Dinitak was the only one who went with him. They slipped away in a quiet moment of the morning, Dekkeret saying nothing about what he had in mind to anyone on his staff. As for Fulkari, she had been feeling slightly ill that day, and had retired to her room at their hostelry. He did not mention his journey to her either.
Although Prestimion had told him that he had gone in disguise on these excursions, even to the extent of wigs and false mustaches, Dekkeret saw no need for any such intricate subterfuges. Prestimion, because he was such a distinctive-looking man, easily identifiable by the curious contrast between his surprisingly unprepossessing stature and his overwhelmingly kingly, commanding presence, would have run some risk of being recognized even among people who had not yet had a chance to see his portrait. The look in his eyes alone marked him for what he was.
But Dekkeret believed he was less likely to be discovered out here so far from the Castle. The new coinage showing his features had not yet been released, and in any case who would be able to identify a Coronal from his stylized face on a coin? Nor were the portraits of the new Coronal that hung in every shop-window particularly realistic; Dekkeret barely recognized his own image in them himself. Wearing rough casual garb that he had borrowed from one of the grooms traveling with the royal party, and with a shapeless cloth cap slouching across his head, he would seem like nothing more than just another brawny itinerant laborer, a big simple man who had come to town looking for work as a road-mender or a logger or something else equally fit for a man of his size and strength. He’d not get a second glance. And no one would have any reason to recognize Dinitak Barjazid at all.
The marketplace in Thilambaluc was a double-lobed oval with a cobbled roadway running up the middle between the two sectors. Everything within was crowded together higgledy-piggledy, each booth jammed up against its neighbor. In the eastern half of the market were dozens of stalls devoted to vegetables and fruits, and the butchers’ tables, fresh red meat piled everywhere and streams of blood running off. A zone given over to the sale of little sweet cakes and mild frothy beverages led to one where the tables were heaped with mounds of cheap clothing, and that was fronted by a row of rickety little cooking-stoves tended by the ubiquitous Liiman sausage-sellers.
Across the way, on the far side of the center roadway, the merchandise was of an even more varied sort: barrels and sacks of spices and dried meats; tanks of live fish; booths hung with simple glittery necklaces and bracelets; stacks of secondhand books and pamphlets, worn and frayed; mounds of wickerwork chairs and flimsy lacquered tables of the same sort, piled ten or twelve feet high; pots and pans and other kitchen implements of every kind; a corner where jugglers and other entertainers were performing; another where public scribes had their tables set out; another advertising the wares of sorcerers and wizards. Both the marketfolk and buyers were of a wide mixture of races other than human—a good many scaly Ghayrogs here, a sprinkling of ashen-hued Hjorts, the occasional towering Skandar or Su-Suheris moving through the throng.
Dekkeret could not remember the last time he had been in a public marketplace. The richly cluttered texture of this place fascinated him. It was so full, so busy. He vaguely remembered the one in Normork from his childhood as having been more spacious, the merchandise generally finer, the customers better dressed, but of course Normork was a city of
Castle Mount and this was a nondescript provincial town in the middle of nowhere.
“Well, shall we go in?” he said to Dinitak.
As he expected, nobody showed any sign of knowing who he was. He moved casually through the place, pausing at this stand to examine a cunningly arranged pyramid of smooth-skinned blue melons, at this one to sniff at some unfamiliar custardy-looking yellow fruit, at this to accept a sample pinch of savory smoked meat from its vendor. Where the crowds were particularly dense, they opened for him as crowds ordinarily will when a man of Dekkeret’s height and mass is coming through, but without any sort of deference except to his superior bulk.
He listened wherever he went, hoping to pick up someone’s opinions of the new Coronal, or some reference to having had unusually unpleasant dreams lately, or complaints about high taxation, or anything else at all that might guide him to a better understanding of daily life in the world over which he now ruled. But these people had not gone to the market for the sake of holding conversations. Aside from the constant interchanges between buyer and seller having to do with the price and quality of the merchandise, they said very little.
On the far side from where he and Dinitak had entered, where the various entertainers were performing, they saw fifteen or twenty people gathered around a gaunt, gray-bearded man in red-and-green robes who seemed to be a professional storyteller, judging by his clear, firm voice and the conspicuously placed begging-plate full of coins sitting on the ground beside him. “This man’s servants,” he was saying as Dekkeret and Dinitak approached, “would set out fine golden bowls filled to the brim with good wine, and at a signal from the great wizard the bowls would fly through the air, and offer themselves to all the passersby, and anyone who chose could drink of them at will. I saw also that the wizard was able to make statues walk, and could leap into the fire without being burned, and assume two faces at once, and sit in the air many minutes at a time with his legs folded beneath him without falling, and do many another thing that defied my understanding.”
A stocky red-haired man with a tanned, seamed face stood just to Dekkeret’s left, listening in slack-jawed awe. Dekkeret turned to him and asked, “Who is he speaking of, friend?”
“The master magus Gominik Halvor of the city of Triggoin, master. Has just come back from Triggoin himself, that one has, and is telling tales of the wondrous things he saw there.”
“Ah,” said Dekkeret. He knew that name, Gominik Halvor: from Triggoin indeed, he was, an adept of adepts among sorcerers, who had served as a magus at Prestimion’s court at the Castle long ago, before Dekkeret’s own time there. But to the best of Dekkeret’s knowledge Gominik Halvor had been dead ten years or more. Well, Dekkeret thought, a good storyteller does not have to worry about such petty factual details, so long as he pleases his audience. And the steady clink of copper coins into the man’s plate, even the occasional flashing glint of a silver piece, testified that he was doing just that.
“One day I stood in the marketplace of Triggoin, just as you are standing here with me,” the storyteller went on, “and a sorcerer appeared, a blue-furred Skandar half the size of a mountain, and took a wooden ball with several holes in it, and long ropes of sturdy twine passing through the holes, and threw it up so high that it went out of sight altogether, while he stood holding the end of the rope. Then he beckoned to a boy of twelve years who was his assistant, and ordered him to climb the rope; and up the boy went, higher and higher until he too was gone from view.
“The Skandar then called out three times to the boy to return, but the boy did not reappear. So the Skandar took from his waistband a keen-edged knife of a size like this”—and the storyteller indicated with his hands a blade that was more like a sword—“and slashed fiercely through the air with it, once, twice, three times, four, five. On the fifth slash one of the boy’s severed arms fell to the ground in front of him, and a moment later a leg, and then the other arm, and the other leg, and then, as we all gasped in amazement and horror, the head of the boy. The Skandar put the knife aside then and clapped his hands, and the boy’s torso came plummeting down out of the sky: and as we watched, the severed limbs and head at once reattached themselves to the trunk, and the boy stood up and bowed! And we were so astounded by this that we rushed forward to press whatever coins we had upon this sorcerer, not just weights or crowns, but some of us contributed five-royal pieces, even, which was the least we could offer for such a remarkable performance.”