It would have been cruel to compare Norl to Zema in terms of awe-inspiring urban glories, but it did have its own source of beauty, the cobalt-blue waves that stretched out for miles from the land's edge. Compared to the dry and dusty ground they'd crossed on the way there, the sea looked beautiful and pure.
"I wish..." Galf murmured softly, looking out across the water.
"What?"
He shook his head. "Never mind. A foolish dream, that's all." He started down the gentle slope leading towards the village before Alys had the chance to ask more questions. She was a little hurt by that, not that he didn't want to share his thoughts but that he didn't trust her not to pry. Unless something had specific relevance to her job, other people's private lives weren't her concern. Galf, she thought, ought to know that.
But then again, she thought as she followed along, she wasn't exactly polite and unfailingly rational about her private problems, either.
The truth of Galf's assumption about strangers sticking out in Norl was made plain as they stepped onto the dusty track that served as the village's main--and only--street, their passage followed by curious eyes from several windows. Of the twenty buildings or so, only two appeared to be shops: a general store that like those in most small towns no doubt sold everything from tools to clothing to dry goods, and a saloon. Farther down, they could see a small forest of masts outlined against the darkening sky. Apparently, the fishing fleet was in port.
"Waterfront or bar?" Alys asked.
Galf drummed his fingers against his belt.
"Why not both? I'll take the boats; you can see what they know at the bar."
"What, you'd sent your female apprentice into a saloon full of fishermen who haven't seen a girl in a week?" she said, only half in jest.
"I have faith you won't kill anyone that didn't really deserve it, Alys."
"Gee, thanks a lot."
"Besides, you're underage. You can back out of any drinking contests without looking like a wuss. Not much point in finding our guy if I have to drink myself senseless in order to do it, especially since you don't know Anti to sober me up."
She grinned at him.
"Somewhere in there was something that sounded like a good point, old man. Keep your eyes open."
"You too. If you need me, just yell. Not much chance of missing the sound of a fight around here."
"That's the second time you've anticipated a bar brawl, Galf. What, don't you think I can ask around about some stranger without starting trouble?"
He smiled broadly at her.
"Let's just say I remember Mile."
"At least I have the Thunder Sword to come bail me out."
Galf winced.
"You fight dirty, girl."
"I had a good teacher," she tossed back with a wink, and headed towards the bar.
The tavern didn't have a proper door, only an open archway, not all that uncommon for a back-country Motavian saloon. The building was jammed by over thirty men who packed the bar and tables, sitting, drinking, gambling, laughing, or cursing. Alys's eyes swept the room, seeing plain clothes, work-roughened hands, and bearded faces, many beneath knit caps. None looked like he might be anything other than a fisherman, with the only exceptions being a dapper gent with an apron and needle-thin moustache tending bar, and the waitress in her low-cut blouse who sashayed amongst the crowd, laughing and joking with her patrons. More than one man looked up as Alys crossed the room; appreciative stares and broad grins were the rule.
"Hey, gorgeous, new in town?" one man called, then guffawed at his attempt at a joke. The barmaid cuffed him on the side of the head.
"Ah, leave the girl alone, Vint. Can't ye see she's just a kid?"
An open question, in fact, reflected Alys. In some of the rural villages of Motavia, she'd likely have been married, maybe even a mother by her current age. On the other hand, among the thriving middle class of urban centers like Aiedo or Piata, there was time for adolescence, years of maturing between schoolchild and adult. As an apprentice, the latter category fit her more than the former, so she figured the barmaid was more right than not. In a year or so, though, she'd be a full-fledged hunter.
She wondered if it would make a difference in her relationship with Galf, being a partner rather than a trainee.
Enough daydreaming, Brangwin. You've got a job to do.
She squeezed into an open space at the bar; there were no stools, allowing for greater capacity, not to mention an easy way to tell when someone had had enough. The bartender came over.
"Evening," she said.
"Good evenin'," the man murmured, his eyes curious and a little wary. "Don't get a lot of strangers around here. What'll it be?"
Alys tossed a twenty-meseta piece on the bar.
"Mila."
The bartender took the money, his eyebrows raising slightly, then turned to fill a cup from a steaming kettle and stirred in spices. The juice of the thorn palm, served hot, was a common drink, but in a tavern it was more often seen in its fermented form, neimila. That could put large people with strong constitutions under the table.
"You want something else with that?" the bartender asked. She'd paid about four times the drink's price, after all.
"I'm looking for another stranger, someone who's come to town in the last couple of days."
"Seems to me, passing on gossip to strangers ain't on the menu," the bartender said, and set Alys's change on the counter.
Cute, she thought sarcastically, very cute. It was time for a different approach.
