The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (12 page)

The next few days passed with blessed sameness.  The forest of the Imperial bank gradually thinned until the great, golden fields of grain that fed the Realms dominated the view south.  Ari spent a lot of time daydreaming in that direction, thinking about his future.  Families could be seen out working the fields as the barge drifted by, sometimes with the great Northern draft horses pulling carts or tillers, or dogs trotting around herding small children while their mothers worked.

He could run a farm, he considered; he knew plenty about it from overseeing with Loren and Lord Herron at Harthunters.  The idea got more interesting when he put it mentally on the slopes of the steep wild land at his back.  He
’d have to scratch a living out, sweat and slave and make it all himself.  Marry.  Raise a happy flock of kids to help with the chores…

“
A hard life,” Selah observed, coming to sit next to him one day.

Whatever had come loose in his chest that first conversation rattled around a bit
whenever she was near.  He blushed furiously.

“
Uh,” he said intelligently.  “Yeah.”  His mind groped wildly for a cohesive thought.  “I like working in the country, though.”

“
Mm,” she agreed comfortably.  Why didn’t she talk about herself like most girls? Ari thought, desperately shy.

“
I always feel closer to Il working the land,” she added.

He froze.  Il?

“You’re Illian?” He tried to sound casual.

“
Mm,” she said again.  “Hard to be in Addah for too long and not be.”  He stole a look at her face—serene, dark eyes wry. 

Cerise called her—Ari swore sometimes it was just so she had something she could control—and she
rose in her liquid way.

“I need to stir the soup anyway,” she said quietly, as if reading his irritation.

“
It smells delicious,” he said, completely unaware there was food product in the vicinity.

Despite his keen interest in the intricacies of Illianism, t
he comfortable routine on the raft seemed bent on preventing him from ever having more than a few words with the one person who might have been able to shed some light on the matter.  The pattern became so predictable that he started glowering whenever Rodge or Loren or Cerise interrupted them with their inanities—like they had anything interesting to say to her.   His blood pressure was reaching critical one day when the barge rounded a turn in the river and came up on a mass of traffic.  Effenrike slowed them down, and Ari, recently interrupted once again and thoroughly disgusted, followed Selah up to the bow with everyone else. 

“
Customs,” Effenrike explained, but it was almost another hour before they could experience that unique Northern delight.  The Triple Mountains of the North waved grandly overhead in the desultory breeze when Effenrike finally pulled abreast of the Customs House.  A heavy chain lay across most of the Kendrick here, with a sliding beam at water level to control the flow of traffic.  Though the Merranic flag flew, too, they couldn’t see any of her men on the ground—and from the sampling they’d had so far, they didn’t seem like they’d be an easy sort of thing to hide.

Effenrike wordlessly handed over a thin sheaf of papers to the Customs official that stepped on board.  The boys looked at him interestedly
, trying to keep straight faces.  He apparently fancied himself a Queensguard; his uniform looked like he’d just stepped off the parade ground, brass buckle shiny, boots gleaming with polish. He had elaborate mustachios and the draping ribbon of a lieutenant depending from one epaulet.

“
We would like to make a report of banditry,” Cerise announced in her best Imperious voice.

“
Noted,” the lieutenant said in clipped tones, poring over the bargeman’s papers and not even bothering to look up.

“
Noted?” Cerise said in frigid disbelief.  “NOTED?!  We were attacked, unprovoked, by dozens of filthy criminals, barely escaping with our lives!  As protectors of the Empire’s wealth and order and as defenders of her citizens, I expect you to do more than NOTE this!”

Bored, he glanced up at her. 
“And do you know where this happened?”

“
Upstream!”  She flung a regal arm over her shoulder, making Loren jerk out of the way to avoid being smacked.

He gave her a look as if to say,
“Exactly.” 

“
And do you know where they are now?”

“
Of course not!” she snapped.

He went back to his papers. 
“Then, it shall be noted.” He finished his perusal of the paperwork, made an efficient row of figures in his book, and glanced up at them all.

“
Why are you wearing swords,” he stated, in the tone of one observing an infraction. 

“
I just told you,” Cerise said angrily, “we’ve been attacked!  If you are not going to do your job to keep the Empire safe, then—”

“
You need to moderate both your tone and your emotions, milady,” he said, firmness creeping into the boredom.

“
We tell her that all the time,” Rodge offered.

“
Wearing arms is an indication of suspicious activity in the Empire,” the official began, as if reading down a sheet of regulations.

“
Which we’re getting ready to leave,” Banion rumbled rebelliously.

The lieutenant looked at him tightly, then took another, closer, look at their party. 
“What was your business in the Empire and what are your plans in Merrani?” He was scrutinizing them in earnest now.  Effenrike groaned softly and not very discreetly.  They’d already been there longer than anyone else and he was fidgety with the delay.  He may also not have been thrilled with the direction the conversation was heading.

“
QUEEN’S BUSINESS!” Cerise almost shrieked, “and believe me, she’ll hear of this!”

If this was expected to bring a nervous subject to quaking knees, it failed.  He ignored her, and rested his eyes on the Dra. 
“And your business?” he drawled insultingly.

Kai, who
’d been watching the activity on the Northern shore, turned his deadly gaze slowly on the official.  The temperature plunged.

After an interminable stretch of silence, the lieutenant finally cleared his throat and, looking almost human, said,
“Well, I suppose you’re leaving anyway…”  He snapped his neat little book up under his arm and stepped off the barge with a few staccato steps.

“
Ahh, the North,” Banion said as they floated on and Cerise fumed and spluttered and formed incoherent half-sentences.  “Never more beautiful than when it’s behind you.”

“
Good thing it’s perfectly stable,” Loren couldn’t help remarking.

