Shadowkill sq-3, page 16
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
6
The houses were stone on the first floor with narrow slits instead of windows. The second floors (and the rare third floors) were wood with loopholed shutters over grilled windows. About half of these windows were closed tight, even through it was nearly an hour after noon. These were wary secret houses, ready to close up at too bold a touch.
The city had no walls. According to the ship’s kephalos, despite the wars that seem to be the natural state of things and constant raiding from wandering bands of pirates (marauders whose only bases were huge junks that moved from island to island within loosely defined territories), even villages had no walls. Walls involve a communal mind-set. Walls are meant to protect groups and need many hands to build and staff. It takes much less cooperation to build individual structures and arrange them so that the overlap provides mutual defense (hence the angular semi-streets). Also this world had been intermittently rediscovered by free traders and was a good market for what weapons the traders were willing to sell. Jump harnesses and pellet guns with exploding missiles made walls irrelevant. It was more efficient to provide covering fire. That’s only a contributing factor, kephalos said. If there were none of these weapons around, it would be the same thing. These people simply have no love for walls. They like mobility. Walls shut in as well as keep out.
She ambled along through hordes of children playing in these semi-streets, round games and ball games and complicated versions of tag, games she remembered from her own childhood, though she’d spent more time watching than playing, shut away from the street children by the walls of the Chateau where her mother lived and worked. She thrust her hands in her pockets and slowed yet more, enjoying the clamor and confusion.
##
As she rounded one of the sharper angles, she nearly stepped into a group of four guards (dark green with crimson slashes and black leather accents) beating a ragged man with their long whippy canes, all five of them silent except for grunts and squeals. One of the guards straightened, glared at her. Hastily, she cut out into the street and walked on by-like the rest of the locals getting out of there as fast as she could. It was a warning, a timely one, reminding her to stop gawking and get to business.
##
As she passed from the semi-slums near the outskirts, the traffic got thicker. Women with bales of cloth and fancywork balanced on their heads (she admired and briefly envied the beauty of their walking, the music of their voices. They wore what looked to be long rectangles of patterned cloth wrapped in complicated folds about their bodies, batik prints with a silky sheen, some local fiber, no doubt. If I have time and some spare cash, I should get me some lengths of that, it looks like it feels wonderful against the skin). Men leaning forward and plodding along under backframes loaded with tubers and gourds, sacks of flour and other staples. Handcarts and flats of the two-wheeled variety with small noisy tractors pulling them.
##
She went round another angle and saw a clot of angry, shouting, arm-waving locals and three guards trying to shift them away from an accident. A tractor without its flats being raced along the thruway by a gang of boys had crashed into a handcart loaded with local chicken-types. There were feathers everywhere, blood, squawking birds, locals trying to get at the boys, the guards pissed off at everyone. A different set of guards. These had dark crimson uniforms with green strips angled down the front. One of them lost his patience entirely, aimed his pellet rifle at the ground and blew a hell of a hole in the dirt.
The crowd scattered and the boys on the tractor ran off.
The only one left was the hapless soul with the handcart. The guards hit him a few licks and went off, leaving him to right his cart, repack it, and trundle it around the new hole in the middle of the road.
Laughter and a satiric run on a stringed instrument of some kind.
Rose looked around.
A street musician was standing in a doorway, swaying, a lutelike instrument cradled in his arms. His face was flushed and he looked more than a little drunk. After a moment he began to sing, improvising a comic account of the accident, describing the guards, the careless boys, and the hapless would-be trader in scurrilous terms, picturing them as capering ludicrously about the hole in the road which he invested with enormous significance, mostly sexual and wholly comical. He had a crowd in moments; laughing and clapping with him, they threw coppers at the case open at his feet. Then someone yelled, someone else took the lute from the singer and bustled him away and again the street was empty-until a squad of guards came marching around an angle.
