The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (17 page)

The others were waiting for me on the dock.

I looked at Flame and took her hand. ‘I have one more card to play.’

Fear ignited in her eyes. ‘Don’t go after the dunmaster—’

‘I doubt if I could find him in time. I was thinking of something else. Will you trust me a little longer?’

She focused her eyes on me with an effort. ‘I trust you.’ She wasn’t talking about the hope I offered her; she didn’t believe in it. She trusted me to kill her.

I turned to Ransom. ‘You owe me one hundred and fifty setus
.’

He was outraged. ‘How can you think of money at a time like this?’

‘Easily. Pay me.’

‘I said two hundred if she was returned alive and well. Look at her! She’s not well!’

Tor said softly, dangerously, ‘Pay the lady, Noviss.’

‘But—’

‘Pay her.’

He dug into his purse and begrudgingly handed over the money. ‘Now take Flame back to the inn,’ I said.

‘
The inn?’ he protested. ‘It's not safe there!’

‘No, it’s not,’ Tor agreed. ‘Not for any of us.’ He looked at Ransom with compassion. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe anywhere. But the dunmaster is not going to bother Flame for a while yet. He thinks he already has her in his power and all he has to do is wait for her to come to him. So the inn is as good as anywhere else. Come, Noviss, help Flame up onto the sea-pony. The creature is fretting; it needs to get back in the ocean soon.’

When the two of them had ridden off, Tor asked softly, ‘Are you thinking of what the Keepers have hidden? Of finding out what it is and then somehow using the knowledge as a bargaining point?’

I shook my head. ‘No. Duthrick has anticipated that. He knows me too well—it’s guarded with more than sylvmagic and I haven’t quite come to the stage where I can kill Keeper sylvs just to see what they are hiding. I have another way out for her, I hope… Go back to the inn, Tor. I’ll be all right.’

He accepted the dismissal, knowing his Awareness was needed by Flame and Ransom, but not liking the role I had assigned him. I suspected that it was more his duty to Ransom that made him decide to accede to my request, not any desire to oblige me. Had the circumstances been different, he would have come with me no matter what I said. Instead, he jammed on his hat, pulled the brim low, and slipped away across the wharf.

Once he was gone, I went to Niamor’s house. I had to pick my way through sleeping vagrants littering his doorway, and felt a stab of sharp emotion: a mixture of pity, shame, anger—and relief it wasn’t me there. The odour of unwashed poverty was still so familiar and childhood memories welled up in response; I had to push them away, not to think, not to remember.

I was lucky to find Niamor home; normally he would have been out at that time of night, but these were not normal times.

He wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about seeing me as he had been that morning, but he invited me in and gave me a drink. It was a drink I needed; I hadn’t had nearly enough liquid that day, and I hadn’t eaten since the grilled fish that morning. I choked on the potent alcohol, which prompted him to offer me water as well. It was equally welcome, although Gorthan Spit well-water always tasted faintly of salt and fish.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. He was uneasy, although he hid it well. ‘I still haven’t singled out a name for you.’ He waved a hand towards his desk where a few sheets of cheap paper were scattered haphazardly, as if to say:
I’ve been working on it.

My last real hope of extracting Flame entirely unscathed from the mess she was in died within me. I took a deep breath and wished the day would end. ‘I came to warn you,’ I said. ‘The dunmaster knows I came to see you this morning.’

‘So?’ he drawled. ‘He can’t know I’m helping you to identify him. Believe me, Blaze, I’ve been
very
careful on this one.’

‘Even if he doesn’t have the faintest suspicion about that, you could still be in trouble. Niamor, the dunmaster had the Cirkasian, and I played a part in her rescue. He knows it. He’s vengeful: dunmagickers are like that. Anyone who has had contact with me could be in danger. It’s time for you to move out. I hope it will only be temporary—the Keepers are working on the demise of this fellow.’

‘
Damn.
You fool, Blaze. Couldn’t you leave well enough alone?’ He gave a quick glance around the room as though regretting what he saw. ‘Damn you, you firebrand. I might have known anyone as splendid as you spelled trouble—’

‘Halfbreeds are always trouble, Niamor, splendid or not. You’d do well to remember that.’

