Hearts of Tabat

by Cat Rambo

  They’d been so absorbed that they’d taken to spending all their time discussing the world of the spectacles, delving into the minutiae of that microcosm.

  They spoke of snow demons in love with ice demons who yearned to cloak themselves in the bones of mist demons. Mist demons who in turn only wanted the cool touch of the first Spring rain and yet inevitably somehow missed that yearly occasion time and time again. An ice demon building a palace of discarded, imperfect snowflakes. A rainbow imp, trapped inadvertently by an accident of the wind, despoiling its splendor. The enraged demon called for a boycott of Winter. And so on and so on and so on.

  The complicated mythochronology mirrored the Trade Gods, but a beat before their actions, so a canny Mage might predict market fluctuations. Were any of them to stoop so low as to become involved in trade! It was peculiar how those least involved in commerce held it in the strongest spite. Sebastiano had noticed that more than once in his dealings with the College.

  He sat only a few feet away from his former friends in the steamy warmth of the tiny space. Oilskins and furs dangled from pegs along the wall, and orange paper tablecloths overlay the tables. In theory, the server changed these between patrons, but in actuality, the paper was imprinted with damp and greasy rings, intersecting like elemental forces, refusing to touch each other, in zones that delineated whose arrival had preceded the others. He folded his coat carefully and put it on the seat beside him.

  He ordered fish tea and counted the coins in his pocket surreptitiously to see if he’d be able to afford a second pastry when it arrived. He’d need to watch his coins from now on.

  The Weather Mages, for he could think of them as nothing else, as though they had devised their own new category—Pilot Mages, perhaps, or a very specialized type of Scholar Mage, even—sat with their backs turned toward him. Where once they had owned but a single pair of spectacles, now there were two—identical—sitting at the table as though to signal invisible third and fourth presences.

  He fished what he hoped—ah, it was!—a silver skiff out of his pocket and bought a pastry topped with a spill of chopped nuts. He leaned over it to inhale its steam and listened to his former classmates.

  “A grand upheaval!” Djon insisted.

  His fellow scoffed. Frume was a dark-complexioned, hirsute man, who Sebastiano remembered as being adept at drinking and who had left the dormitory washbasins abominably unclean, spattered with soap scum and stray hairs. “Nothing that hasn’t been seen before,” he said. “The Fae are always full of rumors and the clouds breathe in and out with each puff on a gossip’s lips.”

  “A strong rumor, indeed, for it blows down every alley. Listen, all the cold-weather imps are pulling out and the warm-weather ones are here a month early at least. Unheard of! You’ve seen the bluster and gales of their battles all day, admit it! It’s as though Bella Kanto had lost!”

  He raised himself as though to address his exhortation to the rest of the tavern at large. Sebastiano hastily looked into the depths of his mug, rather than be drawn into the argument.

  Perhaps the day’s rigors had muddled him more than he had thought. Their conversation swam in and out of sense and he was never sure if his lapses into non-comprehension were due to ignorance or sanity on his part.

  Something about the chill outside, the warmth in here, set a Mage’s mind to maundering. Most of them wanted to explain things, wanted to construct the overarching theory that would make Beasts and Humans, sorcery and science, systematic categories, the theory that would predict the spiral constellations of cells in a Fairy hive or the accumulation of salt crystals on an airship’s hull when surrounded by sea-clouds.

  Was it possible—such an explanation? It seemed to him that life was very complicated. And yet somehow—yes, it seemed to him that mathematics and memory-keeping magics—together, these might solve a thousand problems—indeed, enough to create a thousand more. He sighed and examined the crumbs of seaweed at the bottom of his tea mug.

  All around him, conversations swirled.

  “So he says that if we can supply enough red and blue bunting, he’ll send the contract our way.”

  “Came to town from Verranzo’s New City, full of Abolitionist notions. Such birds won’t fly here in Tabat. The citizenry isn’t soft-hearted to the point of addlepation, like the North-easterners.”

