The Blood of a Dragon

Chapter Seventeen

Riverbanks, Dumery discovered, are not highways.

Riverbanks, he found, can be slippery, boggy, overgrown, leech-infested, mosquito-infested, strewn with sharp rocks and day-old manure, and generally hard to traverse. They can have fences blocking access to them. They can even have rabbit-snares on them that wrap around your ankle and feel like they’re going to rip your foot right off, which you have to remove slowly and carefully, in the dark, while sitting on cold, wet mud.

All the same, the sun still hadn’t cleared the mountaintops when Dumery, filthy and exhausted but still determined, finally reached the inn and dock where theSunlit Meadows had tied up for the night.

He identified it as the right dock by the simplest possible method: TheSunlit Meadows was still there, its distinctive outline recognizable even in the faint light of approaching dawn, augmented by the lesser moon, which had crossed the sky, set, and was now rising again, a thin bow this time.

In the dimness the upraised sweeps looked more like an insect’s legs than ever.

This stretch of waterfront was clear and level and easy to walk. A set of wooden steps led down to the dock; at the top of the steps a plank walk led to the verandah of a good-sized inn. Beyond the inn was a small village, a handful of houses and shops along either side of a single street leading up the slope, away from the water.

Dumery knew the big building by the river was an inn because a signboard hung over the verandah showing a brown pig on a black spit, with a jagged orange border below that was clearly intended to represent a cooking fire. He could see the colors because lanterns hung to either side of the sign, both of them burning.

He found himself faced with a difficult decision. Should he approach the inn, where the man in brown might be staying, or should he go down to the boat?

After some thought, he chose the boat.

He tripped and very nearly fell on the top step, which would have made for a noisy and painful tumble, but he caught himself at the last minute and made his way gingerly down to the dock.

When he stepped off the last step and could spare attention to look at something other than his own feet, he looked up and found he was being watched.

A guard had been posted on theSunlit Meadows, just as on the cattle barge-a man was sitting on a stool on the foredeck, a sword across his lap. He was staring at Dumery.

“Uh... hello,” Dumery said. He spoke loudly enough to be heard over the chirping crickets and the gentle splashing of the river going about its business, and was horrified at how loud his voice sounded. The crickets and water weren’t making anywhere near as much noise as he had thought; his normal tone sounded like shouting.

“Hello,” the watchman answered warily.

Dumery strolled down the dock, trying to look casual. “I was looking for someone,” he said. “I saw him on that boat of yours a few days ago.”

“Oh?” the watchman asked.

“Yes,” Dumery said. “Big man, dark brown hair, wore brown leather, came aboard at Azrad’s Bridge.”

“I might know who you mean.” For the first time, Dumery noticed that the guard spoke Ethsharitic with an accent.

“Yes, well,” Dumery said, “I’m looking for him. I need to talk to him.”

The watchman’s hand had crept to the hilt of the sword; now he lifted it and gestured at the eastern sky. “Odd hour to go visiting, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Oh, well,” Dumery said, “I didn’t want him to slip away before I had a chance to talk to him, you know.”

“Ah. In a hurry, were you?”

Dumery nodded. “Yes, I was,” he said.

“In too much of a hurry to clean up?”

Dumery looked down at himself.

His tunic was muddy rags. His breeches were split at the crotch and frayed to threads for much of their length, and his skin was covered with scrapes, scratches, and dirt. His boots were badly scuffed, but still, thank all the gods, sound.

“I missed the road in the dark,” he explained. “Fell down a couple of times.”

“Well, boy,” the guard told him, “I’m sorry, but you’re not coming aboard theMeadows like that, and I don’t care if you’re a boy baron in disguise, or one of the gods themselves.”

“He’s on board, then?” Dumery asked excitedly. “The man in brown leather? The dragon-hunter?”

The watchman squinted at Dumery. The eastern sky had started to pale; the greater moon had set, but the lesser moon was climbing rapidly, filling out as it rose. A ship’s lantern hung at each end of theSunlit Meadows, shining brightly. In short, there was light, but not enough to read faces easily.

The watchman decided it wasn’t his problem. “The man’s name is Kensher Kinner’s son, boy-that the one you’re looking for? Anyway, no, he’s not aboard. He’s probably at the Roasting Pig. This is his stop, where we pick him up twice a year, and drop him off on the way back.”

A great weight he hadn’t known was there seemed to vanish from Dumery’s chest, and his breath rushed in, then out, in a great sigh of relief. “Thank you!” he said. “Then Ihaven’t missed him!” He whirled and charged back up the steps, ignoring the watchman’s shouted admonitions to watch his step and not to say who’d told him.

He even knew the man in brown’s name, now-Kensher Kinner’s son. Not exactly an ordinary name, by Ethsharitic standards, but not particularly exotic. Dumery had a vague impression that northerners used patronymic names like that more than city-dwellers did.

He dashed headlong up the boardwalk and onto the verandah, and smacked his hands against the door of the inn, expecting it to open.

