by Kate Elliott
MARIT WOKE AT dawn when Warning shoved her nose into her face and slobbered on her. The cursed mare’s coat needed brushing, and her mane was tangled, but her hooves were clean of stones and debris and she was otherwise healthy. By all appearances, the mare was as happy to see Marit as Marit was to see her, curse it all, for there were tears in her own eyes.
5
“Here’s your pay,” said the stable master, holding out a string of vey. He cleared his throat, shifted his feet, scratched an earlobe. “You’re a good worker, no complaints there. You don’t make any trouble. But I have to ask you not to come back tomorrow.”
“I see,” said Marit to her feet. She knew what was coming. She had been through this conversation six times in the weeks she had been in Olossi.
He spoke quickly, to get through the distasteful job. “Custom is off, and that’s besides it being the Flood Rains and fewer folk walking about this time of year due to the weather. Someone is causing trouble on the roads for carters and stablekeepers, for all us honest guilds folk, so we can’t keep our hirelings as we might otherwise want in a better year.”
“Custom does seem low. What do you think is causing the trouble?”
He cleared his throat. She glanced up, meeting his gaze.
Images and words churned: she’s got that northern way of speaking; what if she’s a spy for one of the Greater Houses; I don’t trust ’em; they’re trying to corral all the trade for themselves and their favored clients; anyway, there’s something about her that creeps everyone and no surprise . . .
She dropped her gaze. He took a step away, as from someone who stank.
“Might be anyone,” he said, backed up against the closed door, “ospreys diving for a quick snatch, criminals wandering down from the north, folk wanting to drive a wedge into the carters’ guild and make trouble for them.” His tone picked up confidence. “So there it is. Someone has to go. The other hirelings are, eh, well, it’s your—ah—northern way of speaking. Makes them uncomfortable. I’ve had them on hire for years now, so that makes you lowest roll.”
“First to go,” she agreed with a twisted smile. She had replaced the old sandals she’d taken from the shepherd’s hut with better ones, but after weeks in the city keeping her gaze down she had memorized every stain and nick in the worn leather. Her feet were dirty again, toenails black with grime from stable work. “My thanks. You were a fair employer, I’ll give you that.” She took the vey from his hand, trying not to notice how quickly he pulled his hand back, hoping not to touch her. As if she was a demon walking abroad in human skin.
Who was to say she wasn’t?
Keeping her head down, she walked through the lower city of Olossi toward the baths she favored. Mud slopped over her feet. At the trailing end of the season of Flood Rains, every surface was layered in muck. The clouds hung low and dark, threatening to spill again.
She paused at the edge of Crow’s Gate Field. In the dry season, commerce through the gate would be brisk, and the guards and clerks busy. Today, Sapanasu’s clerks lounged under the shelter of a colonnade, seated in sling-back chairs, sipping at musty bitter-fern tea. They laughed and talked, teeth flashing, voices bright. One slapped another on the arm teasingly. A trio had their heads bent close, sharing secrets. One dozed, head back and mouth open, and the others were careful not to jostle her. Their easy camaraderie reminded her of her days at Copper Hall among her fellow reeves. Those had been good days. She’d been happy there. She’d had friends, colleagues, a lover.
Some things, once lost, can never be restored.
Bear this grief, and move on.
She walked toward the river along the wide avenue that paralleled the lower city’s wall, such as it was, more a livestock fence than a wall to halt the advance of an army. Her sandals shed dribs and drabs with each step. Aui! Everything stank. Everything dripped. Rich folk hurrying home before dusk made their way through town in palanquins carried by laborers whose brown legs were spattered with mud. The streets in the upper city were paved with stone, so presumably there was less Flood Rains filth there, but the one time she’d ventured past the inner gates she had felt too conspicuous. The lower city hosted all kinds: laborers, criminals, touts and peddlers, country lads and lasses come to make their fortunes in a trade, outlander merchants come to sell and buy, slaves and hirelings and shopkeepers and craftsmen and folk who would sell anything, even their own bodies, as long as they could grab a few vey from the doing. She might make folk uncomfortable, but in the lower city the watch would not drive her out unless she actually broke the law.
