Silver in Eillen 8: Desires of the Moment
“Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
<- 7) The Establishment of Others ~0~ 9) Thou Winter Wind ->
The ale in Eillen, Eloan had to admit, was better than in Renua. He was too patriotic to say it, but that didn’t stop him from drinking it.
He didn’t even have to pay for it. Not until they ran out of the captain’s money, at any rate.
The captain’s instructions had been simple, and almost too good to be true. Go out, become friendly with the locals over a few mugs of ale. Listen hard when they started talking and keep your mouth shut whenever possible. Stick together, don’t go looking for trouble, and come back in one piece.
And they’d had a good time for the first few hours, though he’d had to drag Tobias and Len past quite a few pretty women. Eloan hated being the responsible one, but it just wasn’t worth the captain having their hides when he found out. That piece of logic had earned him quite a bit of griping from his two friends until they’d gotten settled into a likely looking tavern. There might have been a few odd looks going around when they entered, particularly from the liveried guards of several houses, but they’d made friends with a handful of guards, liveried in blue with a silver wolf on their front, by the simple method of buying them a round of drinks. In return, the five other men were happy to talk about anything and everything.
But all that was only serving to give a surreal cast to the situation, because Eloan listened. He knew that there was something going on - and these five other men, fellow soldiers though they were, were connected to it. The silver wolf was the symbol of house Isidrus, and house Isidrus was exactly what the captain had wanted information on. They’d been instructed to keep their ears out for everything, but especially anything about house Isidrus.
And what Eloan was hearing was probably important.
“Never could hold with magicians,” one of the Isidrus guard was saying, inspecting the depth of the ale in his tankard, “nor their nasty experiments.”
“Oh, yeah, nasty lot,” Len agreed quickly.
“For example,” the guard replied, “Just the other day that new magician of the house took an old hunting dog that had to be put down to test his poisons on.”
“Poor thing deserved a swifter death,” one of his companions muttered.
“I told you months back that the magician was a nasty piece of work,” the third guard muttered, “Remember when he was so keen to raise winds? It was like a storm at sea, all trapped in the courtyard.”
“That’s because it was a storm, you superstitious fool,” the second guard put in, “Just an ordinary storm - any man can deal in poisons, but no man can bring down the wrath of the heavens.”
“Funny,” Len said, “Ours just mutters - ow!”
Eloan had applied his boot to the other’s shin beneath the table. “The magicians I’ve heard of are a nasty lot,” he agreed. The other guards didn’t appear to have heard Len, but they nodded at Eloan’s words and continued talking among themselves about who knew first that magicians weren’t to be trusted.
“What did you do that for?” Len demanded of his friend.
“We’re supposed to be listening,” Tobias reminded him sharply, in an undertone, “Not volunteering our own information.”
“What did I say?”
Eloan sighed - his friend was clearly not the brightest burning candle of the lot. “Don’t worry about it, Len,” he said, “just shut up and finish your drink.”