Well Met in Molos Read online

  "Of course I did," Kalle says, still speaking cheerfully. "I was enraptured by your beauty the first time I saw you, so I had to know more."

  Tiglis feels cynicism at his flattery, but reveals nothing.

  Kalle shrugs carelessly at this lack of reaction. "That is the truth, I swear it on my honour," he says. "I have no other designs upon you for robbery, death, assault, or anything else. I am purely pursuing my own interests."

  "Spoken like a man used to selling his honour to the highest bidder," Tiglis says, matching Kalle's light tone.

  Kalle draws himself up, his face at last showing hurt. "I sell my services, but never my honour. Nobody has bought, stolen, or taken that, and those who have tried have often been sorry indeed for doing so."

  Tiglis marks a flash of cold hardness about his eyes that is in far contrast to the bantering cheer he has displayed up to now. It lasts for just a heartbeat, then is gone as his grin reasserts itself upon his lips. But it was definitely there.

  "Should I scream for help?" she asks.

  "Then I would make myself invisible and not bother you again, though I would grieve that we had not found common understanding for conversation. Have I misjudged you?"

  Tiglis lets him see her stare judge him, but although he unsettles her and she would sooner knife a stranger in the back than let them talk her into time spent in their company, she has little choice where this particular stranger is concerned. Even so, she is still unsure whether she can trust him or his eyes. He followed her when she was not aware of his presence, passed comment on her appearance, but did not appear to realise her secret. And now he had spoken with Orianna and with Tiglis both, and heard nothing surprising in their voices—nor, apparently, made any connection. Now is the time for confidence, not self-doubt.

  Tiglis stiffens her spine as she dips her head in acknowledgement of his promise, and pulls her mantle open to reveal her own face entirely. "Very well, I will accept your honour. And in Molos, that is a serious judgement."

  Kalle steps back to give himself room for a bow that puts his head significantly below Tiglis's without at any moment losing sight of her eyes.

  This, also, Tiglis marks.

  "I thank you, fair lady," Kalle says. "May I, then, have your name from your own lips?"

  Those lips quirk into a tolerant smile such as a woman might direct at a cockily importunate little boy. She bows—women of the desert do not curtsey—and although her eyes lower, she never once loses sight of Kalle's face from the periphery of her vision. "My name is Tiglis. Tell me, Kalle, do you spend many evenings finding pretty young women to hunt?"

  "Alas, the pleasure is rare and often fleeting," Kalle replies with a small but expressive wave of one hand.

  The other, Tiglis notices, remains resting on the hilt of his long knife.

  "Few indeed are those who possess beauty such as yours, and few indeed are those I can respect as peers. To find such a combination together—well! It has been years."

  Tiglis raises an eyebrow at Kalle's flattery, and makes sure he sees it. "You flatter my skill greatly."

  "Two nights past," Kalle continues, "you easily evaded two men—travellers—who took an interest in you, while a pickpocket enjoying rich pickings gave you a wide and respectful berth. Tonight, you sampled the market's wares well before allowing yourself to be drawn into that woman's tent—a procurer, I must assume—taking at least five purses."

  Kalle spoke softly, his voice pitched to carry to Tiglis's ears and her ears alone, even his lips giving little away to anyone who may have been looking, but he spoke with amused assurance tinged with gentle mocking at her attempted modesty.

  "Five?" Tiglis asks.

  Kalle trades her even stare for even stare before shrugging with one shoulder. "I guessed five. I saw two with certainty, and at least two more I am certain of." He shakes his head with evident admiration. "I swear, your skill is magnificent."

  Tiglis allows Kalle to see a satisfied smile.

  "Very well then," she says, "if honesty is the order of the evening, tell me, Kalle: What are you doing in this city on the edge of the Empire?"

  He spreads his arms. "I have been most everywhere else," he says. "But I have never been here, and there was a caravan coming this way that had need of a skilled guard who took up little room. I have been here a week now. I think I may like it. I may even stay."

  "Camel dung," Tiglis says promptly. It is a gamble, but one she is confident of. That confidence is sorely wanted now, when Kalle holds all the advantages.

