Near + Far (39 page)

He did not go search for his artifact that day. Instead he lingered over his meal, trying to find traces of her in the excellent soup, the limpid beer, the sausages as fat and feisty as fighting pups. Sometimes she came out, bringing a dish to the sideboard, and he tried to be the first to reach it, to lay his fingers where hers had touched, as though he could absorb knowledge of her through his skin.

Finally they cleared away, and he kept sitting there in the common room, waiting. After near to an hour, she emerged, her apron put aside, and a basket on her arm.

Springing to his feet, he approached, asking if she were going forth to harvest fungi. When she nodded, he introduced himself and volunteered to carry her basket.

For a moment, he thought she would refuse him, and the shy blush that rode her cheeks only made her all the more entrancing, for it is a known thing that the entity which proves elusive is ever more alluring than that which comes readily to the hand. But in the end, she assented, and he followed at her heels, holding the basket.

Little conversation passed between them, and when he asked her questions, her answers were short and brief of detail. But he didn't mind, because every sound from her mouth made him tingle from his head to his toes.

When they returned, he was horrified to see Corint at the common fire, giving him a sardonic look as it noted his newly-donned masculinity. But he comforted himself with the thought that his rival would go after the artifact, rather than this new treasure that Ector had found. In fact, he decided, he would give the rival all the information he had, and let Corint have the joy of its discovery.

He took care, though, to give Trice the coldest of nods. There was no sense in giving Corint any clue what was happening.

When he went upstairs, he took his pack out from under the bed and spread out its contents. He took up his most recent acquisition, a querulous flute of bone, its origin unknown, its surface spiderwebbed with fine cracks. Nackle said that one of the main emotions was fear, but that all fears came from a particular type, the fear of the world lest it hurt one. Ector put his lips to the mouthpiece and blew, so softly that it was less than a baby's first breath. The sound that emerged was sad and scared and resolute, but he could not narrow it down, because it was fear, he was sure of that, but the nuances in it were unfamiliar.

It occurred to him that if he fell in love, he would no doubt blunt his perceptions, undo all the careful work that he had undertaken to fine-tune his consciousness and make him the excellent artifact hunter he had become. But it didn't matter. He had a new purpose now.

He would write to his parents, tell them he had decided to settle in Halah. He would study to become a merchant, for what better way could there be to employ all the knowledge he had gathered in his wide-ranging quest? He was better traveled than the vast majority of his race, and he might as well use the fruits of that travel to earn a living that would make him a desirable partner. His parents would be bewildered but pleased; his grandparents less so of either, but equally ready to send him tokens of affectionate well-wishes in his new home: a blanket of knotted mushroom fiber and ceramic jars of fermented pickled cabbage.

He listened to the sounds of the inn all around. Someone in the room below him was walking back and forth, an impatient, thinking pace, and Ector wondered what might concern them. Downstairs was the noise of revelry and the beginnings of the dinner smells, wafts of scent that crept under his door curtain to speak to him of cinnamon and sage and browned butter with fragments of garlic sizzling in it.

He could scarcely wait for dinner, but he bided his time, went down only when he heard other footsteps descending.

The food was unimaginably good. Roots broke open to send up steam, their insides flecked with pepper, and a tangy, pickley sauce overlaid the fresh greens. The meat was unfamiliar, but another diner said it was a bird newly come to this level, migrated from somewhere down below.

"They say it means an Opening is coming soon," Ector's fellow diner said, nodding wisely. "There are always signs and portents."

Ector forked another bite of meat and ate it. It was delicious, soaked in a sauce unexpectedly sweet and savory all in the same mouthful. The savor thrilled through him, and he closed his eyes, trying to pick out every nuance of the spices.

When he opened them, he saw Corint and Trice together, talking.

Fear clamped his legs and arms, a sense of panic that ran through him like electricity, made him as unable to move as an abandoned puppet. And even as he stared across the room, helpless, Corint's eyes met his and his rival smiled, letting Ector see his own newly-chosen gender, rivals even in this.

He did not want to talk to him, but he had to. Surely Corint could be warned off, or appealed to, or bought off? Trice was not an artifact, after all.

But, as it turned out, Corint had other suspicions regarding her and artifacts.