The river became increasingly congested once in Merrani.  Ari noticed his Wilds to the north were not as steep
now as they headed to the Sea, their green flanks dotted picturesquely with boulders and crisscrossed with more and more well-trod paths.

To the south, the rocky foothills of the Ethammers overtook the
Empire’s fertile fields, a few scattered cotholders now barely scratching out a living from what was a breadbasket of bounty just a league to the west.  Clothed with rock and thick evergreen forest, the bank rose increasingly into a tangled mass, more wild and unkempt the farther east they went.  The straight, dull placidity of the Kendrick was vivacious now with rowdy Merranic traffic, all of which hailed Effenrike like he was a long lost brother.  The river began to twist and turn so sharply that it was a shock when they rounded a hairpin bend and were suddenly at the Sea.

 
The bustling docks of Alene, a city that looked like someone had watered the rock of Merrani and grew more of the same, sat right at the mouth of the Kendrick where it flared out into the jeweled water of the Bay of Saffir.  Limitless horizon called like a siren to the boys’ eyes as they gazed out at the bright, beckoning immenseness.  Never had they seen so much water, never had the dash of waves and the sparkle of sunlight on their crests seemed so full of promise.  Adventure whispered, tugging at their hearts, drowning out the ruckus of the crowd of vessels, the rowdy quays and bellowing dockworkers.  They had to be sharply brought back to reality to help unload the horses.

             
Alene was no less fascinating, clinging to the edge of the Bay in a maze of rock on rock on rock: cobblestoned streets, buildings made of nothing but big blocks of stone, slate roofing.  No wood anywhere.  No grass, no trees, no flowers—not even a window box relieved the town architectural fetish.  And there were no parks or open spaces like in the North.  The streets were all narrow and irregular and broken only now and then by a stream gurgling down through town to the Sea.

This
stone and rock warren bottled up all the native life into such a level of noise and exuberance that it outdid even a Northern tradehall. Their senses were bombarded with the strangeness, with the almost overpowering smells of sweat and fish, and with the Merranics in their eye-assaulting flamboyant colors.  Everywhere was the hearty roaring of a people blessed with bottomless lung capacity.  In general, Merranics dressed in colorful trousers tucked into high boots, were prone to fur, and almost without exception had great heads of hair and beards.  Some of the men wore earrings, and all of them wore a sword.  They were a big, well-muscled people, even the women running to tall and husky, with saucy laughs and snapping eyes.  To Ari’s delight, there were several redheads, though of the normal carrot color and all with respectable blue or gray or greenish eyes.  But, with their tanned, weathered faces, he felt he could almost pass as one of them.  No one stared, except the girls, interestedly, which he supposed wasn’t all
that
bad.

Banion led them unerringly uphill through the
winding streets until they topped out on a section that was relatively straight and wide.  The breeze off the ocean hit them here, bringing with it such a pungent whiff of some atrocity that everyone but Banion literally gagged.  Rodge buried his head in his dirty tunic.  

“
Shedder,” Banion explained happily, waving one meaty hand out over the sea to the far cliffs of Addah.  Dimly, through the haze of distance, Ari could make out enormous vats set into the distant cliff side of the Wilds.  He barely had time to consider them before Loren had grabbed his arm, intending to pinch it off from the feel of it.  Wincing, he followed his excited gesture.  Just below them on the slanting hillside of the city sat a huge complex of magnificent stone.  It was encaged like a fortress, an endless stream of bearded, furred men flowing through its gates.  Only tradehouses were ever that busy in the North, but it was a gigantic Merranic flag that flew over this colossus, and the deep blue sparkle of the Sapphire that graced the enormous entrance. 

“
The Forges of Vangoth,” they breathed, almost in unison.

It was torture to slowly
trail after the others, to wait impatiently while Banion haggled over the price of a room—Ari hadn’t known there
were
places that voluntarily would lower their price—but finally the stableman took their horses, they threw their saddlepacks in their room, and they were free.

Rodge just rolled his eyes when they invited him, so they could move quickly back through the strange new streets.  Girls with corselets (on the outside!) over their flowing blouses and bulky skirts smiled boldly at them, swinging the
ir ubiquitous woven baskets.  Men of all types lumbered by, often making cheerful excuses as they bumped into them.  Nobody in Archemounte’s streets ever even smiled. 

The Forges were easy to find, all the biggest
, busiest main streets leading unerringly to their gates.  It was almost all foot traffic around them, horses big enough to carry Merranics probably needed for farm work.  Ari and Loren came down off the hill at the side of the leaping, white-tipped Steelblood, the famous stream that fed the Forges with the compounds so crucial to the life of its metals.  Coming in at one of the side entrances because it was a little quieter, they approached slowly, almost reverently.  Two immense, muscled Merranics in vests of dark grey fur and loose breeches of a billowing dark blue stopped them at the open door.  Just inside, they could see the orange of the furnaces and smell the heady scent of iron and steel being worked, tantalizingly close.  The clang of metal poured out, echoing as if the inside was one huge cavern.

“
My father has a sword from here,” Loren explained, a little dreamily.

“
Most men do,” one of the guards said, gruffly tolerant.  “Main entrance that way.”

They wandered around and
then through the great double doors of exquisitely worked hammered steel, strolling through corridor after corridor in a daze, in a sort of metal ecstasy.  Sitting out on display was virtually anything that could be made of iron, steel, bronze, tin, lead, copper, pewter, or silver.  There was even a little gold.  There were sculptures, figurines, carvings, cooking pots, hair pins, and needles.  There was a section of cart axles, plowshares, scythes, and pitchforks.  Silverware, servingware, belt buckles, gameboards, jewelry—all sat out for sale.