  Kalle stares at her with what Tiglis suspects is a combination of shock at her language and rage at her scepticism. "I most sincerely beg your pardon, dearest Tiglis, and beg also an explanation," he says with dignity.

  Tiglis does not breathe a sigh of relief, but she feels it. "You're richly dressed, you claim you just wanted to see Molos because you haven't been here before, you say you took a job as a caravan guard? I can recognise silk, but I have never seen it walking around without armed escort, and certainly not being worn by someone who is themselves armed. You must be a very long way from home, Kalle, and look more like someone running from their past than someone seeking a new future."

  Kalle's grin is back as quick as eye can see. "Ah! I like giving that impression, it puts people off their guard."

  Few can appreciate that as well as Tiglis, but she lets him see the full force of her disbelief—a considerable force indeed, from someone as skilled as Tiglis in the wearing of faces. "That silk you wear says that you paid a tremendous amount just to put people off their guard—or stole from a king. Is that why you are here? Is this how far you've had to run?"

  Kalle looks surprised. He raises his arm to study his sleeve—a position that lets him keep Tiglis in full view. "Really? Silk is so expensive in Molos? I bought this two years ago, on the other edge of the Empire. I forget what I paid, but it did not leave me destitute."

  Tiglis stares at him until she feels how wide her eyes are stretched. She drags herself back to the moment. "Then if you are not running from a king, what are you truly here for, Kalle? Are you a courier tarrying overlong after delivery? Struggling for two coin to keep each other company? After some great prize?"

  It takes all the skill Tiglis has to avoid putting too much stress on that last sentence.

  Kalle looks shifty, an expression Tiglis is certain is deliberately done, but why?

  "Mayhap I might be more in need of coin than fresh horizons," he admits. "And mayhap I may be seeking such useful prizes as I may." He sighs, a weight of sadness in his words that seems out of proportion to his stature, if not his verbosity. "In truth, I had been intending to seek more employment in the field of caravan guarding, save I have some small business to complete here in Molos, and cannot leave until I have done so."

  "Business?" Tiglis asks, nothing at all in her eyes or tone giving away any further reaction than mild interest. "What business is this? Have you taken a job? Acquired a vendetta?"

  "Ho! No! This has arisen since my arrival—last night, in actual fact—and vexes me greatly because it is a matter of honour, not truly of business at all. At least not of my business. Ah, but let us not think of such depressing things! Come, fair Tiglis, allow me to make it up to you for any concern my presence caused you. Have you had dinner yet, tonight? Allow me to provide. Or a drink? Is there a tavern..."

  Not a muscle on Tiglis's face reacts to this mention of the previous night's disaster, although she is shocked to her core by the implications of what he said. "I do not enter into taverns," she says. "But nor should you, if it is a meal you are after. Food is taken far more seriously here in the markets."

  She draws from her robes the bag of locusts. "I usually eat my fill by sampling morsels from as many stalls as possible," she says, popping one of the fried insects into her mouth. She proffers the bag to Kalle, who looks inside with the keen, interested eye of someone who is prepared to try every new experience that comes his way, but also with the caution of one who ne
ver does so blindly.

  He uses thumb and forefinger to extract a single locust from the depths of the bag. He gives it a quick look of appraisal before placing it in his mouth entire.

  His eyebrows rise as he crunches. "They are less sharp than I was expecting," he says at length, "and also creamier and nuttier. I was truly never expecting to see insects described as morsels, but I am converted."

  Tiglis favours him with a satisfied smile, then casts a quick, appraising glance up and down Kalle's slender, richly dressed body, allowing a slight smirk to play across her lips. "Very well, then. We shall spend your money. Follow me."

  She steps lightly away from the pillar before diving into the crowd. Kalle, whose grin is if anything slightly more satisfied than it had been before her smirk, follows her with ease.

  "I haven't been in Molos long enough to find all its secrets," Kalle says just loudly enough for her to hear as she weaves through the crowd with the deceptive speed she showed before. "I would be eternally grateful for anything you could tell me about the best food, the best drink..."

