Chapter 27
When he got up the next morning, after sleeping for a truly heroic twelve hours, he was ravenous and the room was empty. He dressed hurriedly, then caught a glimpse of movement and froze.
It was a mirror. A small one, polished tin and inexpensive, the sort that you could use to shave with. The Dervish eyed it as if it were a wasp.
You haven’t looked.
I haven’t had a chance. The road wasn’t exactly lined with floor-length mirrors.
You could look now.
He didn’t move.
Coward.
He bit his lip. Surely it couldn’t be too bad? Edmund has mistaken him for an angel. Though that could just mean that he no longer looked human.
The Dervish cursed and flung himself toward the mirror, meeting his own eyes.
They were the wrong color.
He fell back a step, as if to avoid a blow. His eyes had always been brown. Now they were metallic silver. It was a jarring, unnatural color, not one he’d ever seen in a human face, and …
Actually, they were rather attractive. Unique, certainly. Once he was past the initial shock, he had to admit that they were quite striking. He raised an eyebrow, lowered it. Narrowed his eyes. Let the lids fall a little, tarnishing them.
Oh, he could work with this.
The scars on his face weren’t as bad as he’d feared.
He’d expected something like the lines on his arms and thighs, thick strokes of metallic scar tissue.
These were thin strands running from the corners of his eyes to his temples, like silver cobwebs, and equally delicate marks along the line of his jaw.
He didn’t like them—they shouldn’t be there, they didn’t go with his mental image of himself—but the fact that they weren’t disfiguring was such an intense relief that he felt weak in the knees.
He hadn’t realized quite how frightened he had been of what his tormentor had done to his face.
Maybe, like the princeling, he hadn’t wanted to see beauty marred.
A little makeup and these will vanish. And even if I don’t cover them, at least they look deliberate.
I’ve seen much more dramatic things done in the name of fashion.
One of the mercenaries in Sarkis’s troop had dozens of small raised dots along their forehead, and another had the face of a snarling hound tattooed over their own.
Compared to them, the Dervish’s scars would go practically unnoticed.
And his eyes …
The memory of what had caused his eyes to turn silver tried to rise and the Dervish shoved it back. Yes, it was horrible, but so was everything else. And in this, at least, the old bastard did me a favor. If I saw these eyes across a crowded room, I’d definitely want to get closer.
Feeling giddy, the Dervish spun away from the mirror and did an impromptu dance step. His sword—the sword—was laid neatly across a chair. The Dervish slung it around his hips and went out, trying not to clank.
There was a woman in the hallway carrying a stack of blankets. “Excuse me,” he said, “but is there somewhere to get food nearby?”
“Of course, sir,” she said. “If you go downstairs and out the door and turn left, there will be a covered walkway that leads to the dining hall.”
“How much does it cost?”
She looked surprised. “For guests of the temple, there is no charge, sir.”
The Dervish followed instructions and found himself in front of a set of open double doors. The air inside smelled like cooking. His stomach growled loudly.
It was an extremely straightforward arrangement.
You went up to the counter at the far end, where a server scooped noodles into a bowl, then you pointed at what you wanted and the server dumped it on top of the noodles and handed you the result.
The bowl was unglazed ceramic, serviceable, cheap, and easily replaced.
There were mugs as well, though they had glazed rims, which you could fill with water or small beer.
You took your food to one of the many long tables with benches and ate.
Nobody checked to see if you belonged there, which argued either tight security that he couldn’t see or that the White Rat was not particularly concerned about feeding anyone who wandered in.
Edmund and Dog Violet sat at one of the benches, along with Zale and a gnole that the Dervish didn’t recognize. He joined them, still feeling slightly giddy. He hadn’t realized how self-conscious he’d been about what other people saw when they looked at him. Now he knew.
“Thought we would need a horse to haul you out of bed, knife-man.” Dog Violet arched her whiskers toward the other gnole. “This-gnole is Brindle. Brindle knows about swords already, so knife-man can talk in front of him.”
Another one who knew Sarkis, I suppose. Brindle nodded to the Dervish and the Dervish nodded back. He was a heavyset gnole with mottled stripes, clad in ragged brown and blue, with a pale scarf knotted along his left bicep. A sign he works for the White Rat? Or just a fashion choice?
