The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (3 page)

It seemed he was now a useful man to know. He had obviously honed his skills since my last visit to the Spit; I certainly didn’t remember him then being such a prominent figure in the murky business world of the Docks.

Once I had all I wanted on Niamor, I turned to some of the others who interested me. ‘Do you know the name of the tall Stragglerman wearing black?’ I asked. ‘The man who sat by himself in the taproom at lunch?’ And who, unless I was very much mistaken, was one of the Awarefolk.

Tunn nodded. ‘Tor Ryder.’

The name meant nothing to me. Further questioning told me Tunn didn’t know anything about him either, except that he had arrived a week back on a two-masted trader coming in from one of the Middling Islands and that he had a room at
The Drunken Plaice
.

The young man, the one who had been given the dunmagic sore, had arrived two days earlier than Ryder on a fishing vessel, although he was no fisherman. Tunn couldn’t make him out at all. He’d given his name as Noviss, but Tunn was sure that wasn’t his real name. He didn’t do anything except sit around looking as tense as a sand-plover nesting on an exposed stretch of beach.

‘And the Cirkasian?’ I asked.

He rolled his eyes eloquently. ‘Cum yesty.’

‘She came yesterday? There was only one ship in yesterday—the slaver from Cirkase.’ I’d checked that out already.

He shrugged.

In other matters, Tunn was even less helpful. He didn’t know anything about a Cirkasian slave woman—or why a whole slaver ship’s crew and its captain, as devious a load of ocean-going rats as ever I’d laid eyes on, had told me earlier that morning that they had never seen any female Cirkasian, never had one on board, wouldn’t know anything about one. They’d said their whole cargo was male and they’d had no passengers at all, and not even the offer of a bribe had changed the story one whit. But then, they’d also denied being slavers: their story was that they carried indentured servants on their way to Souther employers.

When I was sure I had extracted all the information I could from Tunn, I gave him the coppers and sent him back to the inn.

I took another look at that pet of his before I put the animal back behind the boxes. He had rounded ears that seemed far too small for such a sizable beast, and oddly slitted nostrils. His red coat, at least in the areas where there was no mange, was short and thick. There was a look in his eyes that belied his appearance: a shrewd calculation that had nothing to do with being a mongrel born on the docks. I’d seen that look before in lurgers, the hunting water-canines of Fen Island, but they were never red-haired and had much shorter legs. Following a hunch, I picked up one of Seeker’s oversized front paws and spread out the toes. They were webbed. I almost laughed at the irony—he was part dog, part lurger; a Fen Island halfbreed, just as I was.

Aware that he had my attention, he thumped his heavy tail with more enthusiasm than good sense, whacking it against the fish boxes like a cudgel. He whined, grovelled and then slurped at my face. Fortunately I was quick enough to dodge this time, but saliva went flying in all directions. I ordered him back behind the boxes and he went meekly enough. In spite of his size, he was hardly more than a puppy.

I went on my way into the heart of Gorthan Docks with a certain reluctance.

The more I found out, the more convinced I was that I had stepped into something that was way beyond what I could cope with: there were countless plots inside every intrigue in Gorthan Spit, numerous eddies within every wave, and in my search for a Cirkasian slave, I felt I was somehow placing myself right in the middle of waters that I knew nothing about—and there was a good chance I’d be drowned.

###

Early afternoons on Gorthan Spit were usually hot and still. The glare from the white sands dazzled unbearably; even the harsh glitter of the sea was hard on the eyes. It was at this time of the day that the smells of the Docks were at their worst too, saturating the air, making every breath an unpleasant effort. All those who could afford to do so went indoors, closed their shutters, and slept as I had done. Even the stray dogs dozed, sprawling in the shade, with their heads and tails wilting.

