Saber and Shadow

by S. M. Stirling

  A scream came through the door—weak, exhausted. The guards nodded at each other and crouched down expectantly.

  Surprisingly, words followed. “Oh, please ... the grate, it must have closed—there aren’t any more coming, but—ah, no! I’m tied—”

  One of the guards rose to his feet and laid a hand on the handle of the thick plank door. His companion stopped him.

  “Yo’ out yo’ taany ratfuck maahnd?” she drawled in thick New City patois.

  “Why shoul the dark ones gi’ all tha fun?” he said petulantly. “ ’Sides, order was to let crawlers gnaw em. No mo’ crawlers, we goin’ do it.”

  She nodded reluctantly. He approached the door with caution, pressing his ear to the wood and hearing nothing but a low moaning and a sudden cry of pain. Satisfied, he opened the door a tiny crack, standing well back; the other Adderfang poised to kick it shut and slide back the bar. He saw only Megan lying, apparently bound, on her back, knees spread, sobbing slightly. Behind the hood, his grin spread.

  “Naace,” he said. “Ev’n all bash up. No need to kill fast ...” Together, they strolled into the room. They never saw the Kommanza at all.

  When they woke moments later they had been roughly bound with the fragments of the prisoners’ ruined clothes.

  “Naace,” was Megan’s comment.

  Shkai’ra grinned down at them. “Sorry we can’t stay and entertain you,” she said, “but like thoughtful hosts, you’ve already provided that.” She kicked the table away from the hole, and they bolted the door behind them.

  The screams did begin soon.

  “Now what? We’ve our weapons, assorted wounds and blood, and not much else. Once we find a way out, you think we can walk the streets like this?” Megan asked.

  Shkai’ra shrugged. “Well, with those manacle scars and the battering, you could always claim to be an escaped slave.”

  A long search later, Megan spat, “Well, what can you see? Darkness take it! I want out of this warren. Is that the way out?”

  Shkai’ra turned from the peephole, light falling in a thin shaft into the darkness of the cramped corridor. She turned to her companion, a half grin showing white in the gloom of the corridor. “There’s a room out there, all right ... from the decorations, I’d say a joyhouse on the Street of Dubious Delights.”

  “Better than the sewers.”

  Shkai’ra felt carefully around the edges of the panel; there was a sharp click and it swung inward. Before them was a sea of garishly colored pillows, broken here and there by waist-high padded platforms of varying shape. It was L-shaped, and a chorus of moaning and slapping sounds came from around the bend “Door’s probably that way,” Shkai’ra said.

  “Shall we interrupt?”

  The customer was a woman in her middle years, on her knees amid a pile of pillows. Several of those were needed to support the lithe young boy crouched behind her, his hands clenched in rolls of tissue as he thrust with steady metronomic regularity. There was little chance of the woman seeing the two naked and bloody figures, as her eyes were closed and her face buried between the legs of the girl who lay before her. That one did see them, and raised startled brows at the sight of the edged metal in their hands.

  Shkai’ra raised a finger to her lips and pointed toward the door with the tip of her saber. The girl nodded, leaned back into her nest of pillows, and resumed a series of artful moans, interrupted by bites at a peach she selected from a nearby bowl. Shkai’ra speared another with her sword as they padded by. Megan quirked up one corner of her mouth as they slipped by. So what did you expect in a joyhouse? she asked herself. She slipped out the door behind Shkai’ra and closed it softly. The mosaic was cool on her feet as they passed a number of closed doors. She nudged Shkai’ra. “Do they keep a tally of who enters? If not, then two more customers who had been, ah, a trifle enthusiastic, in the baths wouldn’t be noticed, would they?”

  The taller woman pursed her mouth. “Hmmm,” she mused. Her eye lit on a cool blue hanging of light cotton. She ripped it down with a jerk of her wrist and began wrapping their weapons in it.

  She threw an arm around Megan’s shoulders, practicing a slight stagger. “I guess we’re drunk. Sing in the shower, and if we complain about our clothing being stolen, we can probably get a couple of tunics. I know the management in places like these; I did a stint as a bouncer in one when I was down on my luck, once.”

