Fugitive Prince (28 page)

Arithon and Caolle led the horses ashore for stabling with a liveryman. Ten paces behind, suspended over water on the gangplank, Dakar half sensed
something;
a fleeting prickle of spent energy, not unlike the imprint of a dissipated spell. He suffered a swift pang of nausea. Nagged by the oddity, he braced half in dread that his gift of prescience might trigger between steps to the dock.

But his tread on dry boards raised only the expected hollow echo. He frowned, paused anyway, plumbed mage-sense until his head ached. His search yielded nothing. Only the random, silvered dance of energy which patterned grained wood into substance. The air bore only the reek of black river mud, skeined through by the mulch of turned rose beds in the merchants’ garden courtyards, and the seasonal must of piled leaves.

Dakar rolled his shoulders, irritable and anxious. All week, he had been starting at phantoms, and no wonder. A man with the sense that Ath gave a flea would be anyplace else but in the Shadow Master’s company, inside the crown territory of Tysan.

Dakar hastened on before Caolle’s impatience could shatter the morning quiet.

If the wide, tranquil lanes by the barge docks met misty daybreak in restraint, by contrast, the harborside reflected a livelihood steeped from the rowdier tastes of men who plied deepwater shipping. There, the sky above the roof peaks teemed with raucous gulls. The puddles in the gutters reeked of flotsam and fish, a furlong removed from the exquisite walled mansions of the riverfront. The division between saltwater commerce and fresh lay demarked by the customs keeper’s compound, its seaside encroached on by sagging, tiled roofs and the storm-weathered planks of old warehouses. The market became the hub of activity, with its channeled gutters of herringbone brick spanned by the pilings of squatters’ shanties. Behind them, the half-plank tenements loomed three stories above the street-level sprawl of bawdy houses and dilapidated taverns. The mews in between held the seamier sailors’ dives, wedged amid tangles of cobblestone alleys scarcely wide enough to pass single file.

Arithon traversed the bayside mazes on foot, his lyranthe slung from his shoulder. His step was unhurried, almost meandering, and
everything living made him linger. He dallied to peruse the trinkets spread on open-air tables; conversed with the idlers leaning on lampposts, or carters, wolfing hot pastries over their slackened reins. Caolle wore his sword and shadowed his shoulder. Made jumpy by the lazy accents of townsmen and the hated enclosure of city walls, he insisted on keeping his hands free. Which left Dakar to heft his tinker’s gear, the saddle packs of spare clothing, and the manful share of complaints.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t notice that circle of ash in the market square.” Disgruntled since he had dismissed the painted redhead whose playful fingers had promised fine dalliance, he groused, “They burned some poor wretch for the practice of unclean sorcery only yesterday.”

A pause, filled by the Mad Prophet’s puffing as they jagged up a narrow stair and passed a darkened archway through a close. His chorus rang plaintive echoes through a courtyard choked with frost-withered flowerpots. “The merchants should riot. Who will craft fiend banes if everyone with mage-sense cowers in fear of execution?”

Down a rickle of heaved flagstones, the party of three emerged back into daylight, with Caolle’s grip white on the sword as Arithon stalled again on his course.

Dakar scarcely avoided crashing into him. Blinking like a mole past the bundles clutched to his chest, he snapped, “If you’re going to give silver to every beggar we pass, my back will break before we find an inn.”

Arithon broke off a quiet sentence with his latest fascination, a raggedy old salt propped on a crutch. “That’s heartless bad manners,” he admonished.

Less eloquent, the beggar hawked and spat on the offensive Prophet’s boot.

“You toad-humping spawn of a maggot!” screeched Dakar.

The beggar cracked into devilish, deep laughter. “Now didn’t you say the same on the day you crammed yourself into that beer cask and we heaved you afloat on Garth’s Pond?”

Dakar’s eyes widened. The jab of Caolle’s elbow into barely healed ribs nipped his cry of recognition just in time. “I’m sorry,” he gasped when he could manage civil speech. Through another glare at Arithon, he added, “Our singer here has a soft heart and a head as addled as a duck’s egg. We’d all join you in the streets before he’d let a layabout go hungry.”

The beggar flashed a tigerish grin, none other than the lame joiner
whose past touch at subterfuge had once helped the theft of a princess’s ransom. “Ye won’t lack for beer and feather mattresses, I’d say. Not in the company of a bard whose playing could charm life into a stone gargoyle. The Laughing Captain, hard by the shipyards, is a tavern to welcome a good singer.”

