The guard on the bridge listened politely. When Emmis had said his piece there was a moment of thoughtful silence; then the guard said, “A Vondish ambassador?”
“Yes.”
“And he wants an audience with the overlord?”
“Yes.”
The guard glanced up over his shoulder at the golden marble walls of the palace. “I suppose that seems reasonable,” he said. “I’ll pass the word, but it may take some time to get an answer. Can you come back tomorrow, about this same time? I should have an answer for you by then.”
“You can’t find out sooner?”
The guard turned up an empty palm. “I might,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s not an emergency, and so far as I know it’s not a standard situation where there are procedures in place. We do see ambassadors sometimes, from Sardiron or Tintallion, but I don’t know just how that works. They usually have appointments made in advance.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to do, make an appointment,” Emmis protested.
“Yes, but they usually do it with an exchange of letters, or with magicians sending messages, they don’t just walk up to the door here.”
“I didn’t know who to address a letter to!”
“Well, I don’t, either, but the ambassadors we’ve had here before apparently do,” the soldier explained. “So I’ll have to find out, and let you know, and I don’t know how long it will take, so could you please come back tomorrow?”
Emmis sighed. He started to turn away, then stopped. He took a deep breath, and turned back.
“Am I doing something wrong?” he said.
Startled, the guard said, “I don’t think so.”
“I’m not making some horrible mistake in protocol, or being rude somehow?”
“No. I really just don’t know the procedure.”
“Keeping an ambassador waiting like this doesn’t seem right, somehow, so I thought maybe I’m doing something wrong,” Emmis explained. “I mean, I’m new at this; the ambassador hired me as his local guide on a whim, and I haven’t had any training at all, I’m just making it up as I go. If there’s anything you can tell me about how I should be doing this...”
The guard looked at him helplessly. “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “The only time I’ve seen any ambassadors, they’ve shown up on the bridge and said they were expected, and sure enough the names would be on the daily orders, so I let them in. I’m only a sentry, not some sort of official.”
“But you’ve never had a... a diplomatic aide come up to you like this? Or heard any of the other guards talk about it?”
“No. Never.”
“Then I’m probably doing it wrong.” Emmis sighed again. “Well, thank you. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, then.” He turned away with a polite nod, and this time kept going, ambling back across the red stone bridge, past the two outer guards and into the plaza beyond.
Perhaps he should have spoken to a magistrate, he thought, instead of the palace guards. At least he hadn’t followed his original plan of marching down here with the ambassador in tow, expecting to be admitted immediately. What’s more, he had found a house for rent just off Arena Street, and he had found it in less than a day. It wasn’t actually in the New City, where the lords and ladies lived if they didn’t live in the Palace itself, it was, if the truth be told, in Allston, but it was almost in the New City, and not all of Allston smelled of fish or sawdust or glue. Emmis hadn’t smelled anything inappropriate when he inspected the property, and the wind hadn’t seemed to be in an odd quarter.
So now it was back to the Crooked Candle to report to the ambassador. With any luck they could be settled into the house on Through Street by nightfall. He trotted across the plaza and through the midday crowds to Merchant Street, then up the gentle slope to High Street.
This whole business still didn’t seem entirely real; he kept thinking it would all turn out to be a prank, or a misunderstanding, but then he felt the bulge in his purse as it slapped against his thigh, listened to the jingle of silver as he walked, and told himself that at least the money was real. If Lar turned out to be a madman rather than an ambassador, or if the overlord had him cast into a dungeon as an enemy of the Hegemony, at least Emmis would have something to show for it.
He turned right onto High Street, into the Old Merchants’ Quarter, and hurried on, ignoring the calls of hawkers and the scent of herbs and spices, eager to return to the familiar streets of Shiphaven.
Half an hour later he marched through the taproom of the Crooked Candle, ignoring the rather sparse lunchtime crowd, and climbed the three flights of stairs to the ambassador’s room on the top floor.
The door, which had been standing open when he left that morning, was closed; he hesitated, then knocked.
No one answered, and all his worries about fraud or insanity, which he had been able to hold at bay until now, suddenly tumbled in on him.
“Lar? Sir?” he called, as he rapped on the wood again. He tried the latch, but the door was locked. He groped for an appropriate title for an ambassador, and called, “Your excellency?”
Still no response. He dropped his hand to his purse — the possibility that those coins weren’t really silver at all, but some lesser substance enhanced by a bit of magic, had finally occurred to him. He frowned.
