“What is?” she asked.
He didn’t reply.
Letting someone like Patzer know her full name would be a mistake. For some reason she remembered one of Pella’s stories: A witch who could find you if she knew your name. A fable about being wary of strangers.
She began her painfully familiar story. “When we were first alerted to a discrepancy near the Armer Rim Wall—”
“No,” he cut her off. “Save the story. You’ll just have to repeat it later. We’re going to meet a friend.”
7
They trekked into Chastity Territory for the rest of that day, passing far south of the slumland she, Toornan and Jools had investigated. Patzer set a brisk pace. Thankfully, traveling was easier because the days were shorter than the nights. There was no hot breeze to slow her mind and no sweaty clothes clinging to her skin.
She would have given anything for a functional tram service out this far into the Refugee Territories. It seemed the Cenephan refugees had been deliberately neglected by the authorities. The agreement made a century and half earlier seemed to have been utterly neglected once the Cenephan refugees had arrived.
After Polis Ceneph’s fall, the twenty-three surviving Polis had agreed to take an equal amount of Cenephan refugees. They’d agreed to integrate the refugees into their new Polis.
Back in Armer the refugees were almost extinct, if that was the right word. The refugees had converted to worshiping Polis Armer, intermarried and moved around the Polis to such an extent that now only thousands openly identified with their Cenephan origins. There were annual remembrances of Ceneph’s fall, when Cenephan dances, songs and plays were performed for Armen audiences and all types of art were displayed or performed.
Here though? It seemed the royalty and government had dumped them in the most desolate, cadver-infected areas the Polis had to offer, and forgotten them.
Each step into the Chastity Wastes took the two travelers further from what passed for civilization. Her every instinct screamed at her to run at the first opportunity. She was at least twenty years younger and could easily outrun Patzer. But Patzer was a bounty hunter, and if he found her, she didn’t care to gamble she could best him in a fight, for there was combat readiness in his gait that suggested he was wary of attack.
“Is it much further?” she asked. “I don’t mind sleeping rough. It’s part of the job.”
“Chastity’s got the most cadvers of any territory, Saarg,” Patzer said. “And even if it didn’t, there are lions. If you know a safe place out this way, you use it. But no…” He looked around. “Not much further.”
It was a wonder anyone could find their way around the Refugee Territories. The dipping sparse hills, dead bushes and occasional ruins looked much the same in every direction. Patzer had stories about almost every hill, Wall and ruin. In that distant Wall, for example, lived an old man who owed him coin. That hill was a good place to hide if you were stuck outside a Wall, and that heap of fallen rocks had never been a dwelling but was where some boys had experimented in masonry a generation earlier.
“Do you come this way often?” she asked, trying to keep the conversation topics away from her. When they’d set out, Patzer had insisted he needed to know everything about her if they were to spend a month together. However, he offered little about himself. She had nothing to hide relating to her personal circumstances and had happily told all about her life back in Armer. The generations of her family’s involvement in the Seekers, Pella’s obsession with mystery novels and Terese’s own school days.
“Not many hide out here,” Patzer said. “But if someone really wants to hide? This is a good place.” He chortled at some memory she decided she’d rather not hear.
“Have you been a bounty hunter long?” she tried again.
“More or less since I became a man,” he said, “though I dabble in tools and antiques.”
Terese suppressed a scream of indignant rage. She was familiar with those who described themselves as ‘dabblers.’ A part-time bounty-hunter and smuggler, then. Wonderful. “So how much have you worked with Sumad Reach?”
His chest puffed at that question. “I’m who they contact if they want to know who’s in the area. The arrangement is some years old. It’s… mutually beneficial.”
Ah, that was it. Patzer’s reasons for going over the border were legitimate if he was on a Seeker commission. And if he managed to sneak things back to the Territories, then how fortuitous for him. Most traders out this way inflated their prices, and if Patzer could undercut them, he’d profit nicely.
His would be a life lived at two borders, one between places and another at the boundaries of the law. But smuggling was not a Seeker problem, and she supposed it didn’t matter how Patzer made ends meet.
Without warning, he threw his head back and cackled loudly, startling her. “And before you ask, unlike yourself, I’m a spouse and parent to none. Though I have a family, of a sort.” Odd thing to make him laugh, although smugglers often lived in one another’s pockets, knowing one another’s greatest secrets to force a bond of trust.
“What sort of family?” she asked, confident that she knew the answer.
“The sort that help me locate… antiques.”
“What kinds of antiques?” she said.
“Musical instruments. Sometimes weapons.” He harrumphed a plainly fake cough, then tilted his head like he’d just thought of something. “Look, do you have much to do with your Armer Royalty?”
What a strange question. “No, I’ve only laid eyes on our Royalty a few times. Usually at end-of-year festivals. I’ve never spoken to one. My father has though, since he’s a Holder and reports directly to Lord Feneet, one of the Seeker liaisons back home.”
Patzer stared, like she were somehow on the verge of disclosing some vital piece of information.
She weighed her options, then decided to continue. “My
