Part 19 (1/2)
”Will there be apothecaries in the elven market? Will there be anyone?” she asked suddenly. ”The Moonracers said they'd withdrawn-”
Another wet splatter marked the dust. ”Elves! It's not their market, just the only place where they can set up to trade. Get rid of the tribes and the market will be a little cleaner, a little safer, that's all. There's a little of everything in the market, including apothecaries, licensed and otherwise. The rest will come looking for us as soon as we've talked to the first. That's the way of the market. We can buy and sell at the same time. I'll do the talking.”
She twisted a thick lock of brown hair around her fingers, thinking her way through a tangle of doubts. ”If we sell zarneeka in the market, we've got to tell them how to dilute it with flour to make Ral's Breath.”
The portraits of Urik's master had grown larger, clearer as they walked. Hamanu's robes were a brilliant sapphire blue. The gla.s.s...o...b.. of his eyes flashed with reflected sunlight, looking straight at her. Or so it seemed.
”We've never done that. We're not supposed to do it. We trade zarneeka to the Lion-King's templars and the Lion-King sells Ral's Breath to Urik; that's the way it's always been, Yohan. If something goes wrong-”
”Nothing's going to go wrong. We'll buy and sell and be gone. If the Ral's Breath we buy is as bitter as it's supposed to be, we know where the liar is. We can deal with him when we get back to Quraite and then come back to Urik at our regular time, same as before, with no one the wiser. If Pavek's told us the truth and what we buy is no good-well, Grandmother can decide what we do next.
Curled hair slipped off her fingertips. ”Going to the elven market will be safer than going to the customhouse?”
”Remember: I'll I'll do the talking.” do the talking.”
”Once we get inside the gate,” Akas.h.i.+a corrected; she was the mind-bender. Dealing with templars was her responsibility.
They approached the inspectors and regulators gathered outside the gatehouse. A yellow-robed pair hara.s.sed a merchant while the rest idled in the shade. New laws, regulations, and rewards for wanted criminals were written in red on the gatehouse wall, as usual, a list of warnings and enticements for anyone who dared to read them. She stole a glance while they waited for someone to give them the onceover. Pavek's name was still written there, still wanted for unspecified crimes against his city. The letters were fading, though, and the price on his head had not risen.
A weary-looking yellow-robed woman left the shade. She asked the usual questions; Akas.h.i.+a stared directly into her eyes as she answered them.
”We have trade today in the elven market.” She kept her voice low and even. ”The seals on our goods are all in order. We're no different than anyone else who's come through the gate today. You can think of no other questions worth asking.”
The templar blinked and rubbed her eyes as if she'd suddenly acquired a headache, which was possible, though Akas.h.i.+a had had no difficulty planting her notions in the woman's unimaginative mind.
”May we enter the city?” she asked after a moment.
The woman nodded. The Quraiters each dirtied their thumbs in a bowl of waxy ink and left a unique impression on the tattered sc.r.a.p of parchment the templars were using for today's tally-strip.
”Don't forget: Come back through here before sundown, or you'll owe six bits each, and ten for the cart.”
She smiled. Several shade-hugging inspectors whistled through their teeth. One offered to pay her poll-tax if she'd wait for him beside the Yaramuke fountain at sunset. She kept walking, never flinching or missing a step, and the whistling stopped before they reached the ma.s.sive gates. The farmers gawked with their faces pointed skyward. She had to call them by their true names to get their attention and keep them close to the cart as they entered the always-crowded, always-busy streets.
They smelled the market before she saw it: a dizzying blend of spicy delicacies floating atop the sharper scents of natron, pitch, and artisans' charcoal fires, and, of course, the ever-present sweet aromas of decay.
Yohan paused on the cobblestone verge of the market. He adjusted his grip on the cart traces and looked at each of the farmers before letting his stare come to rest on her.
”Stay close,” he warned them all. ”If you've got to look for something, look for a signboard of a striding lion with a pestle. That's the apothecaries' license we're looking for.”
”What about unlicensed-”
Yohan cut her short with a slash of his finger. ”The difference between licensed and unlicensed doesn't show on the signboard. Remember: stay close.”
And they did. She wrapped her hand lightly around one of the traces; that gave her more freedom to look for a pestle-it seemed that every hawker's sign displayed a striding lion-as they wandered the market. Traders hailed them from every ramshackle doorway of cloth, wood, or bone. Bold, ragged children begged for ceramic bits or offered to sell pieces of bruised fruit obviously scavenged from the gutters of Urik's more reputable markets. One child leapt into the cart and grabbed two handfuls of straw before she and the farmers could chase him away.
