A Dead God's Tear (The Netherwalker Trilogy) (32 page)

Jarrod shot him an apologetic smile as he stood up and pushed in his chair, "Sorry, Simon. Alicia's right, we've got to hi
t the hay. Thanks for the song. May your God watch over you."

It was only Marcius who stayed at the table with Simon. Both Alicia and Jared shot him puzzled looks. "Marc?" Alicia asked.

Marcius nodded. "I feel like staying here a bit longer. It'd be nice to relax with some music."

"Come on, Marc." Jared prodded, "We have an early day tomorrow. It'd be wise to catch a few winks."

Simon recognized the internal struggle going on within Marcius, and he was wise enough to also see an opportunity when one presented itself. "Come on now, if he wants to stay, let him stay. He's big enough to look after himself, plus I'll be here to watch his back if I am wrong."

"I don't recall invi
—" Alicia began sharply, before being cut off by Jared.

“
It’s alright, Alicia. He's right, Marcius is his own man. G'night to you both," Jared spun on his heel, dragging a protesting Alicia by her arm as he led her up the stairs.

"Hmmmm
. . . " Simon threw Marcius a suggestive eyebrow and a lewd wink, "Wonder what he was in a hurry for?"

Th
e dusty-haired boy chuckled nervously, dismissing Simon’s thinly veiled innuendo. "It's not what it looks like. It's just that they worry and have a habit of trying to coddle me."

Simon shot him a disarming grin, “
Ah, well. Let us drink then?” he said, pushing a mug toward the man before picking up one for himself. “You’ll stay to chat and hear me play, right?”

“
Of course.”

And get drunk as you wait
.
Simon grinned into his cup. It was fortunate for him that it also happened that drunks have loose tongues. There was no mystery that a little beer couldn’t solve.

Chapter 19

J
ared closed the door behind him before turning around. “I know what you did to get us our freedom.”

Alicia kept her back to him. She looked remarkably small with her shoulders close together. “
Do you?”

“
Yes. I don’t know if I should thank you or be disappointed. Perhaps both.”

“
Disappointed, huh?” she whispered, and it was something in the way she said it, a nearly indiscernible flutter in her voice that alerted Jared that perhaps he had said something wrong. The Mage turned, remarkably calm, and Jared allowed himself a brief moment of relief, that she’d let his comment slide.  “Jared Garalan, privileged son of Gary Garalan, please tell me on what grounds that you have the right to think that your opinion of me matters?”

Alright, that hurt a bit, he admitted to himself. Not that he
’d show her that. “We are companions on the road. It only makes sense to care about each other.”

She stood her ground. “
Have I not shown that I care? If you knew of another way out of the problem we were in, one that allowed me to keep my pants on, I’d be more than welcome to hear it.”

Jared had no words to counter her logic and a heavy silence fell between the two. It was a tense standoff. Her, defiant and proud, and him, unsure and yet unwi
lling to back down.

He broke first. “
I’m sorry,” he said candidly, “I just wish we could have found some other way.”

“
Are you sorry for me, or sorry for Marcius?” she asked quietly.

“
I do not understand.”

“
You can’t protect him for the rest of his life, you know,” Alicia said, shrugging, “I don’t like what I did, but it got the job done. We are here, and we are alive. He can continue living his fairy tale world. I won’t say anything if you don’t either. This can just be between us.”

Jared opened his mouth,
intent on denying her words, but found that he couldn’t. She was right, in a way. There was just something so blithely honest about his friend, and he found that he wanted to protect Marcius, even if it was a losing battle.

Something akin to sadness passe
d over the Mage’s features then, as if she had seen how accurate her words were and regretted them. “Perhaps his innocence can last until we reach the Academy,” she said. “Though it most assuredly won’t last once he enrolls. He’ll either adapt or get crushed. The Academy will quickly force him to grow up.”

The bluntness of her words, the utter certainty of truth, alarmed Jared. “
Can any place truly be that bad?”

Alicia
’s smile was mirthless and dark. “Hell, you’ll find, has many forms. Nothing is more ruthless than a house of ambition. Cruelty is a product of power.” She turned around, going back to unpacking her sleeping roll. Jared, straining, almost missed what she said next. “After all, it made someone like me.”