Behind them the Vaarlord of this Kehvar (quarter, ward, neighborhood) lolled on the seat of a groundcar, his gorgeousness exhibited behind pelletproof glass as he looked over his subjects. He was a big man, with a seamed, scarred face. He didn’t loll well. Cultural things, she thought, idleness as an attribute of greatness. No, as a toiler, he was an abject failure. There was too much animal vigor in the man; his eyes moved over the houses and the people, over her as one of the people, with hard possessiveness. His hair might be gilded, his mustache and goatee stiff as gold wire, his face enameled white, his lips carmine, but none of that mattered. She watched him pass and shivered. Head down, Rose, she told, herself. It’s survival time.
Quiet went down the street with him, the people around her going still as he passed, prey beasts in the presence of a lion, praying he wasn’t hungry.
One of the guards following him looked at her, interest sparking in his eyes. He kept walking, but he turned his head to watch her as he went along.
As casually as she could manage, Rose turned down one of the semi-streets that crossed this one, moved swiftly through several angles, ran into a swarm of beggar children, turned again to get away from them, nearly ran into two guards at the boundary between two Kehvars engaged in a bracing match that was clearly, on the verge of breaking into a shooting war. The locals were smarter or faster than her, they’d gone for cover. She backed off as quickly and quietly as she could, ducked down another of the winding ways and made her way back to the main trafficflow.
##
Street noises grew louder and less distinct, voices of the child beggars and the street singers blending with drums and pipes and lutes. There were more guards out. New ones like wasps, dark yellow tunics with black vee stripes down the front and back. Kephalos had said it would be so, each Vaarlord hired his own guards. There was a HighVaar over the whole city, but he ruled more by consent than coercion. He was a convenience, a court of last resort, the keeper of the peace; he was the only one who could force the Vaarlords to keep to their boundaries, but he didn’t meddle inside those boundaries.
Which meant she’d better keep her eyes wide open and stop dreaming her way through these streets. Come on, Rose, you know the score. Get a move on, the sooner you’re under a roof the better.
7
The market was five acres of dust and noise. Several free traders were down onplanet looking for this and that, trading what they had for as much as they could get, a complex system of barter that both sides played out full-voiced and passionately, games both sides enjoyed to the max. Spice dealers and flower women, dealers in rare oils and essences, these turned the air into a soup of smells. There were cloth-sellers and leather dealers, used clothes men, lampsellers, knife women, pot women, chandlers and cosmetics dealers, dealers in everything imaginable. Jugglers and jongleurs plied their varied trades with varying success. Painters and sculptors and a local brand of artists who produced a complex combination of both with a touch of performance thrown in, these had their stands and their rivalries. A maximum of confusion and stimulus. Rose sighed with pleasure and plunged into the middle of it.
8
“Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come by, come and see, treasures for the trading, come by, come and see.” Tuluat stopped his chant, leaned across the table toward Autumn Rose, big dark eyes warm and confiding. “And what can I be doing for you, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i?”
Autumn Rose smiled guilelessly back, newly browned eyes warm and trusting, the warmth as genuine as his. “Why, Fentu Tuluat, perhaps you can. I have a few trinkets…” she sighed, “that have sad memories attached. I hate to lose them, but a break is a break and time heals wounds. Perhaps you’d like to look at them?”
“The blessing of the Tanadewa, time and its healing.” Tuluat shook out a square of black velvet, smoothed it on the table in front of him. “Do be letting me see.”
Autumn Rose took her gleanings from the ship and set them with slow care onto the cloth, a ring with a starstone (slightly chipped), an antique chronometer in a nicked and battered gold case, a fingerstone of Tongjok jadeite in the form of a smiling fat frogga, an Escalari earbob its dangles carved from hardalwood and set with fossil amber, and half a dozen similar small but valuable items. When she finished, the serious bargaining began.
9
Autumn Rose weighed the coins in her left hand, shook her head and ran them through the portable assayer she’d found in Barakaly’s antique desk. She clicked her tongue. “Short, Tuluat. Lovely striking, but there’s too much base metal in the gold. I think another ema and two silvers, what are they, ah, peras will make up the difference.”
He shrugged, grinned and handed the coins over without protest. “Now if you are liking to sell that little gadget, I am offering… hmm… a nice sum, say… hmm… 300 emas.”
“No no, I don’t think so.” She tucked the assayer back in her belt pouch, flickered her fingers at him. “You’ve made enough from me today.”
