Last First Snow

by Max Gladstone

  He still looked young. And foolish, in that white shirt. Someone had tried to tailor it to his figure, and succeeded only in demonstrating the impossibility of their enterprise.

  Chel remained, watching them across the grass mats. Temoc beckoned, and she approached. “Thank you,” Temoc said, “for escorting my friend.”

  “She attacked you.”

  “She thought I was about to kill that man. In her position, would you have done differently?”

  Chel’s jaw tightened, and so did her eyes. Elayne sympathized: Chel had exposed herself to bring Elayne through the barricade, realized she had made a mistake, and was now being told her mistake was no mistake at all. She felt she’d failed on all counts. “No,” she said at last. “She says she’s from the King in Red.”

  “And you brought her to me.”

  “Would you rather I have brought her to the Major?”

  Temoc laughed, a deep, echoing sound. “Come,” he said. “The ceremony gives me a little power, and I must use it. Walk with me.”

  * * *

  “So what brings you to this mob?” Elayne asked as they walked.

  They moved among tents and throngs of protesters, some sleeping, some eating breakfast, some singing. A group of mostly men performed a martial exercise. Fathers cradled children. The place should have stunk but didn’t, thanks to neon-colored alchemical toilets and—Elayne was shocked to note—to her own nostalgia. Odors of charcoal and desperation, sweat and hope, dirt and canvas and fear, evoked her youth, and the Wars, and not all those memories were bad. The camps were fun, for the most part. Pranks and drugs and sex and music and black magic relieved the tension of the battlefield.

  “They’re not a mob. They live here. They’re trying to protect their homes.”

  “Against me.”

  “I hope not,” he said. “You have to understand—Tan Batac and his partners live uptown. They want change for their own sakes. The people in this camp are fighting for their lives.”

  “And for the return of the old order, with you in charge?”

  “I’m a priest, not a king.”

  “This city’s never seen much difference between the two.”

  “But the Wars are over,” he said. “Especially in the Skittersill.”

  “You’re still here, and so am I.”

  “Your side won, in case you didn’t notice.” A woman waved to him and he waved back. “My king fell, and my gods are dead. I would have died with them, if not for you.”

  “I’m sorry I interrupted your … show,” she said. There were other words for what she’d seen, but she could not use them. Especially not now the sun had risen and its clear morning light replaced the half-formed world in which she’d seen a man sacrificed who did not die.

  “No trouble. Have you ever noticed that the followers of Glebland mystics rarely write about their teachers’ normal days? They prefer to speak of interruption. For each surviving sermon there are ten tales of blind men who thrust themselves into private conferences, leprous mothers who tackle sages in the street, cripples whose friends lower them through the skylights of houses where masters sleep. You can trace the death of a faith by its decreasing tolerance of such interruption.”

  “So you’re a prophet now?”

  He laughed. “I am trying to be a good man. Or at least better than I was before.”

  As they walked she overheard snatches of fierce argument:

  “—not as individuals, but as members of a class—”

  “—a seed isn’t insignificant—”

  “—Any more wine?”

  “Systems are like magicians, when they claim to be honest with you’s when you need to watch them—”

  “How’s Food Com? Any word on stock after the fire, that’s all, need to know if I should run out and get my own—”

  “Where’d you find that coffee?”

  “—Sleight of hand, that’s all, sleight of—”

  “—More to a city than just lying to people—”

  But as they approached, the speakers saw Temoc and fell silent. The tremors of the priest’s footfalls shook them from one record groove to the next. As a Craftswoman, as a partner in a large firm, Elayne was used to spreading fear. This was different. Fear was only a piece of it.

  Wherever he went, Temoc bore a piece of his sunrise sacrament.

  A young couple approached Temoc, cautious, escorting their five-year-old son. The boy’s chest rattled when he breathed; when he saw Temoc he curled into a ball and began to cry and cough. The cough started last night, his mother said.

