by Patty Jansen
When she finished reading, she noticed that the time stamp on the message was very recent. She wondered if he was still at a place where he could reply to her, probably the Andrahar office. They would have an Exchange hub there. She wrote a short message on her efforts, which said nothing more than that she had little news to report.
He replied immediately. Are you surviving well there?
She typed, As well as I can.
I hear the place is extremely hot.
Boiling. You can barely breathe.
They exchanged some comments about the weather. Rehan said that he'd never been to Barresh. No reason to go, he said. No Exchange, no money. They produce nothing that we sell.
He'd be surprised if he knew the truth.
Then he continued, I would appreciate if you could get your hands on the original import logs from the Barresh Exchange. The ones we have been able to get are from the central Guild log at Kedras. They show the alleged illegal imports, but I want to see the original logs to see if they match the times given by Kedras.
She replied, I will try.
Mikandra had assumed Iztho's innocence up until the moment she was robbed and the Pengali thugs asked her Tell me where it is. Right now, she didn't know anymore. There was no proof that whoever the thugs bought their wares from was Iztho and no proof that they were expecting menisha. She could still not believe that Iztho would have been so stupid, but the possibility had been awakened.
She hesitated and typed, What would you do if Iztho was guilty? She rubbed that out twice, but eventually took a deep breath and sent it. Because, as far as she could see, they should consider the possibility, however unpalatable.
I fail to see why Iztho would have done this. Our regular business makes a lot more money than he could ever make illegally, and none of us ever touch the stuff. Menisha brew gives me such bad dreams that I once ended up in a guard cell after drinking. Apparently, I assaulted a guard while drunk, but I don't remember any of it. True story. It is vile stuff.
She could just about hear his angry and defensive tone.
I'm sorry. I've heard some disturbing stories here that may point to his guilt. You may need to consider that this is indeed the case, unlikely as it seems. She rubbed out the to you at the end of the sentence.
Point taken. Sorry. A small pause. If it would turn out that he is guilty or we cannot prove his innocence, we have to apply for the licence to be transferred to me. We have to prove our character. That will take much longer than a simple court case .
Could you set that process in motion in the case that the court case does not go in your favour.
We are doing that. The Lawkeeper suggested it.
Was he peeved? Was he just being business-like? She took another deep breath and sent another question that would puzzle him. Forgive me a very strange question, but your Aunt Dithiandra, did she ever have a drinking problem that you know of?
That is indeed a strange question. Not that I know of, no. What is this about? I thought you were looking for Iztho.
Mikandra hesitated. This town is awash with menisha brew. There seems to be a link between it and hallucinations in certain people. I'm not sure how secure this communication link is and how much more I should say. I don't understand it yet. Iztho may have played a role. I don't know yet. I haven't found him yet.
She had to wait a while for the reply. The link is not secure. Don't say anything that could cause problems. If there is an important message, please use a Guild courier. Then another pause. Please, be careful. The Andrahar Traders will survive. This case isn't worth dying for. Iztho will turn up. He's gone offline for a few days before.
* * *
The pattern continued. In the morning, before going to the library, she would go to the Exchange and communicate with Rehan and he would rattle out his frustration. The case preparation wasn't going well. The Lawkeeper he had hired was having trouble securing some documents. He used a lot of legal terms of which she wasn't sure what they meant. She wasn't sure if he cared that she didn't understand, but she found a Mirani dictionary in the library, looked up the words and asked him about the process. He seemed surprised about her interest, but responded by elaborating in more detail. She had to ask him several times if it was all right to share that information over the link and he said that none of it was information that people couldn't obtain elsewhere.
On the fourth day, lacking important news and not wanting to go into detail about her own situation, she started talking about the faded glory of Barresh and Omarion Baku. He dug out some history books and diagrams—she bet they were from Iztho's room—to prove that the five-pointed star had been of significance in the past of Miran as well. The Foundation monument had five pillars. There were five Foundation families.
She described the mural as best as she could, and he sent her the life history of Omarion Baku as recorded in the Trader Guild histories. Apparently, he had been a rather brash and obnoxious man, a loudmouth who had made few friends in the Guild.
Then she apologised for talking to him about this non-important stuff.
Please keep talking. It's not much fun here at the moment. Everyone here either yells at us or tries to wheedle information out of us, and that is just the people we trust.
She agreed that this bit of communication with her home town was the highlight of her day, one moment when life seemed almost normal, and when she didn't have to watch her back or pretend to be someone else.
She looked forward to the chats during the day, when her mind was dulled by the mindless work in the library. True to Bakimay's prediction, it was boring. In those first five days, two of her fellow first readers left.
But she stayed, as promised.
At the end of the five-day week, Mikandra lined up with the library's other guest workers for payment. When it was her turn, Bakimay gave her a suspicious look.
"I stayed. You pay," she said in imitation of Bakimay's clipped tone.
Bakimay said nothing and handed her the chip with a sullen expression on her face. Her tail, waving at shoulder height, told the real story.
