Chapter 79: Chapter 79 – Worth The Price Of The Meal

“Gav! Gavish!”

“Zidanya! My favorite customer!”

“Doubtless you say so to each and every Architect.”

We’re standing at the entrance of a stall, not long after I found the closest thing there was in my closet to pants. It’s still tights, but apparently that’s just the fashion here; I don’t believe Zidanya or Amber for a second on the subject, not the way they’re snickering, but that turns out to be unfair of me. Maybe one in five of the humans we run across, across all the demographics, are wearing tights like these, solid, bright colors and all. Additional legwear to go over the tights ranges from nothing, with shirts or other tops that generally go down about halfway down the curve of the wearer’s ass regardless of gender, to dresses and pants that go down to mid-calf. There’s a staggering variety of mechanisms by which they end; hems, fringes, metal or ceramic rings either horizontal or vertical, gathered cuffs of some sort of elastic, gathered cuffs with string-ties or buckles or…

I find myself staring more than once and redirect my gaze, but nobody ever seems to mind, and rarely does anybody notice. There’s just so many people surging through the wide halls and cavernous chambers of the Tournament complex, and even when someone does notice the most that happens is that they either drift farther in the crowd or drift closer in the crowd, playing on a hope of prurient interest.

“Zidanya, you wound me, you grind my nubs and shatter my peaks. Of course I say that to every Architect who comes by. There’s only one of you!”

“Is it so, Gavish? Then two cycles past…”

“Clearwater is my teammate, not my customer!”

“She parts not with a penny nor a stone for you?”

“No! Well, no, but she did start re-enchanting my freezer after Shelig left. Still, that’s no custom!”

I’m pretty sure I could retrace our steps if I had to, but it’s hard to concentrate on that when I’m busy goggling at the store we fetch up at, Khetzi trailing in our wake after Zidanya declines to be guided. The stalls are inset into the walls of the corridors, inset apparently as deeply as they want to be by dint of spatial magic, with textile banners and signage proudly displaying their names and wares; this one is “Chef Gavish’s Comforts”, which does not immediately conjure food to mind. Neither does the color scheme, all deep ambers and reds and purples, of both the banner outside and the furnishings within.

But a restaurant it does seem to be, with a floating fractal ice spike behind a counter and a range of folk of all sorts of shapes and sizes sitting at tables in the tens-of-meters-to-a-side space that is just brazenly impossible, given the proximity of the venue to its likewise-internally-sized neighbors. The floating ice spike is Gavish themself, apparently, a Rue bound or to or defined by some complex notion of the way ice crystallizes. They’re fascinating; I stare unabashedly at the patterns of smoothness, roughness, and jagged protrusions that give them shape and form beyond just being a meter-ish-tall, ten-centimeter radius vaguely conical spike.

“I’m guessing the Sworn isn’t eating. The three of you and a couple of orcs? Anyone I know?”

“Downland clanners, to my eye; long past your time. Clan Berger.”

“Not a name I recognize, not a name I recognize. Still! Maybe one of them knows the lineage. I was Clanfriend to seven—”

“—of the eight First Clans, none who know you are unaware.”

Almost all of Gavish’s clientele are humanoid, kindred species as opposed to the wider kith, though actually I think someone’s told me that orcs are considered kith rather than kindred, for whatever reason. And it mostly is orcs even more than it is humans, but not exclusively those two; there’s a handful of tazi and a few sed, and there’s a quartet of gotz and one table with a pair of four-meter tall nephil, as far as particularly divergent kith go. One of the nephilim could pass for a double size human that happens to have two pairs of arms, and the other is a light grey with a hint of blue and entirely hairless across every centimeter of their body, with fingers that have one fewer joint than mine.

The grey one sees me staring and waves, six-fingered hand splayed flat, and I wave back sheepishly.

“—can’t accept any payment, obviously.”

That gets my attention. “I’m not in the habit of accepting obligations,” I say, cutting into the conversation.

“As the Magelord says,” Zidanya concurs softly. “I have eyes to see, Gavish; you need a Runewright’s attention on your—”

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“I need,” Gavish says, cutting Zidanya off, “many things. Things which—”

“No, Gav.” Zidanya’s voice goes cold. “I will not speak to the Lady on your behalf.”

“Is that what… of course it’s what you thought I was asking.” Gavish’s voice is a mix of a bunch of emotions, and some of the spikes and protuberances on their surface shift in a slow-moving wheel of kaleidoscopically-reflecting ice. “No, Architect, please don’t talk to the Lady on my behalf. In fact, please never again mention my existence to the Lady at all.”

