by Jay Lake
"Nah," said the little girl. "Bendy's dead."
The boy nodded. "You ain't one of them."
This time he didn't beat the cough. His chest hurt, with a broad, hot ache. "One of whom?" Onesiphorous asked cautiously when he'd got his breathing back.
"Ship men. They come into the quarters last night, drug off Mama and all the other women."
Onesiphorous winced. He wondered how the Harbormaster had felt about that. Certainly the women here had cause to hate rather than serve now. "No, I'm not one of them."
"Can you find her?" the boy asked. "Mama," the girl added.
"I don't know." Another round of coughing. "I'm not the rescuing sort." He tried to smile. "I can send for help."
"You got message birds?"
"No. I need to find my way upriver." Now he truly wished he hadn't sent Boudin away. "Can you bring me dry clothes? Something to make me look different. Something for my cough, too."
The girl nodded. The boy glanced at her, then they both slunk out.
Onesiphorous stretched and rose from the cot. He figured there was a good chance they simply wouldn't come back, but it was also unlikely they'd bring the Harbormaster's men. They certainly wouldn't fetch corsairs.
Not after last night.
He was stiff. His breath didn't come right, either. The chill had settled on him after all. He stayed wrapped in the tablecloth, sitting close to the stove for a long time.
When the children did return, they brought a pinch-faced woman whose eyes were puffy and red. She walked with a limp and wore the gray-stained dress of kitchen drab, with a ratty shawl drawn over.
"He's not a big child, you fools." She slapped the boy. "Run on, I'll take care of this."
They scampered into the hall, giggling.
"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, madam," sniffled Onesiphorous. His nose had become something of a fountain.
She peered close. "You're that City dwarf. The new one, who wanted to stop their fighting."
"Yes. I am Onesiphorous. And you?"
"It don't matter who I am. We're all invisible here, 'til them blackheart bastards want a woman to turn up her skirts. But that crazy woman come down with you, the Sister. You her friend?"
That was a loaded question. He didn't know which way the bullet was pointing. He plumped for honesty. "Not precisely friends. I don't suppose she had much use for me." A long, burbling sniffle. "But we worked together, and sought many of the same things."
At least he wasn't coughing.
"She's dead, I hear tell." A stab of fearful sadness shot through Onesiphorous. "Shame, that." The woman didn't appear distressed. "They's upstairs tearing things down around our ears. Turned all us women over last night to use us hard, and killed Einette this morning for moving too fast with the tea tray. Himself made a bad mistake, but he's not one to admit that. Not ever. "
"All the City did was tax you."
"Taxes? Me?" She laughed, a bitter sound like sliding stones. "Got to have money to pay taxes. I live here, I'll die here. It don't make me no never mind whose flag is on the towers. I just don't wish to be any man's dog, you get me, mister City dwarf?"
"Oh, believe me, I do," said Onesiphorous with a fervor which surprised even himself.
"Fair enough. I reckon you took a dunking and then some. Stay here awhile, I'll send Padraig and Shanny back with clean clothes. In a bad light you might pass for an ugly girl, we get a wig on you. Ugly's good these days, believe me." She wound down, smoothing her skirt. He noticed she winced as she did so. "Not good enough, maybe," she added quietly.
"Madame, I will do what I can. But I need to send a letter to the City Imperishable." He needed to go there himself, but that didn't seem likely. "If Big Sister is still alive, I'd very much like to speak to her. And if you hear or see anything of the Northern woman Ashkoliiz, I'd appreciate that news as well."
"I'll see what I can do," she said sourly, "me being himself's private secretary and all. You best rest that chest or we'll all be weeping over your shroud in a week's time."
"Thank you."
She favored him with one last glare before stomping out. "You'd be more use if you was a strapping lad with a great sword and a magick shield."
He wouldn't mind being a strapping lad himself at the moment, but that would probably just get him killed faster.
When he lay down to sleep, the coughing returned. He pulled Old Bendlin's rickety chair by the little firebox and tried to rest sitting up. It seemed a lost cause, but after a while he realized his fevered dreams of panic were no different from his memories of the recent day. He ran on and on into them until he forgot himself.
Imago
He hadn't even made it to the stairs when a big Tokhari emerged from the door leading to the rest of the rugmakers' complex. The full-man was dressed traditionally, right down to the swords. "Lord Mayor," he growled in an accent fresh off the sand.
One of Kalliope's, then—the personal guard who was still bagging about the City. They fought in potshops, haggled in the markets, and swaggered in the streets; in general acting like big men from every corner of the world acted when they reached the City Imperishable.
Imago wasn't certain whether he should find fault with that. "Il-mezzi manit," he said politely in Tokhari.
"Sandwalker says for you to come."
