“Gloag is free,” I said.
Wanek nodded. “Evidently, you and Delia of the Blue Mountains are free, Dray Prescot, for you are not branded. And so therefore must be your friend, Gloag.” He motioned the brand-remover away. “I will have his skin doctored. The scar will not show.” He chuckled, an unlikely sound, and yet fitting in context. “We are old hands at removing brands and substituting our own, in Zenicce.”
His wife, upright, stern, yet still bearing an unmistakable aura of vanished beauty shining about her motherly virtue, said gently:
“There are about three hundred thousand free people in Zenicce, compared with seven hundred thousand in the great Houses. Of course”-she gestured with one ivory-white hand-“they have no seats in the Assembly.”
“They live on islands and enclaves split by avenues,” said Wanek. “They ape our ways. But they are merchants and tradesmen, like ourselves, and sometimes they are useful.”
I had the sense not to remark that from his words one might assume those in the Houses might not be free. Within the Houses all those not slaves were free with a freedom denied to those independent free outside.
Toward the center of the city the river Nicce divided once more in its serpentine windings to the sea and left a larger island than any other in the complex of land and water. On this island was situated the heart of the city-the buildings of the General Assembly, the city wardens’ quarters, administrative buildings, and a mind-confusing maze of small alleyways and canals off which opened the souks where anything might be bought or sold. The noise was deafening, the colors superb, the sights astounding and the smells prodigious.
After a time when it seemed that Wanek and his wife had nothing better to do than talk to me, Wanek asked, most politely, if he might inspect my rapier. I did not tell him I had taken it from Cydones Esztercari. He took it with a reverence strange to me-he could have bought and discarded a thousand like it-and then his mouth drooped.
“Inferior work,” he said, looking across at his wife with a small smile. She tut-tutted, interested in her husband’s occupation.
“Krasny work. But the hilt is fashionable although too cluttered with gems for a fighting man.” He shot a look at me as he spoke. I rubbed my fingers.
“I had noticed,” I said.
“We Ewards are the best and most renowned sword-smiths in all the world,” he said, matter-of-factly.
I nodded.
“My clansmen obtain their weapons from the city, as needs they must; we do not care who fashions them provided they are the best we can buy-or take.”
He rubbed his chin and handed the rapier back. “The weapons we make for sale to the butchers and tanners, who sell them to you for meat and hides, are never rapiers. Shortswords, broadswords, axes-rapiers, no.”
“The man who owned this is not dead,” I said. “But he is probably still doubled-up and vomiting.”
“Ah,” said Wanek of Eward, wisely, and asked no more. The talk drifted. I suppose they, like a number of persons in authority, did not realize that other people were tired when they were not. The hated name of Esztercari cropped up again, and I learned they were the leading shipowners of the city. That figured. Then Wanek’s wife said something almost below her breath, about the damned butchers stealing what was not theirs, and murder, and then I heard a name spring out, hard and strong and resounding. Strombor, was the name.
I believe, now, that then, when I first heard that name it rang and thundered in my ears with a clarion call-or do I deceive myself and am I influenced by all the intervening years? I do not know; but the name seemed to soar and echo and resound in my skull.
At last I managed to make my leave-the question of payment for their hospitality had delicately been raised and as delicately dropped-and I was conducted to a chamber where Gloag snored away in the corner. I dropped on the bed and sank into sleep and my last thought was, inevitably, of Delia of the Blue Mountains. As it was on every night of my life.
We roused in the late afternoon and satisfied our hunger with the fresh light crispy bread of Kregen, loaves as long as rapiers, and thin rashers of vosk-back, and palines, with the Kregen tea-full-bodied, aromatic, pungent-to finish. When we saw Wanek again he greeted us kindly. I asked for Delia.
“I will ask her to join us,” said Wanek, and a slave departed-only to come back with the word that Delia was not in her room and the slave who had with such kind care and attention insisted on attending to her was also missing. I sat up. My hand fell to the hilt of the rapier.
“Please!” Wanek looked upset. A search was instituted; but Delia was not to be found. I raged. Wanek was beside himself at the insult he was thus forced to endure-the insult to him in that he insulted an honored guest.
Delia of the Blue Mountains and I had exchanged only a few words during our escape, for Gloag was near and, at least on my part, I felt a constraint, sure that she hated and detested me for what I had done to her. She had said something that puzzled me mightily. When we had both vanished from the pool of baptism in far Aphrasoe she had opened her eyes to find herself on the beach with the Fristles bearing down upon her, so that she had not been surprised to see me. When I had, in the moment of victory, been tumbled from the zorca, she had been taken to the city and straight to the House of Esztercari. Because of their shipping interests the Esztercari did a thriving business in slaves, and they could also command those caught in other ways. Then Delia had shaken me. For, she said, the very next day, she had seen me in that corridor, dressed in those accursed clothes, and had spilled and broken the water jar.
She also told me that one each of those occasions when she had been captured or enslaved she had seen a white dove flying high, with a great scarlet and golden raptor far above. A messenger was announced. A bluff, moustached bulky man looking oddly out-of-place in the powder blue of the Ewards stalked in, his rapier clamped to his side, his face alive with wrath and baffled fury. He was, I understood, the House Champion, a position occupied in Esztercari by Galna of the white face and mean eyes.
“Well, Encar?”
“A message, my leader, from-from the Esztercari. A slave whom we trusted-how they mock us for that! — has abducted the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains-”
I leaped to my feet, my blade half out of its scabbard, my hands trembling, and I know my face, ugly as it is, must have seemed diabolical to those around me.
It was true. The slave wench with her blandishments had arranged it all. She was a spy for Natema. She had got a message out, it seemed clear, and men had been waiting in that damned emerald livery at a tiny postern. There they had snatched my Delia, thrown a hood over her head, carried her swiftly aboard a gondola and poled away to the enclave of Esztercari. It was all true, heart-breakingly true.
But there was more.
“Unless the men called Dray Prescot freely surrenders himself to the Kodifex,” Encar went on, his bluff honest face reflecting the distaste he felt at his words, “the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains will meet a fate such as is meted out to recalcitrant slaves, to slaves who escape-” He faltered and looked at me.
“Go on.”
“She will be stripped and turned loose into the Rapa court.”
I heard gasps. I did not know-but I could guess.
“Dray Prescot-what can you do?” asked Gloag. He had risen to stand by me, splayfooted, incredibly tough, intelligent, a friend despite his dun bristly hide.
As I may have indicated, I do not laugh easily. I threw back my head, I, Dray Prescot, and laughed, there in the Great Hall of the House of Esztercari.
“I will go,” I said. “I will go. And if a hair of her head is injured I will raze their House to the ground and slay them all, every last one.”