“Chef Gavish.” I smile at the Rue, picking up the thread as Zidanya vaguely makes a frog impression. “What do you want from us, if you don’t want our skills or our currency?”

There’s a pause, maybe an uncomfortable one. I can’t tell; I’m too busy staring at one of the workers behind the counter, a perfectly ordinary-seeming human with an intricate braid of braids and a squared-off beard, juggling knives and vegetables in a pattern that passes the knives through the vegetables. Perfectly-cut pieces rain slowly down into wide, flattish bowls as someone tosses him another uneven oblate red… vegetable or fruit, I can’t tell which, to join the juggling. “I want a few things, but there’s only one I think you might give me.”

“Tell me the others anyway?”

There’s a creaking sound as two of Gav’s spikes splay outwards and then close back in. “Talk up my food in the ring, decide to take a fifth and tell the Lady I convinced you, teach me that trick you impressed the Lady with.” They pause momentarily. “Take me as a fifth.”

“Why would me taking a fifth—ah. Never mind.” It’s a ridiculous question with an obvious answer; if only two parties are making it to the surface and both of those parties are currently four people, that leaves two slots open. Two of Lily’s subjects to be resurrected, which means… “I have to take a fifth, don’t I. It’s condemning someone otherwise.” I blink a few times, then snicker. “So much for not wanting to mess up our dynamic. Maybe I should have said yes to Maarah.”

“The Magelord,” Zidanya says with a credible, near-Amber level of dryness, “is oft easy to convince. One needs only give him the space to draw your conclusions himself.”

“Well!” Gav sounds entirely self-satisfied, almost but not quite to the edge of smugness. “If it pleases you, perhaps you might mention me as the source of your revelation. But please, sit, sit! Let me close up shop, give you some privacy, maybe reconfigure for a good view, eh?”

“Please don’t.” My answer is reflexive, blurted out. “I mean, we don’t really need privacy. I don’t, I mean, I actually was really enjoying watching your sous-chef with the knives. This is great.”

“You… well! Please, have a seat at the counter, then.” There’s surprise in Gavish’s voice, and a sort of grandiose, overcompensatory tone to the offer. “The Iceflame for you, Zidanya?”

“As ever; and two specials.”

We settle in for the wait, and it’s… well, it’s remarkably pleasant. The crowd outside the restaurant is cacophonous, arguing in an incoherent, discordant symphony about a thousand different things mostly related to food or odds of this person or that person making it through the melee; the folks inside are content to eat, or if they’re talking, they're talking quietly enough that I can’t hear them. What I can hear, quite distinctly, is the sizzling and popping of oil and fat having heat applied to them, a pleasantly familiar sound promising Maillard reactions and crispiness.

The man doing the vegetable and fruit preparation is a delight to watch, too. I can’t imagine how sharp his knives must be to cut through all sorts of ingredients in mid-air without deviating from their course, but maybe I just can’t tell and he’s compensating for it in his tosses; either way, he goes through mushrooms and more of what Amber tells me are peppers, but not the spicy kind, plus something that looks suspiciously like a long, cylindrical squash of some sort that is shaped very similarly to the cucumber he moves on to.

He doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to us, either, just humming tunelessly, or maybe in a different tonal configuration from any tunefulness I’m used to, as he juggle-chops steadily. His knives are super neat to watch, almost entirely blade and only as long as my outstretched palm; he grabs them by the nubby handle between two fingers, mostly using his index and middle fingers, and tosses them back into the air. They’re wavy, not in the usual sense but perpendicular to what would be the usual line of chopping, and it leaves a wave pattern on the cut pieces.

I almost don’t want to pull up the Visor to see what his Skills are. I do, though, because nothing enhances the aesthetic of something like understanding it; to my surprise, there’s practically nothing in flight. The man has some sort of self-enhancement Skill going, Perfect Form, which has three interwoven effects, and there’s a connection between him and the knife that my Visor calls Inevitability, but it’s a weak read and I’m probably missing nuances.

The food winds up being long, very thin strips of meat, charred on the outside and cool on the inside, wrapped around vegetables that have been fried in some kind of flavorful oil. There’s a wide range of spices, salt and pepper and turmeric and more, and the meat has an astonishing amount of juiciness for how skinny the pieces are. It’s all served on top of something almost like really big grains of rice, with a texture that’s somehow crunchier while still being fluffy, and when I bite into the not-rice I find that it sort of explodes, releasing an incredibly flavor-dense broth.

We linger over the food and over desserts, which are iced purees of fruit, and despite our lingering, the Clan Bergers never show.

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