He shrugged again, laughed. “So so, I will be having it within the week anyway and cheaper at that. Unless you prove more alert than I am thinking, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i.” He turned away, flung out his hands, “Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come and see, come and see, treasures for the trading, come and see, come and see.”
10
“You are being a free trader, Jonja?”
Rose started, cursed under her breath. The guard had come out of nowhere, was suddenly pacing beside her; he wasn’t one of those in the market, he had a combination of green with purple diamonds and black slashes that was eye-blinding and surprised her because she couldn’t imagine him fading into shadow, no way. Tuluat just might be right, I’m not into this yet. “No,” she said, “just a traveler.”
“Where do you be heading?”
Uh oh, she thought. I hope this isn’t what it looks like. “Just ambling around, seeing what there is to see,” she said. Mistake, she thought. I shouldn’t ’ve answered in the first place. I don’t know. I don’t know. One thing I do know, I don’t like the smell coming off him.
“There is not being much worth looking at round here. Better you are letting me show you a place I am knowing.”
Right, she thought, just come alonga you, huh? No way, skinkhead. She didn’t say anything, just kept walking, looking straight ahead. If she couldn’t handle this jerk, she should’ve stayed away. Best if she could just lose him some way.
A long file of women came walking toward her, baskets on their heads; they were laughing and talking, walking with willow grace. Beyond them there were several handcarts and a tractor pulling a line of flats trundling along at a crawl beside the carts. Other flats and handcarts and oxcarts were coming from behind her. When the women got close enough, if she broke away suddenly, cut around them, didn’t get run over by a tractor, with a reasonable amount of luck she could get lost before the guard made up his mind what he was going to do. She risked a glance at him, stopped walking, her mouth hanging open.
The guard was sinking to his knees, folding down with a surprised look melting from his face. A small gray-green figure in a gray-green shipsuit had him by the elbows and was easing him down so that he didn’t bounce.
She looked at him and remembered. Z’ Toyff! Kikun. He hissed at her, flickered his long fingers impatiently, gesturing at her to get on, let him deal with this.
Right, Li’l Liz.
She swung round and strolled off, the incident immediately wiped from her mind along with Kikun.
##
She moved through a double dogleg, found herself in the kind of place she hadn’t seen before, a green space, grass and trees and a small fountain in the middle and behind that a graceful columned structure that was the antithesis of every other building in the city, open and airy, white marble with insets of colored stones in repeating patterns like those in the cloth the women wore. Three women were dancing on the grass, three women drummers squatted beside the fountain, along with a flute player and a woman crouched over an angular stringed instrument, plucking at it with a metal pick like a teardrop. A ninth woman sat cross-legged beside the walkway, murmuring blessings as passersby dropped coins in the wooden bowl in front of her. When Rose got close enough, she saw that the woman was blind. There were terrible scars on her face and one hand was mutilated, three quarters cut away, with only the little finger and a stub of thumb remaining.
The blind woman lifted her head as Rose walked past. “I am smelling blood,” she cried out. “I am smelling danger. A demon is walking among us.”
Embarrassed and annoyed, Rose walked faster, muttering to herself. Very impolite. Commenting on visitors to their faces. What about a little friendly hypocrisy, haah? She walked quickly on, constrained to a steady pace because she didn’t want to look like she was running, though she would have run if anyone had done more than stare at her. Everyone around stared at her. Blind bitch, what right had she got, saying things like that. You want demons, lady, look closer to home, haah!
A few doglegs on she stopped, sniffed. Sea air all right, where… ah! that way. Now, Rose, find a place you can go to ground. Then we’ll see, we’ll see…
11
Autumn Rose stood on the walkway and examined the house. Another white card in another brass and glass case.
ROOMS
TWENTY KURIES THE NIGHT
ONE PERA THE WEEK
The Rumach was as shabby as the rest she’d looked at, so far, with worn, weathered shakes on the upper floors and salt stains on the shutters, but there was a vigorous vine growing about the door with trumpet-shaped crimson blooms nodding in the brisk wind off the, water behind her, water glittering between two warehouses on the far side of a space that was more like a street than any she’d seen in this place, its form dictated by the water’s edge one line of buildings away.
