The Iron Ship (34 page)

Tyn Lydar did not move.

“Was it Holdean?”

Again, Tyn Lydar did not move.

“I cannot order you to tell me, can I?” She crouched down before the Tyn.

“Your gown goodlady! The dust. It is so dirty here, you will ruin it...”

“Lost gods eat my gown!” she said. “I know a little of geas. Tell me if I am wrong. I cannot order you to confirm to me what I think we both know, because only the one who has placed a geas may remove it.”

Tyn Lydar nodded. A small grunt escaped her lips.

“The penalty you are under is pain. I am sorry,” said Katriona. She stood. “We will get to the bottom of this, you and I.” She laughed sardonically. “What a ridiculous pair.”

“There is, in the Watermarket, if I might be so bold as to say, a certain merchant of the Gallivar Tyn. Shifty they are. Their clan is scattered, their home is lost, and so they are not to be trusted. No surprise that they are dealers in the Waters of Truth.” She fiddled with the tassels on the hem of her robe.

“Are you trying to get around a geas, Tyn Lydar?”

“Now why would you be saying that, goodlady? I am but a humble Tyn. I can do no more than I am allowed, and no less than that either.” She tapped at her iron collar with a yellow fingernail. A nail one would find on a digging animal, thought Kat. “You won’t get me trying to cheat. Rules is the rules. Geas is geas.”

“Fine. Very well. You can tell me no more. I thank you for all that you have... intimated.”

Lydar gave a sly grin, exposed her peg-like teeth. “I am very old, goodlady. Wise by the measure of some. It takes a lot to stop me from saying what needs to be said. But the rest is up to you. I may say no more.”

Katriona sighed. “Fine. Fine, fine!” She picked up a file crammed untidily with papers. Dust flew thickly from it. She sneezed. She stared at it for a good long minute. “This task will not complete itself. Do we have glimmer lamps?”

“Yes.”

Katriona nodded in understanding. “Then as the wife of the proprietor I am ordering you to find me some. There,” she added. “Orders to bound Tyn are more successful the more precise they are. I am correct?”

“You are.”

“I am going to get to the bottom of this.”

Tyn Lydar nodded approvingly. “That you are, goodlady, that you are.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Water Market

G
UIS TURNED UP
his collar. Banksrow was situated perpendicularly to the coast, offering no barrier to the wind. Strong gusts blew right up between the palaces of finance situated either side, creating stinging eddies of dancing leaves and grit.

“There are inconsistencies within the books,” Katriona confided in him. “Money is missing. It has been hidden, but not exceptionally well. I can see that it is gone.”

Guis nodded. “Your love of numbers is doing you a service finally.”

“If you paid as much attention to yours as I did, then you might have the same facility.”

“Yes, well.”

They walked arm in arm along pavements where everyone else hurried away from the wind, faces down, hats clamped to their heads.

“It is everywhere, I fear. The prices for certain of the raw materials we consume in our simpler manufacturing processes are inflated.”

“How so?” said Guis. Department stores replaced the banks, and they stepped into warm pools of light streaming from high windows, behind which goods from across the Hundred were arranged.

“I will give you an example. We have our own smelter, yes? We buy in iron ore. This is marked down as three pennies more expensive per ton than the current base commodity price.”

“You really did pay attention to father,” said Guis.

“Shush! This is important. I checked guide pricing with the Bourse. The information cost a lot, but I had them send me adjusted figures for the trades of all the bulk items the mill uses for the period since Frozmer of 456.”

“And?”

“Everything we have bought is overstated in price. Three pennies may not sound like a lot, and indeed it is not. But when aggregated over hundreds of tons of consumable materials, then it adds up to hundreds, perhaps thousands of thalers.”

“Perhaps this cousin of Demion’s is simply incompetent.”

“I did think so, but I managed, shall we say, to secure copies of company accounts from other firms serviced by the same suppliers. The amounts we were charged are consistently higher.”

“You do not know how much money has been taken?”

Katriona shrugged. “Not at present, no. It all rather depends on how long it has been going on.”

“Who is behind it? Could it be Demion? Is he in trouble, Katriona?”

“I can’t believe it for a second. Besides, he let me look at the accounts precisely, or so he says, because he believes that I am more astute with numbers than he.”

