Immortal at the Edge of the World by Gene Doucette

Author:Gene Doucette [Doucette, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: The Writer’s Coffee Shop
Published: 2014-10-01T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

When we arrived at the palace compound we were met at the gate by a man who introduced himself as Bosphor Talus. He was tubby, had a deep shade of coffee for skin, and displayed a multitude of tattoos and piercings. And I wasn’t sure he was actually a man. I couldn’t tell what he was, however.

“Greetings, plentiful salutations, and welcome,” he said. “Beyond these walls there is only peace, so we ask that you leave your weapons here.”

The walls he was talking about were gigantic for something attached to a private home. They looked more like the sort of thing one would find encircling the palaces of Kashmir. Possibly they were meant to convey exactly that.

“Friend,” I said, “we have no quarrel with the Talus, nor anyone else in these walls, but your battlements are alarming.”

“They are meant to protect you!” Bosphor said. “As are the men who will hold your weapons.” There had been two sentries standing beside Bosphor, but now they were joined by five more. All of them were armed and wearing battle armor. We could have taken them—we had more people, more weapons, and a few goblins—but for all we could tell there were another hundred inside waiting to come out and play.

“I suppose, then, we ought to hand over our weapons,” Hsu said gamely, demonstrating his generosity of spirit by handing over the sword at his hip. It was maybe a tenth of the total number of sharp objects on his person, so the generosity was understandable. It was a little less of a pleasant experience for the rest of us, except maybe the other two goblins we had in our band.

Xuangang was the only one not inconvenienced, since he didn’t have any weapons in the first place. He had books with him, which they let him keep. I might argue that books are also weapons, but only in a philosophical sense, not as a practical way of fending off a broadsword. Xuangang was playing the role of Lo, household servant to Xuangang, who was being played by Hsu. The name I was using was Blasius, and I was claiming to be a learned merchant from the Crimea. These were the roles the three of us played whenever we were in public outside Fa Xi Han’s court, and we had been doing it long enough that hardly anybody knew it was inaccurate. As it was, Xuangang—the real one—didn’t know me by any other identity. We were fortunate Hsu hadn’t inadvertently called me Li-Yuan around him, since that was a name Xuangang would likely recognize.

We handed over our swords. But given we had hired a decent number of men to accompany us with swords, and given those swords represented the extent of their service to us, taking away those swords peacefully didn’t make a lot of sense. So I selected two captains to enter the building with us and left the rest at the gate. Bosphor gamely agreed to let them remain armed if they stayed there and guarded all the sharp things we left them with.

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