a couple of young ladies and introduced one of them to Mithos. He just shook his head and moved away. The ladies, irritated at his lack of interest, doubled their prices, and that was my night blown.
Close to midnight the room was starting to empty. All around us people were pushing clubs and daggers into conspicuous scabbards to deter attackers in the dark streets. Only then did the barman come over and tell us we had a guest. He was sitting by the empty fireplace, a heavy and moth-eaten cloak drawn about him. We approached and he rapped on a pair of chairs with a stick. We sat and listened.
“Been asking about the raiders? Not adventurers neither, else you’d have taken up with the fur man. So, different interest. Like me.”
He looked at us suddenly and his face was sweaty and scarred, ugly in the lamplight. His eyes had a mad, sightless look.
