Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (14 page)

    
“Halloo,” the man said, holding tight to his pole arm.  “You are a big fish to come up out of the water.”

    
I chuckled.  Better to be friendly if I could.  “Let me dismount,” I said, as I came within reach of him.

    
He shook his head.  “No need,” he told me.  “There is no search and no tax to enter the city in off season.  You
are
here to get a jump on the season, I am guessing.”

    
It was tempting to play smart and say, “Sure, I am!”  Anyone who did that didn’t know beat cops and security guards, though.  They are notoriously bored and usually know a lot more than people give them credit for.  I only know this myself because I had worked as one while in college.  If this guard was bored and friendly, I could get a lot of information from him.

    
“I’ve never been here before,” I told him.  “What season?”

    
He laughed and beckoned to me to get down, smiling knowingly as I did.  The saddle creaked and my armor grated, and I smiled, having guessed right.  Blizzard shivered off a big horse fly and I patted his neck, standing between him and the guard, towering a foot above him.

    
“The season is harvest, um…”

    
I extended my wrist for him to grab.  “Rancor,” I told him.

    
“Rancor,” he said, taking my wrist in his hand, and me taking his in mine.  I felt the small dagger in his sleeve and he looked into my eyes.  “Rourke.”

    
“A pleasure, Rourke,” I said.  “The harvest from Sental, I‘m guessing?”

    
He smiled his knowing smile.  I was content to play the big, dumb guy right now.  We spoke for no less than a half-hour about the seasons, and I learned a lot.

    
First, there were thirteen months in the year, each with twenty-eight days.  One day, called
All Gods’ Day,
came between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, and every four years another day followed it called ‘Steel.’  The months themselves were named after their gods, Adriam, Eveave, Weather, Earth, War, Destruction, Chaos, Water, Law, Order, Life, Power and Desire – in that order.  We were in the month of Water, and in Law the Sentalans would bring the Harvest in.  I had arrived near the beginning of Chaos, apparently.  Somehow that made sense.

    
When the Harvest came in, the city made the biggest portion of its money.  The produce would be weighed and the Sentalans paid, the money being credited to the Sentalan collective body.  Then it would be moved from here to other cities and other nations via caravans and by river.

    
They would be hiring armed guards.  Thieves and cutthroats from all over the world would be arriving to prey on the caravans on the open roads.  Sental provided a huge portion of the region’s food at this time of year and the trade promised to be lucrative.

    
Rourke had seen my armor and assumed that I had come here looking for caravan duty.  The drivers liked big men, and I was the biggest that he had seen so far.  As well, a man so heavily armored must have had a successful career as a mercenary.

    
“You are a lucky one, Rancor,” he told me.  “To get a man of your size, they will hire you quick as a wink.  You will be sitting on your arse for a whole month on the pay, or swilling down ale in the taverns and chasing our girls, before they even think to need you.”

    
He gave me a sly wink and I laughed.  “You have the right of it,” I said.  Here I thought it best to lie.  I remembered Hvarl’s warning on the public opinion on Dwarves.  “Who would you think pays best?”

    
“Ah, be smart, Rancor,” he said, slapping my armored shoulder.  It couldn’t believe how bad his breath stank.  He was missing four teeth on one side and I figured there were no less than three gone on the other.  “The highest pay is to the farthest, most dangerous places.”

    
“Such as?”  I asked.

    
He laughed until he coughed.  “Ah, you big buck!  Fine for you, then – go to Ulek or Volka – I think it is Bawser’s Shipping what goes there.  Both are on the Confluni border, and it seems as them Confluni aren’t afraid to make a little side trip on their own into good ol’ Volkhydro to get their wares a little earlier and a lot cheaper, if you get my meaning.”

    
I did and said so.  “More toward the Bay, though,” I told him.  “I want to go to Trenbon Island later this year.”

    
He nodded.  “Smart move,” he said.  “I’m told as they hire Men for guards for the ‘Chi and they pay well for them.  I might should go with you, except that my wife won’t want to live in Outpost IX.”

    
Blizzard bobbed his head and had begun stomping, and I had learned a lot.  I thanked him and shook his hand.  I almost gave him one of my gold coins, but thought he would find it odd to get so big a tip (if it
was
a big tip – and I had to think so) from a traveling mercenary.  I promised I would buy him a drink if I saw him while I stayed here, and he promised he would take me up on it.

    
He directed me to a good smith.  He looked at Blizzard and commented on his size, then recommended Iron Jack inside the city gates.  Not only did he handle heavy horses like mine, he worked out of a decent hostel that would put me up at a deal if I were already doing business with Jack.

    
That night I perched on a stool in a smoky tavern, still in my armor, my sword over my shoulder and my helmet fastened to my belt, eating the best food I had ever tasted only because it was hot and someone else had cooked it.  The Dwarves seemed to prefer their food bland.  Here I had paid a precious gold coin for a month of two meals a day, a room with a door that locked and a bed with brand-new straw ticking. 

