The Ships of Merior (20 page)

Seven days remained until solstice. Then at last he would be free to resume his stalled journey to Shand.

‘Look,’ groused Dakar. ‘If it’s sausage I smell in that package, are we going to eat? Leave meals to you, and we’d die of starvation to arpeggios in all eight keys.’

Dragged back to mundane matters, Halliron wended a path through the garret’s clutter of tin whistles, spools of silver wire and little clamps used to wind lyranthe strings, the faded scrolls Medlir bought from the salvager’s bins, and dog-eared leaves of rice paper with their scribbled variations of old ballads. He elbowed aside an awl and an ink-pot, and dropped his package on the table-top, nailed together from scrap boards on the day the tea upset once too often. The inn’s original rickety trestle had ended up feeding the hearth fire. If his apprentice’s hand at joinery showed a style more suited to a ship’s deck, the result at least was stable. Nothing spilled or fell off through Dakar’s vociferous pounce to be first to lay hand on the food.

Halliron settled on the hassock left vacant and gave the musician’s labours their due. ‘You aren’t needing my instruction any longer.’

Medlir rounded off a last arpeggio and deftly damped the strings. ‘I’m not yet willing to do without it.’ His look held more than humour as he added, ‘There’s one ballad left you haven’t taught me.’

‘You guessed that?’ Halliron bent his attention to stretching his fingers to keep them supple. ‘What a pity Jaelot’s mayor won’t have you play in my stead.’ He flicked his apprentice a piercing glance, then shrugged. Even on the edge of summer, stiff breeze off the bay made the streets salt-damp and chilly; the climate went ill with his joints. ‘What’s the rumour in the barracks?’

Leather scraped a plaintive whine from tensioned strings as Medlir slipped wrappings over the priceless instrument. ‘A scandal’s afoot over coin for the soldiers’ pay.’

‘No!’ Halliron slapped his knees in evil pleasure and whistled a fragmented melody. ‘Don’t say! The town bursar’s an embezzler?’

‘Better.’ Medlir set the lyranthe safely down in a corner and grinned. ‘Word goes he’s sold his sister-in-law’s ruby
bracelets to hire a herb witch to hide how taxes from the town treasury found their way into the coffers of Gadsley’s pleasure house.’

‘The one that peddles little boys? That’s rich.’ Halliron spun around in time to snatch a slice of bread away from Dakar. ‘I heard the mayor’s shrew of a wife intends a surprise announcement. Her feast’s to have a festival theme. The page who serves her table told me she intends to cut out any couple who can’t afford to buy a mask.’

Medlir’s eyes lit. ‘Dakar! There’s a secret you can leak to your doxy. How awkward, if the back-quarter courtesans had the hat shops engaged, and respectable ladies had to settle for second shrift.’

‘Maybe Havrita’s other eye will get scratched,’ the Mad Prophet said through a cheek crammed with sausage. He tore off another chunk of bread, quiet as Medlir joined him at the table and exchanged easy banter with the Masterbard. As long and as hard as Dakar listened, he had yet to trace any regional accent in the younger man’s speech. Although a musician with a well-trained ear might be adept enough to change his intonation, the fact that Medlir’s relaxed moments betrayed no distinguishing trait preyed on Dakar’s nerves. Almost as much as the oddity that, throughout an entire year, even since provoking a plague of fiends thick enough to draw reprimand from Althain, Asandir had yet to pursue him. Despite blatant disregard of orders to seek out and protect the Shadow Master, no Fellowship sorcerer had appeared to call down his misconduct.

Drunk, Dakar wouldn’t have troubled to lay one question alongside of the other; sober, he mentally thrashed himself to cold sweats in paranoia the anomalies might be connected. How demeaning, if Arithon s’Ffalenn turned out to be holed up in Shand, with himself all unwittingly being drawn there.

With the eve of summer solstice just five days away, preparations for the mayor’s masked feast reached a hysterical pitch. Artisans laboured and swore over tubs of wet plaster, mixed to make moulded figurines, while the gilder’s apprentices lined up to adorn them perched idle on their paint pots and called jibes. The confectioners’ shops were plunged into frenzy, and the thoroughfare through the southern gate was jammed into turmoil by the entrance of yet another mule train bearing cut flowers and myrtle. Footmen wore out boot soles delivering invitations; or else they stole kisses from the serving girls as they carried up parcels of ribbons, or jewellery ordered new for the occasion. Lamps burned in the dressmakers’ all night, as women changed their fancy or their shape. The mayor’s oldest daughter lost herself to excitement and ate enough comfits to spoil her waistline.

