Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  “Did you come to tell me about her?”

  “No, I wanted to read you something and hear what you thought of it.”

  Settling into the straw, he opened the book and began.

  The Gryphon listened silently as the Centaur, abducted from its homeland, moved through its journey.

  How vast the world, and here a system that goes out and rips it up, bit by bit, and sends it back to Tabat to be devoured, he thought as he turned the page.

  Sebastiano read as one does when a story is both painful and fascinating, sometimes wincing at the brutality of the acts, yet still noting the relevant sections, again matching them against his own knowledge of Beasts and their magic.

  Fewk breathed in and out steadily, but he could tell the Gryphon was not asleep, but listening carefully.

  The ending of the book said that the Centaur had been taken away, presumably to be killed. Sebastiano hesitated before he read it aloud. He felt the Gryphon tense at the words, but remain silent. When he closed the book, Fewk let out a sigh. Sebastiano tried to sit up, but he was curled along the Gryphon’s side, the wing holding him in place.

  “Sad,” the Gryphon said.

  “Do you think a Centaur wrote it?”

  The great head turned to look at him. The beak was razor sharp. He’d seen Fewk chop a beef bone in half with it, but this was Fewk, who would not hurt him. Would never hurt him. Fewk was unlike other Gryphons, so fierce and quarrelsome.

  “You said a Centaur wrote it,” the Gryphon said.

  “The book says so, yes …”

  “Jolietta Kanto,” Fewk said, and hissed.

  Sebastiano was startled by the tone. “You knew her before this book?”

  “All Beasts know the names of the worst ones,” Fewk said.

  “Why? It’s not as though you could avoid them.”

  “Because we remember,” the Gryphon said. For the first time, his eyes were angry. The wing snapped back into place, away from Sebastiano, and cold air slapped him. “It is all we can do, but we do it. We remember.”

  This was a new Fewk, one he’d never seen, and Sebastiano felt utterly betrayed and rejected as he clambered to his feet, but also in the wrong, as though he’d pointed out a cripple’s twisted foot to her or mocked a blind man for not being able to see.

  The Gryphon rose at the same time he did, but more swiftly, so by the time he’d straightened his entire form, the huge creature towered above him. He shrank back.

  “Afraid of me?” the Gryphon said. The astonished betrayal, mirroring the emotion in his own breast, made him step towards it.

  “No, Fewk,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Fewk stood for a second, contemplating him, before the great head lowered and nuzzled into his midriff, the assault affectionate and forgiving. He clasped his arms around the feathery ruff of the Gryphon’s neck and hugged it to him.

  The question came again, “Not afraid?” and he replied, “No. And Fewk—there is no need to fear me.”

  “I know that,” Fewk said and raised his head to huff out straw and fish-scented breath in his face, comforting and familiar and trusting as a nursery friend.

  CHAPTER 32

  The servants were up at this hour, but no one else. Gray light filtered over the trees outside, the bare branches dark shimmers of ice.

  Adelina loved this time of day. Rising early was a habit of her mother’s in her earlier years and Adelina usually slipped from her bed when she heard her mother wake and accompanied her to the kitchen for chal and bread, then sat drawing or reading while Emiliana undid her account book to pore over it, checked invoices and bills of lading, and wrote out page after page in her fine, assured script.

  Sometimes Adelina was sent on errands, taking envelopes or packages here or there. She loved that too, loved seeing sunrise over the city from new angles: while in the central tram riding to the topmost terrace; from the docks near the Nettlepurse warehouses, gulls screeching overhead while boats unloaded; standing on the steps of the Moon Bank to watch the crowds go by.

  She had never seen it from the Sea Garden, but Eloquence had invited her to breakfast with him there this morning.

  He was waiting when she arrived outside the Press building, walking briskly, warm inside her greatcoat, the serviceable but well-patched one that Emiliana kept trying to replace.

  “Have you been waiting long?” she said as she approached.

