"Oh," the man said. He translated once more. The other man said something. They all smiled. The man patted the chair next to him. "Here. You can go next."
"Thanks." Bembo took such privileges for granted. He sat down.
A few minutes later, the door to the back room opened. A man and a woman came out. The man took one look at Bembo and scooted past him, out the front door, and onto the street. That didn't surprise Bembo, either- the fellow was the type who would have dealt with constables before. The woman looked Bembo up and down, too. After a brittle silence, she asked, "What you want?" in halting Algarvian.
Before Bembo could speak, the man sitting by him said, "He's after your famous cure for the grippe."
"Ah." The woman nodded. She pointed to Bembo. "You come with me."
"Aye, Mistress," he answered, and followed her into the back room. It had the impressive disorder he'd seen before among mages of a certain type, although he would have been mightily surprised if she held any formal ranking. When she gestured, he sat down in one of the chairs. She sat in the other, which faced his.
"Grippe, eh?" she said.
"That's right," Bembo agreed. "My partner's down with it now, and I don't want to catch it myself."
Nodding again, she set her hand on his forehead. Her palm was cool and smooth. She clicked her tongue between her teeth. "You just in time- I hope," she said.
"Have I got a fever?" Bembo asked anxiously.
She held up her thumb and forefinger. "Little one," she answered. "Now little one. You not worry. I fix." She reached for a book. It was, Bembo saw, in Kaunian. He gave a mental shrug. Algarvian mages used the classical tongue, too.
After reading, she rummaged through her sorcerous supplies (had she not been a mage of sorts, Bembo would have thought of the stuff as junk). She bound a small, reddish rock and a bit of something fibrous into a silk bag, then hung it round his neck by a cord. Then she put a couple of teeth, one needlelike, the other thicker but still sharp, into another little sack and set that in his breast pocket.
"Bloodstone and sea sponge good against fever," she said. "Likewise fangs of serpent and crocodile." She stood and set both hands on top of his head. Some of her chant was in Forthwegian, some in Kaunian. When she was done, she gave Bembo a brisk nod and held out her right hand, palm up. "One broad silver bit."
He started to growl. But angering a mage, even a lesser one, was foolish. He paid. Not only did he pay, he said, "Thank you."
It wasn't what he was thinking. The healer had to know that. But nobody could blaze you for thinking. She said, "You're welcome."
When he came out into the front room, conversation stopped most abruptly. A couple of new people had come in while the healing mage was helping him. He thought they were talking back and forth in Kaunian, but he hadn't heard enough to be sure. He strode past them and out onto the street again.
The more he walked his beat, though, the more worried he got. If that was a place where disguised Kaunians gathered, had the healer tried to cure him or curse him? When he got back to the barracks, he put the question to a mage attached to the constabulary.
"Let's see the amulets she gave you," the fellow said. Bembo showed them to him. He nodded. "The substances are what they should be. I can check whether the spell was perverted some sort of way." The mage chanted, cocked his head to one side as if listening, and chanted some more. He glanced over at Bembo. "Far as I can tell, friend, you're not likely to get the grippe for a while. Everything's as it should be."
"Good," Bembo said. "The way things are nowadays, you can't be too careful."
"Well, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong there," the mage said. "But everything's fine this time."
Bembo intended to stop in and thank the healer- and probably frighten the life out of her customers- when he walked his beat the next day. But when he came to the little storefront, the door was ajar. He stuck his head inside. The door to the back room stood half open, too. He went back and peered into the gloom- no lamps shining now. And no litter of sorcerous apparatus there, either. The mage was gone, and she'd cleaned out all her stuff.
Bembo sighed. He wasn't even very surprised. He patted the amulets she'd given him. She'd been honest, and then she'd decided she had to run away. "Shows what honesty's worth," Bembo muttered. And if that wasn't a demon of a thought for a constable to have, he didn't know what was.
Spinello not only walked through the streets of Trapani with a limp, he walked through them with a cane. From what the healers said, he might get rid of the cane one day before too long. The limp, though, the limp looked to be here to stay.
There were compensations. He got pitying glances from women, and pity, for a man of enterprise, might easily be turned to some warmer emotion. The wound badge he wore on his tunic now supported a gold bar. He'd been awarded the Algarvian Sunburst, Second Grade, for gallantry in the face of the enemy, to go with his frozen-meat medal, and he had a colonel's three stars on his collar patches. When he went back to the front, he'd probably end up commanding a brigade.
He tried to straighten up and walk as if he hadn't been wounded. He could do it- for a couple of steps at a time. After that, it hurt too much. He would have traded rank and decorations for the smooth stride he'd once enjoyed in a heartbeat- in half a heartbeat, by the powers above, he thought. But the powers above didn't strike bargains like that, worse luck.
Going up the stairs to the Royal Cultural Museum made sweat spring out on his forehead. By the time he climbed them all and strode into the great rococo pile of a building, he was biting his lip against the pain. The ticket-seller, a nice-looking young woman, gave him a smile that could have been promising. But when Spinello said hello to her, he tasted blood in his mouth. He went on by, his own face grim.
As always, he made for the large gallery housing artifacts from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The spare, even severe, sensibility informing those busts and pots and coins and sorcerous tools and other articles of everyday life was as far removed from that inspiring the building in which they were housed as it possibly could have been. And yet, all things considered, Spinello preferred elegant simplicity to equally elegant extravagance.
As he always did in this gallery, Spinello paused in front of a two-handled drinking cup whose lines had always struck him as being as close to perfection as made no difference. Neither illustration nor memory ever did it justice. Every so often, he had to see it in the fired clay to remind himself what human hand and human will could shape.
"Spinello, isn't it?"
He was so lost in contemplation, he needed a moment to hear and recognize his own name. Then he turned and stared at the aged savant who'd been leaning on a cane longer than he had been alive. His own bow was awkward, but heartfelt. "Master Malindo!" he exclaimed. "What an honor! What a pleasant surprise!" What a pleasant surprise to see you still breathing, was what he meant. Malindo had been too old to serve in the Six Years' War, which surely put him up past ninety now.
"I go on," Malindo said in a creaky voice. "Are those a colonel's stars I see?"
"Aye." Spinello drew himself up with what he hoped was pardonable pride.
"A man of valor. A man of spirit," Malindo murmured. He paused, perhaps trying to find what he'd meant to say. He is old, Spinello thought. But then, quite visibly, the savant did find it. "And have you fought in the west?"
"Aye," Spinello repeated, this time in a different tone of voice.
Malindo reached out with his free hand, all wrinkled and veiny, and set it on the one Spinello used to hold his cane. "Then tell me- I beseech you, by the powers above- that what we hear of Algarve's dealings with Kaunians, dealings with the descendants of those who created this" -he wagged a finger at the cup- "is nothing but a lie, a filthy lie invented by our enemies."