  “The best poet in the city, Melusine! She’ll be there at the Haven for another red moon. I took Grizel, and she was melting and sighing and all over me, halfway through the meal.”

  “I told her she should run for Council, because she spins words sweeter than honey, but she said it takes a fair face as much as fair words. Particularly prickly subjects like Abolition. But Ziff says she’s got presence, real presence.”

  “I told her, take a capon and some cream and then cardamom—that’s the new spice, it’s all the rage this season—and evening peach, which was last year’s flavor. My lady bade me learn all the spices, and she feeds the nobility till they can’t think, and then sells them all manner of fanciful clothes.”

  “It costs a fee to run for office, to be sure, but we’re running on the platform Ale for All! And we’ve got a campaign song, my friend Hanry wrote it, and he’s promised to sing it at every rally. He says eventually, if we spend enough, the Trade Gods will take notice, and we’ll be getting kickbacks and sponsorships of our own.”

  “I just like the idea of something getting done, the way I’ve always thought that it should. It hasn’t been the best, our government, and I wonder sometimes—who came up with this shape for it?—who thought one person should own the mountains and another the sea, and yet another the fish that comes from that sea?”

  “‘But who decides and where do you draw the line?’ That’s what the Beast Trainer keeps asking. And finally the Duke says, ‘I do, and this is where I draw it.’ And he takes out his sword, and makes two Peacekeepers hold the man, and chops his head off there where he stands, and all the Duke does is send three silvers along to his Circus for the loss, to be split with his family if he has any.”

  “The price of spices, good fresh spices, will be up again by at least a half, due to all the unrest there. Fruits and sugar too.”

  Corrado had made the same observation last time Sebastiano had dined there. Even here, he couldn’t escape his father.

  Vyra Serena, help me.

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Sebastiano stopped in the middle of Salt Way and let his gaze sweep up and down the street. Something was wrong. Every magic sense tingled. He wondered, as every magic worker does at new phenomena, whether this signaled he was about to go mad.

  But a whiff of breeze reached him, warm and salty and laden with a hint of new grass against the chimney smoke.

  Warm. Just as the Weather Mages had said.

  That was odd, with weeks left of Winter to go. When had things turned so warm?

  A woman shouldered past him, and he made his way to the canopy over The Dancing Cup and stood there, looking at the sky.

  Blue, a cloudless brilliant blue with a sun like something out of a child’s drawing, yellow and bright and entirely welcome after all these weeks of cold and snow. Across the way, the line of firs that edged the College of Mages grounds was the same as always, but underneath them, amid the drifts of needles, were those gallifry blooming?

  Spring. Spring had come to Tabat. Winter was defeated.

  Had something happened to Bella Kanto?

  CHAPTER 43

  In early days, Adelina had refused to play with the elaborate toy marketplace Emiliana had commissioned, and then in turn the toy bank, and tailor shop, and warehouse, and all the other tiny toys sacred to the Trade Gods. Childhood games of the sort that Merchant children were encouraged to play held no appeal for her, and in school, she joined none of the little groups that focused on an individual Trade God, since figuring out the intricacies of their particular worship failed to engage her. She was a bookworm, an inclination Emiliana encouraged at first, only to become less and le
ss open to seeing her daughter curled up with one of the old volumes that chronicled the early history of the city.

  Adelina had turned to books of old inventories and invoices, but not in pursuit of Emiliana’s desires for her. Instead, she liked to figure out the context revealed by the documents: what was in short or plentiful supply, what was desirable, and what was known. The notebooks’ catalogs of early exploratory expeditions told what markets they were aiming for (cheap trinkets and bright cloth, things flimsy, flashy, and never martial) and what they feared (weaponry, a full outfit for it, and a list for its upkeep, issued to each and every member.)

  And those expeditions had shaped the city. Feathers, for instance, had been cheap until the varied plumage sent back by one had created a demand for feather jewelry and ornaments that were the precursors to today’s system of feather cockades to show one’s political affiliation.