By the time I left Tunn’s pet, late in the afternoon, things were beginning to come alive again. It was then the phenomenon that resident Docksiders called ‘the Doctor’ came to revive the port with its ministrations. The Doctor was a breeze that swept in from the ocean, bringing cooling moisture with it to banish the heat and alleviate the stench. It was then that the night fishing boats put out to sea, tacking their way out of the harbour against the wind, and it was then that the town itself shook off its lethargy. Shopkeepers threw open their wooden shutters, hawkers cajoled passers-by, beggars dragged their diseased bodies on to the busiest corners, dogs loped along on the lookout for whatever they could steal. The contrast to the torpidity of the earlier part of the afternoon was startling, but it never lasted, I knew; as soon as night fell, the atmosphere would change again as the shops closed and the bars and brothels opened. The bustle and legitimacy of the afternoon trading soon degenerated into the quieter and more menacing stealth of the business of the night; a stealth punctuated by the rowdiness of drunken violence, or worse, by the kind of noises that were best not investigated: it was a rare night without a murder or two.

With my sword within easy reach in its back sheath and keeping one hand clamped to the purse on my money belt (the Docks’ pickpockets were notoriously skilled and I could ill afford to lose what little money I had), I went to find an acquaintance who had been helpful on my last visit to the town.

I didn’t find him. The shop he had owned didn’t exist any more. It, and the rest of the street, had been burned to the ground, not an infrequent occurrence in a place where most buildings were built of wood and thatched with seaweed, and an unusually large number of the inhabitants were either crazed or habitually drunk, or both. No one could tell me what had happened to the shopkeeper. Gorthan Spit was like that: people came and went, they died or disappeared, and no one cared.

I stopped in a nearby fish-and-swillie bar, all seafood again, of course. This time I settled for a cheap dish of seaweed and rayfish. Staying at
The Drunken Plaice
was an extravagance; I had to economise somewhere.

I was just finishing the food when I heard my name bellowed from across the room. My hand automatically dropped to my sword (now resting across my knees) before I realised there was no need. The bellow was one of pleasure, not anger, and the voice belonged to Addie Leks, a woman I had inadvertently helped on my very first trip to the Spit. I’d been twenty-three then, and Addie about the same age. I was hunting a man, a renegade sylv, who had a price on his head—a substantial bounty that I coveted—and she’d been that man’s lover. In those days she was an attractive and much abused woman wanting to escape a relationship that contained nothing but pain and violence, and I’d been only too glad to relieve her of the cause. (That part had been easy; it was getting the bastard back to the Keeper Isles to collect the reward that had given me problems. He knew he was going to die if he reached The Hub, and he’d done his level best not to arrive, preferably by killing me along the way. I’d finally handed him over, minus several fingers I’d severed during one of his many escape attempts, but it was the hardest deliveries I’d ever made.)

Addie wasn’t quite as attractive now. She worked in the kitchen of the fish-and-swillie place and she’d grown fat. Her skin had reddened and coarsened. She flopped down in the seat opposite me and launched into a new tale of marital woe; it seemed that although she’d grown older, she hadn’t grown any wiser in her choice of men. With surprise, I realised that she was hinting that I help her out of her present relationship as well. I’m not too sure what she had in mind, because I didn’t give her a chance to tell me. I changed the subject and asked her about Niamor instead.

She said very much the same things that Tunn had, adding, ‘Nice fellow, Niamor. Always good for a laugh and a bit of fun. No more morals that a bitch cur on heat, of course, but he doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings. Kind-hearted, is Niamor, as long as it doesn’t cause him any trouble.’ It was a view of the Quillerman that agreed with my first impression of him.

‘You should remember him,’ she added. ‘He was around that last time you was here. Shacked up with that sylvtalent woman. You must remember her: she was exiled from the Keeper Isles for misuse of power—some said she’d used her talent illegally to help her nonsylv lover become rich. What was her name again?’

‘Oh. Samiat. Yes, I remember now. What happened to her?’

‘The Keepers forgave her. Took her back into the fold when they thought she’d learned her lesson.’

That figured. The Keepers were always loath to lose one of their own.

Addie sighed. ‘I thought she and Niamor made a lovely pair. So refined, the both of them. Yet when the time came, she left him without a backward glance…’ She sighed again, caught up in fantasy even though Niamor was the most unlikely candidate for a hero. He was about as romantic as Blaze Halfbreed… ‘He was broken-hearted, I could tell. Hasn’t looked at anyone, not serious like, since. Reckon that’s why he can’t settle on just one—’

I just stopped myself from snorting.

