The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (7 page)

I drained the last of my brandy and made for the door. Just before I left, she said, ‘You’re still going to search for her, aren’t you? What I said—it didn’t make you change your mind.’

I looked back at her and smiled faintly. ‘You’re learning Flame, you’re learning.’

Two thousand setus was a lot of money.

I hadn’t given up yet.

###

That night I ate in the taproom.

Janko leered at me and deliberately brushed his clawed hand over my breast when he delivered my food; Tunn the tapboy grinned at me when he thought no one was looking; Tor Ryder of the Stragglers, still dressed in black, looked as serious as ever. Noviss glared in my direction whenever he wasn’t staring moodily into Flame’s eyes. I couldn’t believe that the Bethanic idiot had been so stupid as to put in an appearance in the taproom, thus showing himself to be cured of the dunmagic sore. Was he really so confident that the dunmaster wouldn’t try again? Or that Flame would save him next time?

While I was still wondering what made such a young man so arrogantly sure of himself, Niamor the Negotiator breezed in with some friends for a drink, winked at me, and breezed out again. The usual mob of slavers and reprobates were, however, missing and the reason was obvious: ten or so crew from the Keeper ship, all sylvs, had honoured the place with their presence. They had used sylvmagic illusion to improve on their looks, a common and utterly frivolous practice that never failed to irritate me. The faint sweet scent of it drifted through the room from their tables. The trimming on their chasubles told me that not only were they all in Council service but every single one of them was a graduate of the exclusive Hub Academy, which meant they were the best the Keeper Isles had to offer.

They ignored me totally, of course, although I was damned sure there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know exactly who I was and what I was doing there. What I
didn’t
know was just why
they
were there. Was the presence of a dunmaster on Gorthan Spit really enough to send a Keeper Councillor of Duthrick’s stature scurrying across the ocean? Enough to make Academy graduates eat in a place like
The Drunken Plaice?
Of course, Keepers loathed anything that threatened their sylvmagic and were therefore dedicated to wiping dunmagic off the face of the islands (they still had a long way to go, mind you!) but they didn’t usually send a Councillor and a shipload of their top officers to deal with one dunmaster. They normally sent someone like me, together with a few young Keeper sylvs who wanted to prove themselves. I wondered idly just how this lot thought they were going to find the dunmaster without the aid of one of the Awarefolk. I stared at them, exasperated by their arrogance and confidence, envious of their easy camaraderie—yet appreciative of their courage and all that well-trained, lightly sheathed energy.

Anyway, their presence certainly put a damper on the atmosphere in the taproom. Even Janko tiptoed around them. Noviss glowered in their direction as often as he glowered in mine; the boy was a transparent as a jellyfish. I wondered why the Keepers annoyed him so, and I wondered just how long Flame would put up with him; she had ten times his good sense.

However, it was Tor Ryder who interested me more that evening. His expression didn’t change (did it ever?) but he was as tense as a sea-pony too long out of the water. I came to the conclusion that he didn’t like the Keepers one little bit either. Interesting.

I ate my dinner quickly and went back upstairs. As I’d expected, Flame had locked both her room and Noviss’s with sylvmagic, but that meant nothing to me. I just opened the doors and walked through the magic as if it wasn’t there. I searched her room first and found nothing of interest. There were a few clothes, a bar of perfumed soap and a comb and brush, all of a quality that indicated she wasn’t short of money, but there was nothing that gave me a clue to her true identity, or to the whereabouts of the Castlemaid.

Halfway through the search I had that funny prickling feeling you get sometimes when you’re being watched; my heart lurched like a rowboat in a storm. I looked up, and found a line of birds roosting on the window sill in the darkness, on the
inside
of the shutters. They were awake and were looking at me with bright, curious eyes. I decided I must be a poor burglar; my nervousness made me so sensitive that even the stare of a bird seemed sinister.

I moved on to Noviss’s room, and there I had more luck.

I found a breviary in among his belongings.