  Much more fascinating than issues of trade tariffs or taxes and how they affected profit margins.

  It wasn’t until she started working with her Press that such questions came alive for Adelina. Suddenly issues of bulk discount, when applied to reams of streaky, orange paper being fed into the small clanking printing press, took on new meaning. That first little press gave way to three larger machines, huge boxy constructs capable of turning out dozens of pages at a time, that shook the building, steady thumps like heartbeats, just as inevitable and constant.

  The press workers had named them after the Moons, claiming that each exhibited the temperament of the Moon dominant during its construction. Hijae was slow to warm as well as stop, and sometimes enacted tribute in the form of injury when approached without the proper respect. Selene was easy to work with, and the superstition was that books printed on that press did better than the others. Toj the Trickster was prone to odd accidents that slowed production but rarely exacted blood.

  There too Adelina had bargained with a ferocity that would have gratified her mother. She had them custom-designed, custom-made by one of the best machinists in Tabat, working from plans she created after watching the processes by which their predecessors functioned.

  If Adelina had been able to tell her mother what she had done, the bargains, agreements, and deals built of payments and promises that she had crafted, Emiliana would’ve been pleased indeed—were it not for the association it represented.

  Adelina understood the historical forces behind publishing status, the shift from books as objects for the rich to something available to anyone with two copper skiffs to rub together. Supply and Demand were the two major Trade Gods, and everyone knew that when one or the other waxed or waned, then not just prices but other things—like social status—would shift.

  Adelina sighed and pushed away the ledger she had been staring at for ten minutes, sliding it through the puddle of sunlight on her desk that came through the tall main windows.

  She’d been trying to get Bella to stop in for one of the bouts of sitting and talking that helped Adelina generate the bones on which she hung her stories of Tabat’s most famous Gladiator. But lately, Bella had been elusive, ever busy.

  Once that skittishness had meant Bella was about to take a new lover. She was busy wooing, flirting, flaunting, buying elaborate arrangements of flowers from that place on Greenslope Way, and thus had no time to talk with her oldest friend. She had plenty of money, and found it all too easy to forget she was the Presses’ mainstay.

  This time Bella had taken a new lover and her name was Misery. She moped about as though she had not brought it all on herself.

  Not for the first time, Adelina thought that she needed to find a line of works that she could depend upon rather than Bella. If anything happened to her, the Press would be devastated.

  Her thoughts drifted to Eloquence and raised her fingers to touch the smile it prompted. So well named. Is he the Press’s chance to break away from its dependence on Bella? His words … he creates a world and brings the reader into it to smell the tarry smoke from the steamboat smokestack, feel the rocking underfoot as the boat wobbles forward through the waves, see the water gleaming among the reeds and tiny river dragons flitting back and forth among the cattails atop them.

  But was that a world readers wanted? Yes, there were exciting moments, fighting river pirates and catching Dryads, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Bella’s stories offered sex or political intrigue or fighting. One of those alone would’ve been hard to beat, but all three? Even the most beautiful sentences in the world didn’t stand a gavel’s chance against that.

  Her chair grated on the wooden floor as she pushed herself away from the desk and stood, knuckling absently at the small of her back. Moving to the window, she looked out.

  This time of morning, she could see the usual back-and-forth, a courier running through the slower crowds, a Peacekeeper trundling along in the empty space created by the wide berth everyone gave it. Overhead, a gull flew past with a curl of bread dangling from its beak, two others in pursuit.

  So bright and sunny. Unexpected. But the weather had done this before, pulling Spring out and then stuffing her away again, buried under layers of snow and ice. Bella had already determined Winter’s grasp would linger longer. Weeks of that still stretched across the calendar.

  How much longer will Bella persist in that? I must plan for that contingency.

  But not immediately. While finding a solution nagged at her right now, it wasn’t important in the way it would become when all of Bella’s adventures were confined to teaching students. She had time yet. Bella would not step down anytime soon. She’d said so herself.

