Abomination (21 page)

Venator hopped from her shoulder and onto the single hitching post outside the tavern as she unbuckled her twin scabbards and slung them over a hook by the open doorway, where she could keep an eye on them. Many alehouses had rules about bringing weapons inside, beer and blades rarely proving a good pairing. And the sight of a woman with a sword—much less two—always seemed to make people uneasy. Her staff was less of a problem; people rarely realized it was a weapon until it was too late. Still, she propped it by the door.

“Enough!” barked the smith. “I will not be haggled with! Either pay what the work is worth or piss off somewhere else.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder for emphasis. “Good luck finding someone who’ll do the job as well for less money.”

Wulfric sighed. The smith was in a stronger bargaining position than even he realized; the only other man in the vicinity who did this kind of work was days away, and Wulfric would not suffer the beast to remain unbound for even one more night. This was his only option.

He had little money indeed and so had tried to bargain with half of it, but the smith had refused to lower his price. And so Wulfric reached into his cloak and retrieved the two coins that were all he had left. All together, it was still a shade under what the smith was asking, and he could only hope it would be enough.

He held up the two copper pieces. The blacksmith frowned and snatched them from his hand to inspect both sides carefully; counterfeit coinage was not uncommon. When the round ruddyfaced man bit down on both coins to prove their metal, Wulfric stayed silent; if the smith knew where he stashed those coins to keep them hidden from bandits, he would have refused to touch them even with a gloved hand.

The smith looked grudgingly at Wulfric for a moment before dropping the coins into the pocket of his stained leather apron. “Come back in an hour, perhaps two,” he grunted, as he reached down for the two lumpen coils of iron that were piled at his feet and began to gather them up onto his anvil.

“It must be ready before sundown,” said Wulfric.

The smith picked up a hammer from his tool bench. “At this price, you’re lucky I’m doing it at all. Find somewhere else to wait while I work—I’ve had about as much of that smell as I can take.”

Wulfric turned and ambled away. The smith gave him a parting scowl, then stoked his coals and went to work.

It was quiet inside the tavern. There were only a few tables, and all but one were empty. At the one table, two men sat opposite each other, while at the end of the bar sat an older man who by his demeanor appeared to have taken the morning’s first cockcrow as the signal to start drinking. A thin bearded man was rinsing out mugs behind the bar and drying them with a cloth that looked dirtier than anything else in the place.

Indra noticed a tension in the air the moment she stepped inside. It was too quiet, the kind of uneasy silence that pervades not when people are simply saying nothing, but when they are making a concerted effort to pretend that there is nothing to be said. The old man polished off his drink as Indra pulled up a seat at the bar, and he waved his empty tankard at the barkeep. “Another one in there, Ymbert,” he said, his slurred speech betraying just how far into his cups he was.

“I think you’ve had enough, Walt, don’t you?” said the barkeep. From the table across the room, the two other drinkers were glaring. Indra got the distinct impression that whatever conversation they’d been having before she entered was neither a pleasant one nor one they were keen on continuing in the presence of a stranger. She made a show of minding her own business. Looking straight ahead, at the shelves of bottles and mugs behind the bar, she noticed the five-pointed star that had been carved into the wall behind them. The symbol looked old; it had been painted over more than once and then shelving had been erected over it. Many would have missed it, or mistook it for something else, but Indra had grown up with that symbol and would know it anywhere.

The old man started making a commotion, banging his tankard on the bar, so the barkeep reluctantly took it and refilled it. “That’s the last you’re getting,” he warned, although the old man was already too busy drinking to pay attention. The barkeep shook his head and turned to Indra. “What’ll it be?”

“Water,” she replied, since she had no money for anything else. The barkeep gave her a look, but filled a mug from a flagon and placed it on the bar for her. He seemed to be waiting for her to drink it, and so she did, with him watching her all the while. She drank it down, not liking the way his eyes rested on her.

“Another?” the barkeep asked. Indra shook her head, so he took the mug away. “Sure you won’t have something stronger? How about one on the house? Small payment in return for you prettying up the place on such a drab day. I—Oi! No you don’t. Out!”

Indra flinched, startled. She turned in her seat to see the beggar from the blacksmith’s stall standing in the doorway, a disheveled figure in his rain-soaked cloak, bearded face barely visible under its hood.

“Just want to sit for a while out of the rain,” the man said before clearing his throat with a hollow, rasping cough.

“Less you’re buying a drink to sit with, you’re not doing it in here,” said the barkeep, shooing the man away with his hand. “Go on, bugger off!”

The beggar let out a resigned sigh and turned away, about to head back out into the rain when Indra stopped him. “Wait!” she called out, then turned back to the barkeep. “I’ll buy him a drink.”

“What?” said the barkeep, genuinely confused.

“You offered me a drink on the house. I accept. Give it to him and let him sit.”

The barkeep furrowed his brow. He looked at Indra, then at the beggar, then back to Indra again, as though trying to work out if he had just somehow been tricked. Finally he poured a mug of beer and placed it begrudgingly on the bar. Indra beckoned the beggar over, and for a moment he just stood there, unsure, as if conditioned to be wary of any display of kindness or generosity, before finally, cautiously, shuffling over to the bar.

