Chatper 24 - Town of Haghl
Getting into the town went smoother than I expected.
Turns out Grann was well-known to the gate guards in silver armors; two demons, both of them built like they'd been assembled from spare parts and bad intentions, with curled horns that caught the light and expressions that said they'd seen everything and were bored by most of it. The moment they spotted Grann, one of them straightened and the other broke into something that looked almost like a grin.
Words were exchanged. Hands were shaken with the particular firmness of men who respected each other and didn't need to say so. Less than a minute later, we were waved through, bypassing a line of travelers that stretched back a good fifty meters.
"Bwahaha," Grann said to nobody in particular, already walking. "Good lads. Welcome to Town of Haghl![1]"
Lyra watched the whole exchange with bright eyes. "We're in!"
"We're in," I agreed, still looking at the guards as we passed.
I'd seen different races before. Ytval had its share of beastfolks & beastkins travellers passing through from time to time, and the city of Fritz had been genuinely diverse. But this was different. Fritz felt organized, sorted, like a place that had decided what it was. This town felt like it hadn't decided anything and was fine with that. Port towns near continental borders had a way of collecting everything the world produced and leaving it all in one place, and this one was no exception.
Demons with horns of every shape. Some curled tight like rams, others sweeping back like a ship's prow. Beastfolk with ears flattened against their heads in the crowd noise or tails held carefully out of foot traffic. Elves moving through the press with that particular quality of appearing unbothered by things that bothered everyone else. Humans everywhere, of course, doing what humans did in crowds: looking for something, selling something, arguing about something, eating something while doing all three.
The smell hit me first; salt air and fish from the docks somewhere beyond the rooftops, woodsmoke from a dozen cooking fires, something sweet from a stall selling glazed pastries, and underneath all of it, the particular smell of too many living things compressed into too small a space. Not unpleasant. Just a lot.
The noise was constant. Not chaotic exactly, but layered, conversations bleeding into each other, the thud of cargo being moved, animals, wheels on cobblestone, someone somewhere hammering something with great dedication.
Lyra's head was on a swivel. I could tell she was trying to look at everything simultaneously and finding this deeply satisfying.
Grann stopped almost immediately.
A food stall to our left, stacked with cuts of raw meat so fresh they were still glistening under the cloth awning. He studied them with the focused appreciation of a man who had just spent a week eating his own cooking.
"Hello there, young blood," he said to the stall keeper, a beastfolk woman with a fox's ears and the manner of someone who had been selling meat since before Grann was born. "How much for that cut there—"
And that was the last I heard of him for a while, because Lyra grabbed my arm.
"Look!" She yanked me sideways toward a row of market stalls pressed against the far wall, her grip leaving no room for negotiation. "Kyro, those swords!"
I stumbled after her, every step I took made cluttering noise thanks to my backpack.
The stall she'd fixed on was tucked between a spice merchant and a seller of rope, which was already an odd placement. The display was a collection of mismatched blades hung on wooden pegs and propped in barrels of sand, nothing organized, nothing labeled, as though someone had emptied a room somewhere and put a price sign in front of it.
The merchant behind the counter was an old man, human, with the kind of face that had clearly once been untrustworthy and had only gotten more practiced at it over the decades. He wore too many layers for the weather, which I noticed immediately, and his eyes had the quality of moving slightly faster than the rest of his face, like they were checking things the rest of him was pretending not to care about.
He was also, I realized after a moment, watching Lyra's sword before she'd said a single word to him.
"Would you like to take a look, little one?" he said, warm as a hearthstone. The smile reached everything except his eyes, which stayed exactly where they'd been: on the sheath at Lyra's hip.
I felt something register in my chest the way it sometimes did with bad smells—before I'd consciously identified the problem.
"Me?" Lyra looked around, as though he might mean someone else.
"You, yes." He gestured expansively at his stall. "I have excellent pieces. Rare pieces. Things you won't find in those big noisy shops down the lane." He said it with the tone of a man who considered himself misunderstood by a world of fools. "Of course, I notice you already carry a blade yourself..."