  “Sing? I have a voice like a raven!”

  “So be an inconsiderate drunk”

  Chapter XIX

  The Street of Dubious Delights roared around them as they staggered from the joyhouse doorway. Lamplight and window glow ran across the busy pavements; after the close incense-scented silence of the inner rooms, the smells of sweat and dung and garlic struck like a fist at taut nerves. They both knew that a crowd was the best hiding place, but something old and blind within urged them to seek out silence and darkness.

  The two women leaned against each other, feet weaving and voices raised in discordant snatches of song. Two more foreign sailors would attract little notice, except from the pickpockets and slavers; scars and weapons would persuade them that these were best left alone, even with a small keg split between them. They passed the darkened mouth of an alley between two bright shop fronts, and reeled in among the fruit rinds and the smell of stale urine.

  Megan tugged at the cheap cotton of the whorehouse tunic, brightly printed with what a Fehinnan would consider erotic patterns. “I’d like to get out of this wiperag,” she began, then swayed to one side and began quietly vomiting against a wall. There was a limit; across half this huge and alien city, to kill and loll, and running in sewers like a hunted rabbit ...

  The sudden image of a murderous bunny turning at bay with a dagger in its teeth brought a half-hysterical chuckle that turned to a curse as she spat the taste of bile from her mouth.

  “Fortunate that we didn’t eat before this began,” she said. Wordlessly, Shkai’ra laid her hand for a moment on the back of the Zak’s neck; Megan didn’t even begin to twitch away, accepting comfort.

  “Now,” Megan continued, “I want to hole up somewhere. And shake for a sennight.” She looked up at the brightening stars with mild amazement. “Only a little after sunset!” she said.

  Shkai’ra nodded. “Warrior’s time,” she mused. A shake of the shoulders. “Best we go.”

  “Shkai’ra?” Megan said quietly.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Don’t you think it might be a good idea not to go back to the Wayfarer? Even if they haven’t picked up on the fact that we’ve gotten out and had us followed, they will be watching the inn and each other.” They were still a few blocks away from the Weary Wayfarer, near the docks, having swung around to approach the inn from another direction than that of the New City. The streets down here were narrower and the poured-stone light posts fewer. The taste of bile was still raw in the Back of her throat, as if she had scoured the membranes with sand, and she could smell the foulness when she inhaled.

  The blond woman was silent for a moment, eyes scanning the road and rooftops. “Best we do,” she said. “Impossible. It’s a big city, but hard to hide in if the right people are looking for you. Anywhere else, I’d not know the ways in—more chance of being caught off guard.

  “They won’t just try to kill us again,” Shkai’ra continued, musing, ticking off points on her fingers. “Eh, they’ll assume we’ve stashed the message and it’ll come out if we die or vanish. Ka, too open an attack would reveal things to the Sun-on-Earth, and this must be a faction fight below that level, or we’d already be on the flaying tables. So they have to snatch us, for torture, without creating too much of a fuss. Not easy. Better if we got in unseen, yes, but what really worries me is the priests setting spooks on us.”

  “How good are the wizard-priests?”

  Shkai’ra snorted. “At what, mounted archery? I couldn’t tell a spook pusher from a spavined pimp—you’ll have to handle that.”

  “I’m just
a red witch with a few tricks,” Megan said, casting a look back over her shoulder where drag marks from a mugging showed dark in the damp of the street, and checked her dagger in its sheath. “Foolery with wine cups, twistings of light and shadow ...” Her voice trailed into silence. “Could you get in unseen, alone?” They stopped in a puddle of dark in an alcove where one building jutted out. Megan sneezed at the odor of cat piss and almost missed Shkai’ra’s snort.

  “Can the Sun rise? What do you have in that small mind of yours?”

  “Keep an eye out for trouble while I drink.”

  At this, Shkai’ra shrugged and turned to peer down the street. “Don’t think too long.”

  “Cohrse nahht, gaaimun.” At the rumbling bass at her back, Shkai’ra shied violently and whirled, sword already arcing out. The tall, burly, scarred Fehinnan porter made no move to dodge as the edge swept horizontally through his neck nearly two meters above the pavement, and said, in Megan’s voice, from considerably closer to the ground, “Will this pass, in the dark?”

