Realms of Magic - Brian Thomsen King [75]
"Rats?"
Sprite tried to nod, but that only made him feel greener. "Rats-you know, rats, owls, frogs-them little pets wizards get."
"Familursh," she slurred, and gulped down more wine.
"That's right. All them high-ups got 'em. You should have one too, Maeve."
"A familiar?" The wizard rolled the words around like a fine drink, considering the idea. "It'd have to be a right pretty one. No toads."
"No toads," the halfling mumbled.
"I got me a scroll somewhere." Maeve was now musing, working out the deed in her head as if she were planning a foist of her own. Sprite sat back with bleary satisfaction and proceeded to topple right out of his chair.
Passed out drunk, the halfling was in no way able to hear (and certainly in no way able to see) Maeve trundle out of the palace and into the morning light. She blinked like an owly fish caught in the overbright shallows. It had been some considerable time since she'd seen a morning; an early hour, anything before noon, was an exceptional moment. Nonetheless, she was determined to endure this grotesque hardship to realize her goal.
Thus determined, Maeve set out for the comfort of Ankhapur's grimy waterfront. It was the city's lowest of the low quarters, despised by the honest folk who nonetheless crept there every night to savor its taverns, flops, and festhalls. The waterfront stews were gray and small and pretended not to exist, letting their customers imagine they had privacy and discretion, though in truth little transpired that wasn't spread to someone's ears. The naive found themselves compromised, the gullible blackmailed, and it took a native, not just to Ankhapur but to the waterfront itself, to have any hope of keeping one's business to oneself. It was just the kind of place Maeve wanted, her true home.
Though she'd traveled here from far lands, she'd lived most her life in such surroundings. Every town that wanted to be of consequence had its version of the Ankha-purian waterfront. A town could never be a city without one, its character incomplete without this pocked and festering side of its urban body. More than any other monument, statue, palace, or memorial, such districts revealed the hidden souls of the city founders, the dark and secret selves of respected ancestors.
It was far better for her to work in such surroundings. The royal laboratories, territory hers by title, were too public for this work. Nothing she might try there would pass unnoticed, and with the real chance that she might get it wrong, the woman did not want to risk such open humiliation. This task was better done in some forgotten room, among her own kind, where she could do her work in peace. Among the stews, she might raise a few curious eyebrows, but folks there had the sense to give a wizard wide berth for fear they'd wind up as frogs or worse.
As for the stench, the thugs, the blackmailers and loose women, Maeve didn't mind. She was boozily confident she could slide back in, even though her street sense was somewhat out of practice after a year of palace life. Indeed, the doubt that she might not know Ankhapur's cheats and black ways as well as she could never entered her mind.
Clutching an ungainly bag of powders, devices, and bottles, she ignored the looks of the festhall girls going home in the dawn light, the hungry stares of hungover drunks as they staggered themselves out of the mud where they'd fallen, and the curious thronging of urchins who acted far more innocent than they ever had been. She wound her way through the alleys and lanes leading to a wineshop she knew, one where the owner, Corlis, would be discreet