    
The stew consisted of a rich broth with big hunks of carrots, potatoes and some beef-like meat, gobbets of fat floating on top of it.  My lips and chin were already coated from eating so fast.  There were two owners: a one-armed man with a heavy paunch and a patch over one eye named “Fat Garret” and his wife, a rosy-cheeked matron with breasts lying on her stomach, dressed in a white peasant dress and no shoes, named “Elle”.  Both laughed and Elle put another bowl in front of me, no charge.  I smiled up with a mouth full of food, feeling like a little boy, and just kept eating.  Fat Garret put down a thick, foamy beer in a wooden stein next to the bowl.

    
“Here, lad,” he said.  “That rich food is going to make you puke if you don’t settle it.”

    
I wondered at his logic but drank the beer.  It was delicious and I drained it.

    
“Ah, I know a good, fat wife for this one, Garret,” Elle said as she bustled around a low, wide sitting room, the first floor of their four-story hostel.  I counted ten tables that she waited with the help of a skinny girl of about twelve in a white dress like hers.  I sat with several dark, quiet men at the bar.  “He will need her to feed him!”

    
Fat Garret slapped his one hand down on the bar and laughed toothlessly.  “You’re in trouble now, lad,” he told me.  “My Elle has a bead on you – you will be a bachelor no more before your month is up.”

    
“Your Elle will have to run faster than me,” I told him between bites.  I felt her smack the back of my armor.  It surprised me that the two had adopted me so fast.  Iron Jack had been everything that Rourke had said, a competent smith more than able to handle Blizzard.  After the huge stallion had mule-kicked four planks out of the back of his stable, Jack had shackled his ankles to four posts in a special stall and commenced to shave down his hooves and shoe him, dodging bites almost without thinking.  He had then walked me into the hostel, the
Great Eagle
, and introduced me to Fat Garret and Elle as his best customer. 

    
I knew they wanted something – I had no clue as to what. 

    
“You would be surprised to see how fast these skirts come up if I am after you, Rancor,” she told me.

    
“Now
that
is the kind of woman you can introduce me too,” I told her.  The skinny girl blushed crimson and Fat Garret smacked his hand down on the bar again, laughing.  I felt Elle’s fingers grab my earlobe as she playfully shook my head.  I turned on my stool to look into her brown eyes. 

    
“Now, don’t be telling me you think I will help you with some boyish whoring,” she warned, half-serious.  “And I think your teeth are long for such, anyway.  I can double that rent you pay, you know!”

    
The man sitting next to me at the bar, a skinny, greasy-haired fellow with sallow eyes and a long nose that gave him the look of a depressed weasel, gave a bark of a laugh.  “That you already did, Elle,” he said.

    
“Hush, you,” Elle warned him.  “Kark Frinfeld, I was not talking to you, though I could as well be talking to your poor wife of the amount of time you spend here.”

    
Kark poked me in the armor.  “Hey, now – you would want to know that the sign over the door says a silver a week, no?” he asked.

    
“I might at that,” I said, trying to look shrewd as I polished off my second bowl.   Fat Garret started to look nervous.  “I am getting stable for my horse and two meals a day, though, friend Kark.”

    
“And should you be leaving your horse to wander the street, then?” he asked me, by which I assumed he meant that the horse should be stabled free.  “And as for meals, that’s a couple of pennies at most.  As I see it, meals should be two or three silvers, and eight for board, which is nine silvers of change you didn’t get.”

    
I did the math – twenty “silvers” to one of my gold coins, and if 56 meals at two pennies each were two or three silvers…

    
Elle had stopped dead in her tracks and Fat Garret’s hand lay still on the counter.  I had known that they were too friendly, though it disappointed me that Rourke had sent me somewhere to get ripped off.  More likely they had gauged the armor and the size of my pouch and figured correctly that I would pay it.  I could see the embarrassment now and knew that this would be an issue in my stay here.

    
I could likely get my money back and go somewhere else, but it was late.  I could ask for the change now, or I could do something to help them out of this situation.

    
I ran a risk, in that these obviously weren’t honest people.  Likely they would take what I could give them and do nothing more than they had to.

    
So I picked the middle road.  “I take it you haven’t seen my horse, friend,” I told him.

    
“So what about your horse?” he asked.

    
“He is an eighteen-hand stallion,” I told him.  “Do you know stallions?”

    
Kark snorted.  “I am a horse trader, and yes, I get what you mean now.  Eighteen hands, hmm?  There are no bigger on the Wild Horse Plains.  Where did you come by him?”

    
“Wait now,” Fat Garret said, saving me an explanation for a moment.  “What of it that he rode in on a big horse.”

    
Elle smacked his shoulder.  This seemed to be how she interacted with men; though based on where she worked I could hardly blame her.  “It means, you lummox, that he will kick hell out of the stalls every time a mare in rut comes within a block of here.  And that is going to be every day until he leaves or until the end of Life.”

    
Fat Garret looked at me.  “Hey now,” he began.

    
I felt tempted to lay my hand on my sword but didn’t.  I just looked at him with an eyebrow raised.  We stayed like that for a moment, and then he slammed his hand down on the bar, not laughing this time.