Imager's Challenge (17 page)

“It wouldn’t be absolute, but it would seem more likely.”

“Good! I’ll talk to them.” She looked directly at me. “We’ve both had long weeks. Can we not talk about them and enjoy dinner?”

“Absolutely. That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard.” With that, I offered her my arm, and we walked down the staircases.

Bhenyt had hailed a hack, and it was waiting. I slipped him a copper. More, and the family wouldn’t have approved. He grinned at me as I offered Seliora a hand getting into the hack.

“Azeyd’s,” I told the hacker.

“Azeyd’s it is, sir.”

Once inside the coach, I turned sideways to face Seliora. “I am sorry . . .”

“Are you sorry you did it? Or sorry you upset me?”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “I accept. You did need to talk to her, but there was time to tell me that was what you needed.”

I understood all too well. Offering an apology for a necessary act was hypocrisy, but not apologizing for a rude approach to the necessary was unforgivable. Since I had apologized . . . all was well. I hoped.

Azeyd’s was located on a side street without a name off Nordroad, some three blocks to the west of Guild Square. The outside was unprepossessing, just a dark red set of double doors in a yellow brick facade, bound in brass under a short awning and flanked on each side by a set of two narrow windows filled with leaded glass panes that were anything but recent in style or construction.

After helping Seliora from the hack and opening the door, I followed her into the restaurant. The woman standing at the far side of the small foyer tiled in large red and black squares looked to Seliora. “Ah . . . Mistress D’Shelim.” Then she looked to me, her eyes clearly measuring me and the imager grays that I wore. “Sir.”

“This is Imager Master Rhennthyl. He’s a friend of the family.” Seliora smiled demurely. “He’s an even better friend of mine.”

“Then he is certainly welcome here.” Her smile to me was warm, yet wary, before she turned and led us to the right into a narrow and long room that held two rows of tables—four on one side and five on the other, each row set against a pale tan plastered wall.

The wall was decorated with a form of art I’d never seen before—thin strips of colored leather braided and worked into designs, ranging in size from a diamond shape less than ten digits on an edge to a leather mosaic mural almost two yards wide and two-thirds of a yard high. The mural showed Pharsi riders charging a line of musket-bearing foot soldiers.

“The battle of Khelgror,” Seliora murmured. “The last stand of the Khelan Pharsi against the Bovarians.”

“Here you are,” offered the hostess, gesturing to an oval table against the inside wall.

“Thank you.” Seliora and I spoke almost simultaneously.

A single bronze lamp hung from a bronze chain, positioned about a yard above the center of the table. The linens were red, and a single slate sat on a polished black wooden stand set near the plaster wall and facing outward.

“What do you suggest?” I asked.

“Have you ever had Enazai? It’s a traditional ice wine, powerful, but served before a meal.” She paused. “Father claims that’s because, after drinking it, no one cared what the food tasted like.”

“I should try it.”

“Two.” Seliora nodded to the hostess, who slipped away.

I looked over the menu chalked on the slate. “How is the Bertetia? What is it?”

“Cow stomach marinated for months, sliced and fermented, and then broiled and served with blue potatoes. Grandmama likes it. None of the rest of us have tried it more than once.”

“The forest quail sounds better.”

“It’s one of my favorites, along with venison ragout, but that’s very spicy.”

The hostess returned with two half-sized goblets of a pale red, almost pinkish, wine. “What will you have?”

“We’ll share the priata platter, and I’ll have the ragout,” Seliora said, “and a red Grisio.”

“The quail with a white Cambrisio,” I added.

After the hostess left the table, I lifted the small goblet. “To you.”

“To us,” Seliora replied.

I sipped the Enazai . . . and was glad that I’d only sipped. It didn’t burn on the way down, but even that small swallow had a definite impact. Within moments, I could feel the warmth it imparted all over. “I like it, but your father has a point.”

“He usually does.”

“Like you,” I teased.

“And you don’t?” she countered.

Since I was supposed to have a point, I had to come up with one. “I heard something at breakfast this morning. One of the older masters was talking about how life and people really operate in patterns and how some of the problems we face are a result of intersecting patterns—old patterns of doing things that clash with new patterns created by the way things change.”

“Go on,” Seliora prompted.

“Things are changing in Solidar. The number of High Holders is decreasing, and those who are left are more powerful—”

“And more arrogant.”

“The larger factors are also getting wealthier and more powerful, and I have the feeling that we’re getting more people in the taudis, and they’re poorer than before.” That was more feeling than anything, but I trusted it.

“There are boys who are smoking elveweed now. Not just men.”

“Khethila has seen more men smoking it as well.”

“They can’t get jobs. We hire from there when we can, for the hauling and rough positions, but we only need a few men. It’s hard to find ones who will work and aren’t weeded out. Grandmama said it would have been hard for her if she’d arrived in L’Excelsis now.”

“Why?”

“Everyone wants to make golds the easy way, and that’s trafficking in elveweed. She wouldn’t do anything like that.”

At that moment the priata platter arrived. On it were small pastry crescents with a dark sauce oozing from the edge where the two sides of the flaky crust joined, large green olives stuffed with some sort of cheese, melon circles wrapped in thin ham, and marinated grape leaves wrapped around some sort of filling.

Seliora lifted one of the crescents, and I followed her example, discovering the sweet/sharp sauce imparted a tang to the chopped onion and ripe olive mixture within the crust.

