The air, thick and hot, like a blanket of wool a little too heavy for the weather lay on her shoulder as a shroud. Even filtered through her veils, it tasted of dirt and sweat and pollen blown in the wind that swirled up for a moment.
Her mind went blank. Motionless as stagnant water and as rotten. She had no dance in her this night unless it came at the end of a blade. Death in her heart, she could not begin a ritual of life, of love.
Love. She loved the Gods, all four, even as she feared them, hated them for the path they had driven her to.
Death and anger ascendant in her now, she shook from her toes to her scalp. Blasphemy to stand here, filled with rage and blood. She tainted the thanks for a fruitful summer, for good trade, for healthy cattle, and another Measure without war or famine.
The wind kicked again, bringing the smell of smoke from the bonfire before the Temple steps. The dance would end when the flames died.
She could hear wings beating above.
The Great Hawk attended here too, along with His Father as the grass and leaves dried and shriveled before the winter rains, the season of the Father’s fire making way for the Empty’s chill.
Wildfire.
With the image came the inspiration, wild flame held in the fore of her mind till she reverberated back down to the tips of her toes.
Sequa swept her arms down and swirled around her own center, back down to the ground, to the earth, to the source and end of all that grew and sprouted each spring.
She rose as flame personified and danced the God’s fire raving under the eyes of the Goddess ascendant.
Her dance sprang forth so rampant it seemed to stun the crowd. None of the measured intricacies of the trained dancers, polite and safe. She danced with pure uncivilized instinct laid bare. Uncertainty and fear scented the wind.
But in the fleeting moments she caught the eye of the Shadow or the Voice, she saw nothing but approval and respect, and from the Voice perhaps a carnal appreciation of her undomesticated self. Fire held the soul of his God, after all—life and death, creation, destruction. Heat. Sweat lying sweet and torpid on the skin after a long night of love. Sweat cutting rivulets through the blood thrown from the throat of slaughtered oxen, of slaughtered men.
Blood staining the stones of the street.
She jerked and stumbled, staggering drunkenly for a moment. The Voice almost reached out a hand and checked himself sharply.
As though her blunder broke some spell on the crowd, she could hear her name for the first time. Someone saw clearly, finally. A tiny woman, thin but strong, dressed as a peasant, and dancing like this? The avatars would draw her from the crowd; they favored her, that she might meet with them privately at her whim.
Hostility blossomed plain and hard for the first moments of realization. But as her infamous, uncanny turn as the Summer Dancer from those Measures ago had won her the good will—or at least the wary respect—of the other Runners in Michelian stable, so did this untamed fire dance seem to mollify the crowd’s hatred. Despite their shock and initial dismay, no pious person could be unmoved by her dancing. Reverent and revelatory both, it held the spirit of the festival in its core. Joy in life, in growth, in all good things that fed the mind and body. Even in death, when it came with need and purpose. The growing emotion of the crowd became not anger but watchful, guarded approval.
The bonfire’s orange flames began to flicker and fade, and so did Sequa’s dance. She slowed and stuttered like a guttering candlewick and swirled back down around her center in perfect mimicry of her opening movements. With exquisite timing, her head touched the ground again just as the last flash of flame spurted up against the dark and died.
Sequa knelt in the dirt, panting. Her bare feet hurt. Fighting callous was different from dancing callous, and she had done precious little dancing in the last few Measures. She would have blisters in a little while.
It took all her strength not to bubble over with laughter. Circumstance had remade her into a weapon, but she should have known that even the sticks were not her first skill.
Beginning and ending, she could still dance.
Chapter 5
Half drunk on divinity, Sequa gathered her costume for the night’s work. She had precious little in the way of spare clothes—when had her life been stripped down to nothing but metal and leather? —but the sand robes from the desert still lay tucked in the bottom of her pack.
Those and her last set of woman’s veils, tattered but clean, were the lightest things she owned. They would have to do. She put on her leathers and half-veil, bundled the rest under an arm and went weaponless into the night. If this worked out, she might not need to kill anyone for once.
The night grew well advanced before he came stumbling up the street, sounding drunk and smelling drunker. He fell once in the street, ripping the knees of his breeches. He fell again as he reached his own door, ripping down the last remaining coldlight hanging from the front of his section of the shared building. The city would fine him for that in time; householders Under Roof had obligations to maintain the lights since here no slaves tended them. The front stoop, surrounded by churned mud that reeked of urine and vomit, lolled drunkenly itself. To either side, neatly tended and painted entrances mocked the disarray. The small side street, otherwise empty of people, held just the drunk, angry man and his vigilant shadow.
Darkness had always been her ally, so she slipped closer as he fumbled at the padlock he used to secure his door. Too bad she had no skill with lock-picking; it would have been better to be waiting for him when he entered. She had only been able to intuit the layout inside from what she knew about such modest Merchant homes. It would be one open room, with a small hearth for cooking and warmth connected to the communal chimney. One or two bedrooms farther back, with ceiling vents.
