City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [64]
‘So, there you have it. I’m really called Kapp,’ he declared, resignedly. ‘But Randur or Kapp, I still saved your arse.’
Rika was looking out of the window, as snow began to fill the grey afternoon skies. ‘That is true, and your motives were pure – even if your actions weren’t quite what I would approve of. Kapp, you say? A better name, I think. Randur does sound a little sleazy.’
‘What, that’s it?’ Randur asked. ‘No big lectures on morality, on what a fool I’ve been and that my sorry rear is going to burn in some hell realm for a thousand years?’
Rika laughed then, for the first time, and he couldn’t decide if he had been thoroughly stupid in something he’d said. ‘That’s just it, Kapp. My religion isn’t all that complicated at times. Your motivation was a positive one. How else can we judge someone?’
‘I thought you had, like, a million rules about what we’re not supposed to do.’
‘There are some in place, admittedly, but they’re to aid our spiritual practice, not pass judgement. Yes, there are some priests who have interpreted aspects of our belief in what I consider a negative way, but really all we are – any of us – is the sum of our actions. Do I really come across as so . . . condemnatory?’
‘Just a little . . . you know, preachy,’ he muttered. Then, ‘No offence, lady.’
‘I suppose I’ve been through a lot, returning to Villjamur and then . . . leaving again so abruptly. We have all been through quite an ordeal.’
‘Whatever,’ Randur said, forgetting, as he often did, the importance of the woman before him. In truth Rika couldn’t have had it easy – she’d been torn from her spiritual retreat to be thrust into the seat of power controlling millions of lives across the Jamur Empire, only to be manipulated by councillors close to her and falsely charged with plotting the destruction of thousands of her own citizens.
‘Look, we can either sit and be miserable, or cheer up,’ he continued. ‘I’m going downstairs to get some food. Who’s with me?’
Both girls stood up immediately.
*
They took precaution with their disguises, Rika and Eir slouching affectively as girls of royal birth could manage, in the rear of tharkened tavern. Randur’s narrow sword was always ready by his side. Cards flipping, a glass being settled back on a table, a ticking clock: these were the only sounds for much of the afternoon. Things pickep a little come the evening, they way they always did, people witittle money coming to spend it, wasting their daily wage on socianvestments that could barely show useful returns.
Young women came in now and then, displaying different looks and levels of attractiveness. They would sit at the bar waiting to be bought drinks, and men inevitably approached, older, rough agricultural types, some like the cliché he’d imagined, yet some surprisingly well spoken. And he wondered, again and again: Is this all there is for these people?
His life had changed so completely. Doing something now seemed to matter.
The three of them made relaxed and innocent conversation, the kind that could occur anywhere at all, anywhere in time. Eir had found a niche for herself in teasing Randur lightly, while Rika asked him about his upbringing here on Folke. For one of the most loftily placed people he had ever known, she certainly showed a deep interest in other people.
In that dark corner they all became closer.
Then under the light of the lanterns throughout the rest of the tavern, a man came shambling inside, wrapped in a wax-covered cape and wearing ridiculously colourful breeches. He even had a frilly black shirt that would have been at home in Randur’s own wardrobe. Although naturally slender, he carried the paunch of a man whose drinking habit had finally caught up with him, protruding under a grubby complexion, with a broad jaw smothered in greying stubble.
It couldn’t be.
‘Drink, by thunder, sir!’ the man called out across the bar, before wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘How’s a man to quench his thirst in such a Bohr-forsaken hellhole.’
This much was obvious: it