Liavek 6

by Will Shetterly

"Yes?"

  "Is it true, sir?"

  "It's true," Copper said. "I am an unbeliever." He went out of the inn, into the market.

  A street vendor rolled a sheet of rough waxed paper into a cone, folded up the point to seal it, and ladled pot-boil into it. Copper paid for the soup, bought some soda bread and wine, and wandered down to the Levar's Park to eat. The air was crisp but the sun was warm, and a number of people were out: strollers, dancers, artists. A pair of City Guards trailed their pikes; nothing else attracted their attention. Since the business last year with the wizards murdered by magic, the Park had been remarkably free of violent crime.

  Why, no one had been shot dead in the streets of Liavek for months now.

  Copper sopped the last of his broth with the bread, looked around, set the cup down on the grass a little way from himself and quietly drank his wine. After a moment, a stray cat emerged from a bush and began licking the bits of fish and vegetable from the paper. Copper said, "That's it. We've got to stick together," and the cat's head popped up sharply; then it went back to eating.

  Copper spent the afternoon walking at random around the city. He avoided the people he knew; the damned story was in all the news rags, and he wasn't up to explaining it. He didn't go back to the Station, seriously worried that he might do something violent to Tavish.

  But finally he did go back—had to—and found a crowd outside, with what looked like a heaven peddler working them.

  It was Rion Daaveh, in a new robe with a gold-colored sash. Copper moved to the edge of the crowd, just within hearing.

  "—yet not soulless," the old man said. "Perhaps this road of fire and metal is only now discovering its familiar spirits. Perhaps the light comes in darkness, in ways we have not suspected…"

  Copper looked around. The crowd wasn't exactly spell bound; they were paying no more attention than to any other street novelty. The most interest was shown by two Scarlet Guards, the private troops of the Twin Forces religion. They were supposed to protect the property of the Red Faith, but religions tended to define their property in curious ways.

  One of the Scarlets started to turn in Copper’s direction. Copper moved on. This wasn't his affair. Nothing to do with faith was.

  Copper walked the long way around the Station. Artisans were at work, bending brass for lamps and lead for windowpanes, assembling benches and wall panels inlaid with the Railway monogram. A track gang was laying a second pair of rails under the glass train shed, to connect with the northbound line to Trader's Town. Iron tie plates were bolted to wooden crossties, then a three-yard length of rail laid and spiked in place. With both rails down, and a cart rolled up to check the gauge between them, the crew wizard shot heat into the rail joints, welding them together.

  The track laying routine came from Tichen, where there had been railways for nearly thirty years. The Coastal Company had modified it to use mechanical steps for bolting and alignment instead of magical ones, one wizard on the gang instead of five.

  Copper had proposed they do without welded rails, have no magicians at all on the track crews. He'd had to withdraw the idea, of course.

  Tavish's shift was over; Sandjo, the night supervisor, was in. That was all right with Copper. As he walked into the office, Sandjo was looking out the window, at Rion Daaveh and the crowd. "Kaf's hot in the comer," she said, without turning.

  Copper poured a mugful. "Do you know anything about the loud fellow?"

  "He and his niece used to work the Park together. Half-levar magics, you know the sort."

  "They were both magicians?"

  "From what I've heard, she was the talent in the team. The old man mostly argued the deals." Sandjo turned to face Copper. "Could I hear your version of what happened last night? I've got Tavish's and three different rags'."

  "Do they agree?"

  "No. You should also know that Tavish sent his account with the morning coach to Saltigos. Zelle will know about it by tonight."

  "I don't care if Zelle knows." Copper sipped his kaf. "Except that Tavish might have sent it on the ninth-hour express tonight. Made twenty levars for the Railway."

  Sandjo laughed. "So what is your version?"

  Copper told her.

  "Could be an illusion," Sandjo said finally.

  "It could be a lot of things, Anje." He gestured out the window. Rion Daaveh had finished his speech, and was collecting coins from the crowd. "He strikes me as a natural-born swindler."

  "I thought all magicians did. But you're right, he's as trustworthy as a two-copper compass. Still … did you see him with that crowd? Whatever he's doing, it's got some kind of energy behind it."

