Abhorrent Practices - Book 1

Chapter 2.3 - Tremayne (Scene 3: Full Disclosure)

By midday the market square was alive with shoppers bustling about their business, forming queues at the shops and crowding around the stalls, now festooned with banners, pennants and flags of every size and shape; mostly orange and blue, the colours of Tremayne's city crest, but punctuated here and there by the greens, purples and reds of the banners flown by foreign traders.

Perrick was in a good mood now. Around him traders from a dozen different island states barked, cajoled and entreated potential customers to examine their goods. This was what he lived for.

He'd been doing a brisk trade all morning, and had even managed to sell a particularly ugly vase he'd been been forced to acquire back on Sharrow's Bluff some three months earlier. The farmer who'd sold it to him had convinced himself it was the archeological find of the century and wouldn't provide the Jennie with the food supplies she needed, until Perrick had made him an offer for the vase. He'd been trying to sell the wretched thing ever since and now, finally, a local antiques dealer had given him thirty-six shillings for it, more than twice the sum he'd paid. That trade alone had almost banished the distasteful memory of the woman who'd purchased the witchglobe earlier in the day.

"All the way from the exotic String Islands," sang Perrick to the elderly man poring over a bundle of yellowing sheets of parchment. They were tied together at one corner by a ribbon of black lace. "Exquisite, aren't they?"

"Are they genuine?" grunted the old man, holding the pages up to his face, scrutinising the simple black illustrations closely. He had his nose pressed against a drawing of a landscape, a grassy plain lying scorched under a setting sun.

"Can't you tell?" enthused Perrick. "Just look at the penmanship. You won't find artistry like that anywhere in this hemisphere." He hesitated. A member of the City Guard was approaching the stall-holder to his right. Keeping the guard on the edge of his field of vision, he turned his attention back to the old man. "Every page a masterpiece in miniature. But you already know that, I can tell. A distinguished gentleman like yourself ... You have an unsurpassed appreciation of the fine arts."

The old man raised his eyes briefly, exchanged a glance with Perrick and turned his gaze back to the yellowed pages in his hands.

"You got a permit to trade here?" The guard stood before Perrick's neighbour, a produce trader, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

"Again? Really?" The trader threw his hands out in a gesture of exasperation. "You know damn well I've got a licence. I showed it to you people just yesterday. And the day before. Is it because I'm from Brael? Is that what this is about?"

The guard tightened his grip on his sword.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience, sir. But I still need to see your papers. It's nothing personal. We'll be asking to see all the traders' licences."

A young servant girl handling the vegetables on the trader's stall looked up. She wiped her hands on her apron, already streaked with the grime and grease of a hard morning's work in the kitchens of one of the Hillside mansions.

"Is it about the Grand Marshall?" she asked. "Down in the Shanties, they're saying he's dead. That his nurse found him. Is that true?" The guard shifted uncomfortably under the woman's questioning.

"I can't comment on that, miss. Our investigation is ..."

"So, he is dead, then?" The merest hint of a smile flickered across the trader's face. He wouldn't be shedding any tears over Harlan's death but here, in the centre of Tremayne, wasn't the safest place to show the sense of satisfaction he felt. Like many Braelishmen, he held Harlan responsible for so much of his people's suffering. "Well, he'd been ill for a long time, I suppose."