Havrita snatched at opportunity like a barracuda and won the commission to sew her new ball-gowns. ‘A lot of teeth gnashing on Threadneedle Street,’ Dakar reported, back from an assignation with a shop girl. ‘But no more bloodied eyes.’

Between the Mad Prophet’s excursions from baths to brothels, and Medlir’s acquaintances among the city guard, all rumours reached the attic, where Halliron spent increasing hours closeted in private with his lyranthe. He was disturbed just once, by two liveried footmen, who knocked with a small trunk of clothing furnished by the mayor for use on the night of the feast.

All but trampled by the pair’s flying haste to depart, Medlir stepped into the garret to find the Masterbard cursing in unmatched couplets, his rare and red-faced fervour focused to a frightening bent of rage.

When the old man’s tantrum at last succumbed to breathlessness, Medlir caught his wrists and sat him down. ‘Care to say what’s happened?’

Halliron shot back up the instant his apprentice loosed his grip. Pacing, distraught, his collar laces swinging undone and the hair at his temples hooked to snarls by the rake of his vehement fingers, he gestured toward the window that faced the inn’s muddy courtyard. ‘Never have I stayed to play for a man who insults me not once, but repeatedly!’

Medlir set his shoulders against the door post to keep from stepping back as the topaz eyes swivelled toward him, wide and snapping with fury. Quiet, he folded his arms.

‘Well, the nerve of Jaelot’s mayor, to dare to suggest what I should wear in the presence of his ridiculous wife!’ Halliron whirled, kicked the low cot to an explosion of dust from the ticking, and staggered a hopping half-step to end bent double in a sneeze. The paroxysm effectively sobered him. He regarded his knotted fists, and the wry twist to his lips unravelled in a burst of sudden laughter. ‘Dharkaron have mercy! Could you see me wearing some dandy’s tight-assed hose? In
pink
, no less, against a doublet with chartreuse shoulder ruffles?’

Medlir choked back a smile. ‘Imagination fails me. Did his lordship send a mask as well?’

‘Ath. A lamb’s head. You can picture that!’ The Masterbard collapsed on his mattress, loose-limbed as a puppet whose midriff had suddenly lost its stuffing. ‘I’ll be deliriously happy to be quit of this town.’

Far from disarmed by the subject change, Medlir clicked the door shut with his heel. ‘You didn’t say what Jaelot’s mayor sent for me to wear.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Halliron cracked back in caustic, protective sharpness. ‘You at least will stay out of this.’

‘Well, there we disagree.’ The flexible humour Dakar could never shake disappeared. Suddenly more killer than singer, his stance radiating leashed force, the man in the doorway shook out his right sleeve and used his
teeth to yank more tension in his cuff ties. ‘I’m going. Don’t pretend you won’t need me.’

The Masterbard locked eyes with the musician he had apprenticed, and the whetted determination he encountered threw him back six years to the memory of a prince’s oath swearing in a woodland dell. ‘I’m no match for Torbrand’s temper,’ he said quickly. ‘But if you make this your duty, and harm comes to you, I’ll go to my grave without forgiveness.’

‘Oh Ath,’ Medlir said on a queer note of change. ‘If you’re worried only for me, then surely there’s hope left for both of us.’

The sunset on summer solstice blazed over a city fragrant with fresh-split birch and cut flowers. Long since finished with his dressing, Halliron leaned on the sill of the opened casement, kneading the joints of his fingers. ‘Sithaer take it, we have a visitor.’

Caught while threading his points, Medlir said sharply, ‘Another servant of the mayor’s? After today, I wouldn’t expect such a one would dare to show his face here.’

‘You still believe there’s a man in this town who was born with any sense of shame?’ At the thump of footsteps on the landing, Halliron wrenched the door open in the face of the startled arrival and demanded, ‘Where’s Dakar? Or is it true that armed guardsmen snatched him off the streets in the middle of Beckburn market?’

The mayor’s footman tugged down his waistcoat, ridden up over the dome of his belly in his puffing ascent of the stairs. Taken aback by the tall elder in his black silk doublet, he fell back a step and ventured, ‘You speak of the mayor’s prisoner?’

‘I speak of a man who carries my personal word as bond on his civil behaviour.’ Halliron did not look aside
as Medlir snatched his belt and stepped to his shoulder to back him.

The footman cleared his throat. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’

‘But you do know where Dakar is,’ Medlir cut in. ‘Stop hedging.’

