A nasty snicker of laughter down an alley brought Megan’s head up. Leif paused, looking down into the darkness, and Megan said a word under her breath. “Very interesting,” she said after a moment.
Leif couldn’t see anything, but the voice was familiar. “Who was that?” he asked.
“Our little friend again,” Megan said. “Gobbo, the singing dwarf.”
“Oh, really,” Leif said.
“Would have thought he’d be up in the castle, doing whatever jesters do for his boss,” Megan said.
“He might be doing an errand. I think that kind of thing is in the job description.”
“Huh,” said Megan, not sounding particularly convinced. “Well, come on.”
They walked on, went through a gate between two walls, and headed down yet another dark curve of narrow street. Leif paused. Megan kept on going.
“Whoa,” he said. “This is it.”
Megan stopped, and looked up and down the street. “What is it?”
“This.”
Leif remembered Megan referring to the Pheasant and Firkin as a dive. As they paused outside the front of the Scrag End, with the moon very gradually looking over the top of the outermost wall, Megan stared at the structure sticking out into the street, with its cracked wooden shingles and iron-bound, axe-pocked door.
“This looks like somebody’s shed!” she said.
“It might have been, once,” Leif said. “Come on in.”
He banged on the door. A little rectangular iron slit at about eye height slid aside on the inside of the door, and a ray of dim light, blocked by the shadow of a head, sprang out of it into the dark street. Two narrowed eyes peered through the slit at Leif.
“Wayland,” Leif said.
The little door slid shut, and there was a sound inside of a wooden bolt being slid aside and lifted out of its cradle. “High tech,” Megan said under her breath.
Leif chuckled. The door swung ponderously outward, and first Leif, then Megan, slipped through the opening.
Leif watched Megan look around, and thought he saw her finish the thought, It is a shed! So it probably had been — a biggish one that might have been attached to one of the old stables which had been located in this area. The floor was the same cobblestone as out in the street, and the walls were ancient, blackened, cracked planks of wood butted together edge-to-edge, daubed here and there with some kind of plaster in an unsuccessful attempt to seal up the cracks. There were four or five small plain wooden tables, each with a rushlight holder, and a curtained doorway opening into some kind of service area behind the main room: probably where the beer barrels were kept.
The man who had opened the door for them, a strikingly tall and handsome young man in a grubby smock and breeches, incongruously balding on top, with long hair tied neatly back behind, finished shutting and rebolting the door, looked them up and down, and vanished behind that curtained door. At a table at the very back of the room, near that door, sat Wayland. He had a mug in front of him, and two mugs waiting on the table.
They sat down at Wayland’s table. Leif nodded at him, then glanced at the two mugs.
“Saw you in Attila’s,” said Wayland. Then he glanced over at Megan. “I think we’ve met, though.”
“I think so too,” Megan said, reaching out to touch hands with him, the accepted greeting. “Summer festival in Lidios, wasn’t it? The market.”
“That’s right, Brown Meg. My usual stand. Two years ago?”
“Yeah.”
“You were in Lidios?” Leif said to Megan, slightly surprised. “What were you doing there?”
“Slumming,” Megan said, smiling slightly. “I wanted to take a look at the place. But once was enough.”
“Anyway, be welcome,” Wayland said. They lifted the mugs and drank the thin pale Errint beer, more like nearbeer than anything else.
“I just came up from down that way,” Wayland said. “Place is stirred-up as a hornet’s nest.”
“What for?”
“News about what’s going on up here,” Wayland said, and took another drink, as if to get rid of a bad taste. “This whole business with the Duke descending on us from out of the blue, trying to pressure poor Fettick into an alliance with Argath.” Wayland shook his head. “A lot of other countries up this way, six or seven of the little ones, have been getting a lot of pressure all of a sudden to make alliances. Somebody seems to be in a big hurry about it.”
“Why?” Megan said. “Who do you think he’s afraid of?”
“Don’t know that it’s afraid,” Wayland said. “More like angry, I think.”
He leaned back on the bench, against the splintery wall, and studied his drink. “I was down Arstan and Lidios way, as I said, and I stopped on the way up to do some post work—”
“Post?” Megan said.
“Oh, aye,” Wayland said. “The Swift-Post system has an eastern spur that runs up from the Lidians to Orxen and out around the Daimish Peninsula. Their dispatch hub is at Gallev, about — what would it be? A hundred leagues south of here. Sometimes, if I’m between jobs, or I need a little extra hard silver, I stop there and shoe the post-horses. It’s steady work. There are always post-riders coming in and out, special couriers, and the like.”
He took another swig of beer. “This time out, though, I was there ’bout midsummer. They like to take advantage of the long days that time of year so they can add day riders to the schedule, and there are always more private courier-riders going up and down then, same reason. You’ll see maybe one every couple of hours. This one day, there were four separate couriers down from Argath, all wearing his device, all in Rod’s own hurry. Two didn’t stop, two stopped to change horses and went on again. Not without dropping a word or two about what they were up to — you know how it is, must be boring work riding post, they like to impress people with how important they are. Idiots.
“Well, two of those posts — one of the ones that didn’t stop, one of the ones that did — came straight from Argath’s hand at the Black Palace and were going straight to Gerna city in Toriva.”
“What, to King Sten?” Leif asked.
“No, no. To his war-leader, Lateran.”
Leif suddenly became rather interested in his beer. Megan raised her eyebrows. “Don’t know the man.”
Wayland shrugged. “Another hot young general on the way up. Some brilliant victories, since a couple of years ago. Some against Argath, too. Pretty embarrassing ones, skirmishes — around then, people started looking at Argath and saying, ‘Maybe he’s slipping.’ Some people think that started this whole trouble with Elblai up north.” Wayland shook his head. “So suddenly there are all these posts going back and forth. And the one post-rider who stopped, he said that the other rider, the one who didn’t stop, was carrying the Black Arrow.”
Megan, too, became interested in her beer. Leif did his best to stretch nonchalantly. The Black Arrow was a North-continent tradition, a declaration of blood feud to the death.
“Maybe Argath got tired of being beaten,” Leif said.
“Don’t know if it’s just that,” said Wayland. He drank, and put his mug down. “But this…this is what you were asking me about, in a way. Yes?”
Leif nodded. “You said about Elblai…that she was bounced.”
“That’s what I heard,” said Wayland. “News does travel fast.”
Leif nodded. In a medieval setting, news might take days or weeks to get from one place to another, but this was a medieval setting with e-mail. Post-riders were still needed, but for carrying physical artifacts rather than news.