It didn’t. His damp feet slipped on the oiled wood of the verandah, and his nose and chin slammed up against solid oak hard enough to bruise, but not to break anything.

He caught himself and stepped back, rubbing his injured nose, then reached forward and tried the latch.

The door still wouldn’t open.

Dumery frowned. Who ever heard of an inn where the door wouldn’t open? What good wasthat to anyone?

Well, maybe the owners were worried about bandits wandering in. After all, this wasn’t Ethshar. Dumery looked about for a knocker or bell-pull.

A black metal rod hung down just behind the signboard; he hadn’t noticed it before, taking it for a shadow or part of the bracket holding the sign. The upper end vanished into a boxy structure protruding from the wall.

He reached up and gave it a tug.

It moved freely, and when he released it it swung back up into place-obviously counterweighted somewhere. He wasn’t sure whether he heard a clunk somewhere when he let it go, or not.

An unfamiliar voice, oddly hollow, called, “Ie’kh gamakh.”

Dumery blinked. That wasn’t Ethsharitic.

It was probably, he realized suddenly, Sardironese. He was presumably somewhere in the Baronies of Sardiron, so that would make sense.

Unfortunately, Dumery didn’t know a word of Sardironese, and couldn’t begin to guess whether the phrase he had just heard meant, “Welcome,” or “Go away,” or “Give the password,” or “The key’s on the windowsill,” or something else entirely.

“I don’t speak Sardironese,” he called-not too loudly, as he didn’t want to annoy anyone.

Nobody answered.

He stood there, looking about and trying to think what he should do, until he was startled by a scraping sound.

He spun back toward the door, and there, an inch or two above the top of his head, a panel the size of a man’s hand had slid open. Bleary green eyes beneath bushy white eyebrows were looking out, and from what he could see of them, Dumery thought they looked puzzled.

“Hello,” Dumery said.

The eyes blinked, and looked down, suddenly discovering Dumery.

“Hello?” a voice answered, the voice of an old man.

“May I come in?” Dumery asked.

The voice replied, “H’khai debrou... ie’tshei, yes, one moment.” The panel slid shut, metal rattled against metal, and the door swung open.

Dumery stepped in and looked around, to see what he could see, and discovered that mostly he could see the starched white apron and voluminous red nightshirt of the man who had admitted him. That worthy was standing in Dumery’s way, looking down at him with an unreadable expression on his face.

“By all the gods, boy, you are a... amess!” the man exclaimed.

Dumery was relieved to hear the man deliver a complete, coherent sentence in Ethsharitic, even if itwas accented.

But then, an innkeeper would naturally want to speak several languages.

“I’m looking for a man dressed in brown leather, going by the name Kensher Kinner’s son,” Dumery said.

“He is-ie’tshei,is he expecting you?”

“He’s yetchy?”

“No, no. Is he expecting you?”

“Is he here?”

“I am...ie’tshei, why should I tell you?”

Dumery was tired. He was, in fact, exhausted, and as a result he was in no mood to deal with obstructions when he was so close to his goal. “Just tell me, all right?” he said. “And what’s that ’yetchy’ mean, anyway?”

The man glared down at him fiercely, and Dumery realized he’d said the wrong thing.

“Ie’tsheiis Sardironese for ’I meant to say,’ boy,” the man said. “You don’t make fun of my Ethsharitic, all right? You want to hear me use all the right words, you talk to me in Sardironese. We aren’t in the Hegemony here. Since I was your age, I could speak four languages enough to run this inn. I don’t hear you saying anything in anything but Ethsharitic. You don’t sound so smart to me, boy, so watch your manners.”

“I’m sorry,” Dumery said, not really meaning it.

The innkeeper ignored the interruption. “You come in here an hour before dawn, when I need my sleep, you drip mud on my floors and look like the worst garbage, like someone who takes what the dogs won’t eat, you don’t say who you are, you make fun of how I talk in a foreign language when I’m half asleep, you want to talk to one of my guests who isalso still asleep, assuming he’s here, which I haven’t said... boy, you better have the money to pay for a room and a bath and a meal and new clothes, because if you don’t you go right back out that door. I don’t want you in here like this. You make me look bad.”

“I’m sorry,” Dumery said again, a little more sincerely.

“Sorry, nothing. You have money?”

Dumery looked down at the purse on his belt. Six bits, he knew, wasn’t going to buy him much here. It certainly wasn’t going to buy him any sympathy, let alone new clothes and all the rest of it.

The innkeeper saw Dumery’s look and interpreted it readily enough.

“No money,” he said. “Out, boy. Out.” The man put a hand on Dumery’s chest and pushed gently.

Until he felt that hand it hadn’t really registered with the lad just how big the innkeeper was, which was very big indeed. Dumery doubted very much that this particular innkeeper had ever had to hire anyone else as his bouncer; he was clearly capable of handling the job himself.

Unwillingly, Dumery stepped back out onto the verandah, and the heavy door slammed shut an inch from his face.