  "Speaking of energy, if I'm going to drive the express back tonight, I ought to catch a nap. Is the Inn room open?"

  "No, the track foreman from the Trader's Town line is in there … and just wait a minute, who said you were going to drive the nine tonight? You especially?"

  "That's why," Copper said. "Me especially."

  Sandjo sighed, pointed at a side door. ''There's a cot in the files room. Shall I wake you at eight?"

  "Seven."

  •

  Copper fired Brazen Venture himself, no magic this time. He was half-aware of being watched, Station workers staring at him as he stoked the boiler and oiled the rods. There was supposed to be someone keeping the builders on the job. Copper didn't care. Not his department.

  At ten minutes to nine Sandjo came out to the engine with two dispatch boxes and the cabin clock. She handed them up to Copper with a grave look.

  "Who sent these?" Copper said, tucking the strongboxes into the comer. There was rarely more than one package a week from Liavek to Saltigos.

  "One's Admiralty papers," Sandjo said. "The other's from a merchant I never saw before." She tapped her hand on the side of the cabin. "He asked me if you were going to make the run anyway. When I told him yes, he seemed … disappointed.”

  Copper nodded. "Realized he'd wasted twenty levars."

  Sandjo said, "Copper, if you see something tonight—"

  "Don't worry about it, Anje. Think of it this way—he just paid your salary for two weeks."

  "Yeah. Good trip, Copper."

  "Thanks. Good night, Anje."

  She waved, and Copper opened the throttle. The engine sighed and began rolling, past the wall of Liavek, leaving the gleaming glass station behind.

  Copper was not thinking about the girl Krisia, whoever, whatever she had been. There were other people to think about, real ones. Smiths hammered out boiler plates, forged tight pistons. Cartwrights shrank hot iron tires on wheels, just as they had done for generations, but these tires had flanges to hold rails. Artisans who had made pleasantries for the rich now made gauges and clocks and signal works. Wizards came out of their disappearing houses to work on the line just like spike drivers and engine stokers. When the rails ran, the world changed.

  No one else saw the Railway in quite the way Copper did. He had no doubt of that. But it didn't matter. Steam and speed and precision—and the ideas behind them—were in the world now, and it didn't matter what people thought they saw.

  There was a white flicker in Venture's headlight, a figure on the tracks ahead.

  Copper thought for exactly ten ticks of the clock about maintaining speed, making the thing ahead jump if it was real and sensible, driving clean through if it was something else. But before the fourth tick he knew that he would not. Could not. He calculated distance and speed and braking force, raised the throttle and turned the brake. Brazen Venture came to a halt twenty paces in front of the girl, who stood still and calm in the mist and the glaring light, as if she had been perfectly certain that the engine would stop.

  Copper swung down, went to her. "Good evening, Mistress Krisia," he said.

  "Hello, Master Driver."

  "I wasn't sure you'd remember me."

  "I don't know how I do," she said. "My memory is very strange, these days… May I ride with you?"

  "I'm going to Saltigos tonig
ht, not Liavek."

  ''That's all right. I'm not really certain anymore just where I should be going."

  He helped her aboard. "There's a condition of passage tonight," Copper said. "I want you to hold on to my hand. Don't let it go unless I tell you. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, Master Driver," Krisia said, and put her hand on his. Her fingers were cold, but no more so than anyone's might be on a night like this. Her grip was quite firm.

  "Hold on, now," Copper said, let off the brakes, and opened the throttle. Their speed built quickly. Above the Silverspine to the north, the moon raced like a sloop on white water. Krisia's fingertips pressed hard into the back of Copper's hand, her thumb stroking his palm; he turned for a moment, reminded of what that touch had once felt like, but the girl was not looking at him. She watched the moon. Her hair was, as Rion Daaveh had said, a dark gold, alloyed white by the silver moonlight. Her nails were trimmed very short, like an artisan's or musician's. She had been a novice wizard, Sandjo said. He could see nothing that might be the power-vessel a magician needed to work spells; her white shift was hardly appropriate and no jewelry was visible. Unless she wore it beneath…

  Copper turned back to the tracks, the stoker, the throttle, and the clock. She still held his hand. That was sufficient.

