The Slime Farmer

But he was conveying four people out of the house after a gathering that had quickly turned into a raucous game of "I"ve seen more strange things than you have" that was entirely Cuthes and Cor"s fault. It hadn"t felt like an interrogation at all.

Defi maintained that if he wasn"t restrained by not wanting to die, he"d have won that game.

A fine mist of rain was gently falling, the raindrops barely felt on skin, an insidious rain, the kind that dampened even the underside of a waterproof cloak.

"You"re going to the night-market, right?" Cuthes narrowed his eyes.

"Yes." He"d learned that gatherings in Ascharon, particularly the ones after something like the Blades, should not be missed without a good excuse. Like near-death, which was impossible to experience when there was an Ascharonian master chef willing to lend her expertise on the medicinal effects of mystic cooking.

"Good. Don"t hole up here like a cave bear, eh?"

"Cave bears are actually very social," said Lon, then abandoned what snippet of trivia he was going to elaborate on as Cuthes turned his gaze on him.

The young guard, in the hour or so of the not-interrogation, proved himself capable of inserting tidbits of barely related data about anything the conversation meandered to. Even if he lost the game every time.

Even Jorne"s forbidding countenance had exasperatedly lightened after a while and he won some of the rounds. Defi survived on Garen"s many many tales. Even if he never won, he hadn"t lost so much either. Cor and Cuthes had set their eyes on each other, their compet.i.tiveness the main reason the game lasted so long.

"Night market?" Cor was curious.

"A black market?" frowned Jorne.

"Don"t be such a suspicious prune when you"re so young, kid," Cuthes pointed at Jorne.

Defi glanced at Cor. "You did want to taste the fish in the Lowpool. The night market sells most of it cooked I heard."

"Really? How interesting. Teacher, we"re going!"

"Starts at sundown," Cuthes said to the younger boy.

Jorne looked like he wanted to protest, but was dragged away.

Defi watched them untie their horses from the low branches of a stand of trees.

"Can you tell me the talk on the Blades?"

Cuthes grunted, also watching. "Worried about the gathering tonight? Don"t be. We did what we needed to, and so did they." He slapped his hands together, his former injuries seemingly all healed, face suddenly craggy in the late afternoon light as if the lines on his face deepened. "Enough about that, how"d you get an inspector on your tail anyway?"

Lon whose fists had suddenly clenched subconsciously at Defi"s question, also looked at him in curiosity and slight suspicion.

"The people on the west have been doing something strange." He pointed to his west boundary. "They wanted to know if it was connected to something they"re looking into."

That was innocuous enough. The two who"d just left had been asking about the farm and Jorne had thrown out a few questions about his neighbors.

If the mayor wanted the town guard to investigate Calor Ducan, she"d tell them so. That she hadn"t, meant Defi shouldn"t go stirring up calm waters.

"I think those thieves might have been testing their entry method and tried the homestead for practice."

Cuthes shrugged. "Reasonable, if nothing really was taken. Isolated, you were gone a few days, the noise is covered by the construction. Probably heard people were returning and took the chance."

"I have little enough that if something disappeared, I would notice." Defi easily kept the slight strain in his tone, enough to tell the two guards that he was upset.

And he was upset.

The broken things were replaceable. Zivenof could be replaced, even.

But there was some part of him that was boiling in anger that his house had been breached, that his safety was compromised.

Defi took a deep breath.

Cuthes gripped his shoulder briefly. "We better be going. Rain"s about to get worse."

Defi nodded.

Cuthes strode into the rain, heading for their own horses.

"We worked with them sometimes," Lon suddenly said. "There hadn"t been serious bandit problems in Havare province since the Blades were hired. Some of their people were recruited locally."

He looked like he would say more, but shook his head and he stepped out of the shelter of the porch as well. The lanky form that indicated Lon had not yet finished growing into his limbs blurred in the rain.

They lifted their arms in farewell. Defi made a similar gesture in response, then his arm dropped as they cantered into the trees in rain that was just starting to hurl fat droplets down from heavy dark clouds.

