Liar's Island: A Novel by Tim Pratt Page B

Rodrick took the hint and turned in his own chair, nodding with a bland smile to the iron-faced man wearing dark orange robes beside him. The man looked Rodrick up and down frankly, frowned, and said, “You are a swordsman?”
    â€œIn my own modest way,” Rodrick said.
    The monk grunted. “We train with swords, a bit, but mostly we teach our students how to take them away from men who don’t know how to fight without blades in their hands. Take a sword away from a swordsman and what’s left is often barely a man, and can be beaten by any student halfway through his first year.” With that, the monk turned in his own chair and began speaking to a vastly bearded man beside him, chattering about preparations for something called the Challenge of Sky and Heaven.
    Rodrick looked to the seat across the table from him, but it was unoccupied, though a plate and silverware waited there. Ah, well. Who wanted to socialize anyway? Rodrick concentrated on the wine and food which regularly appeared before him, delivered by smoothly gliding servants. Every dish was strange, with an emphasis on flatbreads, yellow rice, heaps of green vegetables, and spiced fish in strange sauces of cream or peppers. No proper meat at all as far as he could tell, no beast or fowl, just seafood, and little enough of that. A peculiar people, but it all tasted good, even if none of it touched his appetite the way a rare steak or roast lamb reliably could. The wine was odd, too, honey-sweet or strangely spiced, but more than palatable. There was entertainment, with graceful dancers on a stage, followed by acrobats (one of them winked at him, he was sure of it, and when he saw the way she bent all the way over backward and grabbed her own ankles, he was more than happy to give her a broad smile in return). Then came someone playing an instrument that was a bit like a lute with an absurdly long neck, full of twangy atonalities. Not to Rodrick’s taste, but it would be a boring world if we were all the same, he thought.
    Partway through the meal a young woman arrived, with the largest, darkest eyes he’d seen here yet, and dangling earrings in geometrical shapes the eye could not quite follow, shapes that were repeated on the silken cloth of her loosely cut blue dress. He’d heard of cloth-of-gold, but surely this was cloth-of-magic, illusory and shifting. She seated herself in the empty chair across from Rodrick, and a servant appeared immediately to fill her plate and goblet. He thought he recognized the woman from the palace courtyard full of noble youths, but he’d passed through so quickly it was hard to be sure. Her presence at this banquet was enough to tell him she was either someone important or related to someone important.
    Rodrick smiled at her, even though he might as well have been smiling at the moon for all the response he got. Her sharp, foxlike face was pretty, despite a certain ferocious quality in her expression, as if she were replaying the details of a recent argument in her mind. She finally noticed Rodrick looking at her, and after a glance that seemed to measure and weigh him to the inch and the ounce she looked over at Hrym, then nodded as if she’d received confirmation of some horrible prognosis. When she spoke, it was in his own language. “So you’re the mysterious swordsman. Your arrival has been on everyone’s lips.”
    Instinct almost made Rodrick say something like, “I wish I could be on your lips,” but while that might get him a laugh and a blush in the right tavern from the right woman, this one could be a fighting monk or a mystic or a political leader, despite her apparent youth, so he stepped more lightly. “My name is Rodrick, my lady. I don’t think I’m all that mysterious. To me, Jalmeray is the land of mystery.”
    â€œIt’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose,” she said. “My name is Kalika.” She looked at him in