As usual, Bezul spoke first. “Good day, Dysan. What can I do for you?”
Dysan breathed a faint sigh of relief, glad the Changer had obviated the need for chitchat. “I … was just wondering.” He found the words harder to speak than he expected and wished he had rehearsed them.
Bezul dipped his head, encouraging.
Worried someone else might come into the shop, Dysan forced himself to continue. “That man I saw in here, a while ago. Pel, you called him.”
“Pel Garwood. The healer. Yes.”
“Yes,” Dysan repeated, shifting from foot to foot. He let his gaze wander over a shelf of neatly stacked crockery. “You do sell him his … flasks and vials and such.” He dodged Bezul’s gaze. “Don’t you, Bez?” He cursed himself for further shortening the man’s name. That only encouraged the Changer to do the same to his, and he hated when anyone called him Dys. It reminded him that his name started with the same syllable as the Bloody Mother, Dyareela. He added lamely and too belatedly, “ … ul, cleared his throat, and put it all together.”Bezul.”
Bezul regarded his single patron more intently, squinting, the grin growing slightly. Dysan trusted no one fully, but he relied on Bezul more than anyone else in Sanctuary. He had no way of knowing whether or not the Changer had ever cheated him, but he always managed to buy the things he needed here. When he laid a handful of coins on Bezul’s counter in payment, the Changer rarely claimed all of it. “It would seem so, yes. When I have it, I sell or trade him what he needs.”
Dysan could not imagine Bezul ever not having anything. No matter what he wanted, he found it here amid the clutter of junk and finery, even the time he sought snakes, rats, and mice. “If I were buying a cure from him today, what would he put it in, do you think?”
For an instant, the Changer’s dark eyes showed a spark of curiosity, but he did not ask Dysan’s purpose. He never did. Instead, he turned, walked to the opposite side of the room, and perused his inventory. He tapped a finger over generous lips. “A large or small amount of … cure?”
The recipe had demanded a single dose of “a treatment for buttocks boils distilled from tamarask bark.” It was the only difficult item in the brew, so poorly described that it would take an expert with potions to create it. The other objects, such as salt and red dust, a vat of soured wine, a specified number of rat hairs, the blood of an orphan and a virgin, could come from almost anywhere. “A small amount.”
Bezul rummaged through crockery. “So long as there isn’t anything that reacts with clay, he would use …” His head disappeared among the wares, his toned, round-cheeked bottom swaying as he shifted through the mess for the right piece. He pulled it out and turned simultaneously. “ … this.” He held up a well-cast bottle. “And he’d wrap it in this.” He dangled a dingy triangular pouch by the strings.
Without bothering to examine them, Dysan moved to the main counter, mostly free of disorder. He tossed his own small purse onto the top as Bezul came over with his finds. As usual, Dysan dumped the entire contents for Bezul’s perusal. Padpols spilled out, more than five by Dysan’s crude form of counting. Bezul claimed three, shoved the rest toward Dysan, and handed him the bottle, now swaddled into the pouch. Dysan swept the remaining coins to his purse, tying both at his left hip.
“Dysan.”
The young man looked up cautiously, anticipating some sort of warning. Bezul would not question, but he might remind Dysan that the new healer performed an important service for Sanctuary. He would not want to do anything that caused Pel to change his mind about coming to ply his trade in this mudhole. But Bezul said only, “Be well.”
Dysan nodded, heading toward the exit. The healer was not his concern. He worried for the future of Sanctuary itself, for the return of the murders and maimings. He could not risk his new mothers; they came from an imperial world where the politics had more to do with money than survival. They opened their hearts and home too easily, and they trusted men whose own fathers would not dare share a confidence. Pel was a stranger to Dysan, one who bore a striking and terrifying resemblance to a cultist Dysan had once known. That likeness kept him a cautious distance from Sanctuary’s new healer and the Avenue of Temples, though a neighboring street to his own. The many shattered buildings in the area gave him plenty of places to hide and watch the patients who came and went from Pel’s growing building. Not all of them seemed innocent or wholesome.
Dysan headed there now, trotting down streets that grew more familiar daily, choosing a route that took him through as many darkened alleys as main thoroughfares. He changed his manner from habit as he entered each one: winding congenially through the regular masses or slouching through the puddled shadows of the alleys. Feigning focus allowed him to appear deaf to the conversations, though he heard, and inadvertently memorized, every one. It allowed him to dodge the small talk that usually defied him and the cutpurses seeking larger and easier prey. He stopped only once, to partially fill his new-bought bottle from a washerwoman’s tub.
At length, Dysan reached the home and shop of Sanctuary’s healer, every bit as new as his own, yet not quite finished. The Sisters of Sabellia had prepaid for the stonemasons and builders with a large amount of money that came from their temple in Ranke. Pel, on the other hand, had had little coinage, forced to barter his trade for the work and materials to rebuild a crumbling temple bit by bit. Like Dysan, Pel had suffered Sanctuary’s dark and icy winter without adequate protection, but Dysan believed he had a lot more experience. Now, they both had four solid walls and a roof that shed the rain, though Pel’s was not yet completed.
Well-hidden in a dense patch of greenery that had sprang up amid the wreckage of Ils’s temple, Dysan watched people come and go from Pel’s apothecary. Some approached boldly, others limped or came steadied by friends or family, and one woman sneaked to the door beneath the cover of a dark hood, mincing every step as if stalking the building. Pel took them all inside in turn, nodding his head and shaking his long, white-veined hair. Some left empty-handed, others with a hidden bulge at their waists or clutched tightly beneath their cloaks. A few openly carried bottles that looked much like the one Bezul had sold to Dysan. Fewer still threw guilty or nervous glances around the neighboring wreckage before slinking, red-faced, from the apothecary. No one visited after nightfall, but Dysan continued to watch until Pel extinguished the last candle, leaving his newly built home as dark and hulking as the ruins all around it. Only then, Dysan realized he had eaten nothing since breakfast.
Swiftly, he headed home. His mothers rarely questioned his comings and goings anymore, but they would force food upon him. He did not intend to protest.
Dysan resumed his vigil just before sunup the following day, pressed deeply into a tiny crevice of a mostly toppled wall that had once served the followers of Vashanka. His handlers had taught him how to twist, stretch, and bundle his undersized body into holes more fit for rats than men. He found the tight quarters secure and surprisingly comfortable. Though he had tried to sneak out without awakening his mothers, SaMavis had beaten him to the larder and forced a midday meal upon him. It now lay, still wrapped in a tattered rag, near the shambles of an altar. Smashed artifacts studded the mushy ground, long ago looted of anything valuable. Nervous excitement kept Dysan’s stomach in knots, and he regretted the few bites of breakfast he had managed to swallow.
Wedged into his hiding place, Dysan watched the comings and goings of Pel Garwood’s patients through the morning, seeing patterns where none had previously existed. He noticed many of the same people who had left with nothing the day before now held bottles in their hands or concealed in folds or sashes, their purses flatter. The elderly widow Sharheya, who owned the northside lumberyard, arrived with her son-in-law, the surly sawyer Carzen. Pel opened his door and waved them inside; but, unlike the others, Carzen did not comply. The three exchanged words, not wholly civil by their expressions and gestures. Then, Pel shut his door and led the other man around his shop and home, indicating a large area of his roof completely devoid of planking. Only a thickly oiled sheet of canvas protected Pel and his valuables from the elements, and that would not last long in a place as stark and damp as Sanctuary. Already, the wind worried at the edges, tattering them into streamers. Only half the roof had secure boards in place, and not a single tile had yet been laid. Carzen nodded grudgingly.