  A knock on the door, then Obedience’s head inserted itself before Adelina could answer. Wide-eyed and agog, she squeaked, “Be ye needing anything, miss Adelina, ma’am?”

  Was she worth the fight with Eloquence? It drove such a splinter between us.

  “I’ve told you before, one word of address, preferably my name, is suitable,” Adelina said.

  Obedience’s eyes widened as she tried to decipher that. She slowly nodded, but said nothing, just waited.

  “No,” Adelina said. “I don’t need anything at the moment.” Unwilling to let Obedience’s labor go to waste, she added, “Serafina should have some galleys to be checked.”

  Obedience’s eyes reached their widest point yet. She had primarily been used for errands up till this point, and even those had been of little import, mainly chasing one of Figgis’ carts in quest of hyacinth cookies for Serafina.

  But there was no reason not to set her at a book. Someone could read behind her and find whatever problems she missed. She could read Scholar Layaman’s book. It was not as though the audience for that would be particularly large—or even large at all—but at the price she was charging in the name of Scholarship, a few dozen copies would see the Press breaking even and she knew from experience that relatives and friends could usually be counted on for those authors who were above a certain social rank.

  The Scholar might be light-pocketed, and his family crest a little threadbare, but he had enough influence that people would buy his book, although they might not read it.

  That was all right. Adelina preferred to think that the books she produced would be read. But she was also pragmatic when it came to the Press, in a way that would’ve been familiar to anyone accustomed to bargaining with her mother.

  “Tell Serafina to give you the Layaman galley,” she said. Then, hearing the chime and wheedle of a bakery bell outside, she added, “But go and buy us all treats first, so you can run in the sunshine.”

  This time Obedience’s smile was wide and wholehearted. She caught the silver skiff Adelina tossed her and the door shut as she withdrew.

  Adelina turned back and rested her hands on the windowsill, finger pads testing the wood. When she’d first bought this building, it had been riddled with flaws and rot, but that had been fixable. And look what I have created from it.

  Movement down along the street. Eloquence, walking with his long-legged,
purposeful stride, hat removed though his hair still showed signs of its presence. He was smiling. As Adelina watched, he stopped to help an elderly woman whose net bag had slipped, spilling lemons across the cobblestones still damp with last night’s rain. Really, so unseasonably warm.

  Something about that made her uneasy.

  Eloquence finished collecting the woman’s fruit and handed the last back with a flourish that forced a smile to Adelina’s lips. He was coming here—no other place to be visiting, down in this neighborhood—and while he might ostensibly be coming to see Obedience, surely it was not the thought of seeing his youngest sister that put such a spring in his step. No, he was thinking of her.

  And how did she feel about that? She cupped the thought to her like a little treasure box, the sort jewelry came in, and peeked within, feeling a surge of fondness. He liked her. She liked him.

  Eloquence looked up, waved to her, and she found herself downright grinning—absurd, to be so giddy, silly as one of Bella’s students. Clearly she had been forgiven all. Below her, he vanished from view as he entered the doorway.

  He would not find Obedience, off buying cookies for them all. Adelina would share hers with him, for surely he would linger till his sister reappeared. And when he did not find Obedience, he would come find Adelina.

  She smoothed her hand over her dress front and went to the mirror, taking out her comb. She was no lady’s maid, but she could at least make sure she looked orderly. More in control of myself than I actually feel.

  Her eyes, trapped in the mirror’s icy surface, looked wide and dazed as though drugged. Oh, I am in love all right, and making a foolish choice for its sake. Sebastiano would be so much more suitable, and I do like him.

  She’d been wrong to think harshly of Bella for the same behavior. She’d succumbed to it to an even sillier depth than Bella. Maybe. She thought back on some of the lovers Bella had entertained over the years. Some of them—most of them, truth be told—had been jealous of Adelina, jealous to the point of surreptitious hissed threats while Bella was out of the room, various ill wishes, and the occasional bad luck spell.