Sailing to Sarantium (20 page)

If he proved a decently quick study, Uncle Erytus had allowed, he
might be permitted to come into the business at a fair salary and
lead some minor trading expeditions himself. Eventually, perhaps,
after time had run and maturity had demonstrated itself, he might
become a partner with his uncle and cousins.

Thelon's mother and father had showered Uncle Erytus with abject,
embarrassing gratitude. Thelon's creditors, including several
shit-faced dice players in a certain caupona by the harbour, had
declined to express similar enthusiasm.

All things considered, Thelon had to admit that this had been a
usefully timed journey away from home, though the weather was ghastly
and his pious uncle and bloodless cousins took the sunrise
invocations too seriously by more than half and frowned at the very
mention of whores. Thelon had been actively pondering how to arrange
a quick tension-relieving encounter with their pretty blond serving
girl tonight, when the artisan's voluble indiscretions at the next
table had steered his thoughts in another direction entirely.

Certain hard facts were unfortunately inescapable. He was going to be
home in a few too-short days. There had been an intimation from some
parties that if he wished to continue enjoying the use and comfort of
his lees he had best be prepared to make a significant payment
towards eliminating his dicing debt. Thelon's uncle, as mulishly
stupid about a little gambling as he was about girls, was not about
to advance him any sums. That much had become obvious, despite Uncle
Erytus's almost reluctant good humour after his successful
transactions in boots and cloaks and whatever for the soldiers, and
the purchase of crudely carved religious artifacts in a town east of
the army camp. Trakesian wooden sun disks, he'd informed Thelon, were
much in demand in Megarium, and even more so across the bay in
Batiara. There was a good profit to be made, as much as fifteen per
cent, after all expenses. Thelon had heroically refrained from
yawning.

He had also decided, long before this, not to point out that his
uncle's piety and scruples appeared not to make him averse to bribing
innkeepers-all of whom appeared to know Erytus well-to allow them to
stay illicitly at a sequence of Imperial Inns along the road. Not
that he was complaining, mind you, but there was a principle here,
somewhere.

'Would it be a very great presumption,' Uncle Erytus was now saying,
leaning towards the red-bearded man, 'to ask to be honoured with a
glimpse of the illustrious Permit you are honoured with?' Thelon
cringed at the fawning, unctuous language. His uncle, licking
someone's boots, was an ugly sight.

The artisan's face darkened. 'You don't think I have it?' he growled,
affronted.

Thelon lifted a hand quickly, to hide another smirk. His uncle,
drinking a polite cup of the other man's Candarian, flushed red as
the wine. 'No, not at all! I am sure you ... of course you ... it is
just that I've never actually seen the Seal or the signature of the
august Chancellor Gesius. So celebrated a man. Three Emperors served!
You would be honouring me, good sir! A glimpse... the handwriting of
so glorious a figure... an example for my sons.'

His uncle, Thelon reflected sourly, had all the social-climbing
traits one might expect in a modestly successful provincial merchant.
He would endlessly regale his family with the unspeakably trivial
story of this Permit if he saw it, and would probably find a
religious moral to impose upon them, too. Virtue, the rewards
thereof. Thelon diverted himself by imagining just what sort of
example a eunuch was for his cousins.

'S'all right,' the Batiaran artisan was saying with a lordly gesture
that nearly toppled his latest flask of wine. 'Show you tomorrow.
Permit's up'n the room. The best room. Over the kitchen. Thash mush
too far away t'night!' He laughed, finding himself extremely amusing,
it seemed. Uncle Erytus, visibly relieved, also laughed loudly. He
had a terrible, unconvincing laugh, Thelon decided. The red-bearded
man stood up, swayed towards their table, poured again for Erytus. He
lifted the flask in unsteady inquiry; Thelon's cousins hastily
covered their glasses and so he, of necessity, had to do the same.

It was, quite abruptly, too much to endure. Candarian on offer and he
was forced to decline? And here he was, in the midst of some utterly
unholy nowhere, without any funds at all and only a few days from an
encounter that placed his legs-and Jad knew what else-at more than
some risk. Thelon made his decision. He'd just had a confirmation of
his earlier guess in any case. The man was such a fool.