”What's wrong with them? Are they that that hungry? Should we offer them something?” she whispered anxiously to Yohan. hungry? Should we offer them something?” she whispered anxiously to Yohan.
”Stay close,” was his only reply, repeated through clenched teeth as the raids became more frequent.
Every dwelling or stall in the elven market seemed equally old, equally dilapidated and despairing. There were no signposts for the streets that met at odd angles and irregular intervals. Had she not heeded Yohan's warning and kept dose to the cart, she'd have been quickly and hopelessly lost. The tumult of noise and color, so attractive in her imagination, grew less so when it devolved into hostile stares and furtive bent-mind probes of her inmost thoughts.
She was unprepared for that Unseen onslaught from anonymous minds. In her previous visits to the city, she'd dealt only with templars-broken, mean-spirited individuals, each and every one of them, but, by their master's order, untrained in the arts of the Unseen Way.
No stray curiosity or inquiry penetrated the defenses she'd learned from Telhami, but time and time again she caught an unwelcome glimpse into another mind. The imaginations of those who dwelt in the elven market were as foul as the sewer channel in the middle of the so-called street they followed.
The market was not her grove; the confidence she'd felt when Telhami upbraided her about the dangers a city-man like Pavek posed to any solitary woman evaporated like morning dew. Her grip on the cart trace progressed from feather-light to a panicky clench.
One of the farmers shouted that his knife had been stolen. He plunged toward a twisted alley, determined to catch the culprit. Yohan intervened quickly, hauling the farmer back to the cart and staring down the hard-faced denizens who swarmed out of nowhere, ready to support the thief, not them.
”Nothing happened,” Yohan a.s.sured me grumbling mob.
”But my-” the poor farmer wailed, until Yohan pinched his wrist to quiet him.
”Everybody, move on.” Yohan used a commanding tone she'd never heard from him before.
”We ought not have come here,” she whispered.
He replied with a grunt that could have meant anything at all, then pivoted the cart sharply on its left wheel. They went down a rubbish-strewn alley to the lion-and-pestle signboard he'd somehow spotted during the fracas.
”Wait here,” he told the farmers. ”Sing out if anything happens.”
His hand on her arm guided her into a dusty shop. The proprietor, a human woman of indeterminate age, pushed away from a table covered with fortune-telling cards. The long red gown she wore might once have belonged to a wealthy woman, but the silk embroidery threads had been plucked out and now the lush floral patterns were mere dots and holes across the cloth.
”What's your pleasure?” she asked with a voice coa.r.s.ened by too much wine and too little fresh air.
”You need to ask?” Yohan gestured toward the fortune-telling cards.
Akas.h.i.+a recognized the ritualized rudeness that pa.s.sed for civility in the city. She used the style herself with the yellow-robes. It didn't bother her, or it hadn't until Just-Plain Pavek became a man in her mind, not a templar. And it bothered her even more with this woman who, on second glance, was only a few years older than she was herself. But the shop was filled with magic-laced things she could not name and the air itself was thick with Unseen inquiries; she held her peace, staying close by Yohan.
The proprietor lifted her shoulders in a worn-out shrug: ”A love philter?”
”Ral's Breath.” Yohan's arm dropped quickly from hers; the old dwarf was embarra.s.sed.
”You've come to the wrong place, then. Never sold the baby powders; never will.” And staring bluntly at Akas.h.i.+a's belly, the woman let out a snorting, bitter and private chuckle. ”Good luck. You'll need it.”
”Why?” Akas.h.i.+a asked, disregarding Yohan's admonition that she be quiet while they were in the shops.
”You won't find any, that's why. It's gone. Old Breath, new Breath, good and bad: it's all gone. Sold or confiscated by the yellow-robes.”
”Confiscated?”
”Where've you been, girl? S'been weeks since the orators harangued that the stuff'd been tampered with.” She swore and wiped a weepy nose against a dirty sleeve. ”Never worked much anyway, 'cept with babies and old men. But it's gone now.”
”Would you like some?” she asked gently.
Yohan's fist clamped over her elbow like a vise.
”S'all been confiscated. Ain't none left in the city. You got some, you keep it far and away from me. Don't carry no stuff from the rotted-yellow customhouse. Don't want no rotted yellow-robes bustin' in here, roustin' me outta house and home.”
The woman took a deep breath, staring at the single roof-beam of her establishment. Aware of her own foolishness-treating a vendor of the elven market as if she were a woman of Quraite-Akas.h.i.+a tightened her mind-bending defenses. But the woman was no master of the Unseen Way; her vacant expression was the product of a Tyr-storm of wildly suspicious thoughts whipping through her mind.