Читать онлайн «The Face in the Window»

Taniel stepped down the gangplank of the merchant galleon into his exile.

He pulled at the collar of his cut-across coat and unbuttoned the front, letting it hang loose as he hurried to the end of the dock. He had not expected the Fatrastan spring to be so hot and humid and was eager to find a cool pub where he could hide from the sun and wait.

More than a month by ship from Adro, then another two weeks touring the Fatrastan coastline, and Taniel didn’t care if he never saw a ship again. The quarters had been too cramped, and the only thing to keep him occupied had been drawing in his sketchbook and shooting seagulls. The view of the coastline had been nice enough, but Taniel was a soldier and a powder mage, not some foppish noble’s son. The landscape meant little to him beyond defensible positions.

This was the frontier-a wild place with immense trees that had never seen a woodsman’s ax, red-headed natives that would kill you at a wrong glance, and immense open spaces where you might not see another soul for weeks.

It might have been exciting, if Taniel wasn’t so angry with his father for sending him here in the first place. A ‘tour,’ Taniel’s father had called it. Time for him to see a little bit of the world between terms at the university.

Taniel saw it more like an exile. It would be half a year until he saw his fiancé and his homeland again. Half a year before he was back with his friends, skipping out on university classes to float bullets with Sabon, or spending nights with Vlora. It was going to be a long six months.

New Adopest, the city beyond the dock, bustled with excitement that Taniel couldn’t quite place. People spoke in hushed whispers, and boys and men were running back and forth. Everyone seemed to have a rifle or musket.

He’d seen the whole of New Adopest from the water, and it wasn’t immense. Perhaps fifty thousand souls. The docks took up more space than the city did. All around him ships were unloading immigrants or taking on raw goods to ship back to the Nine. The city had been founded by Adran colonists over a hundred years ago, but then the Fatrastan territories had been sold to the Kez less than six months ago. Taniel couldn’t imagine that made the colonists very happy.

He caught sight of a bronze statue of King Ipille of Kez, standing thirty feet high to look out over the harbor. As he watched, a young man climbed the base of the statue and dropped his pants to piss all over Ipille’s feet. Taniel chuckled at that, and waited for the Kez gendarmes to appear out of the crowd and chase the man off.

None did.

Perhaps it was a festival day. That would keep the gendarmes occupied, and would certainly explain all of the excitement around the city. His father had talked about colonial towns having a certain vibrancy that the big cities of the Nine lacked. Maybe that was it.

“Taniel! Taniel!”