Steelhands - Jaida Jones [39]
“Is there something going around?” Toverre asked, face suddenly even whiter than before.
“It’s a precaution,” I told him. Honestly, did he not know how to listen? “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”
“You’ll be called in soon, like as not,” Gaeth said. “Just a simple blood testing, and nothing else too awful, I’d suspect.”
“Oh, needles,” Toverre murmured.
“Barely felt it,” Gaeth said.
“Some of us have very small veins,” Toverre shot back.
In an attempt to make sure nothing too awkward happened between them—Gaeth was easygoing enough, but Toverre had a way of provoking even the gentlest of folk—I decided to step in, and in my brand-new boots, no less. “We were just going to get something to eat,” I said, having decided that once my stomach’d started growling only a few moments ago. “You hungry, Gaeth?”
“She means to ask if you would like to join us,” Toverre corrected. At least he was picking at me now, but I was used to it. I could take it.
“Maybe another time, hey?” Gaeth suggested. “They said I should head straight back to my rooms after the visit. And I don’t want to argue with those in charge, at least not right away.”
“Who said?” I asked, but Gaeth had already turned and started off down the road, and not in the direction of the ’Versity Stretch, either. “Weird,” I said, turning to Toverre.
“Not very,” Toverre replied. “Because you would expect someone like that to have a coat that smells of horses.”
ADAMO
I arrived at Roy’s place in the Crescents about ten minutes too early. Leave it to a man of war to be early to meetings—never early on the battlefield, though, where being early was just as bad as being late. This tendency of mine was especially bad with Roy, who always liked to be fashionably late. And the last thing I wanted was to have the door answered with a scuffle of noise and laughter after the long pause it took when the people you were calling on were trying to get dressed and make it look like they hadn’t just been going at it like rabbits. No one ever did a good enough job of tucking in their shirts or combing out their hair to put one past me.
No, I’d already had my life’s share of catching Roy in flagrante, and I wasn’t going to tempt fate any more than I already was, just by paying a social visit.
So there I stood, down on the street in the Crescents, ignored for the most part by anyone who did pass by, waiting for the city bells to ring out the hour. I was damn near certain that Roy—or his boy, if he even cared halfway what happened over the top edge of his current roman—knew I was already out there. I could assume I was being made fun of upstairs, in the top room of Roy’s Crescent tower. But I’d weathered worse insults than those. Dealt out worse ones, too. They’d roll off me.
At least the building wasn’t one of the crazier structures I always passed walking from my new place in the middle of Charlotte up to the Crescents, seeing for myself easy enough why th’Esar had trouble with magicians. They fancied form over function now and then—though I didn’t think they were so stupid as to live in buildings that would actually screw them over, or whatever they were working on. No, it was more a display of what they could do—how they could defy nature and still come out on top—that must’ve made the fire in th’Esar’s mustache stand out a little more against the gray, whenever he caught sight of it. It was a bit of a nose-tweak, if you asked me, and the kind of thing people with Roy’s disposition for tweaking noses really went in for.
It was a sight different from the simple buildings in Miranda, where all th’Esar’s people lived. There, the houses and the offices were just straight up and down, made of solid brick or white stone or marble, no rooms on stilts or hanging towers.
I didn’t prefer either since, by my taste, both were too fancy.
The first bell of the hour was struck up