Chapter 35: The City Has Teeth

Alden had come up beside him without appearing to and stayed there for about a hundred yards, which was as near to sympathy as Alden ever came in public.

"You all right."

"Aye."

"Right." He dropped back again.

Inside, the city unfolded: tiled roofs and narrow winding lanes, timbered houses pressed close as teeth in a jaw, the bell tower of the old cathedral standing over the whole skyline flanked by the spire of the merchants' guildhall and the domed roof of the archives. Chimneys smoked. Banners hung from upper floors. The crowd parted for the column and heads went down at Waldric's approach, and here and there Osric caught a sigil he did not know, because the old nobility of Auenstadt had been either killed or exiled after the rebellion, and what ruled it now was a council of aldermen and minor lords in the Count's name.

Twelve of them. He had the list in his coat and had read it four times on the road and had not yet worked out which of the names mattered.

Waldric had taken rooms at an inn in the merchants' quarter rather than in the Palace Quarter, which Osric had queried on the road and which the old man had explained in one sentence: a guest in a lord's house owes the lord a courtesy, and they were going to need to be discourteous.

It was a good inn. The beds were clean and the doors had bolts and there was a stable alley at the back that Osric walked twice before he took his boots off.

Waldric had them all in his room before supper, which he had not done on the road.

"The council does not sit for two days," he said. "That is deliberate and it is not an insult, or it is not only an insult. It is two days in which every man on that council will be visited by somebody with an interest, and I intend to be one of the somebodies, and I shall be out most of tomorrow doing it and I shall be extremely dull about it afterward."

"And us?" said Argilac.

"You will be soldiers of a border barony seeing a city, which is what everybody expects of you and therefore what nobody looks at twice." Waldric poured. "You

may go where you like. You may drink what you like, within reason, and Alden will tell me what he considers reason and I shall halve it.

"Two rules. The first is that you do not speak about the woman. Not to a tapster, not to a girl, not to a man who buys you a drink because he admires your accent. If it comes up, you know nothing and you are dull about it."

"And the second?" said Doran.

"If somebody starts a quarrel with you, you lose it."

That got a stir.

"I mean it and I shall say it once." The old knight looked round them. "This city has twelve men on a council and about nine of them would like the Baron's business to fail, and the cheapest way to make it fail is to have one of you in a magistrate's cell before Thursday. A tavern brawl would do it. A cuffed apprentice would do it. So if a man puts his shoulder into you in the street, you apologise to him, and you keep apologising, and you walk away, and you come and tell me who he was."

"And if he draws?" said Alden.

"Then that is different and you know it is different, and I shall not insult you by explaining where the line is." Waldric drank. "But he will not draw. That is not how it is done here. Here they will spend a week making you look like exactly what they have already decided you are, and they will do it in front of witnesses, and they will not once put themselves at risk doing it."

Osric said nothing.

He had heard the whole speech before, in different words, from Throderic, before the Brennoc campaign, and had believed about half of it then and rather more of it now.

Toman got his cart into the lower market by the western square, near the coppersmiths, and came back at dusk flushed to the ears and full of a long story about a man who had tried to buy the whole load at half its worth and had been sent away with a flea in his ear.

"You said no?" Osric asked.

"I said I'd been told the price by my father and that I hadn't the authority to change it," said Toman, "which was a lie, because I have, but he didn't know that."

Alden roared. Argilac clapped the boy on the back hard enough to move him.

Osric said nothing, and thought that Beren's plan for this trip was going to be a great deal harder to execute than his brother had reckoned on.

Later, when the others had gone down to the common room, he sat on the edge of the bed with his coat off and his mail across his knees.

The rings under the left arm had gone at the tower, where a sabre had caught it and been turned. Nine or ten of them, broken and sprung, and the gap was wide enough now that a man could get four fingers into it, and it had been that way for five weeks.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He turned it toward the lamp and looked at it for a good while.

Then he folded it over the chest at the foot of the bed and went to the window and opened the shutter a hand's breadth and looked out over the roofs, north, toward the coppersmiths' row and the several columns of forge smoke going up over it in the last of the light.

Four days' ride, he had been telling himself for nine days.

It was about eleven minutes' walk.

He closed the shutter and went to bed and did not sleep for some while.

Waldric spent all of the first day in other men's parlours, drinking wine he did not want and saying almost nothing of substance in a great many words, which was the work and which he was extremely good at, and he came back to the inn at dusk looking like a man who had been carrying stone.

"Tomorrow I do it again," he said, and went up.

So the second morning belonged to nobody, and four soldiers with a day on their hands in a strange city went where soldiers always go, which is to look at things they cannot afford.

The Great Market of Auenstadt occupied a square that would have held all of Valmarch village twice with room for the hedgerows, and it was full to the corners.

Traders and hawkers and shouting boys. Voices bouncing off timbered façades and stone archways like birds let out of a cage. Baked bread and old fish and boiled leather and sweet wine and piss, all of it at once, all of it competing. Somewhere a bell was being rung continuously for reasons nobody could establish.