“Does he want to be caught, perhaps?”

“Guis!” said Katriona. It was a tone of voice that was always accompanied by the rolling of eyes. “If he is trying to expiate his guilt, he is going about it in an extraordinarily roundabout manner.”

“Be careful, sis, he may be trying to implicate you to save his own skin. His father acted like a kindly old duffer, but he was a cunning old devil.”

“You have known my husband since he was seven. Do you really think Demion is capable of that?”

“Well, bluntly, no. Who are the other suspects? I like this, it is like a play.”

Katriona bit her lip. “We have many Tyn working for us, but they have no use for money.”

“They may be securing it for someone else.”

“I am afraid the culprit is closer to home than that.” Katriona sighed. She stopped and pointed over the busy street to the Watermarket. For five millennia, its squat shape and shallow dome had been the grandest edifice in all southern Karsa, presiding over the Old Maceriyan city, its ruins, the fields that followed them and the town that followed that. Now Prince Alfra’s redevelopments cast their shadows over it, attempting to outdo it in every conceivable way. But their architectural exuberance could not compete with its venerable presence, coming off callow in comparison. It was a respectable matron surrounded by dandies.

“Let’s go into the Watermarket. It’s too noisy out here. I need to think.”

“A weak excuse to go and buy a love philtre. Married only a couple of months, and already you are out to snare a younger lover!”

“You are insufferable,” she said.

“So they say.”

“I’m not laughing, Guis, not today. If I get this wrong...”

“I understand,” he said. “You won’t get it wrong. You’re too bloody clever.”

“Language!” she hissed. “We are not in one of your seedy little artists’ dives now, brother.”

“You are such a prude. That’s not bad language.”

“Guis...”

“Sorry, goodlady.”

They waited for the traffic master on duty to halt the traffic, then streamed across the road with dozens of other people. Collectors of the pure took advantage of the break in the carts and charabancs, dodging between well-heeled feet to scoop up the large amount of dogshit all over the setts. Katriona raised a tuzzy-muzzy to her nose against its bitter scent.

They reached the other side. The traffic controller blew his whistle. Recognising it for the signal to depart, the dogs in their traces bayed and leapt forward without prompting from their drivers. A steam whistle blew in answer. There were more and more steam coaches on the road every month. They puffed white clouds alive with dancing blue sparks as they clattered along the road on legs and wheels and Shefirian fired-rubber tracks.

The Watermarket loomed over them. Huge arches, heavy and somewhat ugly by comparison to modern styles, strained under the mass of stone they supported. There was always a sense of great weight to the Watermarket, more than that of masonry. The antiquity of the place pressed down hard.

They passed inside and the noise of the street diminished immediately. The temperature was constant throughout the year. Inside it was cool and pleasantly damp—as much of a relief from the chill winds of autumn as it was from the freezing days of winter or the heat of high summer.

There were many pools within, some stacked in complex fans that rose most of the way to the domed roof. Water trickled over warn lips into the bowls below. Worn carvings of sea life and drowned men decorated their rims and sides. The Watermarket’s original purpose was long behind it. The pools had once contained the only pure water in the city. Now they had fish in them. The real draw of the place were the shops, three arcades of them arranged around the building’s circumference. They ranged from boutiques frequented by the highest born, to strange little dens known only to a select few, full of dusty jars and dried things of dubious origin and run by foreigners, Tyn and Ishmalani.

“This place always raises a smile,” said Guis.

“Why?”

He craned his neck to look up at the dome. Large slabs of quartz were embedded into the concrete to let the light in. “Because it was built by the Old Maceriyans at the dawn of their power. And in this age when their works are so highly regarded and so often mimicked, it is derided for being insufficiently Maceriyan! It is all so very functional, it lacks the refinement of their later works, it is ugly... On and on, so they go. One should have a continuity, don’t you think? This building is five thousand years old.”

“I did know that.”

“And do you know Fenk Kespser wanted to blow it up when he built Bankers’ Row?”

“I did not. You shame my ignorance, brother.”

“We each have our talents and interests. You stick with your numbers, I with my history. I am particularly amused and exercised by the true seeming of things. And Trassan told me. He and I share a mutual fascination with architecture.”

