The Steerswoman's Road (26 page)

Sala interrupted. “Of course we are. And you’re using us. It
seems fair to me. Now go away.”

“But I could help you better. And maybe you could help me
better, too, and easier, if I knew what was going on.” He turned from one to
the other, Sala’s face stubborn, Attise’s full of weary exasperation. “Maybe
you think I’m not much, but I’m not stupid, I can see things too. Why did the
people stop being friendly?”

“What?” Sala was taken aback, but Attise watched him
closely.

“The potter said that people here were friendly to
strangers, but they weren’t friendly to you, or to me. The jeweler was friendly
to Attise, but the weaver wasn’t.” Calmer, he sat on the wet grass and looked
at Attise intently. “It’s something to do with that jeweler. Something
important is going on here, isn’t it?”

Attise hesitated, then said, “I hope so.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“Not yet.”

“What will you do if you find out there is?”

Her mouth twisted. “Run away.”

“And report this to Shammer and Dhree?”

The women exchanged glances; then Attise took a moment to
think. She leaned forward. “What did you take from the potter’s shop?” Sala
looked surprised at the change of subject, then watched Willam with renewed
interest.

Will was not surprised at all. “There’s some stuff that
grows on stone walls, and in caves. In Langtry, we had a lot of it. People had
to scrape down their walls regularly, especially in cellars.”

“And?”

He knew what she wanted and shrugged uncomfortably. “And I
use it in my charms.”

“What does it do?”

With great reluctance, he said, “It works with the other
things in a spell, one of the spells I know.”

Attise said nothing else, but sat watching him, waiting.

“I don’t think I should tell you anything else,” Will said
at last.

Willam noticed with some surprise that Sala was looking at Attise
as if concerned for her. She touched the merchant’s arm to get her attention. “Don’t
press the boy. I think it’s a good thing. The more magic the common folk know,
the better matters will go for everyone.”

Surprisingly, Attise made no protest against the comment,
but only stirred uncomfortably. “I don’t have enough information.”

Suddenly Willam noticed that Attise was tired—no, exhausted.
She seemed weak and worn, and her expression bleak. She turned away. “Willam,”
she began, not looking at him. “I’m sorry that you think I’m being unfair. It’s
not my doing, it’s the situation.”

“You mean that because of your mission, you get to push me
around.”

Her voice was flat. “I don’t mean to push you. I simply do
what I need to do. It’s because I don’t do what
you
want me to that you have a problem. Now, please leave for a while,
so that Sala and I can discuss this.”

Watching her, Willam slowly recognized again what Sala had
pointed out to him once: that this woman was doing something against her own
will, acting in a way that she hated. Sala had meant it differently, but now he
realized it was true in a deeper sense. Somehow, in some important way, Attise
was helpless.

His anger evaporated, and what was left, surprisingly, was
pity. “If you don’t like working for Shammer and Dhree,” he said, “why don’t
you quit?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, and Willam could not
tell if that meant that she could not quit, or that she could not tell him why,
or that she did not want to talk about it. He began to wonder if it was
possible to quit the service of a wizard, if it was permitted at all. Perhaps
Shammer and Dhree would do something terrible to her if she tried. Perhaps they
were no better than Abremio—maybe there was no difference between the behaviors
of Blue and Red. But that could not be; there had to he some difference.

Suddenly he wished, truly and sincerely, that he could do
something to help Attise. Without preamble, he said, “When I’m a wizard, I won’t
do this to people.”

She understood. But she turned back, and amazingly, he saw
pity for him on her own face. “When you’re a wizard,” she told him sadly, “you’ll
do what wizards do.”

The front door thumped open, and a thin voice demanded, “Have
you seen him?” Carroll’s slatternly wife stormed out, fists on her hips,
glaring up and down the damp sunlit street.

Startled, Attise looked at her once, blankly, then rose and
turned aside to deal with her own dark thoughts.

Sala exchanged a glance with Wiliam. “Meaning your husband?”

