City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [90]
‘Really?’ she managed, a little breathless after her rigorous training.
He bowed as he handed it to her the second time. ‘You have earned it. I only wish you could have been my student years ago – starting as a young rumel. I might have seen you become a master by this time.’
‘Thank you, master.’ Marysa returned his formal bow and accepted the weapon. Eventually he faded into his back room, behind the wooden slats and the paper lanterns.
She examined the blade in more detail, noting the beautiful simplicity based on no era she knew of. Just simple steel, with a varnished wooden handle.
Marysa owned her very first weapon.
*
Jeryd wanted a steak that night, and to hell with his diet. He was all this way away from home comforts, investigating crimes that were apparently unsolvable no matter how assiduously he applied himself, and most of all he now wanted to spend the evening with his wife, who he was beginning to miss more and more. As the months slipped by, since he had risked his life in Villjamur, he was becoming ever more the philosopher. On his deathbed, would he be wishing he’d spent more time at work or would he be regretting lost days with Marysa, either way a nostalgia for the never-was?
Exactly. So tonight he would share a steak dinner, perhaps with a bottle of some cheeky little northern vintage, conversing with the woman he loved, then maybe with his personal appetites satisfied, he might be able to work on the crimes of the city more effectively. With that plan in mind, he set out along the streets on a quest for meat and wine.
By its presence alone, the military had slowly crushed the spirit of Villiren, that was certain. Where, only a few weeks back, people had seemed sanguine in the face of an almost-certain war, the company of so many soldiers sifting through the lanes and among the populace brought a feeling of an occupied city. Locals were largely welcoming, but the sight of precision weaponry displayed in an open, brazen fashion was unsettling.
The soldiers had not been buying much in the way of provisions from the markets, relying instead on their own supply routes, so thankfully prices weren’t being forced too high.
Activity in the irens carried on as normal. Some were already starting to take down the strips of coloured cloth denoting zones, wares, individual flair. Biolumes arranged in brine-filled trays continued to provide no end of curiosity for Jeryd – they had never had anything like them back in Villjamur. One stall offered an array of masks, in different shapes and colours and materials, and for a moment he even considered buying one to see what the fad for wearing them was all about.
He came to one of the meat sellers, a portly man speaking in an exotic dialect, that Jeryd decided was a bastardization of Tineag’l and Y’iren grafted on a Jamur framework.
‘I’m after some steaks,’ Jeryd announced to him across the now sparse selection of fish and crustaceans. Hanging from the top of the overhead frame were two large trilobites, about two armspans in length, twisting this way and that in the wind.
‘Steak? We got steak. What animal you wanting?’
Jeryd shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You any beef steaks – pork chops, even?’
The man’s eyes settled on Jeryd for a moment, then he nodded, shifted to one side of his stall to retrieve something. When he returned, on the flat of his palm sat two fat, juicy steaks. ‘Just the thing,’ Jeryd confirmed, reaching into his pocket for a Lordil. ‘Keep the change.’
The trader growled his appreciation after he inspected the coin, then he wrapped the steaks in paper and passed them across to Jeryd, who tucked them under one arm and continued on his way to buy some wine.
*
Later, with candles giving their shoddy apartment an aura of nostalgia, he thought he might make the dinner a success. It wasn’t ideal, this place, but with some good lighting and incense it could become rather romantic. You can make the most of any situation, Jeryd reflected, when you seek to instil a little romance. The good investigator