Chapter 39
The Rat did sort it out in the end, although He was helped by the eventual arrival of Sarkis, Halla, Dog Violet, and most important, Zale, who all caught up with them on the road by nightfall that same day.
Large Francis’s guards were only part-time employees of the White Rat, but the appearance of a lawyer tends to focus a situation rather dramatically.
“How did you get away?” Edmund asked. “I was so worried!”
Sarkis looked sour. “My dear wife shoved me into the sword, stuck the sword in a manure pile, and went out and talked at them.”
“Talked?” Edmund looked over at Halla, puzzled.
“It’s a gift,” Zale said.
The group—or rather Zale—decided that they would all travel together, to minimize the odds of any more cultists attempting something rash.
The Dervish’s sword was placed in Francis’s wagon, which had indeed been refitted into something much more comfortable, with a good deal of padding and a tin bath that Francis could use to dampen herself.
“It-is-a-very-small-bath,” she confided to Edmund, “but-it-was-a-kind-thought-and-I-can-fit-myself-into-it. Just-not-all-at-once.”
Edmund rode in the wagon with her a great deal.
The Dervish had died for him, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, so he threw himself into work.
Work in this case was cataloguing customs and, more importantly, idiomatic expressions of Francis’s people.
He’d found his journal in the Dervish’s saddlebags and that nearly broke him all over again, but as long as he was writing about phrases like “a roasted turtle,” indicating something very dry and therefore bad, or “whistling” to indicate extreme anger, he was only thinking about the Dervish a few hundred times a day.
No human was ever going to be able to speak Francis’s language without a device like the music box … possibly some kind of dysfunctional squeeze-box … but at least a human traveler to their land could avoid some of the most egregious solecisms.
It filled the daylight hours, anyway. It was the nights that seemed designed to drive him mad.
You got the sword. You rescued him. You won.
Yes, but what if he decides he doesn’t want to deal with me anymore?
He sent you away to protect you. He told you how much it would hurt him if you died.
Which was true, and he clung to the memory of those words like a lifeline, but the days passed and the doubts grew louder and he knew that he was doing it to himself but he couldn’t seem to stop.
“Twisting your whiskers, book-man.”
“I know, I know. I just keep … thinking.”
“Think less.”
“I don’t know how.”
Dog Violet shook her head slowly, clearly saddened by the failure of human brains.
When they finally reached the ferry, Francis rolled into a ball in the back of the prison wagon and Sarkis climbed inside. When the customs officials came to the wagon, Commander Leon said, laconically, “I’m not taking him out. I don’t suggest you go in with him.”
“Do it,” said Sarkis, staring at one of the officials and smiling in a deeply unsettling way. “Come in, little southern boy. I promise I’ll play nice.”
The customs official blinked. “What’s he in for?”
“Murder.”
“Murders,” Sarkis corrected him.
“Six of ’em,” Leon said. “Terrible business.”
“Seven,” Sarkis said. “You didn’t find the first body.” He pressed his face against the bars and leered. “Because I ate him.”
Zale put their head in their hands. Dog Violet went past on Greathoof, pretending that she didn’t know any of them.
“Anyway,” Leon said, handing a stack of paper to the customs official, “we’ve got all the documents here.”
“I cooked him though, I’ll have you know. Because I’m not a barbarian.”
“We’re supposed to search the wagons…” The official flipped through the documents, saw the appropriately impressive seals, and looked back to Sarkis. Sarkis licked one of the iron bars.
“But in this case, I think we can make an exception.” The official waved them hastily through.
The other passengers on the ferry inched away from the wagon until the captain yelled at them about weight distribution. Dog Violet moved Greathoof over to compensate, and a few bolder souls joined them, probably for an excuse to gawk.
A small grubby child of indeterminate sex came over to the wagon and stared up at the barred window. Around the finger working busily inside their nose, the moppet said, “Are you a bad man?”
“Very bad,” Sarkis said. “Absolutely the worst.”
“Wha d’you do?”
“Ate people.”
“Gosh!”
“Mind your mother if you don’t want to wind up like me.”
The grubby child considered this. “Mum never tole me not to eat people.”
“See, I call that irresponsible parenting,” Zale said, leaning against the railing.
“D’you eat people?” The child’s expression indicated that they thought it unlikely that they would be so lucky twice in one day.
“Sort of. I’m a lawyer.”
Small eyes narrowed. “Mum tole me not to talk to lawyers.”
“If you go around eating people, you’ll need to talk to a lawyer eventually.”