She considered the Rumach. The flowers were nice, the touch of color appealed to her, it was the first she’d seen on the outside of any house. She curled her toes inside her boots. There was a burning on her heel where a blister had burst, she knew it had, she could feel skin moving with each step. Goerta b’rite, if this Rumacha is marginally less a sleaze than the other oof’narcs I’ve talked to so far, this’ll do.
She climbed the short flight of stairs, tugged at the stag-hoof that served both as bellpull and signifier.
The woman who opened the door was tall and lean, with a cloud of tightly curled white hair and a face carved from dark chocolate. Offworlder and female. Rose sighed with relief. “I’d like one of those rooms you’re advertising,” she said, “I’ll be here several weeks.”
12
Rose shut and locked the door, tossed the key on the bed, shrugged out of the backpack and dropped it on the floor next to a large overstuffed chair with a blue throw on it sewn from the silky cloth she’d seen in the clothing of many of the women. She yawned, threw herself into the chair and sat a moment running her hands along and along the padded arms, relishing the cling and slide of the brilliantly colored material. Then she bent, jerked off her boots, tossed them aside and scrubbed her feet back and forth on the rug, braided from more of that cloth, green and red and purple and bright blue. The room was shabby and well used, but clean and comfortable and pleasant on the eyes, furnished by someone who had a love for color and the strength of personality to force order out of exuberance.
There was a saggy double bed with crisp white sheets and a pile of quilts. A table beside the bed with a lamp and a blotter and stylus, a ladderback chair pushed in under it. Next to the table was the room’s only window, deeply recessed with a cushioned window seat built atop a chest. Kikun was sitting there, nested, among the pillows.
Rose gasped, blinked. “Hello, Li’l Liz,” she said finally. “Um… can’t you fix it so you don’t do this to me every time? I could drop dead with a heart attack.”
The folds of skin on Kikun’s face shook with silent laughter.
Rose unlatched her belt, pulled it from around her, tossed it on the bed with the key. “I picked up ten emas, two hundred peras and a handful of kuries for the junk I brought off the ship. How much did you get?”
“I haven’t counted it yet. Let’s see.” He dumped his sac on the cushion, began arranging the coins. “Hmm. One hundred coppers to one silver, one hundred silvers to one gold, right?”
“What kephalos set the assayer to.”
He swept the coins back into the sac, announced the total. “Fifty emas, three hundred peras and about a hundred kuries. And a handful of offworld coins, no telling what they’re worth, I don’t recognize any of them.”
She yawned. “Z’ Toyff, I’m tired. Hungry, too, but I don’t feel like moving.”
“Trailfood in your pack.”
“I know. I’ll dig it out in a moment. Kuna, you going to be all right here? This doesn’t look to be a good world for outsiders and you’re more outside than most.”
The houses were stone on the first floor with narrow slits instead of windows. The second floors (and the rare third floors) were wood with loopholed shutters over grilled windows. About half of these windows were closed tight, even through it was nearly an hour after noon. These were wary secret houses, ready to close up at too bold a touch.
The city had no walls. According to the ship’s kephalos, despite the wars that seem to be the natural state of things and constant raiding from wandering bands of pirates (marauders whose only bases were huge junks that moved from island to island within loosely defined territories), even villages had no walls. Walls involve a communal mind-set. Walls are meant to protect groups and need many hands to build and staff. It takes much less cooperation to build individual structures and arrange them so that the overlap provides mutual defense (hence the angular semi-streets). Also this world had been intermittently rediscovered by free traders and was a good market for what weapons the traders were willing to sell. Jump harnesses and pellet guns with exploding missiles made walls irrelevant. It was more efficient to provide covering fire. That’s only a contributing factor, kephalos said. If there were none of these weapons around, it would be the same thing. These people simply have no love for walls. They like mobility. Walls shut in as well as keep out.