  Temoc touched the child over his heart. The scars on his arm glowed green. A piece of the power he’d gathered at sunrise, the strength the godlings gave him, flowed into the boy and made him whole.

  Simple trick. Medical Craft could accomplish as much with as little trouble. But there was no doctor here, and Elayne doubted a doctor would have received such tearful thanks.

  “Chel mentioned a Major,” she said when they left the couple and their laughing boy behind. “A rival leader?”

  “I am not a leader, and so I have no rivals. But not everyone in this camp thinks peaceful protest is the best road. Some feel this crowd should be the core of a new army. Most of those have never fought a war, you understand.”

  “What about you? Do you want peace?”

  “I want to help people,” he said.

  “So do I.”

  But before he could respond, a group of camo-clad men and women had a question about the distribution of supplies. After came a young man with a broken arm. Temoc ran his hand over the wound, smoothing the bone whole. Elayne watched. What the others made of her presence, she could guess: outsider who did not comprehend their ways, servant of the dark powers arrayed against them.

  Fair.

  Temoc slowed. He gave more thought to the decisions put before him, and grew more careful with the healing he offered. The power of the morning ceremony ebbed. Mock sacrifices, it seemed, did not impart as much glory to Temoc’s gods as the blood-gushing kind.

  A cluster of youths dressed in dust and ripped denim bore a stretcher to Temoc, and upon the stretcher lay a girl. Fallen in a dance, they said. She breathed, her heart beat, but she could not speak, or even move save when convulsions wracked her.

  They set her at Temoc’s feet, and Temoc looked down. Elayne recognized his fear only because she’d seen it before, in battle. He doubted he could heal this girl, and he did not want to try and fail. Beneath that doubt she saw anger, too: at his own hesitation, at her friends for not bringing her earlier, at the girl for falling, at Elayne for standing witness.

  So it may have been sympathy that made her say, “I’ll do it.”

  Elayne approached, but the dancers clustered around their fallen friend like dogs at bay. They said nothing, but she saw witch in the set of that young woman’s jaw, and that boy’s white-knuckled grip on the fallen girl’s arm. Of course she seemed an enemy, briefcase-bearing, pinstripe-clad, shod in patent leather: portrait of a monster in her early fifties.

  The girl trembled.

  “Please,” Elayne said. “I can help.”

  The dancers did not move.

  “Let her,” Temoc said.

  They drew back, a knotted muscle unclenching.

  Elayne knelt by the stretcher. Lines of time clung to her as spiderwebs—the moment thick with hagiography, each observer trapping Elayne and Temoc and the girl in a tale. Forget history, though. Forget politics, and focus on the patient.

  Elayne closed her eyes.

  A good doctor could describe the girl’s ailment with a glance at the tangle of her being. A good doctor could fix her problem permanently, or recommend preventative drugs and exercises.

  All Elayne could do was reach inside the girl’s head with fingers finer than the edge of broken glass, grasp the snarled threads within, and restore them to their proper course.

  Which looked impressive enough.

  She opened her eyes. The sun had gaine
d the high ground against the earth. The girl breathed deep. Her pupils dilated. She squinted against the light, and spoke. “I see.” She did not say what she saw. Her friends embraced her.

  Elayne shook with the cold her Craft left behind. Temoc offered her a hand up. For the second time that day she accepted, and for the first she did not begrudge the offer.

  “Thank you,” he said when they found a private space in the crowd. “For her.”

  She didn’t reply at first. She’d come here to find evidence of inconsistence, weaknesses to exploit. She remembered the dancers’ fear, and the sacrifice weeping, and sour breath through a reed and the tarry stink of hunters’ torch-smoke. She wasn’t sure how to say, you’re welcome.

  A cry interrupted her search for the proper words. “Temoc!” Chel’s voice: the woman came running. “There’s trouble.”

  5

  They heard the argument from halfway across the Square.