"Hey, boys!" she called out, her voice easily cutting through the steady murmur of lower-pitched male speech. The resulting hush was impressive, the only sounds a dart thunking into the wall off-target and several pairs of dice rattling to a stop. "I'm looking for a stranger, somebody who came to town in the last couple of days and wanted a boat ride with no questions asked. Could any of you help me out?"
"I could," announced a scar-faced man with black hair, "if you give me a reason to." He looked her over assessingly from head to foot, but there was a glint of humor in his gaze, she thought, that made Alys decide to play along instead of introducing his face to a nearby solid object.
"So what can I do to make you more...willing?" she tossed back.
The scar-faced fisherman chuckled.
"How 'bout a little wager, then. I always like to test my luck off the water, so Fortune figures I don't need to on it. You beat me, and I tell you everything I know. You don't, and you get to buy a round for the house--unless you'd rather give me a kiss." He wiggled his eyebrows in mock invitation.
"Deal. That's presuming, though, that 'everything you know' doesn't amount to 'Sorry, haven't seen him.' In that case, you get to pay for the damage from the fight. So what's your game?"
"Darts." He pointed at the battered board hanging on the wall.
"Oh, yes, the traditional game where drunk people throw sharp objects across the room. You're on."
The fisherman plucked two of the small, flat throwing knives out of the board and retrieved the third from the wall, hooking his fingers through the steel rings on their base. Alys's mother, who'd collected tales of that sort, had once told her that the game had evolved from assassin's weapons.
You do not need to be thinking about her right now!
"You want to go first?" her opponent offered.
"No thanks. Why don't you go on and show me what I'm up against?"
"If that's how you like it."
He strolled jauntily over to the mark on the floor where they'd presumably throw from. All eyes in the place were on them, enjoying the free show. Side bets were offered with murmured whispers.
"All right, lassie, here we go," the scarred man announced, and then with a smooth overhand motion tossed three bullseyes.
"Not bad," Alys admitted, fetching the darts.
"Might be a little tough to beat that, wouldn't you say? And if you might recall the terms of our wager, if you don't beat me, I win."
She had agreed to that, hadn't she?
Damn.
Alys walked to the mark, weighing the blades in her hand, gauging the shot. Then she whipped her arm out in a backhand arc like she used for throwing her slashers. Her darts, too, thunked into the center spot of the target.
On one throw.
The room instantly fell so silent that one could hear a jaw drop. Or in this case, about a dozen jaws or so as the locals watched disbelievingly, but the scar-faced man only grinned while shaking his head.
"Dern, suckered again. Okay, girl, your boy showed up in town yesterday, from what they tell me. We got the boats in today, so he tried to buy passage over to Valhalla. Can't tell you why 'cause I didn't ask. For a thousand meseta you tend not to be too fast with the questions. I said we'd take him out tomorrow."
"Do you know where he'd be now?"
"Sal's, I'm assuming, since he's not in here drinking. She's got a spare room she rents out to folks passing through or those of us who get our wives a little more torched off at us then usual. It's three houses down from here."
"Thanks. Out of curiosity, what does he look like?"
"You're looking for him, aren't you? Seems to me as you'd ought to know."
"Ought to, but don't. Thieves try to avoid letting people find out that kind of thing, as a rule."
The scar-faced man laughed heartily.
"Sassy wench, aren't you? Anyhow, your boy's about your height, has black hair, and one of those faces you forget two seconds after seeing it. He's a shade on the skinny side, but wiry, you know, so you get the idea he's not so much of a wuss as he seems at first glance."
In other words, an almost generic example of the thief/spy/assassin subtype. Galf would know if most of that sort actually looked so typical. He definitely wasn't the one who had sold the case of daggers to Argus, and yet he was heading for Valhalla, which opened up more scenario combinations than Alys cared to think about.
"Thanks." She turned to go, then stopped and looked back. "Hey, if he paid you a thousand meseta, why are you helping me at all?"
"Girl, you reek of hunter. That makes my passenger a crook. Seems to me that I've got no obligation to repay a thief money he paid me to help escape the law, right? You drag him off to jail, I'm a thousand meseta richer without having to leave port. I like those kind of jobs." He grinned widely and added, "Besides, you're one heck of a lot prettier than that guy is."
Alys chuckled, then tossed five meseta to the bartender.
"Thanks, and have a round on me. I like a guy who doesn't lose like a man."
Galf was coming up the street as his apprentice left the saloon.
"Any luck?" Alys asked.
"Nope. Only guys still hanging around the waterfront were offloading their catch and hadn't even gotten back to the village. The boats had just come in today. How'd it go with the natives lucky enough to get to the ale?"
"Pretty well. I've got a description and know the place where he's supposed to be staying, all for ten meseta." She couldn't help but let a trace of pride into her voice.