The child considered this, gave Zale a last wary look, nodded to Sarkis as one hardened professional to another, and slouched away. Edmund waited until they were out of sight before he burst into hysterical laughter.
“You enjoyed that far too much,” Halla said in an undertone, once they were safely off the ferry.
“Enormously. Better not get too close, wench, or I’ll take a bite out of you.”
“Maybe later. Commander, can we get this cage open before he corrupts the city youth?”
“The great god is cruel,” Sarkis said, emerging from the wagon. “I clearly missed my calling as an actor.”
“There are surprisingly few theatrical roles for villainous cannibals,” Zale observed. “It’s an oversight, I know.”
Sarkis muttered something about decadent southern theater. Edmund and Dog Violet exchanged speaking looks.
They rolled the wagon directly to the library and decanted Large Francis there.
Sarkis and Halla went off to their own quarters and Dog Violet took Greathoof to the stables for some well-deserved oats.
Edmund retrieved the sword, then he and Zale led the pillbug to the room that he had helped the librarians design.
He was surprised to see a middle-aged woman with hair like iron and a spine to match waiting for them, flanked by attendants.
“Bishop Beartongue!” Zale said.
“Indeed.” She bowed to Francis, who inclined several of her segments in return.
“Large Francis of Building”—she did not so much as bat an eye at the name—“we are honored to host you here and extraordinarily sorry for the loss of your colleague. Please be assured that we will take every possible action to see justice done, and to ensure good relations between our peoples.”
Francis’s antennae swept out into a stiff, formal pose.
“Bishop-Beartongue, I-do-not-hold-your-people-responsible-for-my-colleague’s-fate.
I-have-seen-that-humans-come-in-a-great-many- varieties-and-like-swamp-plants, not-all-of-them-are-good.
But- my-friends-Edmund-and-Dervish-and-Dog-Violet-have-shown-great-courage-and-intellectual-curiosity-and-I-will-gladly-have-relations-with-their-people. ”
Edmund coughed. “In this case, you probably want to say enter into relations.”
“Oh? Thank-you. Forgive-my-misspeaking-Bishop-Beartongue, I-am-not-yet-fully-fluent-in-your-language.”
“You speak far better than many of my colleagues, believe me.” The bishop smiled.
“And now that we have gotten the formalities out of the way, I suspect that you are tired from your travels and would like to rest. We have prepared these quarters for you as best we could, but please, if there is anything that we can do to further your comfort, let us know. The librarians are very eager to speak with you, and to share volumes. And you and I can discuss exactly what our peoples can do for each other at a later time, perhaps?”
“I-would-appreciate-that-greatly, Bishop-Beartongue.”
Beartongue bowed again and swept out of the room, somehow contriving to carry Zale and Edmund in her wake. Her attendants followed. Once they were out of earshot, she let out a deep breath and her ramrod posture slumped. “Dear sweet Rat. Was she sincere, or have we made a horrible mess of things?”
“No, she’s extremely sincere,” Edmund said.
He tried to stand up straighter under the bishop’s gaze and to pretend that his half-healed knee wasn’t hurting at all.
“I don’t actually know if she lies at all.
But I’ve only met one of her species, so I can’t tell you if she’s a typical individual or not. ”
The bishop nodded. “You are Learned Edmund, correct?”
“Well. Just Edmund, now. I’ve left the temple.”
“Undoubtedly a wise choice.” She glanced over at Zale. “I take it that your … mmm … small vacation was productive?”
“Very,” Zale said. “Although I really should have taken a carriage.”
“And your friend with the … ah … metalwork problem?”
Edmund tapped the sword that he was still carrying awkwardly in his arms.
“Excellent. I trust he will join us in due time.”
“A week or two, I think.”
“They will go by quickly,” the bishop assured him.
Edmund sighed. “I know, I just…”
“No,” Beartongue said, “I mean that I will have you working so hard that you won’t have time to think about anything else.
You’re our resident expert on Large Francis’s culture and since we’re already dealing with the fact that most of our population will run screaming if they see her, we are going to need all the help we can get. ”
“But I’m not a diplomat…”
“You’re diplomatic, which is a damn sight better, believe me. We’ll call you a cultural liaison, if that helps.”
“He’s already been compiling information on their customs,” Zale said helpfully.
“Look,” said Beartongue, moving in for the kill, “you already wrote a book on gnole language. You’re the closest we’ve got to an expert on interspecies relations. Do you really want this left in the hands of politicians?”
Edmund shuddered at the thought.
“And cultural liaisons get paid,” Zale added, delivering the finishing blow.
“Oh,” said No-Longer-Learned Edmund.