His nerves didn’t stop jumping until he finally reached his goal: a plain storefront with a sign of a green leaf above the door. The place looked closed up for the night, but when he tapped in a prearranged signal, the door opened for him.
He slipped inside and his contact closed the door behind him, quickly, leaving him standing in the darkness, shivering. “Come into the dispensary,” came a low whisper. “I can strike a light there that won’t be seen from the street.”
He followed the sound of footsteps ahead of him, barking his shin on a bench and holding in a curse. A hand touched his arm, guiding him forward, and then he heard the sound of a second door closing.
A moment later, a lantern flared into life, revealing the man he had been asked to meet, as well as the contents of the room in which they found themselves.
His nose would have told him the contents of the room: herbs, more herbs than he could identify by odor, a mingled aroma of bitter and sweet, fragrant and pungent, and just plain odd. The room was lined with shelves covered with bottles, jars, and little boxes, carefully labeled. There was a waist-high table in the middle, covered with an immaculately white cloth.
His contact was a middle-aged man, balding, with a fringe of beard, and very fit-looking. What hair the man still had was curly and brown, like the beard. The only trouble was, he was fully human.
“I was told you have something,” the man said abruptly. “Something that—something that blocks elven magic.”
The back of Lorryn’s neck prickled afresh. “Who told you that?” he asked cautiously. “And—why are you asking?” He’d assumed his contact would be another minor elven lord—and this man’s thoughts, like those of many humans, were murky and chaotic with fear. Lorryn couldn’t precisely read what his intentions were through the emotions.
But the human surprised him again; taking a deep breath, and steadying his own nerves to the point that his thoughts came clear again. Lorryn almost choked; where had this man acquired that kind of discipline?
“I heard—from your good host,” the man replied carefully, and nothing in his mind contradicted that. “And as for why I want what you have—do you know what a ‘physiker’ is?”
Lorryn shook his head, dumbly.
“Elves don’t sicken, but humans do, and of course, our mighty masters couldn’t be bothered with tending, to a sick slave,” the man said bitterly. “Nor are they prepared to deal with the sick or the injured in their own dwellings. That is when they call for me—or more often, send the poor sufferer to me. Not that I can do much, but it’s better than nothing, and nothing is what they’d get without me. I take care of your host’s young ladies, when one of the young lords gets too careless with his toys.”
Lorryn winced at the tone of the man’s voice; the suppressed anger and hate alone spoke volumes—he knew, all in that moment, that this physiker had seen things that he simply did not want to know about. Hearing more tales of horror was not going to get his job done any faster—but he would end up with nightmares, and he couldn’t afford that right now.
“So—you want protection, because some of the lords—** he began.
The physiker interrupted him with a snarl. “Not only have they punished me because I couldn’t force someone to heal faster than nature would allow so they could get on with their amusements, they’ve tried to force me to do—things—” He choked, and Lorryn held up his hand in entreaty and resolutely shut his mind against the thoughts that beat against it
“Please,” he begged. “I’d rather not know; I can see that your need is genuine. Here—” He emptied out his pockets of every pouch he’d brought with him, a total of three. ‘Take these; you may know of others who could use them. If—”
He was about to say more, but was interrupted by someone pounding on the street door.
The physiker froze, and so did Lorryn. The pounding stopped, then began again.
“Bryce!” bellowed an angry voice. “Open up!”
The physiker leapt into action, and shoved at Lorryn, pushing him toward a waist-high basket with a few bloodstained towels in the bottom of it “Get in there!” he hissed, pulling the towels out and forcing Lorryn to crouch down below the level of the rim, with the three pouches dropped in after. “Don’t move if you value your life!”
He covered Lorryn with the towels, draped (so Lorryn hoped) to cover him completely, then hurried to answer the pounding.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” he shouted, as the light moved out of the room—Lorryn guessed that he was taking the lantern with him.
The door slammed against the wall as soon as Bryce opened it, and whoever it was stormed into the outer room. “Who’d you let in, just now?” the harsh voice demanded. “Somebody with a wound, maybe? Or something else he doesn’t want the Master to know about?” The man’s tone turned raspy and dangerous. “You remember what happened the last time you played that little game, Bryce. This time they might not let you keep that hand—”
“If you must know,” the physiker replied testily, “I wasn’t letting anyone in, I was letting—her—out. One of the wine-girls from the Silver Rose. She has—ah—a slight infection of a personal nature.” Lorryn had to admire the way the man coughed and flustered, as if he were embarrassed. “I was—ah—treating her—ah—as a favor, you might say.”
The other man remained silent for a moment, then broke into a gale of laughter. “She, huh? A personal problem? You sly old dog, I didn’t think you had it in you! Or have you got somethin’ in those leaves of yours to get it in you?”
Bryce coughed again, and the man laughed even harder. “Next time, you ask the Master before you go treating personal problems. Otherwise I just might bust in here before you’ve let her out so I can get some of mat fun for myself.”
The door slammed again, and the heavy boot-steps retreated.
The light returned, and Bryce pulled the towels off him. “You’ll have to go out the rooftop now,” the man said, his face white in the dim light of the lamp that trembled in his hand. “He’ll be watching the front. I hope you can climb—come, I’ll get you out and you’ll have to take care of yourself from there—”
He was babbling with fear, a fear that made him literally sick, and the images in his mind told Lorryn why he was so afraid. Lorryn swallowed his own nausea and kept his mouth shut.
He couldn’t get out of there quickly enough—even if it meant a harrowing climb across the roofs. Anything was better than being in the same room with a man with those memories in his mind…
Sheyrena dressed carefully in a purposefully soiled and torn gown, one she had prepared herself for this ruse. It had to look as if she had trekked across the wilderness in it. and not willingly, either. Instead of shoes, though, she wore a pair of worn-out old boots that could have belonged to Lorryn, with rags stuffed into the toes to make them fit. No shoes she owned would have survived the trip she was going to de scribe to Lord Tylar, and she would claim to have stolen the boots from Lorryn.
She and Mero had worked out every detail of her story, from the point where Lorryn talked her into coming for a morning walk with him to the point where she escaped from him, stealing his boots both to protect her own feet and prevent him from following her, and traveled alone, back along the route he had taken. Inside her gown, sewn into the body of her petticoat, she had two sets of the iron jewelry, one for herself, and one for her mother.
Myre would become, in this tale, Lorryn’s willing accomplice and his contact with the wizards. Why not? It would certainly account for her presence in the boat, for a third figure had surely been seen, and it would also account for her absence after she fell out of it. That would also be why Lorryn had not gone straight to the wizards, but had wandered around on his own—without her, he had no guide. Anything that anyone overheard in that brief period between the moment when the pursuers had sighted the boat and the moment when it flew out of sight that might indicate that Rena had been encouraging Lorryn could easily be attributed instead to Myre.
“Are you ready?” Lorryn asked. She nodded, unable to force herself to speak. Mero was lying down with his eyes closed; that was because Lorryn was going to take all of his magic power and most of his own to send her straight to the border of Lord Tylar’s land. The transportation spell, as modified by the wizards and taught to Mero, then taught by Mero to Lorryn, was not as “noisy” as the version Shana had used. The trick was that the person actually casting the spell had to remain behind, and the “noise” remained with him. In a big city such as this one, where there were hundreds, even thousands of spells being cast each day, another burst of magical “noise” would not be noticed.