The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [49]
“Now, now, I doubt it’ll come to that. Alaena’s so rich that no one’s going to interfere, not even that brother-in-law of hers. Without the commission she pays him he wouldn’t live very comfortably. But there’s going to be nasty talk if this gets spread around, and somehow or other, things always do get out, don’t they? No matter how careful we all try to be.” He sighed, shaking his head. “You’d best pray to all the Holy Stars that Pommaeo never hears of this. A clever man, of course, can help the goddesses answer his prayers.”
“By keeping his mouth shut and watching every step he makes?”
“Just that. And by making himself well-liked. If any of the mistress’s friends tip you, you might consider spending part of it on Vinsima.”
“Very well. And Disna’s never going to carry a heavy load upstairs again, not while I’m within reach of it.”
On a day sticky with a cool drizzle Jill and Salamander arrived at the harbor town of Daradion. Since it was too late in the day to question the harbormaster about the Gray Kestrel, they found a room in an inn, then went down to the evening market as soon as the rain stopped. Jill found the wet weather such a pleasant change that she was shocked to hear the citizens complaining bitterly about the cold and damp. The market was nearly deserted, with over half the stalls empty and only a handful of customers hurrying along on brisk business.
“Well, there won’t be much use in putting on a show tonight, will there?” Salamander remarked with a certain gloom. “I’d forgotten how the Bardek folk carry on about the weather.”
“You’d think we were in for howling snows, truly.” She paused to grab her gnome, who was splashing through a filthy gutter puddle. “How are we doing for coin?”
“We’ve got enough to pay our passage over to Surtinna, but we can’t go first class.”
“That hardly matters.”
“It does. Cursed if I’ll spend days and days crammed into the common hold with merchants and other riffraff.”
“Then you’d best think up a show you can do in daylight, hadn’t you?”
“Now that, oh beauteous handmaiden, is an excellent idea. Hum. Colored smokes might work. And I could have some sylphs carry a scarf through the air—it’d look like it was flying of its own accord. People would think I was doing that with black wires, no doubt. And how about mysterious music from unseen sources? Possibilities—truly, I see possibilities.”
For the rest of that evening, Salamander brooded over his new show. Every now and then he would make some alarming noise, or fill their inn chamber with vast illusions of red and green smoke, but mostly he left Jill to her work. By then, she was gaining a remarkable degree of control over images, enough so that she was forced to admit her natural aptitude for the craft. Once she snapped a remembered object into her mind, she could turn the image this way and that, looking at it from all sides and moving it so that it seemed she was seeing it first from above, then below. That night she stumbled across a particularly interesting trick. She was visualizing the small leather sack in which Salamander carried their coin, and in her mind she laid the open sack on a table so that she could peer inside it. All at once she felt that she was only a few inches tall, standing on the table and looking into the yawning mouth like a cave. Startled, she lost the image immediately, but it seemed important enough for her to disturb Salamander, who was producing an effect of sunset clouds on the ceiling. He let the illusion dissipate and listened carefully.
“This is real progress indeed, turtledove. You’re beginning to get to the important part of the work, so don’t lose heart now.”
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself about that. This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
He let his jaw drop in honest surprise.
“You think it’s interesting? Ye gods, you are marked for the dweomer sure enough!”
“Well, not the exercises themselves. I can see how they must have driven you absolutely mad with boredom. It’s the whole thing, truly,