He didn't, either. When Reijka threatened him with her semipartner the professional litigator, he agreed to take the case to his superiors, but in the meantime we were embargoed from spending any money in the city of Narkunden.
"If that's all you can say," Reijka concluded, "you might as well get out of here and spread your peculiar brand of joy in someone else's life. And I hope Zaria takes up exclusive full-partnership with Vestavion. He may be a bit of an oily fledge, but at least he isn't a dusty old droop with his cranny full of queck-bugs."
It takes a person with a certain amount of character to stand up in the face of unanimous disapproval from a roomful of people, and Glemmurn wasn't made that way. He babbled something about "just doing the job," then fled before any of us could give him our opinion of his job.
"Well," Reijka said, breaking the dismal silence that Glemmurn left behind him, "if his bosses don't reverse him, I'll take the matter up with the borough syndic. But for the time being you'll have to shop across the river in Aflraun, I guess."
"Why didn't we settle in Aflraun in the first place?" Fasra wondered. "It's a lot more wide open there."
Roble looked at Morlock and, when it was clear the crooked man was not going to say anything, said, "We needed a place to heal up, after the mountains. And it's safer here."
"Except for harthrangs," Morlock added thoughtfully. "There might be a few more around town: bodies have been disappearing from the graveyards. That's what they were saying at the body dump. I'll place a demon-sconce around the house."
"You'll want Bann and Thend to help with that, I guess," I said. (He always did: Thend for Seeing, Bann for Making.) "I'll go across the river and buy us a couple days' worth of food. Roble, why don't you and Fasra hold the fort here?"
"Holding the fort is boring," Fasra grumbled. "I'll never get any interesting scars that way."
When I realized she was referring to our nightmare among the Khroi, I was speechless for a moment. I had been on the verge of suggesting that Stador come along with me and do the heavy lifting, and suddenly I remembered that Stador was dead and rotting in a hole in the mountains. And here she was making a joke about it. On the other hand, Fasra's jokes were rare and fragile things these days. I wanted to cloud up and storm at her, but in the end I just said lightly, "You could get a scar. Sooner than you think."
"I think she means it, kid," Reijka said, grinning at me. "Never mind. I'll stick around and we'll write an angry letter to the syndic and a friendly one to my litigator."
"Why not the other way around?"
"The litigators are the ones who run this town. The syndics and bureaucrats just think they do …"
I grabbed a bag of money off the counter and walked out the door. It was a little brusque, but I wanted to get out of hearing range before I started snuffling. In fact, I made it almost all the way to the Aresion Bridge over the River Nar when suddenly for some reason I remembered how Stador had looked in the green-and-gold shirt he had worn to his first Castleday when he was six years old. It wasn't like I was trying to remember it; the image forced its way into my mind. It was followed by a wave of others and I had to stand there in the middle of the street, clutching my bag of coins and weeping, until the tide of memories receded and I could think about something else again. That's how grief works for me. It's always there, but you can almost forget about it for a while; you think you might be over it. Then it drags you down and drowns you in itself.
What can I say? I don't know if you have kids. If you do, I suggest you die before they do. It'll save you a lot of trouble.
Eventually, I made it to the bridge. The Narkundenside guards gave me kind of a funny look; maybe they'd been watching me weep. But they didn't say anything about it: they just asked to see my proof-of-residence. By the time I'd crossed the bridge to Aflraunside, my eyes were dry (if somewhat sore) and the guards there didn't even glance at my card; they just wanted their bridge toll.
Aflraun is a lot livelier than Narkunden. If you want a banker, a bookkeeper, an academic, you go to Narkunden. If you want to buy or sell something, if you want to fight with somebody, if you want to become famous (or at least notorious), you go to Aflraun.
For one thing, the towns are run very differently. Narkunden has a democratic charter where the syndics go to the people for reelection every year, and any important law has to be passed by a citizen assembly, and all citizens get the same vote. Aflraun, on the other hand, is a democratic timocracy. All citizens get a vote, but your vote counts more depending on how important you are. You can acquire importance (the technical term is "gradient") through money, or other achievements, but one of the most common ways to achieve it is through dueling, as the victor in a duel automatically inherits the timocratic gradient of the person he kills.
Noncitizens aren't exempt from the constant duelling, but noncombatants are: duellists actually lose gradient if they are seen challenging or provoking someone not carrying unconcealed weapons.
More people prefer to live in Narkunden: it's safe, quiet, law abiding. But they swarm over the bridges to spend money and time in Aflraun. Commercial magic is not illegal there; neither is prostitution (another way to gain gradient, but apparently only if you do it right) nor public brawling nor most other things.
Then there is Whisper Street. I find it hard to explain Whisper Street; you'll have to bear with me for a moment. It is a place where, for a fee, you can become invisible and say anything you want. Physical contact is forbidden (not that it doesn't happen sometimes), but no speech of any sort is regulated. You can be anyone or anything that you want, as long as you can convince someone else of it. Apparently it is the city's great moneymaker, greater than people coming to watch the duels or engage in the gray-market activities banned in Narkunden and elsewhere. Whisper Street gets a little longer every year, to accommodate all the people who want to participate. Morlock said to me once that someday the whole city will be inside Whisper Street, and I'm not sure he was joking.
I'm not a fan of Whisper Street. If you'd ever been a widowed mother in Four Castles, you would have had your fill of being invisible. That's one thing. Then, after that, I was a Bargainer, kidnapping people on the Road, robbing them and carrying them away to the God in the Ground. I did it because I had to do it to save my daughter. I'll tell you the whole story sometime if you're in the mood to listen. But the point was that I was always doing things I hated. "This isn't me," I had to keep saying. "This isn't me."
But you are what you do. It was me, doing all those terrible things. I escaped when I could. But while I was there, that's what I did and that's what I was. What was I, now that I had escaped? I still wasn't sure. But, in any case, I didn't want to take my face off and pretend to be somebody else. I wasn't that sure I could ever find myself again. Maybe this doesn't make any sense: it was how I felt.
The point is, I had to cross Whisper Street to get to the main market of Aflraun, but I didn't want to participate. You have to pay to become invisible on Whisper Street, but you pay a little more to not become invisible: they give you a little wreath to wear that exempts you from the spell. I paid my fee, got my wreath, and started to make my way across the broad empty avenue, jostled by whispering people who didn't seem to be there.
It can be pretty icky, and it was that time. I passed by a group of people who were discussing in low tones their sexual practices involving overripe fruit. A couple others were shrieking at each other a set of accusations involving serial murder, treason, and genocide. The argument seemed to have started over a difference of opinion about some athlete or politician, but even that wasn't clear.
I was about halfway across when a voice spoke insinuatingly in my ear, "Why do you travel with the man who killed your son?"