The Nomad - By Simon Hawke Page 0,56
ways and still leave us all rich beyond our wildest dreams. Aside from which, you owe me, as you yourself admitted. It was I who found you and tended to your wound when the marauders left you for dead, and it was I who helped you rescue Ryana from their clutches. Moreover, there are all my winnings that I was forced to leave behind back at the gaming house.”
“No one forced you, Valsavis. You could easily have kept your winnings, though you would not have won them without me,” Sorak said. “The manager said that he would not try to force you to return them.”
“Perhaps,” Valsavis said, “but after the noble example you two set by returning your winnings, I could hardly fail to do the same, now could I?”
“I thought money was not important to you,” Sorak said. “Did you not say that all an excess of money brought a man was trouble?”
“Perhaps I did say that,” Valsavis admitted, “but it is one thing not to wish to steal another’s sword, however fine a weapon it may be, and quite another to win a treasure by risking life and limb. One act is craven, while the other is heroic. And at my age, I must think about how I shall spend my rapidly approaching declining years. A share of the lost treasure of Bodach, even if it were just a small share, would insure my comfort in my final days. Or is it that you are greedy and wish to keep all of it for yourselves?”
But at that moment, before Sorak could reply, Kallis returned. “The Silent One will see you,” he announced. “This way, please.”
They went through the beaded curtain and followed him through a supply room in the rear of the shop and up a flight of wooden stairs to the second floor. It was dark up there, with only one lamp burning at the head of the stairs. Valsavis tensed, not knowing what to expect. They walked down a short, dark corridor and stopped before a door. “In here,” said Kallis, beckoning them. “Open it and go through first, old man,” Valsavis said.
The apothecary merely looked at him for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. He opened the wooden door and went through first. They followed him, Valsavis keeping his right hand near his sword.
Behind the door was a room divided into two sections by an archway. The front part of the room contained a small, cone-shaped, brick fireplace in which a small fire burned, heating a kettle. The walls were bare, and the floor was wood-planked. Bunches of herbs hung drying from the beamed ceiling. There were two small and crudely built wooden chairs and a small round table made from planks. On it sat a candle in a holder and some implements for cutting and blending herbs and powders. There was a small sleeping pallet by the wall and a shelf containing some scrolls and slim, bound volumes. The room held no other furniture or items of decoration.
On the other side of the archway was a small study, with a writing desk and one chair pushed up against a bare wall. There were no windows in the room. A solitary oil lamp burned in the study, illuminating a white-robed figure with very long, straight, silver hair, who was seated at the desk, facing away from them.
“The Silent One,” said Kallis, before he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.
The Silent One stood and turned around.
“Gith’s blood!” said Valsavis. “It’s a woman!”
The silver hair hanging down almost to her waist more properly belonged to a woman in the twilight of her life, but the Silent One looked scarcely older than Ryana. Her face was ethereal in its fragile beauty, unlined, with skin like fine porcelain, and her eyes were a bright, emerald green, so bright they almost seemed to glow. She was tall and slender, and her posture was straight and erect. When she moved, as she came toward them, it was with a flowing grace. She almost seemed to float across the floor.
She held out the copy of The Wanderer’s Journal that Sorak had given Kallis. “I believe this is yours,” she said in a clear and lilting voice. “You come with impeccable credentials.”
“But.., you can speak!” said Valsavis.
She smiled. “When I choose to,” she replied. “It is far easier to avoid unwelcome conversation when people do not think I have a voice. Here, I am known as the