by Holly Lisle
Right in front of them, red and black and half as long as Faia was tall, a monster’s head slashed out at them from the place where it had been hidden by the other side of the embankment. The giant mouth spread open and teeth gleamed. The downed Klaue lay where it had fallen, mortally wounded but not yet dead enough.
Faia didn’t think; she reacted. She hurled her staff as if it were a javelin, straight down the beast’s throat. The Klog gagged and tossed its head from side to side; neither Faia nor Edrouss Delmuirie stayed to see if it freed itself from the obstruction. They both ran full out until they reached the place where Faia’s half-brother had hidden.
He crawled out from under the thorn shrubs where he had hidden as soon as he saw them, and wrapped his arms around Faia by way of greeting.
“Bytoris!” She was sincerely glad to find him unharmed.
“Faia!”
His dirt-caked cheeks were tear-streaked, but he managed a sincere smile for her. “We must hurry,” he told her. “I have to check on the rest of my family.”
Chapter 21
THE cantilevered arch of the gate before Faia rose higher than the wall. Men of old had carved the forms of humans and beasts into its grey stone, and the eyes of those pocked and worn faces stared warily at Faia as she approached. This, too, was an ancient place, she thought—though not as old as the First Folk ruins. And it lacked about it the feeling of alienness those distant ruins had. Two burly men leaned beneath each side of the carved arch, their hands resting on the pommels of swords or the hafts of long spears. A fifth sat at a small table to one side. His helmet rested on the flat paving stones at his feet. He had weary eyes, Faia thought. Weary—and sad.
Gyels hurried ahead of the rest of them. He stepped up to the seated guard and whispered a word. The guard nodded, his face expressionless—and Gyels passed into the walled city and immediately strode through the midst of a group of bickering merchants, where he disappeared into the crowd.
Bytoris frowned, Faia noticed, but he didn’t say anything. He walked up to the seated guard and addressed the man. Faia, standing in the background waiting, paid no attention to her brother—she stared up at the gate arch over her head, fascinated. More stone faces stared down at her—the faces of imaginary demons and all-too-real monsters, their mouths open in silent, eternal screams. The hollows of their mouths extended further into the stone than normal carving could account for, and the teeth and insides of the mouths, bleached white in the otherwise grey stone, told her the rest of the story. She realized suddenly that those mouths were hollowed tubes. Weapons. The soldiers on the arch above could, at any time, pour boiling water or acid or liquid fire on the people below. She shuddered and looked away; those disguised weapons seemed to her a sly and evil use of art.
“What do you mean, I cannot take them in?” Bytoris suddenly shouted.
All the guards looked at him with eyes no longer bored or weary. “Rules since the change,” the seated one snapped. “None but citizens or their families in.”
Bytoris opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. “Come,” he said to Faia and Delmuirie, and turned away from the gate.
They walked in silence alongside the wall. Bytoris was clearly angry; he clamped his jaw tightly, and Faia could see the muscles twitch. He stormed along, saying nothing. Delmuirie prudently kept quiet, and Faia decided to follow the same path of wisdom herself. She and Delmuirie nearly had to run to keep up. They came to a good-sized stream that fed into the moat. Bytoris led them along it, away from Bonton and toward a little bridge and a pleasant-looking copse of trees not too far away.
They crossed the bridge and achieved the cover of the trees. Bytoris threw his pack on the ground, opened it, and began rummaging for something. Faia watched him, puzzled; He had a cold smile on his face, and he kept muttering, “I’ll show them. Won’t let my people in, hey? Who do they think pays their salaries, tell me that?” At last he found the thing he sought. He gave a satisfied snort and sat back on his haunches, and held up his find for both of them to see.
“What is it?” Faia asked when her brother didn’t explain.
Bytoris looked past her, to Edrouss Delmuirie. “Stick this in your pack. It’s your citizen’s pass. When the soldiers at the next gate ask, you’re Geos Rull, collector and language expert from the House of Antiquities and Artifacts.”
Faia felt her eyes widen. “I thought Geos was a scholar.”
