House of Shadows(20)

Those would be the very words. Taudde could hear the old man’s exact tone: exasperated and affectionate and acerbic. But Grandfather wouldn’t laugh if he’d seen the cold, clever avariciousness in Miennes’s eyes, or Ankennes’s calm intensity. Taudde shivered. It wasn’t the chill in the air. He was, he admitted to himself, afraid. Lord Miennes was merely greedy or ambitious, he thought. Miennes had some ordinary, petty motive. He was dangerous, undoubtedly, but Taudde found he was much more afraid of Ankennes. Men who were absolutely certain of their own righteousness might do anything, and he thought, now he had time to think about it, that that kind of certainty was exactly what he’d heard in the undertones of the mage’s voice. Taudde shivered again. He paused in his walk to make himself breathe deeply, dismissing fear. Whatever their plans, he would disentangle himself from them.

But, whatever he did, Taudde would have to do it carefully. If Miennes or the mage suspected that Taudde was going to slip whatever traps they’d prepared, what would stop them from sending word of Taudde to the Laodd themselves? Nothing, Taudde concluded, and thought, although he tried not to, of the soundless cells of the Laodd, in which a bardic sorcerer might be imprisoned in helpless silence.

He walked on after a moment, taking a faster pace as he neared his townhouse. Much of the traffic had died away, now. Smoke, tinged faintly red by the last light of the sun, rose in thin wisps from innumerable chimneys. Beyond the city, the great fortress of the Laodd brooded down upon the homes of lesser men, its glass windows throwing back the red light so that the fortress seemed to glitter with crystallized blood. Above it, ragged clouds tore themselves free of high mountain peaks and unfurled across the sky. Beneath and behind and beyond the city, Taudde fancied he could hear the sea itself calling, the waves breaking against the shore in a cadence older than time.

There would be snow three feet deep across Kalches at this time of year. Yet the chill of coastal Lirionne, at least here in Lonne, seemed to cut with a finer blade than any Kalchesene winter. The Lonne winter was altogether different from the brilliant cold that in Kalches drew folk out for skating parties on the frozen rivers. Taudde set his teeth as much against sudden, violent longing as against the wind. Yet for all he longed for his home, and for all the trouble in which he was now embroiled, he could not wish, even now, to exchange the drawing tides of the sea for the frozen rivers of Kalches. He bowed his head and tried to ignore the unfriendly bite of the chilly Lonne wind.

That was why he was taken by surprise by the young thugs of some street gang. There were three of them. They had taken advantage of an unlit part of the street, slipping out of a narrow side street to block his way. Two of the three had knives, the other a short, metal-bound club.

In Lonne, generally the threat of purse cutters was greater than the threat of plain violence, for the Laodd frowned on disorder. But foreigners were not permitted to carry weapons, so of course they attracted the city’s predators. Wealthy foreigners such as Taudde were expected to travel by carriage, or hire local guards, or both. Taudde, not accustomed to thinking of petty threats, had carelessly let himself walk into danger and now was not certain he dared deal with it as he would have in Kalches. He glanced around, but saw no one on the street who might come to his aid.

“Not lookin’ for trouble,” the largest of the thugs said, smacking his club against his palm and grinning.

Taudde longed to smash the thugs to the cobbles. He was sure they deserved anything he might do to them. But he couldn’t. There was no time for subtlety, not in this; yet any fast unsubtle sorcery he might do would give away his true nationality in a blaring rush of magic every little magelet in Lonne must perceive, never mind the skilled mages of the Laodd. Taudde shivered with the effort to contain his outrage. The thugs smirked, taking the tremors for terror. Their obvious self-satisfaction only fed Taudde’s fury.

The moment he’d recognized the trap, Taudde had automatically slipped his flute from its special pocket in his sleeve. Now he almost brought it to his lips, despite the risk any hurried use of sorcery entailed, in Lonne.

Then he clenched the flute in his hand instead, and set his teeth as he forced himself instead to reach for his pouch. He thought he had enough script and hard cash to satisfy the street thugs. If they had the least sense, then they would indeed not want the trouble a wealthy foreigner might bring down on them—if he could stand to yield a little money to them, they should fade back into the streets that had spawned them. Ridiculous though it was that one of Kalches’s dozen master sorcerers should be robbed by common thugs, striking them down was surely not worth the risk of drawing attention from Lonne’s mages.