  "Here," Tiglis says abruptly, stopping in a circle of stillness among the chaotic movement of people. She has once more disappeared her parcel of locusts about her person. "You can buy fried goat or pigeon anywhere and it is all good, but if you really want to fill your belly, you need a tajine, and you buy it from here."

  The tajine seller has a space around him free of stalls but crowded with people who stand each with a pottery bowl in their left hand and a battered metal spoon in their right. The seller has an assistant, a young boy, who spends his entire time washing bowls between two basins of water, one already filthy and one slowly becoming so. Soon, he will go to empty and refresh the filthy one.

  The seller himself stands in a ring of charcoal braziers, each one holding its clay tajine pot. Two of them are already empty despite the early hour.

  Kalle flourishes his hand, producing coins with a conjurer's trick. The tajine seller is too busy to seem impressed, and Tiglis does not give Kalle the satisfaction, but his smile does not alter at this lack of response.

  Tiglis faces him almost squarely, the better to put a little distance between them, as they eat. Kalle examines the tajine with interest, announcing that he has identified dates, preserved lemons, olives and goat meat but cannot pick the spices. He has no trouble talking whilst chewing, and sees no problem with doing so.

  "Molos takes a lot from the deserts," Tiglis says between mouthfuls.

  "Where I come from," Kalle says, "a desert means sand where nothing grows. But I come here, and there seems to be a lot growing in this desert."

  "There are oases," Tiglis says, "and rivers, and there are edges where the desert fights with farmland, and there is much that lives and can be caught by a skilled hunter. Where do you come from, Kalle?"

  "Oh, a ways that way," Kalle says with an airy wave of his hand. His spoon points south and east, away from the desert, towards almost every other land in the Empire. "We have much less sun, and more night. It grows cold at night, and there are entire months when it is cool during the day."

  "It grows cold in the desert at night," Tiglis says. "Here in Molos, the stone keeps the heat during the day and releases it slowly at night. We say in Molos that stone dulls the passage of time, so if you are not careful, you cannot see where it went."

  Kalle laughs gleefully at that. "Where do you keep food?"

  "Inside, and underground." Tiglis gives Kalle a thoughtful look as he chases a date around his bowl. "Why did you come to Molos?"

  He flashes her a mad grin. "As I said, my steps bent me this way. I needed work, a caravan bound for Molos needed a guard. When I arrived, it seemed interesting, so I decided to see if I could fund a short stay."

  Tiglis resigns herself, at least for the moment, to accepting his story. "Are many guards as short as you? Most guards I see are much bigger men."

  Kalle laughs again, something he seems to do easily. "They are slower than me, as well! The best time to gut someone is when they underestimate you."

  Tiglis allows a smile to flicker across her lips at this brief moment of shared understanding. "Tell me: This habit you have, of making your hands join your mouth to speak, and your mouth to say two words when one will do. Is this wetlander custom?"

  His eyebrows rise interrogatively. "Wetlander? I am not familiar with the term. Is that anywhere in particular, or just east of Molos?"

  "It is everywhere where water is said to fall from the sky."

  Kalle grins again. "Then it is most everywhere east and south of Molos," he says. "Wetlander—I like it. I must tell you of the sea later, and the ships that spend months at a time upon it, and the men who never set foot on land. But no, it is not entirely wetlander custom. It is merely my way."

  "To distract people from what your other hand is doing?" Tiglis drops her gaze to her bowl, where an olive is trying to escape her spoon.

  Kalle's grin develops a hyena-like quality. "Something like that," he says. "Whereas in Molos, you make every word count, but a simple greeting involves the health of cousins so distant you have not met them since you were a child on your mother's knee. I said hello to a beggar yesterday, and I swear it took me ten minutes to extricate myself politely."

  "Oh? You insult our ways, now?"

  Kalle gives voice to a bark of laughter. "Ho! It was merely an observation, sweet Tiglis, made in an entirely innocent spirit."

  "When heat makes actions unwise, all that is left is thought," Tiglis says, before sucking her spoon clean. "We think deeply, and speak only when we are sure of what to say."

  She hands him her bowl and spoon to return to the seller. "You said you wanted a drink."

