Clouds hung only a few hundred meters above them when they came at last to the clean and seemingly bottomless lake that fronted the mountain like an apron many kilometers wide. Dozens of bustling harbors thrust wharves out into the water. River muttered his commands, and Sken worked the helm as they picked their way skillfully among the boats and jetties, finding an empty slip in the harbor River picked out for them.
To everyone's surprise, Will jumped ashore almost before an aging portboy had finished tying their line to the dock. Will elbowed the old man aside, then retied the line himself.
"Why did you do that?" demanded Angel as Will carefully stepped back into the boat. The portboy was muttering curses behind him.
"Because this is Freetown, and if you fall in with the jackals at the beginning you're lost."
"What do you know of it?" asked Ruin.
Will looked at him steadily for a moment, then turned to Reck. "I've been here before," he said.
Reck raised her eyebrows.
"I had a master once who brought me here as his bodyguard."
Patience saw that Will spoke with the same openness that she had seen a few mornings before, when they talked in the predawn darkness, lit only by the moon. It was the same in daylight. He did not lie. It was impossible not to believe that he believed what he said. Yet in all their journey, he had not given her or anyone else the slightest hint that he had ever been to Cranning before.
"You've been to Cranning?" asked Ruin.
"Why didn't you say so before?" demanded Angel.
Will considered a moment before he answered. "I didn't know you'd dock right here. This is the only part of Cranning I've visited." He smiled. "My master thought there were some secret whores in some of the houses higher in Freetown. Some whores who could do things that no one had ever imagined."
"Was he right?" asked Sken.
"He didn't have much imagination," said Will. "So he was easy to satisfy." He tossed a small coin to the old portboy, who was still wailing on the dock. The man caught it with a quick, snakelike strike of his hand and grinned. "Now he'll fetch us someone who has the money to buy our boat. Instead of pretending that he's willing to guard it for us."
From the back of the boat, they heard River's voice.
"I'm known here," he said. "I fetch a fair price."
"I daresay," said Patience. "But you didn't much care whether we got that price, or that old portboy's cronies."
"I can't spend it," River admitted freely. "What's money to me? But when they steal me, they put me back on the downstream voyage much faster."
Sken was furious. "I ought to break your jar."
"If I still had my body," River retorted, "I'd teach you what a woman ought to do to a man."
"You were never man enough for me," said Sken.
"You were never woman enough to know a real man when you saw one."
Their quarrel went on; the others paid no attention. In a matter of moments, the whole hierarchy of authority aboard the boat shifted. Sken and River, the autocrats of the voyage, were now mere background noise. The others simply transferred to Will the trust they had placed in Sken. The tyranny of knowledge.
Will did not embarrass himself with authority as Sken had done. Patience watched as he deftly took charge of their expedition. In all these many days and weeks of travel, he had never once asserted himself, except on that single morning with her, when no one else could see. But now he stepped easily and naturally into command. He did not have to order people about or raise his voice. He listened to questions, answered them, and made decisions in a quiet way that admitted of no discussion. She had seen many men who were accustomed to command; most of them wore their authority defiantly, as if someone had just accused them of being powerless. Will took his authority as if he didn't have it, and so the others obeyed him without resentment, without noticing they were subjecting themselves to him.
If he were my husband, would he expect me to obey him? Almost at once, she was ashamed of the thought.
For he was using his authority solely for the good of the group. That's why he was equally content to follow and to lead. For whether he gave the command or someone else did, if it was a good command it should be obeyed.
And so if he were her husband, if he ordered something that was right and good, she would do it, and have no doubt that if she ordered what was right and good, he would easily obey.
"You can't take your eyes off him," Angel whispered to her.
She had no desire to tell Angel why. "He's not the silent oaf we thought him to be."
"Don't trust him," said Angel. "He's a liar."
She could not believe that Angel would say such a thing. "How can you hear him and see him and think he says anything he doesn't believe?"
"All you're telling me," said Angel, "is that he's a very good liar."
She moved away from Angel to conceal how flustered she was. Of course Angel could be right. It hadn't occurred to her, and it should have, that Will's openness and honesty could be as much an illusion as her own.
After all, hadn't she schooled herself all her life to speak so she would be believed? Couldn't he have done the same?
Or had Angel sensed how much she was beginning to center herself on Will? Could he be jealous of the man's influence on her? But no. Angel had never acted out of jealousy in his life. She had trusted Angel from her earliest memories. If he doubted Will, it would be dangerous for her not to doubt him, too.
Yet she couldn't doubt him. In that one night, he had moved to the very center of the story she saw unfolding for herself. She couldn't thrust him into the background again. Whatever Angel thought of him. Will's abilities were real enough, he was proving that. And she did love him, she was sure of that-
The doubt was there, though. Now Angel stood on the dock, talking with Will, paying no more attention to Patience; but his words had been enough to put a doubt in Patience's mind. Her trust of Will was no longer complete, as it had been. And she resented Angel for it, though she knew she ought to thank him. Trust no one, Father had said. And she had forgotten it, with Will. But what a fool she had been, a religious fanatic like that, a Vigilant, and she had trusted him completely. Wait and see. That's what she would do. Wait and see.
