7
A DRIZZLE was pattering softly around them as they walked out through Vel Virazzo’s north gate a few hours later. Sunrise was a watery line of yellow on the eastern horizon, under scudding charcoal clouds. Purple-jacketed soldiers stared down in revulsion from atop the city’s fifteen-foot wall; the heavy wooden door of the small sally-port slammed shut behind them as though it too was glad to be quit of them.
Locke and Jean were both dressed in tattered cloaks, and wrapped in bandagelike fragments from a dozen torn-up sheets and pieces of clothing. A thin coating of boiled apple mash, still warm, soaked through some of the “bandages” on their arms and chests, and was plastered liberally over their faces. Sloshing around wearing a layer of the stuff under cloth was disgusting, but there was no better disguise to be had in all the world.
Slipskin was a painful, incurable disease, and those afflicted with it were even less tolerated than lepers. Had Locke and Jean approached from outside Vel Virazzo’s walls, they never would have been let in. As it was, the guards had no interest in how they’d entered the city in the first place; they’d nearly stumbled over themselves in their haste to see them gone.
The outer city was an unhappy-looking place: a few blocks of crumbling one-and two-story buildings, decorated here and there with the makeshift windmill towers favored in these parts for driving bellows over forges and ovens. Smoke sketched a few curling gray lines in the wet air overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Beyond the city, where the cobbles of the old Therin Throne road became a wet dirt track, Locke could see scrubland, interrupted here and there by rocky clefts and piles of debris.
Their coins—and all of their other small goods worth transporting—were tucked into a little bag tied under Jean’s clothes, where no guardsman would dare search, not even if a superior stood behind him with a drawn sword and ordered it on pain of death.
“Gods,” Locke muttered as they trudged along beside the road, “I’m getting too tired to think straight. I really have let myself slouch out of condition.”
“Well,” said Jean, “you’re going to get some exercise these next few days, whether you like it or not. How’re the wounds?”
“They itch,” said Locke. “This damn mush does them little good, I suspect. Still, it’s not as bad as it was. A few hours of motion seems to have had some benefit.”
“Wise in the ways of all such things is Jean Tannen,” said Jean. “Wiser by far than most; especially most named Lamora.”
“Shut your fat, ugly, inarguably wiser face,” said Locke. “Mmmm. Look at those idiots scamper away from us.”
“Would you do otherwise, if you saw a pair of real slipskinners by the side of the road?”
“Eh. I suppose not. Damn these aching feet, too.”
“Let’s get a mile or two outside town, then find a place to rest. Once we’ve put some leagues under our heels, we can ditch this mush and pose as respectable travelers again. Any idea where you want to strike out for?”
“I should’ve thought it was obvious,” said Locke. “These little towns are for pikers. We’re after gold and white iron, not clipped coppers. Let’s make for Tal Verrar. Something’s bound to present itself there.”
“Mmm. Tal Verrar. Well, it is close.”
“Camorri have a long and glorious history of kicking the piss out of our poor Verrari cousins, so I say, on to Tal Verrar,” said Locke. “And glory.” They walked on a ways under the tickling mist of the morning drizzle. “And baths.”