by Tanya Huff
“Your word, Alpha.”
“My word.” She hadn’t realized she’d raised her free hand to touch her chest until she felt the ridge of the scar under her fingertips. “Right now, I’m worried about what happens if there’s a guard in the hall when your door comes down.”
“He’ll be right outside my door, won’t he? And, thanks to you and Kirstin, he thinks I’m harmless. That should slow him down considerably.” Stina’s lips drew back off her teeth. “Our mage-craft isn’t all we are. It never has been. I’ll deal with him.”
* * *
Two or three Tardfords would have fit into Karis with room left over for Bercarit. Lessons on the Kresentian Empire taught that the capital had originally been built within a loop of the Vone River, but over the years that loop had been entirely enclosed by the city. When the sun rose, the yellow glow of the lights had been replaced by a yellow pall of smoke, hanging thickest over the closely packed buildings nearest the water.
“The Mage-pack has to be in the palace,” Mirian muttered, trying and failing to pick out individual buildings. “They were taken because of Emperor Leopald’s Soothsayers, so he’d want to keep them close.”
“The palace is on the east side of the river. The only direct way in from the west is by the Palace Bridge, but it’s heavily guarded and there’s an old portcullis gate that’s still fully functional on the palace end. Rumor has it the bridge itself was designed to break away and that the mechanics are so precise even a child could operate it. The empire is always the enemy,” Tomas explained when Mirian turned to stare at him. “Junior officers work out ways to defeat it. According to Harry, you can’t take the palace by force; it has to be subterfuge. He suggested once that we could get the entire Hunt Pack in by pretending to be a dog show. Not one of Harry’s better ideas,” he admitted after a moment.
There were two other ways across the river—the Bridge of the Sun, south of the palace, passing directly in front of the Grand Temple of the Sun, or the Citizens’ Bridge to the north.
“We’d need to cross over two thirds of the south city to get to the Citizens’ Bridge. It’s too far, and these boots hurt my feet.”
“Forgive me if I’m weighing your feet against having you skinned at the last minute,” Mirian told him, stepping around a section of broken cobblestone. The puddle filling the hole was green and bubbling intermittently in the sun. “We’re taking the north bridge and staying away from anything that looks like it might be or had ever been a market.”
They stuck to narrow residential streets of narrow red brick houses older, dirtier, and at least two stories taller than the houses in Abyek. The first floor started half a story up, and they learned they could judge the neighborhoods by the seven steps leading up to heavy wooden doors. On those blocks where the steps were whitewashed to a gleaming contrast with the brick, every trace of coal dust removed, stern-faced women with their sleeves rolled up, watched them pass from first-floor windows or from the tops of the steps themselves. While they didn’t seem likely to scream abomination, they weren’t pleased about strangers. Children too young for school played quietly.
“Alphas by committee,” Tomas bent to murmur in her ear.
Mirian laughed, able to feel the weight of their gazes even if she couldn’t see their faces.
On blocks where the whitewash was worn or the steps were so close to the same dirty color as the brick that Mirian could barely make them out, babies screamed behind open windows, children ran happily up and down the street with balls or hoops, and the dogs quieted only as they passed.
On some streets, the spaces between the steps had been filled in with small shops—tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, cabinet makers, ironmongers, undertakers, coffee houses, bakeries, taverns. Once a small school where a dozen children around five or six repeated the Imperial alphabet. Every now and then the bricks gave way to a wrought-iron fence and small courtyard and a Temple of the Sun. A few of the temples were old enough they’d clearly been built for other gods, before Leopald’s grandfather had brought the empire out of the darkness and under the Sun.
“How can they live like this? All crammed in so close together?” Tomas muttered as they turned sideways to slide past a knife grinder’s cart. “It’s like that room in the shelter, only with more smoke and way too much cabbage. I think my nose has gone numb. There’s no air; the buildings are too high and the streets are too narrow and…Horse.”
It took Mirian a moment to figure out what he meant. Then she heard the clop, clop of hooves against the cobblestones, squinted down a street to the right, and saw an elderly bay not much larger than the ponies at home, pulling a cart full of coal. When the cart stopped, the driver rang a bell and people swarmed out of houses and shops carrying metal buckets as the driver moved from the seat back into the box. The horse lowered its head until its nose nearly touched the road. Mirian thought it looked more bored than exhausted.
It certainly didn’t look like it cared there was a predator standing on the corner.
“We’re downwind, if she even has a sense of smell left. But we need to be careful. If a horse panics in these kind of close quarters, people will get hurt and we’ll be blamed.”
“They won’t know,” Mirian began, then remembered the women on the steps. They’d be blamed because they were strangers and then Tomas would be found out. They were so close. Too close to be caught again.
Not close enough.
“Hurry,” Jake said. Not once but twice. Maybe a dozen more times since they’d left.
Hurry. They were moving as fast as they could without arousing suspicion.
Not fast enough.
They’d been walking for hours when the street they followed spat them out onto a broad boulevard, the buildings made of pale limestone rather than brick. At first Mirian thought the stone new enough it hadn’t had a chance to be stained by the smoke and then she made out scaffolding and heard people shouting about water and hats.
