Cerryl nodded. “How do you find the White highways?”
“Like ’em. Don’t like the tariff, have to say.” Triok looked toward the gray sky and then the warehouse door, as if to indicate he had better matters to attend to than educating a young White mage, preferably before it began to rain even harder. “Be good if we had a road into Spidlar…once the troubles there are over,” he added quickly.
“I’ll convey that.” Cerryl smiled. “Thank you.” He led the gelding back from the wagon slightly before remounting.
“…what was that about?” Triok’s consort stood inside the loading door.
“Don’t know…care less…but didn’t take many moments, leastwise…”
Cerryl frowned. Myral had said the tariff for large outland merchants was a twentieth, but it had been collected as a tenth for years, and none in the Guild had known or cared. Somewhere over three years ago, the rate had been raised in Certis to 15 percent. Why? And why then? Wasn’t that when Rystryr became viscount? Or had that been afterward?
He kept riding, headed eastward until he reached a larger street to take him back to the viscount’s palace, still wondering, his gray eyes scanning the streets, the scattered shops, and the mostly shuttered windows.
Cerryl halted the gelding just before the corner of the larger street that led southward to the viscount’s palace. While he didn’t exactly sense chaos, what he did feel was unease, something he could not describe. As he studied the empty street ahead, he mustered chaos around him.
Empty? When has any street in Jellico been empty?
He glanced toward the top of the wall to his left, a good three cubits above his head, even mounted, not a house wall, but a wall enclosing a courtyard of some sort.
A dark figure peered over the wall, bearing something…
Cerryl swallowed and flung chaos, then turned to the other side and flung a second wall of chaos fire. Whhhstt!
Sprung! Sprung!
Crossbow bolts and chaos fire met. Both figures on the walls vanished.
Clunk! Clunk!
The crossbow bolts clattered along the damp paving stones. Belatedly Cerryl could feel the rain begin to mist down around him, so light as to barely cause a twinge in his skull.
Cerryl raised the light-blurring screen and simultaneously urged his mount ahead and around the corner, raising yet more chaos, but the street remained empty for almost a block. He was breathing heavily as he rode carefully southward for a block. The street ahead, across the way that he knew led eastward to the market, was also empty, and he turned eastward to find a less direct-and more crowded-way back to the palace.
After another few hundred cubits, with the main square in sight, he reined up, leaving the light-blurring screens up. He remained on the gelding, trying to catch his breath.
He sniffed, smelling something beyond the sewage and filth and roasting fowl, something burning. Two wagons, each pulled by a single horse, careened down the street into the Market Square and then eastward. A building was burning to the northeast of the square, down the street where the trader Freidr had his establishment. Cerryl swallowed, then eased his mount in the direction of the wagons, reining up once more well back of the building where flames flickered from a single window.
A group of men in gray threw buckets of water on the roofs of the surrounding buildings, then, as the fire did not seem to grow, began to dump buckets on the warehouse itself. The rain began to fall even more heavily, and cold water seeped down the back of Cerryl’s neck. He shivered in the saddle but did not urge the gelding any nearer to the dying fire or the men who fought it. The thin blonde woman sobbed under the overhang of the cooper’s shop, holding an infant while Cerryl watched.
To Cerryl’s surprise, the fire guttered out, but he realized part of that was because the fire had apparently started in the office and the office walls were stone. The combination of the rain and the bucket brigade had managed to quench the flames before they spread.
Cerryl nodded to himself-chaos fire.
Still keeping the blur screen up, he turned his mount and headed back toward the viscount’s palace. Once inside the second courtyard, he reined up outside the stable and dismounted.
“Ser?” asked an ostler he did not know or recognize.
“I’m Cerryl, returning my mount for grooming and stabling.” He offered a polite smile.
“Oh…you be one of the mages. Yes, ser. I’ll be taking him, then, and Firkflat will be back shortly.”
Cerryl could sense the confused groom was telling the truth and handed over the reins. “Thank you.”
“Our duty, ser. Our duty.” The groom bowed.
Cerryl inclined his head in response, then slipped through the doorway and up the steps toward his own room-still as stark and empty as ever. Where was Shyren’s room-and was the mage around? Again, Cerryl could offer many reasons for his suspicions of Shyren, but not a single featherweight of proof.
Cerryl wasn’t about to ask anyone, because everyone remembered a mage who asked questions. Rather, he decided to continue his explorations of the viscount’s palace.
The corridors of the wing that held the formal dining hall were deserted, except for a single guard, who barely looked up as Cerryl walked past briskly, his pace indicating he was in a hurry to reach a definite destination. While the dining wing held other chambers, including what seemed to have been a council space of sorts, all were empty.
Cerryl moved to the next wing, the old wing, where he passed two guards, directly inside the entry arch, both of whom studied him and dismissed him as he started up the stone staircase that was roughly four cubits wide, not wide enough for an official staircase yet seemingly too wide for mere servitors to use.
Shyren’s apartments were on the second floor of the old wing of the palace. At least, Cerryl would have called it old from the sense of aged chaos exuding from the stones.
The young mage glanced up and down the narrow corridor, but there was no one around. The door was secured by a simple bronze lock, one Cenyl recognized. A sewer lock, for darkness’ sake! Just like all the locks that guarded the sewers of Fairhaven and, like them, filled with a knot of chaos. But the lock was not closed, just turned so that it appeared closed.
Cerryl frowned, then shuddered as his chaos senses discovered the less obvious line of chaos-a line of force strong enough to destroy even a strong mage, were such a mage caught unaware.
Cerryl wrapped the light-blurring screen around himself, then eased up to the trapped lock and slid away the two concentrations of chaos. He studied the door again before opening it and leaving it ajar.
Finally, he slipped inside, smiling wryly as he quickly surveyed the room-or rooms. The anteroom contained an inlaid desk with a matching wooden armchair and a thick red velvet cushion. On each side of the desktop was a polished bronze lamp. There were two matching onyx inkstands and a quill holder as well. Three golden oak bookshelves stretching nearly five cubits high and each one almost as wide were set against the rear stone wall, and all three were packed with leather-bound volumes.
His ears and senses alert for anyone approaching, Cerryl slipped into the second room-the bedchamber. A heavy and dark red velvet curtain blocked most of the light from the wide window, but even without the light, Cerryl could see the high bedstead that did not fill a fifth part of the room. The hangings on the high four-postered bed were red and golden satins, and filmy golden silks screened the bed itself. A diaphanous gown lay across the red velvet cushion that turned the long chest at the foot of the bed into a settee of sorts.
To the right of the man-high hearth opposite the bed was a small table, set for a dinner for two.
Cerryl stopped studying the furnishings and began to use his senses to survey the room. Even more chaos lay within the chest by the bed-chaos and metal. The young mage swallowed. The chest was literally filled with gold. He could sense that without even touching the ancient and polished white oak. He could also feel an even larger mass of chaos coiled under the lid of the chest.