The lock eventually opened, and he dropped it in the filthy mud at his feet, which went a long way to explaining why it had been so hard to open. The door swung inward on rusty hinges, and he lurched his way into the darkness.
Sequa followed almost on his heels and knew he remained unaware.
He crashed and banged his way past already broken furniture, through small drifts of trash, until a tiny, coldlight lantern on a battered tabletop flared up under his hand.
She kicked the door shut with a loud scrape and surged forward as he turned in drink-addled surprise.
The man shrieked, throwing up his hands in horror. She passed him so fast he could have seen no more than a muted pale shadow in the uncertain darkness.
“The Goddess would speak to you, Merchant-born,” she hissed, swerving around him and dropping down the instant she cleared his line of sight. She pressed her palms against the polluted floor boards for leverage, ready to spring to either side or roll under the table as he moved.
“The Goddess?” he gasped in befuddled shock. “What is the Goddess to me now? What else does She want to rip from my life? I have nothing left for the whore to take!” He screamed his last, the words turning into a wordless howl.
From the other side of the joined wall, someone banged hard and shouted in illegible anger.
Such blasphemy, too much to bear. That she had said worse about all four of the Gods in her own mind was immaterial. If she abused her playmates, she had the right.
She popped to her feet beside the table without thought, spun him around and struck him barehanded across the face.
Small she might be, but skill and speed balance strength so the fat, angry man staggered into the far wall, his nose streaming blood. She hit him again, close-fisted, as he turned back. A third blow to his stomach spewed sour wine and foul matter across the already filthy floor.
He dropped to his knees in the mess, gagging.
If she had reached down and grabbed his hair, hauled his head back, he would likely have told her everything she wanted to know, all the details of his son’s death, everything that could have helped her piece together the first parts of the puzzle she saw in these deaths.
> The room spun, blood on her lips and vomit-stench in her nose.
Feathers across the skin, light as the air. The still, easy comfort of the paving stones at the end of a flight.
Her hand went down it, moving fast and holding one of her new weapons.
His head shattered with the dull, wet noise of a clay wine jug tumbling to the hearthstone.
The exciting, metallic reek of fresh blood buried the other smells in the room.
The pounding on the wall stopped. A thick silence squirmed its way along the floor, inching gingerly over the corpse at her feet to wrap itself around her body like another set of veils.
With no thought of sanity or safety, Sequa stood before the corpse and watched the blood flowing from the mortal wound, slow and still, into a thick, blunted pool. There had been no intent to kill; she needed him to speak to her. There had been no conscious thought, no choice. It had been pure reaction, from the base of her spine, from the base of her soul.
No dancer now. How could she have believed she could be anything else than this? Beginning. Ending.
Killer.
Sequa staggered into the night as though drunk herself, leaving the door to the cramped, dirty, and disastrous home wide open. She did not care if the first person to come across it ransacked the place or reported the body. The street could have been lined with waiting looters, the entire Iron Quarters standing at attention and all of the Avatars bearing their Gods in hand, and she would not have seen them.
In the sky above, the Feathers whirled with the low, slow noise of beating wings.
Wandering in a stupor that would have gotten her killed in the capitol, Sequa found her feet had taken her to the edge of the Noble’s district, cordoned off from the city by a band of parks and fountains, open expanses of sheep-cropped lawns and the occasional ornamental garden of flowers.
From the position of the Feathers, the night had much advanced. The Goddess had laid down to rest. A mad urge overcame her and she unfolded the sheet of paper the Michelian guard had given her that day before. It contained bland and meaningless pleasantries and the directions to the Michelian townhouse.
Which she knew, since she’d stayed there during the halfway stop on her Run. Still, the politeness of the whole thing soothed her a little.
She took a deep breath, feeling some of the agitation and self-contempt fade. She needed something concrete she could start and end that very night, not drag on and on until she feared her own madness had infected the world.
Sequa didn’t use the front door, though from where she had stood and watched for a while the guards there were professional, alert and dedicated.
She didn’t use the entrance on the Peasant’s Road at the back of the townhouse, where she had entered before. House Runner she might have been then, but slave she still was too.
House Michelian did not maintain a large estate in Ressen. Their fortunes, long tied to their Runner stables, depended on the money and prestige from the antics of the gladiator slaves. Even those who failed to be chosen to make the Run every four Measures could be sold at a profit as guardsmen and bodyguards. Bed slaves, too, for Noble men and women who liked a little danger with their pleasures. The townhouse was relatively small, but richly appointed and just off the main plaza that centered the Noble’s Quarter. Sequa passed Anem’s own townhouse one street over. The first three floors of the Michelian’s house had bars on the numerous shuttered windows, with the third floor being all inset glass. As displays of wealth and power went, it managed to be tasteful and restrained.
The top floor, though, held a traditional roof garden and a walled off office. Lantern light spilled through the cracks in the shutters and the open doorway to the garden. The lord of the manor would be there, working or reading or possibly debauching.
She would soon see.
Reading as it turned out.