On a street on the river side of Harrier’s Gate stood two ranks of bright green pipe-brush, ruthlessly cut back, which flanked an ordinary pedestrian gate set into a compound wall. A bell hung from a hook on the wall. She rang it, keeping her gaze on her dirty feet.
The door was opened from inside. “You again. It’s extra for a bucket and stool carried to your tub.”
“I know.”
He held out a hand, and she pressed vey worth a week’s labor into his very clean palm. He led her along a covered walkway raised above muddy ground and lined with troughs of red and pink good-fortune trimmed into mushroom caps. Water flowed smoothly alongside them through split pipewood. The attendant gave her a sour look when she bypassed the usual changing rooms and common scrub hall.
The private rooms were a series of partitions separating filled tubs heated by hot stones and stoked braziers. In the dry season, awnings could be tied across the scaffolding of the tall partitions for shade. The smallest and cheapest private room lay closest to the entrance and the common baths, where everyone must tramp back and forth; the more expensive were larger and sited at the end of the walkway. The truly wealthy could purchase relaxation at one of five tiny cottages situated within the pleasant garden with its manicured jabi bushes, slumbering paradom, and flowering herboria.
He showed her into the smallest of the private chambers, and watched to make sure she removed her filthy sandals before she stepped up on the raised paving stones alongside the slatted tub. He left the door open until he brought back a bucket of water and a stool.
“You pay extra for pouring bowl, scrub brush, and changing cloth,” he said.
She showed him the ones she had purchased from a peddler, items not too worn to keep in use but certainly nothing a prosperous clansman would carry. The attendant inspected the items, touching the cloth only at the corner, pinched between thumb and forefinger.
“You want the lamp lit?” he asked.
“No. I’ve light to make my own way out.”
He tested the water with an elbow, sniffed to show it was satisfactory, and finally cut off a sliver of soap. When he shut the door, she had, at last, a measure of peace.
She stripped of everything except her cloak, scrubbed, rinsed, scrubbed, and rinsed, and climbed into the tub. The heated water was not hot enough to redden her skin, as she would have liked, but it was satisfactory. She draped the cloak over the rim, and sank in up to her chin.
The heat melted her. She tilted her head back to rest against the slats and let her senses open.
Someone lit lamps in other chambers, oil hissing as it caught flame. Folk passed clip-clop on the walkway, treading heavily or lightly according to their nature. Business increased at dusk, as the shadows gave cover to men and women who didn’t want to be recognized.
She tasted the powerful scent of night-blooming paradom like cinnamon kisses on her lips.
A pair of lovers whispered in one of the cottages, words of longing and promise poured into willing ears. How fiercely they yearned! She sank into memories of Joss, made more bitter and more sweet because she knew he might well yet be alive, older than her now although he had once been younger. She had to let go of her affection for him. He had lived for twenty years without her, grown his own life without her. And anyway, was it even possible to love where there are no real secrets, where no part of your lover is thankfully hidden away from you?
She ac
cepted the grief, and set it aside, because there was work to be done and she had never once in her life turned away from any task laid before her.
In these baths met merchants and guildsmen who desired privacy for certain delicate negotiations. She had come to these baths the first time because she’d heard she could pay coin for a private bathing room, an astounding luxury. Now she ate and drank sparingly of the cheapest gruel and watered rice wine, and slept in a boardinghouse little better than a rathole, so she could keep coming back for the conversation that her unnaturally keen hearing picked up.
She had learned a great deal about the city of Olossi: trade secrets and outside-the-temple dealings; petty rivalries pursued by narrow-minded competitors; militia men deep in schemes for the upcoming Whisper Rains games. Olossi’s Lesser Houses and guildsmen were discontented, being ruled by the greed of the Greater Houses, and certain people in their ranks plotted an uprising. A group of reckless young men was engaged in smuggling, more for sport than for profit. A lad and a lass from competing clans who would never ever consider letting them marry made their assignation here, even though—as Marit knew—they were long since being followed by various agents from their own families.