“He was.” Bytoris looked suddenly grim. “He was also employed—being a scholar pays nothing here in Bonton. But there’s money enough to be had in collecting curios.”
Stealing them, more likely. Faia thought of the contents of Geos’s pack, which Bytoris had moved to his own when no one was watching and had subsequently carried without complaint. It must have been full of artifacts from the First Folk ruins, she realized. And, likely, her brother’s pack had contained even more of the same. Medwind and the other scholars would have been furious had they known what the Bontonard “scholars” had actually been doing in the ruins.
Edrouss Delmuirie nodded and shoved the little plate into his pack.
Bytoris, meanwhile, pulled out a piece of drypress and a scritore, and began scratching out a note of some sort. He looked up at Faia once, assessing her, then began to write again.
“What are you doing?” Faia asked him.
“Forging a bride-price paper. Says that Edro—ah, Geos, here, picked you up from traders moving from Omwimmee Trade to the Forst Province. That makes you Fisher—they’re the only folks who sell their women. So you can’t speak at all, right? Because I’m betting you don’t speak Spavvekith.”
Faia nodded. “You bet right.”
“And your name is Reeluu. Every woman I’ve ever met from the Fisher Province had been named either Malleth or Reeluu.” He sighed. “I’d take you myself, but I already have a wife and a whole crew of kids, and I can’t afford the extra taxes another wife would cost me—even temporarily.” Bytoris stood. “Anyway, that will be enough to get us through the gate. We’ll have to make you and—er, Geos—” He frowned at Delmuirie. “You and Geos permanent. The laws of Bonton don’t look kindly on men buying wives unless they then make them citizens—and we’ll have to do that fast.” He finished his forgery, told Delmuirie to sign it, then blew on the whole thing until the ink dried. When he was satisfied it wouldn’t smudge, he handed the paper to Delmuirie, who put it in his pack with his own pass.
Faia frowned at Bytoris and protested, “But I’m your sister. The guard at the gate said family. I shouldn’t need to have to pretend to be…” she spat the word, “property.”
“You and I have nothing to prove that we are brother and sister,” Bytoris said. “And I’m betting more than one man has tried to claim ‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’ he didn’t have in order to help friends outside the city get inside.” He shook his head “No. This is best. Just play along while we’re here.”
They rose, and Faia, patently unhappy, turned to go back the way they’d come.
Bytoris said, “We aren’t going back to the Doweth Ecclesiastic Gate. The guards might be off their shift, but they might not be, too, and I don’t want to take a chance of running into them again. Besides, I think we’d get better treatment from the guards of a gate that hadn’t so recently been under attack by Klogs.”
He led them through the woods along a well-worn path, down to a rutted cart-road that ran between fields of summer wheat and cherticorn. “Timnett Merchanter is a better gate, anyway,” he added
It was a very different gate, at least. Faia noted that the cantilevered arch was the same, but the carvings were of trade goods—bolts of cloth, pack and draft animals, herd beasts, fruits and grains, amphoras and jugs. The gate was prettier, the carved faces of the few people on it not so crazed-looking. Yet when she stood underneath it and stared upward—while Delmuirie and Bytoris talked to the guards—she could see that the bottom jugs were tipped and angled and hollow, aimed to pour destruction down on anyone beneath. She frowne
d. Ariss had not resorted to such mundane means of defense—the mages and sajes guarded the city magically.
“Reeluu!” Delmuirie said. Faia ignored him.
The mages and sajes had guarded Ariss magically, she thought. Then she wondered how Ariss, magically built on a magical hill in the middle of a nasty swamp, was faring. Probably the whole bedamned city had sunk beneath the water and everyone in it had drowned. She had hoped to do something that would make her welcome in Ariss again. Instead, it seemed more than likely she would never be able to set foot near that city—if any of it remained—for as long as she lived.
“Reeluu!”
She decided not to think about Ariss.
“REELUU!” Delmuirie ran over to her, grabbed her arm, and dragged her back to the guards. “I’m not sure she can even hear,” he told them with an apologetic smile. “Perhaps that’s why the Fishers sold her to me. But she’s pretty, isn’t she?”
