Skeen's Return

by Clayton, Jo;

  And so the bargaining begins That fly on the wall grows quickly bored because the young Min is painfully outmatched. Picture him rubbing his forelegs and preening his wings, doing his flydance to amuse himself, round and round the gilded loop as the unequal contest moves to its inexorable end. Angelsin turns the Min inside out though he is unaware of what she is doing. Unaware that she is extracting from him everything he knows or suspects about Timka and her companions. There is one break in Angelsin’s smooth performance, enough to have warned him if he were not so blindly sure of his abilities. He lets slip his conviction that Skeen has somehow acquired an Ykx. The Pass-Through wants to reopen the Stranger’s Gate and pass back to the place she’d come from. Angelsin is so startled by this that she lets her desire flare through her trading face; the betrayal is brief but complete. If he had been looking at her at that moment, he would have sprung from his chair and fled that room so fast he left his shadow behind. But he is not looking and he does not run and he continues beating at Angelsin’s price until he drives it down to a bare two hundred gold which he is sure he can acquire one way or another within the three-day gap Angelsin specifies between agreement and delivery. He does not notice that the last part of the chaffering is perfunctory on her part, clear evidence that she no longer cares what price she gets for Timka’s flesh.

  The Min youth leaves, full of himself and his dreams, congratulating himself on his cleverness. Angelsin warns him to say nothing of the bargain until it is completed or it might come unglued. He quickly agrees with her; he sees in his imagination the day he can walk up to the Powers of the Holavay and display the S’yer of Timka Minslayer.

  Buzzing now in smaller circles, preparing to flit, the fly, could it speak, might have said to him: You have three days to live, Fool. Enjoy them.

  After the door has closed on the Min, Angelsin smiles down at Hopflea. “It is almost a sin to play one like that.”

  “But he is too juicy to throw back.”

  “True.” She shifts her feet, groans. “Have someone keep an eye on that idiot. He’ll hint he’s got something, he can’t help it; if he starts talking too much, take him out. We don’t need that kind of misery.”

  “You really going to give him the Min?”

  “Certainly not. If he lasts long enough to get the gold, bring it to me; don’t bother bringing him.”

  “I hear.”

  Angelsin gazes thoughtfully at a small black dot buzzing busily on her sleeve. It walks down toward her thumb. She pinches it between the thumb and a broadfinger of her other hand, then extends the hand to him. “Clean that. So. The shy one is Ykx.”

  Hopflea cleans the mashed fly off thumb and forefinger, then smooths a scented cream onto the soft pale skin. “Angelsin’s luck,” he murmurs.

  She clicks her teeth, a sound of exasperation. “Word will get out.”

  “Not by me.” He says that hastily with a touch of fear.

  “Not by you. It’s that Min. How many has he told, how many of them? We’d best be quick.”

  “Tonight?”

  She frowns at a tall clock ticking loudly by the door. “It’s early yet. That Chalarosh hanging around the Boy.…”

  “Terp the Hole, he says the Chala takes care none of them see him.” Hopflea says that, not as one providing information, but as one using a form of words to show his agreement with an obliquely stated thought. “Bring him?”

  “Softly, softly, my Flea. So softly even the whores don’t catch you at it.”

  “I hear. After noon meal? Good.” He bows quickly and goes gliding out, leaving Angelsin to her musing.

  The Chalarosh stalks in, gives the room a single glance and ignores it thereafter. He also ignores the chair and squats on the carpet far enough from her so he doesn’t have to look up to see her and can watch Hopflea at the same time. Intransigence is writ indelibly in the set of his neck, the spear of his spine. His face is concealed behind a head cloth and mask made from bronze links, supple chain mail fine as heavy velvet. He sits saying nothing, the only movement visible the sometime glitter of his eyes through their slits. His aspect is that of one willing to wait forever.

  Defeated, Angelsin speaks. “You want the Boy.”

  The only sign that he hears her is the flicker of his eyes. He says nothing.

  “This is not a matter of intruding into Chalarosh affairs.” She is speaking slowly, using her rich warm voice to woo him out of his (as she reads it) pretended indifference. “This is a trifle of commerce. The Chalarosh want something, this one can deliver it.” She waits. Again she is defeated by the desert man’s impenetrable silence. “A simple matter of reaching agreement on the price.” Silence. Exasperated, she says, “You are here, Chala. Why?”