For that matter, Dog Violet’s clothes looked substantially different this morning. Several brightly colored bits of fabric had joined the haphazardly laundered rag layers that she’d been wearing. “I like the new colors,” he told her.
Dog Violet’s ears went down to the sides, in a gesture that read almost like embarrassment. “A job-gnole was kind to a rag-and-bone gnole. A gnole’s clothes needed help.”
“A rag-and-bone gnole had many troubles,” Brindle said, his voice an octave deeper than Dog Violet’s. “A job-gnole helps if he can. Saw big horse and mule. A rag-and-bone gnole did good work.”
Edmund’s head came up sharply at that last sentence and he looked over at the two gnoles thoughtfully.
Dog Violet’s ears were down again, but she seemed pleased.
The Dervish had no idea what to make of any of it, so he started eating.
The noodles were covered in vegetables and some kind of small, chopped fish.
Probably cheap to make in quantity, but it was edible and his stomach was on the verge of crawling up his spine and beating him over the head if he didn’t eat something.
“So the good news,” Zale said, “is that the bishop is very concerned about your … erm … insect friend…”
“Isopod,” Edmund said absently.
“Sorry, what?”
“She’s technically an isopod. More closely related to a crab than an insect.”
Zale, to their credit, took this in stride. “Your isopod friend. The bishop’s sent a postrider north to contact a guard post on the far side of the swamp. If all goes well, they’ll be able to bring her south in a closed wagon from there.”
“Oh.” The Dervish set down his spoon. “So we’re not going to get her?”
Zale’s smile was genuinely sympathetic. “I know, it’s hard to trust other people to handle it, but I assure you that the bishop would not have chosen anyone she didn’t feel was capable. And this way your friend will arrive here in half the time.”
“It’s probably for the best,” Edmund said, sounding slightly glum.
“I know she said she was fine in the swamp, but I worry people will trip over her and … well, you know.” He shook himself.
“Anyway, I’ve already had the books sent over to the library, so I thought we might go to the scholar today. If you want to?”
“Yes, of course,” the Dervish said. For an instant, the hope that he’d been deliberately squelching threatened to bubble up. What if today is the day I get free?
Zale tamped it down thoroughly an instant later. “I wanted to talk you about that,” the lawyer said. “In my … err … past experience with such a sword…”
“You can say it was Sarkis,” the Dervish said, not looking up from his noodles.
“I’m not going to yell at you. I was just taken by surprise earlier.
” Which was possibly the understatement of the century, but damned if he was going to pass up information about getting free of the sword just because he’d learned that his old commander was still around.
“Very well, then. Some people learned what Sarkis was and stole his sword. The person doing so called himself a follower of the ‘Sainted Smith.’ Sarkis thought that was a reference to the woman who forged the swords originally.”
The Dervish stopped chewing. When he remembered to swallow, it went down like a lump in his throat. “They made her a saint?”
Zale looked pained. “Unfortunately there isn’t really a central authority for canonization.
I’d tell you more, but we haven’t been able to find anything about them at all.
Either they’re very secretive or there simply aren’t that many of them.
Since I can’t imagine you aren’t cautious about telling people, I won’t tell you to be careful, just to be aware that there is some kind of organization that has been looking, and that they are … ah … ruthless.”
“I’m fairly ruthless myself,” the Dervish said.
“I’m not,” Edmund said. “So it’s good to know.” He looked across at the Dervish. “Do you still want to go with me to meet this scholar? I suppose I could tell her that I lost the sword.”
“I appreciate the sacrifice, but we’ll go together. I don’t want to turn down a chance to maybe break the curse because there’s a weird cult out there somewhere.”
Edmund nodded. The Dervish bolted the last of his food, took the tray to a counter where the dirty dishes were being piled up, and adjusted the hang of the sword in question. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go find this scholar.”
The walk to Chime Street was long, but not onerous, so they did not take Sweetness, who was currently eating her head off in the stable and wouldn’t have appreciated it anyway.
The streets mostly confirmed the Dervish’s first impression of Archon’s Glory, so he spent most of the trip watching people, particularly gnoles.
There were more around than he’d realized, but they moved so unobtrusively that they were easy to overlook, even in their colorful rags.
He saw badger stripes gleaming briefly in shadowed alleys and watched small figures whisking around corners and ducking between humans without the humans seeming to even register them.