Monstrous Races Read Online Free PDF Page B

can see that they’re earning their money’ he added, his eyes gleaming. ‘Still, you know what will happen to you if you don’t live up to my expectations.’ George looked down at the floor. ‘Besides, we can manage perfectly well without a serving boy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘How hard can it be?’

Chapter Four
Scouting for snacks
     
    Rufus walked hand in hand with Elli up to the great entrance doors of Brayston, her arm held up high to reach his. They’d left their horses with a stable boy who had a stall at the back of the queue, and would pay for them to be brought in and put in some stables of their choice that evening. They’d changed clothes in one of the earlier villages they’d passed through and now wore loose trousers and comfortable shoes, part of a deal that Rufus had made with a man named Trencher. He’d struck a hard bargain, and as Elli handed over the coins Trencher bit them; at the same time she saw Rufus very quickly reach out for something that miraculously disappeared beneath his clothes. When they’d travelled further on she asked what it was.
    ‘In my defence, he was trying to cheat us out of those coins and we need them. He can’t have been that wise anyway, I threw in a couple of less solid ones for good measure and he didn’t even notice. How can you be a trader and not know faked coins? Useless.’
    ‘Rufus, I’m learning more about you all the time. What did you take?’
    ‘This scarf,’ he said, holding it up. ‘I thought you might cover your face with it sometimes and pretend to be a dog-head. Not the most original idea but it might pay off.’
    ‘Or you could pret end to be a human,’ she replied. ‘A very tall one. With a muzzle.’
    The doors of Brayston were made of thick oak criss-crossed with iron, and her overriding impression was to question whether they were designed to keep people in or to stop them getting out. They’d heard it well before they’d seen it, a cascading noise of movement, carts and horses, street vendors shouting and the occasional squeal of laughter or flash of raised voices. The walls around it were thirty feet at least, but somehow the aromas permeated outside as well, the rich meats sizzling and smell of bread mingling with the great unwashed and greasy cattle stench.
    They were in a queue of people tr ying to get in and walked between carts, traders, and people on foot, all talking loudly and conducting some business there and then. Every few minutes somebody would sidle up to them with an offer or a deal or a piece of merchandise they really couldn’t do without, except they could. They’d bought vegetable pasties and weak beer from a woman with a small cart at the back of the queue, and now they were hungry again but were too close to the front to leave it.
    Humans and dog-heads patrolled in pairs up and down its length, looking for trouble or queue-jumpers. Anyone daring to do so would be marched straight out of the line and booted down a very steep hill at the bottom. Children and the elderly however would be gently pushed. An equally heavy door to t he right let people out of Brayston, another time-consuming process as this time everything had to be checked to make sure that they weren’t wanted by the gendarme f or making off with anything valuable that hadn’t been properly paid for. Elli was over-awed with the vibrancy and speed of the place before she got inside, and asked Rufus how it all worked.
    ‘Well, the gendarme is a foreign idea that came over a few years ago,' he said, casually scouting for snacks. 'Humans, dog-heads and anyone else can join, and the idea is that they stop people doing anything they shouldn’t be, like stealing or clubbing somebody around the head, and if they do they stick them down together in the cellars. They’ve started to spread them out a bit now, because in the early days people would try to be put down there so they could learn from the best. They’d go in for refusing to pay tax and end