  The Chalarosh gets to his feet. He has Angelsin so off-balance that she almost signals Hopflea to have him stopped. She catches herself and is yet more flustered at her narrow escape. The community of Chalarosh exiles and traders is small and quarrelsome, but it unites immediately and lethally when attacked from without, and that touchy half-mad collection could take offense at almost anything. She straightens her back, breathes heavily, near strangling on the rage she dares not show to that corpseworm of a Chala.

  He turns when he reaches the door. “The words are understood.” His voice is soft, almost a whisper, almost gentle. “The intent of the speaker is judged. No injury is found to the honor of the Chalarosh in the words, for no nacarach has any idea of honor and will stray where the winds do blow it. Touch not the Boy. We will deal with him according to our honor.” He turns to go.

  “A moment.” Angelsin speaks calmly, with effort. “What if the Boy threatens me and mine? What if I lock him away, gently and without doing him injury, until such time he can be loosed without harm to either?”

  The Chalarosh stands silent, a tall thin man muffled in layered black robes, the painted mail mask swaying with his breath. “No price to loose him?”

  “No price.”

  “Do as you will.” The door swings silently shut behind him; Hopflea scrambles after him to see him out and set a watch on him.

  When the Not-boy comes back, Angelsin is swaying in her chair, yielding to the fury that had been consuming her nearly the whole while that the Chala was there. A few years back she would have been pacing about the room, a whirlwind of rage, throwing whatever her hands touched, destroying anything fragile enough to break or be torn, but her affliction has made her immobile as a statue. And it has made her clever where once she was merely powerful, so the folk of South Cusp fear her far more than they did when she walked among them. Then they could run from her, hide from her, now there is no place to run; what her legs cannot do, her mind performs through the agents that come like flies to her hands.

  She quiets when Hopflea kneels before her and sets his hand on her foot. She looks down at him. “It is time we were rid of these vipers, these Chalarosh,” she says to him, “not today and not tomorrow, but soon.” She smiles and her anger is gone and there is a new vigor in her gaze. “One by one they die, never knowing the agent or the reason. One by one death will come to them, one by one until there are no more Chalarosh in Cida Fennakin. Yes. Not today and not tomorrow, but soon. Oh, soon.”

  SO MUCH FOR SPECULATION. TIMKA AND SKEEN GO ON WITH THEIR PLOTTING, IGNORANT OF THE INTRICATE WEB OF ACT AND EYE BEING SPUN ABOUT THEM.

  In her night owl shape Timka circled high over the compound watching the guards and the servants settle into their nightly somnolence. A fan of light spread across the lawn that sloped to the oval pond, the fringes of that light skipped along the wind-teased ripples on its surface. Beside the ceremonial door to the main house, also near the edge of the light, half a dozen Funor guards squatted over a grid chalked on a paving stone and played stones and bones in finger flickering silence while they waited for their Char to march them home uphill. Forbidden to speak on duty, they’d evolved the finger signs and honed them until they approached the level of speech. Six guards, all true Funor, no mercenaries. W
hoever was visiting Tod was one of the uphill Funor, either important or desiring to seem so; two was the usual number even after dark.

  Though Skeen would yell it was foolish (but who was Skeen to inveigh against rash acts?), Timka gave in to the prodding of her curiosity and spiraled down to an open window in one of the upper floors, smiling inside as she acknowledged the change in her since Skeen winkled her out of her comfortable prison in the Poet’s house. She had resented that once, but no longer. She was alive as she hadn’t been in a long, long time, not since she fled the mountains and Telka’s spite, though she felt more pain now that the numbing was gone, felt the ache of being cut off from her kind. There were moments when she suffered a loneliness that seemed more than she could endure. Such moments generally came late at night when she woke for some cause or other and lay staring up into the dark; they never came when she was actually with her own; then she was usually so irritated at the Min she felt more kinship to Skeen than she did to any Min, however close by blood and belief. Insular, rigid, fearful, ossified—loving, gentle, tied deeply to the land in ways even the Skirrik who came closest to that tie could not experience or understand. Like three rounds, one placed over two, bits of her overlapped the Skeen world, other bits of her overlapped the Min world and bits of her touched neither. That’s my sigil, she thought, three mingled circles. She had begun to understand Skeen’s restlessness, her need to keep busy; when she was busy with immediate concerns all that other business about having no place to call her own was something she could ignore. More than ignore. Forget.

