Cashel made up his mind with a sigh. A shopkeeper had set the bar across his shutters and was fastening it with a bronze padlock. Cashel touched him on the shoulder.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Can you direct us to an inn? We’re strangers here.”
“What?” said the shopkeeper in a female voice. “An inn?”
She raised her head to look them over from beneath her cowl. Judging from her grimace, she didn’t like what she saw. “Try the Hyacinth,” she said. “Down at the end of the street, where it meets the water.”
She wriggled away and disappeared into an alley. Cashel didn’t try to hold her. He looked at Tilphosa, and smiled as he said, “I guess even strangers can find the river, huh.”
She patted his arm.
Cashel wasn’t sure what the shopkeeper meant by “the street,” since three roads joined at an intersection close enough to touch with his quarterstaff. He picked the one that headed most directly toward where he knew the river was. That didn’t mean a lot in a place where the streets wandered like sheep paths across a pasture, but…
“If it doesn’t work,” Tilphosa said, “we’ll try another one. From the way the woman looked at us I’m not sure I’d regret missing the Hyacinth, but I suppose it’ll do until we’re dressed properly.”
She sounded cheerful again. Cashel looked at her and grinned. Tilphosa had adjusted her sash so that the brass hilt of the broken sword was out where anybody could see it. For a little while there she’d gone back to being Lady Tilphosa, concerned about her social position. Now she was Cashel’s companion again, the girl who’d come through shipwreck, battle, and anything else the Gods chose to throw at her.
They were getting close to the river. Besides Cashel being able to smell the mudflats, several of the shuttered shops had coarse tunics or ship’s stores of one sort and another on their signs.
Prostitutes waited in alley mouths, following Cashel with their eyes. He kept his gaze forward, but Tilphosa glared like a queen at each woman they passed.
Cashel kept his grin from reaching his lips. She was a queen, after all; or anyway she’d be the next thing to a queen after Cashel delivered her to Prince Thalemos.
Tilphosa pointed to the sign hanging from a building at the end of the street. “There it is,” she said. “The Hyacinth.”
Cashel glanced at her, wondering how she knew. Were her eyes that good? The wood was so warped and faded that he wasn’t sure he’d have recognized a bunch of purple flowers painted on it even in daylight.
It was an inn, all right, though. During the day there’d even be a counter facing the road, though it was shuttered now. It was on the corner of the street they’d followed and the one fronting the river, so it was the right place beyond question.
He said, “I couldn’t have told from the picture.”
“Oh, the name’s drilled out of the wood below, Cashel,” Tilphosa said. “See? Though it’s backwards from this way.”
She pointed again. He’d taken the design for a cutwork border, not a word.
“I see, mistress,” he said. “But I can’t read letters either way round.”
“I’ll read for us, Cashel,” the girl said, squeezing his arm again. “You take care of all the other things. And Cashel?”
He met her eyes again.
“Remember that I’m Tilphosa, not mistress. All right?”
“Right,” he agreed, giving her a shy smile.
The inn had double doors, but the left panel was latched closed. A pair of men stood in the opening, watching the riverfront as they drank from elmwood masars.
Cashel shrugged, loosening his shoulder muscles as he considered how to tell the fellows that he planned to enter through where they were standing. He’d be polite, of course, and the chances were that they’d respond politely as well; but there was just the least chance that they wouldn’t.
“Cashel!” Tilphosa said as she caught his arm.
For a moment Cashel thought she was telling him not to start a fight—which meant walk away from a fight that somebody else had started, and that wasn’t going to happen to Cashel or-Kenset. Then he followed the line of her eyes out to the river road and saw what she and the men in the doorway both were looking at. Calm again, Cashel watched too.
A tall, hooded figure walked at the head of a procession of men rolling a two-wheeled hand-truck. The corpse on the truck was wrapped in coarse wool. The accompanying men wore peaked hats with black-dyed feathers standing up around the brims, apparently a sign of mourning; the pair of bareheaded females bringing up the rear stroked tambours with muffled sticks.
The figure in the lead was a good seven feet tall. It—Cashel wasn’t going to guess sex, not after his mistake with the shopkeeper—wore a robe that was pale green in the glow of the lanterns carried by some of the mourners. The hem brushed the mud, and a veil covered as much of the face as the cowl itself didn’t hide. The figure moved as smoothly as the images of the Great Gods brought from Carcosa to outlying boroughs in wheeled carts during the Tithe Processions.
The funeral turned onto the causeway leading to the temple in the river. Cashel saw the click of a spark from the hand-truck’s iron tires: the causeway was paved with hard stone.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Tilphosa said unexpectedly to the men in the doorway. “We’re strangers here. Who is that, please?”
The men turned to look at her; the fellow nearer to Cashel jumped back, much as he might have done if he’d glanced up from his drink and found a bull standing at his side.
“By the Shepherd!” he muttered, brushing with his free hand the beer he’d sloshed on the front of his tunic.
The procession reached the temple; its doors opened with only the faintest squeal. Somebody must keep them well greased in this soggy atmosphere. The men pushing the truck stepped back expectantly, and the female musicians redoubled their muted drumming.
“Well, I believe it’s Tadbal Bessing’s-son the cobbler, mistress,” the other man said. “Leastways I’d heard he’d died last night, so if it’s not Tadbal, he’ll be along shortly.”
“No,” said Tilphosa in a noticeably sharper tone. “I mean the tall fellow leading them, not the departed. Is he a priest?”
The men looked at each other. Partly to explain Tilphosa’s ignorance, and partly to remind the locals to be polite when they spoke to a girl who had a friend Cashel’s size, Cashel said, “We’re strangers here, you see.”
“Right,” said the fellow who’d spilled his beer. “That’s one of the Nine, you see. They take care of the dead.”
“It’s the custom here in Soong,” the other man agreed.
A figure which could have been a mirror image of the leader came out of the temple. While the mourners stood back, the two of them lifted the corpse from the hand-truck and carried it inside. The temple doors closed behind them.
“There’s nine priests?” Tilphosa said.
Cashel consciously kept from frowning. Local customs were no business of his, unless they involved feeding him to a tree or the like. In Barca’s Hamlet people buried their dead in the ground in winding sheets, if they could afford the wool, but every place Cashel had been since he left the borough had a different way of dealing with death. If the people of Soong wanted priests to slide corpses into the river for the catfish to eat, well, that was their business.
“I don’t rightly know, mistress,” the first speaker said. “Nobody’s seen more than three of them together, not that I’ve heard about. Maybe Nine’s just a name.”
“Tilphosa, I think we ought to see about food and a place to sleep,” Cashel said firmly.
All three looked at him. The man leaning against the closed panel reached down and lifted a pin so that he could pull that half-open as well.
“There you go, master,” he said with a sweep of his hand and a friendly smile. “That’ll save you having to turn sideways, I guess.”