The Wide World's End (19 page)

Aloê scribbled
Many thanks! A.O.
beneath this and returned it to the sock.

She stopped for a moment or two to chat with the thain outside the message room. She felt a little guilty about brushing her off earlier. She felt less guilty when it turned out that the girl was excited to discuss the “fit of madness” that had caused Morlock to destroy the Witness Stone. Aloê walked away while the burbling thain was in mid-word.

There was a Well of Healing not so far from here; she recovered Raudhfax from the watch-thains outside and rode her along the old wall-road until she came to Wall-Well.

The Skein of Healers always dug a well outside their hostels of healing. Aloê had no idea why, although she had studied with them off and on over the years. But she was grateful for herself and for Raudhfax tonight: she was suddenly dry as a summer street—thirsty enough to drink straight from the well bucket. And Raudhfax drank as deeply after Aloê filled the trough beside the well.

The door to the healing hostel was open and unguarded; they always were. She walked in to find two yellow-robed healers playing a game with word tiles.

“Yes, Vocate?” said one of the healers, with a supercilious air.

“Your throat bothering you?” asked the other, who either had a quick eye for bruises or had attended the aftermath of the day's Station.

“No, thanks,” she said to the second healer, ignoring the first. “I'm headed north to investigate the death of Summoner Earno and I was hoping one of your order could come and assist me with the gorier details.”

Master Snide said snidely, “Binder Denynê was dispatched some days ago and is awaiting a vocate at Big Rock House.”

“Don't mind him,” said the other healer. “He hates nightwork and he's losing at Wordweave and these things make him grumpy.”

“Thanks for your courtesy,” she said to him, “and good luck in your game. All night long.”

She spun about and strode out the open door.

It was a long way to Big Rock, but the Road was clear, the moons were bright, Raudhfax was game, there was no way that she was going to sleep tonight.

“Let's go!” she said, leaping into her palfrey's saddle. Raudhfax snorted and clattered away up the street. She needed only a word or two in Westhold horser dialect to turn west and then north to find the great Road.

They were not far north of the city when she felt rather than saw three shadows pass between her and the moons. She was conscious of the ill omen, but she would not let it keep her from her work. She would not let anything do that.

They arrived in the hour before dawn at the inn at Big Rock. There was only the one, built into the side of the gigantic boulder that gave the little town its name. The ostler and the cook were already up, so she kissed Raudhfax's nose and told her she was a champion and then went in to consume as much egg-pie and smoked fish as the pantry could conveniently yield.

“Your healer and gravedigger friends are both already here,” the cook explained when she no longer felt Aloê was going to die from hunger or thirst. “The householder put you all in the big room in the front of the house—there are three beds in there.”

“Do you suppose I can sneak in there and grab a few hours' sleep without waking them?” Aloê asked wistfully.

“The door is very quiet, Vocate—I'm sure you won't disturb them.”

The door was quiet on its hinges and opened with hardly a sound; Aloê did not in fact disturb them. But they weren't sleeping. They were wriggling around on one of the beds with their heads lodged between each other's legs. Aloê closed the door as quietly as she had opened it and went back down to the kitchen.

“Another room, possibly?” she asked.

With a thousand apologies and a face burning with shame, the cook took her up the back stairs and admitted her to paradise. Paradise was a drafty, closetlike room in a corner of the attic; at its center was a bed that was softer than clouds in a summer sky. Aloê muttered incoherent but utterly sincere thanks, fell into the bed fully clothed, and slept most of the day.

When she awoke and crawled out of her closet paradise, she found it was midafternoon. Wandering around the upper floors of the inn, Aloê found nothing like a privy or a rain room. There was an empty room with a tub and a pump, but Aloê guessed it must be some sort of laundry: the coarse brushes and bitter, stinking soap on the bare, water-stained board beside the tub could not have been meant for use on people.

She descended the back stairs to the kitchen, where she found a woman in a blue gown eagerly discussing food with the cook while a thin-faced, apricot-colored woman in yellow watched enviously, perched on a nearby stool.

“Vocate Aloê!” cried the cook—with a certain relief, Aloê thought. “Here are Necrophor Oluma Cyning and Binder Denynê from the Skein of Healing.”
And now they're you're problem
, her pointed glance seemed to add.

“Necrophor—Binder—good day,” Aloê said.

Blue-gowned Oluma jumped across the kitchen and slapped both sides of Aloê's right hand in greeting. “Good morrow, Vocate! Or close to evening now. I trust you had a good ride up last night? I saw your horse this morning; she's a beauty. Do you want to look at my seconding papers? I've got them up in our room. We've got a great room at the front of the house; I don't know why they didn't show it to you this morning. When—”

“Be glad to look at your seconding presently,” Aloê said hastily, “but I've been asleep all day—”

“And you're hungry!”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Thirsty, too, I bet! Lundê, what have you got for a midafternoon breakfast?”