  Picking up the basket at his feet, he flashed a smile at her. “Not long. And it gave me time to think of a new pamphlet idea, a most poetic one. Smells of Tabat. The fish and spice market are givens. What else shall we include in it, if we co-write such a thing?”

  She considered, matching her strides to his. She liked the way he walked: he didn’t make her go fast, like Bella with her tight Gladiator’s pace. “In Tabat’s heart, on the third terrace up, there are Summer roses. When you stand there in the sunlight, it’s nothing but perfume.”

  “I’ve never smelled that. I’ll have to linger in Tabat this Summer.” He shifted the basket from one hand to another. “Perhaps you’ll take me?”

  “It would be my honor,” she said. They rounded a corner. The crowd of birds perched on the platform’s railing burst upward, fluttering like her heart.

  “This smell,” Adelina said.

  Eloquence rolled his eyes at a Satyr standing towards the back, waiting for the Beast-only car. “You are unkind!”

  She pushed at his shoulder. “No. The tram smell. The smell of metal mingling with aetheric energy’s tang in the nose.”

  “Then you need one more, beyond that,” he said. “What encompasses the city when combined with fish and spices, roses and trams, and good grain bread on a cold morning?”

  “You supply it,” she said. “You’re the author here.” They shuffled into the car, holding onto the ironwork sides. The conductor slid the gate shut with a clang and they began to shudder downward.

  “Says the writer of Bella Kanto and the Cliffs of Doom and Bella Fights the Tiger Sharks of Kesh.”

  Adelina made a face. “Here today and someone’s fish wrapping the next.”

  He leaned down towards her. “Everyone in Tabat reads the penny-wides. I can only dream that my book will be read by a hundredth of that number.”

  Warmth suffused her but she forced a shrug. “Well,” she said. “Apples for some and Ellora’s fruit for others.”

  “You speak this evening?”

  She made a face. “My mother wishes me to try again.”

  “You are a dutiful daughter,” he said. “I approve.”

  “You are laughing at me, I think.”

  “I am laughing that you are nervous. On the page, your words flow and carry one along so smoothly.”

  “Flatterer.” She thought of Jilla’s drug tucked in her waistband. She would try it. She would see what would happen.

  And if the worst occurred, and again she could not, then surely it would convince Emiliana once and for all that her daughter had tried to obey her will not once, but twice, and leave it at that.

  CHAPTER 33

  O bedience paused and mopped at her face, then regretted the action as her eyes stung anew from a whiff of the lime caking her gloves. She had thought that there was no way the tannery could be as bad as Ellora’s caves, but the day had not proved her right, going wrong even from the first moment, when Compassion had stolen most of her breakfast.

  “You’re moving too slow,” her new mistress barked.

  Ordea Hidelong was as tanned as the leather her business produced. The tannery specialized in Beast hides, of all varieties. Obedience stood now in one of the chambers, the slab floor caked with filth, holding vast stone tubs in which different hides soaked in different liquids. Someone had attempted to whitewash the brick walls, even the pipes that led in various directions, but the grimy red of the underlying surface had seeped through to reclaim them.

  Ever since she had entered, the taste of sticky metal had lingered on her tongue, an
d she’d been driven from her initial post by burning nose, watering eyes, and raw throat. All around her was the monotonous slap and slosh of workers grabbing hides with long iron poles, each ending in a curved hook, in order to pull them from one pool of gray liquid to another.

  She struggled to keep up, but everyone else was so much faster. White patches dappled the skin of many of her fellow workers. Would that happen to her too?

  “This won’t work till ye build up more muscle,” Ordea said. “Come.” She led Obedience to another chamber. Here the floor was dug with circular pits, roughly a yard in diameter, each filled with murky gray-brown liquid.

  “I told ye the process afore,” Ordea said. “Do ye remember it?”

  “The hides are soaked in water when they first come in, and then you—we—take the hair off. Then they’re put in salt …”

  “No,” Ordea interjected. “First they’re bated.”