  “Rotten meat!” a man cried. Temoc forced through the crowd, and for once Elayne followed: if the priest gig didn’t pan out some navy could hire the big man for an icebreaker. They approached what she judged, from the smoke and the smell of singed pork, to be a cook tent. The shouting continued: “My daughter and my son are puking up their guts from rotten meat you served!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with our food,” a woman answered, firm, angry.

  “You’re a fraud, Kemal, you and your husband both, frauds and poisoners.” When they pushed to the front of the crowd Elayne surveyed the tableau: the woman, evidently Ms. Kemal, with cleaver and blood-spattered apron, blocked the cook tent’s entrance. A pale-skinned sous chef stood by her side. The shouting man before them had a voice meant for the stage, and a smolder that would have impressed the hells out of a jury. Classic case of missed calling. Bright eyes bulged from a lean hungry face, and his teeth were yellow. “You take our souls and poison us in return.”

  A drum beat in Elayne’s chest, and she looked up: Wardens circled on Couatl-back overhead. A fight would draw them down.

  And that fight wasn’t far off. The corners of Kemal’s mouth declined, and her grip tightened on the cleaver. “Shut your face. Bill and I pass the hat, and every godsdamned thaum goes for food and fuel. It’s hard work to feed a camp and you’re wasting our time. Nobody’s taken sick from our food before, and nobody has now.”

  “You call me a liar?”

  “We cooked yesterday for a thousand people. If our food hurt your kids, why’s no one else sick?”

  “I’m going in that tent. I’ll show the world your rotten meat.” Nods from the crowd. Shouts of support. Not many, but enough to cause trouble.

  “There’s nothing in that tent but a lot of work for us to do. It’s a kitchen, for the gods’ sake. If your kids really are sick, what they have might be catching. I won’t let you dirty up our space.”

  “Dirty?”

  Temoc stepped into the clearing and addressed the cooks: “Kapania,” to the woman, and “Bill” to her helper. His voice carried, and people looked to him. “This man’s worried about his children. It’s a reasonable request. What’s your name, sir?”

  “Sim.”

  “Surely it won’t be trouble to let Sim into the tent.”

  “Temoc.” Kemal’s jaw jutted forward, and she bared her lower teeth. “The whole camp eats our food. I can’t trust anyone in here I don’t know. We caught this man trying to sneak in.”

  Sim flushed. “Why post guards if you have nothing to hide?”

  Grumbles of assent from the crowd. Temoc glanced back, and the grumblers fell silent. “What if I look myself, Sim? I give you my word I will tell you if I see anything unsavory.”

  “These are my kids. I trust no eyes but my own.”

  Kemal rolled hers. “Waste of time, Temoc. Sim, I’m sorry your kids are sick, but it’s no fault of ours. We have work to do.”

  She must have thought the matter settled—she turned her back on Sim and lifted the tent flap.

  Sim rushed her. Bill tried to block his path, but he wasn’t a fighter. The angry man threw him to the ground and tried to shove past Kemal. Kemal shoved him back, turned with cleaver raised—not out of anger, Elayne thought, she just happened to have it in her hand, one of those thousand unhappy coincidences of which tragedies are made. Sim seized her wrist, twisted—the cleaver swept down toward their legs—Elayne woke a glyph in her arm, in case—

  But suddenly Temoc stood between them.

  Sim lay on the ground, staring up wide-eyed. Bill had caught Ms. Kemal before she fell. Temoc held the cleaver.

  The crowd pressed close and angry. “Kapania,” Temoc said. “People are upset. Let Sim look.”

  “No.”

  The new voice clamped like a fist around the murmurs of the crowd, and crushed them to silence. Elayne turned, Chel turned, the whole crowd turned, even Sim lying prone. When he saw the new arrival, he blanched.

  A man of steel emerged from the crowd.

  Golem, Elayne thought at first, but no, the movements were too fluid, the voice too wet—the figure was human, armored from helmet to boots in scrap metal plate, all sharp lines and jagged edges and dark leather. A lead pipe hung in a sheath by the figure’s side, and a red enamel circle glinted on his left arm.

  “Long time, Sim.”

