“Tradition? Or because the captain wants to decide when he’s worked off his contract?” Thinal shrugged, and for a moment seemed to revert more to his old friendliness. “I guess there’s no such thing as a free sailor, Rap. Not around here. You might shake hands on a promise that you’d be released when you reached the mainland, but you’d still be just trusting the captain.” The oily smile crept back. “Of course a servant of the famous Doctor Sagorn would be quite safe. He has friends in high places, so he’d be a good patron! You’d best be patient, Rap.”
They had reached civilization. The thief was the expert now.
Sugarcane had given way to open fields, then those became muddy paddies and finally smallholdings of shacks and vegetable patches. At last the travelers topped a slight ridge, and Milfor ran down to the sea before them. Its renowned occult defenses, supposedly proof against monsters and headhunters, were revealed as no more than a decrepit stockade, half buried in weeds. Its gates hung awry on rusted hinges. The tumbledown gatehouse looked as if it were used only by vagrants; nor could Rap’s farsight find any trace of magic shielding like the barrier around the castle at Krasnegar. He concluded that the magic defense was as fictitious as the dangers it was alleged to keep out, just one more puzzle in the overall mystery of Faerie, the mystery that so intrigued Thinal.
Inside the palisade, he saw trees and more trees, small buildings, shrubbery-and people. He caught one glimpse of distant blue water and ships sheltered by the high headland beyond. The cape was rocky in patches, but also bright with grass and flowers and trees, and the scattered buildings there seemed larger and more substantial than anything his vision or farsight detected on the mainland. But soon he found himself down among the streets of the town and was lost among the people.
Long ago Andor had tried to describe Milflor to him, while they sat in a dismal attic in subarctic Krasnegar. “Shabby as a miser’s nightgown,” he had called it. In the past few weeks Thinal had tried, also, interpreting the same set of memories in his own snide fashion. “A woodlot with dog kennels.” But neither of them had prepared Rap for the reality. He had never seen a city, and his efforts to imagine Krasnegar grown large and lush had done him no good at all.
Milflor was certainly lush. There had been rain that morning; vibrant tropical greenery dripped and glistened everywhere, loading the air with heavy odors of blossoms and decay. Narrow streets, unpaved, unfenced, went weaving through the woods like animal tracks, and yet their mud steamed in hot sunlight, for these trees were like no trees Rap had ever imagined. They were not the solid, saturnine spruce of the taiga, nor yet the dense tangle of the jungle he had so recently left. Their canopies floated high overhead, transparent as lace, more like clouds of dust than foliage, letting sunlight fall through unhindered. Wind stirred and dancing like gnats, their branches hardly darkened the sky. Palms Rap knew now, but Thinal babbled airily about acacias and eucalyptus and other strange names, although he was obviously unsure which was which.
The undergrowth, though, was a dark soup of shrubs and vines and flowers, half drowning the buildings. The houses were mostly small and no more substantial than the huts of the fairy village—timber and wicker and shingles. Rap saw crumbled ruins rotting away right next to new construction. If Milflor was old, it was also eternally being made new. And he felt as if some trick of the light, or a sweetness in the air, had bathed it all in pure and potent magic.
He had forgotten what crowds were. He had never been in a crowd of total strangers, of unfamiliar people thronging by in unfamiliar dress. They were imps, mostly, but draped in gowns or wraps of a brilliance that rivaled even the ever-present flowers. They jostled and jabbered all around him in unfamiliar accents, wielding mysterious burdens, driving donkey wagons or pulling carts, surrounded by laughing children, splattering mud.
Very likely he would have been overwhelmed by it all anyway, even had he not had farsight. Farsight in a crowd, in a strange town, was an overwhelming experience; it smothered him. He forgot to keep his head down to hide his tattoos; he forgot to care that the goblin might be noticed as alien. He was vaguely aware that there was something wrong—that his inner self was shouting warnings of something he should have noticed and been worrying about—but sheer overload mulched his mind. He saw the insides of the houses as well as the outsides; he saw people in the distance as clearly as he saw those close by; and he comprehended nothing.
He knew that Little Chicken was holding his arm and steering him through the milling hordes of people—thousands of them, it seemed, hurrying everywhere, in reds and blues and yellows, all gabbling busily. He was only vaguely aware that he and his companions had reached a marketplace: a muddy clearing cluttered with stalls and tables of wares, with people-lots of people.
Imps, and a scattering of others: dwarves and gnomes and a golden-skinned youth he guessed must be an elf, and a couple of barley-haired, blue-eyed jotnar-sailors, of course. And far away, on a street farther up the gentle hillside, two women stood deep in talk, holding babies on their hips, and they were fauns.
Like his mother. Like him. Here, for the first time in his life, he would not be a freak.
And the stalls held cloth and vegetables and shiny pots and painted pottery and straw sandals and even books and . . . Farsight: people and sounds and colors and people and motion . . .
Then Little Chicken lifted Rap by the shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled.
“What—”
They were out of the crowd now, some way along a weedy path that wound through thick shrubbery, down toward the seafront. Rap’s attention had still been on the people. He had not been aware of leaving the marketplace.
“You all right?” Thinal demanded.
Rap picked up his wits from somewhere. “Yes . . . Huh?” He rubbed his neck and pouted at the goblin. “Did you have to do that?”
Little Chicken scowled back at him. “You were asleep. You wouldn’t answer.”
Rap said, “Oh!” and grabbed his mind before it went slithering right back into the bustle at the top of the slope. He must have been entranced for a long time, walking unawares right into the middle of town, for the market lay on a saddle where the hilly cape joined the mainland, at the nub of the wishboneshaped harbor.
“Hold this!” Thinal tossed Rap a small leather bag that clinked. Its drawstring had been cut. “And this.” He added a bundle of fabric.
“Wait!” Memory came flooding back, memory of inner warnings ignored, warnings of something badly wrong. Thinal hauled his shirt over his head. “What?”
“Danger!” Frantically Rap scanned. What was it he had noticed and pushed away, out of mind? The little wooded slope was deserted. At the top of the hill was the crowd-and he hastily withdrew his farsight in case he mesmerized himself again. The muddy trail he stood on was a shortcut from the market down to the harborfront, emerging at the back of a row of scruffy, ugly buildings set on a wide and busy road. The far side of the road was the seafront, with small craft loading or unloading at little jetties. To his left lay the mainland, its shore a vista of silver beach and great mansions stretching out of sight. Off to the right lay the harbor proper, with real ships and the hilly cape topped by the—
“God of Fools!”
Thinal had dropped his pants and was holding out a hand for the garment he had given to Rap. “What?” he repeated, with little more interest.
“Magic!” Rap said. “Oh, Gods, why didn’t I think? We’ve been landed, gutted, and cooked!” He waved a hand at the high parkland of the proconsul’s palace grounds. “What’s that up there? At the top?”
“The Gazebo. Local landmark. You can see it from all over.”
“And it can see us! It’s a sorcerer’s tower!”
That was what had been scratching at his mind, wanting to be let in—the turrety little building on the highest crest of the headland. It was only two stories tall, likely no more than a single room on each level, ringed by a balcony and capped by a spiky roof. But he had been able to see it from everywhere in the town, and probably it would be visible for leagues in all directions. What really mattered was that he couldn’t see the rest of the hill, not with farsight. Long practice had increased his range greatly, and he must have sensed the problem subconsciously as soon as he entered the town. Now that he was closer it was glaringly obvious. Much of the headland was a blank to his occult vision—missing, wiped, not there. Only the upper half of that little wooden watchtower was clear to him; it floated above the fog just as Inisso’s chamber of puissance floated above Krasnegar.