  “Well, I’ll be a sheep-raping offspring of a nomad leper,” Shkai’ra swore, peering more closely. The edges of the figure seemed a little blurred; she squinted and saw her companion’s figure beneath, as through muddy water.

  The illusion vanished. Megan stood before her, wiping sweat from her forehead “That’s tiring. Especially in warm weather. But there will be less effort when the image is what people expect to see.”

  “Ahi-a,” Shkai’ra said, tapping her chin. A cold smile bent the wide, thin-lipped mouth. “Do you know what an oxgoad is?”

  The pile of wicker cages reached the full five-meter height of the main kitchens. Below stretched the orderly chaos of tiled floor, stretches of wooden counter, and the great multiple brick hearths; the hen pheasants clucked and circled wearily, as if resigned to their fate. A violent squawking brought the attention of an undercook.

  He saw the black-furred figure crouched in the second tier. “It’s him!” he cried, through the hiss of fires and thudding of cleavers. “The demon!” He reached out, grabbed and threw the first object that came to hand. As this chanced to be a stuffed and roasted salmon fresh from the bake oven, a shrill scream followed the fish as it whirled through the oil-smoke haze.

  The salmon smacked flatly into the brick wall behind Ten-Knife-Foot. This alone might not have distracted him; a paw outstretched through the lattice of a cage was only a hairbreadth from the cowering and hysterical form of a quail in the far corner. The shower of scalding oily droplets was sufficient to attract his attention.

  The cat streaked for the top of the pile. An equally unthinking reflex drove the undercook with a burned palm to attempt to climb the pile after the four-footed nemesis of the Wayfarer’s kitchen staff.

  Even braced against a wall, the thin withes were inadequate to support his weight, and the pile exploded outward.

  Most of the cages were secured only by straw. The oddly muffled sound of four and sixty woven cages thudding down over table and hearth and vat was lost under the noise of near twice as many birds freed and driven frantic in the same moment. A large turkey, with the wit of its farm-bred race, made a perfect ballistic trajectory into one of the great ceramic vats lining the opposite wall. A few brief flailing strokes of its wings distributed enough smoking-hot peanut oil on the near-naked skins or the kitchen slaves to send half a dozen screaming and leaping into the center of the floor. Turkeys of the four-footed breed scampered up the walls, their two sets of claws grappling at the bricks. Chickens landed and scurried, clucking. The quail and pheasants circled above, bedewing the trampled food and leaping servants below with guano. One with more presence of mind than the rest fluttered in to perch on the highest object available.

  Unfortunately, this was the centerpiece of the kitchens this evening, an elaborate confection of spun sugar, crystallized caramel, ginger, and flake pastry, all adorning a centerpiece of froth-whipped cream and brandied sliced gooseberries. The bird landed, clutched, was entrapped, and sank layer by layer to lie thrashing amid the berries and cream, until its claws scrabbled through the pastry shell and spilled the fruit on the bare feet of Glaaghi, the head cook. There it formed a complement to much of the superstructure clinging to her face and shoulders.

  She scraped the sticky goo out of her eyes just in time to see a fleeting black shadow, hampered by the hysterical quail in his mouth, dart between the legs of one of the burned kitchen slaves. The slave staggered as the cat hit him and tried to lift his other leg into the air as well, as a flailing wing hammered him across the shin. He fell into another servant, and both tumbled back to hit the edge of the trestle table holding that evening’s late dinners out of the way until they could be delivered to the common room. The table arced like a released catapult, plastering the entire results of an evening of careful work against the opposite wall.

  With a bellow that almost silenced the pandemonium, Glaaghi snatched a cleaver from the block just behind her and, skidding in fruit, feathers, pheasant dung, and sugar, went after Ten-Knife-Foot.

  “Killing’s too good for you, you scraping of a whore’s scabs! I’ll make cat soup without doing you the good of cutting that verminous, mange-ridden throat! I’ll ...” The tirade became a wordless roar.