"Not all Mirani are fickle and untrustworthy. Judge the person, and not where they come from."
Walking out into the light-filled corridor, the small victory made step light.
* * *
Mikandra took her chip to a credit booth where she obtained a hand full of pearls that people in Barresh used as currency.
In the guesthouse, Jocassa refused to take back the money he had lent her. He said, "Jus' pay your dues when someone else is in trouble."
So in the dying daylight, she went to one of the clothes shops and bought two tunics and two pairs of loose trousers. She chose ones with a pattern of red swirls on white. They were a bit more expensive than the plain ones, but those were the Mirani colours. Being less tight than her usual clothes, they felt more comfortable in the heat. She bought sandals made from local leather which she had learned was made from fish skins. She bought soap. She paid for a barber to dye her hair dark. And at Machizu's stall, she bought a big bag of crunchy worms and ate them all.
* * *
Time flowed into her new routine and one day bled into the other.
Although there were parties in the guesthouse almost every night, the thugs did not come back. Neither did the woman they had taken.
At the council buildings, Mikandra did not see the tall man again. She heard nothing more about Iztho Andrahar because most of the workers in the library were not locals, and she saw nothing more of her stolen bag.
She went to the account keepers and opened an account—although the employee frowned deeply at her paltry collection of pearls. The thing was, she wanted the money to be safe for when she needed to go to Kedras.
A merchant and a couple of men at the guesthouse paid her to write letters of reference. The ex-soldiers needed to re-affirm their availability to the army and the merchant was a Barresh local, bitterly complaining how the new Mirani import laws stifled his business. She n
odded and listened, and agreed with him.
The money in her account grew. Slowly, Mikandra climbed out of the hole she had fallen into when her bag was stolen. Slowly, she started to think again about the reason she had come here, and the started to think about other things than pure survival.
In the library, she and Bakimay had agreed on a sullen standoff. Bakimay no longer reminded her that she was supposed to be fickle and unreliable because she was Mirani, and seemed more grumpy about having been wrong about this with every pay day.
Mikandra had now been working in the library for a couple of weeks. More than a sun cycle had passed. In that time, she and her fellow assessors—a selection of itinerant Mirani men of varying intelligence—worked through a substantial pile of musty books that were becoming progressively newer and less musty. Some were even legible. It was amazing what extravagant nonsense the previous Mirani council had funded. Dinner and entertainment for the members of the Barresh council. Fish bread flown in fresh from Miran. Really?
Today was the day that the group of local women came to the library that had also been there the very first time she had come. They came every week to take part in some kind of tuition. An elderly woman would sit in the middle of the group giving instructions while the students wrote in their books.
Mikandra walked past on the way to the shelves several times and made out lines and scrawls on the pages of the women's books. She had been curious about the strange alphabet they used. People in Miran said that keihu was not a written language. Since coming here, she'd seen it written using Mirani characters, but the script the women used was unlike any she'd seen before. Their speech sounded like keihu. So, it was a written language.
It seemed that people in Miran, including the council, severely underestimated Barresh and its people.
No one ever said that Barresh had once had a Trader. Every time Mikandra came into the building she couldn't help looking at the proud face of Omarion Baku. Sometimes she would linger and hope that the tall man would appear again. From overhearing discussions between library workers, she made out that this Daya was the Chief Councillor of Barresh, the man who had married the woman Iztho had wanted, but she never saw him again. She sometimes wandered the corridors at midday trying to find him, but when going into the depths of the building, she always came across a section of corridor closed by vicious-looking Coldi guards and she didn't want to draw attention to herself by trying to get past.
As usual at the weekly women's meetings, many of the women had brought children. The older ones sat with the women, writing in their own books, but the younger ones ran riot between the shelves. It annoyed Mikandra. In Miran, children had to be quiet and out-of-sight. They had to behave and do as adults told them.
These children were plain ill-behaved. A couple of the brats were pulling books from trolleys.
Mirani had already told them a few times to stop it. They looked frightened at her and ran away, but she didn't think they understood Mirani, because they came back as soon as she turned her back. What were all these children doing in the library anyway? It was a place of quiet, for study.
Now two boys were collecting some of the empty boxes which had contained the documents that Mikandra was working on. Oh, yes, the rascals would build forts out of those boxes while their older siblings and mothers were attending their lessons.
But those boxes were not rubbish and she would need them for putting the books back in when she'd finished with them.
"Hey!"
The boys froze. One clutched the box he was holding to his chest. He backed away from the pile.
"Give that back. It's not yours."
The boy dropped the box and he and his little friend ran away, but as they rounded the corner, one of the boys crashed into a toddler who had just learned to walk. They both went tumbling.
The bigger boy scrambled up and ran after his friend. The toddler started wailing.
Mikandra yelled after them, "Now look at what you've done! Ill-behaved brats!"
She picked up the child and set him back on his feet. He cried big tears which ran over his chubby cheeks. Where was his mother?
