He Is Greatly Mistaken Who Considers Mere Disapproval Sufficient To Maintain Society's Frail Edifice
“It is,” Dirant confirmed. “There is the matter of obtaining permission from Stanops Bodan-Tin, and some awkwardness exists because we cannot with honesty aver Eizesl Kair is involved. Moreover, never having seen the Stanops in dudgeon myself, I am free to draw my own sketch of the scene. It is suitable from what I have heard of Drastlif's great to include in a novel of horrific encounters.”
“What are we talking about? Is someone in trouble?” Takki shook some chilly droplets from a clump of blue-green fur while she trotted over.
“It remains to be determined. There are cultural factors. What is your opinion, Eizesl Nein-Cadops-Bain? Eizesl Bavan-Ston?”
Loigwin offered his first by his right as an armiger. “Your guess is not a fantasy to judge by what is said of the Stanops. A misunderstanding, or even an understanding true but unwise, is best avoided. I'll venture to repay the honor of this invitation with a favor, and that's all there is to it. Eizesl, will you inform the Stanops of our departure soon taken and soon ended?”
“Gladly so, Eizesl.” Petarun Bavan-Ston sounded just as glad as he claimed to be.
The doctor hustled off to the Bodan-Tin residence, leaving to Loigwin the business of armigers. In furtherance of that, he said, “I'm going to be a bit presumptuous and make accord the excuse for an audacious act by riding to Steiraf and requesting entry at the very wall. The road is shorter with company, they say.”
“That is an invitation for us,” Dirant clarified for Takki. “I recommend we accept.”
“Oh, I'm sure that's the right thing to do then. Do I have time to stash this first?” She shook the clump a few more times and wrung it out, necessary precautions before she dropped it off in a house she did not herself own.
The three agreed that Dirant and Takki would give Loigwin ten minutes to make all relevant preparations including the acquisition of horses. Two of them wondered at the third's optimism, which again confused that third for a time before he remembered the hardships of the common man and tapped the shield woven into his jacket.
“Ah,” Dirant said.
“Even here?” asked Takki. “We're in Koshat Dreivis, not, um, Imslif, was it?”
“It will be Imslif at any time you visit, but until then call it rather Morosiltif, the city of sorrow. But yes, even here.”
Somewhere, sometime, a Drastlifar of high station overestimated the advantages of his position, but on that day Loigwin waited with three horses fully outfitted at the appointed time and in fact rather earlier, thereby proving both the influence of the major families and the key difference in attitude between his tribe and the Dvanjchtlivs. How he planned to ride on Steiraf and offer immediate battle before word or succor could reach it with only one set of steeds, no Dvanjchtliv could figure. Clearly his arrangements made no practical sense.
The slow, Drastlifanly ride southwest past the fields and trees of Koshat Dreivis into the trees and fields of Steiraf, not that they could tell the difference without a map and surveyor's tools, gave Loigwin and Dirant time to inform Takki of the journey's purpose and discuss their plans.
“Please tell me if I make a mistake, Eizesl.”
“Should you do so, Sajaitin, everyone will agree it was a fault of my own for misinforming you.”
There was probably a standard courteous response to that sort of statement, but as Dirant did not know it, he went straight on through. “Is it our hope that the Kair family will permit us to interrogate young Gretlin in order to avoid a dispute with the Bodan-Tins, and therefore there will not be any need for us to say anything about an attempted murder, or?”
“We may hope for that and not earn reproach. Provided they are not implicated in the conspiracy, the opportunity to discuss their infraction with a third party when by right the Bodan-Tins may impose the penalty against them is a debt joyful to owe and to redeem. That they will make the wayward eizesl available is no chance but rather a certainty unless the heavy winter pressed hard on their brains and made them mad. Suppose they are involved as a family and not a lone eizesl, and there is hope yet to buoy us, for it is all trade with them whether legal or otherwise. It is ever their policy to ignore the Council, else long since theirs was a seat at it, as any of a political mind will attest.”
As much as Loigwin's words did to elucidate the present situation, he caused a new question to form in the minds of the northerners. Takki put it forth. “This . . . heavy winter. Do you mean winter is always heavy, or that this one is heavier than usual? I don't mean to sound incredulous. It's just that I would think it's late spring if I went by the weather.”
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She leveled her halberd at the flourishing foliage which even at that season demanded to be trimmed or hacked down entirely by the laborers the riders passed. There was also a gopher being pursued by yet more Drastlifars bent on gathering valuable hole intelligence. Takki and Dirant considered their point proved, but Loigwin looked unaware an argument had begun.
“Always winter weighs heavy, Seifis.” So far as he was concerned, nothing more need be said.
On that topic at least. He could be persuaded to give a preview of their destination. “Do you see how the land rises here so that no sea of pebbles and sand meets the salt-laden field where graze the scaled and finned? Further on, the cliff hides grottoes visible only to ships and less visible still when contrivances are used which some report are. I've never been here before, let me say. Steiraf is a small town and its harbor more welcoming but a little than Dreivis's beach, but the Kairs like it well for reasons their own.”
