Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
The mage studied me for a moment. “She will see you. Just you.”
“No,” Everard said.
I faced the mage. “I didn’t come here for my own sake. Your mistress invited me. If she no longer needs my help, I will simply go home.”
The mage studied me.
There was exactly one sentence in the entire series devoted to this man. At some point, Hade got desperate and hired some people to break Galiene and her daughter out of Hreban’s mansion. The book said, Hade’s mercenaries failed, and the Garden’s only mage met his end with them. No name, no description, nothing.
Powerful mages were rare. The best analogy in our world would be doctors with an unusual medical specialty, like neurosurgeons. There was something like one neurosurgeon per ninety thousand people in the US. Mages weren’t quite that endangered, but the fact that the Garden even had one was odd. For some reason, Damaes chose to tolerate his presence and autonomy. He was literally irreplaceable.
“May I see what’s in your basket?”
Everard held the basket out to him. The mage moved the piece of cloth covering the contents aside, looked at them for a long moment, and put the cloth back.
“Follow me.”
Galiene’s office lay all the way up on the fourth floor in an airy, light tower with tall pale walls and massive arched windows. The window on the left offered a stunning view of the city, the one on the right showed a hillside cushioned in greenery. Beautiful flowers bloomed in ornate pots, artfully grouped on the floor by the windows, their white and vivid red blossoms almost glowing in the morning light.
The wall between the windows was filled with shelves supporting books and treasures: boxes carved from stone and wood, glass vases, and small statues. A large wooden desk stood in front of the shelves. Galiene sat behind the desk looking exactly as I remembered, regal and cold, with her dark blond hair curved at the nape of her neck into a spiral. Today her gown was pewter gray.
On the left, Hade waited in a padded chair, her eyes sharp.
The mage took up a position by the door, just behind us.
I took my hood down.
“You found shoes,” Galiene said.
“Among other things. What can I do for the Garden?”
Galiene’s face was impassive. Whatever it was had to be bad.
“We are being harassed,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Our shipments are going missing, our people are being accosted, and our patrons are being robbed.”
It sounded like Ulmar Hreban’s petty brand of revenge. He couldn’t touch Galiene directly, so he was using his money and hired muscle to complicate her life.
“We’ve hired additional guards to take care of the last two,” Galiene said. “But we can do nothing about the shipments.”
“What sort of goods are not coming in?”
“The special sort.”
He was going after their aphrodisiacs and drugs. One of the Garden’s lures was providing a touch of the rare and forbidden. They stayed away from harder drugs, but they did dabble in lighter stuff that Rellas restricted or heavily taxed. Their shipments were smuggled in.
“I assume that you’ve tried changing the schedules and routes, and it made no difference?”
Galiene nodded. “It seems Elaut wasn’t our only traitor.”
“Someone is talking to Hreban, and you want to know who.”
“Yes,” Galiene said.
“Have you narrowed it down?” I asked.
“Wesla, Orrem, and Arale,” Galiene said. “They are the only three who knew of the new shipping changes. We’ve questioned all of them and all of them deny it. We cannot detain all three of them indefinitely. The Garden would grind to a halt.”
“Nor can we afford to lose the next shipment,” Hade said.
Wesla was their bookkeeper, Orrem was the head of security, and Arale was the one who took over the Garden after Hreban took Galiene. Right.
“Before we go any further, let’s talk compensation,” I said. “I need to borrow your mage. I have a magical item, and I need to know what it does.”
Galiene glanced at the mage. He nodded.
“Done,” she said. “What else?”
I took the basket from Everard and set it on her desk.
Galiene lifted the cloth and stared at the twenty bars in four different colors all stamped with a small shell design. Gort had carved the stamp for us.
“What am I looking at?”
“Soap samples. I’d like you to use them in the Garden to see how they perform and how your clients like them.”
“Very well,” Galiene said.
“It’s Arale.”
Galiene and Hade shared a look.
“How do you know?” Galiene asked.
“Orrem was born to a horrible father, who took his frustrations out on Orrem’s mother, his sisters, and him until Orrem grew large enough to put a stop to it. He abhors violence against women and sees himself as a protector. He would never ally himself with someone who sought to kidnap a child from her mother.”
He also led the raid on Hreban’s compound and was blinded in one eye. There were a couple of scenes from his point of view, and I had gotten a good glimpse inside his head. His thought process toward Ulmar was very straightforward: hate and then more hate.