In the Way

Stone struck Rishi’s heel before he had finished the step.

He bent his knee, caught Maeril’s weight against his forearm, and turned so the pack would clear the wall. Something hot splashed his sleeve. A metal wheel shrieked beside his foot.

“Move!” someone shouted.

Grim hit him from behind.

Rishi took a short step forward into a narrow delivery passage. The wall opposite the arch was almost within reach. Wet canvas sagged overhead and brushed his scalp. The air smelled of frying fat and sour wool, thick enough to taste after Blackstaff Tower’s cold dust.

“Out of the arch! Deliveries!”

A porter stood behind a handcart piled above his head with narrow wooden crates. Only his eyes and a pair of broad, blunt horns showed around the load. One wheel pressed against Rishi’s boot.

Rishi brought his staff upright. He turned Maeril clear of the cart, then moved against the wall himself. Behind Grim, the last pale edge of their passage snapped out.

The porter shoved forward. “Some of us work here.”

“We had hoped to arrive somewhere with a little space,” Maeril said.

“Pay for some.”

The cart rattled past.

Rishi watched its load tilt. His hand rose toward the upper crate, then stopped as a strap pulled tight and held it. The porter knew the balance of his own goods. He continued without looking back.

Across the passage, a customer argued with an elderly woman in a stained apron over a basket on her counter. The customer raised a hand. Rishi checked the blade at the customer’s hip. The hand came down on a scale. The blade stayed in its sheath. The woman shoved a weight across the counter and resumed the argument in a language that sounded like pebbles poured into a dish.

No one was attacking them.

A shoulder struck Grim’s pack. He turned, already angry, but the person responsible had passed beneath an awning and was shouting a price at someone else.

Rishi lowered his staff’s butt to the stone. He had space to stand if he kept his elbows close. That was all the passage offered.

Maeril had gone back to the arch.

She set two fingers against its left upright, where the rough stone had been polished by passing loads. Her head angled so her living eye could follow the curve overhead.

Rishi saw a little chalk still caught in the crease of her hand. “Anything?”

She drew her fingers away and held them a moment in the air.

Behind the arch stood an ordinary service door, propped open with half a brick. A woman carried a sack through it and disappeared into a storage room. The room contained barrels. Rishi could see three of them and the edge of a fourth.

Maeril touched the frame again, more lightly.

“It has finished being ours.”

Her hand fell. She rubbed the chalk against her thumb and checked that her pack had survived the crossing.

Grim reached over his shoulder to feel for his book. The buckle still held. He looked at the arch, at the barrels beyond it, and then at the people passing without interest.

“Good. Alive and obstructing trade.”

“You prefer the alternative?” Maeril asked.

“I preferred the part where I understood who was allowed to threaten me.”

A kettle screamed somewhere behind the wet canvas. Rishi turned toward it just as a small painted door opened in the wall beside his shoulder. A man stepped out carrying two fish by their tails. Rishi drew back to let him pass.

The man shut the painted door. Rishi glanced along the wall to the two corners of the building. The room he had glimpsed was wider than the building itself.

He looked away before another passerby could strike his staff.

At the end of the passage, a thin figure floated above a crooked sign. Symbols formed and faded beside its head while it worked a tool into the sign’s bracket. Nobody below answered.

Maeril shifted her pack away from the crowd.

“Elisa?” Rishi asked quietly.

She searched the moving bodies, favoring her right side. A flash of warm light passed beneath the canvas, and both of them followed it. It belonged to a brazier being carried on a pole. No mimir bobbed above it. No familiar voice complained about the smoke.

“No trace I can separate from this.”

Rishi searched faces anyway. Elisa could have stood ten paces away and been hidden by the traffic. The thought made him want height, a clear line of sight, a moment in which nobody moved.

The porter returned with his empty cart.

“Still here?”

Grim looked down at the wheel. “We’ve barely arrived.”

“Then get on with it.”

Maeril caught Rishi’s sleeve before he could make room in the same direction again. She pointed toward a gap between two hanging rugs.

“Through there.”

He went first, holding the staff close. Grim followed Maeril with his pack turned sideways and one hand over its fastening. Behind them, the cart took back the space where their only door from Waterdeep had been.