She picked out voices like threads from a multicolored shawl.
“. . . No one can know we are negotiating. I’ll lose the contract if the Greater Houses suspect I’m going outside the official channels. I tell you, we in the Silk Slippers clan have been providing reliable river transport for generations, and what do the Greater Houses do now? They try to force us to lower our rates, greedy bastards . . .”
“. . . If you take the cargo across the river after moon-set, Jaco’s boys will meet you just downstream of Onari’s Landing with the knives. . .”
“If the militia continues to refuse to send out long-range patrols, then the carters’ guild has agreed to cooperate with us. We’ll send a joint mission to Toskala to appeal to Clan Hall directly, and ask them to intervene to improve the safety of the roads . . .”
“Eh. Eh. Yes, like that. Ah. Ah.”
“I want you to kill a man.”
Her breath caught in her throat as she strained to hear.
“That would be murder. Against the law.” The other man’s voice had a slight hoarse timbre, as though he had once inhaled too much smoke.
“Do as I ask, and no charges will ever be brought against you.”
“How can you possibly guarantee that?”
“We control the council. It will never get past a vote.”
“The council does not control the assizes if the reeves bring me in to stand trial.”
“Argent Hall will not charge you. They have a new marshal, hadn’t you heard? He’ll not interfere.”
“The hells. You sound certain, Feden. Considering what manner of crime you’re asking me to commit.”
“You haven’t asked the name of the target. Or why he needs killing.”
“I want to know first why Argent Hall won’t interfere if it gets wind of the killing. Surely the dead man’s clan will seek justice.”
“Argent Hall is too busy looking for some manner of treasure that my allies in the North seek. Something valuable taken out of the Hundred years ago that they have reason to believe has been found and brought back.”
The smoky-voiced man’s laugh was sarcastic. “Silk? Gems? A rare cutting from one of the Beltak temples’ Celestial Golds? A stallion for stud?”
“I don’t know.” This was said brusquely. “It’s not my responsibility, but if you want to keep your eyes open at the border crossing it wouldn’t hurt to get word of such a thing before anyone else did. I don’t mind telling you, I don’t trust that new marshal, Yordenas.”
The other man hrhmed thoughtfully under his breath. He seemed distracted, perhaps spinning out fantasies of treasure and wealth as the other man—Feden—went on impatiently.
“I don’t mind telling you I think the entire cursed mob of them are hatching a plan to overthrow the Greater Houses.”
“The reeves of Argent Hall?”
“Neh, neh, the Lesser Houses and those ungrateful guildsmen. After everything we’ve done to make Olossi prosperous and safe! If we kill just one man, one of the ringleaders, it may make the rest hesitate.”
“Because they’ll see you can get away with it?” asked Smoky Voice with sharp amusement. “Don’t they already know that you in the Greater Houses can do what you cursed well please?”
Water splashed on rock and poured away as hands emptied a bucket over stone. A door slid closed with a slap.
“What if we ran away?” the youth demanded in a husky whisper. “We could go to Toskala, make a new life there for ourselves.”
“Dearest,” she replied breathlessly, still recovering from her drawn-out pleasure, “the roads aren’t safe. Anyway, they’d send agents after us. How can we hide from them?”
That piece of practicality silenced the idiot, thank the gods. Marit wound a path past his unsteady breathing, past the chuckling of the young fools planning their latest smuggling venture for no better reason than the lark of evading the militia, pinched out the low-voiced argument of a man sure sure sure that the gift he had proffered to the Incomparable Eridit had been rejected because she thought herself unworthy of his attentions while his friends, lounging with him in the baths, assured him rumor had it she wicked anyone who was to her taste, so gifts were meaningless because she had rejected him merely because he was one ugly Goat.
There.
