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Eviction Conniption
Posted: 04 May 2005 09:29 PM |
Entering the Unicorn, Salt slid up to the counter and addressed an uncomfortable and shifty-looking Cale Adams. Exhausted, Salt smacked his lips together, dry as they were from the road. He had been traveling a great deal, for ten days at least. The dust of the road clung to his garments and dulled their saffron hues, as had the sun and the rain. The sole of his right shoe gave way five miles outside of Midor – he limped as he entered the city – and his toenails scratched the wood floor of the Unicorn as he went. Dropping his traveling bag and loosening his scarf, Salt was cut off mid-query by the offer of a refreshing beverage.
Cale declined payment. “Take it, my friend. Quench your thirst.”
“Thank you Cale. Some sustenance would also be welcome!” The old man put a pewter tankard to his lips and drank a cool frothy ale in gulps. Strain gave way to relaxation and soon thoughts of calves livers and raw onions, boiled fresh peas, new potatoes mashed with cream and garlic, and something sweet distracted him thoroughly.
Cale tapped a finger on the countertop and sucked his usually well-groomed moustache.
It took Salt several moments to notice. While Cale sucked, he sat and with some effort brought his right foot across his lap. “Ah, look at this. They are ruined…” He tugged and dropped his foot back to the floor, and then looked at the innkeeper, waiting.
“I held your room for as long as I could,” Cale said slowly, “but…”
With that he shrugged and showed his empty palms.
“What do you mean?” Salt said with an ale-foam moustache on his lip. But, gradually he realized that his accounts were at least five days in arrears. Less than 250 coins weighed in his purse, and he would have to hock some of his property if he was to afford the rather steep rent that Cale asked. Those powerfully enchanted bracers in his trunk would cover his room and board for a month or more. So Salt thought, as he considered what the innkeeper was saying.
“I have already let out your room,” Cale said firmly. “I do not hold rooms. Rent is due when rent is due!”
Salt flew straight to the counter. “Do not trifle with me!” he demanded.
“Rent is due when rent is due!” Cale repeated loudly.
Salt shouted, “Fool! I demand that you give me shelter!” When Cale began to shake his head the magician continued to shout. “Where is my property?!! My things! The contents of my trunk! You will bring them to me, here and now!”
“I WILL CALL THE RIGHTEOUS SWORDS!” Cale bellowed, arm extended fully to point an accusing finger at Salt. “This is a city of laws, and it is YOU who are the fool!”
Kara fell to the floor and rolled under a couch. The raid had terrified her, and she shook at the mention of the red knights who stormed through the inn not long ago.
Furrows piled upon Salt’s forehead, rolling up over his scalp and down the back of his neck. He whispered an incantation, a spell that would freeze the innkeeper to the spot and hold him like a statue. The spell, however, he had not prepared. Anyway, he was too frustrated to concentrate. He tried to calculate the loss. Several weeks of alchemical experiments, enchanting oils and rare essences, and the glassware he had struggled to accumulate…a crossbow that served him against kobolds and goblins, and brought down game to feed him on the road…and worst of all, precious artifacts of Lynaeum, including a great tome and a weapon inscribed with characters that would help him to decode it.
His notes on Aristi!
These traveled with him. There on the floor, in his traveling bag, was the wooden portfolio containing his notes, and the larger volume into which his discoveries were chronicled in narrative style. And of course, the book in which he inscribed his spells and the precious papers upon which he could recopy them. Nonetheless, this loss was incalculable.
Cale revealed his defenses. “You will not conjure against me, Salt Sower…I know what you do here, I know who your friends are and I know what was in your trunk. You pry into things that you should not. Yes… you talk with that old guardsman Edrik, talk politics, and no one can discuss politics in the White City without coming under suspicion. And in your case, suspicion is probably justified. Outsider! Unbeliever!”
Salt sputtered.
“I will have no more trouble in this inn!” Cale finished. Kicking Salt’s bag, he insisted, “Get out! Go now, or I will summon the guard to remove you.”
Salt silenced him by slapping his palm loudly on the countertop. Gathering his dignity, he picked up his satchel, turned on his road-worn heel, and strode unsteadily out of the Unicorn. He snatched a rye bread and a half-wheel of cheese on the way out. |
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about dying."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means lying in the ground with dirt on your face and holding your breath forever."
