The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) by Glenda Larke Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t approach me from behind.
    When they attacked again, it was half hearted. They were still getting in one another’s way, and their inept hacking was easily countered by my long Calmenter blade. Inevitably one of them made a mistake; a clumsy attack that I first turned aside, then followed up by tucking the point of my sword between his sword hilt and his fingers. His sword sprang from his hand and his fingers ran with blood. It was hardly a major wound, but the sight of more blood was all it took to end the fight.
    ‘I’m off,’ one of them growled. ‘You didn’t blasted tell me she could blasted fight !’
    There was a murmur of agreement from two of the others, and the three of them retreated into the gloom of the side alley. The fellow with the bloodied nose had long since gone.
    The remaining man glared at me. I made a move with my sword in his direction and he backed off some more, trying to look as if he wasn’t hurrying. A moment later he too disappeared into the alley. When I looked around the corner there was no sign of any of them.
    I might have continued to think that it had been just another ordinary robbery attempt if I hadn’t seen the nose on that last man: it was as large and as squashily knobbled as a sea-potato. Teffel, the brawn without brain.
    There was nothing in the dead man’s pockets and I left him cluttering up the street, showing a lack of civic consciousness that was not unusual in Gorthan Spit; it was a rare night when the streets weren’t decorated with a body or two. In fact, they had a sort of unwritten rule: only scavengers who stripped a body of its clothes were obliged to dispose of it, which usually meant throwing it into the ocean on an outgoing tide. Incoming tides sometimes washed the bones back, but not much else.
    Back in my room, I went to bed thinking of sleep, only to find that my young neighbour had evidently made a fine recovery from the dunmagic with the aid of his sylvmagicking friend. By the sound of it, patient and healer had embarked on a night of lovemaking to remember for all time. They had endurance, I’ll say that for them. They were still at it at dawn, which was when I finally fell asleep.
     

FOUR
     
    The next day I went to the main wharf where the slaver ship from Cirkase was still docked. I wanted to see if it was possible to sneak on board and search it. Not a brilliant idea, but my only other one was worse: break into the Gorthan Spit slave-holding house and have a look at the merchandise—without an official guide who might not have shown me all there was to be seen. It was just as well that in the end events overtook me and I never got around to doing either of these foolhardy things.
    When I arrived at the dock, it was clear that something was happening. The place was crowded with onlookers—I saw Tunn the tapboy and Janko the waiter from The Drunken Plaice not to mention the sylv Cirkasian beauty, all in my first glance around. A moment later, I spotted two of the Fellih-worshippers Niamor had mentioned; it was hard to mistake them with those ridiculous hats and oversized bows tied under their chins. Besides, they towered over most people because the heels and soles of their shoes were a hand-span high. I’d been told when I was on Mekaté that they wore them because the being they worshipped, Fellih, required his followers to be clean. They thought shoes like that raised them above the dirt of the world and kept them pure.
    Call it religion, and people will believe the most ridiculous things. Why, I remember that on Fen Island, there were marsh dwellers who made human sacrifices to will-o’-the-wisps, believing they were ancestral gods who had to be placated. So I went to have a look for myself, and you know what they were, those will-o’-the-wisp lights? Marsh gases! Stamp on the ground, the bog shivers, and out leaks the gas, glowing in the dark. And people were dying for that! But I digress.
    There were also quite a few of Gorthan