stableyard. A door in the wall of the inn had opened, at the back of a narrow passageway that Dumery had mistaken for just another stall, and a figure was standing in it, lamplight pouring out around him.
“Are you out here, boy?” the innkeeper’s voice called.
“Yes, sir,” Dumery replied, getting stiffly to his feet.
“I’ve got the scraps for you. Leave the bowl on the step when you’re done. Sleep well.”
Before Dumery could say anything, the figure stepped back and closed the doorway.
Dumery hurried to the doorstep and found a large wooden bowl, full of something he couldn’t see at all. It smelled of grease.
He dipped in a hand and came up with a crust of bread, soggy with congealing gravy; he ate it eagerly.
It took some chewing, and as he worked on it he ambled back through the short passageway to his corner of the stableyard, where he settled down, cross-legged, with the bowl in front of him.
He began picking through it, working by smell and touch, dropping back the pieces he considered unfit to eat.
Unfortunately, most of it he considered unfit to eat.
He was pawing through it, trying to find something edible, when his hand hit something unfamiliar. He tried to pick it out, to see what it was, but it pulled away.
He blinked, startled, and peered through the gloom. Was something sitting there on the other side of the bowl?
Yes, something was, something about the size of a kitten, but more or less human in shape, with its hands in the bowl of scraps. He stared.
It was sitting cross-legged, a pot-belly slopping across its lap, and it was staring at him with outsize, bulging eyes. Dumery couldn’t make out much more than that in the darkness; he had no idea of its color, or what any features except the big white eyes might look like.
“Gack,” Dumery said, snatching his hand away.
“Gack?” the thing replied.
Dumery suddenly guessed that this was probably one of those little green things that had been running about Ethshar lately, tripping people and getting in the way.
That didn’t tell him what it was, though.
“What areyou?” he asked.
“Spriggan,” the thing said, in a squeaky little voice. “Hungry,” it added pitifully.
Dumery looked down at the bowl; even in the dark he could see that the thing had both its arms thrust into the scraps almost to the elbows.
“Oh,” Dumery said. He gently pushed the bowl away, toward the spriggan.
“Here,” he said. “Help yourself.”
He had lost his appetite.
As if eating garbage weren’t bad enough, he was supposed toshare it with some vile little monster? A monster that had shoved its dirty little paws into the bowl like that?
That was simply too much. He wouldn’t stand for it. He turned away, huddled up against the stableyard wall, and tried to go to sleep.
Given his exhausted condition, that didn’t take long.
Chapter Eight
Falea had begun wondering around mid-afternoon just what Dumery was doing that was keeping him so long. Was he still at Westgate Market? Had he found something to do, some apprenticeship or other prospect, that appealed to him?
Had he, perhaps, wandered off to some other part of the city?
If he’d found an apprenticeship, that was fine-if it was something completely inappropriate Doran could refuse to cooperate, and that would put an end to it, and if it was anything halfway respectable then the problem of Dumery’s future was solved.
If he hadn’t found an apprenticeship, that didn’t matter; he had plenty of time left before his thirteenth birthday.
She did wonder, though, what was keeping him.
The wondering turned gradually to worry as the sun set, and supper was cooked and served and eaten, and still Dumery didn’t return.
This wasn’t the first time Dumery had missed a meal, of course, or even the fiftieth, but still, Falea worried.
Doran, of course, hadn’t even noticed the boy’s absence. He was involved with the accounts from theSea Stallion ’s latest run out to Tintallion of the Isle-Falea knew that there were apparently some discrepancies, and that this was important, so she didn’t force her worries about their youngest son on her husband.
Doran the Younger and Derath and Dessa all made the predictable snide adolescent remarks about their brother’s absence, naturally, and Falea hushed them half-heartedly.
Their father paid no attention.
After dinner Falea and Derath cleaned the table and kitchen, while Dessa swept and Doran the Younger hauled water in from the courtyard well. The elder Doran finally found the flaw in the records about an hour after dinner, as Dessa was settling to bed, and spent the next twenty minutes loudly arguing with himself as to whether he should have his agent whipped for theft, or merely fired, or whether he should forgive her this one last time-a keg of good Morrian brandy was missing and unaccounted for.
“Why not ask her what happened to it?” Falea suggested. “It might be an honest mistake.”
“Ha!” Doran bellowed. “Honest? Her?”
“It might be.” While she had her husband’s attention, she added, “By the way, have you seen Dumery? He wasn’t at supper.”
“I’ll ask her, all right,” he said. “I’ll ask her first thing in the morning, with a guardsman at my side.” He snorted.
“Have you seen Dumery?” Falea insisted.
“What? No, I haven’t seen the boy. Ask his brothers.”
Falea did ask them, catching them just before they retired for the night. Both of them insisted that they hadn’t seen Dumery since breakfast.
“You’re sure?” she asked.
They took offense at that, unsurprisingly, and she could get nothing more out of them. She let them go on to bed.
Ordinarily, she would have gone to bed herself not long after, but this time she didn’t. She sat up, waiting, instead.
She got out her sewing basket and did the mending. That kept her hands busy, but didn’t really distract her thoughts from all the terrible things that might have happened to her youngest child.
There were slavers over on New Canal Street, and prowling the streets. There were drunken sailors starting brawls all along the waterfront.
Dumery had gone to Westgate Market; that was near Wall Street and the Hundred-Foot Field. There were thieves in the Field, and maybe worse. Slavers never dared enter the Field itself, but they patrolled Wall Street, collecting strays.
There were stories about evil magicians kidnapping people from the Hundred-Foot Field for various nefarious purposes-as sacrifices to demons or rogue gods, as food for monsters, as a source of ingredients for strange and terrible spells. Young innocents were supposed to be especially prized-virgin’s blood, hair, and tears were reputed to be necessary ingredients in several spells.
That was usually presumed to meanfemale virgins, but perhaps boys had their own uses.
And there were stories about other people than magicians finding uses for boys. She had never heard such
