The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked him if he knew a man called Niamor the Negotiator.
    He nodded.
    ‘Tell me about him.’
    That was when I discovered we had a problem. Tunn evidently spoke so rarely that he had just about forgotten how—if he had ever known. He could understand all right, his speech was about as articulate as the chatter of a retarded parrot. He wanted to be obliging, but the tangle of sounds that came out of his mouth could hardly be called words. His first effort, as far as I could determine, was something like: ‘N’mor gudly tulk. Him sy summat…rightful allus. Bilif itn.’ I managed to translate this as: ‘Niamor talks good. If he says something, it’s always true. You can believe him.’
    He wasn’t unintelligent: he knew much more than he could say. I felt a momentary anger at a world in which no one bothered to spend the time to teach a child to speak, but I wasted no time with that fruitless emotion. Instead, with a lot of persistence and many carefully worded questions, I managed to find out that Niamor had been on Gorthan Spit for as long as Tunn could remember. A rumour—which I now vaguely recalled having heard on my last visit—said that the Quillerman had been involved in a daring but disastrously unsuccessful embezzlement back on his home islandom, the uncovering of which had necessitated his exile. Now, from what Tunn said, it seemed he was not an embezzler any more than he was a slaver; he was more a go-between. An entrepreneur, although the lad did not know the word. Because Niamor had a reputation for being absolutely trustworthy in all his dealings, he was trusted. That did not, of course, make him entirely honest. He was as capable of making a self-serving deal in stolen goods as the next Spitter, but if he told you something, you could believe it. And in the dark world of slavers, thieves and pirates, a go-between who would faithfully deliver a message or undertake a negotiation was very much in demand. Niamor never double-crossed, and therefore kept his head on his shoulders even though the game he played was a dangerous one.
    It seemed he was now a useful man to know. He had obviously honed his skills since my last visit to the Spit; I certainly didn’t remember him then being such a prominent figure in the murky business world of the Docks.
    Once I had all I wanted on Niamor, I turned to some of the others who interested me. ‘Do you know the name of the tall Stragglerman wearing black?’ I asked. ‘The man who sat by himself in the taproom at lunch?’ And who, unless I was very much mistaken, was one of the Awarefolk.
    Tunn nodded. ‘Tor Ryder.’
    The name meant nothing to me. Further questioning told me Tunn didn’t know anything about him either, except that he had arrived a week back on a two-masted trader coming in from one of the Middling Islands and that he had a room at The Drunken Plaice .
    The young man, the one who had been given the dunmagic sore, had arrived two days earlier than Ryder on a fishing vessel, although he was no fisherman. Tunn couldn’t make him out at all. He’d given his name as Noviss, but Tunn was sure that wasn’t his real name. He didn’t do anything except sit around looking as tense as a sand-plover nesting on an exposed stretch of beach.
    ‘And the Cirkasian?’ I asked.
    He rolled his eyes eloquently. ‘Cum yesty.’
    ‘She came yesterday? There was only one ship in yesterday—the slaver from Cirkase.’ I’d checked that out already.
    He shrugged.
    In other matters, Tunn was even less helpful. He didn’t know anything about a Cirkasian slave woman—or why a whole slaver ship’s crew and its captain, as devious a load of ocean-going rats as ever I’d laid eyes on, had told me earlier that morning that they had never seen any female Cirkasian, never had one on board, wouldn’t know anything about one. They’d said their whole cargo was male and they’d had no passengers at all, and not even the offer of a bribe had changed the story one whit.