  She aimed herself through the window, snapped her wings out once she was inside and curved to a soundless landing on a carpeted floor. A bedroom. Empty now, though there were noises outside, women talking, one laughing. Huge room; the one she, Skeen and Lipitero shared wouldn’t make a closet here. More voices, getting louder, the speakers coming toward her. She ruffled her feathers impatiently and peered about. Stupid choice, Tod’s own bedroom. Stupid. Go out and start over? No fuckin’ chance as Skeen would probably say. Unless I absolutely have to. She shifted to woffit and padded away from the hidden women. A door. Woffit’s large ears up and swiveling. No sounds outside. She shifted to Pallah, needing hands, squeezed the latch and eased the door open. Lifefire be blessed, old Tod didn’t like squeaks and kept his hinges oiled. She started to go back to woffit, then hesitated. Woffit eyes were dim, unreliable. Woffit nose was keen, but she needed to SEE. I’m going hunting, so I go as Hunter. She shifted to her cat-weasel shape, willing her splotchy fur high-summer dark, then went padding down the wide hall keeping close to the side, blending into embroidered hangings blowing gently in the drafts that prowled the halls with her. Ears twitching, her hunter’s eyes searching, her nose tasting the air, she teased out the pattern of the rooms. The big house was mostly empty, no children in it as far as she could tell, a few women. Slaves? Probably. From what she’d learned about Tod, he’d want no one he couldn’t control anywhere near him. His slaves would be sufficiently cowed to offer no threat. She left the halls and stood in the shadows at the top of a graceful spiraling ramp, whiskers twitching, tail jerking back and forth, irritation like heartburn in her middle.

  In the Great Hall below servants were clearing way the remains of a sumptuous feast and a pair of semi-naked gauze-draped Balayar girls (they looked like twins) were moving along the table, getting in the way, helping themselves to tidbits off the plates, each clutching at a decanter of wine and drinking from it without bothering with glasses. The serving women worked patiently on, ignoring them as if drunken twelve-year-olds were a common thing in this place and perhaps they were.

  Timka-cat fidgeted back and forth behind the elaborate grill that fenced off a sort of balcony that ran along the wall giving a concealed view of the hall. She could not go down to snoop on Tod and his guest as long as those women were working. She glided to the end of the balcony nearest the place where she could hear snatches of glittery music, settled in a corner and waited. Tinkly metallic sounds, pretty enough but irritating to her cat-ears. The soft clish-clash of the cleanup below was pleasanter but she was happy enough when it stopped. She crawled to the grill and looked down. The women were lifting the sections of table, carrying them to the edges of the Hall. They came back when that was done, lifted up the sleeping twins and carried them away. Ti-cat moved swiftly to the head of the ramp, but waited before she started down it. Within moments she was glad she had.

  Two girls came back carrying a heavy tray laden with a steaming urn and etched crystal stemware. They crossed to the embroidered velvet arras that was pulled across the northwall of the Great Hall; the girl on the right carefully freed one hand and pushed the folds aside, baring an open archway. The music was abruptly louder. Moving with continued care the girls eased around the end of the arras, letting it fall into place behind them.

  Timka dithered briefly, then darted to the ramp and oozed-down it as fast as she could without breaking silence. She flowed across the mosaic tiles to the west end of the arras, nosed it aside. Blank wall. Good. She dropped to her belly and edged along as if she stalked nervous rabbits in short grass until she reached a section of wall pierced and set with fans of stained glass. With the dimly lit Great Hall behind her and the heavy dark arras she felt safe enough to ease an eye past the edge of one of the fans.

  Tod and his guest, a longhorn Funor, sat cradled in lounge chairs. Beside them a fire danced in the round throat of a free-standing hearth, its threads of smoke carried off by a funnel chimney hung above it. The serving girls were arranging the urn and goblets on a table between the chairs. The men ignored them as they watched torches being set on poles outside a long curved wall that was mostly glass. When the lawn was dancing with shadow and firelight, Tod clapped his hands. The musicians stopped their tinkle twang and filed out, all of them stocky Balayar women much older than the other servants. Or slaves. Whichever they were.

