“Why have we come here?” Lixal asked. “This is some ancient graveyard.”
“Just so,” said the deodand. “But not truly ancient — burials have taken place here within relatively recent years. You have long forbidden me the chance to dine as I please, on the meat that I most like. Now I shall no longer be bound by your absurd and cruel strictures. And yet I do not want the vigilante impulses of your kind to interfere with our contest, so instead of sallying forth for live human flesh we will encamp ourselves here, where suitably aged and cured specimens wait beneath only a shallow span of topsoil.” The creature grinned hugely. “I confess I have dreamed of such toothsome delicacies for the entire span of our annoying and undesired companionship.”
“But what about me?” said Lixal. “What shall I eat? Will you hunt game for me?”
“You seem to think you still hold the upper hand, Laqavee.” The deodand spoke as sternly as a disappointed father. “You are far away from the assistance of any of your fellows and in the passing of a single heartbeat I can tear your throat with my talons. Hunt game for you? Nonsense.” The deodand shook its head and shoved him down onto his knees. “You will eat what I do. You will learn thrift as the deodands practice it! Now set up the gaming board and prepare to defend the honor of your species, Lixal Laqavee! In the meantime, I will begin digging for breakfast.”
The Terrible Conflagration at The Quiller’s Mint
When I was but a young man newly come to this great city from my mother’s house near the ocean cliffs of Helmingsea, I had no friend or family here who could give me houseroom, so I paid a few copper pieces each week for a bed at the ancient inn known as The Quiller’s Mint. The place was owned in that time by a man named Arvald, although in this our present day it has a different owner. He was a dour and secretive fellow, as are many of the Vuttish who live in the March Kingdoms — he had been born in the islands but had traveled all over the world on merchant ships in his youth, much as had my own father, born in Krace but buried on the foggy hills of Helmingsea. It was a strange thing to see, a Vuttish taverner — odd as an extravagant Settlander or a chaste Syannese — and he was as thrifty with words as you might guess. I think not many people who occasioned the inn favored Arvald much or would have chosen his establishment above any other, but that his prices were low.
I slept near the top of the building, three floors above Squeakstep Alley, in a room with a tiny window that looked out at a dark warehouse so close I could almost touch its timbered walls.. Several others shared the poorly-furnished room with me, most of them merchants staying only a few nights, and even the louse-ridden bed could not be called my own, for Arvald was not prey to the sort of foolish generosity that would let a bed go unused half the day. I slept my fitful sleep in it when the world was dark, and in the daylight hours a riverman who worked at the night-docks outside the walls would make it his. Many were the evenings I came home to find the sheets still dank with river water. Once I found a small fish in the blankets that I suspicion had come from out of his boot, for others who shared the room told me the riverman wore his sodden old pair even in bed.
Before I found my position in the royal tax office, I earned a bit of my lodging-fee back by helping Arvald serve his guests, and a strange, sad lot they were. Even today, when it has a slightly better name for hospitality, the folk lining the tavern benches of The Quiller’s Mint are a motley collection at best, rhymers and other less lawful blather-men, snitches, sharpers, and shave-pennies.
For those who have not visited the place, it stands inside the outer wall of the keep like a man who has been backing away from a brawl and run out of room, between Fitters Row and Tin Street, with Squeakstep Alley running past its front door like a narrow, muddy river. Its painted sign is a faceless woman veiled and dressed in black, for no reason anyone knows. The tavern sits just a short distance from Skimmer’s Lagoon on the Fitters Row side, and while the skimmers themselves do not visit the place — they have their own establishments into which the rest of us are not welcomed — the smell of the lagoon is always in the place, especially when the sun is high or the tide is low, and the cries of seabirds are its usual music, when they can be heard above the bellowing of drunkards and slatterns. It is an old building, and in fact at the rear it is built straightly into the city’s outwall, as though the wall were built around it rather than the other way round. No one claims to know when it was first put up, or even how far it extends. I could not tell you myself, despite having worked there for a year. There are several rooms down beneath the main tavern, pantries and other places I never explored. It troubled my heart to go down there by myself because it was quiet and dark and the corridors twisted most confusingly, and thus kept my visits short. When Nevin Hewney — perhaps Southmarch’s most famous playwright, and certainly its most frequently drunken playwright — is in his cups and claims another entire tavern lies deep beneath the one in current use, deserted but preserved, it will not be me who calls him a liar.
In any case, the Mint (as many called it then and still do) was not so much different in my youth than it is now. Most of the patrons, as is generally the case with poets and criminals, swung between extremes of morbid silence and loud bragging, often prodding each other to some dangerous bet or inflicting childish pranks. One that I remember is when a young poet with a demanding mistress was told that the pie-plant growing in the Mint’s kitchen yard was a sovereign prompter of the gallant reflex. This foolish versifier ate several uncooked stalks and grew so ill he nearly died, prompting amusement in all but the most charitable customers.
On the night of the conflagration, I recall little happening that was not of the ordinary. It was a chillsome late autumn, especially down by the lagoon where the winds blew unchecked, and a fire had been set in the fireplace. The air was thick with smoke and my eyes stung. Nevin Hewney, who was then still such a young man that he had no beard upon his face at all, but only a yellow fluff like dandelion, was bragging about having finished his first play, a piece of what we suspected must be dubious skill and even more doubtful virtue, which told the story of a famous Trigonarch’s mistress. To our surprise, a year later this play, The Eidolon of Devonis, was performed at the Firmament Theater and became quite popular, and Hewney received his first post with Earl Rorick’s players.
In another corner a trio of strangers, who despite the warmth of the room had not taken off their hooded cloaks, drank moderately and spoke quietly among themselves for most of the evening. I have heard it said in after days that these were the Lord Constable’s guardsmen, but what their purpose in the tavern should have been I do not know, and I doubt the story. There are places closer to the inner keep than the Quiller’s Mint where guardsmen can drink, and in fairer circumstances as well. I have even heard it claimed that one of these hooded men was young Prince in disguise — he is said to have liked to sit with ordinary men and women to learn something of their lives — but I suspicion this is a false claim. People will see the hands of princes and hierarchs in any fateful event, but there are fateful events enough in this world that princes and hierarchs would have to forego sleep entirely to have a hand in them all.
A few other of the tavern’s regular patrons were in the main room on that night, including a poet and occasional swindler named Thom Regin (although most who knew him would have said that it was the poetry that was occasional and the swindling his fulltime vocation) and a Jellonian woman named Doras, of whose virtues the most charitable thing that can be said is that she did not haggle much about prices. Doras, who from time to time kept a sort of company with big-bellied, booming-voiced Regin when he was sober, had on this night brought in a stranger, a dark-haired, pale man who she introduced as John Sommerle or Summerlea (I have seen the name spelled in diverse ways) who she said was a sailor. Sommerle himself did not speak much.