He glanced about, but saw only two clerks, a messenger boy, and several of Enero's men. The latter watched the Tokhari carefully, hands on their own weapons.
"I'm coming." Imago shrugged out of his canvas car coat—heavy enough for the pre-dawn mists—and followed.
He was led quickly to the hallway outside the map room. It was thick with Tokhari prostrate on the floor. All their heads faced the map room door.
He tried to convince himself that this was a good sign.
Imago picked his way past outflung arms. No one seemed to notice him except for his erstwhile escort who stood back and glowered.
The door wasn't even locked. He took a deep breath and pushed it open.
Bijaz, Kalliope, and Jason stood around the north side of the map table, studying the country beyond the Silver Ridges. Jason looked almost normal. His skin had a faintly luminous cast.
"Hello . . . " Imago had hoped against hope for success. This was far better than the strange, shadowed terror he'd glimpsed the day before.
"Lord Mayor." Bijaz was almost formal.
The old dwarf's hand was on Kalliope's hip. They both looked exhausted, Bijaz run down enough to seem somehow normal. No farting of butterflies this morning, either. Raising the dead must take a lot out of a man.
Imago swept a bow. "I see things have changed."
"Imago," Jason said.
His voice stopped the Lord Mayor's breath. It was as if a tree had spoken, spring shouted upward from the buds in the soil. A green scent like a laden haywain came on the words. Imago's hair stirred, his skin warmed. Jason was the sun and he the blooming flower.
The Lord Mayor shook that feeling off. He'd been god-touched before. This wasn't the same thing, not exactly. More elemental than noumenal.
The dead man of winter had become the Green Man of spring.
"Jason. It's so good to see you."
"Mmm." Jason didn't smile, exactly, but the warmth of his gaze flared a moment in some indefinable way before he returned the focus of his attention to the map table. "I know no more than you, but there are conclusions to be drawn," he said. "If this map was correct at the time of the Imperator, would he have taken an entire army through the forests? Or would he have chosen a road through open land? How big were his bivouacs?"
Bijaz eyed the stack of books, scrolls, and maps at the east end of the table. "Might be in there somewhere, though we've found no direct account of his departure."
"Odd, that," said Kalliope.
Imago cleared his throat. "If I might ask a question?"
All three gazed brightly at him.
"Why is the hallway outside full of Tokhari in the depths of rel
igious transport?"
Not that he didn't know the answer, in the sense of the proximate cause. One godling around the place was bad enough. If Bijaz had forged himself a twin, Imago was going to ship them both down to the coast in exchange for Onesiphorous. And he wanted to know what to expect when he let this cozy little trio leave this room.
Kalliope smiled. "The sula ma-jieni na-dja walks. Would you not be stricken with awe if the lamb rose from the ashes of the altar to bleat for its mother?"
Imago wasn't sure what he'd think. Not these days. "Will they do that in the streets?"
"I cannot say."
"We shall see, I suppose."
Their heads bent to the map once more. Imago felt obscurely betrayed. He had been left out of whatever these three now shared, even though they were precisely doing his bidding. "When you reach a stopping point," he said, "please come to my office. Discreetly."
Kalliope looked up at him once more with a nod.
He turned to leave. It would be interesting to see if they could make it up the stairs without causing a riot.
One of the full-man clerks met Imago in his office. Robert Stockwell, Imago recalled. The man was tall, and favored black suits of the trim found in the more conservative gentlemen's clubs.
"The steam packet Riverfall came in to dock this morning, sir," Stockwell announced.
"So soon?" He'd sent Onesiphorous word of the misadventures of Ashkoliiz in a despatch by the same ship two days earlier. It took five days to make the round trip—two down, and at least three back depending on the current.
"They were attacked at the Gravel Bend."
"By whom?"
Steam packets were not fighting ships—they sailed the River Saltus with minimal crews. Trading scows, barges, and ships of all sorts off the Sunward Sea each moved cargo at their own pace. The packets carried messages, money, and people whose time was valuable.
What they did not carry was armament. River piracy hadn't been an issue in a very long time—he couldn't bring to mind any recent record of it. Few people lived on the river between the City Imperishable and Port Defiance. The land was too mucky and overgrown for farming, while there were far better places for grazing or timber, all free for the taking in the empty lands of the old empire.
"The captain could not say who made the assault. They took rifle fire from a wooded copse on the shore. As he put on steam to outrun the attackers, the bow watch spotted cables in the river. The captain felt backing off and returning to be a better choice than sailing unarmed into further ambush."
"Brilliant." Imago slapped his desk. "We have no marines, and no fighting navy. The armed ships in port are all merchants who won't take a commission from us. There is simply no way to respond. And my letters to Onesiphorous have not been delivered."
