The Warrior's Bond (Einarinn 4) by Juliet E. McKenna Page A

stick.
    “Temar.”
    “What is it?” He looked up.
    “It’s from Glannar.” I’d made the man swear on his arm ring to write and tell me what he found out. “They’ve not turned up any of the stolen goods and there’s still no scent of any culprit.”
    “Any trace of the Elietimm?” demanded Casuel.
    I shook my head. “No sign of any strangers at all.”
    “That’s no proof,” snapped Casuel. “They use Artifice to conceal themselves.”
    “You can see all the Eldritch-men you want if you stare into a chimney corner long enough,” I retorted, “but they’ll still only be the shadows from the lamp stands.”
    Temar looked at Casuel and then to me. “So what does that tell us?”
    “That we know no more than we did when we left Bremilayne.” I didn’t bother concealing my own annoyance. I wasn’t about to blame the Elietimm or the Eldritch-men, not without proof, but it would have eased my mind to know the theft had just been wharf rats taking a tasty morsel.
    Temar returned to his list and Casuel started leafing through his books, marking places with slips of paper and stacking the volumes in front of Temar. “These are significant events in the annals of the leading families that you must know about.”
    I opened my third letter: good-weight paper precisely addressed in an elegant hand using sloping Lescari script in regular lines and faintly perfumed with something my memory told me was expensive. “Will you excuse me, Esquire D’Alsennin?” I asked formally. “It seems I have some business to attend to.”
    “What?” demanded Casuel.
    I hesitated; best not to raise Temar’s hopes until I knew if this speculation had paid off. “A lady I know is visiting the city.”
    Casuel sniffed with censure but Temar laughed. “Can I come?”
    “Not this time.” I winked at him.
    “Well, you can hardly read these things for me, so by all means call on the lady.” Temar shrugged a little unconvincingly.
    “Then I’ll see what I can do with your list.” Temar’s expression lightened at that thought so I left him to his studies, abandoning Casuel to his disapproval.
    Once outside, I looked both ways along the road before leaving the broad portico sheltering the wide steps of the building. The D’Olbriot archive is housed in one of the Name’s many ancestral possessions scattered throughout the city. While the nobility have long since left the lower town to tradesmen and hereabouts to worse, the archive has stayed put. The contents are just too unwieldy to move to more salubrious surroundings and, valuable though the yellowing parchments are to advocates preparing their interminable deliberations, they’re reckoned safe enough here. Thieves prefer real gold more readily spent and the clerks are backed by watchmen big enough to deter casual destruction or fire setting. I tossed a copper to an old man sitting on the steps with two shock-headed puppets dancing lifelike at his deft command. He’d been there for years and always alerted the Archivist to anyone threatening his pitch.
    The close-packed houses all around had been long since broken up into squalid lodgings, four or five families now cramped beneath roofs sheltering one household in better days. The crumble-edged yellow stone was marred by stains of water and filth poured from narrow mullions below old-fashioned steep gables. Here and there intricate oriel windows stood out below the vanity of the little turrets that had been so desirable in the days of Tor Inshol, their conical caps of ochre tiles broken and patched.
    A gaunt girl staggered out of a nearby alley, green-tainted eyes vacant. I could smell the sickly sweet sweat of the tahn enslaving her clean across the street. I ignored her outstretched hand and hurried on, clapping a hand over my mouth and nose as I passed a dead dog motionless but for the seething of maggots. Even with the sun riding high, shadows were held captive by tall buildings three and four stories high, and I