"Good," Bembo said. "The way things are nowadays, you can't be too careful."
"Well, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong there," the mage said. "But everything's fine this time."
Bembo intended to stop in and thank the healer- and probably frighten the life out of her customers- when he walked his beat the next day. But when he came to the little storefront, the door was ajar. He stuck his head inside. The door to the back room stood half open, too. He went back and peered into the gloom- no lamps shining now. And no litter of sorcerous apparatus there, either. The mage was gone, and she'd cleaned out all her stuff.
Bembo sighed. He wasn't even very surprised. He patted the amulets she'd given him. She'd been honest, and then she'd decided she had to run away. "Shows what honesty's worth," Bembo muttered. And if that wasn't a demon of a thought for a constable to have, he didn't know what was.
Spinello not only walked through the streets of Trapani with a limp, he walked through them with a cane. From what the healers said, he might get rid of the cane one day before too long. The limp, though, the limp looked to be here to stay.
There were compensations. He got pitying glances from women, and pity, for a man of enterprise, might easily be turned to some warmer emotion. The wound badge he wore on his tunic now supported a gold bar. He'd been awarded the Algarvian Sunburst, Second Grade, for gallantry in the face of the enemy, to go with his frozen-meat medal, and he had a colonel's three stars on his collar patches. When he went back to the front, he'd probably end up commanding a brigade.
He tried to straighten up and walk as if he hadn't been wounded. He could do it- for a couple of steps at a time. After that, it hurt too much. He would have traded rank and decorations for the smooth stride he'd once enjoyed in a heartbeat- in half a heartbeat, by the powers above, he thought. But the powers above didn't strike bargains like that, worse luck.
Going up the stairs to the Royal Cultural Museum made sweat spring out on his forehead. By the time he climbed them all and strode into the great rococo pile of a building, he was biting his lip against the pain. The ticket-seller, a nice-looking young woman, gave him a smile that could have been promising. But when Spinello said hello to her, he tasted blood in his mouth. He went on by, his own face grim.
As always, he made for the large gallery housing artifacts from the days of the Kaunian Empire. The spare, even severe, sensibility informing those busts and pots and coins and sorcerous tools and other articles of everyday life was as far removed from that inspiring the building in which they were housed as it possibly could have been. And yet, all things considered, Spinello preferred elegant simplicity to equally elegant extravagance.
As he always did in this gallery, Spinello paused in front of a two-handled drinking cup whose lines had always struck him as being as close to perfection as made no difference. Neither illustration nor memory ever did it justice. Every so often, he had to see it in the fired clay to remind himself what human hand and human will could shape.
"Spinello, isn't it?"
He was so lost in contemplation, he needed a moment to hear and recognize his own name. Then he turned and stared at the aged savant who'd been leaning on a cane longer than he had been alive. His own bow was awkward, but heartfelt. "Master Malindo!" he exclaimed. "What an honor! What a pleasant surprise!" What a pleasant surprise to see you still breathing, was what he meant. Malindo had been too old to serve in the Six Years' War, which surely put him up past ninety now.
"I go on," Malindo said in a creaky voice. "Are those a colonel's stars I see?"
"Aye." Spinello drew himself up with what he hoped was pardonable pride.
"A man of valor. A man of spirit," Malindo murmured. He paused, perhaps trying to find what he'd meant to say. He is old, Spinello thought. But then, quite visibly, the savant did find it. "And have you fought in the west?"
"Aye," Spinello repeated, this time in a different tone of voice.
Malindo reached out with his free hand, all wrinkled and veiny, and set it on the one Spinello used to hold his cane. "Then tell me- I beseech you, by the powers above- that what we hear of Algarve's dealings with Kaunians, dealings with the descendants of those who created this" -he wagged a finger at the cup- "is nothing but a lie, a filthy lie invented by our enemies."
Spinello couldn't nerve himself to lie to the old man. But he couldn't nerve himself to tell Malindo the truth, either. He stood mute.
Malindo sighed. He took his hand away from Spinello's. "What shall become of us?" he asked. Spinello didn't think the old man was talking to him. Malindo heaved another sigh, then slowly shuffled down the exhibit hall.
Try as he would, Spinello couldn't contemplate the cup the same way after that. The other Kaunian artifacts seemed somehow different, too. Cursing under his breath, he left the Royal Cultural Museum much sooner than he'd intended to. He wondered if he would ever be able to go back.
Two nights later, though, he hired a cab to take him through the darkened streets of Trapani to the royal palace. The last time he was wounded, he'd been too badly hurt to attend any of King Mezentio's receptions. This time, while not yet fit for field duty, he could- and did- display himself before his sovereign.
A somber servitor checked his name off a list. An even more somber mage muttered charms to test his cane before allowing him to go forward. "I haven't got a knife in there, nor a stick, either," Spinello said. "I could have told you as much, had you asked."
The mage bowed. "No doubt, your Excellency. An assassin could have told me as much, too, but he would have been lying. Best to take no chances, eh?"
"I suppose not," Spinello agreed with rather poor grace. But he added, "You didn't fret about such things when the war was new."
The mage shrugged. "Times are different now, sir." He waved Spinello past him.
Spinello went. What the fellow meant, of course, was, The war news sounded a lot better then. Who would have wanted to harm King Mezentio when Algarve's armies drove everything before them? No one, save perhaps some foreign hireling. Nowadays… Nowadays, there might well be Algarvians who'd lost enough to seek to avenge themselves on their sovereign. Spinello hoped not, but had to admit Mezentio was right to use the mage to help keep himself safe.
"Viscount Spinello!" a flunky bawled after Spinello murmured his name and rank to the man. A few heads turned his way. Most of the people already in the reception hall went on with what they were doing. A viscount limping along with the help of a cane was neither exotic nor prominent enough to be very interesting.
Officers and civilian functionaries drank and gossiped and eyed one another's women. The women drank and gossiped and eyed one another's men. And everyone, of course, eyed King Mezentio, who drifted through the room talking now with one man, now with another, or yet again with one of the better-looking women there.
After asking for a glass of wine and sipping it, Spinello looked at it in some surprise. "Something wrong, sir?" asked the servitor behind the bar.
"Wrong? No." Spinello shook his head. "But I've poured down too much in the way of Unkerlanter spirits, I think. Any drink that doesn't try to tear off the top of my skull hardly seems worth bothering with."
"Ha! That's the truth, by the powers above!" a soldier behind him boomed. The fellow also leaned on a cane, but would have been monstrous tall if straight. He wore a brigadier's rank badges, and had three gold bars under his wound badge. He went on, "After that stuff they brew from turnips and barley, wine isn't good for much but making you piss a lot."
"It does taste good," Spinello said, sipping again. For all the jolt it carried, it could have been water.