She ambled along through hordes of children playing in these semi-streets, round games and ball games and complicated versions of tag, games she remembered from her own childhood, though she’d spent more time watching than playing, shut away from the street children by the walls of the Chateau where her mother lived and worked. She thrust her hands in her pockets and slowed yet more, enjoying the clamor and confusion.
##
As she rounded one of the sharper angles, she nearly stepped into a group of four guards (dark green with crimson slashes and black leather accents) beating a ragged man with their long whippy canes, all five of them silent except for grunts and squeals. One of the guards straightened, glared at her. Hastily, she cut out into the street and walked on by-like the rest of the locals getting out of there as fast as she could. It was a warning, a timely one, reminding her to stop gawking and get to business.
##
As she passed from the semi-slums near the outskirts, the traffic got thicker. Women with bales of cloth and fancywork balanced on their heads (she admired and briefly envied the beauty of their walking, the music of their voices. They wore what looked to be long rectangles of patterned cloth wrapped in complicated folds about their bodies, batik prints with a silky sheen, some local fiber, no doubt. If I have time and some spare cash, I should get me some lengths of that, it looks like it feels wonderful against the skin). Men leaning forward and plodding along under backframes loaded with tubers and gourds, sacks of flour and other staples. Handcarts and flats of the two-wheeled variety with small noisy tractors pulling them.
##
She went round another angle and saw a clot of angry, shouting, arm-waving locals and three guards trying to shift them away from an accident. A tractor without its flats being raced along the thruway by a gang of boys had crashed into a handcart loaded with local chicken-types. There were feathers everywhere, blood, squawking birds, locals trying to get at the boys, the guards pissed off at everyone. A different set of guards. These had dark crimson uniforms with green strips angled down the front. One of them lost his patience entirely, aimed his pellet rifle at the ground and blew a hell of a hole in the dirt.
The crowd scattered and the boys on the tractor ran off.
The only one left was the hapless soul with the handcart. The guards hit him a few licks and went off, leaving him to right his cart, repack it, and trundle it around the new hole in the middle of the road.
Laughter and a satiric run on a stringed instrument of some kind.
Rose looked around.
A street musician was standing in a doorway, swaying, a lutelike instrument cradled in his arms. His face was flushed and he looked more than a little drunk. After a moment he began to sing, improvising a comic account of the accident, describing the guards, the careless boys, and the hapless would-be trader in scurrilous terms, picturing them as capering ludicrously about the hole in the road which he invested with enormous significance, mostly sexual and wholly comical. He had a crowd in moments; laughing and clapping with him, they threw coppers at the case open at his feet. Then someone yelled, someone else took the lute from the singer and bustled him away and again the street was empty-until a squad of guards came marching around an angle.
Behind them the Vaarlord of this Kehvar (quarter, ward, neighborhood) lolled on the seat of a groundcar, his gorgeousness exhibited behind pelletproof glass as he looked over his subjects. He was a big man, with a seamed, scarred face. He didn’t loll well. Cultural things, she thought, idleness as an attribute of greatness. No, as a toiler, he was an abject failure. There was too much animal vigor in the man; his eyes moved over the houses and the people, over her as one of the people, with hard possessiveness. His hair might be gilded, his mustache and goatee stiff as gold wire, his face enameled white, his lips carmine, but none of that mattered. She watched him pass and shivered. Head down, Rose, she told, herself. It’s survival time.
Quiet went down the street with him, the people around her going still as he passed, prey beasts in the presence of a lion, praying he wasn’t hungry.
One of the guards following him looked at her, interest sparking in his eyes. He kept walking, but he turned his head to watch her as he went along.
As casually as she could manage, Rose turned down one of the semi-streets that crossed this one, moved swiftly through several angles, ran into a swarm of beggar children, turned again to get away from them, nearly ran into two guards at the boundary between two Kehvars engaged in a bracing match that was clearly, on the verge of breaking into a shooting war. The locals were smarter or faster than her, they’d gone for cover. She backed off as quickly and quietly as she could, ducked down another of the winding ways and made her way back to the main trafficflow.