She slipped her hand from the crook of his elbow.

“What are you looking for?”

She flashed a quick, distracted smile. “What do you mean, dear Guis?”

“I understand. I see now. You have come here for something. Was I right about the love philtre?”

“Now what made you think that?” She tugged his forearm. “This way!”

She pointed to a small store, its glass front obscured by stacked baskets of obscure goods.

Guis was dragged uncomplainingly within. There was a strange smell, musty, on the borderline between enticing and unpleasant. A shop for magisters. Ingredients for rituals, most of them surely bogus, were stacked from floor to ceiling or hung from the beams in tight bunches. A glass-topped counter somehow contrived to find space within, full of more brown, leathery arcane bric-a-brac. Tiny wooden drawers filled the wall behind the counter, a wooden ladder that appeared slippery with a century’s accretion of polish and grease ran on rails to allow access to them all.

Between drawers and counter sat a hunched Tyn of a kind neither of them were familiar with. He had immense ears. From these issued tufts of white hair, dense as rushes. Three pairs of glasses sat on his long nose. He was bent over a book so far it appeared that he meant to literally digest it. He read aloud at such volume he did not hear them enter. Only when Guis passed a half dozen cages containing lesser Tyn did he look up, for they chattered and squealed at Guis’s companion. Tyn eyed them warily from under Guis’s hair.

“You are a carrier, goodfellow,” said the Tyn shopkeeper. He had a nasal voice that vibrated in the ears in a way that makes a man twitch.

“Me?” said Guis. “I am.”

“Looking for a new one? That one worn out? Geas too onerous?” The creature slid off his chair.

“No, goodtyn. I am here with my sister.” Guis gestured at Katriona. She had been staring fixedly at the Tyn since they had entered. Only now did he deign to notice her.

“Goodlady,” it said with a bow. “What’s a lovely like you want with an old Tyn like me?” It licked its lips. Katriona took a step backwards.

“I require a draft of the Waters of Truth.”

“Of course, dearie! You have come to the right place.” It came out from behind its counter. It had a peculiar gait, a hobbling skip that accentuated the hump upon its back. The Tyn went to a large onion bottle in the window, full of bright blue liquid. He removed a glass stopper and reached for a measuring beaker of pewter hanging by a chain. “Whatever you need to uncover, a good drink of this will reveal the secrets you crave.”

Katriona caught the Tyn’s wrist. She bent down to whisper in the creature’s large, hairy ear. “Tyn Lydar, Queen of the Morthrocksey Tyn is my confidante.”

“That is nice, my lovely. What does it mean to me?” The Tyn affected breeziness. It could not hide its grimace.

“Do not play ignorance with me. I want the genuine article, not the coloured water you sell to lovesick youths or tourists.”

“I have no idea what you...”

“Shlee mafana,” she whispered.

The Tyn’s eyes narrowed. It wagged its head from side to side and yanked its hand from Katriona’s grip. “Bah! Very well.” It replaced the stopper. “It will cost you, Katriona Kressinda-Morthrocka.”

Katriona was not surprised it knew her name. “I will pay four times the price of whatever you were about to sell me, in gold.”

The Tyn was back behind his counter. It bent low, fishing about underneath.

“That is not the payment I require and you know it.”

“Be careful, Kat,” said Guis. “Don’t start bartering for magic with the Tyn. As soon as they are in a position to, they will laden you with conditions you can’t hope to fulfil.”

“I know that! And I know what kind of thing you will ask me for,” she sad to the Tyn. “I will not grant you a day of my life, or a kitten’s breath, or my ability to enjoy the act of sexual congress!”

“Sis!” said Guis, scandalised.

“That’s a good one. Did one ask you for that?”

“No. It is an example.”

“Uh-uh-uh,” said the Tyn, waggling its head. He grinned lasciviously. “You’re that kind of girl, eh? I’ll remember that one.”

“No double-dealing Tyn magic or impossible geas.”

The Tyn looked shifty. “Alright, alright!”

Katriona smoothed down her dress. “Now, the price.”

“Well,” it said, placing a small, unremarkable vial of water on the glass counter with a chink. “It’s a warning.”