The sun was casting the shadows of early afternoon. A lot could have happened while I was having my dealings with the Guard, and I figured I’d better get back in touch with events pretty quick. On the other hand, my sojourn in the sewers had left me thoroughly unfit for any decent human contact. The street I’d entered had a horse trough a block or so down, but it was going to take more than a simple trough to deal with me. One idea was a fast jump in the nearby river. That would get me wet but not necessarily clean; the sewers had to empty someplace. A public bath was another idea, and I was about to go looking for one when my mind unexpectedly lit on the third and best idea of all.
I took off at a jog. People wrinkled their noses and tossed rotten things at me as I passed, and the lucky few who saw me coming had enough time to move out of nasal range. I didn’t blame them a bit. I lost a small pack of dogs that had showed up out of nowhere, rounded one final corner, and pounded on a neat oval door next to the open-front stall of a glassmaker. A window opened on the third floor high above my head. “Who is it? said a woman’s voice.
I stepped back and looked up. “Hey, who are you?” she said.
“Look under the scum,” I said.
“… I don’t believe it.”
“I’m having a little trouble with it myself,” I said. “How about coming down and letting me in?”
“Are you crazy? Let you in? After what happened last time you were here, you think I’d ever open my door for you again?”
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. “Flora, be reasonable. I was under a spell, you know that. I was more embarrassed than you were.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said, sniffing at me. “Maybe it’s even true. I don’t care. Even if it is true, you shouldn’t be in my neighborhood at the moment, let alone my house, looking like you look and smelling like you -”
“If you don’t come down here I’m going to start smearing myself on the walls. Then you try dealing with the neighbors.”
“… If I let you in, what next?”
“What do you mean, what next?”
“Are you planning to tell me later you were under another spell?”
I considered telling her I was under another spell, only not the kind she was thinking of, but under the circumstances I thought she might not take it the right way. “You’re safe from me, Flora, I promise I’m not going to pull anything.”
“We’ll see about that. Where’s your sword? I’ve never seen you without a sword.”
“The Guard took it,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it when I’m clean.”
“I’m sure I’m not interested,” she said haughtily. “But all right, then, suppose you’re telling the truth for a change. What do I get out of this?”
“The story’s got more in it than just the sword. It’ll tell you something useful.”
“Useful? Hah! What could you tell me that would be any use at all?”
“Something that could keep you from getting dead. That sound good enough for you?”
Her head withdrew and the window slammed. A moment later there was a stamping on the stairs inside and the door opened a narrow crack behind a chain. I could dimly see Flora inside with her arms folded. “Okay, the door’s open, big guy detective. Now what do you want?”
I was highly aware of how much I was dripping on her porch and she was clearly about ready to kick the door shut again in my face. “Carl Lake been around lately?” I said quickly.
Her foot against the door paused. “Why?” she said.
“He called you to a meeting, right?”
The chain rattled loose and slowly the door swung more fully open. “How do you know about that? And what’s it to you?”
“Clean up first.”
She sniffed again, this time at closer range, gagged, and turned a light shade of green. “If I want to stand close enough to hear what you’re saying, I guess you’ll have to get detoxified somehow. Go around the back.”
The front door closed, and I went around the side of the building to another pair of larger cross-timbered doors, like the doors to a barn. One of them creaked as the bar inside was pushed back. With a louder creak, the door slid open just enough for me to ease through it and into Flora’s workroom.
The workroom was a two-story chamber with a loft, filled with several hulking barrels and tanks, two bookcases, a workbench, and a blackboard. Windows around the second floor let in the light. “Stand on that grate,” Flora said, indicating a square mesh inset in the floor with open space underneath. As I walked over to it, she threw a lever and manipulated a crank on the wall. Belts attached to the crank stretched up to the ceiling and ran off into a complicated maze of pulleys and gears. A tube and spout attached to one of the tanks swung over until it was suspended over my head. She drew a figure in the air, a figure that trailed like blue smoke behind her finger and then drifted across the room to spin slowly around my head. Through the slight haze of dancing blue motes, I saw Flora throw another lever. A valve squeaked, up on the tank, liquid gurgled, and then a rush of water cascaded through the tube and out of the spout and down over me. Bits of blue from the hanging ring came off in the water and washed over my clothes in a glittering rain, spreading and scouring away the slime and refuse with remarkable efficiency.
“I’m sure I won’t be flattered,” Flora said over the patter of the water, “but why did you decide to come here?”
I rinsed my mouth, gargled, and spit. “You’re a magician, your specialty is water, and you were close. I needed to talk to another magician, I needed to get washed off, and I needed to do both of them pretty quickly. That may not be flattering, but it’s unfortunately the truth.”
She cranked the lever back and the stream of water slowed to a trickle and stopped. “That’s the truth?” she said. “There wasn’t anything in that little talk about friendship.”
“These days I don’t know who’s a friend and who isn’t,” I said, brushing water out of my hair with both hands. “Besides, if I’d said I was coming to see you because you were a friend, I sort of thought you might take it the wrong way, judging from the other part of our conversation outside.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “What’s funny?” I said.
“You!” she whooped. “You’ve got a timid streak as wide as the Oolvaan!”
“I’d call it tact. Throw me a towel.”
She found one and lobbed it at me, still laughing. Flora was in her fifties and in good conditioning; magicians usually had to be because of the physical demands. She had put on a few pounds, though, which probably meant that business was slow; Flora was on retainer to the Venerance for maintenance of the flood-abatement defenses, but the weather had been quiet lately and I guess she didn’t have too much else going on. Remember coupling? When a magician was active running a lot of spell-work, he or she had trouble keeping up their body weight; the power expenditures kept burning through their flesh. Between jobs, the thoughtful magician tried to put on some body mass, in order to have an extra cushion to draw against when things picked up again.
Flora wasn’t really my type, not that I’d ever figured out exactly what that was, but events had thrown us together a few times before this and we’d found that we could be pleasant with each other. It wasn’t automatic, pleasantness never was, but it did happen on occasion, and so every so often we’d been friends.
At the moment, though, it remained to be seen. “All right, you’re clean now,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.”