All four of his visitors would be drenched before they reached town.

No, there was likely some Emblem to prevent that. Inspectors and town guards were professions that were outdoors all the time, and both had an organization backing them. It would only be practical to issue weather protection.

But did anyone think of the farmers, Defi half-complained half-jested internally. Were they expected to evolve rainproofing naturally?

He locked the door as he entered the house. The silence felt soothing, but there was a note of uneasiness under it.

Defi sighed, now that the others were not here to hear it.

It would take more than a few hours for the place to feel like his again. He put Turq in the makes.h.i.+ft pen with the others, took up a spade and one of the un-inscribed barrels.

He re-treaded the dirty footprints he and Karles made as they left the underground storage earlier.

He considered the mess on the stone floor. Now that he needed to clean it, the underground storage room seemed unreasonably large.

He snorted derision and amus.e.m.e.nt at himself, then got to work.

*

When he was finished, the underground floor sc.r.a.ped and mopped, the stairs washed and the tools cleaned, the sky had darkened into near twilight and the rain had softened into the same faint drizzle from before it poured.

He should probably get ready to meet people at the night market.

But the fate of the hybrid Herbs niggled at his mind.

Naranj, liongra.s.s, and shyleaf.

They were minor Mystic Herbs, according to his research, but Defi did not know what Kern had crossed them with.

The three planter pots had surprisingly germinated enough seedlings to fill two vegetable plots each, of the size Kern had been using in the southern gardens. He had only used a quarter of each bag.

Mystic plants were unsurprisingly hardy.

Defi put on a farmer"s hat, took a shaded lamp, and headed around the house to the Herb plots.

Five minutes later he was frowning.

As expected, the Herbs had begun siphoning vitality from the land. It was just a much faster pace than he expected. The land had not depleted so quickly in the initial days since the plots were planted.

They were near full-grown now, their leaves s.h.i.+ning healthy in the dew left behind by the rain.

He sat down on a convenient stone at the edge of the cultivated area, sank the Current into the earth.

The hybrids were not only greedy, they were voracious. Every tendril of Current he spread into the soil was hastily gathered and subsumed. He increased the flow to the maximum the land could take without undue effects to the insect life or the long-term management of the soil.

The Current was exceedingly helpful to agriculture in Ontrea, but only in moderation. It could only revitalize, not be the sole reason for the growth of a crop. Legends say that the wasteland that made up a third of Ontrea was the result of too much Current-dependent agriculture. They were only legends, but the image of the wasteland was always stuck in the mind of Ontrea"s children.

Better too little than too much. It was a popular adage, applied to a myriad philosophies. The main meaning was to allow others to cultivate the independence of self. It was similar, but not the same, to an Ascharonian proverb about teaching someone to fish. The lords of Ontrea in particular subscribed to the saying when laying out the process of raising their children.

Defi shook his head. He had a feeling that if he flooded the plots with Current, the Herbs would suck it all up in a breath before the negative effects could show themselves.

He kept the steady moderate flow, and felt the land ease. If he did not have a gathering to attend he might try the flooding.

He sat for half an hour, until the Herbs did not feel so starved.

He took a deep breath and stood, a little dizzy at the depletion of energy in him. The rain had stopped and the moon was peeking out of a cloudbank. Here and there, as the clouds parted, stars twinkled.

Around him, the twilight was s.h.i.+ning as pearls of rain left on the living plants reflected the pale light from above.

Instead of withdrawing the Current, he spread it over the land as far as he could.

The land teased his senses with shocking familiarity, tendrils of the Current caught in odd crevices in the soil, s.h.i.+ning with leftover raindrops on the leaves of the sansu trees, blooming with the wildflowers on the edge of the small orchard.

He used so much of the Current on the land that it felt like his.

His eyes snapped open.

It felt like his mother"s farm had, he realized, after he had started healing the land.

It felt like home.

He shook his head, withdrawing the Current from the earth under him.

Impossible.

He took up the lamp and walked back to the house.