And that could only mean one thing. He was a Manod. A Man of God. My jaw dropped about as far as it could go—that naïve, immature boy was a lay brother of the Menod? He didn’t fit with my image of the sect at all. I’d been schooled by Menod, after all. As a child I had sometimes loathed their discipline and their rules and their constant attempts to mould me into someone they thought I should be, mainly because I had never been a soft-shelled hermit crab, willing to shape myself to fit another’s shell. I had respected their earnest goodness, however. Later, as an adult, I had come to know a few of them, lay members of both sexes as well as patriarchs, and I had a sneaking admiration for their dedication to Good with a capital G. I had learned to respect them all over again, mostly because they were so pragmatic. They did things rather than talked about what ought to be done. They didn’t bother too much with public prayer or proselytising like the Fellih priests. They certainly didn’t hate anything that was fun, as the Fellih did. They may have been prompted to good works by their belief that such would take them to heaven, but nonetheless I had always found them genuine in their kindness and charity.

The relationship between Menod and Keeper was often strange, which might explain why Noviss had glowered at the Keepers downstairs. Most nonsylv citizens of the Keeper Isles were in fact Menod, worshipping the Menod God and subscribing to the idea of a single all-powerful, all-loving deity. There were more Menod patriarchs and worship-houses in The Hub than in any other city in any islandom. The Menod Patriarchy itself was centred on Tenkor, which was one of the Keeper Isles. In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, the Keeper Council of The Hub and the Menod Council of Tenkor often squabbled, sometimes quite acrimoniously. The Keeper Council did not like the growing power of the Menod, nor did they appreciate the directives given to the faithful about the way they should behave if they were in administrative positions of power. The Menod criticized Keeper morality and preached against the use of sylvmagic, calling it the temptation of the Great Trench. Worse still, at least from the Keeper Council’s point of view, the Menod faithful were growing in numbers as many of the smaller religious sects in other islandoms, impressed by Menod charity and education, were being converted. And greater numbers meant more power…

At home in the Keeper Isles, anomalous situations were frequent. Some of the Keeper Council sylvs attended services, for example, seeking salvation as assiduously as any patriarch. Many atheist Keeper Councillors sent their children to Menod schools because of their superior teachers; and many sylvs managed to accept the faith while still using their magic powers. ‘Ethical Sylvs’, they called themselves. Their catch phrase was ‘Sylv power with responsibility and Menod morality’. As a consequence, the Patriarchy often turned a blind eye to what their sylv flock was doing in their spare time. I might have called them hypocrites, except that they had a strong aversion to injustice, such as the injustice done to obvious halfbreeds like me. Curiously, many Menod, particularly many of their patriarchy, were Awarefolk, which gave me another affinity with them.

Well, Noviss had no Awareness, that’s for sure, any more than he had compassion for the halfbred. If he was a Manod, he was a poor specimen.

I thumbed through the breviary and found a name on the flyleaf: Ransom Holswood. Holswood. A Bethany Isles name, if I remembered correctly, and Noviss had a ruby-shelled crab tattoo, the mark of Bethany Isles citizenship. Oddly enough, I was fairly sure I’d heard Holswood linked to the personal name of Ransom somewhere before. I’d have to think about it.

I didn’t find anything else of interest and I left the room as unobtrusively as I’d entered, the sylvmagic locks seemingly untouched.

###

I went out into the town again that night.

As usual, the day had cooled with the arrival of the afternoon Doctor, but the wind had dropped since and the evening was unpleasantly warm. A snatch of conversation I heard as I passed a group of middle-aged men loitering on a street corner told me I wasn’t the only one to notice the heat. ‘Damn weather,’ one of them was saying. He scratched himself vigorously and I saw that his skin was covered with a scabbing rash; there wasn’t a piece of him bigger than a fingernail that was free of it. I didn’t know what disease it was that he had, but I guessed he’d been hounded out of his home islandom because of it. He continued, ‘I feel like a lobster on the boil. Must be three months since it rained last.’

‘Yeah,’ another agreed, ‘we’ll be back to buying water from bastards with deeper wells.’ I walked on out of earshot as the others began bemoaning the extortionate price of well water during a drought. It wasn’t my problem, thank God. With any luck, I’d be off-island before any wells dried up.

