Around him, beyond the stone walls of the shop, he could sense the flows of red-tinged white. The energies he’d felt in the mines, or even with the white mages who had fought at the mill, were insignificant compared to those which suffused Fairhaven. He shivered.
Careful. . he would have to be most careful. Already he had seen enough to know that Fairhaven was a dangerous place for him-for anyone. With those thoughts, his eyes finally closed.
XXVII
AFTER HELPING RINFUR move the wagon and harness the team, Cerryl waved as the teamster eased the wagon out of the courtyard. Then he swallowed as Rinfur and the team disappeared behind the buildings of the side street leading to the square.
Finally, after a deep breath, he hoisted his pack and slipped into Fasse’s shop. The crafter stood to one side of the front door, surveying the street outside and the handful of passersby.
“Ser? Could you tell me the way to Tellis the scrivener?”
“What? Oh. .” Fasse half-turned. “That be right. Dylert be sending you there.” The crafter fingered his narrow ginger mustache, then lifted and dropped his angular shoulders. “Tellis? His place be across the square and four long blocks up the lesser artisans’ way.”
Cerryl wanted to ask Fasse who or what the lesser artisans were, but the cabinet maker’s continued glances toward the square were enough to discourage questions. “Thank you, ser. I appreciated the bed and the food. Very much.”
“Be nothing, young fellow. You be doing the same for another some day.” Fasse glanced toward the main avenue again. “Best you be off. I be awaitin’ a mage.” The crafter gestured toward the polished white oak chest that stood to his left.
Cerryl’s eyes took in the chest, waist high, and finished with something that glistened like fresh oil but was just as clearly not.
“Have to be varnished for them. All they touch. . they destroy in time. The varnish helps.” Fasse looked down the avenue to his right again.
“Thank you.” Cerryl nodded and shouldered his pack.
“High price for managing chaos. .” murmured the crafter.
Cerryl concealed a frown as he stepped through the open door and onto the raised stone sidewalk, still marveling at the very idea. In Hrisbarg, sometimes the shopkeepers put down boards during the rains, but pedestrians and horses shared the streets, and Cerryl knew to watch where he put his feet.
He waited for a two-horse wagon piled with baskets of potatoes to pass, and crossed the western part of the avenue. The farmer on the seat had never even glanced in his direction.
The sun was barely above the roofs to the east of the square, and long shadows lay across the white stone avenue and the sidewalk stones and curbings, and darkened the emerald grass. The slight coolness of the evening before had vanished, and neither grass nor stone bore the slightest trace of dew. Although the air was already warm, the oval shape of what Rinfur and Fasse had called a square was empty. A handful of people walked the sidewalks, mostly from the gates toward the center of Fairhaven, and the creaking of wagons and the clop of hoofs on the stones were the loudest sounds.
Cerryl almost felt as though his breathing were too loud in the hushed city. He straightened his shoulders and followed the white stone walk across the center of the empty square to the far side. There was a single street there-without a name or symbol. Was it the way of the lesser artisans?
With the slightest of shrugs, he crossed the empty eastern half of the avenue and started up the unnamed street. Cerryl glanced into the first shop, peering between vivid blue shutters drawn back open against bright white-plastered outside walls. A potter sat cross-legged, throwing a pot on a wheel powered by a foot pedal. Behind him was a low wooden shelf displaying an array of pots and crockery. The gray-haired man did not look up as Cerryl studied him.
Cerryl walked slowly eastward, along the lesser artisans’ way that was but the eastern side street away from the square-exactly across the square opposite the side street that adjoined the alley leading to the rear courtyard of Fasse’s shop.
The next shop was that of a weaver. Two girls, each younger than Cerryl, one brown haired, one redheaded, sat on the floor working backstrap looms. Behind them a man flicked the shuttle on a floor loom that filled half the small room. Skeins of colored yam-all colors of yam, except black-hung from pegs set into the wall just below the roof beams. The round-faced brown-haired girl grinned shyly at Cerryl, even while her fingers slipped the yam wound on the hand shuttle through the spread woolen yam.
Cerryl offered a grin in return.
“Mind the loom, Pattera,” came the comment from the weaver.
“Yes, ser,” murmured the girl, dropping her eyes from Cerryl.
Cerryl nodded and continued along the street. Pattera had been pretty enough, yet nothing to compare to the golden-haired girl he had seen but once in his screeing glass. Would he ever meet her? Or was she the daughter of some white mage who would treat him like the other whites had dealt with his father-or the fugitive at Dylert’s mill? He repressed a shiver. “Careful. . Cerryl,” he whispered to himself.
On the inside wall of the next shop were rows of small shelves filled with small wooden boxes and a large chest of many drawers, and a scent-many scents-that Cerryl didn’t recognize. Spices? Why so many? The heavy man who looked up from a wooden mortar and pestle on a polished table offered an enigmatic smile before looking back at the dried herbs before him.
So silent was the lesser artisans’ way that Cerryl could hear his own footsteps. Somehow, he had expected that Fairhaven would have been busier, even so early in the day.
The line of shops ended at another cross street, rather than at the alleyway he had expected. On the far corner was another shop, but this one sported a sign over the open door bearing an open book and a quill poised above it. Hoping that the sign referred to the scrivener’s, Cerryl crossed the street and eased into the shop, pausing just inside the open door to let his eyes adjust.
The front of the shop was a small area, less than four cubits square, with white-plastered walls and empty except for two stools and with a golden oak cabinet that was made up of a two-drawer chest with three attached bookshelves above the chest. The top shelf held a silver pitcher, and the second two were each largely filled with leather-bound volumes.
Even from the door, Cerryl could smell the tanned leather. He took another step into the front room and paused, scanning the two dozen or so books on the shelves before him, but aside from the different colors of leather, there were no identifying marks on the spines. Nor did any of the books bear the unseen but sensed whitish red of chaos that the three books in his own pack bore.
Two doors led from the front room-one on the right side, which was closed, and one on the left. After another moment, Cerryl stepped toward the door behind the left side of the chest, stopping in the doorway.
A single man bent over a table in the workroom, a space not much bigger than the front room. The far wall was filled, half with a huge doorless cabinet that contained shelves transformed into cubbies filled with rolled leathers, parchments, palimpsests, real glass jars, stoppered crockery vials, and other manner of items unfamiliar to Cerryl. On each side of the cabinet were racks, the one on the left holding an array of hand tools; the one on the right, green leathers cut into long strips perhaps two spans wide and more than two cubits in length. A writing desk was flush against the left wall, the worktable against the right. The scrivener was stitching something with a long needle that flashed in his fingers.
Cerryl waited until the man paused before speaking. “Master Tellis?”
Tellis straightened and turned, revealing a spare and surprisingly thin face above a more rotund frame. “Yes, young fellow? Are you here on an errand for your master?” The scrivener seemed to squint as he surveyed Cerryl.