Will sold the boat almost at once, and for a low price.
River was included in the price-and he cursed Will for valuing him so low. Will only laughed. "I sold you fast to get you on the river sooner," he said. "I thought that was all you cared for."
River clicked his tongue, and his monkey turned his jar around to face downstream, so River couldn't see his former owners anymore.
Speaking to Patience, Will had another explanation for the low price. "We're better off if they think we care nothing for money. They'll take us for rich visitors who have come to play. In Freetown there's no official government and no written law. But as long as they think we're here to spend money, our lives are absolutely safe.
We could drop a purse of steel on the open street and come back a week later and find it untouched."
"People are that honest?" asked Angel.
"The robbery is more organized. The big thieves make sure that little thieves don't interfere with their profits.
Street crime? Just keep to the main streets, the well-lighted streets and walkways and stairs. We'll be safe.
The thieves will be waiting for us indoors, at the gaming tables and in the whorehouses. No one leaves with much more than the price of passage back home."
"What happens when they find out we're just passing through?" asked Patience. "That we aren't here to lose a fortune and then go away and tell other people what a wonderful time we had?"
Will smiled. "We may leave some corpses behind us when we leave. Angel told me you were good at that."
His words, his expression gave no hint that he remembered their conversation. He was a deceiver, then, a concealer; either he was hiding his love for her now, or he was wearing it as a false mask then. Either way, Angel was rig
ht-he could lie.
They called good-bye to River, who ignored them; then they left the wharf and took rooms at an inn three levels above the river. Patience and Angel passed as a rich young woman and her grandfather, with Will as bodyguard, Sken as servant, and Reck and Ruin as gebling merchants who had traveled with them as their guides.
The surprise was Ruin. Will insisted that he dress the part, and when he appeared on the dock bathed, brushed, and finely attired, with his sister elegantly at his side, Patience saw that his previous undress and uncivility were from choice, not ignorance. Together they were king of the geblings, and could look the part if they needed to.
All this time that we traveled together, thought Patience, I believed I was the only one in disguise. But we were all in disguise, and are in disguise again. When we reach Unwyrm, if we're still together, will the last disguise be gone, and the truth of all of us be known?
If there is any truth. Perhaps we are what we pretend to be, taking on new identities with each change of costume.
She knew that she, at least, would have no disguise when she faced Unwyrm. No hiding place. No protection but her wits and what strength she could muster. It made her feel naked, as if everyone could see through her clothing to the thin and white-bodied girl that Unwyrm called.
"You must come down to the gaming tables," said Angel.
"I have better things to do with my time," said Patience.
She sat at the window, looking out over the harbor and the forests beyond.
"Sit and brood? Feel his fingers close in on your heart?"
Sken piped up from the bed. "If I can bathe every day, you can go down and play Kalika."
"Sken is right, you know. We're here pretending to be pleasure-seekers. We therefore must seek some pleasure.
Whether it pleases us or not."
"Visit the whores for me. Angel. Do double duty."
But she left the window and walked to the mirror. Her hair was still cropped short, and deeply marred by the surgery. Still, the stubble was now a good two centimeters long. "Angel," she said, "cut the rest off, will you?
To this length."
"It's not your most attractive style," said Angel.
"I may need to shed my wig somewhere along the way. Be a good fellow." She smiled flirtatiously. Since Angel was the one who taught her how to smile that way, she knew he would see it as a joke. And, indeed, he smiled. A trifle late, though. He was preoccupied. It was harder for them to pretend to be calm when they were here in Cranning, with Unwyrm's lair somewhere above them.
Angel took the shears from his trunk and began to cut.
It gave her a severe look, to have her hair almost gone.
"Where is the nearest tunnel from here?" asked Patience.
"Reck says we'd be insane to try the tunnels from here. It would take three times as long, and there are robbers who live in the shallow caves."
"I didn't ask if we should use the tunnels, I asked where the nearest tunnel entrance was."
Angel sighed. "There's probably one in the back of this place. Somewhere. Along this cliff, though, the houses are built half on top of each other. Who knows which ones touch the mountain face at a point where a tunnel comes out?"
"If I could once step inside a tunnel, I'd know where he is. I have the geblings' memory of the labyrinth. I'd have a sense of where we're going, then."
"And what's to stop him from forcing you to go through the tunnels? He can keep you safe enough, Lady Patience, but we'll have no protection. I imagine he'd be just as glad to have us all dead somewhere in the tunnels, and bring you safe and sound-and alone-to meet him."
"If I want to step into a tunnel for a moment, Angel, I don't see why I can't do it."
"Do you want to?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Doyow want to?"
Or was the idea coming to her from Unwyrm? She frowned into the mirror. "Are you trying to make me doubt everything?" she asked.
"I just want to make sure you're doing what's best."