“I’ll do it, then. But if you get any word about what the treasure is, you’ll let me know.”
“Don’t tangle with the Northerners, Captain. Don’t try to take what they want. You’ll regret it.”
“Only if they know I have it. If the Argent Hall reeves are so busy patrolling the Barrens and the Spires, who’s to say they might miss what passes right under their talons, eh?”
“Do you envy the reeves, Captain? Is that resentment I hear?”
“I have a sword, and you have your coin and your clan’s power. Don’t think we’re friends to share confidences. Just allies of convenience, that’s all.”
“You’ll be glad enough I approached you, come the end of this Fox year. Mark my words. Come Goat year, you’ll value this alliance. You’ll thank me.”
She hauled herself out of the tub and toweled dry with the changing cloth. She dressed quickly, and slung her bag across one shoulder; it was everything she owned and needed, the essentials of her life—or her death—pruned back to almost nothing. She waited, listening for the smoky rasp of his breathing, and followed. She did not need to stay close to keep track of him. She had been a good reeve in her day, able to sniff out trouble without knowing precisely where the rot grew, but she could now follow the odor of dishonesty and cheating and corruption and depravity straight to its putrid source in a venal heart.
The compound had half a dozen gates set at discreet intervals. He left by the one closest to Harrier’s Gate, and by his gait and posture—and the rank his associate had given him—she placed him as a militia man, dedicated to Kotaru the Warrior and still in service to the Thunderer. He wasn’t a fool. He felt an itch in the center of his back where her gaze had fixed, and once out on the street he paused to sweep his gaze along the passersby, most of them hurrying home with lamps to light their way. She halted some ways back, a nondescript traveler among many, but lifted her eyes to meet his.
As corrupt as they come, and willing to sell out his duty in exchange for wealth, yet even so, his were the shadows of a small heart ruled by the banal greed of a man pinched by jealousies and resentments.
He staggered, rubbing his head as if he’d been struck a blow. She stepped into the shadows. After a puzzled glance at the street, he strode to the closed gates and gave an order to the guards on duty. They let him out the postern gate and barred it back up tight, and she had no means by which to force an exit. She was not ready to draw attention to herself in a city whose masters had apparently allied themselves wit
h the shadow out of the north. If they discovered her, she would find herself with wolves hard on her heels and a cloaked man called Yordenas ruling Argent Hall, not so far away.
As long as the others did not find her, she could continue her investigation. So she kept her head down, and worked gathering information in the same slow, circuitous way.
Master Feden she tracked to the merchant house marked with a quartered flower, just as the shopkeeper had described. But she could not reach him; he guarded his privacy too well and she never encountered him again at the baths. It was days before she identified the captain as a man called Beron, commander of the contingent stationed at the border crossing on the Kandaran Pass, which led southwest into the Sirniakan Empire. By then, a well-known merchant had vanished from town, and while gossip whispered that he’d been murdered, or decamped after a string of humiliating gambling losses, nothing could be proven.
She rode west on the trail of Captain Beron.
CARAVANS DID NOT travel in the season of the Flood Rains; folk tended their fields and stuck close to home. She traveled through the West Country, mey upon mey of empty road and sprawling vistas of uninhabited high plateau and stretches of shoreline. The majestic Spires thrust heavenward in the far distance. In an isolation that magnified one’s daunting insignificance, it was easy to forget how difficult it had become to converse with ordinary folk in an ordinary manner because you did come to desire the simple everyday contact of one person chatting with another about the consequential and trivial matters of life.
Yet on every stop she made on West Spur to buy a bag of grain or a bladderful of ale, she was reminded all over again that people did not feel comfortable around her. To minimize these contacts, she spent more time foraging for food. Twice, Warning insisted on flying free, stranding her for a day each time in the wilderness but then returning. Marit had a very good idea that the horse was visiting Guardian altars. When she thought of the fountains that lay at the heart of every altar, her throat burned with a physical longing. Yet she dared not enter a Guardian altar, where the others could find her.