‘Yeah. My mistake.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll send a message to you in a day or so; I’m close to working out who this fellow is. In the meantime, I will move out.’

I didn’t doubt that he had a bolthole already planned for just such an emergency. I said, ‘There’s one other thing you can help me with.’

He threw up his hands. ‘Sheesh. She’s just wrecked my life and now she wants to poke at the remains.’

‘I just want to know who’s the best doctor in Gorthan Docks. And where to find him. Or her.’

He laughed. ‘Now I know you’re joking, right? The only good doctor in Gorthan Docks is the afternoon sea breeze, love. There’s a good herbalist, though.’

‘I need a surgeon.’

‘If you need an operation—and I must say you don’t look half as good as you did this morning—then I advise you to take the next ship out and get it done elsewhere.’

‘There must be someone.’

‘If you want to die, sure. Believe me, sweetheart, you’re better off without Gorthan Docks’ only doctor. He’s a drunken butcher, he is.’

I stared at him. ‘Well, maybe that’s what I want. A butcher.’

‘That was only a manner of speaking. I wouldn’t even trust this fellow to carve up a festive dinner. He’s a
drunk,
Blaze, the good doctor is. Got the shakes. Memory failing. Halfway through delivering a baby he thought he was amputating a leg. The result was not pretty. Forget him.’

‘All right then. What about a real butcher?’

‘Come off it, love. We eat fish on Gorthan Spit. You can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that. Fish-gutters are a setu a score though,’ he added helpfully.

‘There must be
somebody.
’ I sounded desperate. I
was
desperate.

He thought for a moment. ‘Well, maybe there is someone. Fellow named Bloyd. I did hear tell he was a butcher by trade, although he sells fish now. I heard he had to leave the Norther Islands because he carved up his wife one day and sold her to his customers as prime pork.’

‘You joking?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s the story I heard.’

‘Where would I find him?’

‘At this hour? He’ll be in that wretched little cantina where the fish-gutters hang out. It doesn’t have a name but you’ll find it by the fishmarket. It doubles as a brothel, and you’ll recognise it by the bouncer who decorates the doorway. Size of a whale, he is.’ He shook his head as if exasperated by my foolhardiness. ‘If you really want to use a butcher when you actually need a surgeon—which has to be the height of insanity—then you had better get yourself a herbalist as well. There’s a very good one on the island at the moment, believe it or not. You can find him down in Chandlers’ Row. He’s rooming with a family of halfbreeds—fellow called Wuk and his wife and kids. His name, the herbalist’s, I mean, is Garrowyn Gilfeather. A Mekaté man. Quite a character.’

I touched his cheek, more grateful than he could possibly know. It almost seemed that things were beginning to go right at last. ‘Thanks, Niamor. Take care—’

He kissed me, without passion, on the lips. ‘Only a temporary goodbye, I hope, my lovely firebrand. I’m still hoping we’ll share a bed one day. Take care yourself, huh?’

###

I borrowed a lantern from Niamor and went to find the herbalist first.

He wasn’t too hard to find. A man selling rancid tallow from a tub on the sidewalk in Chandlers’ Row told me which place was Wuk’s. ‘The one with all the people outside,’ he said, pointing a greasy finger down the street.

‘Why the crowd?’ I asked. There must have been about thirty people in a line outside the house. It was a narrow building, two storeys high, made of rocks cemented together with shell-lime in a haphazard mosaic, its solidness topped by seaweed thatching.

He shrugged indifferently, but gave me a reply anyway. ‘The herbalist that lives with ’em. Sells medicine that works, would you believe? One of those Mekaté medicinemen.’

That sounded promising. Only trouble was, I didn’t have time to wait in line. I nodded my thanks and walked up to the building with a purposeful stride. Once there, I saw that the queue led up to a wooden lean-to built on the side of the house. I bypassed the waiting people as though I knew exactly what I was doing, opened the door to the lean-to without knocking, and closed it behind me.

