So I went over and waited, collecting glances, until a heavy-set man with gray and amazingly shaggy brows came over and asked what I wanted. I told him the blue sea scut and pointed at an empty table to the rear. He nodded and shouted my order back through a hole in the wall, then asked me whether I wanted a bottle of Bayle’s Piss to go with it. I did, he got it for me, and a glass, uncorked it and passed it over. I paid up there, headed back to the table I had chosen and seated myself with my back to the wall.
Oil flames flickered through dirty chimneys in brackets all about the place. Three men-two young, one middle-aged-played cards at the corner table in the front and passed a bottle. An older man sat alone at the table to my left, eating. He had a nasty-looking scar running both above and below his left eye, and there was a long wicked blade about six inches out of its scabbard resting on the chair to his right. He, too, had his back to the wall. Men with musical instruments rested at another table: between numbers, I guessed. I poured some of the yellow wine into my glass and took a sip: a distinctive taste I remembered from across the years. It was okay for quaffing. Baron Bayle owned a number of vineyards about thirty miles to the east. He was the official vintner to the Court, and his red wines were generally excellent. He was less successful with the whites, though, and often wound up dumping a lot of second-rate stuff onto the local market. It bore his emblem and a picture of a dog-he liked dogsso it was sometimes called Dog Piss and sometimes Bayle’s Piss, depending on who you talked to. Dog lovers sometimes take offense at the former appellation.
About the time my food arrived I noticed that two young men near the front of the bar were glancing in my direction more than occasionally, exchanging a few indistinguishable words and laughing and smiling a lot. I ignored them and fumed my attention to my meal. A little later the scarred man at the next table said softly, without leaning or looking toward me, his lips barely moving, “Free advice. I think those two guys at the bar noticed you’re not wearing a blade, and they’ve marked you for trouble.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Well. . . . I was not overly concerned about my ability to deal with them, but given a choice I’d rather avoid the occasion entirely. If all that it required was a visible blade, that was easily remedied.
A moment’s meditation and the Logrus danced before me. Shortly thereafter, I was reaching through it in search of the proper weapon-neither too long nor too heavy, properly balanced, with a comfortable grip -with a wide dark belt and scabbard. It took me close to three minutes, partly because I was so fussy about it, I suppose-but hell, if prudence required one, I wanted comfort-and partly because it is harder reaching through Shadow in the vicinity of Amber than it is almost anywhere else.
When it came into my hands I sighed and mopped my brow. Then I brought it up slowly from beneath the table, belt and all, drew it about half a foot from its scabbard, to follow a good example, and placed it on the seat to my right. The two guys at the bar caught the performance and I grinned back at them. They had a quick consultation, and this time they weren’t laughing. I poured myself a fresh glass of wins and drank it off at a single draught. Then I returned to my fish, about which Jordy had been right. The food here was very good.
“Neat trick, that,” the man at the next table said. “I don’t suppose it’s an easy one to learn?”
“Nope.”
“It figures. Most good things aren’t, or everybody’d do ‘em. They may still go after you, though, seeing as you’re alone. Depends on how much they drink and how reckless they get. You worried?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so. But they’ll hit someone tonight.”