Limits by Larry Niven (tohfa e dulha read online TXT) 📗

“You couldn’t have been more than…ten? How can you remember so much?”

A shrug. “After the Torovan invasion, after we had to get out…Mother talked incessantly about palace life. I think she got lost in the past. I don’t blame her much, considering what the present was like. What she told me and what I saw myself, it’s all a little mixed up after so long. I saw the travelling eye, though.”

“How did that happen?”

“Mother was there when a messenger passed it to the king. She snatched it out of his hand, playfully, you know, and admired it and showed it to me. Maybe she thought he’d give it to her. He got very angry, and he was trying not to show it, and that was even more frightening. We left the palace the next day. Twelve days before the quake.”

Karskon asked, “What about the other—?” But warning pressure from her hand cut him off.

Thone had finished rolling up the sail. As the boat thumped against the stone wall he sprang upward, onto what had been a balcony, and moored the bow line fast. A girl in her teens came from within the tower to fasten the stern line for him. She was big as Thone was big: not yet fat, but hefty, rounded of feature. Thone’s sister, Karskon thought, a year or two older.

Durily, seeing no easier way out of the boat, reached hands up to them. They heaved as she jumped. Karskon passed their luggage up, leaving the cargo for others to move, and joined them.

Thone made introductions. “Sir Karskon, Lady Durily, this is Estrayle, my sister. Estrayle, they’ll be our guests for a month. I’ll have to tell Father. We bring red meat in trade.”

The girl said, “Oh, very good! Father will love that. How was the trip?”

“Well enough. Sometimes the spells for wind just don’t do anything. Then there’s no telling where you wind up.” To Karskon and Durily he said, “We live on this floor. These outside stairs take you right up past us. You’ll be staying on the floor above. The top floor is the restaurant.”

Durily asked, “And the roof?”

“It’s flat. Very convenient. We raise rabbits and poultry there.” Thone didn’t see the look that passed across Durily’s face. “Shall I show you to your rooms? And then I’ll have to speak to Father.”

Nihilil’s Castle dated from the last days of real magic. The South Tower was a wide cylindrical structure twelve stories tall, with several rooms on each floor. In this age nobody would have tried to build anything so ambitious.

When Rordray petitioned for the right to occupy these ruins, he had already done so. Perhaps the idea amused Minterl’s new rulers. A restaurant in Nihilil’s Castle! Reached only by boats! At any rate, nobody else wanted the probably haunted tower.

The restaurant was the top floor. The floor below would serve as an inn; but as custom decreed that the main meal was served at noon, it was rare for guests to stay over. Rordray and his wife and eight children lived on the third floor down.

Though “Rordray’s Attic” was gaining some reputation on the mainland, the majority of Rordray’s guests were fishermen. They often paid their score in fish or in smuggled wines. So it was that Thone found Rordray and Merle hauling in lines through the big kitchen window.

Even Rordray looked small next to Merle. Merle was two and a half yards tall, and rounded everywhere, with no corners and no indentations: his chin curved in one graceful sweep down to his wishbone, his torso expanded around him like a tethered balloon. There was just enough solidity, enough muscle in the fat, that none of it sagged at all.

And that was considerable muscle. The flat-topped fish they were wrestling through the window was as big as a normal man; but Merle and Rordray handled it easily. They settled the corpse on its side on the center table, and Merle asked, “Don’t you wish you had an oven that size?”

“I do,” said Rordray. “What is it?”

“Dwarf island-fish. See the frilly spines all over the top of the thing? Meant to be trees. Moor at an island, go ashore. When you’re all settled the island dives under you, then snaps the crew up one by one while you’re trying to swim. But they’re magical, these fish, and with the magic dying away—”

“I’m wondering how to cook the beast.”

That really wasn’t Merle’s department, but he was willing to advise. “Low heat in an oven, for a long time, maybe an eighth of an arc,” meaning an eighth of the sun’s path from horizon to horizon.

Rordray nodded. “Low heat, covered. I’ll fillet it first. I can fiddle up a sauce, but I’ll have to see how fatty the meat is…All right, Merle. Six meals in trade. Anyone else could have a dozen, but you—”

Merle nodded placidly. He never argued price. “I’ll start now.” He went through into the restaurant section, scraping the door on both sides, and Rordray turned to greet his son.

“We have guests,” said Thone, “and we have red meat, and we have a bigger boat. I thought it proper to bargain for you.”

“Guests, good. Red meat, good. What have you committed me to?”

“Let me tell you the way of it.” Thone was not used to making business judgments in his father’s name. He looked down at his hands and said, “Most of the gold you gave me, I had spent. I had spices and dried meat and vegetables and pickle and the rest. Then a boat pulled in with sides of ox for sale. I was wondering what I could sell, to buy some of that beef, when these two found me at the dock.”

“Was it you they were looking for?”

“I think so. The lady Durily is of the old Minterl nobility, judging by her accent. Karskon speaks Minterl but he might be of the new nobility, the invaders from Torov. Odd to find them together—”

“You didn’t trust