❧　❧　❧

Simon needed to clear his mind. This was a lot to take in, and he needed the smell of fresh air and the constant rhythm of his feet to calm his nerves. The humorous part of him didn’t fail to point out that if he really needed fresh air, what was he doing walking along the streets of Lowtown?

He ignored it.

A wizard? Plots by the Academy? Captured by the infamous Solokovian bandit group and walking away from the encounter?

It was an amazing tale, like something he would tell over a roaring campfire to an en
thralled group of travelers in the dead of night. And the worst part was that Simon believed Marcius. The man was drunk, but didn’t seem the type to embellish things.

It didn
’t hurt that he offered to show the bard some spell play to prove his tale, which Simon was quick to stop. Everybody wanted money here, and money followed wizards around, or so everyone believed. Marcius would have had his throat slit and pouch emptied before the sun had risen.

Simon found himself strangely excited. Wizards! Magic! He
’d spent his life looking for adventure, a trait which contrasted sharply with his strong sense of self-preservation. Still, everyone knew wherever magic was, great events followed. He believed that rumor more than the gold one and had that familiar itch, like a personal song that he felt rather than heard. Things had gotten stale here, and now there was opportunity. He’d be a fool to overlook it.

But magic was also dangerous, and he had to think this through. He was also writing an autobiography, and wouldn
’t it be more interesting if he had something exciting to put in it? But how would he convince them to let him tag along? It seemed obvious that they weren’t interested.

Opportunities don
’t fall in your lap like this every day. He always felt as if he was destined for something great. Something more than getting by day to day as he was doing now. He was a chosen of the Broken One! That had to count for something, right?

He growled, lost in thought as the myriad of questions that seemed to only lead to more
questions constantly eluded his grasp. It made his head spin! The entire time he had been walking, counting on his subconscious to lead him through streets by memory. Normally one wouldn’t dare walk the Lowtown without some situational awareness. It was tantamount to a death wish, or at least meant that one wasn’t overly concerned with his money.

But Simon wasn
’t excessively worried. He had a knack for working his way out of trouble, to the point that he sometimes wondered if it was divine intervention. At the thought, his mind flickered back to the Broken One, but the notion unsettled him and he drove forward, both literally and figuratively, away from it. But more importantly, everyone knew him and knew that it really wasn’t worth robbing him because he never had anything of value besides his music.

The sounds of street assailed him from all sides, blended together in a comforting blanket of familiarity. Vendors haggled with buyers, the clip-clop of horses plodding slowly, pulling heavy wagons, and the low
murmur of dozens of individual conversations was exactly what Simon, who had lived and dealt with such his entire life, needed to tune out all the distractions as he pondered alarming information he had gathered the night before.

It als
o made him relax his guard, so that when two pairs of grubby hands reached out and grabbed him into a nearby alley, he was caught completely unawares.

Much like a mirror being held up to Harcourt itself, the Lowtown district was split into two distinct wor
lds, both deadly, but in sharp distinction to each other. The face of Lowtown was what any unknowing visitor, oblivious merchant or ignorant waif might recognize. It was a place of dirt, filth, and poverty for those who, either through luck or fate, had no other place to retreat to. But, like a mask, one merely had to look beyond the obvious.

There was power in Lowtown. Organizations that had fingers in machinations that went far beyond even the expansiveness of Harcourt. And the sanctuary of this underworl
d resided in the recesses, the blackened alleyways. It was here that deals were made, among the very dregs of society.

The fingers of power were like roots of a tree. Spreading out, splitting off into smaller and smaller veins, all of which fed the main bo
dy. Currently one of the very small fingers had slammed Simon against alley wall, knocking the breath from his lungs and causing an explosion of stars to dance before his eyes.

“
Well, well, lookit what we found, Tomgin, eh? Just a’wanderin’ about the streets, eh?”  A pair of grubby mitted hands, the fingers cut out either by design or wear and tear, held the wayward bard by his collar, punctuating each word with a rough shake. Simon’s nostrils flared as the acrid breath washed over him, and it was a struggle just to focus his eyes on his assailants.  Two blackened orbs, glistening from what little light that managed to filter in through the high tight walls of the alley, stared at him with ill-intent. A dirty brown cap stood at a rakish angle, almost covering one eye, and Simon could see several missing teeth in the yellow feral grin the man gave him.