"No, sir. They were sent back to your office with the report of the attack."
Ashkoliiz. He knew the mountebank was behind this somehow. Where had she gotten guns? That was not so hard to imagine. But blocking the river channel? "What sort of cables?" he asked.
"Sir?"
"Go down to the docks. Find the captain of Riverfall. Ask him what sort of cables they were. Get details. Make him turn out his crew, and speak to whoever actually spotted them."
"What am I looking for, sir? What will it mean?"
"I have no idea, Robert. Only a hunch that it will signify something, once we hear the answer."
"Yes, sir."
Robert left.
Cables in the river. Onesiphorous out of touch. Jason back from the dead.
Well, first off, he'd best warn the Portmaster before anyone set sail on the morning current. In case this chicanery was something broader than mere interference in his own plans. Imago found a sheet of writing paper and began a memorandum.
The Burgesses would become involved in this. Anything that impeded shipping grasped the attention of a syndic faster than a whore's fingernails clamped upon his scrotum.
Jason was back, he told himself. Have joy.
Still, he couldn't forget the panicked dogs down at the warehouse on Sturgeon Quay.
Three arguments later, including a threatening ring from the Limerock Palace via the telelocutor, Bijaz opened Imago's door. "He's here," the dwarf said.
Imago realized that nothing had slipped or flown from Bijaz's fingers the last two times he'd seen the old dwarf. Interesting. "Come."
Jason walked in, still slightly luminous, still smiling. A crowd gathered outside.
Kalliope slipped in after and shut the door behind her. "He's hard to hide."
"I do not require concealment." Jason sat in one of Imago's chairs. A faint crackling noise erupted, then quickly subsided.
Something wrong with Jason's eyes, Imago realized. Color . . . they were the wrong color. How had that happened? He shook away the distraction to focus on the business at hand. "What have you found?"
"We're not sure," Bijaz admitted. "That Terminus went north is as good a theory as anything else. No one seems to have kept records of the Imperator's departure. That can only have been deliberate, as if they wished to put it out of their collective minds."
"There was the razing of the temples," Imago said. "That little bit of history's somewhat more complicated than most people imagine."
Bijaz nodded. "We can't tell much from what we have. Are you considering sending someone northward to have a look?"
Imago didn't want to know where this tomb might be. "The last thing this city needs is for the Imperator's final resting place to actually be found."
He continued to wish fervently that Ashkoliiz might be just another confidence trickster, but there was too much to her. The ice bear, the Northmen, and those damned bells. It was far too elaborate for an everyday con—that would have involved a map and some conveniently discovered old diaries.
Maybe those would have come next, if Bijaz hadn't ensured her departure for points south.
"Am I still to remain concealed?" Bijaz asked with a glance at Jason.
"Another day or two, please. There's been no new riot. I still await a lawsuit over your activities. And now there's trouble on the river. I suspect Ashkoliiz, but we need to know if it was anything more serious, or just violent spite directed at the City."
"You want something else from me." Jason's smile was small and perfect.
Imago nodded. "I want you to take a ride. Will you come, just the two of us?"
"Of course," Jason said as Kalliope and Bijaz both opened their mouths to protest.
"The pair of you can do me a favor," Imago told them. "Get yourselves into Onesiphorous' office and see that it's in order. Then set your heads to recommending someone who might be able to fill his place. Possibly including one or both of you. I have a feeling that getting him back up the River Saltus is going to prove quite difficult."
He rose to leave. As Jason stood, Imago realized that fresh leaves were budding through the lacquer of the chair where his guest had been sitting.
The Green Man of spring, indeed. It seemed Bijaz was contagious. Or perhaps the City was in dire need of more champions.
"Come with me, please," he said to Jason, glad this time for the irritation of the enclosed fiacre.
Through the entire ride, Jason continued to exude a musky scent of sap that made Imago's scalp itch with every breath. He was relieved when the horses clattered to a halt outside the Footsoldiers' Guild Hall. Imago hopped down to the pavement, followed by Jason.
They had not spoken along the way, but the silence had been like that of an empty temple—pluripotent, laden with promise. There was no strain between them.
"A woman is here," Imago said once they were both standing in the alley. "Hiding within. She needs someone who can tell her that she is fit to live."
"She is dead?"
"Not so much dead as deathless, I believe. She was done a great violence long ago. It has turned her within, forcing her back on herself like an ingrown nail which rots the finger."
"I am not a healer," Jas
on said.
"No. But you live as she is afraid to. She has spent long years pretending to ordinariness. You might show her another path. I only ask that you go within and talk to her."
They both looked at the looming, crowded mess of the old guildhall. "Perhaps you could show me the way?"
Imago laughed. "So you are not all powerful."
"I have no power at all. I am merely growing once again."