She leaned towards me conspiratorially, resting her elbows on the table. The fat of her forearms wobbled as she clasped her hands. ‘People say he came from a princely Quiller family. That he actually has a title. D’you think that’s true? Could he be noble? Thrown out for some youthful indiscretion perhaps… Or even a son of the Quillerlord, d’you think? He has
such
nice manners.’

I’d never thought that nobles had particularly good manners myself, but said vaguely, ‘Anything’s possible.’

I went on to ask her where I might be able to find him at that hour of the night and she gave me the name of several bars, then asked wistfully, ‘Are you sure you can’t help with my little problem?’

When I refused, she pouted—a gesture that might have looked appealing on the face of a pretty twenty-year-old, but looked ridiculous on a sagging woman of over thirty.

I shook my head, made my excuses and left. I had a lot more to do that night.

I met up with Niamor again even sooner than I had expected. He was lounging in the shadows of one of the port’s ramshackle wooden buildings and confronted me just a hundred paces down the street from the fish-and-swillie bar. Perhaps he’d even been looking for me; it would have been a safe assumption to make that I would be out and about at night since that was the time when most of my sort of business was done. The port wasn’t so large that it would have been impossible to find an acquaintance, if you knew the kind of places they’d be frequenting.

When Niamor materialised out of the shadows I was leaning against a post so that I could scrape clean the sole of my boot with my sword blade (the woman who’d forged the weapon for me would have been appalled). I had apparently stepped on the slime trail of a sea-pony and the glue-like mucus had created a gall of sand and fish scales in my instep.

‘Evening, Blaze,’ he said. He took my hand and raised it to his lips in a gesture that had gone out of style in high society fifty years before. ‘Time for some conversation?’

I slid the sword over my shoulder and back into its scabbard. ‘Certainly.’ I looked up and down the street. The lesser moon was already up and shedding a soft light; there was no one in sight, no one to overhear us, so I added, ‘Especially if the company doesn’t mind imparting information.’

‘Information has a price in Gorthan Spit.’ He grinned at me and pulled me gently into the darkest shadows. I went willingly enough and didn’t object when he put his arms around me (so much for my intended caution), although I raised a disbelieving eyebrow when he added, ‘You are the most magnificent creature that’s come to Gorthan Spit in a year or two.’

‘Try again, Niamor. Or have you already forgotten that Cirkasian lovely we saw in
The Drunken Plaice
this afternoon?’

‘Milksop. I like fire, I do.’

‘People who play with fire get burnt.’

The kiss was long and thorough and very satisfying—as far as kisses alone can ever be satisfying.

‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Sometimes I like to burn my fingers.’

I buttoned up the tunic buttons he had just undone. ‘This lady is in no hurry to do likewise.’

He pulled a rueful face, but didn’t protest. ‘So? I can wait. I confidently predict that you and I are destined to share more than information one day.’

He was about to say something further but someone came down the street in a swirl of blue robes. I just had time to note that the newcomer was wearing a peculiar hat and walking as if he had a pebble in his shoe, before he swept past, deliberately banging my shoulder as he went. ‘Slut,’ he said, almost spitting out his loathing.

I blinked in surprise and looked back at Niamor. ‘
Who
was
that?’

He grinned at me. ‘There are a couple of Fellih-worshipper missionaries from Mekaté here. He’s one of them.’

That explained the strange gait and the hat. Men who worshipped the god Fellih wore top hats with a tall narrow crown and a small brim, tied under the chin with a big black bow. They thought it was a sin to venture outside their houses without covering themselves in this rather ridiculous and inconvenient headgear. In addition, they wore shoes with raised soles and heels that sometimes made them clumsy pedestrians. You probably haven’t heard of them. They were a strange sect that sprang up on Mekaté, a combination of pagan superstition and Menod ideas of a single God. They’ve largely disappeared now, swept away by mainstream Menod doctrine, and no great loss to humanity either. They were an unpleasant bunch while they lasted, and powerful too, in places.

‘Not going to go after him with that sword of yours to pay him back for the insult?’

‘Come off it, Niamor. If I stuck my sword into everyone who ever insulted me, I’d be the worst mass murderer the Isles have ever known. So tell me: Fellih-worshippers are sending
missionaries
here?’

‘Yep. Been trying to convert sinners to their peculiar brand of religious zealotry for the past couple of months.’