-Burt Reynolds, "The End" |
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Death in a Pan of Water
Posted: 25 Jun 2005 06:32 PM |
A frigid wind blew open the casement windows in the room that Salt occupied at the Icy Vale Inn. They were glazed in thick green glass like frozen pond water, and Salt had opened the wooden shutters in order to shave his face by the feeble tinted light that they admitted. His good razor had been taken from his room during an absence – such is boarding house life, the life of an elderly bachelor – and now he shaved with a razor hammered from bronze until it was paper thin, and sharpened with a smooth flat pebble from a stream near Lake Ladriel.
The casement flapped as he tried to catch it and close it, and a quarrel of glass fractured showering green slivers into the dirty snow below. Even with the window closed up tight, there was a serious threat of freezing. Using a woolen blanket he draped the window, cutting out the draft and casting the room into deep shadows.
The intensity of the cold outside was striking. Frost had formed on the bronze razor still held in his hand. He set it down somewhat fearfully. The paper-thin razor was sold to him by a neighbor at the Inn, another older fellow named Warnick. Warnick was a tinker, but materials were hard to come by in Icy Vale, and work was even harder to find. Moirin at the general store wanted nothing to do with his wares of flimsy and second-rate recycled metals. Bent by the years and living on the last few coins in his savings, he was three months behind with the rent on his room, and Salt wondered why he hadn’t been thrown out into the snow to perish. Surely, he thought to himself, it would only take a few moments in this cold for old Warnick to find sleep, and for good. But the innkeeper seemed to like the man, and allowed him to work off part of his rent sharpening knives, repairing lanterns and glazing windows, and so on.
Salt bundled his bedclothes around himself as the wind whistled through the hole in the casement glass. There was no hearth in his room, and he checked and found the coals in each of three bed warmers had gone cold since he retired the night before. Cranky and impatient, he left his room, moved to the end of the corridor, and climbed down the stairs with deliberation.
An hour later found Salt in the common room of the Icy Vale Inn, wrapped in some kind of stinking hide with the wool turned inwards, and his feet soaking in a pan of hot water. And still he could not get warm!
As he sat, intensely awake and aware of his discomfort, there came a gentle knocking at the disused door to the inn. His eyes went to the door and his ears pricked up tensely. He heard the building shake and clitter in the driving wind, and ice crystals moving along outside in wispy suspended drifts. Rags had been stuffed around the cracks in that disused door, and he had never seen anyone come or go that way, nor truly ever seen it opened, and an uncanny sensation resulted from this knocking. He wondered for a moment if he hadn’t gotten it wrong, thinking Is it always that door that allows me to come and go? Has it been that door all along, and the other one boarded tightly? The puzzle jammed up his mind in its depthless possibilities. And so, he stared at the door until the knocking came again.
“Go around!” shouted the innkeeper loudly.
The knocking was repeated more gently, and was delivered with an unintelligible bleat, a whining, feeble complaint that none could make out. Then the bleating could be heard above the wind, moving around the side of the building to the entrance that Salt now realized was in fact the one he generally used.
The door swung open, admitting a cutting wind that blew the flames from the hearth to low blue horizontality. A grey cloaked figure shuffled in bow-legged, and very slowly turned to shut up the portal. Salt saw as he approached that it was the tinker, Warnick. Strips of cloth were wrapped around his feet, the toes on his right foot showing black and dead. He would most definitely lose them. His arms were extended from his sides as though he waded through waist-deep water, and his face was ashy and expressionless. In particular Salt could see grey spots on his faded cheeks, and his nose was a bloodless yellow. “Just come from Moirin’s place-“ the tinker began, and then he sputtered with weak dry coughs. He continued to shuffle as he coughed, moving slowly towards the stairway that climbed to his rented room upstairs.
“Tinker!” called the innkeeper with some concern, but Warnick just shuffled away stiffly, seeming unable to lower his arms. He used both hands to clumsily open the latch and allow himself upstairs. Salt shook his head and stepped from the pan of warm water. In that moment, he felt very alone. He reached between his feet and carefully lifted the pan of water to a long wooden table, and seated himself in front of it. It only took a moment for him to focus, and then he looked beneath the surface.
Of course he saw Warnick, stiff and frozen in his bed.
His hand automatically stirred the water, as though this would dispel the knowledge of what would pass that very night. He sat feeling very lonely, and decided in that moment that he would leave Icy Vale before the time came when he would see his own death in this footbath or the next one. |
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about dying."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means lying in the ground with dirt on your face and holding your breath forever."
-Burt Reynolds, "The End" |
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