'My excuses, Uncle,' Thelon said, standing, a hand at his belly. Too
much of the sausage. Must purge myself, I fear.'

'Moderation,' said his uncle predictably, a finger lifted in
admonition, 'is a virtue at table, as elsewhere.'

'I agree' said the fatuous artisan, sloshing his wine.

This, Thelon decided, heading towards the archway to the shadowed
front room, was actually going to be a pleasure. He didn't go to the
latrine across the hall. He went up the stairway, quietly. He was
quite good with locks, as it happened.

As it happened, he didn't even need to be.

'Be ready,' Crispin said inwardly, ‘I believe we have landed
our fish.'

'How
very nautical of you,'
Linon replied
sardonically.
'Do we eat him in salt or
sauce?'

'No wit, please. I need you.'

'Witless?'

Crispin ignored this.
'I'm sending the girl up now.'

'Kitten!' he called out, his voice slurred, too loud. 'Kitten!'

The girl who had called herself Kasia came over quickly, blue eyes
anxious, wiping her hands on the sides of her tunic. Crispin gave her
a brief, very direct look, then tilted sideways, spilling some more
of his wine, as he pulled the room key from his belt.

He'd had, truly, no idea who might fall for the baits he was offering
... the unlocked door, the garrulous drunkenness, crude hints dropped
over dinner and wine. Indeed, it had been entirely possible no one
would succumb. He had no fall-back plan. No brilliant constellations
of tesserae. A door left foolishly open, careless words about a purse
upstairs ... all he'd been able to devise.

But it seemed someone had risen to his lure. Crispin refused to let
himself ponder the ethics of what he was doing when the sullen nephew
he'd been watching gave him a too-naked glance and excused himself.

He squinted owlishly up at the girl and pointed an unsteady finger at
Erytus of Megarium. 'Thish very good friend of mine wants to see my
Permit. Gesius's Seal. S'in the leather purse. On the bed. You know
the room, 'bove the kitchen. Go get it. And Kitten ...' He paused,
waggled a finger at her. 'I know 'xactly how much money's in the
purse, Kitten.'

The Megarian merchant was protesting faintly, but Crispin winked at
him and squeezed the girl's rump as she took the key. 'Room's not too
far for young legs,' he laughed. 'Might let her wrap 'em round me,
later, too. One of the merchant's sons let out an alarming giggle
before blushing ferociously under his father's swift gaze.

A Karchite at a table across the room laughed loudly, waving his beer
at them. Crispin had thought, when he'd first entered the common
room, that one of that group might slip away and up. He'd spoken
loudly enough for them to hear... but they'd been drinking steadily
since mid-afternoon, it seemed, and two of them were fast asleep,
heads on the table among the food. The others weren't moving anywhere
quickly.

Erytus's bored, angry nephew with the thin mouth and long, fidgety
hands had said he was going to the latrine. He wasn't. Crispin was
sure of it. He was the fish, and hooked.

If he goes into a room intending to steal, he told himself, he
deserves whatever happens. Crispin was utterly sober, however-having
spilled, or shared, almost all of his wine-and he didn't really
convince himself. It occurred to him, suddenly, before he could push
the thought away, that it was possible that a mother, somewhere,
loved that young man.

'He's
here,'
Linon said, from the room
upstairs.

She went up the stairs again, moving quickly this time past the wall
torches, her passage making them waver, leaving a casting of uneven
brightness behind and below her. She carried a key. Her heart was
pounding, but in a different way this time. This time there was hope,
however faint. Where there has been uttermost blackness a candle
changes the world. There was nothing to be seen through the windows.
She could hear the wind.

She reached the top, went straight on back to the last room over the
kitchen. The door was ajar. He had said it might be. He hadn't
explained why. Only that if she saw anyone in there when he sent her
up, anyone at all, she was to do exactly as he told her.

She entered the room. Stood in the doorway. Saw the outline of a
startled, turning figure in the blackness. Heard him swear. Couldn't
tell who it was, at all.

Screamed, as she had been told.