The guards grinned. Faia kept her expression neutral and just a little puzzled.
“Tax officer will want more than ten percent for her,” one of the side guards said “She’s the best-looking Fisher I’ve ever seen.”
Bytoris frowned. “He got her for a good price—due to her defects.”
The guard at the table chuckled. “If she can’t hear and can’t speak either, that would make her the perfect wife.”
Bytoris and Delmuirie both laughed, and Bytoris said, “He didn’t buy her to talk to, anyway.”
The guard looked at the paper Delmuirie handed them, and nodded. “That was a good price. Pity they didn’t come through here first—I’d have bought her myself.” He handed back the paper and the metal pass, then pointed to the packs. “You people have anything to declare?”
Bytoris nodded and smiled. He pulled out a couple of carved stone rings from the top of his pack and held them up to the guards.
The seated guard frowned. “What are they?”
Bytoris shrugged. “I don’t have any idea. I found them in the First Folk ruins.”
“So they’re artifacts.”
Bytoris nodded. “Of some sort.”
One of the other guards wandered over from his niche in the wall, and both he and the seated guard took one. They turned the rings over, ran their fingers along the edges, and squinted at them as if they thought squinting would make the artifacts make more sense. Finally, the guard in charge shrugged. “Small artifacts, unknown purpose, unknown value—let’s say one rit each. Silver, though, not pressleaves. If they turn out to sell for more than that, the tax officer will surely drop by to pay you a visit.”
Bytoris and the guard laughed, and Bytoris said, “Oh, surely. I imagine he will anyway—you know how they are about their taxes.” He reached into his pack again and pulled out two small, octagonal silver coins. The guard checked both sides of the coins, nodded to the other guards, then waved them through.
“And that is all there is to that,” Bytoris said with a chuckle as soon as they were out of earshot.
“What the man said about the Klaue worries me.” Edrouss Delmuirie wasn’t smiling. His dark eyes were thoughtful.
Faia hadn’t heard any of the guards say anything about Klaue. “What was that?” she asked.
“He said they have been attacking that same quarter of the city every day since first sunrise. No one knows why. This is the first day any of the Klogs were killed, and there were fewer human casualties than any previous day.” He shook his head. “That is not like the Klogs. They usually have a plan… and they usually win.”
“Maybe they’ve changed,” Faia suggested.
Edrouss shrugged, but did not look like he was considering the possibility. “Maybe.”
Faia studied Bonton. It was nowhere near as impressive as Ariss. She recognized the peak of the Remling Tower, visible from time to time over the rooftops. Anyone who’d gotten paid in Dorrell Province would recognize that, though—its image decorated the obverse of every Dorrellian coin minted or pressleaf pressed. It wasn’t as attractive in real life as it was stamped onto gold, either. And the rest of Bonton was even less prepossessing. The buildings, stone and baked brick and hewn timber, jumbled on top of each other closer and closer the further she and her companions penetrated into the city; deep in the backways, the inhabitants had built far into the streets so that in places the main road permitted only two people to proceed abreast. Traffic throughout was thick and rough; people fought past on foot or on horseback or in skinny little goat-carts. They all smelled of sweat and dirt. Their hair was greasy to a one, and their faces showed grime.
If the people were dirty, though, the city itself was worse. The cobblestones were slick with the droppings of horses and cows and other livestock, and the gutters ran with trash and dumpings from chamber pots. Faia noted rats and flies and thin, wary alley cats. The stink grew, and grew, and grew, the further they went into Bonton’s heart.
Bytoris slowed. Faia watched the expressions that dashed across his face; bewilderment, disgust confusion, and finally fear. “This is what this city has come to without magic,” he said. He stopped completely, looking at the filthy streets and the grimed people who hurried through them. He shook his head. This is vile. I need to get home.”
He led them quickly down a twisting, close road, through a foul, stench-bathed alley, and at last into a little closed-off circle of tall, brightly painted houses. The paving-stone circle was awash with the same mire that befouled the rest of the city, though Faia could see how the little circle of houses might have been thought pretty, if the stink were not so overwhelming.
