Certain hard facts were unfortunately inescapable. He was going to be home in a few too-short days. There had been an intimation from some parties that if he wished to continue enjoying the use and comfort of his lees he had best be prepared to make a significant payment towards eliminating his dicing debt. Thelon’s uncle, as mulishly stupid about a little gambling as he was about girls, was not about to advance him any sums. That much had become obvious, despite Uncle Erytus’s almost reluctant good humour after his successful transactions in boots and cloaks and whatever for the soldiers, and the purchase of crudely carved religious artifacts in a town east of the army camp. Trakesian wooden sun disks, he’d informed Thelon, were much in demand in Megarium, and even more so across the bay in Batiara. There was a good profit to be made, as much as fifteen per cent, after all expenses. Thelon had heroically refrained from yawning.
He had also decided, long before this, not to point out that his uncle’s piety and scruples appeared not to make him averse to bribing innkeepers-all of whom appeared to know Erytus well-to allow them to stay illicitly at a sequence of Imperial Inns along the road. Not that he was complaining, mind you, but there was a principle here, somewhere.
‘Would it be a very great presumption,’ Uncle Erytus was now saying, leaning towards the red-bearded man, ‘to ask to be honoured with a glimpse of the illustrious Permit you are honoured with?’ Thelon cringed at the fawning, unctuous language. His uncle, licking someone’s boots, was an ugly sight.
The artisan’s face darkened. ‘You don’t think I have it?’ he growled, affronted.
Thelon lifted a hand quickly, to hide another smirk. His uncle, drinking a polite cup of the other man’s Candarian, flushed red as the wine. ‘No, not at all! I am sure you … of course you … it is just that I’ve never actually seen the Seal or the signature of the august Chancellor Gesius. So celebrated a man. Three Emperors served! You would be honouring me, good sir! A glimpse… the handwriting of so glorious a figure… an example for my sons.’
His uncle, Thelon reflected sourly, had all the social-climbing traits one might expect in a modestly successful provincial merchant. He would endlessly regale his family with the unspeakably trivial story of this Permit if he saw it, and would probably find a religious moral to impose upon them, too. Virtue, the rewards thereof. Thelon diverted himself by imagining just what sort of example a eunuch was for his cousins.
‘S’all right,’ the Batiaran artisan was saying with a lordly gesture that nearly toppled his latest flask of wine. ‘Show you tomorrow. Permit’s up’n the room. The best room. Over the kitchen. Thash mush too far away t’night!’ He laughed, finding himself extremely amusing, it seemed. Uncle Erytus, visibly relieved, also laughed loudly. He had a terrible, unconvincing laugh, Thelon decided. The red-bearded man stood up, swayed towards their table, poured again for Erytus. He lifted the flask in unsteady inquiry; Thelon’s cousins hastily covered their glasses and so he, of necessity, had to do the same.
It was, quite abruptly, too much to endure. Candarian on offer and he was forced to decline? And here he was, in the midst of some utterly unholy nowhere, without any funds at all and only a few days from an encounter that placed his legs-and Jad knew what else-at more than some risk. Thelon made his decision. He’d just had a confirmation of his earlier guess in any case. The man was such a fool.
‘My excuses, Uncle,’ Thelon said, standing, a hand at his belly. Too much of the sausage. Must purge myself, I fear.’
‘Moderation,’ said his uncle predictably, a finger lifted in admonition, ‘is a virtue at table, as elsewhere.’
‘I agree’ said the fatuous artisan, sloshing his wine.
This, Thelon decided, heading towards the archway to the shadowed front room, was actually going to be a pleasure. He didn’t go to the latrine across the hall. He went up the stairway, quietly. He was quite good with locks, as it happened.