I was incredulous. I had been to Mekaté. I’d heard the Fellih-worshippers preach: they muddled justice and judgement, sex and sin, vaginas and vice—the end result was the mix of ignorance, bigotry and fear of death that they called their religion. They didn’t impose the same rigid dress code on their women as they did on the men, but the moral code was similar for both sexes. Then, with odd logic, most of what was banned to their followers on earth was promised to them in heaven as a reward for their abstinence, which seemed ridiculous to me, but I had little patience with religious philosophy at the best of times.

I thought of Fellih-worshippers trying to preach salvation and their brand of puritanical morality to the people of Gorthan Spit and started to laugh. Niamor evidently didn’t need to be told what was so funny, because he said, ‘I’d
love
to see them take on the whores down along Bonesetters Street.’

‘I’d like to see them telling the brothel owners on the dockside to close shop.’

‘Can you imagine what would happen if they castigated Irma Goldwood for having dyed hair?’ We both giggled like a couple of kids. Irma I remembered; she had tried to recruit me as one of her girls once. She was the rather large and foul-mouthed madam of the largest brothel, a formidable lady as unstoppable as a great white shark, and almost as scary.

Niamor was still smiling as he leant forward, ran a thumb over my bottom lip in a gesture of intimacy and, lowering his voice, asked, ‘Just what
is
your interest in a Cirkasian slave, Blaze?’

I sobered up.
Careful, Blaze.
He’s no fool, and you could like him far too much. ‘I have a mandate to buy one. It’s that simple. But you can tell me something much more interesting: just what is going on here, Niamor?’

‘You came in from Cirkase on a fishing boat this morning, right? And you already know that there’s something going on? Who the hell are you, my lovely one?’

Laughter forgotten, we were sniffing one another out like a couple of cautious dogs and that could have gone on all night, with neither of us actually saying anything. One of us had to break the deadlock. I grinned. ‘Someone very like you, I think. I’m doing this for money, which I am very much in need of. Most of all I want to keep my skin intact. I don’t like treading on toes, Niamor, especially toes that belong to people who are a lot bigger—figuratively—than I am. I would very much like to know where not to tread.’

He nodded as if he accepted that much as truth. ‘Then we do have a lot in common. I thought I recognised a kindred spirit. Blaze, take my advice and leave. For all that you’re a halfbreed and, I’ll wager, a citizenless one too,’ he reached up to brush curls away from my left ear confirming that my lobe was indeed unmarked, ‘and therefore unwelcome just about everywhere else; for all that, you’d be better off looking for your slave on some other island. It’d be safer.’

‘Come on, Niamor, where else am I going to find a Cirkasian slave woman, especially one that’s young and pretty? Most islands have banned the slave traffic, if not the slavery of criminals; you know that. The Keepers won’t have it any other way. That ship from Cirkase is calling their cargo “indentured servants”, would you believe.’

‘You should have taken up my offer to get you that woman at the inn. It’d be much simpler. She doesn’t have a hope of leaving Gorthan Spit in one piece anyway, not her.’ He sounded cheerfully unconcerned about her fate.

I said, ‘Whoever tangles with that blue-eyed charmer will find her about as easy to deal with as a handful of lugworms in a rainstorm.’

That interested him, but he didn’t press the matter. He probably sensed I wasn’t going to tell him any more. He reverted to my original question instead. ‘Blaze, I don’t
know
what’s going on. And that’s a terrible admission for someone like me to make. Up until now, I’ve survived and prospered here because I knew what was happening. I knew the people. Not any more. I’m seriously thinking of emptying Gorthan Spit’s fish scales out of my shoes for good, and I advise you to do the same. Half of Gorthan Docks is scared hairless, and no one’s talking. They’re too frightened.’

I caught his faint uncertainty. He was still none too sure whether he could trust me, any more than I was sure if I could trust him. I didn’t think he had been the source of the dunmagic, but there was no way I could be positive. No smell of it clung to him now. I cursed the unexpected limitations of my Awareness. I had only my instincts… I took a gamble. ‘Dunmagic?’ I asked.

He gave me a sharp look with those dark eyes of his and lowered his voice even more. ‘I don’t know. I don’t have Awareness.’