She lifted him up and he stopped crying out of surprise. Tear-filled big eyes met hers.
His irises had a very unusual light brown colour, sandy almost. The only other people who had eyes like that were Kedrasi. The boy's fine hair hung past his ears, straight, unlike that of most local children who had curly hair. It was very black, almost unnatural for a child this age . . . yes, the roots of the hair were light-coloured. Dyed? Whatever for?
She had dyed her own hair to be less conspicuously Mirani.
This boy . . .
His eyes were not Mirani, but face was quite narrow, Endri-like, even for a child that age, serious-looking and intense. A chill went over her as she recognised the set of his jaw. The boy didn't yet have the long and sharp nose, but the shape of his mouth and chin were familiar. She'd seen a much older version of that face before, in a comfortable room by the fire in Miran.
Unless she was very much mistaken, this little boy was the heir to the Andrahar business. The oldest son of the oldest son.
At that moment, there was female voice and a woman came around the corner. She was taller than Mikandra, pale-skinned but had black hair which she wore loose over her shoulders. Not keihu, not any type of person she had ever seen before, except perhaps that mysterious Daya.
She froze, and looked from Mikandra's short hair to her tunic. Was she looking for the Trading medallion or a family emblem?
The boy held out his hands to her, making sounds like mamamamamamamam.
"Is he yours?" Mikandra asked. Her heart was thudding.
"Yes, thanks." Quite curt.
"He's cute. Looks a bit like my nephew." Well, she couldn't straight-out ask about Iztho, could she?
A flick of her eyebrows. "Thank you." Oh so cool. She took the boy from Mikandra's arms while not breaking eye contact and hoisted him on her hip, above the slight rounding of her stomach. Pregnant?
Mikandra wanted to ask, Are you the woman who refused an offer of marriage from Iztho Andrahar? but there was no need to ask. This was the woman. Anmi Kirilen Dinzo was her name. That little boy was Iztho's son. And the child she carried, was it Iztho's, too?
She wanted to ask, confront her, but all of a sudden, she felt like she had walked into a wall at full speed and her head was spinning from the impact.
She had to steady herself by holding onto the shelves. What was that?
A male voice sounded, and a man came around the corner of the shelves. Oh crap, this was the creepy Daya guy she had met the first day she'd come here when looking at the wall paintings.
He said something to the woman, and she replied, but Mikandra had no idea what language they spoke. Not keihu. His voice sounded cautious. Mikandra tried to listen through the woolly feeling in her head. Now her ears were ringing. Her chest felt constricted, like she couldn't get enough air, but she stood stoically, although her heart was racing.
Daya and Anmi each wore one dangling earring of fine silver filigree with an inset amber stone. As far as she knew it was a Coldi custom that married couples adhered to, although Coldi didn't marry but had contracts. But these people weren't Coldi. Whatever language they spoke to each other wasn't Coldi.
The pressure in her head abated. Mikandra took a deep, unrestricted breath.
The little boy held his arms out and the woman passed the boy to the man. He lifted the boy to sit on his arm. The woman nodded coolly at Mikandra. "Thank you. He won't disturb you anymore."
They both walked away, leaving Mikandra behind in a thick silence. She leaned against the shelves, shivering all over. What the hell was that? Maybe she should start looking after herself better.
She returned to her work, but while she filed away moisture-eaten books under their respective dates, anger grew inside her.
So, this was how she saw things:
Iztho had fallen in love with this woman, fath
ered her child, but she had chosen to marry this other man Daya. This had been her own choice, since Iztho had offered marriage, but she had refused.
Why? Because the other guy offered more power and a better deal?
So, the child had been born and—oops—the boy turned out to be Iztho's. So, this woman was stupid enough to think that dyed hair would hide his identity? Maybe she had hired some of the black-clad guard thugs to drive Iztho out of town and falsify the Exchange records so that she wouldn't have to deal with the Andrahar family ever again.
This woman was evil.
Chapter 22
The more Mikandra thought about it, the more angry she became. This was what Iztho had meant with situations Traders had to deal with. Large-scale bullying by people backed by governments that seemed so overwhelming it didn't look like you had any chance to fight back. Ganging up of entire communities conspiring to rid themselves of a Trader who they thought had wronged them. Likely, he had even suspected that some of this might be happening by the time she met him in his room, but likely even he had misjudged the depths to which the Barresh council would go to get rid of him.
After finishing at the library, she went to the markets and bought a notebook and a pen. She hadn't owned either of those since going to school. Everyone used readers, but although she lingered at the shop that sold those for longer than she should, she couldn't afford them just yet, or at least not if she wanted to have money to travel to Kedras.
At night, after sharing a meal and chatter with the two Kedrasi women in the corner of the veranda, she sat down on her bed. A few days ago, she had also bought a small metal stand with a light pearl. It was a strangely cute little thing, resembling an eyeball on a metal spring, and when it stood on the shelf next to the bed, she often half-expected it to come to life and start jumping around.