meet Alary, another character from The Foreign Sorcerer
Back across the river in Tamren, she used less crowded side streets. She knew Basilisk intimately by now, an utter crush of buildings and labyrinthine ways. The architecture had a dull uniformity to it here, conservative, neat, very clean. Space was most dear in Tamren, and a studio here would have been a closet Rookswood or Hannibal. But that closet lay in the gloomy shadow of the Havlsburg, and that was all that mattered to its residents.
A bell tinkled when Alary pushed open the door. Thankfully, it was Master Tojer at the counter; she didn’t like the way his wife looked at her. “Miss Lemarn! What brings you here on your day off?”
“I came to return the last book I borrowed and borrow another, if I may.”
“Ah, of course.” He rubbed his hands together as he moved out around the counter. “What will it be this time?”
She had decided on her way here that the wisest course was simply to ask for his recommendation. Master Tojer might not be a scholar in the way she thought of them—porphyry-robed and grand, masters of the University—but he knew books. She opened her mouth to ask, and the shop-bell jingled.
The man who entered with the bell wasn’t native stock, not with that honey-hued skin stretched across a distinctly foreign bone structure. If he even glanced at her, Alary didn’t see him do it, already backing away. She put the last book she had borrowed, Midnot’s Imperial Succession, back where it belonged. While the two men talked, she wandered about the shop.
After ten minutes, when they still hadn’t finished, she decided to get that recommendation another day. Snatching up a copy of Ephrem’s A History of the Mountain Wars, she held it over her head.
The sight of her waving a book in his periphery certainly got Master Tojer’s attention, but he only glanced at it briefly before nodding permission. He had never really stopped talking to the man across the counter from him, but the customer must have thought otherwise: he interrupted the conversation entirely to turn around and stare at her.
She had meant to duck her head and flee with a muttered apology, but all aegis had been stolen from her. To say his eyes were black would be an understatement farcical in its degree. Lots of people in the Cities had eyes so dark they appeared black. What his eyes had wasn’t color but depth. Negative space. Like there were two holes opening onto infinity right in the middle of his face.
He nodded sharply as if satisfied. Like he was glad he had frightened her. Master Tojer was mumming over his shoulder, looking her urgently to the door. The man put his back to her, and she finally noticed the line of orange gemstones pierced in his left ear. That was the point where her legs took over for her dumb brain and got the rest of her out of there.
Outside, Alary leaned against the storefront until she got her breath back. She felt as if she had just run the length of Wall Street carrying half the books in the shop on her back: her heart thundered, limbs trembling woozily. An Azhkan Soubir, in the flesh. In her bookshop!
Re, the stories were right, he would as soon have killed her as looked at her. What was one of the dread few, the world’s most feared sorcerers, doing in Tamren? In a bookshop!
Once she could be certain her knees would support her weight, she set off down the street. She kept shaking her head as if to deny the experience. Her thoughts felt more like one giant exclamation point than a coherent train of reasoning.
She was still clutching the book to her chest, and she had picked it almost at random; a book she had meant to read someday out of curiosity but not a canonical work she needed to read in order to pursue her dreams. Now, it struck her as remarkably on-point. It recounted the struggles between the Malisaat and Penpedoci that ended with the former controlling both their countries thirty years ago. This scholarly work might not be able to tell her why one of their terrifying sorcerers was a smug jerk, but a thirst to learn everything there was to know about Soubrál had caught her.
From The Three Faces of Dissatisfaction
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