"Yeah!" Lyra brightened immediately and reached back for the hilt. "My teacher gave it to me. It's decent at best, but it does the job—"
I caught her wrist.
"Kyro?" She raised an eyebrow.
I leaned in and kept my voice low. "He's been looking at your sword since before we stopped."
"So? He's a sword merchant."
"His stall has three broken crossbows, a dagger that's missing its tip, and what I'm fairly certain is a butter knife on a decorative peg." I glanced past her shoulder at the display. "Also, look at the shops down there."
About thirty meters further down, two proper armament stalls were doing brisk business, their displays full of customers handling merchandise and asking questions. Compared to them, this stall had exactly one customer, which was us, and we hadn't chosen it so much as been maneuvered into stopping in front of it.
"Lyra," I said, "why do you think he's all the way over here, away from the other weapon sellers?"
"Because rent is cheaper on this side?" she said.
"Because nobody who knows anything about swords comes to this side." I stated the obvious.
She sighed with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "Mom says don't judge a book by its cover."
"Mom also taught us arithmetic and you didn't listen to that either."
"Shut up or I'll break your jaw." she said casually, without heat, and turned back to the merchant.
I watched as she, despite everything, began to draw the sword from its sheath. The merchant's expression did something subtle; a small, satisfied settling, like a man who had been holding a breath and could now let it go.
"May I take a look?" he asked.
"Suit yourself—"
"Lyra."
"Kyro, honestly, it'll be fine." She handed it over the counter. "There. Just a look."
The old man received it with both hands and the careful reverence of someone who handles rare artifacts, which immediately told me he'd done this before. He turned the sword slowly. He held it to the light. He made a series of thoughtful sounds. Low, serious, hums while his eyes moved over the blade with what looked impressively like expertise.
Then he set it down below the counter in front of us.
Then he placed both hands flat beside it.
Then he looked up at us pleasantly.
Then he didn't say anything at all.
Lyra waited. "...So? What do you think?"
The merchant tilted his head and began picking his nose. Slowly, he examined what he found there with the same apparent attention he'd just given the sword.
"Mm?" he said.
"My sword," Lyra said. "What did you think of my sword?"
He glanced at her. Then at the empty counter between his hands. Then back at her.
"What sword?"
I put my face in my palm.
This was exactly what I'd been talking about. This was precisely, specifically, exactly what I'd been talking about. I'd said the words. I had used my mouth and formed complete sentences and said the words, and she had handed him the sword anyway.
"My sword!" Lyra said, her voice climbing slightly. "The one I just handed you! The one you were just holding thirty seconds ago!"
"I'm not sure what you mean, little kid." the merchant said, in the tone of a man who had said this many times and found it consistently effective. "Anyway, would you like to buy something? I have some wonderful pieces—"
"You have my sword!" Lyra's hand slapped the counter. "You're holding it below the counter right now, I can see your arm—"
"Little one, I think perhaps you're confused. These things happen in busy ports, so much to see—"
"Give. Me. Back. My. Sword."
The merchant looked wounded in the practiced way of someone for whom being wounded was a professional tool.
"I really don't know what—"
That was when I felt it.
The air around Lyra changed. It was subtle at first, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't paying attention but I'd spent enough time next to her during training to know what it meant. A faint, visible shimmer around her right hand. The hairs on my arm standing up. Her breathing dropping from normal to very, very controlled.
Her aura was coming up.
"Lyra," I said carefully.
Her jaw was set. Her eyes had gone to that particular flat quality they got when she stopped thinking and started calculating damage.
"LYRA!" I grabbed her arm with both hands, throwing my whole weight into it.
She didn't even look at me.
"Don't!" I yanked. "There are guards twenty meters away—"
She turned her head slowly, like a door rotating on a hinge. Her golden eyes found mine.
"He took my sword, Kyro."
"I know—"
"My sword."
"I know, but—"
"Saul gave me that sword."
Oh boy.. Oh shit..!