That suggestion passed off in languid disinterest, Arithon pursued, “If Lysaer’s royal guardsmen are busy burning talent, what does this city do for fiend bane?”

The beggar scratched his chin. “Well now, the Koriathain fashioned the talismans for the yard. Merchant guilds signed oath of debt for that.” An expert lag, while scruffy fingers poked for lice; until Arithon’s hand obligingly dipped into his purse. In glad speculation, the joiner delivered. “For the rest, we had a good bell founder.”

Arithon’s interest lit. “Had?”

“Aye. Man’s fair useless to anyone now. Born without perfect pitch, see? Can’t rematch the tone since one of his master set’s cracked.” Nonplussed by Dakar’s scowl, the scoundrel joiner palmed coins as though he had begged all his life. “Strolling that way, are you? Yon craftshop’s off Chandler’s Alley.”

Yet if the bell founder’s plight concerned Arithon s’Ffalenn, the path he chose to the harborside became everything else but direct. His small party tailed him in and out of three wineshops. Underneath the planked walkways which linked the close tenements, he shared biscuits with the filthy children who lived by picking pockets in the shadows. Dakar battled his shortening temper. Each move seemed to fuel his anxiety. More than once he spun around, certain someone was dogging his heels. He saw only slinking alley cats and rats. His skin stayed nipped into gooseflesh, as if the creatures were golems raised from bones, and set spying by furtive conjury.

Oblivious, Arithon loitered to gossip with a laundry girl, rinsing linens on a gallery, while Caolle dodged wind-scattered droplets of runoff, and Dakar fumed in annoyance. His chastised survey of each chance-met acquaintance revealed no other familiar faces.

The day wore past noon. Arithon jaunted through the sailors’ market, loquaciously intrigued with its glass beads and shell trinkets; its whalebone charms against drowning, and its philters and potions mixed against ague and hangover and whore’s pox. He chaffed the apothecary and acquired a posy of dried catmint. A second talisman maker sold him assorted tin scraps in a sack.

Jostled by a press of tar-smelling riggers, they withstood the buffeting sea breeze while Arithon purchased a burgundy silk waistcoat trimmed with mother-of-pearl spangles.

Before suffering another zigzagging course through the market, Dakar balked and dropped all the packs on the cobbles. “No more.”

Arithon looked at him, eyebrows raised, then unslung the lyranthe from his shoulder. “Hold this,” he bade Caolle, then balanced his sack of tin leavings on top of the load.

Right there in the street, amid rumbling drays and carters who swore and reined their racketing teams around him, he donned his ridiculous glad rags.

The maroon-and-gold garment clashed stupendously with moss green hose. Dakar gave way to disgust. “Spare us all, you’re a sight to make a corpse walk.”

Arithon grinned, an edged flash of teeth. “I agree. After the clothes, who will look at the face?” He asked back his instrument, to Caolle’s relief, then waded undaunted through the rows of shawled women packing salt barrels.

Dakar’s vociferous frustration cracked echoes off the mews chosen this time for an exit. He sucked in a breath and choked on the miasma of tar and hot wax. His next comment was expelled as a cough. They had entered Chandler’s Alley from the north. The craftshop of the benighted bell founder loomed ahead, every casement boarded up, and its signpost demolished to slivers. The cobbles beneath were sugared in smashed glass and the shards of pulverized roof slates.

The Mad Prophet gave the warped door, the bent nails, the litter of bashed casements his expert survey, and chuckled. “Ath. The iyats are having themselves a field day.”

Arithon leaned close, cautious in a realm where mage talents lay under interdict. “They’re still here? You can see them?”

Dakar nodded. His trained eye picked out the whorled dimples of distressed air which pocked the shop front and the surrounding alley, unmistakable trace of the energy sprites’ presence. “The whole place is riddled. Do you guess this is sport, or plain revenge for the fact the warding bells are out of true?”

“Likely both,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn in delight, “and for us, a rapturous throw of fortune.” He banged on the door, which swung inward on shrieking, bent hinges.

A short step into a lanternless dimness, then a violent stir from the shadows: an angular crane of a man scrunched across a piney spill of sawdust, most likely scattered to cushion the impact of tools the rampaging iyats might throw down. “Are you blind?” he howled in calamitous agitation. “Get you out. We’re fiend plagued and closed!”