  “What is that?”

  “We soak them in pigeon shit and water.” Ordea nodded at the pits. “Then someone gets in and walks around on them a while.”

  Obedience stared at her in disbelief.

  “Make sure you’re nice and thorough, stamp a while on each one, give it a good quarter bell by the Duke’s tower,” Ordea continued. “You can do that, aye?”

  Without waiting for Obedience’s answer, she was gone.

  Obedience turned back to the pools and began to roll up her skirts.

  ELOQUENCE KNEW Obedience wasn’t happy, but he steeled his heart as he looked at her across the dinner table.

  “You smell,” Honesty said. She often banked on her name to excuse herself such remarks, and Eloquence cocked an eyebrow at her in admonishment.

  “I don’t like the tannery,” Obedience said. Her voice was high and desperate and she was speaking directly at him. “Please, I’ll do almost anything else.”

  He had to laugh at the caginess of that last little qualifier. “Almost, eh? You can’t be that bad off, scamp, if you’re still mindful enough to be tricksy with your words!”

  He ignored the appeal in her eyes and went out for a walk. He had to think about Adelina. If he wanted her, he could probably get her to marry him, and she was well-pocketed enough to provide for him and all his family.

  But he didn’t think she would be willing to follow the Moons, and that would be a sticking point with the Temples. He paced down icy lanes and went to the Temple courtyard to pray. But when he rose, a full bell later with his knees aching, he was no closer to any sort of answer.

  CHAPTER 34

  O bedience shouldn’t have been there on the grounds of the College of Mages. But ever since the day she had visited to leave Sebastiano’s pendant with the doorkeeper for him, Eloquence at her elbow as stern and silent as she’d ever seen him, the glimpses of the things she’d seen had drawn her.

  She sometimes fantasized that if she went there and Sebastiano discovered her, perhaps he would realize how foolish he had been and that she should be trained in magic as he had been. That pleasant dream could be spun in a number of different directions.

  She’d learned by now that as long as you looked as though you knew where you were going, no one would question you. She used this to explore, casting about through the College grounds and seeing what she could find.

  Quite a bit as it turned out.

  Fortunate coins come to the boldest purse. That was a Trade Gods saying, and even though they all followed the Moons, it was still a wise phrase. Obedience resolved to follow it.

  Here the air was clean, where the tannery was an awful, reeking hell. To soften the leather, it was soaked in an odorous mix of water and pigeon shit. Every day her main duty was still to wade through the pools, trampling the hides so the water would touch every inch of their surfaces.

  Other duties that had been given her were equally unappealing, like scraping gobbets of flesh from the undersides of the thick, stiff cattle or Beast hides just arrived from the slaughterhouse down the street. At night her arms and shoulders ached so badly that she wept with the pain of it, unable to sleep.

  She’d tried to talk to Eloquence, but he’d said it was her duty to work to support the family. She’d get used to it in time, he said.

  Never.

  Lucky for her that fifteenth day had fallen only two days into her tenure there. And luckier still that her sisters were still shunning her. They wouldn’t notice her absence. Or rather they’d think her hiding somewhere.

  Instead, she was here at the College of Mages, ready to seize a different future. A frighteningly big place, in a section of the city she’d never visited. In the distance, she could hear a roar. Some great machine the Mages had built?

  She wandered for a while. No one seemed to question her.

  At the College, she found a hall she had never paused in, only glimpsed from a distance. She’d never seen such a thing: a great glass cage, all full of Fairies. They didn’t stir at her approach, seemed to not notice her at all, engaged in their own interactions.

  If she were a student here, she would have stood here watching every day, she thought in wonder. Two students passed, and spared not a glance for either Obedience or the Fairies, although one of them wrinkled their nose going by.

  Finally, reluctantly, she pulled herself away. She smelled food, although it had an unappetizing edge of cinnamon and cabbage. A sign marked “Administration” must surely mark her destination. That sounded important enough to supply help.