If that was the case, well... all he had really lost was a day’s work, give or take a few hours, and a little of his self-respect. He could stand that. At least he hadn’t bragged about his new job to anyone; by the time he had gotten Lar settled in the Crooked Candle, answered hundreds of questions about the city, discussed rents and wages, and carefully gone over the plans for today, he hadn’t felt like talking to anyone else. He had eaten supper with Lar downstairs here, then gone back to his attic room in the tangle of uncertainly-named streets behind Canal Square, where he had looked over the foreign silver carefully, gotten out his best clothes to air overnight, and then gone to bed early, so as to get an early start today.
He had spoken to his landlady in passing, on his way up to his room, mentioning that he had a new job that might force him to move out, but he didn’t think he had told her anything that would embarrass him. He hadn’t run into any of his friends or family.
And today he had breakfasted with the ambassador here at the inn, then set out on his business. He had not told the owner of the house in Allston who his employer was, merely that it was a foreigner with business at the Palace.
He had told the guard at the Palace the whole story about the Vondish ambassador, but he could live with that.
“Are you looking for the man with the red coat and the fancy hat?” someone asked.
Startled, Emmis turned to find a young woman standing at the top of the stair. “Uh?” he said.
“The foreigner with the plumed hat,” she said. “Are you looking for him?”
“Yes,” Emmis answered.
“He went out about an hour ago. I’m not sure when he’s coming back, but he left all his things, so I’m sure he’ll be back eventually.”
Emmis glanced at the locked door, then back at the young woman, who, he realized, was wearing a beer-stained white apron and had her hair tucked up under a mobcap. “Oh,” he said. “Do you work here, then?”
“Sometimes. My uncle owns the inn, and I help out when he’s short-handed.”
“You’re sure he’ll be back?” he said, nodding toward the door.
“He didn’t take his belongings, so I’d say so, yes.”
Emmis’s hand squeezed his purse; the silver, if it was really silver, was still there. And the girl said Lar’s luggage was safe inside the room.
Lar was probably real after all, and he had been worrying about nothing. The ambassador had surely just gone out on an errand of some sort, perhaps to buy a few things in Shiphaven Market.
Not that Emmis had seen him when he had passed through the market a few minutes before. “Did he say where he was going?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. Not a word.”
For a moment Emmis stood silently staring at her, trying to think of something useful to ask her, but nothing came to mind.
The girl stared back. “The other foreigners might know something,” she said at last.
Emmis blinked. “Other foreigners?”
“Downstairs, eating lunch,” she said. “Four of them.”
“Are they Vondish, too?”
She turned up both palms. “I have no idea,” she said. “I just know they’re foreigners from the way they talk.”
“Oh.” He took a final look at the locked door, then said, “Could you introduce me, perhaps? My name’s Emmis of Shiphaven.”
“Of course. My name’s Gita, by the way. Come on.” She turned and beckoned, and led him back down to the common room.
The four foreigners were three men and a woman, seated at a large table to one side of the room. The woman was middle-aged and full-figured, wearing a white blouse embroidered in two shades of blue; the men wore brown cloaks with hoods thrown back. All four had the dark hair and dark complexions common in the far south, but were otherwise unremarkable.
Gita took his hand and led Emmis directly to them.
Emmis was unsure what they had been doing when he first entered the room, whether they had been talking amongst themselves or not, but the moment Gita started toward them they had all turned and stared silently at her approach, and at Emmis behind her. That did not strike him as entirely normal behavior, but after all, they were foreigners, and couldn’t be expected to have any manners.
Then the woman smiled at him, and while she was at least a decade older than he was and no great beauty to begin with, that at least made him feel less like an intruder. “Gita, my dear,” she said, speaking Ethsharitic with a truly barbarous accent, “is this the young man you told us about?”
“Annis, this is Emmis of Shiphaven,” the innkeeper’s niece said with a curtsey, and Emmis suddenly found himself thrust forward, and his hand released.
The three men still hadn’t moved or spoken, but the woman waved at a vacant chair. “Have a seat, Emmis of Shiphaven!” Her accent was thicker than Lar’s, but Emmis did not think it was the same; she spoke her vowels through her nose. While she was obviously from the Small Kingdoms, he didn’t think she was from the same one that had produced the Vondish ambassador.
There was clearly something going on here that he didn’t understand, but none of these people looked particularly dangerous, and no one was likely to do anything violent here in a public house. Warily, keeping his eyes on the woman, Emmis sat down.
“I am Annis the Merchant,” the foreign woman said. “I hope you don’t mind that I sent Gita upstairs to see if you would join us.”
Emmis gave the innkeeper’s niece a quick glance, but she was hurrying away toward the kitchen, carefully not looking at him.
“Ah,” Emmis said. “You did that?” Gita had done an excellent job of getting him here without mentioning that she had been sent to find him.
“Yes. And of course you want to know why.”
“Well, yes.”
