by Jay Lake
This had been the great hall once. The junk above him had layers, a sort of informal scaffolding. Imago devoutly hoped he did not have to climb.
Marelle's winding path led to a cleared area before a door. "One of the old certamentaria," she said. "Where they fought."
"Surely they had a sward to drill on?"
"The Green Market, now."
Of course. Everyone knew it was an old parade ground.
The door was padded. Several judas holes were scattered at various heights, each covered with tiny steel flaps. His fingers brushed one. Imago could feel the shouts and blows from half a millennium past still captured in the battered, rusted roundels. "They fought with what weapons in there?"
"Everything, I think." She grabbed the door and yanked it open. Imago's retrospective moment vanished.
The past was safely gone. He was just a man—a dwarf, now—standing amid an enormous junk heap with a very strange woman. The bell in his pocket jingled as he stepped into the next room amid the scents of leather and dry rot.
Bijaz
He stomped through the streets playing the angry god. That came too easily to him.
He was the City's luck, after all. The Numbers Men had told him so, that fateful day when he'd been dragged to the white room with the blank gaming table. But this mountebank with her tales of Imperator Terminus' wealth would be ill luck indeed for the City Imperishable.
So he stalked down the middle of the road. Instead of confining his powers to flights of feathers and drabbles of sand, Bijaz allowed free rein. A faint coruscating nimbus enveloped him, an antishadow which stood out even in the afternoon sunlight. Tiny lightnings played among his fingertips. His glare set puddles steaming.
More to the point, he drew a crowd. They trailed in from the pothouses, the alleyways, the carts and platforms that did business on the roadway, gathering like the skein of a fishing net being drawn tight in a sailor's hand.
His hand.
City people loved a show.
Bijaz had no idea where to find the mountebank. He couldn't say where she'd gone since leaving the Spice Market. Enero might know. He trusted the City's weird to find her.
The Card King waited at the intersection of Filigree Avenue and Orogene Avenue. The krewe leader was in full regalia, red and gold robes, mounted on a horse the color of bleached straw. He might have been just a fat man in a tasteless suit with hair the color of tarnished brass, but for the stillness with which he met Bijaz's advance.
Bijaz and the Card King had helped save the City. Imago's rush to power would have stumbled but for their bright distractions that winter's day.
"Hello, friend," the Card King said softly.
Bijaz stopped, arms akimbo. "The powers of the City are taking note." His voice boomed oddly loud.
"As they do." A meaty hand reached down. "Will you ride with me?"
"Where are you bound?"
The crowd had gathered around. Bijaz knew this feeling of power, and feared it. Where crowds gathered and men grew large, the Old Gods began to direct their dreams of wakefulness. This hour had acquired that focused sense of inevitability.
"I go to hear a mystery play about the uttermost North, from a woman with a bear and bells."
"Then I am your dwarf." Bijaz clasped the Card King's hand and leapt weightless to a saddle which was set higher than his head.
Power, indeed, he thought, leaving a trail of smoldering flowers in his wake. They formed their own processional heading toward the River Saltus.
People followed, gathering the stinking blossoms as they came.
The Card King reined in his horse on Water Street before the Softwood Quay. They were opposite Ducôte's scriptorium, amid rambling stacks of lumber both green and cured. The air was filled with the reek of murdered forest. Beyond the docks, the Saltus steamed thick as blood though it ran the color of old oil. Ships and barges rode at anchor, while carts and drays stood about, but work had ceased.
The air itself was noumenal. Bijaz willed the magick to stop, but the City was having none of his petty wishes.
A stage was in the process of hasty assembly. Workmen scuttled about with slightly dazed expressions. A high-wheeled wagon with a leather tent atop the bed stood nearby.
"Is that her?" he asked, pointing.
"Wait." The Card King turned to look at Bijaz, a plain man's eyes panicked in his broad-beaming face.
So they both played a role today. It seemed to Bijaz that a krewe king must be ever ready for his part. They were priests, of a sort, with their strange rituals to keep the Old Gods dreaming. Now one of them was present in this man's body.
He'd never understood which krewes served which of the Old Gods, and had been reluctant to reason it out. Some things were better left asleep.
Until they woke up, and then understanding might come too late.
Enough, he thought. This battle had already been fought and won. We have a new chapter before us now.
Bijaz spent his waiting time imagining how large a bird he might conjure, something to carry this troublesome woman away and sharpen its beak upon her bones in a distant aerie. When he realized that flights of shocked curlews were speeding away from him with screams tearing from their mouths, he stopped. "I will abide."
The Card King grunted.
The stage was quickly built. Workmen dropped their tools and slipped away as a drumbeat began. The air stilled. Traffic stopped on Water Street, and the crowd began to breathe as one animal.
It was a summoning, whether of god or spirit or just people massed in panicked awe did not matter. He could break a summoning.
