The Brand of the Warlock by Robert Kroese

Author:Robert Kroese [Kroese, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Culain Press
Published: 2019-09-13T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

For the next five days, I searched in vain for clues regarding Beata’s whereabouts. The neighborhood of the inn had changed a great deal since I had first gone there looking for her six years earlier, the city’s less desirable elements having broken out of the ghettos to the south and west and converged on the Hidden Quarter as if by some tacit agreement. Residents with the means to move to more dignified areas of the city did so, taking their wealth and prestige with them. In at least one way this served me: what I paid for a month’s stay at the inn would once have bought me perhaps a week. But the change complicated my search: few of the residents and shopkeepers in the area had been there for more than a few years, and those who had were suspicious and defensive as a rule. In any case, few of them remembered a beautiful girl with honey-blond hair who had once entranced the customers of the Lazy Crow with her songs, and none of these had any clue of her whereabouts. The most I got from anyone were fragments of a story I already knew: Beata had disappeared after some sort of disturbance at the inn.

I didn’t bother with the bandages during my inquiries. I found that if I approached in daylight, giving a cough or scuffling my feet to announce my arrival, people were generally not overly frightened of my appearance. That isn’t to say that they were warm or friendly, but only that they treated me as they might some other pitiable specimen of humanity, such as a hunchback or paralytic. I avoided smiling or any other overt expression of emotion, as these resulted in contortions of the dark labyrinth that made it appear even more sinister.

I found too that the brand could be a boon to my efforts as well as a hindrance. It certainly augmented my ability to intimidate, as I’d learned when dealing with Pyotr’s captors, but it also made me memorable. After a few hours of inquiring of shopkeepers, everyone in the neighborhood knew of the strange man with the disfigured face who was asking about a woman who had disappeared six years earlier. After two days, I daresay everyone in the city knew. If anyone in the city knew Beata’s whereabouts, pity or curiosity might prompt them to seek me out. If Beata was still in the city, she might even come to the Hidden Quarter to see this strange man for herself.

This notoriety carried risks, of course: for one, the gendarmes or acolytes might take an interest in me. But so far I had done nothing illegal, and if I were to give in to the fear that I might once again be arbitrarily apprehended, I’d be so handicapped in my investigation that I might as well resign myself to a career as an assassin of Barbaroki. In any case, the bandages were hardly less frightening than the brand; I thought I may as well select the more unnerving of the two.

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