CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

 

DEFFO MET FURY, or Dr Fisher as he was known to everyone besides the other Guardians, on the headland overlooking Ilkand Bay. He hadn’t wanted to but Fury had insisted and since Deffo didn’t like being followed everywhere by a noisome parakeet constantly asking him, “Where’s da trouble? Where’s da trouble, squire, eh?” he had discreetly withdrawn from the party as they walked through the market and made his way up here, following the flapping, multi-coloured invention of Duke Timoran all the way. The parakeet was meant to be for lords and ladies who enjoyed new and exciting means of rapid communications in setting up their various intrigues but, like the brass mechanical army, it had suffered a lot from local weather conditions and was now only fit for annoying someone to the point of madness until they did whatever it had been told to ask them to do or found a way of permanently disposing of it.

Deffo had swatted it with his walking stick, but it was too quick for him and after a houseman in livery had tossed him two scits, thinking him a refugee doing a busking act, he’d given up that effort and done as he was told.

“What do you want?” he asked the taller and more distinguished Fury. Fury had a certain short tempered, hawkish nature that didn’t abide Deffo gladly and he was longing to be out of there and into a pleasant evening anywhere else.

“I want to know what you know about this Tzark business,” Fury said. The parakeet, now that its duty was done, had returned to his shoulder and switched itself off with a distinct spanging noise. He removed it and placed it back in his satchel. “Tricky must have seen you. And here you are. Who are those women and where are they taking them?”

“I don’t know and we are all going with Wanderer to see the gods again. Why didn’t you ask him, anyway?”

“Asking you is always more rewarding,” Fury said. “And he has a way of not giving the answers. Did Tricky say she wanted to reconnect them with the world?”

“No.” Deffo paused. “Did she say that to you?”

“No,” Fury said. “Isn’t it strange that there are Tzarkomen abroad with you and Tricky had a Tzarkomen coffer with her the other day. But she’s not here and they are.”

“It’s strange that you spend your life working in a dusty shop pretending to be human but I didn’t bring that up,” Deffo said, resentfully. “Each to their own. I should think you’d find more answers in Tzarkand.”

“The shop is not dusty,” Fury said. He paused, watching the gulls and gannets wheel over the port, the cloud coming in across the sea on a breeze of chill and damp. “She’s up to something, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.”

“Tricky?”

“Who else? And if I find out you knew and it endangers my existence in my clean and beautiful shop then we will meet again.”

“Why would I know anything?”

Fury looked at him. He smiled, although it was very much a baring of his long, slightly yellowed teeth. “Go along now. Before they miss you.”