Balancing against the fat man's back, Bijaz stood on the Card King's saddle to scatter silver coins from his fingers. He laughed in the booming voice that the Numbers Men had granted him.
He shattered building momentum like a thrown mug.
The woman stepped up on to the stage, a sour look on her face so fleeting as to be almost unnoticeable. The crowd's attention was divided among her and Bijaz as the noumenal world slipped back into the spaces between the air. She gave Bijaz a short, sharp nod, then spread her arms wide to speak.
"The City Imperishable—" she began, her tones sonorous and pitched for oratory.
Still using the great voice, Bijaz interrupted her. "She knows our name." He grinned so wide his lips hurt. "My congratulations on your scholarship, girl."
This time her gaze brimmed with rage. "Indeed. I see you are a rare man."
"Hardly." Grasping the Card King's shoulder, Bijaz bowed. The hand that swept wide spread gleaming confetti cut from cloth-of-gold. There was a scrambling at the horse's feet as people grabbed for the stuff. "Half a man at best. I'm sure you can see that I am the better half."
This time the crowd roared with laughter. By Dorgau's sweet fig, he preferred music hall comedy to the kind of shadowed power that she had been gathering for herself. Did this rabble-rouser even understand what forces she played with?
Bijaz had come to appreciate the horror in which old Ignatius had held the raw use of magick. Jason had explained to him why the Inner Chamber had been such a danger to the City Imperishable, and indeed, even the world as a whole.
"Half me no halves," the mountebank called out. "I am dwarfed by your demi-measure of wit."
At least she was playing the game, though her sally was not so well received. People at the edges began to drift away to their errands.
"Forward," Bijaz hissed. The Card King's horse eased through the crowd at his host's barest urging. Then, loudly: "I am told you come from the North, girl. There's nothing up there but ice and lice. Got any frost on you?" He flicked his wrists and a spray of snow settled on the people close around the horse.
They were hooting now.
"Hardly." His words had her temper up now. Or perhaps it was his casual displays of magick. Half-miracles for a half-god, but by the brass hells if he could use his powers to peacefully shame her away, so much the better. "I—"
"You had best get a permit
for your circus," Bijaz said. "These good people have work, and you are blocking a dock." The Card King sidled the horse close to the stage. Bijaz climbed up to look into the mountebank's eyes. They were blue-white, and very angry. "Give it up," he said quietly.
"Another time," she muttered, then looked around. Losing her audience, she simply stepped back. Her shoulders settled as her hands rested at her side. Suddenly she was just an ordinary woman, pale with brown hair, overdressed for the spring weather in blue silk and pale fur.
Bijaz felt an unaccountable surge of pity. "I would advise you take your business elsewhere."
"You don't know my business, little man," she snapped.
"Actually, I do." He forced a smile. "Enough to know what is and isn't needful. Those tricks I was doing, to distract your audience?"
He could see she was interested despite herself. "They were well done. I could not spot the take-in." Now her tone was mellower. The kind of voice to make man or dwarf dream.
Bijaz shook off that thought. She'd said "take-in." "You are a mountebank. You see me as another sharp." Bijaz held out his hands, palm up, then closed his fists. When his fingers flexed open again, two silver fish wriggled, one on each palm. "There is no sleight, my lady."
"Miracles." This time she laughed. "Any fool can pray down a miracle from a willing god. It takes a true artist to create the illusion of a miracle and be believed." She turned to climb down off the stage. "Come drink with me and tell me why I am sadly mistaken."
Bijaz looked back at the Card King, but the fat man was gone. With a shrug, he followed, glorying in the touch of her hand as she helped him to the cobbles.
They didn't bother with her wagon, but repaired instead to the Ripsaw, a potshop just off the Softwood Quay. It was a lumberman's place. That didn't seem to bother his hostess. Bijaz had no fear anymore.
Inside, the place stank of sawdust, sap, and burly men. The lumbermen hunched over their tankards and stew in knots of four and five—crews off the barges and log rafts floated down the Saltus basin from the broad country below the Silver Ridges.
The woman didn't even glance at the rough trade, instead heading straight for the bar. Used to their company, Bijaz thought. More evidence she had in fact come from the North.
The mountebank turned with two tankards of ale and nodded Bijaz toward a rickety table by the unlit fireplace. He sat, glancing at generations of initials and obscene carvings of the impossible. Bijaz was all too familiar with the confluence between the obscene and the possible.
"I will not drink with a stranger." She pushed a tankard toward him. "I am called Ashkoliiz."
"Bijaz." He sniffed the ale. It was dark, foamy, all but liquid bread. "The dwarf," he added.
"Truly?" She took a deep draught of her tankard. Bijaz followed suit.
He was more of a wine man, but if ale could talk her past the gates, that was even better than laughing her out of town. Anything to avoid a duel of powers.