Many others, including, Dirant admitted, himself, would have laid on their pointedly clever commentary in case anyone failed to notice. He would not have rated Loigwin Nein-Cadops-Bain among the ranks of the subtle before, but perhaps the entire Onerid situation had shown him too much Loigwin and not enough Nein-Cadops-Bain. The reverse was also possible.
Steiraf, they saw when they reached it, possessed defenses, and it might have been mistaken perception on Dirant's part that the walls looked higher than those of Koshat Dreivis, though Takki also commented to that effect. She further noted, “They have platforms behind them, too. You can tell by where the sentries are.”
“Ah, I do see a hat over to the left. Perhaps the red feather is a signal and not a fetching accessory.”
“All fashion is a signal, Ressi. I didn't need to tell you that, but we have to talk about something while Eizesl Nein-Cadops-Bain gets us inside.”
“That is why we are speaking in Adaban, or?”
“Yes. Now we look like implacable Adaban bodyguards. You could be a Distorter even though you couldn't be. Um, did that make sense?”
“It may have, though I admit to confusion over the impressions people form of me. No two agree so far as I can determine except in their unfavorable nature.”
“That means there's a lot to you, Ressi.”
The guards, unable to make so important a decision themselves, sent a messenger into town. That messenger never returned, and the man who came in his place startled the visitors. His jacket had sewn on it a black field below a blue sky and a red and green whale facing each other as if to test the endurance of their skulls, which represented, the foreigners presumed and the native had memorized along with his letters, the Kairs. Did the relatively simple emblem indicate a lack of ennobling history, a lineage so ancient that it recalled times when they needed fewer adornments to distinguish families, or a refusal to engage in the opportunistic splittings and combinings of families employed by the ancestors of most councilors? The second and third, Loigwin told them later. At the time, they comprehended only the three thin lines which traced the shield's edge. The head of the Kairs himself had come to welcome a son of the Nein-Cadops-Bains.
His towering prestige aside, the head reminded Dirant of his oldest brother, but only because of the glasses. This man looked friendlier and more approachable for one thing. Also he was a Drastlifar, complete with beard. As far as age, he looked old enough to have produced a Gretlin and young enough to get out a few more if he applied himself to the task with vigor. He wore a red cummerbund which, whatever the fashion experts might say on the subject, decently complimented his jacket of darkest blue.
While the usual cloud of helpful fellows surrounded so eminent a man, a different layer of society breathed it forth. The friends of the Bodan-Tins at least tried to appear to be respectable, hard-working, and well-off members of the skilled professions; goldsmith Isarx Tomein was a model of the type. The Kair supporters, meanwhile, mostly looked to be people who, at some point in their lives, had been forced to eat rats to survive. They had recovered from the ordeal of course. Probably their Muscle, Verve, and Sticktoitiveness saw them through, whereas Coordination and Panache favored the Koshat crowd and were loved by it in return. Those were all superficial observations, but Dirant felt confident about them.
The Kair head executed the standard maneuver of pulling Loigwin Nein-Cadops-Bain through the gate by means of the double handshake. “I thought today to be a grand day, but I didn't know anything. It's so much grander now that you're here, Eizesl. Kargin Kair. And you?” If he had needed to ask, he would not have said eizesl or been there at all, but etiquette imposes certain requirements upon a conversation.
“Loigwin Nein-Cadops-Bain, Beran, and Eizesl Rasto Takki Upki's daughter, Seifis Millim Takki Atsa, is here.” That Beran was one of the honorifics learned by the northerners since their arrival in Drastlif. It meant “lucky,” and if any profession preferred luck to any other quality, it was sailors. Kargin's polite smile widened and deepened at receiving that address as he moved on to Dirant.
“Dirant Rikelta,” said Dirant Rikelta.
Before Kargin Kair could call Dirant Eizesl, which while not exactly rude was at the same time not the most suitable term, Loigwin hurried to explain his presence and drop a hint together. “I thought someone not attached to the Bodan-Tins might be an aid, and contrary to the groundless fears of a timid man afraid of all the world, Sajaitin Rikelta and this Seifis accepted my request. They say wool and thorns alike come in masses, and it's just the same here. If I'd known you were here, I never would have worried at all.” What was so aidful about them, or intimidating for that matter, Dirant did not quite understand, but Kargin nodded one of those slow nods that showed how serious the nodder was.
“But I'm grateful you did. It's nothing for us to think of our welfare, but for you to, it's almost too much. Why not come this way?” Kargin's lackeys took charge of the horses, and Dirant then mused he ought to have posed a few questions earlier about the likelihood of their being murdered, their bodies never found. He might have done so in a cunning way such as asking Loigwin how often the Nein-Cadops-Bains massacred unsolicited visitors. Monthly? Weekly? It was too late for that, and Loigwin looked neither worried nor like the sort of person who practiced philosophy so thoroughly that he no longer feared death, viewing it as a mere biological process.