  He did not look back again for half an hour, as the tracks began to curve northward along the coast, some ten miles from Saltigos. Krisia's grip had begun to cramp Copper's hand; he supposed her muscles must be sore, and turned to tell her to be calm, to relax.

  She was gone. Copper looked at his hand: there were five small bruises there.

  He turned forward again, put a hand on the stoker and another on the throttle, and did not release either until Saltigos terminal was full in his headlights and it was time to brake. Brazen Venture came to a stop at the far end of the platform, just short of the switch points, and Zelle came running out, lantern in hand.

  "Are you all right?" she said, as Copper stepped down, the strongboxes under his arm.

  "Yes, I saw her again," Copper said, much too harshly, "and, yes, she vanished again. Here." He handed over the dispatch cases. "Anything going back?"

  "Not tonight. Not that you'd be driving it if there were."

  Copper didn't answer. He started to walk away, then stopped. "Wait a moment."

  Zelle hadn't moved. "What is it, Copper?" she said quietly.

  He pointed to the case from the new merchant, the one who had been so concerned that the night run take place. "Open that one."

  "What?"

  "Ola Shenai told you all about last night, didn't he? Well, I want to be sure this one's in order. If it is, we'll lock it back up and no one but us will ever know."

  They went into the station, put the cases on Zelle's cluttered desk. She found the key, opened the strongbox, and said something both obscene and bewildered.

  Inside the box was a stack of news rags, perhaps two hundred copies of tomorrow morning's Old Town News. Zelle riffled through them, no doubt looking for something of value interleaved, but there was nothing but the block-printed papers. She said, "Somebody spent twenty times what these are worth to have them hauled out here?"

  "It's a new idea," Copper said, "but give it time. Eventually Saltigans won't be able to live without a morning paper fresh from Liavek." And, leaving Zelle standing nonplused over the open box of papers, he went off to find his bed.

  •

  Copper dreamt of Syvann. It was bad. It always was. Almost as bad as when Syvann had been alive.

  They had met four years ago. Copper had just returned to Liavek; he'd spent two years in Tichen, learning railway engineering, and was trying to help sell the idea of railways to the Liavekans. He supposed later that he must have sounded like a priest with a message, that that was what had drawn Syvann to him. He'd certainly never met anyone who needed a message so badly, who needed a god so much.

  Copper wasn't a god, but wet heat makes mirages. In a cooler, drier season, Syvann saw more clearly. Copper was fairly sure she still loved him, but there was the god problem. It was soluble, Copper knew; Liavek was full of gods. But he also knew it was beyond his solution.

  He knew it was solved when he came home from a line survey to find Syvann in a bizarrely cut robe, the same gold as her hair, practicing a ritual in front of a mirror. She looked very natural in the robe and the pose. Even her smooth bronze skin fit the image, made her seem to be a gold-leafed bronze statue, such as he had seen in eastern Tichen.

  She was happy, he knew that. He saw it in her eyes, the distortion of rising heat that let her see something he never would. But he accepted it. And then, in the middle of their second summer together, Syvann was dead. In the street, in the middle of Liavek, in broad daylight.

  There had been some sort of a fight, knives and bullets and broken glass. The broken glass was important somehow, Copper had never found out quite why. He had never found out quite anything, beyond the raw facts. The bullets were a fact: there were two great holes smashed in Syvann's body, rather like a pomegranate hit by a spike maul; the remnant, juice dried to powder, was left on a morgue slab for Copper to identify, and that was all the sense it made, or seemed ever likely to make.

  The Guard who pulled the sheet back from the mashed fruit—a Scarlet Guard, not the City patrol—had asked Copper about Syvann's faith.

  "She had one."

  "Yes. In what?"

  "In a god, I suppose."

  The Scarlet Guard didn't like that answer at all. He kept on asking until he was convinced Copper was either stupid or mad but definitely ignorant, and there it ended. Copper wondered how this was the Red Faith's property, but he didn't ask.