“I have an even more urgent need, though,” Aloê said, while the cook (Lundê, it seemed) considered the question put to her. “And I couldn't find a privy upstairs,” she added, when no one seemed to get it.

The cook slapped her forehead. “Fate on a pitchfork! The little cubbyhole you're in probably doesn't have a honeygourd in it?”

“I did not see one,” Aloê said truthfully, not adding that she would not know one if she did see it.

“It's smell it you'd've done, if there were one in there,” Oluma said cheerfully. In response to Aloê's baffled look she added, “They call it a honeygourd because it's anything but sweet, you see?”

“I think so,” Aloê said thoughtfully. A honeygourd must be some kind of chamber pot. Well, she had roughed it on the road often enough. But a
house
without indoor plumbing? She hadn't seen a thing like that in decades. “So, where . . . ?”

“There's an earth closet out back,” said Lundê, nodding at a doorway. But she kept an amused eye on Aloê for her reaction.

Aloê realized that she could not afford to play the white-gloved, effete citydweller. “Thanks, Lundê! Ignore any earthquakes or thunder you hear from that direction.”

Lundê gagged theatrically, and Denynê's face scrunched up in distaste, looking somewhat like a dried apricot, and Oluma laughed and slapped Aloê on the back, sending dangerous shockwaves through her bladder.

“Back in a time,” Aloê said, before the worst happened, and fled out the door, and up a well-worn path through the weedy side garden toward a rickety outbuilding whose purpose was tolerably obvious.

Once she was inside with the door shut, she confronted a saddle-like seat that she was apparently supposed to plant herself on. She hung her cloak of office on a nearby peg, skinned off her riding pants and underwear and hung them alongside it, then squatted over the seat. The wood there, unlike the rest of the building, was polished and oiled from contact with many behinds. She could not bring herself to touch it, but managed to hover over it. She waited for the moment of release.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij,” said a thin voice weaseling its way through the thin door.

“This is not a good time,” she said with absolute sincerity.

“Vocate Aloê Oaij, I am Binder Denynê of the Skein of Healers. I did not have a chance to introduce myself to you earlier.”

“I'm not giving you the chance now. Go away.”

“I don't know what you saw this morning, or what you thought you saw—”

“GO AWAY!” roared Aloê.

Little miffed-sounding footsteps receded into the distance, and Aloê heard off in the dim afternoon Oluma's painfully jovial voice cry, “I
told
you to leave her alone!”

Later, a much-relieved Aloê sponged herself off in the tub room (which was indeed intended for human occupants, it seemed) and changed her clothes, returning to the kitchen to find dinner being served and a new occupant at the kitchen table, a tall woman with orange hair and black eyebrows.

The newcomer stood as soon as Aloê entered. “Guardian,” she said stiffly. “I'm the Arbiter of the Peace in Big Rock and roundabouts. I brought a couple of horses for your seconds so that you can ride out to the murder scene.”

“Thanks, Arbiter!” said Aloê, and would have said more, but the Arbiter walked out of the room.

Aloê shrugged and sat beside her seconds.

“She's a pretty good sort,” said Oluma in a worried tone, “but I think the last vocate through here sort of high-handed her. You'll like her better when we get a few drinks into her tonight.”

Oluma was more worried about it than Aloê was, and Denynê was worried about something else. They had their secondings with them, though: witnessed documents that they accepted the authority of Aloê for the purposes of the investigation into Earno's death. Without them, her orders to these Guarded would put her in danger of exile under the First Decree. With them, she could order them around like thains—but she would not, of course. That was no way to get skilled work out of someone.

Aloê tucked the secondings into her sleeve and then ate a quick dinner of seared landfish and earthapple crisps alongside her seconds.

“What's to do for the rest of the evening?” asked Oluma. “Do we show you around Big Rock and introduce you, or—”

“Let's ride out and look at the body,” Aloê said.

“A night exhumation!” Oluma said. “I love them! Although, strictly speaking, the body hasn't been
in
humated yet. Still, it should be equally creepy, don't you think?”

“Let's hope so.”

Oluma ran off to get her bag of tricks, and Denynê took the opportunity to say urgently to Aloê, “Vocate Aloê, I don't know what you saw or what you thought you saw this morning, but. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Aloê met her orangey-brown eye. “Yes?”

“Well, I. I just. I just want to assure you. That I would never. I would never ever. That is, never again.”

“Never what?”

“Oluma seduced me, is what it is. We were waiting, and I was bored, and she is agreeable—don't you think she is?”

“I do. I'm glad for you.”

Denynê drew back, appalled, as if the small distance between their two chairs had become a deep chasm spouting fire. “What do you mean? I assure you that I am a person devoted to my craft of healing and to the Skein of Healers.”