"The food's the clue," he said to Ector over too much wine, hearty swallows of it following slivers of cheese. "Is that how you found her too?"

Ector had learned, long ago, that silence often elicited more information than you thought it would. To other people, it often implied that you knew much much more than you were saying, and this proved the case with Corint. "Of course it was," he said before Ector could fill in anything else. "How could anyone produce such food unless they had learned to appreciate the ingredients, to gather them together in a jigsaw of tastes that fit so smoothly together that you cannot tell where one leaves off and the next begins?" He sighed, and his breath rippled across the surface of the carved stone cup in front of him. "Imagine that such a pretty young woman could hold the key to such a thing! She must have found it somewhere. Oh course I became male, it's clearly the best way to gain her trust."

Relief washed through Ector. Corint wanted the artifact he thought Trice must have, not Trice herself and now that Ector considered it, of course that would be why the food at the inn was so extraordinary. In contemplating the artifact, Trice must have absorbed its lesson well, in order to create such dishes.

Despite all their past difficulties, the happiness that surged through him at this realization made him regard Corint, good old Corint, always reliable, always there, differently. He decided that honesty would be the best policy. He would be a new, changed being now, one who spoke the truth in a way worthy of the woman he adored.

"I will help you find the artifact," he said earnestly. "All I want is Trice." He felt a pang at the thought of an artifact in Corint's hands, he couldn't help that, it was old habit, but he pushed it aside. What he was seeking was much better.

Corint regarded him with a trace of suspicion that faded at the sincerity evident in Ector's face.

"Very well," he said. "Help me with that, and I will help you in turn."

True to his word, Ector broached the word of the artifact the next day while he and Trice were gathering pallid watercress from the river that spilled into the Tube near the village's entrance. He did so delicately. He didn't want her to think that he attributed her skill at cookery with some force outside herself; he must let her know that he acknowledged it as part of herself, intrinsic. She had cultivated the sensibility that allowed her to cook so through no-doubt unconscious contemplation of the artifact (for she had avowed no knowledge whatsoever of Nackle when Ector had brought up the topic the day before.)

But when he edged towards the subject, she skittered away, sought refuge in all manner of topics: the mating habits of crawdads, the sounds of dying unicorns, the secret name of the Nihilex Queen and whether that entity remained the same person from year to year.

At length he gave up. She seemed relieved.

That night in his room, listening to the sounds of the village through the open window, hearing distant snores and stony echoes, he thought about when all his heart had been given to artifact hunting, less than a week ago.

Those days seemed as distant as though they had fallen down the Tube like an addled suicide, leaving only their confused and water-colored ghosts behind. He remembered the fever of finding an object that completed a series, the glossy joy that could color days on end, at least until the itch for some other part of the chain drove him elsewhere. Should he give what he had collected already, what he carried with him, to Corint? His fellow was one of the few who could appreciate the nuances of some of the objects; to do anything else was to waste them, surely, and if he kept his collection, wouldn't it just nag at him to go back to it, like the wine kept for sickness and cooking eats at an alcoholic through mere knowledge of its location?

He would wait. He would see.

He played his flute long into the night.

As the days wore on, he began to think Trice was some sort of Guardian; whatever artifact inspired her cooking was also her hereditary charge. Such things were not unknown; many of the artifacts that Nackle described had guardians of one kind or another.

If this were the case, to get the object and persuade his rival away, he must ask her to betray her order. He agonized over the ethics of the situation—what would Nackle have done, under what emotion would this worry have been placed, and what sort of artifact could possibly evoke it, other than the living one that was Trice, built of sinew and bone, of blood and hair and hands and eyes?

She knew he was wooing her, she acknowledged it, and let him speak of love and what he had to offer. But let the slightest syllable close to artifact cross his lips and she was on to other subjects, grown cold and distant one time, flurried and a mass of distraction the next.

He put on weight, eating deep of her dishes every morning, every evening. His pants were tight, and he discarded his belt entirely, then went to the tailor and ordered two new sets of clothes for everyday. He studied at the merchant's guild, working towards his license, and continued to stay at the village inn, despite the lack of economy the choice represented, since he could have (and was offered the chance to, more than once) rented a room in someone's house.