‘I do.’ The admission was enough to kill me if he was a dunmaster. ‘There’s dunmagic in the air, Niamor. I’ve been smelling it ever since I arrived.’

‘Shit.’ He looked at me with new respect. ‘You’ve taken a risk in telling me. I suppose you’d know if I was a dunmagicker, but what if I worked for one?’

I shrugged. ‘Then I’m as good as dead. Life’s full of risks. What if I’m the one who’s lying?’

He gave a reluctant chuckle. ‘Life’s shit, isn’t it? Hell, Blaze, you and I ought to team up. We could go a long way together, we could.’

‘I’m a loner, Niamor. Always have been. However, if you can find me a Cirkasian slave, I’ll pay the percentage. And I’ll owe you a favour. In the meantime, have you no idea who’s behind this dunmagic?’

‘Well—no. Until now I wasn’t even certain there
was
dunmagic, although there have been a helluva lot of strange deaths lately. And most of them very nasty as well. There’s been talk of people tortured to death or just rotting away, that sort of thing. And there’s a village up the coast that’s become a very bad place to visit. In fact, those who go there don’t seem to come back. Creed, it’s called. I used to bed a girl who lived in Creed, and she hasn’t turned up in the Docks for weeks.

‘I don’t
know
who’s behind it all,’ he added.

‘But—?’

‘But I can have a good guess as to who his chief henchmen are.’

‘You interest me. Go on.’

‘There’re four of them. Four bastards known for their unpleasant habits. A big red-headed Breth Islander called Mord—a killer, Mord is. Got to be with a name like that: doesn’t it mean death in Brethian crim argot? He’s an ex slave-handler. Then there’s his brother, Teffel. You’ll recognise him by his nose: it’s the size of a large sea-potato and about as attractive. He’s just a cliché; all muscle, no brain, is Teffel. Then there’s a small wiry halfbreed called Sickle, a torturer by profession until torture was outlawed just about everywhere. Didn’t stop the likes of him, though, or the kind that employ his like—just made them more circumspect. He hangs around
The
Drunken Plaice
a lot. Rumour has it he likes one of the backroom girls there, poor bint. The fourth one’s the most dangerous of the lot: a Fen Islander with a chip on his shoulder about his short stature. His name’s Domino and he’s the one with the brains.’

‘But you don’t think any of these attractive fellows meddles with dunmagic? Were any of them in
The Drunken Plaice
at lunch today?’

‘Sickle the torturer was. But I’ve known all four of them for years, including Sickle. I’ve had business with them all, at one time or another. If any of them practises dunmagic, then I’m a lot more dense than I thought. No, this dunmagic business—if that’s what it is that’s got everyone so scared—started only about four months back.’

‘Then maybe you could give a thought to remembering who arrived on Gorthan Spit about four months back. Someone who has contact with at least one of those four. And who was in
The Drunken Plaice
at lunch.’

He gave me an uneasy glance. ‘Offhand I can’t think of anyone, but I’ll give it some thought. Why?’

‘Because someone cast a dunspell.’

‘At lunch? In front of everyone?’

‘Yes. Not aimed at either of us, though, don’t worry. But it was too powerful for me to say who was responsible.

‘A dunmaster, then. That’s a dangerous brew to stir, Blaze.’

‘If I know what’s in the brew, then I know how to avoid agitating those ingredients that would give me trouble. I don’t
want
trouble, Niamor. And neither do you.’

‘How to avoid it—that’s the problem. There’s just too much happening. And I haven’t told you the half of it. For example, I haven’t told you about all the people who have become interested in Gorthan Spit in the past few months. We even had a Keeper ship in here—Keepers! They’ve never concerned themselves with the Spit before. And there’s a ghemph in town. Why would one of those thumb-fumbling web-foots come
here?
In addition, I’ve seen more patriarchs of the Menod in the last couple of months than I’ve seen in thirty years of sinful living.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. At a guess, Niamor had never had much to do with the Men of God patriarchs, or any other priest for that matter.

A ghemph, however, now
that
interested me. I fingered my empty earlobe instinctively. Ghemphs were citizenship tattooists. Niamor’s remark about thumb-fumbling was a gross calumny; ghemphs were skilled artisans. But they weren’t human. ‘The ghemph: is it still around?’ I asked casually.