Dusk had fallen. Uncertain light from the chamber’s single candle played into the gloom of the hall and raised hard sparkles from the trim on Halliron’s dress clothes. A dimmer gleam of sweat sheened the footman’s pink forehead as he fluttered his hands in ruffled cuffs. ‘Well, I’m not to blame,’ he began, then flinched back, though no one moved forward to threaten him. ‘Your prophet’s set in chains in the banquet hall. My Lord Mayor decreed his fetters shall be struck only after the Masterbard has delivered his promised performance.’

From the street three storeys below, a carriage rumbled by, the harness bells on the team a sweet trill behind a woman’s airy laughter. A dog barked, and a scullion banged the door to the midden as life in the precinct of the innyard ran its indifferent course: in contrast, confined, unspeaking tension gripped the close little garret.

Then Halliron spun on his heel to a near soundless whisper of rich silk. None of his temper showed, nor did his words reflect rancour as he said in terse quiet to his apprentice, ‘Ath forgive me, you were right. In every sense, I will need you.’’

Unobtrusive in his tunic of dove-grey linen, Medlir had no words. The silver-tipped laces of his shirt sleeves tapped and chimed as he hooked the last studs on his bootcuffs. He fetched his master’s wrapped lyranthe from its corner peg behind the bed, and wondered in silent and venomous fury whether any other ruler in Athera’s history had grossly flaunted such ignorance, to repudiate a masterbard’s given word before his very face.

‘Come on now.’ The footman edged toward the
stairwell. ‘My Lord Mayor has a carriage ready outside to collect you.’

Another insult: by ancient custom, a masterbard came and went at no man’s pleasure. Halliron said stiffly, ‘Tell your mayor I would break all my fingers before I accepted the ride.’

The brass buttons on the footman’s waistcoat flashed to his protesting breath. ‘But -’

‘The weather is fine. We will walk.’ Anchored against rage by the guiding touch of Medlir’s hand on his shoulder, the Masterbard of Athera swept the mayor’s cringing servant aside.

He left behind a garret picked clean of belongings and a paid up account with the landlord. The pony cart also waited, packed to roll at a moment’s notice, in the post stable nearest to the gate.

‘Dawn,’ Medlir murmured. ‘It can’t come soon enough.’

Master and apprentice reached the base of the stairs and by unspoken agreement turned down the service corridor that let into the alley beyond the kitchen. Behind, the tavern bulked massive and dark, its high, gabled roofline like folded black paper against a sky pricked with midsummer stars. The sea breeze reeked of salt and the fish offal spread to dry for fertilizer. Birch smoke drifted from the festival fires alight in the markets by Dagrien Court. The thready, wild notes of a fiddle spun through the dark, clipped by the slap of harness leather and the grinding turn of wheels as the mayor’s carriage team was shaken up and reined around to leave the stableyard, its conveyance empty of passengers.

Halliron set a brisk pace. The palace lay in the fashionable quarter across from the council hall, a distance made difficult by crooked streets and cobblestone byways that rose and fell with the terrain, or zigzagged unexpectedly into staircases cut into the ribs of the
headland. After six months, Medlir knew every shortcut; given the gifts of his mastery, darkness held no impediment.

Tempered back to reason by the anonymity of the night, Halliron gave a rueful sigh. ‘I should have worried more about footpads.’

‘Why? Because of your jewels and gold chains?’ Medlir grinned and turned his shoulder to guard the wrapped bulk of the lyranthe as he passed through a narrow archway. ‘Take a closer look at yourself, my friend.’

The Masterbard glanced down, rocked by a start to see his glittering court finery masked to featureless black. ‘Ath! Your shadows? I should have guessed.’

‘Pray the thieves won’t,’ Medlir said. ‘There’s little risk to use my power here. No one knows my reputation well enough to send an informer to Etarra. And anyway, if you’d set foot in that carriage, I would have broken the mayor’s head. I still might. Do your joints hurt?’

‘Not so much.’ Halliron glanced at the prosperous tall-fronted houses limned in the bronze glow of torches. A high-wheeled phaeton rattled by, driven by a dandy bedecked in peacock plumes. ‘Where are we?’

‘Spicer’s Row,’ Medlir said around a small cough. The last female to share the phaeton’s upholstery had bequeathed enough perfume to shed a cloud of patchouli in the wake of the vehicle’s passage. ‘But never mind if you can’t smell the cinnamon. Turn here.’

They crossed a formal courtyard, where Medlir out of mischief flushed an amorous tom cat from yowling serenade beneath a rose bush. A shutter cracked open overhead, and a toothless matron emerged, shouting invective.