“Are they washing that building?”
“If you ask me, they should wash the whole city,” Tomas snorted. “But yes.”
A raised footway ran along their side of the road—and she assumed the other side as well—allowing pedestrians to move comfortably in front of hotels and theaters and cafés. It was the first part of Karis that felt a bit like Bercarit. Had Mirian been in her own clothing, she wouldn’t have felt out of place. As it was, clutching the bedroll and staring, she felt every bit the country yokel she was dressed as.
A double line of steel tracks ran down the center of the road. As they watched, an open, bright yellow-and-red carriage, little more than six rows of empty benches, came to a stop at a yellow post. A small crowd got on.
“This is Citizens’ Avenue,” Tomas announced.
“How do you know?”
“Says so on the plaque on the corner of that building.” Hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face the plaque, much as she’d done to him back in Tardford. “If Citizens’ Avenue goes straight through to the Citizens’ Bridge—like in any normal city where they haven’t destroyed their brains with stink—we could ride. You have money.”
Mirian watched the carriage move up the road, a group of young officers waiting until the last minute to get out of the way of the horses, shouting genial insults back at the driver. “We could walk faster. We need to hurry.”
“I know, but we can’t run and my feet are killing me in these boots.” He sighed. “Riding would be a more sensible thing to do than crippling me.”
He had been limping a little—although, for all his whining, he clearly hadn’t wanted her to notice. “What about panicking the horses?”
“Why wouldn’t the whirlwind thing work? You started up a whirlwind the moment you saw the number of horses on the street,” he added when she frowned.
Cabs. Delivery vans. Private carriages. Riders. All with horses. Although she hadn’t as much seen the individual horses as known they were there.
A quick check of their immediate
surroundings and she discovered she’d wrapped Tomas in a spiral of air that rose straight up as it passed his head, dissipating high enough to prevent panic.
“You did start it, didn’t you?” he asked, grip tightening on her shoulder. “Tell me it’s not happening without your control.”
“I’m controlling it.” And that was the truth, although she hadn’t consciously started it. The moving air pulled a bit of dust up off the footway, but given the amount kicked up by both people and horses, Mirian doubted anyone would notice. The risk of discovery—and yes, lack of control—was preferable to the disaster that would follow if even one of those horses caught scent of Tomas. She didn’t care so much about the people—any one of them would skin Tomas for the bounty—but she hated the thought of the animals being injured. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” She nodded toward the middle of the road where the carriage had disappeared in the traffic. “It’s gone.”
He turned her to face the other way. “There’s another carriage coming.”
She couldn’t actually pick it out in the traffic, but she could see another crowd already gathering at the yellow post even if she couldn’t make out the individual people. “Fine.” Truth be told, she was tired of walking, too. Tired of Jake’s shoes that didn’t fit right. Tired of being either stared at because they were strangers or ignored because they looked poor. She’d gotten used to the feel of the earth under bare feet, of feeling the connection to where she was going. Of having no one watching what she did except Tomas, who never judged.
Maybe the urge to run would ease if she sat down.
Under the dirt and manure, the road seemed to be crushed gravel pounded into tar. Barely able to separate the traffic into individual pieces, Mirian held Tomas’ arm as they crossed to the post. The post seemed to be nothing more than a post, so the word TROLLEY painted vertically down it most likely referred to the carriage. Or it was an Imperial word she didn’t know that meant: gather here and complain about how long you’ve been waiting.
Mirian met the eyes of a stout woman who looked as though she wanted to be left alone and would therefore, logically, not want to chat with strangers. “Excuse me, does this go over the bridge?”
“It does.”
“For how much?”
“Havmo from here to the southside. Each.” The way she said it, she didn’t believe they had it. She didn’t care, but she didn’t believe.
Mirian slipped her hand into the bedroll and into the purse. She didn’t pull it out, they had far too much money for the clothes they were wearing, just slipped the knot and removed a few coins by touch. Fortunately, the coppers with the half moon on the side opposite Emperor Leopald’s profile were larger than the rest. She could see which coins were copper but not the image stamped on them.
“Hey.” Tomas’ breath brushed against her ear. “You all right?”
“Just thinking about…” Going blind. “…words.” Thinking about words was infinitely preferable to thinking about going blind. Halfmoon to havmo. Language moved. Shifted. Changed. The Pack had been named abomination. If it could be changed, it could be changed back although Mirian didn’t know how.
First, the Mage-pack.
Her control over the whirlwind slipped a little as she passed over their fare and climbed up onto the trolley, sliding across to the far edge of the last bench, but she got it back before a passing chestnut did more than kick at the traces.
Theaters and hotels gave way to private clubs to banks to construction to what looked like new government buildings on the last few blocks before the river. Which smelled as bad as Mirian had suspected it would.
The tracks extended right across the bridge although the trolley had to keep stopping and starting because of workers hanging Imperial purple banners on overhead wires.