That would explain the breath.

The point of something sharp, presumably a knife, was now jabbing Simon through his brown leather jacket, in the soft flesh of his stomach. Tomgin, sans hat and only slightly better garbed than his friend, pushed a greasy strand of black hair out of his face as he too leaned close, “You see,” he began with a snarl, “the boss wants his money that you owe him. Told ‘ol Gerald here to gut you like a fish if you didn’t have it.”

The sharp object accentuated the demand by digging even deeper, to the point where Simon was afraid it might draw blood. And given the state of his attackers, no doubt if the cut didn
’t kill him, the following infection would. He gulped. His mind raced. Time to stall. “Please guys, I’ll have your boss’s gold in a bit. Work has been rather lax you see, and well, you know how it is.” He couldn’t stop himself from giving a nervous chuckle.

The two men didn
’t share in his mirth. “Look, do you have the boss’s money or not, eh? I’d rather just cut ya here and leave ya to the guards to find in the mornin’.”

Heavy weight, like cold hard iron, welled up in the depths of Simon. He was a lover, a singer, a teller of tales; he
was a lot of things, but certainly not a fighter! He couldn’t die here like this! It wasn’t his fault that Lady Luck just wasn’t with him that day!

He secretly suspected the gambling pit cheated somehow, but he couldn
’t prove it. He certainly didn’t deserve to die like an animal in the back of some alleyway! For a second his normally clever mind failed him, and it took every ounce of his willpower to rein it in.

Calm down. Think!

It came to him. An idea so simple and easy, he was almost impressed with how obvious it was. It was a dirty, but he didn’t have much of a choice. “I have information for your boss that would easily pay off my debt.”

“
That so?” Gerald licked his lips, the doubt obvious in his voice. “An’ what would that be, eh?”

And Simon told them
of the great and powerful wizards seeking shelter at the inn. Of how they were practically overflowing with gold and riches, just begging to be pilfered. Even now, with his life in danger, Simon couldn’t help but take pleasure in the art of storytelling and found himself embellishing. Their eyes grew wide with each sentence, until Simon was sure that they would fall right out and roll about like dice.

It was too easy.

“Do ya hear that, Gerald?”

“
Yeah, Tomgin, I did. . . wizards!” Gerald said, “But how do we know he ain’t lyin’?”

Simon held both hands up as if to defend himself.  “
Do you think I’d lie to you, knowing that it’d just anger your boss with such a ridiculous story? Check for yourself, you all know where I am staying. They’re staying at the same inn as I am.”

“
He has a point,” Gerald agreed, loosening his grip on Simon enough so that Simon’s heel touched the ground. “But so help me, if we report this to the boss and it turns out to be nothin’ but a lie, they’ll need half o’ the guard to find all the pieces of you. Don’ you be skippin’ out of town ‘fore we check ou’ yer story.”

With that final warning and one last shove for good measure, the two men melted into the winding corridors of Lowtown, no doubt eager to deliver this precious information to t
heir boss and receive a hefty reward.

He waited a few respectful seconds, just in case they were still nearby, before allowing the grin to hit his face. It had worked like a charm, and he was already formulating how to turn these events into a profit for h
imself. He was fitting all the pieces to the puzzle together. Of course it was a bit of luck on his part that they didn’t insist upon taking him to their hideout until they checked out his information. Simon found that intelligence was a lacking trait the further from the trunk one got in Lowcourt.

Whistling, he set off back to the inn, notably happier and with a sense of purpose.

❧
　❧　❧

Marc, wake up. There are people here to see you.

The first thing that Marcius noticed when he opened his eyes was the in
tense throbbing pain of a hefty hangover. It pounded in his temples and made him squint at the rather annoyed face of Alicia. The second thing that came to his notice, as his mind slowly caught up to everything, was that he was wet and that Alicia was holding a bucket.