I hadn’t gone much further before I saw the two Fellih-worshippers again. Not surprising really, as Gorthan Docks was not that big a town. They’d set up a raised stand, hung up a couple of lanterns, and were haranguing the passers-by from this makeshift stage, exhorting them to change their ways or face eternal damnation. If they thought to make converts that way on Gorthan Spit, they were about as stupid as crayfish trying to find their way out of a craypot. It’s hard to threaten people with hell when they already live there, and it is equally hard to entice them with a vision of paradise when in order to get there you had to abstain from anything even remotely enjoyable along the way. The inhabitants of Gorthan Spit, of course, gave as good as they got, and heckled the speaker unmercifully. I stopped to listen.

‘Eternal life will be yours,’ one of the preachers shouted with impassioned sincerity as he wagged his finger at a drunk who could barely walk straight, ‘if you change your ways! Swillie is the instrument of the Devil, leading you down the whirlpool to eternal drowning in the Great Trench, choking and struggling for air as the demons of the Deep attack from the abyss…’

‘Never mind, old Ike there’ll drown happy as long as he’s got his swillie,’ someone interjected.

‘A nasty sort of fella, Fellih,’ someone else said loudly. ‘Drownin’ people like that.’

The speaker ignored them and turned his attention to me, singling me out with his waggling forefinger. ‘And you, you heathen woman, how dare you flaunt your sex in a man’s clothing! How dare you proclaim your sins to the world by your wanton dressing! Do you not feel shame? You entice men to the sin of fornication that will block their way to paradise! You turn their thoughts away from Fellih towards lust of the basest kind—repent your evil! Cover your body in skirts and go forth with modesty, eyes downcast, to serve only your husband, lest you drown in the waters of hell…’

‘Why, Blaze, I think he fancies you,’ a voice murmured in my ear.

It was Tor Ryder, of all people, standing right behind me. I had not thought to find that he had a sense of humour, and wondered if he was just being sarcastic.

Uncertain of how to take it, I ended up being entirely graceless. ‘Oh shut up.’

‘Sorry,’ he said lightly. ‘They are somewhat repulsive, aren’t they, with their absolute surety that they speak for a higher power.’

‘Not to mention their certainty that anything pleasurable has to be wicked,’ I said with a smile, trying to make up for being needlessly rude. The preacher was even then blasting forth about singing being the Devil’s tool, and dancing the Devil’s trap. ‘I think I’ll be off to do some more sinning. It’s more fun than listening to this.’ I said this loud enough for everyone to hear, and there was a ripple of laughter through the listeners. I nodded to Tor and went on my way.

I dropped by a couple of bars, drank a couple of mugs of watered-down swillie and asked some questions. About an hour later, as a result of the answers, I headed for a rooming house on the other side of the docks, a place that was renowned for the quality of both its whores and its swillie, either of which could be found in its cellar bar. I was looking for the ghemph that Niamor had mentioned—my own business this time, nothing to do with Keeper affairs.

The place was quite pleasant, as far as bars in Gorthan Spit went. It was clean and it was quiet; the woman who presided over the cash desk was as huge as a whale calf—and as intimidating as the calf’s sire when it came to dealing with troublesome customers. I nodded to her and the narrowing of her eyes indicated that she recognised me. She had a good memory; it had been five years since I’d had a drink there. I gave the place a quick survey as I came down the steps. It didn’t seem to have changed much and I couldn’t see anything that looked dangerous: no armed drunks, drugged crazies or rowdies looking for a fight. The bar was the same block of hammered-down coral, the furniture could have been the same unmatched assortment of driftwood tables and chairs, the candles were still of the best spermaceti wax. The whores and the clientele might have changed, but the former were just as blatantly bored as their predecessors and the clientele looked just as harmless. Several Keepers from the ship were there. And Tor Ryder had evidently tired of the Fellih-worshippers, because there he was too, sitting with a man who was wearing a Keeper-style artisan’s tunic that had seen better days, a poorly dressed fellow who certainly wasn’t one of those from
the
Keeper Fair
. I couldn’t see the slightest touch of sylvmagic around him and I would not have been surprised if was talentless: he lacked the air of confidence that Keeper sylvs always had about them.