I felt her arm move before I could stop it, her elbow pulling back with the kind of force that told me this was already over. My hands slipped. My feet lost purchase on the cobblestone. The momentum carried me sideways and I hit the ground on my tailbone with a crack that sent a jolt straight up my spine.
"OW—"
BAM.
The sound was enormous, like a detonation, the kind that stops conversation for a ten-meter radius. Lyra's fist, aura fully channeled, came down on the merchant's counter with everything she had.
The counter didn't break so much as ceased to exist in its current form.
Wood exploded upward and outward in a spray of splinters. Coins rattled off their pegs and scattered across the cobblestones. The display behind the counter shook violently, two swords falling free and clanging against the ground. A barrel of sand tipped sideways and split open, spilling its contents across the lane.
"EEEK—!" The merchant stumbled backward into his own stall, arms flying up to cover his head, his earlier composure evaporating completely.
I stared from the ground. "Lyra—!"
She was already moving.
Her hand shot forward across the wreckage of the counter and snatched her sword back with a single smooth motion. She pulled it free of whatever he'd been hiding it under, checked it with the quick flick of someone who knew their blade on sight, and re-sheathed it with a click that sounded like punctuation.
"You don't mess with my stuff," she said, voice completely level in the way that was actually more terrifying than shouting, "and get away with it."
Then she drew the sword again.
"Lyra!" I scrambled to my feet. "What are you—"
She wasn't aiming for the merchant. I realized that a half-second before she moved. Her eyes weren't on him, they were on the stall itself. On the support beams.
One step forward. One swing, fast enough that I barely tracked it.
CRACK. CRACK.
Two beams, cleanly severed. The stall gave a long, terrible groan. Then the entire structure leaned inward and collapsed onto the merchant with a crash that shook the surrounding stalls and sent a cloud of dust rolling outward across the lane.
A muffled yell came from under the wreckage.
I looked at the stall. Then at Lyra, who was watching it settle with her arms loose at her sides and her sword still drawn, her aura shimmering faintly around her like heat from an open oven.
"He's still alive," she said. "Probably."
"Probably," I repeated.
Then I heard it. The clinking of armor. Boots on cobblestone moving with purpose.
I looked to my left. Guards, four of them, swords sheathed but hands near hilts, cutting through the crowd with the focused efficiency of people who'd heard a very large bang and come to find out why.
To my right, the crowd had parted into a wide, cautious ring. Every face in it was staring at us. Several were staring at Lyra specifically, in the way people stare at something they're not sure whether to run from or watch.
From under the collapsed stall came the merchant's voice, muffled and aggrieved.
"HELP! Those children harassed me! HELP! GUARDS!"
"Lyra." I grabbed her shoulder. "We need to go. Right now."
She turned to look at the approaching guards. Her eyes did that calculating thing again.
"There are four of them," she said.
"Yes—"
"That's not very many."
"Lyra—!"
"I could probably take three. The fourth might be trouble, but—"
"Listen to me." I stepped directly in front of her and put both hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at me instead of the guards. "I need you to think for two seconds. If we fight the guards, we get arrested. If we get arrested, Grann gets pulled in for being responsible for us. Grann, who has never done anything wrong to these people today. Does that seem fair to you?"
Her aura flickered.
I pressed the advantage. "We put Grann in trouble for something a sketchy old sword thief started."
A muscle worked in her jaw.
The guards were fifteen meters away and closing.
"STOP RIGHT THERE!" the lead one called out.
Lyra's aura spiked again, instinctive, and her hand tightened on the hilt.
"Lyra." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "We run, then we find Grann and then we let the adults handle it. That's the smart move.."
She turned to me. I could actually see Lyra's aura dimmed, indicating she was listening.
"I guess you're right.. Fine. We'll—"
"Seriously, cubs?"
Lyra's aura flared orange once again, a voice came from directly behind us as both of us spun around.
