Fanuilh by Daniel Hood (best books for students to read TXT) 📕

to his fingernails. "I don't know," he said at last, flashing his wolf's grin. "I'll find out when I get there, I suppose."

Do not smile like that at him.

He laughed again, and the dragon squirmed impatiently beneath his hand, indicating that it had had enough scratching.

"If Your Highness has had enough, I'll be on my way," he said.

Do not smile like that at him, the dragon thought again, and Liam threw a groan at the ceiling and left quickly.

He frightened his roan by leaping heavily into the saddle and kicking hard with his heels, urging the horse up the narrow cliff path at a fast trot.

He frightened himself with his own high spirits. With the cold and the shorn fields and the lowering gray clouds, with a dragon holding part of his soul and his only acquaintance dead, he should have been depressed.

Instead, he was eager to begin his search.

Viyescu's shop was on the landward side of the city, in a quiet section of the artisans' quarter called Northfield. The rise on which Southwark sat was steep on the south, so that the houses of the rich quarter rose above each other on streets like mountain paths; but the slope was far gentler to the north, and the streets of the artisans' quarter were broader and less steeply inclined. Cobblestoned in the same black stone as the rest of the city, they nonetheless seemed brighter because the houses had fewer stories and more of the gray vault of sky showed beyond the peaked gables.

A helpful washerwoman and a colorful sign directed him to the apothecary. Above the scrubbed doorstep hung a yellow board on which a skillful hand had painted a wreath of ivy over a steaming thurible. The brand was heated by a stooping woman whose breath was flames.

Uris, Liam remembered. Though Uris-tide was not celebrated. in the Midlands, he knew enough of her from the sea, where she was honored as the Giver of Direction, the inspirator of navigators and charters. He also remembered her as the patron of alchemists, herbalists, and druggists, though most of those that he knew gave her only lip service.

Ton Viyescu, it seemed, gave her more credit than that.

"A religious man," Liam said to himself and, assuming a grave expression, walked into the shop.

Viyescu looked almost exactly as he had expected, almost familiar in a tantalizing way Liam could not put his finger on, but the state of the shop was unexpectedly different. The druggist was short and gnarled like the roots he sold, with a magnificently tangled expanse of bushy black beard flecked with gray creeping up his cheeks and endangering his tiny, gleaming eyes. He wore a stained leather apron tied over equally stained fustian that might once have been white but was now an ugly yellow-gray. His hands, composed almost entirely of huge knuckles, rested impatiently on the wooden counter. He stood behind it like it was a wall and Liam a spear-shaking raider.

The shop, however, was not the musty, disordered mess he had expected from his other experiences with apothecaries. It was crowded, but each thing seemed to occupy its proper place. Herbs hung in bunches from dowel racks, the spacing between each leafy bundle exact; roots in open boxes filled shelves, their names carefully painted in clear letters on the shelf beneath them. Flasks, pottery jars and heavy glass decanters lined the higher shelves, ranked like soldiers and labeled like the roots. The druggist's protective counter was bare and clean; behind him ran another counter, on which were neatly arranged the tools of his trade. Several mortars with pestles in attendance, a tiny brazier with glowing coals, a thick-bottomed glass beaker for boiling, and a rack of glass and copper tubes of different lengths, jointed and beveled so they could be attached one to the other.

A precise man, Liam thought, as well as religious. It came to him where he had seen Viyescu before: he had been in the procession the day before, at the front of the lay worshippers.

"You are the apothecary?" He managed to achieve a decent Torquay accent, thick and musical.

"I am Ton Viyescu," the druggist growled, eyeing him rudely, and Liam assumed it was his normal manner. His accent marked him from the far northwest, a harsh land by any standards, and not likely to breed politeness.

"I only ask because I have, well, I have important business, and I wish only to deal with a, well, with someone who really knows."

Viyescu squinted suspiciously at him, his beady eyes almost lost in wrinkles. "I know what there is to know about herbs, Master ... ?"

The question was so pointed that Liam could not ignore it. "Cance," he answered. "Hierarch Cance, from Torquay." He chose a religious title, and it seemed to affect the druggist.

"Ah, well, Hierarch, what can I do for you?" There were no protests of humility, but the hunched man's attitude loosened a little, and he stopped squinting and shifted his hands slightly on the counter, indicating a willingness to serve, if not an eagerness.

"You see, I came to Southwark to meet a man, a wizard"—he whispered the word, as though it were dangerous in itself—"and now I find he is dead. Murdered." He nodded somberly, but inwardly he cursed. The druggist was nodding also, not the least surprised, although he seemed a little puzzled.

"And who would this wizard be, Hierarch?"

"One Tarquin Tanaquil," Liam responded cautiously. "Perhaps you knew him?"

"Oh, I knew him. I knew him well enough." His tone; indicated that the acquaintance had not been pleasant, and there was something else, a change in his eyes, like the shutting of a door.

"You sound as though you did not like him," Liam said, but continued before the druggist could respond. "I ask, you see, because he was engaged on, well, on certain works for us that are of some importance. Uris-tide is almost upon us, you know." He filled the last sentence with as much importance as it could hold, and let