  The head cook was heavy, but capable of a good turn of speed once started, and unlike the cat, she saw no necessity to weave among feet and tables. Through the shrieking ruins of what had, not sixty seconds before, been a busy but well-ordered kitchen, she plowed with the ponderous inevitability of a knight’s destrier. Ten-Knife-Foot had been making for the main stairs to the upper levels. Glaaghi’s course made that impossible, and the cat turned and ran for the ladder-stair that descended to the storage level below. Most traffic to the bins was by the counterweighted lift in the far corner of the great room, or by the steep ramp from the rear laneway.

  Ten-Knife had the quail gripped closely, at the base of the throat; there had been no time to attend to killing it, and the frenzied battering of its wings forced the cat to keep his head high as he weaved his way through the milling feet and down the rough wooden treads. It also slowed him enough to keep Glaaghi only a little beyond a cleaver-swing behind.

  Good practice, Megan thought. She was trembling with the effort of keeping up the image, reaching to prod the slow oxen walking to her left. But I should have hidden with Shkai’ra. As the cart of new linen rumbled around the corner and down the incline to the door of the undercellar of the Weary Wayfarer, she could just make out the flicker of movement marking the drawing back of one of the watchers who waited for a small dark woman. Or a tall red-blond; together or apart. A Fehinnan porter and his laundry interested him not at all. “All right?” she muttered as the cart creaked to a stop, below.

  “... hot!” Shkai’ra’s answer was muffled by the bales of linen bedding, but Megan caught the last word. With a grunt, she swung open the door that would block them from outside view and dropped the image, shaking hands and shoulders to loosen muscles tense and fatigued by concentration. There was a surf-roar of noise from somewhere in the bowels of the inn; she wondered vaguely what it might be as she turned to help Shkai’ra move the bales and get out.

  The undercellar was dim. Little could be seen of Ten-Knife-Foot save for the flutter of quail wings as he raced across the littered floor and bounded to the top of the oxcart. There he paused, glanced over one shoulder at the looming figure of Glaaghi, and began throwing sheeting aside with flying paws, mroewing around a mawful of feathers.

  Tense and made sensitive by the strain of maintaining an image for much longer than she’d ever done before, Megan caught a blast of cat-thought ... big-one, safe, help big smelly big big watch-out, help feather spit, eat-good, help big bright-sharp, hide, run, hide, here safe, hide-with, help run, angry, SNEEZE feathers, HELP ... Shkai’ra’s hand snaked out between the bales, snapped the quail’s neck, and pitched the cat to the other side of the cart over Megan’s head. “Stupid beast, go away!” she said.

>   Glaaghi thundered past Megan who was leaning casually on the cart, and beyond, no longer able to track the cat by the sound of the shrieking bird, still chasing shadows.

  Shkai’ra heaved a bale of sheets off her shoulders and rose to stand.

  “Something tells me,” Megan said, looking down at her claws to hide her tired smile, “that there’s going to be another itemized bill.” Shkai’ra giggled almost hysterically and climbed out of the cart. Leaning on each other, they staggered upstairs to bed.

  In a comfortable corner of the roof, far above, Ten-Knife-Foot settled down to rid his quail of the irritating feathers

  Chapter XX

  As the door closed behind them, Megan headed reflexively for the bed, tired and aching in every limb, but forcing herself to stop and check the warding on the room. She regarded the ward sign, the thread-thin band of silver outlined in red, both now bracketed in a thicker band of blue. Someone much more powerful than she was reinforcing her spell, subtly and with care. Someone she had felt before. Yeva. Megan looked over at Shkai’ra and said nothing. None but the most powerful would even think of checking for these wards; perhaps only their God-King could see them, should he be interested—at least from what everyone’s reaction was when the Avatar was mentioned.

  Every pillow, from both beds, was piled against the framework between two of the posts, forming a nest just below where Shkai’ra’s sword hung. In the middle of this Megan sat curled, with the sheet pulled up close. She frowned at her nails and resumed rasping at one of them, not satisfied with the edge. Shkai’ra looked up from a cushion where she had been painting her scratches and abrasions with the brown liquid from the bottle in her hand, almost flinching as it stung in each wound. “You’ll wear them away if you keep that up.”