“Of course. You would be a fool not to wonder, and I’m sure you are not a fool.” She smiled again. “Are you?”
Emmis did not care to answer that. “Who are you people?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”
“I told you, I am Annis the Merchant. These three are, if I have the names right, Neyam, Morkai, and Hagai, all of them from Lumeth of the Towers.”
The three men shifted at the sound of their names, and it occurred to Emmis that they might not understand Ethsharitic. They gave no sign they were following the conversation. Emmis did not think he had ever heard of Lumeth of the Towers, which meant it was almost certainly one of the Small Kingdoms. Emmis did not know much about the lands outside the city walls, but he was fairly sure he had at least heard a mention of every nation outside the Small Kingdoms, from Kerroa to Shan on the Desert, or from the Pirate Towns to Srigmor.
But he hadn’t heard of all the Small Kingdoms simply because there were too many.
“And where are you from?” Emmis asked. “You don’t sound Vondish, and I notice you said they were from Lumeth, not we are.”
“Ah, not a fool at all! I am from Ashthasa, on the South Coast.”
Emmis had heard of Ashthasa, and even met a few Ashthasan sailors, and now that she said the name, her accent did seem to fit, and her coloring was dark enough. She might be telling the truth.
One of the Lumethans said something in what sounded like Trader’s Tongue, and Annis made a quick, brief reply. Emmis thought she was telling him to shut up until he had been introduced, but Emmis’s command of Trader’s Tongue was almost as weak as he had told Lar it was, and Annis spoke Trader’s Tongue with that same thick Ashthasan accent she had in Ethsharitic, so he was not at all sure of his interpretation.
“They don’t speak Ethsharitic, do they?” he asked.
Annis smiled at him again. “If they do, they won’t admit it,” she said. “I take it you don’t speak Trader’s Tongue? Morkai wanted to know what we were discussing, and I said we were still on introductions.”
That matched what he had heard reasonably well. “Shall we get beyond the introductions, then? What did you want with me?”
“To the point. You are working for the Vondishman? The one in the red coat and plumed hat?”
Emmis wondered whether the woman was exaggerating her accent; if she knew the Ethsharitic word for “plumed” she had to be pretty fluent.
“He hired me to find him a residence, yes.” Emmis didn’t see any reason to admit to more than that.
“Ah, is that where you were today?”
“Yes.”
“Did you find him one?”
“I did. Why do you want to know?”
She leaned back in her chair. “Do you know where Ashthasa is?”
“You just told me — it’s on the South Coast, in the Small Kingdoms.”
“But do you know where it is relative to the Empire of Vond? And how big it is, and how big the Empire of Vond is?”
“No,” Emmis admitted.
“Our entire eastern frontier is with the Empire,” she said. “It was our border with the kingdom of Quonshar, until the Great Warlock conquered Quonshar three years ago, together with all the lands beyond. Where there were once eight other kingdoms along the coast to the east of Ashthasa, there is now only the empire, reaching from our border to the very edge of the World, and Quonshar is merely the westernmost province of Vond. There are more than a dozen other provinces in the empire, and while Quonshar is one of the smallest provinces, all by itself it’s larger than Ashthasa. If the empire should decide to extend its borders ever so slightly, my homeland would vanish, and become Vond’s eighteenth province; we could not possibly resist them effectively.”
Emmis glanced at the three silent men.
“And Lumeth of the Towers — well, it’s inland, not on the coast. It’s one of the larger lands in the Small Kingdoms, though of course it’s nothing compared with the Empire of Vond, or the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars. A few years ago it bordered on nine other kingdoms; four of them are now provinces of Vond, and Lumeth is half-surrounded. If you were to look at a map of the empire — you know what a map is?”
“Yes,” Emmis said. “I’ve seen maps.”
“Good. Well, if you had a map of the Empire of Vond, you would see that it’s shaped a little like a half-moon, with the sea and the desert around the curve to the south and east, and the rest of the Small Kingdoms to the north and west of the flat side. Except that the border isn’t straight. There’s a piece broken off the western tip — that’s Ashthasa. And there’s a bite out of the middle — that’s the southern part of Lumeth. So they’re worried about the empire just as my own people are.”
“Oh,” Emmis said.
“So we are all very, very interested in everything the empire does, and when the Imperial Council and the Regent send an envoy to Ethshar of the Spices, well, naturally, we want to know who he is, and what he’s doing, and why. I am telling you this openly to save time; I could have made up some elaborate story, but why should I? You have no ties to Vond, and we are not asking you to do anything terrible. We just want to know whether you can tell us anything about why this Vondishman is in Ethshar.”
Emmis glanced at the three silent Lumethans, then looked Annis in the eye.
“What’s in it for me?” he asked.