“Flaming Soothsayers and their flaming public days,” the middle-aged man on the bench next to Mirian muttered, folding his newspaper and slapping it down on his lap. His coloring suggested his family had originally come from the Southern Alliance although he spoke Imperial like he’d never spoken anything else. In spite of Gryham, she hadn’t expected that; people who’d moved to the empire from countries it hadn’t absorbed. The empire was the enemy. “Citizens’ Square’ll be a madhouse tomorrow,” her neighbor continued. “How’s anyone supposed to get any flaming work done?”
A madhouse might be useful. They could hide in a madhouse.
They got off at the first stop on the other side of the bridge, the yellow post obvious at the edge of what Mirian assumed was Citizens’ Square. To the east was the river and the road the trolley continued to travel along. To the north were blurry rows of shops and taverns. To the west just blur. And to the south, the palace wall and the north gate.
“Looks like the Shields’ garrison to the west. They never leave Karis; they’re here to defend the city. Well, really the emperor. Although Harry figured the rankers and junior officers were rotated out fairly regularly to keep them from getting fat and stupid. I bet there’s another way inside the palace wall from the garrison.”
Mirian stopped trying to see across the square and focused on Tomas’ face. “Are you suggesting we stop to take out a division of the Imperial army on the way?”
He grinned. “Why not?”
He was waiting for her to come up with a plan. She could see well enough to see that on his face. They were here, in Karis. What now?
Mirian had no idea. Her entire plan had been to get to Karis and rescue the Mage-pack.
A ridiculously ornate fountain topped with a large statue of an emperor on a rearing horse—maybe Leopald, maybe not—anchored the center of the square. It was, thankfully, the only horse Mirian could see, although there were a lot of people in the square. Sitting around the base of the fountain. Buying meat pies from a cart. Enjoying a beautiful spring day. Mirian had never seen a priest of the sun before, but the trio of men in yellow robes under white tabards were fairly easy to identify even given her vision problems. She could hear music and assumed it came from the cluster of people over by the garrison. When she heard yelling and the swoosh of falling fabric, she turned to see workers—well, dark shapes—on the top of the palace wall hanging yet more banners.
She and Tomas weren’t even the only people in the square clutching bundles and looking lost.
But mostly, there were soldiers. Which made sense if an entire garrison made up the western boundary of the square. Where else would the soldiers go to…?
Tomas’ hand closed around her arm. “Mirian, don’t look, but I think that’s the soldier we escaped from.”
“Captain Reiter.”
“No, he’s no captain.”
Mirian frowned, trying to remember the other man. “Blond? About your height? Kind of squinty-eyed?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Chard.”
“I don’t know his name, but he’s seen us.”
Chapter Fifteen
FOR THE FIRST TIME since the Soothsayers had placed him at the emperor’s elbow, dinner was not served in the Imperial dining room. The palace staff—as opposed to the emperor’s staff—were preparing for the festival.
“On public festivals, the palace is opened up to the citizens of the empire and anyone can wander around as if they have a right to be there.” Major Meritin pushed a pile of paper across his desk toward the corporal waiting for it, leaned back, and continued as the corporal left the room. “Their Imperial Majesties appear off and on throughout the day and have, in the past, gone so far as to interact with random persons in the crowd. It’s a security nightmare.”
Tavert had already explained what happened at a public festival, up to and including the phrase: it’s a security nightmare. That wasn’t why Reiter was in Major Meritin’s office. “So you’ll have to deploy more Shields within the palace.”
“I tend to think of it as more of a reassignment than a deployment, Captain, but yes, I will. More than a few. You won’t be one of them. I know,” the major raised a hand be
fore Reiter could argue. “You’re bored spitless playing politics, but, honestly, all you can hope for at this point is for the flaming Soothsayers to announce you’ll be better off at the border. You’re not under my command; I can’t reassign you. Even temporarily. Enjoy your freedom.”
If the major saw him wince at the word, he didn’t mention it.
He had the rest of the day and most of tomorrow until he was required to dance attendance on the emperor again although, as Tavert had reminded him, he could be recalled to the palace at any time.
The guards at the north gate took his name, and he stepped out into Citizens’ Square.
A band practiced for the festival to the west by the garrison wall. Half a dozen or so people sat around the base of the fountain. Three kids chased the pigeons. Two old women were arguing loudly about…cheese? It sounded like cheese. There were soldiers walking toward the garrison gates. And soldiers walking away from the garrison gates. There were soldiers gathered around the meat pie cart, so old Duff was probably selling off the last of the day’s stock.
Out of his braid, Reiter looked like any other soldier killing time in Citizens’ Square.
He didn’t look like he knew the sound bones made cracked between teeth, or the smell of burnt fur when a charged staff finally came into play, or the look of hate in eyes that were not an animal’s eyes. He didn’t look like the man the Soothsayers had given to the emperor. He didn’t look like he knew what he knew and had seen what he’d seen.
He wanted to take that anonymity to the Blue Goose, the least disreputable tavern his rank would allow him into, eat greasy food, drink cheap liquor, and start a fight where he could use his fists to pound out his anger and frustration. He wanted to. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t guarantee his tongue if he got drunk, wouldn’t recognize one of the emperor’s special guards if the ass bought him a drink, and while he hated the thought of the beastmen starving, he had no desire to be the next to feed them.