The interior was unprepossessing—the usual hotchpotch of materials put together to fashion walls and simple furniture. A seal-oil lantern illuminated the man who sat cross-legged on the floor next to a huge sea chest, and his customer, an old woman, who sat on a stool in front of him. They both stared at me, then the man turned his attention back to the woman. ‘Follow the directions exactly, d’ye understand? Nary a change.’

She nodded seriously as he folded up some leaves and seeds into a parcel with seaweed wrapping. ‘And the cost, Syr?’

‘Nay, no Syr,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Not this mun. I’m no more than a humble selver-herder from a distant land. Pay what you will, gentle lady, no more, no less.’

Shyly, she dropped some coins into his hand and bobbed a curtsey. On her way out, she skirted me without a word and closed the door behind her.

The herbalist met my gaze and we took each other’s measure. He was on the wrong side of middle age, this Garrowyn Gilfeather, and I had never seen anyone like him, ever—for all that I thought I had met representatives of all the nations of the Glory Isles. He was from Mekaté, all right; the lantern light shimmered on the pearl inserted into the tattoo of a rabbit on his earlobe. However, he bore no resemblance to the Mekaté people I had encountered before. They had all been dark Souther folk, like the top-hatted Fellih-worshippers: high-nosed, clean-shaven aristocratic-looking people with deep black eyes. This man was red. And hairy. Broad at the shoulder but not, I guessed, very tall. His hair was red, a sort of gingery colour I’d never seen before, and all crinkled. It surrounded his head, a wild array of fleece, worthy of a Calment mountain ram. He had a red beard to match, although that was streaked with grey. A large long nose peaked into a sharp red end that seemed strangely mobile. The tip wriggled at me like that of a dog picking up an interesting scent in the air.

His skin was white, but it was blotched with red freckles, except where hair grew thick and curly on his arms and what I could see of his chest. He truly was a red man.

The clothes he wore suited his wild appearance, although they seemed inappropriate for Gorthan Spit’s suffocating heat. They were made of some kind of rough wool woven in a twilled pattern that confused the eye, and looked all the more startling because the fabric was tucked into haphazard folds around his body rather than sewn, or tied, or buttoned.

I looked back at his face. His eyes were flecked, and I could not quite decide what was the predominant colour. A deep slate grey? Or the dark red-black of freshly spilled blood perhaps…

They regarded me with an amused scepticism, I do know that.

‘Well, wee bittie lady?’ he asked finally. ‘Have ye looked your fill?’

‘My pardon,’ I said, hastily gathering my wits. ‘Are you Garrowyn Gilfeather, herbalist?’

‘Physician,’ he corrected. ‘At your service. And ye, I think, did not wait y’turn.’ His accent had a lilt to it that was all charm and music and it was easy to ignore the bite to the words.

‘No. It is a matter of urgency.’

‘Ye look healthy enough.’

‘A friend needs a surgeon, immediately, or she’ll die.’

‘Ah, lass, I’m no surgeon. I don’t like blood.’

I shifted my gaze to the sea chest. It had hinged top and sides, all of them swung wide so that it opened out into a cabinet. One side was filled with square drawers, labelled with writing I could not read; the other with shelves of stoppered bottles and corked ceramic pots. On the floor in front was a small mortar and pestle, next to that a brass brazier, no larger than a chamber pot, which glowed with hot coals.

I looked back at him. ‘Can you drug her, though? So as she’ll sleep through it? I’ve heard that Mekaté medicinemen have the secret of that… And you have the salves to prevent infection afterwards.’

‘Ay. Possibly.’ He shrugged. ‘Nought is certain, know ye.’

‘I’ll pay you ten setus
,
if you come to the Drunken Plaice in half an hour. I’ll have the surgeon.’

‘And m’patients?’ he asked, waving a hand at the door.

‘She’s doomed if we wait.’

Those eyes looked at me from under woolly eyebrows that grew every which way, and the look skewered me with its acuity; the nose wriggled some more. I tried not to look at it.