As he speaks, she runs her eyes over the men and women that move like water through the light of the Hall, watches the small, hushed knots of their chatter. The trade in words, in silence.
‘Spies,’ she says.
‘Information brokers,’ Fallon replies, then grins. ‘Basically, yeah.’
She elbows him affectionately, her eyes wandering over a man whistling softly to a bright-feathered bird, which repeats the tune back to him, note perfect. He holds a lock to its beak, and she watches it unclasp as the notes sound out.
Declan appears at her shoulder, the ghost of a smile lingering under his moustache. ‘Half the birds are liars,’ he mutters.
She shakes her head bemusedly. ‘So why am I here?’
‘I want you to meet someone. Before you set off for Thell.’
‘Why’s Shroud not here?’
Fallon twists his lips. ‘I asked him to look in on the wife, see if anything could be done to ease her pain.’
He twists to one side to let a gaggle of chattering men past, their fingers moving as fast as their lips. Shipwright catches just a snatch of Katkani… green fire over the halls …
Fallon’s eyes track over his shoulder. ‘Besides, this might be difficult for him.’
They skirt the left edge of the Hall. Here, separate from the welter of stalls and hawkers and back-of-the-palm whisperers, an elegant dark-skinned woman watches them pass. Her throat is marred by a chalky scar that runs the length of her neck and the cuffs of her jacket are trimmed in gold. Two lean black dogs with long ears curl at her feet, reaching up to take scraps of meat from her manicured fingers.
Fallon turns to look inquiringly at her as they pass.
She shakes her head in reply. ‘Too early to read the bones of the year, Lord.’
As she recedes, Shipwright sees a man approach the woman’s stall, his face still studded with the grit of the road. He waits as she bends down to one of her dogs, and whispers in its ear. Dog and man leave together, his hand resting lightly on its undulating spine.
The swirl of foreign languages pulls Shipwright deeper into the Hall. She finds her eye drawn again to the massive maps. In each one, the south-eastern corner of the continent has been carved out, or marked with sigils of warning, or simply pried from the wall to leave the bare brick beneath.
On some maps, this torn corner was in the north-west. The world did not look the same to everyone here.
As her eyes wander the curves and lines, Fallon turns her gently, his hands on her shoulders. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’
She nods. ‘Incomplete, though.’
He laughs. ‘From your perspective, of course. Not sure we have walls big enough forthatocean.’
‘It’s not just ocean, Declan,’ she smiles.
You’ll have to tell me about it one day.’
‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll take you.’
‘I get seasick.’
‘I’ll keep you drunk.’
‘I couldn’t leave her.’
Shipwright reaches back, grips his wrist. ‘When she wakes up.’ Determination in her tone.
She runs her eyes over the maps again, the bold strokes of paint. Mountain ranges as long as a boat. Forests as tall as a man. Almost all of it still so strange to her. A few brief points of familiarity, for better or worse. Hesper, Astic, the Burners’ Wood. Thell.
As her eyes run over the walls, Fallon pulls her towards a long, low table stretched in front of the nearest mural, covered by scrolls and maps, staked out neatly, and annotated more precisely still. All of them drawn at different elevations: an eagle’s view, aforester’s stance, some political, marking out the big cities, the smaller towns, the legacies of older wars, the ruin of the south. Others are more specific – here one for the currents, West Tide and East Tide swirling constantly in teasing parallels, the deep water that pulled off to the Heron Halls, and the shallowing cuts that arrowed in towards where Luss would once have been.
Here was another for herbs: killing, healing, sleeping, dreaming, marked with stunning care and precision. The men and women behind the table move with professional grace, some old, some barely out of their teens, united only by the stain of inks on their fingers, the marks on their lips and teeth from sucked brushes.
