He turned and hurried downstairs, and out onto the street. Two blocks from home he turned right onto Shipwright Street. The avenue was already crowded with people hurrying in both directions, and Dumery quickly fell in with the southbound stream.
He stumbled and almost fell once, near the corner of Sea Captain Street, when something small and green ran between his legs, but he caught himself in time.
When he turned to see what had almost tripped him it was gone.
He wondered if it had been the same sort of creature he had seen in Thetheran’s workshop, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere.
He shrugged, forgot about it, and marched on.
Twenty minutes’ walk brought him to Wall Street and into the northeast corner of Westgate Market, where the morning sun shone brightly on the vividly-colored awnings of half a hundred merchants’ stalls, and even turned the somber grey stone of the great gate-towers cheerful. Farmers in brown or grey homespun jostled against city-dwellers in blue and black and gold, and a freshening sea-breeze had worked its way through the streets and over the rooftops to send the tunics and robes and striped awnings flapping. The snapping of fabric provided a beat for the shouts of hawkers proclaiming the superiority of their wares.
“The finest hams in all the Hegemony!” a man shouted, almost in Dumery’s ear as he passed a wagon beneath a red-and-white striped awning, and for a moment the pungent scent of smoked meat pierced the more general overlay of dust and sweat.
“Peaches, sweet peaches!” called the woman in the next stall, gesturing at her own fruit-heaped cart.
Dumery looked, then walked on. He had no intention of becoming a farmer or a butcher, nor anything else so mundane.
The market was not over-large-certainly smaller than Shiphaven Market-but it was very crowded, so it took some time for Dumery to see everything.
He passed stalls selling apples and pears and plums, beans and broccoli, beef and mutton. He passed churns of butter and shelves of cheeses, all fresh from the farm-or so their sellers swore. Fine wool and spun cotton, felts and velvets, silks and satins, all, proclaimed a cloth merchant with an unfamiliar accent, the best in Ethshar, and at bargain prices.
Dumery didn’t believe that for a moment. He knew that the best fabrics were sold in the Old Merchants’ Quarter, not in the open-air markets.
Most of the goods sold here were the products of local farms; that was Westgate’s specialty, after all. Anything that came any great distance came in by ship, and went to the markets of Spicetown and Shiphaven and Newmarket.
Anything that could stand to sit unsold on a shelf for any length of time was more likely to wind up displayed in a shop somewhere, rather than hawked in the market square. That foreign cloth merchant was an anomaly, probably some ambitious fellow from the Small Kingdoms who had hoped to get around the Ethsharitic shipping cartels. Westgate Market was a place to find pumpkins, not a career.
All the same, it was pleasant to stroll about, taking it all in. The sun was warm, the colors bright, and the smell of manure much less than he remembered.
As he strolled, there was a brief disturbance on the far side of the market, and Dumery heard a cry of “Thief!” He stood on tiptoe and craned to see, but could make nothing out through the intervening crowds.
He shrugged, and wandered on.
After a time it occurred to Dumery to look behind the carts and wagons and stalls of the vendors, at the permanent buildings that lined the east side of the square.
They were all inns, of course-the Clumsy Juggler, the Gatehouse Inn, half a dozen in all, squeezed into the hundred or so feet between Shipwright Street and High Street, each with its signboard and open door. Dumery paused and considered.
He knew that scores of other inns did business in Westgate, in addition to this row on the square, and there were many more elsewhere in the city as well, a few at each gate and several scattered along the waterfronts-though of course, Westgate had the largest concentration.
Dumery thought about inns. Could he become an innkeeper, perhaps?
Howdid one become an innkeeper? Did innkeepers take apprentices?
It might be interesting, meeting new people all the time, listening to travelers’ tales-but on the other hand, an innkeeper probably heard more about account books than adventures, more complaints than chronicles. And really, he’d be little better than a servant. It wouldn’t do.
All the same, he looked over the row carefully, admiring the artistry of the signboards.
The Clumsy Juggler, with its red-clad fool dropping half a dozen multi-colored balls, was the most whimsical of the six; most were fairly straightforward.
Two, the Gatehouse Inn and the Market House, had their names spelled out in runes, while the others relied, sometimes mistakenly, on illustrations to convey their names. The sign two doors from High Street, showing something green and wiggly on a field of irregular blue and gold stripes, seemed particularly incomprehensible.
Dumery was staring at that one, simultaneously trying to figure out what it was supposed to be and wondering who painted the boards and whether there was a potential career there, when two figures emerged from the door below the sign.
He glanced at them, then stared.
The lead figure, a big man wearing scuffed brown leather, he had never seen before, but the other, following a step behind and looking very irritated, was Thetheran the Mage.
Dumery blinked in surprise, and then, without really knowing why, he turned to follow the pair.
They were marching straight across the square toward the southern half of the huge pair of towers that bracketed the city gates. The man in the lead seemed cheerful and lighthearted; Dumery glimpsed a smile on his face when he turned to look back for a moment. Thetheran, on the other hand, seemed very annoyed about something; he was frowning ferociously and stamping his way across the hard-packed dirt.
Dumery wondered whether he would hurt his feet, walking like that. Maybe there was some sort of magic in it.
Curious about what could possibly annoy the wizard that way, Dumery continued to follow even after his initial impulsive action. He hurried through the crowd, dodging around clumps of haggling tradesmen and farmers, at one point ducking through a display of melons and almost toppling a pyramid of the great pale fruit.
The man in brown reached the base of the south tower, where a guardsman in yellow tunic and red kilt was leaning comfortably against the grey stone beside a small wooden door. He spoke to the guard; the guard rapped on the door and shouted something that Dumery couldn’t quite make out over the noise of the crowd.
Thetheran, Dumery noticed, looked quite impatient about all this.
The door opened, and the man in brown stepped inside, out of sight; Thetheran started to follow, but the guardsman stopped him with an outthrust hand against the wizard’s chest.
Thetheran exploded into a bellow of rage, but the guardsman bellowed back, and the wizard subsided.
Dumery stared. He had expected Thetheran to pull out a magic wand and blast the guardsman to dust, or something, not to simply back down like that. He wondered what in all the World could possibly make Thetheran behave this way.
Of course, even wizards, he supposed, must fear the power of the city’s overlord, Azrad VII. And the guards were Azrad’s direct representatives.
Then the leather-clad man re-emerged from the tower, one hand held high, clutching something that looked like a peculiar sort of bottle. It wasn’t particularly large, perhaps the size of a big man’s fist, and it gleamed purplish-red in the sun.
Thetheran reached for the bottle, but the man in brown turned away, holding it out of the wizard’s reach.
Dumery had now crept close enough to hear when the man in leather said, “That’ll be six rounds in gold, in advance.”