Read Whitemantle for Free Online Page B

shambles. He followed on in silence, watching as Gwydion stopped here and there at corners to search out strange marks that had been left chalked on posts or scratched into beams. They seemed to guide him like secret clues. Often he tasted the air for spell-working tell-tales and magical resonances. And when he found them he quietly danced, undoing the dismal tokens of bone and blood that his rival had hidden in so many nooks about the City.
    ‘They do much mischief,’ Gwydion said, holding up his latest find. It was a severed finger and a cockerel’s claw that had been bound together with a silken thread and put high up on a ledge. ‘This and others like it overlook many of the City’s crossroads. They power the spells that Maskull has trussed about the commerce of the streets. Six or seven of them will have to be rooted out if the stock market here is to flourish again!’
    A pack of Fellows watched from a little way off. They slunk away from the wizard’s eye as he turned to face them, then dissolved among the crowds. Will was amazed to see so manySightless Ones walking openly and almost at liberty within the City. They were always in groups of at least three, sometimes led by a sighted guide. Fellows from different chapter houses dressed in different coloured robes, and there seemed to be a certain coolness, or perhaps even rivalry, between them. Will was reminded that although called ‘Sightless Ones’, they possessed a strange, groping sense that served in place of vision, and the more he walked the City streets, the more he began to fear there were those among them who had already identified him as the defiler of Verlamion and were passing the news to a higher authority.
    ‘Come!’ Gwydion whispered sharply. ‘You do right to beware the Sightless Ones, Willand, for they do not forgive and they are surely hunting for you. But do not gawp so plainly at them. See how they tilt their heads at you! Mind you do not give your thoughts away so easily.’
    Will did as he was told and guarded his face as the wizard took them past narrow alleys that stank ripely in the heat. There were many beggars and peddlers and barrow-men here. Gwydion said they would do well to get quickly across the Wartling, the main Slaver road that cut diagonally through the City. They passed down thronging lanes, and in time came to another market. There was much that Will had never seen before, and more for which he saw no good reason. The street sellers offered too many wares that were unneedful – dubious foods, badly made flutes, sweetmeats, vain hats, posies of wilting flowers, false charms, and little songbirds confined in tiny cages, too distraught to do anything but hop back and forth and chirrup warnings to one another.
    Nor could Will’s own talent find silent rest. Threat and malign intent bubbled among the press of bodies, and there was such a cacophony of human weakness in the air that it pained him to feel it all. He was relieved when the wizard steered him away from the Cheap and down a lane towardsthe wide river where the brown-grey waters sparkled in the sun. Ships from beyond the seas rode at anchor, loading and unloading their cargoes at Queenhythe. There were the smells of faraway places here – salt and spice and spiritous liquors. Oddly, it made him feel homesick, though he could not say why.
    ‘In the days of the First Men a great burgh stood here,’ Gwydion told them. ‘It was known as Ludnaborg by the seafarers, and was the greatest and most famous of all the burghs in the Land of Albion. Then came the Desolation, when giants and dragons ruled here, but afterwards came Brea, out of a far land. A descendant of Abaris and son of Frey, he built the Wooden City after the style of Trihan, which was the place of his birth. And he called it “New Trihan” or in his own speech “Trinh Niobhan” and that was eleven hundred years before the founding of the Fellowship of the Sightless Ones.’
    Will looked up at the