  There was no trace of Craftwork about the armored man, but the crowd hushed all the same.

  Save for Chel, who whispered to Elayne: “The Major.”

  As if Chel’s voice broke some binding spell, Sim spasmed to his feet, shocked upright by terror. He hadn’t quite gained his balance before he tried to run.

  The Major’s hand flicked out, and Sim crumpled. Craftwork, Elayne thought before she saw the blood on Sim’s temple, and the small iron sphere that rolled from the man’s fallen body. A good throw, that was all.

  Sim tried to stand, but before he could the Major reached him, lifted him, struck him across the face with a mailed fist. Sim spun, gained balance, tried to tackle the Major—but that junk-metal armor didn’t seem to slow the man. Sim slipped on the iron ball and fell face-first. The Major pressed his knee between Sim’s shoulder blades and twisted the man’s left arm up behind him. Armored fingers probed Sim’s sleeve.

  Temoc advanced. “What are you doing?”

  “Temoc.” Again the dark, heavy voice. “I’m saving you trouble.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Bring me meat,” the Major told Kapania Kemal.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Meat!”

  And she moved.

  “Sim and I,” the Major said, “have a history, don’t we, Sim? If that’s your name.” Sim cursed, then screamed when the Major jerked his arm. The Major found what he sought in the sleeve: a small phial that shimmered before Elayne’s closed eyes. “Dockworker’s strike last year, at the solstice, when the bosses were about to cave, this man visited our food tent. Half the camp took sick two days after. We turned on each other, and the Wardens came. Hard to put a protest back together after that, isn’t it, Sim?” The fallen man groaned. “Didn’t think you’d be dumb enough to try the same trick twice. Where’s that meat?”

  Bill brought it from the tent: a handful of raw ground beef. The Major uncorked the phial and poured its shimmering contents onto the meat. Elayne watched the transformation with clinical interest: the accelerated putrescence, the maggots that took writhing shape within the flesh. Basic decay agent—not over-the-shelf, but hardly traceable. Some in the audience retched. Chel staggered, and Elayne steadied her.

  “That,” the Major said, “is what happens when I pour so much onto so little. Spread through an entire stew this would sour the taste slowly—and tonight there’d be sickness all through camp. Just like last time.” The Major drew his weighted pipe from its makeshift scabbard. Sim whimpered. “Not again.” The Major raised the pipe.

  “Stop,” Temoc said.

  The Major did. “Why?”

  Temoc pointed up. The dark eyes behind the mask
glittered as they peered into the blue, where Wardens circled.

  “If sneaks try to break us, shouldn’t we break them back?”

  “We can’t beat Wardens in a fight,” Temoc said. “We are strong in peace.”

  “I’ve seen the strength of peace fail.”

  “If you want to give them an excuse to come for us,” Temoc said, “you’re no better than the man beneath you. And I will stop you.”

  The moment wobbled like a spinning top, and Elayne could not tell which way it would fall.

  The Major let Sim go, and stood. Sim gasped and flopped on the stone like a landed fish. He rose slowly onto his hands and knees. Temoc and the Major stared at one another.

  “Go,” the Major said. “Before I change my mind.”

  Sim ran. The crowd parted for him, and followed him with their eyes as he hobbled to the edge of the Square. Elayne ignored Sim; she and Temoc watched the Major retreat toward the fountain.

  Temoc almost followed, but walked away instead.

  “Not a rival,” Elayne said when she caught up. “I see.”

  “What do you want from me, Elayne?”

  “The same thing you want. Peace. These people need someone to bring them to the table.”

  “Come home with me,” he said.

  She looked at him with mild disbelief: they were not what they once were, but time had refined them both. Still, there were some lines one did not cross.

  “Temoc,” she replied, and pondered her next words.

  He almost succeeded at covering his laugh. “Not what I meant. We need to talk in private. Besides.” And then something she had not expected to see: the rock face broke, and he smiled almost like a normal person would. “I want you to meet my family.”