As he drew up next to Indra, she tried not to react to the foul odor he brought with him. The barkeep was not so kind. “Sit by the door,” he told the beggar. “I don’t want you stinking the whole place out.”

The beggar gave a grateful nod in Indra’s direction as he took up the mug of beer, but was careful to avert his eyes and keep his head down. It was the kind of humility known only to the truly wretched. “Much obliged to you,” he mumbled. Then he moved away and took a seat at the table closest to the door.

The barkeep, clearly irritated, took a rag and wiped the bar where the beggar’s sleeve had briefly touched it. “Charitable soul, ain’t ya?” he said to Indra in a derisive tone.

Indra wanted to just leave. She had felt vaguely uncomfortable from the moment she stepped into this place, and that feeling had only been growing steadily worse. Still, the words she had learned as a child rose up within her, unbidden, and she found herself saying them aloud without thinking.

“When you give a feast, do not invite your friends or your rich neighbors, in case they might invite you in return, and you would be repaid,” she said, gazing down at her hands on the bar. “Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.”

She looked up. The barkeep was eyeing her quizzically, as though she had started speaking in tongues. Indra felt very self-conscious. She had just given away a part of herself, a part that she usually kept carefully guarded. But something about the plight of the beggar had brought it out of her.

The barkeep’s look of bewilderment turned to one of mirth. He looked to the table where the two men were drinking. “Ho! Bax, Roy! Did you hear this one? Give all your food to cripples and the blind because they can’t pay you back. That’s a new one on me!”

Neither man seemed particularly interested or amused, so the barkeep turned back to Indra. “What idiot taught you that?”

“Jesus Christ,” slurred the old man at the end of the bar, and the barkeep’s smile slackened. The two men at the table chuckled quietly to one another, deepening his sense that he had just been made to look a fool. He would usually be in no hurry to get a pretty young woman out of his pub, but he was beginning to lose patience with this one.

“That stool’s for paying customers,” he told Indra, in a tone far less convivial than it had been. “You’ve had your free drink, now either buy one or get out.”

Indra imagined grabbing the man by the back of his head and bouncing his stupid face off the bar so hard it broke his nose. The image played vividly in her mind as she tried to suppress the urge to convert her mental picture into reality.

The barkeep placed both hands on the bar and leaned in a little closer. “’Course, if you’ve no money, there’s always other ways to pay your way around here,” he said. The little finger of the man’s left hand lightly stroked the little finger of her right. Subtler than some of the crude advances to which she had been subjected, but enough to fill her stomach with ice and momentarily put her urge to hurt this man beyond her control.

The barkeep winced and released a quiet whimper that nobody but Indra was close enough to hear. He looked down at the bar, at where their fingers touched. Indra had entwined her little finger around his and was twisting it in such a way that every bone was brought close to breaking. The barkeep’s knees buckled and might have given way but for his fear that his finger would snap under the strain.

Indra showed no sign of loosening her grip. In fact, she tightened it, compelling him to move closer. He was just inches from her face now, close enough for her to smell the onions on his breath as he gasped in pain and to see the rivulet of sweat running down his temple. It would be easy, so easy, to apply another ounce of pressure and leave him with a lasting and painful reminder of his disrespect. She looked into the man’s panic-stricken eyes and thought of all the others who had insulted her or tried to take advantage. If she had succumbed to whim on each of those occasions, she would have left a trail of broken limbs from here to Canterbury. That was not the person she wanted to be. More than that, to react in such a way every time someone slighted her felt like a waste of good anger. The time would come when she would need it all.

She let him go. The barkeep stumbled backward, clutching his hand. Nothing was broken, but he would be nursing that finger for a day or two. She glanced over at the old man and the two at the table; their drinking continued undisturbed. The whole incident had happened so quickly and quietly that it appeared to have passed unnoticed. She did not think to look to the beggar by
the door, who had been the one person to have seen it all and had quietly taken note.

“Thank you for the drink,” she said, still trying to temper the wave of anger that had almost overwhelmed her and was only now beginning to subside. She noted furtive glances from the drinkers at the table as she turned and made for the door. They had made her feel unwelcome from the moment she had entered, and now they appeared glad to see her go.

She gave a nod to the beggar sitting at the table by the doorway as she passed, but got none in return. She did not think him impolite; men as lowly as he were invisible to most who passed, and so those people often became invisible in return.

When she stepped outside and took her swords from where they were hanging, she was relieved to have avoided undoing her small act of kindness with one of violence. But her blood was still up, the sound of her heartbeat thumping in her ears. She wanted to be away. Yet as she buckled her scabbards across her chest—

“All’s I’m telling you’s what I heard from Hewald, who saw it with his own eyes.” It was the old man, in the overly loud manner of a drunk—loud enough for his voice to carry to the doorway and outside. “And Hewald’s no liar! Torn in half, the poor bugger was!”