Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [28]
Gray stones, worn and scuffed by years of use, seemed to welcome my boots. A mist-spray of water filmed over me, cutting through the burn of cook fires that tingled in my nostrils. Dogs yapped, circling widely around the sharp black beaks of the sabruns and the raw eyes of Kreeg, and Valyan, and Graye. The people fell silent and watched. There were hard beings among that crowd, beings with old scars and fresh bruises, beings with swords ready for callused hands. Even they watched.
“I am Ruenn Maclang of Nyshphal!” I shouted. “I seek my brother, Bryce. Or any that know of him. I will ask you all to send word.”
I glanced around. Directly across from me hung the thorn-wood sign of a tavern. I pointed to it.
“Tell Bryce Maclang!” I shouted again to the crowd. “Tell Bryce to meet his brother at the sign of The Rattling Saber. Tomorrow at the tenth dhaur.”
I stepped down from the fountain, strode back to the saddle birds. The four of us mounted. Broad wings spread and flattened against the air, and the sabruns took the sky with cries of “Haih Kerang” cracking across the square. A cart overturned in the buffeting wind, sending copper pots clattering like thunder in a gathering storm.
The sound seemed appropriate.
* * * * * * *
I gazed down upon the lights of Trazull. It was now near the twentieth dhaur, the Taleran midnight, and we were encamped upon the brush-dotted ridge that curves around the sprawl of the city from the southern shore to the northern shore of the Temeri Sea.
It is said that this ridge is not natural, that it was once a wall. I believe it, for in scrounging for firewood I had nearly fallen into a narrow, stone stairwell that descended into the ridge. Trazull is a very old city, built long years before and settled by men unlike the pirates and outlaws who inhabit it now.
Diken Graye coughed and I turned toward him. Kreeg and Valyan were asleep. It was my watch. Graye had not even tried to seek his blankets. He squatted, this man who had once been a Thorn Nomad, and stared into the fire as if he searched for solace there. I strode over to him, squatted across from him and poured myself a cup of fragrant verhlis tea. He glanced up.
“Why have you not fled?” I asked him. He was, after all, a prisoner of sorts. And yet there were no bonds holding him; he even carried weapons. A dozen times he could have escaped us aboard his sabrun. I wondered why he had not.
He shrugged in answer to my query, his black eyes finding and holding mine. Then he looked away.
While I sipped my tea, the mercenary glanced down the ridge toward Trazull. Even to this distance the occasional raucous shout carried. Trazull is not a city that goes early to bed.
“I once thought I belonged with such men as those,” Graye said abruptlly, jutting his chin toward Trazull’s harbor where pirate brigs rubbed wooden shoulders with sloops and caravels manned by outlaws.
I did not speak, letting him find his own way through his thoughts.
“I told myself that my home was a deck or a saddle,” he continued. He shook his head. “But it isn’t enough.”
His gaze met mine again. “Do you understand?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and I thought of Rannon and felt a pain that I was suddenly sure Diken Graye knew something about.
He sighed, and I changed the subject. But it was for my sake rather than his. “Did you ever,” I began, “hear of a man named Eric Ryall? Perhaps linked in some way with my brother?”
He frowned. “The name is not familiar. Why?”
I started to answer, but he clicked his teeth at me as it occurred to him. “The other member of your family!” he blurted. “He of whom you spoke before. Without naming him.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “He, too, is lost.”
“I do not know of him,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
We both remained silent for a bit. It had drizzled earlier, a barely chilled drizzle that meant the coming spring was almost upon us, and the damp wood crackled in the fire as we sat there. I pulled a blanket around my shoulders, for winter still owned this night at least.
“I apologize, also,” Graye added, “for my behavior