  Tiglis heads off without waiting for him. He catches her within ten of her steps, the bowl returned.

  A stall only a little farther on sells potent date and barley wine in small glass cups. Customers pay, drink in one swallow, and move on. It takes little watching to realise that those who drink date wine are from the desert or affecting its clothing, while those who drink barley are from the city or the wetlands.

  Kalle tries date. He has a thoughtful expression on his face when they step away to let the next customer approach, then declares he likes it.

  Tiglis raises one eyebrow, but says nothing.

  "Have I interrupted your shopping?" Kalle asks as Tiglis leads him on a seemingly random wander around the periphery of the markets. "If I can help you carry anything..."

  "Have I interrupted your evening?" Tiglis counters. "Am I keeping you from anything important?"

  Kalle waves this away. "My evening is my own, to do with as I wish. I have no obligations, no commitments, and no promises to keep. In truth, I came here tonight in hopes of seeing you again."

  "And this matter you mentioned? This business of honour?"

  Tiglis makes sure that as she asks this, she can see his face, across which a dark shadow passes.

  "Ah, now, there I am temporarily at a loss. I must find someone who, in all likelihood, will be as easy to find as a single ghostly gem in an entire robber-king's hoard."

  "Who is this person?" Tiglis endeavours to give the impression she could be convinced, if reluctantly, to offer assistance.

  Kalle coughs. "Ah, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your interest. It gives me a wild surge of hope to think you might be able to assist if only through your inestimable advice. You see..."

  "Then who is it you seek?"

  "Ah, now, when I tell you, I must assure you that..."

  Tiglis feels a surge of malicious glee. Perhaps now is the time to indulge herself. She slips into a gap between stalls, a space small enough nobody will try to move past them and where they can speak without fear of being overheard above the hubbub of the markets.

  "Well? Who is this person you seek?"

  "A thief," Kalle says reluctantly, "whom I interrupted in her work."

  Tiglis takes a sharp half step backwards while drawing her mantle across the low
er half of her face. "A woman?" she hisses, her voice rising in pitch even as it remains low in volume. "You hunt me, flatter me, and offer me inducements merely so you can use me to find another woman?"

  Kalle sighs and spreads his hands as one who helplessly petitions the Gods. "Please, sweet Tiglis, let me explain! My interest here is solely one of honour, and righting a wrong I inadvertently committed. I beg you to remember that it was you who expressed interest in this matter, and that you cut short my attempts to explain myself!

  "Last night, I was wandering Molos seeking diversion, and came across a house where a party gave me the idea of seeing what I could lay my hands upon. I inadvertently interrupted another thief in the course of what seemed, with later reflection, to have been a well-planned and purposeful endeavour, and it seems likely I interrupted her catastrophically, thus causing her great difficulty in evading capture. That has stung my conscience and preyed upon my mind, and I must seek her out to apologise and to see if I can make amends by assisting her in the completion of her goal."

  Tiglis, who was intending to reveal her mouth so Kalle could see the last of a satisfied smile, instead keeps her mantle raised as she works hard to contain her shock.

  Her mind, already racing to keep ahead of Kalle, is whirring like a fat beetle desperate to stay airborne.

  "Help her complete her goal?" she manages to say. "What cut would you ask, to fix what you broke?"

  "Nothing," Kalle snaps, anger flashing briefly in his eyes for the second time that evening. He contains himself with a visible effort. "I would ask nothing in return, for the mistake was mine and I owe her a debt. That is all."

  Tiglis slowly lowers her mantle again to reveal her mouth.

  "It is the first I have heard, a thief offering to make amends for interrupting another thief's work," she says. "It seems unique."

  Kalle shrugs, but nothing in his expression suggests carelessness, indifference, doubt, or ignorance. "Well, I am not by nature a thief. I turn my hand to many things, depending upon my mood, my needs, and my options. Sometimes I wander markets, sometimes I wander roofs. Sometimes I play at dice, or take work as guard. Sometimes I seek out treasure wherever it may be lying unclaimed in the dangerous places of the world. I am not tied to thieving, and my honour is more important to me than a brief profit." As he completes his final sentence, his eyes grow harder than diamonds.