“Who else? Slippery devil, saying he’s off visiting, saying
he doesn’t know where the money went.” She whirled on them, shaking her fist vehemently.
“All the good coin you gave me, gone! Never drinks, doesn’t touch a drop, he
says! Well, I’ll catch him at it, one of these days, and when I do he’ll be as
gone as the moon. I tell you ...” She wandered back into the house, muttering,
leaving a large silence behind her.

Will tried to find something to say, to recover from the unresolved,
interrupted discussion. Something comradely. “I’d drink if she was my wife.”

Sala glanced at Attise’s back and played along. “Never
marry. Or marry someone more entertaining.”

“Or smarter; you’d think she’d have it figured out by now. I
guess she doesn’t look at the trash heap much.”

“Trash heap?”

Attise had turned back and was looking at him as if he had
said something astounding.

He paused, puzzled. “That’s right,” he told her, confused. “Out
back. There’s a dozen broken jugs in the trash. And some not very old, either.
She doesn’t have to try to catch him at anything—those jugs tell the story themselves.”

Attise looked at the house, then the other houses, with a
faintly stunned expression. “This town doesn’t have a communal trash area.”

He could not tell if she was asking him or telling him. “No,”
he confirmed. “From the yard, you can look along the whole row of houses—”

But she had swept into the house, through the front room,
past the still-grumbling wife, and toward the hall to the back door. Will hurried
after. “Where’s Bel?” she asked when she saw he was still with her.

That was Sala’s real name, he knew; but Attise only slipped
and used it when she was excited or upset. The mercenary caught up. “Here.”

As they emerged from the rear door, Attise turned left,
ignoring the trash heap Will had mentioned, and hurried on, intent.

“What’s the matter?” Will asked. They had crossed the back
garden and were passing through the next yard. An elderly woman emerged from a
chicken coop and stared in bleary confusion as they swept past.

Attise made an offhand apology to her and continued on to
the next yard. “Either nothing, or everything,” she said to no one in particular.

“What do you mean?”

But she was absorbed in her urgency and did not reply until
Sala repeated the question. “Contradictions. That’s what’s wrong with this
town.” Attise stopped and scanned the area. “We have a saying,” she continued
distractedly. “‘There are no contradictions.’” She spotted her goal and hurried
on.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Will asked Sala, but she waved him silent and
followed Attise, fascinated.

To Will’s amazement, they stopped by a pile of trash behind
one of the shops. Sala peered at it while Attise stooped and began rummaging
through, heedless of the dust and dirt.

“What are you looking for?” Sala asked.

“Nothing specific.” Attise pulled out a pair of wood laths
connected by an odd rusty hinge and examined them closely. “But I shall be
very interested in what I do find.” She dropped the laths and was briefly
absorbed in the study of a tangle of string. The mercenary dropped down beside
her and watched as she extracted from the tangle a short white splinter.

“Contradictions,” Sala hazarded, “between what you know and
what Ingrud said.”

Attise kept the splinter and moved to another side of the
heap. “And,” she said, poking at some potsherds, “between the way the people
of this town act, and what they tell us.” She found a boat-shaped piece of dark
wood as long as her hand, cracked down its length. She stopped and gazed at it,
lost in thought, then looked up at Sala and Willam as if surprised to find them
there. Hefting the wood, she studied the shuttered windows at the back of the
shop. Will realized that the shop was the jeweler’s, and as he watched Attise,
he found himself reminded of the careful, thoughtful expression Ingrud had
worn when he had asked her questions.

“What sort of trash does a jeweler leave?” Attise asked.

Sala paused in surprise. Then, inexplicably, she laughed. “Not
the sort you have there?”

Puzzled, Will recognized one item. “That’s a shuttle, a
shuttle from a loom.”

Attise had returned from her thoughts strangely lighthearted.
She grinned up at him, and he found the expression incongruous on her face. “That’s
right,” she said. “And this—” She held up another item. “—is half of a bone
needle, broken.” She pointed at parts of the heap. “Rather many bits of string
and thread, too short to be of use.” She reached in, pulled out a potsherd, and
indicated it. “Stained on the inside; that’s from dye.” She dropped the items
and stood, dusting her hands. “Until very recently, the jeweler’s shop was held
by the weaver.”

“He moved his shop?”

