The Ships of Merior

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.

Laughing as he ducked through an arbour of flowering vines, Medlir unlatched a side gate that let into the gutter behind the court house. ‘Mind the horse piss.’

‘Or not,’ Halliron commented. ‘If I stink enough to turn heads, do you guess the mayor’s wife would throw me out?’

‘She’d doubtless roast Dakar for the lapse, then sidestep sensibility by giving you a replacement pair of shoes, fancy ones with satin ruffles.’ Medlir offered an arm to steady his master across the puddle. Through his thin sleeve, the old man trembled shockingly. ‘It’s not much further. We can cut through the guards’ barracks.’

‘That’s not necessary.’ Halliron squared trim shoulders. ‘I need the walk to cool my temper.’

Companionably silent, the pair passed sights grown unwontedly familiar through the course of their enforced stay in Jaelot: the scarred stalls of the butcher’s sheds, and fishmonger’s baskets stacked like nested eggs in the starlit gloom of the alley. Halliron broke step to fling silver into a beggar’s bowl. The mournful, deep bells in the guard tower chimed the hour, rousting up a flapping flock of pigeons. The birds wheeled above the city’s muddled skyline, smudged into soot from coal fires lit to cut the sea damp.

‘It’s hard to believe this place was once the site of Paravian mysteries,’ Halliron commented over the clop of horses and the grind of gilt-striped carriage wheels. Foot traffic crowded the road, couples cloaked and masked and laughing as they hurried to dance at the festival fires in light-hearted contrast with hawkers trudging homeward with handcarts of unsold pastries. ‘The sixth lane resonance once channelled through this headland. At solstice, you’d think I’d feel the pulse of the earth’s song through my very boots. Everywhere else the unicorns danced, at least a ghost echo lingers.’

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