A boy from the top window of a tall, thin yellow house suddenly shrieked, “Mama! Mama! Papa’s home!”
There was an instant of silence; then the house erupted with noise. “Papa! Papa!” a veritable chorus of young voices shouted, and a woman’s voice cried out “Bytoris?! Oh, gods, you’re home at last.” The floors echoed with the thunder of running feet; a slight blonde woman burst out of the front door first, leapt up, and wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips. “Godsall, I thought sure you were dead!” She hugged him close and smothered his face and neck with kisses; Faia couldn’t help but grin.
“Renina!” Bytoris spun her around and hugged her. “I nearly was dead, love. Nearly was.” He kissed her, then pulled away. “What’s been going on here?” he asked, but he didn’t have time to hear an answer. A horde of children—Faia counted six, but they were moving fast enough that she might have missed one or two—streamed out of the house and surrounded him. They, too, hugged him and shouted. The scene in the cobblestoned courtyard was mayhem; neighbor women ran out to see what the commotion was, and squealed when they recognized Bytoris. They and their children surrounded him, too, shouting and laughing and talking all at once.
It sounded like a huge flock of chickens in the henyard. Bytoris was popular; her brother seemed to be friends with everyone, and everyone stood around talking about how pleased they were to see him alive and how concerned they had been about him—and how worried about the winged kellinks getting him.
His wife Renina finally shooed the children back into the house—this time Faia was certain she counted eight—with an admonition to them to get back to work. Then she turned back to her husband with a laugh and flung her arms around his neck again.
Faia stood apart. She turned at the sound of a sniffle, and found Edrouss Delmuirie standing there, fists clenched and eyes suspiciously bright.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“It just hit me—anyone who might once have run out of a door like that for me has been long years dead.” His eyes unfocused, and he turned his head away.
“Your wife, you mean?” Faia asked. “Your children?”
For a moment he seemed not to hear her. Then he said, “No. I wasn’t married. I had both my parents, and two brothers, and two sisters. Nieces and nephews, too.”
“And a line of lovers that would reach from here to the sea,” Faia said suddenly.
&n
bsp; “What?”
“All those women who begged to share your bed, and attempted to seduce you.”
“I never—”
Faia cut his protest short with a wave of her hand. “I read your diaries,” she said.
Edrouss Delmuirie turned the red of a ripe roseberry and pressed his face into a hand. “My diaries?” he groaned.
“Scholars found and translated them. Hundreds of people have read them. Maybe even thousands,” Faia told him.
He shook his head, and his face grew even redder, though Faia would have thought that impossible. He didn’t seem lost in grief anymore, though, she decided. He seemed positively buried by mortification instead. She grinned. It was always pleasant to think she could help distract a man from his troubles.
In the pause, she heard Renina say, “—well, invite them in, dearlin’.” Faia turned to see Bytoris’s wife tuck a bit of the hem of her outside skirt into her kirtle and spin around. She danced up the steps, radiating happiness.
Behind her, Faia heard Delmuirie mutter, “Why would anybody read my diaries? I made up everything in them… almost.”
Faia chuckled. She’d suspected as much when she read those diaries—nobody had people bowing and scraping the way Delmuirie had described; nobody was so invariably right at the expense of chagrined fools who’d disbelieved; but most of all, nobody got laid as often or as variously as Edrouss Delmuirie had claimed to get laid. The Delmuirie scholars had insisted the contents of the diaries were an unflinching look at the life of a great man; but then, they were trying to emulate that life.
Bytoris followed his wife into the house, and Delmuirie and Faia trailed after. Renina led them through a dark, narrow foyer, into the bright, window-lit interior of the house.
Glass windows, Faia thought, looking around. The individual panes were little and held together by narrow strips of lead—some of the panes were brightly colored so that the sun, blazing through them, left rainbow patterns on the floor. Faia had seen such windows before, but only in the great university buildings of Ariss—never in common houses.