“You said you had a point,” Seliora prompted.

Not only did I see the mischievous glint in her eyes, but I could hear a certain interest in her voice. “Besides a good dinner? Oh . . . I was thinking that better steam engines mean we need fewer strong backs and mules and horses, and more people who can do things with powered looms, the way you design fabric patterns, or the way Father can order a fabric more to a clothing factor’s requirements.”

“Those engines that power the looms and the ironway engines cost more in golds, but they produce more, and so the large High Holders get larger, and the larger factors get wealthier, and there are more smaller businesses like NordEste, and fewer individual crafters—”

“You’re not exactly small,” I pointed out.

“Compared to the wealth of a High Holder like Ryel? We’re nothing.”

“But there are hundreds of businesses like yours. Thousands all over Solidar, and that will change things. The Council is based on the way things were a century ago.”

“Rhenn . . . listen to your own words. The structure of the Council hasn’t changed. People still think of Pharsis with distaste, and shopkeepers and trades-people as unworthy of having any real rights. Do you think that the High Holders or the guilds want to give up power? Together, they outvote the factors. Why would they change?”

“Not all the guild members think that way.” I was thinking of Caartyl.
“You’re right, though. Maybe they won’t change, but it’s still a pattern of conflict.”

By then we had finished off everything on the priata platter, and the hostess appeared and whisked it away, only to reappear with our dinner and wine.

From there on in, we talked about families, the world, food, wine, and each other. Before all that long, or so it seemed to me, I was helping Seliora out of the hack outside of NordEste Design and escorting her to the door—holding my shields so as to protect us both.

“Can I stop by tomorrow?” I asked just before she was about to close the door.

“Why don’t you come for lunch—except that it’s really a combination of breakfast and lunch? It’s at half before noon.”

“I’ll be there.” I couldn’t help smiling, and it certainly didn’t hurt to see her smile back at me.

The wind had turned much colder by the time I returned to the hack, and as I rode back to the Bridge of Desires, I realized that if I reached my rooms without incident, it would be one of the few times in recent months that nothing had occurred after I had left Seliora.

I didn’t relax until I was back in my rooms, but nothing happened. “Not this time,” a small voice whispered inside my skull. I had the feeling the voice was right . . . that sooner or later, I’d have an unpleasant surprise, courtesy of High Holder Ryel, but I’d still had a wonderful evening.

Just before eighth glass on Solayi, after waiting for nearly half a glass, I hailed a hack off the Boulevard D’Imagers and asked the driver to drop me where South Middle turned off the Midroad, close to four milles northeast of the Bridge of Hopes.

South Middle angled off Midroad, so that it actually ran almost due east-west, unlike the Midroad, which angled from the northeast to the southwest. In practice, the central part of South Middle where I was headed, almost a mille from the intersection, was the north border of the South Middle taudis, where the street riot supposedly caused by street preaching had taken place. I wanted to walk the distance to get a feel for it, and Solayi morning was a good time. It was bright, if cool with a brisk wind under a sky with only a few clouds, appropriate for the first day of Feuillyt and the official first day of fall. Not that many were out on the streets.

The first sign that I was approaching the taudis was a chest-high brick wall to my right, on the south side of South Middle. The bricks had once been yellow, but now presented a mottled tannish brown appearance. In a few places, there were patches of faint yellow, where graffiti had been scrubbed off by one of the penal road crews. The second sign was that I could hear children playing beyond the wall.

I glanced over the time-smudged brick barrier wall and across the narrow strip of dirt that had been a parkway decades earlier at the rows of ancient two-, three-, and four-story dwellings, the wall of one building indistinguishable from the next. Most of the front stoops were empty, but I saw one man with a tangled beard, puffing on a long pipe of the type used for elveweed. I glanced farther south along the row of battered brick dwellings. There might have been another elver on a stoop near the cross street.

I kept walking.

A dark-haired woman with two children, both girls, looked up as I approached.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, sir.” She took their hands and did not meet my eyes. Her shawl and cloak were both spotless, but the wool was frayed in places, and
the pattern an Extelan weave that had not been available since before I had become an apprentice to Caliostrus.

Two boys almost old enough to be working stepped through a gateless gap in the wall. The taller one looked at me defiantly, but only for a moment, until the other murmured something, and both turned and headed back into the taudis.

Just ahead, again on the right and behind the wall, was the first new building I’d seen, a narrow, single-storied, yellow-brick structure with a steeply pitched roof. A cupola of sorts rose on the nearer end above the three sets of double doors that made it look like a meeting house or an anomen of some sort, but I’d never seen an anomen like that, which suggested it was one for another faith, although they wouldn’t have called it an anomen.

For the next half mille, I saw no one else at all close to me, and I turned back.

I almost had reached Sudroad before I could hail another hack. This time, I had the driver take me a quarter mille beyond NordEste Design, farther out Nordroad, and drop me off. I didn’t know if I’d see or sense anyone with less than savory intentions, but if I did, I had an idea I wanted to try.

The only problem with my idea was that on the entire walk back, I saw almost no one. In fact, I saw fewer people than I had walking past the taudis. I did reach Seliora’s a fifth of a glass or so before I was due, but that wouldn’t be a problem. I dropped the polished brass knocker twice and waited.