The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3) Read Online Free Page B

had told him about the unhygienic continental habits. Somewhat hesitantly, he extended his smooth, scholarly hand and rubbed the skin of his palm against the rough, callused hide of the ship’s officer. The man’s fingers twitched, tried to make that contact stay, but Jarman slipped his hand back.
    The shipmaster did not attempt the same thing with Lucas, Jarman noticed. He realized it would take time before he gained the same intimidating presence as the master wizard. Having your skin pricked a hundred thousand times with ink needles also helped.
    “Thank you,” the young man said and headed for the gangplank. It seemed narrow, and he wobbled on carefully, thelack of the seesawing motion, after days at sea, playing silly with his inner ear. Lucas followed, his strides steady. A knot of sailors trailed after them, carrying their luggage.
    Solid ground
, Jarman thought. Well, almost. Rotten wooden planks, bleached white with salt and the sun, slick with spray. He looked around: kegs, piles of nets with their white buoys, boxes stacked neatly, cages with birds inside, flapping, making noise. Then, he saw the crowd of dockworkers, waiting their turn to approach the maid and ravish her. They looked coarse, with skin full of wrinkles and grime outlining every one of them, faces that never really got shaved, only trimmed, meaty bodies with extra fat they had to have to be able to lug the cargo all day long, eyes squinting, suspicious, and hostile.
    And that was only their own ship.
    The same scene unfolded to the left and right, stretching without end. Quickly, the majestic glory of Eybalen truly assailed him. He waded through the mass of sweaty, stinking men with his arms half raised, trying to avoid touching them. One of Shipmaster Arimo’s men walked ahead, never quite bothering to check if they kept pace. The fish market almost made Jarman gag. He tried to block the almost physical punch of offal from his eyes and nostrils, but it did not really work.
    Twenty or thirty paces was all it took to clear the dock front and get into the calmer harbor area, with squat warehouses and whorehouses blocking the view of the city. Jarman breathed deeply, as much as he dared. Behind him, the piers seethed. It was madness there. So unlike home.
    He stared at the narrow streets worming toward inner Eybalen. He did not like the look of those streets; they were too dark, too filthy. Refuse ran down the sides in rivers of brown. It spilled into the harbor, just beneath their feet, slopping throughcracks in stones and slits in the rotten planks. No wonder the cove was so murky.
    How can people live like this
, Jarman wondered.
    “We will not be staying here long,” Lucas tried to reassure him.
    “That’d be all, gents,” the sailor said, saluted casually, and walked back toward the stench.
    Jarman did not like this place. He didn’t like it at all. But then, he had spent his entire adult life in a place where order ruled—order of things, order of thought. You might not like everything at the temple or agree with some of the customs, but you could appreciate the certainty of them. You knew that you would not be randomly punished; you knew that luck and chance had nothing to do with how well you did in your tests and how quickly you progressed in the temple’s cadre. This…was chaos.
    “What now?” he asked, feeling lost. The train of sailors was stacking their things, wooden cases and hide bags, too many for two people to carry.
    Lucas watched the ship’s crew carefully, as if seeing things that the plain eye could not detect. “We must get transportation. A carriage.”
    Jarman pointed dramatically. A brothel, some sort of an inn, the customs office, another brothel, another, a warehouse, a brothel, a building with its windows boarded. “Here?” A steady trickle of men was going about its business, in and out of various doors. This was chaos, it seemed, but it worked somehow.
    “I will take care of it,” Lucas said. “Wait