Casket of Souls

luck!” Seregil exclaimed softly.
    “He doesn’t have anything hanging from his belt.”
    “But he made a trade, all the same. You take the boy. I’ll see where the old fellow is headed. If you don’t catch up, I’ll meet you by the fountain in the Sea Market in an hour’s time.”
    Leaving Alec to his work, Seregil set off after the old man.
    The boy was walking away, looking at something in his hand.
    Alec sidled up behind him. “What you got there?” he asked, doing his best to speak with a woman’s voice.
    The child whirled around and drew a short dagger. He had a thin, ugly face and a wen on his cheek the size of a sparrow’s egg. “What’s that to you?”
    Alec held up his hands, showing that he meant no harm. “Nothin’, except I been looking for one of those raven people and I thought that might have been one you was talkin’ to.”
    The boy regarded him shrewdly for a moment, still wary, then said, “What do you want with ’em?”
    “I hear they make trades. I was lookin’ to make one myself, maybe. So, was that old man one of ’em?”
    The boy’s mouth slanted in a taunting grin. “What’s it worth to you to know?”
    Alec pretended to hesitate, then turned away and fished a couple of copper pennies from the small pouch around his neck under his tattered gown. “Will that do?”
    “Yeah, he was raven folk,” the boy said as he reached to snatch the coins from Alec’s outstretched hand.
    But Alec held them back. “For this, I ’spect more of an answer than that. What’d you two trade?”
    The boy opened his left hand and showed Alec a yellow rock crystal. “I give him my hog tooth necklace. Easy enough to come by another. Ain’t seen nothing like this, though.”
    “That is fine,” Alec replied. It was a pretty thing, and a far cry from anything the boy was likely to find here. But it was a far cry from a sweetmeat, too.
    “Sell it to you.” The boy jutted his chin at the coins Alec still held.
    Alec pretended to consider it, then nodded and took out two more coins. The boy tossed him the stone, and Alec handed over the price.
    “We finished?” asked the boy, still gripping his knife. “I got nothin’ more to trade or sell.”
    “That’s fine.” Tucking the stone away, Alec turned to take his leave, but alert to any sound of the boy coming to knife him. Glancing back, though, he was already gone.
    Seregil kept his distance, blending in with the crowd of destitute and cutthroats coming out like bats as the light failed. He dogged the one-eyed man, hoping to see him do another trade, but the old codger seemed to have somewhere to go, for he went on without pausing anywhere, head down and limping a bit. Dressed no better or worse than those around him, he attracted no one else’s attention, and no one greeted him.
    It took him a moment to notice the tall, dark-haired man trailing the old one. At first he thought it might be coincidence, but when the old man turned, so did the big man. Seregil frowned; the last thing he needed was for the old man to get murdered in front of him before he could talk to him.
    Drifting along behind them, Seregil caught glimpses of the old man’s face when he turned down a byway, and then another. Though the bowed legs could have made him a horseman, a cripple, or just undernourished, he had the rolling gait of a sailor. Perhaps the raven folk did come from somewhere else, by ship, or from a seafaring people.
    The taller man’s face was hidden by his cloak hood but Seregil guessed from his stride and those broad shoulders that he was more than a match for the old fellow, and could easily have overtaken him by now, if he’d wanted to. Perhaps Tall Fellow expected Old Fellow to lead himsomewhere? If so, Seregil suspected it might be of interest to him, as well.
    Having to keep out of Tall Fellow’s way made Seregil hang back more than he liked, and he nearly lost them both when the old man turned aside and headed deeper into the shack town through a wide place in the path. There were more people here, bargaining with the sellers of bruised vegetables and questionable meat. Seregil had to look over heads and past shoulders to keep them in sight.
    And then Old Fellow was gone, along with his tall shadow.
    “Bilairy’s Balls,” Seregil muttered as he hurried up to where he’d last seen him and looked around. It was an intersection of sorts where two paths crossed amid a cluster of tumbledown shacks. Seregil checked both ways, but