Eventually he fell asleep; and if he had bad dreams sleeping in that bed in that house, it was most likely because of the cheese.
Vetriz Auzeil sat on the front step of her house, watching a small boy in the street below. He’d gathered a substantial hoard of small stones, and he was throwing them, with great deliberation, into a clump of raggety, neglected ornamental shrubs that grew in the front yard of the house opposite. Nobody had lived in that house for years – it was only still empty because Venart, bless him, was trying to buy it (and, being Venart, was going about it in a counterproductively devious way, using phantom intermediaries supposedly undercutting each other’s offers and pulling out just before an agreement was due to be sealed – it was costing him a fortune, but it made him feel cunning, which was the main thing); nevertheless, Vetriz had a feeling that small boys throwing stones were a bad thing on general principles, and that as (gods help her) a grown-up, she was invested with all due authority to tell him to stop – except that she couldn’t make out for the life of her what he was throwing the stones at, with such care and deliberation.
Finally her curiosity reached torture levels, so she went down the steps and asked him.
‘Spiders,’ he answered.
‘Spiders?’
‘That’s right.’ The boy pointed; and, sure enough, just inside the tangle of bushes was a veritable city of spiders’ webs, most of them with a big fat brown spider in the middle; they hung so still and moody that they reminded Vetriz of stallholders in a market on a quiet day, gloomily poised for the onset of any customers who might eventually appear.
‘Any luck?’ Vetriz asked. She detested spiders. When she was a little girl, it had been an entirely passive loathing, but now she was an adult, it had evolved into something more militant.
‘Four so far,’ the boy replied proudly. ‘It only counts if you kill them dead; if they just fall off and run away you don’t score anything.’
That was as much of an invitation (a challenge, even) as she needed; she selected a pebble from the munitions dump, made her best guess at elevation and windage, and let fly -
(- Like the trebuchets at Perimadeia. In a way.)
‘Missed,’ the boy said, perfectly expressing by tone of voice alone the eternal contempt of the male at womankind’s ineptitude at missile warfare. ‘My go.’ He picked up a stone, looked at it between his fingers, looked at the spider of his choice, and launched.
‘Missed,’ said Vetriz.
‘I never said it was easy,’ the boy replied, scowling.
This time, Vetriz tried to be more scientific in her approach. She pictured in her mind the trajectory of the stone, the decay of its arc as its mass overcame the initial momentum of launch. With the picture clear in her mind as if it had been scribed on the back of her eyelids, she cocked back her wrist and let go -
‘We shouldn’t be doing this anyway,’ she said huffily. ‘It’s cruel. Those spiders never did us any harm.’
‘They’re poisonous,’ the boy replied. ‘If they bite you, you swell up and go black and you die.’
‘Really?’ Vetriz said. ‘I never heard that.’
‘It’s true,’ the boy assured her. ‘My friend told me.’ ‘Oh, well then,’ Vetriz said, sneaking another stone. ‘In that case, I suppose it’s our duty – there,’ she added. ‘Direct hit.’
‘Doesn’t count,’ the boy said. ‘It wasn’t even your go.’
Vetriz smiled. ‘And you’re just a rotten loser,’ she said. ‘Now stop doing that at once, before I tell your mother.’
The boy looked at her savagely, his eyes accusing her of treason in the first degree; then he kicked over the pile of stones and slouched away. Vetriz, unaccountably delighted with her prowess, went back to her step, where she’d been supposed to be double-checking the stock ledger. She was trying to puzzle out a double-looped squiggle (Venart was a sucker for fashionable new abbreviations, but he tended to forget what they meant the day after he started using them) when a shadow fell over the page. She looked up.
‘Vetriz Auzeil?’
She nodded and looked away quickly, trying desperately not to stare. But it was hard; too hard for her. After all, she’d never seen a Son of Heaven before.
‘I’m looking for your brother, Venart,’ the man said. ‘Is he at home?’
Vetriz shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘he’s away on a business trip. Can I help you?’
The man smiled, as if the offer had come from a six-year-old child. ‘Thank you, but no. It’s business.’
It was well known among her friends that you only ever patronised Vetriz Auzeil once. ‘Then it’s me you need to see,’ she replied, smiling sweetly. ‘Please come in. I can spare you a quarter of an hour.’
The man looked at her, but followed. She led him into the counting house, which she knew would be empty at this time of day, when the clerks were either at the warehouse doing the stock reconciliations or in the tavern. ‘Please excuse the mess,’ she said, indicating the immaculately neat desks with a sweeping gesture. ‘Now then, what can I do for you?’ She sat down behind Venart’s desk, the one he’d been lumbered with as part of a mixed lot of Perimadeian war loot, bought sight unseen; it was huge, ornate and unspeakably vulgar, and Venart hated it. ‘Sit down, please,’ she said, knowing full well that the stool on the other side was so low that you had to sit on a cushion just to see over the desktop. Disconcertingly, the Son of Heaven didn’t seem to have that problem; were they all this damnably tall? she wondered.
‘Thank you.’ She watched the man trying to squirm himself comfortable; impossible on that stool. ‘My name is Moisin Shel, and I represent the provincial office. We’re interested in chartering a number of ships.’
Vetriz nodded, as if this sort of thing happened every day. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘What sort of ship, how many, and how long for?’
Moisin Shel looked at her, raised an eyebrow. ‘You have a ship called the Squirrel,’ he said. ‘We understand it’s a twin-masted square-rigger capable of sustaining six knots with a following wind, and that you’re used to sailing a close-hauled course with the wind abeam, on coastal runs. It should be suitable for our purposes, if the capacity is adequate. Am I right in thinking the Squirrel is at least a hundred and thirty tons?’
‘Oh, easily,’ Vetriz replied, not having the faintest idea what the man was talking about. ‘What cargo do you have in mind?’
Moisin Shel didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘A few technical points, before we go any further – I’m sorry if this sounds fussy, but we have to satisfy ourselves that your ship conforms to the provincial service specifications before we can enter a charter agreement. Are you able to answer such questions, or should I wait until your brother comes home?’
‘No problem,’ Vetriz replied firmly. ‘Ask away.’
‘Very well.’ The man steepled his fingers. ‘Are the garboard strakes mortised to the keel rabbet, do you know?’
To her credit, Vetriz managed to keep a straight face. ‘The Squirrel is a working merchant ship, Mr Shel, not a pleasure yacht. I can assure you, you need have no worries on that score.’
The Son of Heaven nodded again. ‘And presumably the stempost and sternpost are scarfed to the keel,’ he went on. ‘As I said, I’m sorry to have to trouble you with this sort of detail, but we have had some rather unfortunate experiences in the past when dealing with civilian shipowners.’