She studied him over the rim of her tankard. "I would not have marked you for a priest, but you have the touch of mana." Those pale, pale eyes held him a moment, glinting like distant ice. He was reminded of the forests embedded in the water droplets at Kalliope's fingertips.
This woman was so unlike his old master's daughter, except for her age. When had the world grown so young?
"Your accent is flawless," Bijaz said. "Nicely done, given your desire to bend the good citizens of the City Imperishable to your will."
"Presuming there are any good citizens here." She quirked an eyebrow. "You seem to believe I am not one of your own."
"No one here would use that term . . . Mana? We are very aware of the noumenal world."
Ashkoliiz smiled again. He found himself warming to her. "You are a little old man come to ruin my drama, throwing birds and coins with abandon, touched by the noumenal. It is as if the City itself has risen to greet me."
"Think of me as a warning. With two feet and a hand for the take-in."
"You were not doing parlor tricks."
"Nor stage magick, either." He set his ale down again—was he already feeling the drink? "You are being straight enough with me. I shall be straight with you.
"You brought a bear and dark-skinned men with strange flutes, and tossed a bell to the Lord Mayor himself. Were you a company of mummers, I'd pay my obol to pass within your tent, for it is a wondrous show you promise.
"This city, though, has barely recovered from the Trial of Flowers and the ugly rule of the Imperator Restored. We cannot withstand another pass through the hands of royalty so soon. Your dumb show aims to raise a rabble and erupt through the River Gate with flags flying and the promise of hope. Our people need to stay home and rebuild the City's trade. Not send their sons and their money haring after old rumors."
She traced signs for a moment in the water pooling on the splintered table, before meeting Bijaz's eyes once more. Something in that pale gaze made him shiver. He was reminded once more of how long it had been since he'd lain with a woman. "I trade in dreams of history, friend dwarf," she said.
Another push of a tiny puddle.
"I've sold maps and bought ancient diaries. Forged a few of both. People love to know what came before, love the wealth and wisdom of history." The smile came back. "We both know the past is tired men and women with baby-chewed breasts cowering in huts, fearing winter wolves. There is no wealthier era than today's. But people always long for a golden age when their nation was strong and their language was pure and everyone knew their place. You were right to call me a mummer. I am. I act out history, and take my fee where I find it."
He released a stag beetle from his cupped hands. The ale was definitely going to his head. "We have more history here in the City Imperishable than any people ought to be cursed with. Take your history and . . . and . . . " The room closed in, the clatter of the beetle's wings far too loud.
Ashkoliiz rose to her feet, her smile broad as a cat's. "Take my history and what, little man?" She stepped to his side of the table and pushed his face into the tabletop. She leaned over to whisper in his ear, "No one calls me girl."
Girl.
Girl.
Drowning in the foamy residue of brewer's bread, he wondered where he'd ever known a girl. Someone's footfalls melded into the buzzing of wings, then the lumbermen began to laugh in chorus.
Onesiphorous
Returning to his office late in the afternoon, still damp from his tumble into the sea, Onesiphorous found a dwarf huddled before his door. He didn't recognize the visitor. The man was of middle years, dressed in traditional wrappings. His clothing was stained and torn. Onesiphorous sourly noted a few stitches at each corner of the dwarf's mouth—a compromise that nodded at Sewn tradition while being more suited to everyday life.
The dwarf was crying.
A small gathering shouted insults and advice. They seemed mostly concerned with the best way to achieve a fatal dive into the channel below.
Onesiphorous was horrified. He stepped close to grab the dwarf's shoulder. "Inside, man. And pull yourself together."
The dwarf's eyes were red with tears—and drink, Onesiphorous realized, with a stout whiff of the other's breath. "You're the City's man," he said, his words slurred.
"We're all the City's men." Onesiphorous unlatched his office and dragged the unwelcome visitor within, casting a final glare at the hecklers.
He'd planned to change into some old clothes he kept in the office—his apartment was several islets further and required a ferry ride to cross a channel too wide to be conveniently bridged—but not with this visitor to hand. Instead Onesiphorous poured cold black tea from a stone crock. It seemed best to place a prop between him and the crying dwarf.
"Here," he said, voice more rough than he'd intended. "What brings you to my door?"
"I'm asking the City for help." The dwarf ignored the tea. "I've a right to petition the Lord Mayor."
"You've a right to petition the head of the Ropemakers' Guild, too. For all the
good it will do. The Lord Mayor's writ doesn't run in Port Defiance. You'll want to speak to the Harbormaster if there's a legal issue at stake, or take your case to the Burgesses back home."
"No." His visitor's face pinched in pain. "This is a dwarf thing. Lord Mayor's a dwarf. One of us. Port Defiance is no city for honest dwarfs, and there's been none in the Burgesses ever. They'll not care at all."
Imago was no more a dwarf than he was an Alate. Certainly the Lord Mayor had been made over to resemble a dwarf, but a few passes of the knife by some moldering god was hardly sufficient to claim Imago as one of their own.