"Pleased with yourself, aren't you?"
"Yeah," Alys said, a bit warily, but instead of a lesson on pride she got a smile.
"Well, you should be. Let's go keep up your winning streak, so fill me in."
She told him about Sal's and gave him the stranger's description--or, more accurately, the lack thereof.
"Do we try the same plan as last time?"
"It worked on Argus. This time, though, you take the back side, in case he tries to make a break for it, too, when I come busting in his door. These old legs aren't too fond of chasing down youngsters who don't want to be caught."
Alys nodded, marveling as she did at Galf's apparent lack of worry. This was the first time that they'd gotten close to the thief, the first real breakthrough in the job. Before, they'd only gathered information, but now they were going to confront a human opponent for the first time in Alys's career as a hunter. Her stomach was a knot, her mind whirling with the dozens of possible actions the thief could take and how she was supposed to combat them. She envied Galf the ease that allowed him to joke about the process and hoped that with experience she'd develop something of the same confidence.
They split up, and Alys went down the little alley between Sal's house and the next one in the row. Fortunately, the back windows--it had to be the back, Galf had said; he'd never seen a boardinghouse yet that rented out a front room--were shuttered, the stranger choosing privacy over visibility. That was all to the good; people with guilty secrets tended to react badly to the sight of others sneaking around whether or not there was any real threat, and an armed hunter definitely looked threatening even to the innocent.
She didn't have long to wait. Angry shouts and the crash of overturned furniture heralded the shutters being thrown open. The man who appeared, clambering through with a knife in hand definitely matched the stranger's description. She'd half-expected the knife; it was an ideal weapon in the kind of close-quarters fight Alys associated with sneak thieves. Still, using it while climbing through a window was another thing altogether, so she made her move quickly.
Even as Alys moved, the stranger caught sight of her and pulled himself the rest of the way through the window with a quick jerk of his body, fell to the dusty ground, and tried to roll to a defensible position all at once. Eschewing finesse, Alys lashed out and slammed her boot into the escapee's midsection before he had time to protect himself. He flopped over onto his back and, more importantly, dropped the knife.
"There's a man in Zema who'd like a few words with you," she said, hauling the man to his feet by his shirt front. She'd overestimated the situation, though, for as he was pulled off the ground he grabbed a boot knife and cut up at her abdomen. Alys barely caught a glimpse of the move at the edge of her vision and did the only thing she could, shoving the stranger away from her while falling back herself. The sharp point swept by, missing her vulnerable belly, and both combatants fell. As they hit the ground, they had already gone into controlled falls, absorbing the impact and getting to their feet as quickly as they could.
Alys's hand dropped to a slasher--folded, the blades made a utilitarian if slightly off-balance dagger--but did not draw it. They needed to take this man alive, so he could answer questions. There was another reason, though, that she hesitated to draw: although she'd killed monsters before, she had never taken a person's life, and without even realizing it consciously she flinched away from the possibility.
Her opponent had no such scruples, though. With a quick move of his free hand he produced a second blade, this one a short, slim dagger with no quillions. Wrist sheath, Alys guessed. Then the man came at her.
Galf had warned her during her training against taking on a knife fighter unarmed, and Alys quickly learned the truth of his words, sustaining a shallow cut across her right forearm and another on the back of her hand while she worked to evade or block the stranger's attacks. Her plan, such as it had been, was to counterstrike with a disarming hold or throw, but he simply wasn't giving her any chance; the thief was too skilled to fall for that kind of trick.
Thankfully, Alys had bought enough time for Galf to get out of the house and run around back. The stranger heard the big hunter's footsteps and turned, then disengaged from Alys to try and get away, but Galf pressed the attack before the thief could get clear and run off.
The popular idea of a sword was not unlike an axe, a heavy, slow, powerful weapon that owed its effectiveness to weight and the wielder's strength--a view especially common among knife-fighters and those who favored similar "speed" weapons. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as Galf demonstrated most effectively for about forty-seven seconds. His two-handed grip afforded exceptional control over the razor-edged ceramic blade, allowing him to strike quickly while not overextending himself to give up his guard position. Two weapons became one and then zero as the Thunder Sword systematically disarmed the stranger and delivered a crushing blow with the flat of the blade that left the thief twitching in the dust, all without ever giving up the advantage in reach his weapon's length provided.
Alys had only seen Galf in real combat against another person once before, when he had saved her from the highwaymen that had killed her parents. Now that she had a much better idea of the subtleties involved in combat, she found the experience of seeing him at work even more impressive, since she could appreciate not merely the victory but the steps that led up to it.
Apparently, the stranger was equally impressed. He looked up at the blade at his throat, then over at Alys (who had finally gotten her slashers drawn) and decided that surrender was his safest course of action.