"It's a fine job," Bryck said, straightening up. When he dropped a small bundle of Felk-issued colored scrip on the desk, the dwarfs eyes went narrow and his hand slapped down atop the forged civilian travel pass.
"Not paper. That wasn't our contract." He seemed on the verge of crumpling the vellum then and there.
But Bryck had already dug out the proper number of silver coins. He stooped and put the neat stack on the desk. "That's your payment. And here's another—a goldie. Prepayment for another job, if you're interested."
"Make me interested." The silvers were already in Slydis's tunic pocket. He was eyeing the gold coin lustfully.
Bryck pointed to the notes. "That. The paper money."
"If you want quality, paying with coin is—"
"I am paying in coin. What I want copied is that money."
Slydis stared up at Bryck a long time. At last he said, "By the sanity of the gods ... that is a diabolical notion."
Bryck told the little man he wanted to see a convincing facsimile of each denomination. If the work was as good as that which had gone into the travel pass, he would pay for more notes. Many more.
Bryck left the shop with the pass tucked away in his coat. The Felk had confiscated the one he'd been issued earlier. He had decided that having a replacement pass of his own would be prudent, in the event he wanted to leave Callah before the start of winter.
He permitted himself a small smile as he walked. One of the very first theatricals he had ever written was The Deceitful Doings and Derring-do of Dabran Del. (Back then he had thought alliteration inherently funny.) It was the sort of unremarkable early effort every artist cringed over, he imagined. Weak, forced, demonstrating more potential for talent than actual skill. Fortunately the play hadn't been performed in years and was by now probably mercifully lost. Bryck himself could remember few of its particulars.
In truth, all he really recollected was that the lead character had forged some crucial document—a certificate of marriage, he suddenly recalled—and that that simple piece of paper had by the play's end brought about the fall of an entire kingdom.
HE STILL MISSED Aaysue. Still missed his children. Their glaring absences were the central source of his internal pain, which was considerable ... which was excruciating at times. But he could temper his agony. He could alleviate its worst heat by applying cooling thoughts of vengeance to it.
The Felk occupiers were handling their captured city shrewdly, he judged. Women weren't being raped; people weren't being killed arbitrarily. Callah's citizens still had their livelihoods, still earned money—albeit the loathed paper variety. There were some food shortages, but not serious ones. The Felk, then, weren't behaving as barbarians.
It seemed improbable that these were the same people that had slaughtered and incinerated his home. U'delph's destruction was an act of evil mindless savagery. Bryck didn't relent an iota in his hatred of his
enemy, but the strange dichotomy in the behavior of the Felk was curious.
He was letting his beard grow. He'd felt only a slight alarm when he found it coming in almost entirely grey. It made him appear older than his—nearly—four tenwinters. Once vanity would have made him shave it, in an effort to still look young and vigorous, no matter that his years might say otherwise.
Actually, he thought as he approached a tavern, vox-mellie on his back, he was more physically fit now than he had been in a long time. He had lost a considerable amount of weight. In fact, he had initially decided to grow the beard to cover the recent gauntness of his once round face.
He wasn't living a coddled noble's life anymore. No rich foods, a minimum of drinking. Once he had been soft. Now he was toughened.
Bryck had scouted out the tavern and made his arrangements with the proprietor. He entered through the rear, stepping over a rivulet of slops and presenting himself to the one-eyed landlady whose remaining eye held a flinty intensity.
"Need a meal?" Animal blood flecked her apron.
"Not now. Later perhaps."
"Play good as y'did before, and there'll be a later. Ycan have a drink now, if you want."
"Hot wine."
"I'll bring it to your corner. Go there now. Play."
He wended his way through the tables. A fair number of people were gathered. It was a good venue for what he intended. The place was spacious enough to accommodate a crowd but still felt intimate. Bryck sat and, ignoring a tingling of stage nerves, started playing.
He deliberately sang songs he knew to be unfamiliar this far north. It was best that these people understand he was a foreigner.
He drank his wine in cooling stages between bawdy ballads and mawkish verses. The tavern's patrons drank likewise, and ordered and ate their suppers, thereby bringing a satisfied glint to the proprietress's intact eye.
His fingers moved with a nimbleness they hadn't possessed even a half-lune ago. He had become, in his own humble estimation, a reasonably respectable musician— certainly a finer one than he'd been before this adventure. Back in Udelph, back during his lighthearted days of carousing and gambling and penning the occasional theatrical, music-making had been merely a hobby, a stunt to make himself the life of the party. And so many parties there had been, so carefree and uncomplicated was his life, what with his nobility, wealth, fame, a loving wife, a cheerful passel of children.
He had played past his allotted time. It would be curfew in another watch. He now picked out the doleful melody of "Lament for the Unnamed Dead," moving the winder with dirge-like slowness, intoning the sad simple words, feeling nothing more than a vague melancholy. It had been some while now since he had actually wept, for Aaysue and the children, for all he'd lost. His tears had gone cold.
The last notes played to a nearly silent room. Bryck blinked, having almost forgotten about his audience. Dimly lit faces regarded him. Here and there in the crowd he saw the shine of tears.
He lifted off the stringbox and waved over the landlady. Money had accumulated over time in the empty jar he'd set on the floor at his feet. Paper only, he saw, no coins. He recalled the Felk soldier, a conscripted Callahan, who at the city's border checkpoint had offered a coin (itself an illegal act!) for the music Bryck had played.
He counted out the notes from the jar where the landlady could see.
"Y'might've ended with something a mite more jolly," she muttered, but still seemed pleased with her take. She'd brought him his meal. He ate.
He waited, and they came to him slowly, the patrons. First, a few congratulators; then, the ones with questions.
"You're a real bard, then? A ... traveler?"
"Yes." He finished his food. Someone bought him a fresh mug of wine without asking if he wanted another. They pulled chairs near him. They leaned in. He was in a semicircle of ten, twelve, more. The vox-mellifluous stood propped beside him. Some had left the tavern when he'd finished playing. Everybody else was now gathered near.
"Have you any ... news?"
It was a man with the soot of a forge embedded in the age-lines of his face who asked. None in Bryck's audience was young. All were roughly his age or older. In Callah there were only such semi-elders, and children, and the infirm and crippled. All able bodies had been drafted into the military.
The man's question touched off many others, all at once. All wanted word about this place or that, cities and hamlets both nearby Callah and far away. They went so far as to ask urgently after specific individuals who lived in these places, some of which Bryck had never heard of. He lifted a hand and waited.
When he had quiet, he darted his eyes right and left, adding to the sense of secretiveness that had come over the scene. His questioners huddled closer.