Excerpt: The Shrouded Sea

So I found myself walking through the city, with some extra change in my pocket, but not a soul who knew me. That wasn't terribly unusual, especially in this seafaring land where everyone talked like princes but looked like beggars. The unusual thing about it was that, once they encountered me, they seemed interested in finding out who I was. You would think they had more important matters to mind.

Keeping the cloak-cloth up to cover my face from any hint of infectious spirits, I trudged through the streets, wondering where I could go to get a drink. Was there even drink to be gotten? The first two shops that I passed were boarded up, with hastily tacked signs declaring all manner of curses on anyone who broke through to rob the tills inside. It appeared nobody was interested in theft, though. As easy as it would have been, something stopped me, too.

Maybe it was how eerie the city seemed, even though the sun had not even set. The streets were all but bare, with a fine film of sandy dust scattered over the stones now and again. A few streets away, the barking of a dog ricocheted like fire from the largest harquebus imaginable.

Without more people in the streets to buffer its advance, the wind whipped through, disturbing the cloth I held over my mouth. I stretched my fingers an extra inch or two to keep it from flapping, hoping that the few seconds of exposure had not already sent me to a quick death. If the rumors of plague were true, and certainly nobody was around to provide any reason for me to think otherwise, then I did not want to risk even a chance of infection. The priests in this land said that demons had sent the plague to cure the people of their sins, and the Lords know I’d committed enough sins to get sick twenty times over.

However, if the medico I’d spoken to a few nights ago had been telling the truth, then the priests were more right than they knew. According to what he had said with a knife at his throat and a hand sorting through his wallet, demons were very likely not the cause, but one certainly could catch the plague just by stepping foot in Surmaingel. I had no reason to disbelieve him, since people usually tell the truth when they think they might die. Given his probable honesty, I would have avoided the city, but I had no other safe and sane options.

For now, though, I would have cheerily shaved twenty years off of my life if I could have found some booze. The water I had drunk from the River Madu had been brackish, and I was almost thirsty enough to drink piss. Kalmistani firewater wasn’t too far off from that.

Not a tap-house in sight, though. I had walked over a good ten city blocks, full of high, crowded buildings of four or five stories, before I decided to give up for the time being. I had a good reason, though. The lone man approaching me from the other side of the street had seen me, and from the glint of metal on his shoulders, I knew without needing to investigate that he was a city guard.

I had the doctor’s papers on me, and a second set from a Magilane aristocrat whom I’d beaten at cards and holding drink. I shuffled them around with a quick gesture inside my waistcoat, so the aristocrat’s details were in front. No matter how foolish the guard was, nobody would trust a haggard-looking man without a medicine bag or even proper shoes, or think for a second that the man was a doctor. Compared to that, the fact that I was about five paint-shades too dark to pass for a Magilane seemed terribly insignificant.

There was only one question that had to be answered: Had I encountered a particularly intelligent guard? In all my travels, they were quite rare, although they seemed to crop up more frequently when the danger I faced was greater. I studied the man coming towards me, trying to divine any signs of particular savviness or stupidity.

One thing I knew from experience: If you talked first, you had the drop on any guard, no matter how smart he was. So I moved in swiftly, all smiles and bland voice, dropping the cloth from my mouth. As I’d expected, he stopped short, staring suspiciously at me. Maybe I was a thief, a killer, or mad from plague.

“Sir! I don’t suppose you know where a man such as myself could find a bottle of grog, eh?” I did my best to force my voice into the peculiar accent of the Magilani, all short stops and glottal noises. “For you see, I’ve only just arrived, and it’s a cold day in a hot desert before I go without my beer.”

The guard came no further. He stared at me mutely, and for a moment, I felt as if he was looking through me. I couldn’t let myself shiver.

I made my voice louder, and I stepped even closer to him, into his personal space. My hand inside my waistcoat withdrew the Magilane papers, and I thrust them towards him. For a brief moment, I felt as if it was the only tangible proof he might take that I was really there.

“Three streets down, on Northfork, there’s the Painted Lady,” the guard mumbled, definitely on the less intelligent end of the scale. He reached out for my papers, although from the way he flicked through them I figured that he couldn’t possibly read them. “They don’t let Magilani in, though. You’d have to be a damn sight richer than half what they’ve kicked out from the highlands.”

I sucked in a breath, and tightened my smile. “Nothing wrong with that, sir. I half-expected such. You’ve a fine city here.”

The guard may not have been the brightest man that Surmaingel had ever produced, but he at least knew enough to catch even the faintest veneer of sarcasm when he heard it. “Used to have,” he corrected me with some tartness, “before the plague hit. Now there’s not hardly nothing left. Most’ve fled. Rumor is it came in on one of the ships.”

Like I did years ago, I thought, but I kept that to myself. Magilansk had no coastline, and it certainly would not have brought in a seafarer to a country with whom it shared a landlocking border. Even considering the guard’s lack of intelligence, he would have figured out that.

I dipped my head shortly. “A thousand sympathies, sir.” The Magilane custom was to gush, in apology or in exultation. It felt awkward to me, and insincere. Charlatan that I was, though, I had no real reason to complain about phoniness.

The guard stared at me for another moment. I wondered if he might bring up that I looked nothing like any Magilani he had ever met, but he held his tongue, and so I bit mine.

Along with gushing, the Magilani liked to bow and to clasp hands, so I did that quickly. His shake was less firm than it should have been. If I’d been spoiling for a fight, I could have jerked his arm to the side and had him in an armlock, his pockmarked face drawn in surprise and his reedy voice begging for mercy. As it was, I simply tested his strength by shaking his hand with some force, and he responded by shaking my hand with a peculiar weakness.

Maybe the plague had hit him too. I jerked my hand back as if a snake had bitten me, remembering only then. Visions of death flooded my head as I pulled the cloth back over my mouth. The doctor’s words came to me, that most people who were still alive were very likely safe to contact, but now I was no longer sure of how much truth he had spoken.

I was doubly thirsty now. The Painted Lady on Northfork had to be a sanctuary of some sort for those few souls brave or lucky enough to survive the plague to this extent. I looked three streets down, where the buildings clustered even closer together, and could just barely make out the wooden silhouette of a dancing street-girl, decked out in feathers and gaudy jewels that glittered in the sunlight.

“At your service,” the guard murmured. I caught a strange twist to his voice, but at the moment, I wanted nothing more than to leave him and find myself a cold glass of Kalmistani brew, no matter how terrible its taste and how weak its promises of intoxication might be.