  She took the steps one by one, her shoes pinching her toes at every step, ice slick underfoot. She marched to the double doors, twice as tall as she was, the brass engraved with strange images: kraken and clouds and lightning, and an odd border of what seemed to be bottles.

  The doors looked too heavy to move, but at her touch they swung open, revealing a vast hall lined with narrow windows that cast arrows of light across the marble flooring, checkered in gray and black. At the far end, impossibly far, towered a desk with a man sitting behind it.

  He did not look up as she came across the floor towards him, her steps sounding ridiculously loud in her ears. It seemed to take forever to reach the space before the desk. When she did, he raised his head. Possibly as old as the oldest person she’d ever seen, his face bore a maze of wrinkles. Then a smile split it, and his voice creaked out, “How may I help you, child?”

  “If you please,” Obedience said, swallowing a gulp of chill air and courage, “I want to apprentice here.”

  He blinked, the smile falling away into astonishment. “You want to become a student here, you mean?”

  She shook her head. “No, an apprentice. I’ll work for you and you’ll teach me.”

  “My dear girl, that’s not how it works at all,” he said.

  Behind him a door opened. The figure that emerged was unexpectedly familiar.

  “Merchant Mage Sebastiano!” she exclaimed.

  He stopped at the sight of her, looking startled.

  “Is this your child then, Sebastiano?” the doorkeeper said. “Charming, charming, if a little, er, … pungent. And most amusing. She wants to apprentice here!”

  The disapproval on Sebastiano’s face made Obedience remember that the last time he’d seen her had been when Eloquence shouted at him. But he had been so kind to her before, surely he could be coaxed into that again? She flashed a desperate smile at him.

  “I’m pledged to the tannery,” she explained in a babble of words. “It’s awful there, you’ve no idea. So I decided I would come be an apprentice Mage instead.”

  “Does your brother know you are here?” he demanded.

  She shrank back from the censure in his eyes. “No. He’d be angry.”

  “Come.” He took her hand and led her across the expanse of floor, back towards the entrance.

  “Mages do not apprentice like crafters,” he explained as they walked. “They enroll in the College and study at their lessons all day.”

  “I could study all day,” she offered.

  They reache
d the door and he released her hand. “I am sure you could. But it is an expensive tuition.”

  “Are there scholarships?” she asked. “Or I could work as your servant. I could be your courier or fetch your chal.”

  His unkind laugh made her cheeks burn. “Goodbye, Obedience.”

  She was outside the door, back in the cold, wintry air. She kicked the door. It moved not at all beneath the blow, leaving her with a stubbed toe and a heart filled with anger.

  She turned a corner and ran directly into a wall of coarse, sand-colored fur that smelled old and rank. It knocked her back and she reeled, sitting down suddenly on the cobblestones and jarring her tailbone with an impact that rang up along her spine into her head, making her vision double for a moment. Then a weight on her chest pushed her back into the stones, grinding them into her shoulder blades.

  She fought for breath, trying to summon enough air to scream, but just as she was about to let the sound out, the weight redoubled, pushing the breath out of her.

  “You do not belong here,” a voice hissed.

  The Sphinx! Larger, more alarming, more frightening than imagined. The great dark eyes narrowed, so angry, so full of hate that Obedience’s throat clutched tight with fear.

  The smell. It was the smell from the gallery.

  “Should I just kill you, stupid child? You are dressed poorly. No one will miss you.”

  “Sebastiano,” she managed.

  The pressure eased, just a little. “The Merchant Mage?”

  She gulped air. The eyes were still boring into her but she managed to dip her head in a nod.

  “How do I remember you?” the Sphinx said slowly, releasing her. “Your smell is almost familiar, but there is such a stink about you …”

  Obedience scrambled to her feet, backed away, and fled.

  CHAPTER 35

  A delina would not have noticed the figure huddled beside Sparkfinger Jack’s statue if she hadn’t heard her name called.