  The serving girls moved on their knees to Tod’s side and knelt there, mute and pliant, waiting for whatever he chose to ask of them. Timka had done the same herself with the Poet and thought little of it then. A matter of surviving with a minimum of pain and fuss. Now her tail twitched and her muzzle flattened in a soundless snarl. The fit was brief and ended with a burst of silent laughter as she mocked herself. It all depends on where you’re watching from, eh, Ti? For those girls no doubt it was the same as it was for her. A bit of business in the art of surviving. No more than that. For all her understanding, though, a bad taste lingered in her mouth.

  Tod sent the girls away with a flick of his hand. Timka edged her head under the arras and watched them stroll off across the hall and vanish into the back where the servant quarters were, stretching, rubbing at their necks, talking in whispers as they moved.

  Ti-cat crawled nearer to the archway, flattened herself below the glass fans and pricked her ears to listen. Nothing. Her tail jerked against the arras with small thudding sounds. She raised her head. The men were looking out at the torchlit lawn, watching the musicians as they readied themselves. A few scattered notes, then a heavy driving beat from the drums, a fast hard counter from the cittern strings. A tall angular androgynous Pass-Through walked between two torch poles, took up the beat of the music, stamping in place on the grass, torso rippling, then began a splendidly barbaric dance.

  “Oh, it’s not authentic,” Tod murmured, his peeping voice so very modest, “just a little entertainment I devised for your pleasure, Char Vassa Bassa.”

  The uphill Funor had laid aside his cowl. Ti-cat could see the back of his neck, one ear and a bit of face. His half-meter horns were polished until they gleamed a dark ivory; gold and silver wire were inlaid into the tough substance, intricate whorls that outlined cartouches where bits of jade and pearl and chips of amethyst and emerald and ruby were shaped into rayed designs. A glittering opulent decoration to an otherwise undistinguished form. Fat jowly head, very white skin flushed roseate with wine and lust. He leaned toward Tod. “That dancer, is it as agil
e on a mattress as it is on the grass?”

  Tod shrugged. “Too old for my tastes, too bony. So many more enticing come through here.…” A wave of a limp hand.

  “You live in a paradise most men only dream of, Tod. Are there no men at all in your house?”

  “Women are pliant creatures and adaptable,” Tod said. “They keep me comfortable, why not. My men walk the walls and watch from the guard towers, why should I have them here?”

  Outside, the dance ended, the musicians and the dancer collected their gear and vanished round the side of the house.

  “And woffits in the garden. No doubt there are woffits where I sit once you have gone up.” Vassa Bassa sounded blearily envious. “And a peaceful night, bedwarmers beside you, no fear your throat will be cut before the dawn breaks. Sometimes I think I should buy peace with that cow Pululvatit Grytta and go back to the Funor Plain where I have kin who’d guard me with their lives instead of spending those lives looking for a way to bleed my veins dry.” He gulped at the tepid wine and his neck got a degree redder while the ear that she could see was almost purple. “Heyya hai, I’d do it tomorrow had I the blood price. Tod, you Pallah don’t know what greed is; just wait till you come across a cow in spite, you’ll find out.” He grunted, squeezed his nape into accordion folds and gulped the lees of his wine, blew out a cloud of droplets, and settled back muttering to himself. “Not my fault he had air ’tween his horns. Every shorthorn plays rough games. We played rough games, so what? Wasn’t my fault he tried to play Fool without the Tapping and bashed the Ippy Lyta. Nearly got ME killed, that gimp brain.” He scowled uncertainly at the goblet, wrestled himself up and refilled it at the urn cock. The effort seemed to sober him. Head swaying, he peered at Tod. Ti-cat read hostility and alarm in what she could see of his face and the set of his body. Tod had the presence of mind to have his eyes shut and to produce a soft eeping snore. The Funor relaxed. He’s either dumb or very drunk, Timka thought; she watched him settle back and changed her mind. No, Ti, you don’t make that mistake or you’re the dumb one; maybe he’s not the brightest of the Funor, but he’s cunning or he wouldn’t be alive. No. Tod was giving him a way to save face and he took it because Tod’s too useful to him to throw away for such a little happening.