The girl's fierce cry ripped through the inn. They heard it clearly,
even in the noisy common room. In the sudden rigid silence that
ensued, her next frantic shout rang clearly: 'There is a thief! Help
me! Help!'

'Jad rot his eyes!' roared the red-bearded fellow, first to react,
leaping to his feet. Morax rushed out of the kitchen in the next
moment, hurrying for the stairs. But the artisan, ahead of him to the
archway, went the other way, inexplicably. Seizing a stout stick from
by the front door, he stormed out into the black night.

'Mice
and blood!'
Linon had gasped.
'We're
jumping!'
The inner words came right on
the heels of the girl's cry.

'Where?'
Crispin demanded as he scrambled to his feet
downstairs and snarled a curse for the benefit of the others in the
room.

'Where do you think, imbecile? Courtyard out the window. Hurry!'

The wretched girl's scream had frightened him almost out of his head,
that was the trouble. It was too loud, too . . . piercingly
terrified. There was something raw in it that went far beyond
spotting a thief in an upstairs room. But Thelon had no time at all
to sort out why; only to know, almost immediately after he did the
wrong thing, that what he ought to have done turn calmly to her and,
laughing, order her to bring a light so he could more easily fetch
the Imperial Permit for the Rhodian to show his uncle, as promised.
He'd have so easily been able to talk his way through an explanation
of how, on an impulse, a desire to be of assistance, he had come up
to the room. He was a respectable man, travelling with a
distinguished mercantile party. What else did anyone imagine he was
doing? He ought to have done that.

Instead, panicked, stomach churning, knowing she couldn't see him
clearly in the dark and seizing that saving thought, he'd grabbed the
leather satchel lying on the bed, with papers, money, and what felt
like an ornament sticking out halfway, and darted for the window.
He'd banged the wooden shutter open hard, swung his feet out and
jumped. It took courage in the darkness of night. He'd no idea what
lay below in the courtyard. He might have broken his leg on a barrel
or his neck when he landed. He didn't, though the blind fall drove
him staggering to his knees in the muck. He kept hold of the satchel,
was up quickly, stumbling across the muddy yard towards the barn. His
mind was racing. If he dropped the satchel in the straw there, he
could double back to the front of the inn and lead the chase out onto
the road in pursuit of a thief he'd glimpsed on his way back from the
latrine after the girl screamed. Then he could reclaim the satchel-or
the worthwhile parts of it-before they left.

It was a good strategy, born of swift thinking and urgent cunning.

Had he not been felled by a blow that knocked him senseless and
nearly killed him as he angled across towards the shadow of the barn
under scudding clouds and a few faint, emergent stars, it might even
have worked.

'Imbecile! You could have hit me!'

'Learn to duck,' Crispin snapped. He was breathing hard. 'I'm sorry.
Couldn't see clearly enough.' There was only a faint spill of light
from the shuttered windows of the common room.

He shouted, 'Over here! I've got him! A light, rot you all! Light, in
Jad's name!'

Men calling, a confusion of voices, accents, languages, someone
rasping something in an unknown dialect. A torch appeared overhead,
at the open shutter of his own room. He heard footsteps approaching,
the loud voices nearing as men from the common room and the servants
from the other side streamed out the front door and rushed over. Some
excitement on a wet autumn night.

Crispin said no more, looking down in the light of the single
overhead torch, and then in the gradually brightening orange glow as
a ring of men surrounded him, some with light in their hands.

The merchant's nephew lay at his feet, a black flow that would be
blood seeping from his temple into the mud. The strap of Crispin's
satchel was still looped through one of his hands.

'Holy Jad preserve us!' Morax the innkeeper said, wheezing with
exertion. He'd raced upstairs and then back down. Robbery in an inn
would hardly be unknown, but this was a little different. This was no
servant or slave. Crispin, dealing with complex emotions, and aware
that they were only at the beginning of what had to be done here,
turned and saw the innkeeper's frightened gaze shift quickly from his
own face to that of the merchant, Erytus, who was now standing over
the body of his nephew, expressionless.

'Is he dead?' Erytus asked finally. He didn't kneel to check for
himself, Crispin noted.