“I think that if we ask, we’ll be told that he didn’t. He’s
a recent arrival. And here’s the proof.” She pointed with her chin at the heap.

“But,” Will said, “the potter said he’s always been here.
Was he lying?”

Attise nodded.

“What happened to the weaver?” Sala wondered.

Attise pointed down the row of shops. “She moved onto the
cross street, to that new house on the end. It’s not a proper shop at all; it’s
not set up correctly. It’s just a dwelling, pressed into use.” She turned back
to the jeweler’s. “He took this one because it’s one of the oldest buildings in
town, supporting the claim that he’s always lived here.”

“But why would the people lie?” Willam asked.

“Why does anyone do anything?” Attise replied. “To make
their lives better, or to prevent them from getting worse.”

Sala nodded. “Rewards or punishments.”

“In this case.”

“The jeweler is a wizard’s man.”

Attise held up a cautioning finger. “And we mustn’t let on
that we know.”

“And this was all designed—”

“To convince me that I’d been mistaken. That I’d been ...
chasing the moon.”

Sala laughed a little. “We have that saying, too.”

“That surprises me not at all.”

Will looked from one woman to the other. They ignored him
completely.

“And here we stand in full daylight, in sight of the back windows
of the jeweler’s shop,” the mercenary said.

Attise was amused. “He’s visiting Ammalee, who is a housemaid
for an invalid living at the first farm up the main road.” Will remembered the
conversation.

“So his shop stands empty.”

The merchant made an airy gesture. “Convenient for us to
break into and discover all sorts of fascinating items pertaining to the making
of jewelry.”

“Which you’d recognize?”

“Some. Not all, because of his ‘secret process’—”

“But they’d be the sorts of things that make sense.”

“Exactly. It would be the
sorts
that were important.
Items unidentifiable in specific, but recognizable as to type.”

“To someone used to thinking that way ...”

“Such as myself.”

The jeweler might be a wizard’s man, Attise had said. “Are
you going to kill him?” Will asked.

They turned on him in surprise. “No,” Attise told him. “We’re
going to act naturally, and leave here.”

“And report to your masters?”

A quick glance at each other, another glance toward the shuttered
shop, apprehension on their faces, and suddenly it was as if a toy house of
twigs collapsed inside Wiliam, revealing something hidden within, something startling.
Everything was changed.

He said in slow amazement, “That jeweler was sent here by
Shammer and Dhree themselves. You don’t serve them at all.”

They faced him. Attise was wearing her watching-and-waiting
look, but, strangely, Sala was standing as if ready for sudden action, dark
eyes full of danger. A memory came to him unbidden: When he had first met these
two, it had been Attise who had saved his life.

She spoke. “Wiliam, if you want to find Shammer and Dhree,
follow the main road north to Lake Cerlew. Make your way along the shore to
the east; someone there will know where to send you. I don’t recommend you
approach the jeweler. It’s best you’re not connected with us.”

Sala listened in growing astonishment, then turned on her. “You
can’t mean that. We mustn’t let him go!”

“It will take him some time to reach the wizards. We can vanish
into the woods.”

“It’s too risky.”

This was impossible. Attise, whom he hated, was trying to
save him from Sala, his friend.

“I won’t have the boy hurt, Bel. He’s innocent. And you said
it yourself: The more magic the common folk know, the better things will be for
everyone.”

By that statement, Wiliam identified another change, but it
only added to his confusion. “You don’t serve a Blue, either. You—you don’t
serve any wizard at all.”

Sala narrowed her eyes and shifted, but with a gesture
Attise asked her to wait. Attise turned to the boy, spreading her hands in a
wide gesture of honesty. “Wiliam, I’m not a spy. I’m a steerswoman.”

“No,” he said immediately. “Steerswomen never lie.”

She nodded, and her mouth twisted a bit. “True. Say, then,
that I’m a lapsed steerswoman. I was one, until the time came that I needed to
lie, to save my life. I’ll be one again, when that time is past.” She shifted
uncomfortably, but her gaze remained steady on Wiliam. “The wizards want me,
Willam, all of them. They’re hunting me. Don’t betray me.”