Osric had been in perhaps a dozen markets of that size in his life and had never once managed to enjoy one. There were too many people at his back and too

many upper windows and a hundred places where a man could stand and be looked at without knowing it, and none of that was a real danger in a city under the King's peace at ten in the morning, and his shoulders did not care.

He walked at the front with the familiar weight of the messer at his side.

Doran came behind him, tall and lean, scanning the crowd out of habit. Alden drank in all of it with an open delight he did not trouble to hide. Argilac kept a wary eye on anybody who brushed too near, which in that press was everybody, and had therefore been quietly furious since the north gate of the square.

"This market's grown since last I walked it," Alden said, nodding at a line of painted dancers performing near a fruit stall.

"It's got richer." Doran cast a sidelong glance at two velvet-robed merchants haggling over a crate of polished glassware. "Half those wagons weren't here last autumn."

"That's what peace brings," said Argilac. "Trade and fools both."

They passed a wagon drawn by two horned hill oxen with their breath steaming, and ducked under a banner advertising whale oil and salts out of the southern coast, and came by a stall of armour that glinted expensively and was fit for nothing whatever: ornate breastplates, plated gloves, horse helms chased in silver, every piece made to be looked at and none of it made to be hit.

Osric glanced at it for exactly as long as it deserved.

"That's four hundred marks of steel that'd fold on the first proper blow."

"Aye, but look at the engraving," said Alden.

"I am looking at the engraving. It's cut into the plate. They've taken the thickness out of the breast to make a picture."

Toman had come with them and had not said a word in forty minutes and was looking at everything with his mouth slightly open, and at the armour stall he stopped dead and had to be collected.

"There he is," Doran murmured. "That man's not from around here."

The tent stood out of the row the way a bloodstain stands out of a garden.

Black cloth and deep crimson, its posts carved in curling patterns that mimicked the coil of a tail. A single banner hung above it, black silk, bearing a dragon coiled about a burning star.

Osric looked at it a moment longer than he meant to.

A dragon.

We march under a wyvern with its wings out. There's a fire-lord with a gaping mouth stood over the altar in our own chapel. And the men who smoked us out of that tower hang a serpent with its tail in its teeth off a stake.

Everybody's got one. Three peoples who've never agreed on anything else.

You'd think a scaled beast had actually come through here once, back when the world was young enough to remember it.

He put it away where he put such notions, which was down among the ones he had never said aloud to anybody, including Lambert, who would have had a great deal to say about it.

The man beneath the canopy was no common peddler.

Osric knew the device on the banner, because everybody did. The Second Auren Empire lay a very long way east and south of anywhere, and had been the first one once, in an age that had left nothing behind but ruins and a great many stories nobody sensible believed. Its traders came this far perhaps twice in a decade.

Tall and lean, with skin the colour of burnished bronze and eyes an odd pale amber, in a long fitted dark coat fastened with silver clasps shaped like dragon's teeth. His boots had no dirt on them, in that square, on that morning, which was a small impossibility Osric noticed and could not account for. His raven hair was combed back with military precision.

He looked up, and smiled like a man who had been expecting them all morning.

"Ah. Men of steel and worn boots." His voice was smooth and unhurried. "I could smell the discipline from halfway across the square."

"We've been called worse," said Alden.

"Bacchus." He clasped his hands behind his back. "Trader by title. Imperial by birth. My tent and my licence are registered and stamped, should your watchmen become curious."

Osric let his eye go over the goods laid out on dark velvet: tools of a make he did not recognise, inks in small stoppered bottles, vials of foreign perfume, talismans in the shape of coiled things, and blades with a deep smoky sheen along the flat that spoke of ore that had not come out of any hill in this county.

"We don't see many of your kind this far east."

"Then the road is failing both of us." Bacchus spread his hands. "Still. I am a modest soul, dragging a wagonload of old Imperial craft through a kingdom on the brink of eating its own tongue."

Osric's gaze sharpened.

"Speak plainly."

"I don't gossip. I only trade." The merchant shrugged. "But even in the Empire the whispers reach us. The sons of the crown pulling in opposite directions. The elder, Serwin, headstrong, full of fire and fury. The younger, Marek, cold and clever and silent when he ought to be shouting. Two princes, one crown, and a dying king who cannot hold either of them in check. Not for much longer."

"That's court gossip," Doran said.

"It's weather." Bacchus said it mildly. "You may not see the storm yet. You can feel the pressure in your lungs."

Argilac frowned. "You talk like a man who knows too much."

"I listen like a man who wishes to live long. And I speak just enough to earn his coin."

Alden had drifted along the front of the stall toward a small open crate of carved trinkets: ivory, bone, horn polished to a sheen. He crouched under the pretence of examining a carved griffon, and his hand went sideways toward a dragon-headed clasp tucked half under the edge of the cloth.

Osric's hand came down on the back of his head with a flat crack.