Grann stood there, arms crossed, a glazed pastry still in one hand and crumbs at the corner of his mouth. He looked at the collapsed stall. He looked at the scattered splinters. He looked at the guards now twelve meters away and still coming. He looked at Lyra's drawn sword and the orange aura still shimmering faintly around her shoulders.
His expression was that of a man who had come outside to enjoy a quiet snack and found a small war.
"The first thing you do in a new town," he said, "is cause trouble." He bit into the pastry. "What a pain."
"He took my sword!" Lyra started.
Grann sighed; the specific sigh of a man who had raised children and knew the sound of his own exhaustion. He tucked the rest of the pastry in his coat pocket, then reached out and grabbed the back of both our collars in a single-handed grip, one of us in each massive hand, as casually as someone picking up two sacks of grain that had fallen over.
"Grann, we have to—" I started, but was interrupted by a sudden burst of speed upwards. "WAH!"
He jumped.
I don't mean he jumped like a person jumps. I mean his legs bent once, briefly, and then the ground was gone. The quay dropped away beneath us, stalls, guards, scattered coins, the open-mouthed crowd, all of it shrinking as we rose in a single smooth arc above the roofline. The wind hit me in the face. My stomach did something complicated..
I covered my mouth. "MFPT--!"
We came down on a rooftop two buildings over without a sound, Grann's landing somehow completely silent despite everything about him suggesting it shouldn't be.
He set me down while holding Lyra on the other his shoulder.
"BLEGHHH—" I puked.
"GRANN! PUT ME DOWN! I CAN ESCAPE ON MY OWN!" Lyra's voice rang out across the tiles, slamming the hilt of her blade to Grann's head, which didn't bother him. "LET ME G—MFFT!!"
Grann shoved a pastry in her mouth.
"MMMFFFP!" Her voice muffled as her hands and legs squirmed defiantly.
"Fine, fine! Just keep it down, will you?" Grann wearily as he let her go.
"You okay there?" Grann turned to me as I wiped my mouth.
I clutched my tummy, "N-never better.." I gave a weak thumbs-up.
Lyra's aura was still flickering. After a few seconds, she was breathing calmer. Her hands were clenched as she sheathed her sword to her back while pastry is still stuck on her mouth.
I was sitting on the rooftop tiles, rubbing my tailbone where I'd hit the cobblestones earlier, watching both of them.
"You're hopeless," I said, mostly to Lyra but also, vaguely, to the situation in general. "We could've avoid the trouble if you had listened to me in the first place."
Lyra crossed her arms and scoffed. She didn't say anything back to me, and her face was clearly still angry; she had furrowed brows and every exhale was like a bull.
A moment of silence followed, and Grann finally sighed.
"Come on," Grann said to her, then started walking again. "next time someone takes your sword—"
"I know," Lyra muttered, falling into step. "Do not cause trouble, blah, blah, blah. Be a coward and talk, talk, talk. Whatever."
"No," Grann shook his head, "Take it back yourself before they get it fully behind the counter. Hit and run. Even better, steal an item or two."
I stared at the back of his head. That was not the lesson I thought he was going to deliver.
"Grann," I said. "You can't tell her that."
"That's how the tribe handles market swindlers."
"We're not in the tribe!"
"Bah, we'll be there in three days." He stepped off the edge of the rooftop onto a lower surface, landing easy as stepping off a curb. "Consider it a preview."
Below and behind us, faint across the market noise, I could just barely hear the merchant's voice still yelling for the guards, and the guards apparently trying to figure out what exactly had happened to his stall and where the two children had gone.
Lyra looked back once, then forward again. The last of the shimmer was gone from her shoulders. She was back to normal or what passed for normal when you were ten years old with a blood of a warrior coursing through her veins.
She glanced at me sideways. "You okay? You fell pretty hard."
"My tailbone is filing a formal complaint," I said.
She snorted. "You should've let go faster."
"You should've listened to me in the first place." I repeated again at her, still rubbing my tailbone.
We kept walking across the rooftops, following Grann's broad back toward the far end of the port, where the dark-sailed ship was waiting.
[End]
[1] Pronunciation: "HAG-uhl"