Sequa settled back on her heels in the broad, open casement of the window, one hand out for balance and waited for the young Nobleman paging through the bound text on the table to notice her.
He looked greatly like his father and seemed perhaps her age—her real age, most people thought her least five Measures younger than the truth. The older of the two Michelian sons… Ranthasin if she remembered correctly; she had heard his father call him Ranny more than once. She had seen his younger brother around the estate. This one had been out of the kingdom when she trained and fought to Run, on some expedition across the Emerald Sea to the west.
When he looked up and saw the shadow crouching at his fourth floor window, he had the control not to show his surprise and fear on his face. She only saw one hand clench on the table top. She almost smiled.
“Father… Father did advise me you disliked using doors. He said you preferred to lounge on windowsills, like a cat bathing in the God,” he addressed her eventually in a smooth baritone, sounding so much like Jesan that for a moment her heart stopped in her chest.
“I dislike being marked as I enter any dwelling, my lord,” she answered then stepped lightly down from the window onto the brightly dyed carpet that covered most of the floor. She had cleaned the blood from her boots at a public fountain in the Merchant’s district.
“Never your lord, Champion,” he said mildly, his hands flat on the tabletop on either side of the book. She tilted her head in acknowledgement of his politeness. She reached up behind her and drew her sticks, laying them openly on the ledge and turning to step further into the room.
Here, I will pretend that without weapons I am no threat to you.
When she looked back at him, he smiled just a little.
“How fares your father? Your family? I have been long from the kingdom, several Measures, and have had no time to gossip since I returned,” she said as she came to a halt on the far side of the table from him, out of reach of anything but a thrown weapon. He stayed seated, his hands still open and palm down.
“Father is well. My brother is a little fool, as always. Mother…declines. As always.”
Lady Michelian had no accomplishments besides bearing her lord two living sons. Her only renown came as one who enjoyed being frail, spending her time lounging in bed and inventing maladies for the clerics and physicians to treat.
Sequa studied him again, closer. Remarkably like his father, built thin but strong, with the healthy flesh and tanned face of a Noble. His eyes and hair, both dark brown, looked like some rich, exotic wood. He had sword scars on his hands and wrists and a strange, flowing design of dark ink embedded in the flesh of one upper arm. His sleeveless leather vest had the worn and comfortable look of an old favorite garment. He wore no rings, no ornamentation, but if he did not have at least one blade concealed under the table, she’d eat her own armor.
“You speak with candor to a slave of your household. I think you are not one for normal yourself,” she said eventually.
“You’re a freewoman now, so that is hardly a consideration. And Father told me a great deal about you when I came back.”
“Ah.” Lord Michelian had risked much when he made her a Runner. She had never been sure if it had been the product of some machination of Jesan and his father to protect her from afar or pure fortunate accident.
“Thank you,” he said in a quiet, formal voice, “for helping restore the fortunes of my family. Your victory got us out of debt, and the fact that two of our Stable made the final stage has brought us many more investors. Though this current trouble does us very little good, I admit.”
“Is that why you are here? To see what happens to Curran?” Sequa fought and mostly succeeded in keeping her voice neutral. Not angry. Not bitter.
“No, I am here looking to diversify our family’s support. We will not again be dependent on one venture for our lifeblood. The world changes. We must change too.” He looked straight at her, catching and holding her eyes.
Sequa straightened her spine, blinking. She sensed more gravity to this young man than she had thought could be there. What he had just said held more subtletie
s than most people would hear.
“I was already in the city when Curran was arrested, so I have stayed longer than I intended to assess what we might do. Then you arrived, and I find I need make no interference. I will be leaving for the capitol soon, I think.”
I will take word that you are returned to the kingdom to my father.
She opened one of her own hands and closed it again, indicating agreement.
He nodded just a little at her slight movement then rose to his feet.
Sequa blinked again, shocked. Ranthasin stood barely taller than she, as though someone had taken his tall, lean father and shrunk him in the Godslight. He smiled openly then spreading his hands.
“I think I wore your discarded armor when first I became a Runner for your house,” she blurted. That made him laugh.
“Indeed, though you have moved upward from those days. I watched from the crowd when you…rescued…Curran. Would you be willing to share the provenance of that gorgeous set you wore?”
“Give me a sheet of parchment and an ink stick, and I will write you an introduction to a Southron merchant who might be able to source you some. I suspect it will be costly.”
“Costly. Also, profitable. Or so Commander Anem advises me.”
Oh, deep and tricksy, this man; he played the game exquisitely. She half loved him already.
“Returning to the matter of Curran, he is innocent of this crime.”
“So I am told you believe. I am not…sure. I have seen the runners in the Stables act…nearly as badly.”
She nodded. “I understand. But I am sure. And so it will be proved in time, if he is allowed to live so long.”
“Proved? How?”
“While he languishes in his cell, more people will die.”
He stared at her a moment though he could see only her eyes, then shook his head. “I cannot even say if I hope you are right or wrong.”
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