  Copper woke up from the dream of bloody metal, wondering if it had perhaps begun to make some new kind of sense.

  It was two hours before noon. He dressed, in a plain cloth jacket, trousers, and cloak, not his driving leathers, and went to Saltigos's Street of Magicians.

  The Street was a little oval court with a fountain at its center, and unlike Liavek's more famous Row, one could always find it. The houses were also fairly plain, and generally stayed so. Finding an open house, now, there was the problem. The first two doors Copper tried were securely bolted, and no one answered his very loud knock. The third door had no handle at all.

  The fourth was opened by a tall man with a hard body and a harder expression. "I am Lengh Niaru," he said. "What is your business?"

  "Magic," Copper said, "but not illusions," and he walked through the open door and the man holding it, down a short hallway to a room hung with velvets and beads. A somewhat fatter version of the man at the door sat at a small brocade-covered table, with a glass of wine and a plate of chops and gravy.

  The man chewed and swallowed without hurry, said, "You are Copper, the railway driver, I do believe."

  "How long have I had a reputation among wizards? Assuming that you are Lengh Niaru?"

  "I am. And you've been known to us longer than you might think, sir."

  ''Typical pretense of an answer."

  Niaru gestured aimlessly. ''Typical pretense of worldliness. But you came here looking for a magical service. I am willing to listen. I don't think we have anything to prove to one another."

  ''That's fair enough," Copper said. "I want a chain to hold a ghost."

  "But you don't believe in ghosts," Lengh Niaru said, not rudely. "It takes a tight box indeed to hold doubt. And a deep grave to bury it."

  Copper shrugged. "If you know what I don't believe in, you should know what it is I want." He took a step toward the door.

  "I do," Niaru said. "You believe in magic, like an intelligent person, and you want a counterspell. Reasonable enough."

  "Does that apply to the cost as well?"

  "It depends … yes, Master Engineer, it usually does… Is your ghost merely invisible? To cancel invisibility is very simple. Or is it impalpable as well? That's a much subtler—"

  "She was solid enough to bruise my hand. And then vanished
from a moving train at thirty miles an hour."

  Niaru stopped quite still, and paled a little. He put down his chop and pushed the plate away. "My dear sir, I knew some of this, but—and I assure you I am not being condescending—has it occurred to you that this might be … a real ghost?"

  "I don't know what it is," Copper said. "I'm trying to narrow down the possibilities."

  "But if it is actually a revenant spirit … are you certain you want to bind it? Ghosts can be … well, vengeful. It's inextricably bound up with their being ghosts."

  "Is there a charm or not?"

  "Yes. There is."

  "How long to make it, and how much?"

  "Oh, it could be done by tonight," Niaru said. "It's not a difficult spell at all … but there's a limitation I should warn you of."

  ''That's rare candor," Copper said. "What is it?"

  Niaru said levelly, "You must want the spirit confined. If your will falters…"

  "You mean, if I'm afraid."

  Niaru shook out a linen napkin and wiped his hands elaborately. "It doesn't matter why. If you cease to want the spirit held, even for a moment, it will go free. I've heard of a man who caught a succubus…" He looked at his partly eaten lunch. "You know what's left on your plate, when you finish eating a lobster?"

  Copper said, "How much?"

  "Ten levars."

  Copper got out a cartwheel, tossed it to the wizard. Niaru caught the coin, then bounced it in his palm and dropped it on the table, as if it had burned him. "Are you sure you want to pay me with this one?"

  Copper looked at the gold piece, lying on the tabletop with the Levar's face up. "What's wrong with it?"

  Niaru picked it up and tossed it. It landed heads-up. He flipped it three more times. Heads all three. "This coin's as full of magic as an egg of chick," he said.

  "I thought it was called luck in this country."

  "And you think there's no reason for that, don't you."

  "So I got some gambler's cheating piece."

  "That's twice in a row you've joked about what isn't funny. Strong luck can leave traces of itself on things, gold particularly—"

  "Like a bad smell?"

  "Third jest, it's your head. I said strong luck. Stronger than mortals are allowed. Do you understand me?"