Dakar cringed, face masked in his hands; Arithon tucked back an
exhalation suspiciously like laughter; while the fiends, busy creatures, rocked into a wakened frenzy of assault.

A tin cup chained to a fallen washbasin gyrated in crazed circles in the dark. Something else made of wood, a potstand or a close stool, galloped to life on a circling course to smash ankles. Caolle yelled, stamped down on an offending pair of fire tongs which tried to stab holes in his boots, while a row of tin canisters rocked as if to dump themselves over his head.

“Ath, see what you’ve done!” the bell founder screeched above burgeoning commotion. “The blighted infestation has started all over again!”

Iyats enjoyed feeding upon human rage. Hand-wringing, dithering hysteria teased them on. Recharged to delight, they obliged, and seized on wild energy to fuel a new round of pranks.

The cup snapped its tether, shot off into space, and clanged into a hamper of metal scrap. The lot toppled with a deranged, belling crash over the workbench with its crucibles and anvil. Filings and scrolls of shaved iron whirred airborne, a threat to eyesight and flesh. Through that scourging storm, and the craftsman’s imprecations, a sound to drill through quartz: Arithon whistled a shattering threnody.

Scrap metal dashed to the floor like dropped chaff. The close stool toppled flat and lay with its legs pointed skyward, while from every darkened corner, the artisan’s dropped wares belled in resonant, dissonant sympathy.

The rampaging fiends ceased their mischief. Under threat of dissolution from those ranging harmonics, they unraveled their energies from purloined items and fled. Their departure, willy-nilly, raised small flurries of ripped air, the ping of popped nails, and a staccato barrage of cracked boards and burst shutters. Inside a handful of heartbeats, the sawdusty gloom subsided to muffling silence.

“Praise Ath Creator!” The bell founder gaped. His protuberant eyes cast right and left, but saw nothing except blessed stillness. “Here’s a bard!” Nary an iyat remained on his premises, and the impact of rescue sank in. “A bard with a true ear for fiend bane.” He kicked through his muddle of violated belongings, snatched Arithon’s sleeves, then thumped to his knees and gushed out his tearful apologies. “I had no idea. None. Forgive my rude welcome. What amends can I make to beg for a ward on my shop?”

“A fee.” Arithon slipped his wrists free of moist fingers, amused and cool, but not unkindly. “You’ve no cause to plead. I don’t have the talent to set lasting protections. But to place the pitch to recast your cracked bell, a sum of ten silvers will suffice.”

“Bless you man!” The craftsman scrambled erect and closed on his find with doggish, backslapping eagerness. “That’s far less than your talent deserves.”

Caolle scuffed sawdust in stiff-lipped distaste, as much for the disrespect shown to his liege as for the frivolous delay. Arithon’s humor stayed unruffled. For a private man who disliked being touched, he weathered his patron’s unctuous handling with striking equanimity.

Which anomaly at last snapped Dakar to cold thought. He had accompanied Arithon’s travels too long not to sense another seamless thread of subterfuge. Nor did his hunch prove misplaced. The reputation the bard earned in that one afternoon won them the most sumptuous, private room in the Laughing Captain Tavern for the rest of the week, free of charge.

Event fell out with natural elegance that, after Arithon’s morning of plying gossip from passersby and his fresh notoriety at the bell founder’s, a nonstop stream of Riverton’s folk should stop to exchange words in the taproom.

Nor did every admirer wear the face of a stranger. Dakar recognized a ropewalker, a handful of caulkers, and two doxies twined through the arms of a suspiciously familiar sailhand. A street child sidled up, brother to one who had served them before as informant through a forced stay in Jaelot. Ath alone knew how the filthy mite had tracked Arithon the width of the continent.

Inevitably also came Cattrick, covert conspirator to the Shadow Master’s cause, and paid master of Tysan’s royal shipyard.

Dakar caught first sight of him, a bluff, square man whose muscular tread rivaled Caolle’s for strength, and whose presence exuded authority. He elbowed his way through the press of galleymen, carousing deckhands, and off-duty royal guards as if he expected due deference, his immense, callused hands broad enough to span the slopping rims of four tankards. The squint to his eye from sighting straight board lengths, or the lines of new keels on their bedlogs, had grown more pronounced through the years since the
Khetienn’s
first launching in Merior. Lank shocks of brown hair still licked his wide shoulders, a new gleam of silver at the temples.