Patience kept silent. Everyone seemed so eager to give her advice. As if the presence of Unwyrm's urging in her mind made her incapable of making decisions on her own. Or was her resentfulness coming from Unwyrm, in his effort to separate her from her companions? She wondered if she could trust her own judgment. It would be so comfortable to concentrate on keeping Unwyrm at bay, while letting Angel lead her up the mountain. Angel could keep her safe. Perhaps she should have been taking his advice all along. She thought about Will and Reck and Ruin in the next room, and wondered if she had been wise to take the road through Tinker's Wood after all.
They were just an added complication. Angel was enough, with Sken to help them where brute strength was needed.
Reck and Ruin were too unpredictable-when had human and gebling interests ever coincided? And Will-what insanity, his religion. With Patience as deity, a love goddess, a sacrifice; that morning on the boat was a dream, a deception. How could she go up the mountain with these strange people tagging along? Who knew what they might do?
She almost suggested to Angel that they ought to leave now, without telling the gebling king, just disappear into the crowds. As soon as she was far enough from Reck and Ruin, Unwyrm would repel them from Cranning again; they could never follow her.
But she felt uneasy about that. A fleeting memory of lips on her cheeks, fingers touching her body. Am I such an adolescent, to be held by such meaningless stirring in the blood? But it held her. And something else, too: the memory of being the gebling king herself. She felt the pressure of that, too, the sense that Cranning was herself, that all the millions of geblings who lived their busy lives here were her responsibility, hers to protect, hers to command. She remembered clearly that she had ruled here once, when only a few thousand geblings inhabited the place. She couldn't cast aside that responsibility, not easily, anyway. So she said nothing.
Angel set aside the shears. "Lovely," he said.
"You look like a prisoner just getting out of Glad Hell," said Sken.
"Thank you," said Patience. "I find the style becoming, myself." She put on her wig and became a woman again. "What's the game of the house?"
"Actually, this is more of a show house." Angel smoothed the back of her hair. "There's a theatre here, with a company of gaunts. But they do have worm-and- slither fights, and the betting gets quite intense sometimes."
"I've never actually seen a worm-and-slither," she said.
"Not pretty," said Sken.
"We ought to bet something, or they'll think we aren't gamblers, and they'll worry about whether we're worth keeping around." Angel tossed a heavy purse into the air and caught it. Sken's gaze never left the bag.
"Still. The show sounds better. What is it?"
"I don't know. In this place, probably a scat show."
"Maybe we can look for a show somewhere else."
Angel frowned. "If you want theatre, there are better places than Freetown."
"I'm here on business," said Patience. "So I don't have much choice."
A knock on the door. Will stuck his head in. "We're ready when you are."
"We're ready now," Angel answered.
There was a fair-sized crowd in the worm-and-slither room. Angel led them to the pens first, to size up the evening's competitors. The slithers all clung to the front of their glass cases, colors shifting like ribbons inside them, new arms and legs growing in various directions as others retreated. They weren't more than five centimeters across. "I thought they'd be bigger," said Patience.
"They will be, during the fight," said Sken. "They starve them down to low weight for transportation. Slithers are all pretty much the same, anyway. What matters is the worms."
The worms were kept in swarms, as many as a dozen to a case. They drifted slowly and aimlessly through the water. Patience quickly lost interest in them and looked around the gaming room.
It was strange to see how easily humans and geblings intermingled here. There was no sense of separati
on, no hint of caste. There were even a few dwelfs who were not servants, and gaunts who might not have been prostitutes, though it was hard to tell about that. Gaunts wouldn't do very well in a game of chance-they'd take too many bad bets. Surely the people here weren't so unsporting as to steal from creatures with no resistance.
Everyone was beautiful, or at least wanted to seem so.
Dozens of thick women and paunchy men wore clothing tailored to emphasize this sign of wealth; jowls and chins abounded. Brocades tumbled from padded shoulders; velvets flowed from uncontainable hips. But the gaunts who stood here and there among the crowd made a mockery of human attempts at beauty. The human ideal was massive and strong for men, rounded and fertile for women; good breeding stock, it was called, and it was high praise. But men and women both had a way of thumping when they walked, as if beneath their clothes they wore bronze plate. The gaunts, on the other hand, seemed to glide. Not ostentatiously, the way a dancer might do it, isolating the legs from the trunk, so that the head stayed on an even, unmoving horizontal plane. Rather they moved like a ripple in the earth itself, as if they grew out of the floor like the graceful, purposeful pseudopodia of the slithers in their cages.
When they move, their bodies are the song of the earth.
When they speak, their voices are the song of the air.
When they love, ah! The pleasures they give are as strong as the pulse of the sea.
So said the "Hymn to Gaunts," a half-satirical, half- insane paean by an ancient poet who was too eccentric for his name to be remembered or his poetry to be forgotten.
And Father had said, Humans don't miss their machines on Imakulata because the gaunts are almost as obedient and far, far more beautiful.
One gaunt in particular, a young boyok, white-blond and, though small, too tall for his weight: Patience noticed him as he bobbed in and out of the front row of the crowd that gathered around the current game. His hand sometimes, and sometimes his shoulder, had a way of brushing ever-so-gently across the crotch of a rich-looking customer. A catamite? No-when he had their attention, he handed them a thin paper. Selling something, then, but something that sold better with a sexual approach.
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