##
Street noises grew louder and less distinct, voices of the child beggars and the street singers blending with drums and pipes and lutes. There were more guards out. New ones like wasps, dark yellow tunics with black vee stripes down the front and back. Kephalos had said it would be so, each Vaarlord hired his own guards. There was a HighVaar over the whole city, but he ruled more by consent than coercion. He was a convenience, a court of last resort, the keeper of the peace; he was the only one who could force the Vaarlords to keep to their boundaries, but he didn’t meddle inside those boundaries.
Which meant she’d better keep her eyes wide open and stop dreaming her way through these streets. Come on, Rose, you know the score. Get a move on, the sooner you’re under a roof the better.
7
The market was five acres of dust and noise. Several free traders were down onplanet looking for this and that, trading what they had for as much as they could get, a complex system of barter that both sides played out full-voiced and passionately, games both sides enjoyed to the max. Spice dealers and flower women, dealers in rare oils and essences, these turned the air into a soup of smells. There were cloth-sellers and leather dealers, used clothes men, lampsellers, knife women, pot women, chandlers and cosmetics dealers, dealers in everything imaginable. Jugglers and jongleurs plied their varied trades with varying success. Painters and sculptors and a local brand of artists who produced a complex combination of both with a touch of performance thrown in, these had their stands and their rivalries. A maximum of confusion and stimulus. Rose sighed with pleasure and plunged into the middle of it.
8
“Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come by, come and see, treasures for the trading, come by, come and see.” Tuluat stopped his chant, leaned across the table toward Autumn Rose, big dark eyes warm and confiding. “And what can I be doing for you, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i?”
Autumn Rose smiled guilelessly back, newly browned eyes warm and trusting, the warmth as genuine as his. “Why, Fentu Tuluat, perhaps you can. I have a few trinkets…” she sighed, “that have sad memories attached. I hate to lose them, but a break is a break and time heals wounds. Perhaps you’d like to look at them?”
“The blessing of the Tanadewa, time and its healing.” Tuluat shook out a square of black velvet, smoothed it on the table in front of him. “Do be letting me see.”
Autumn Rose took her gleanings from the ship and set them with slow care onto the cloth, a ring with a starstone (slightly chipped), an antique chronometer in a nicked and battered gold case, a fingerstone of Tongjok jadeite in the form of a smiling fat frogga, an Escalari earbob its dangles carved from hardalwood and set with fossil amber, and half a dozen similar small but valuable items. When she finished, the serious bargaining began.
9
Autumn Rose weighed the coins in her left hand, shook her head and ran them through the portable assayer she’d found in Barakaly’s antique desk. She clicked her tongue. “Short, Tuluat. Lovely striking, but there’s too much base metal in the gold. I think another ema and two silvers, what are they, ah, peras will make up the difference.”
He shrugged, grinned and handed the coins over without protest. “Now if you are liking to sell that little gadget, I am offering… hmm… a nice sum, say… hmm… 300 emas.”
“No no, I don’t think so.” She tucked the assayer back in her belt pouch, flickered her fingers at him. “You’ve made enough from me today.”
He shrugged again, laughed. “So so, I will be having it within the week anyway and cheaper at that. Unless you prove more alert than I am thinking, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i.” He turned away, flung out his hands, “Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come and see, come and see, treasures for the trading, come and see, come and see.”
10
“You are being a free trader, Jonja?”
Rose started, cursed under her breath. The guard had come out of nowhere, was suddenly pacing beside her; he wasn’t one of those in the market, he had a combination of green with purple diamonds and black slashes that was eye-blinding and surprised her because she couldn’t imagine him fading into shadow, no way. Tuluat just might be right, I’m not into this yet. “No,” she said, “just a traveler.”
“Where do you be heading?”
Uh oh, she thought. I hope this isn’t what it looks like. “Just ambling around, seeing what there is to see,” she said. Mistake, she thought. I shouldn’t ’ve answered in the first place. I don’t know. I don’t know. One thing I do know, I don’t like the smell coming off him.
“There is not being much worth looking at round here. Better you are letting me show you a place I am knowing.”
Right, she thought, just come alonga you, huh? No way, skinkhead. She didn’t say anything, just kept walking, looking straight ahead. If she couldn’t handle this jerk, she should’ve stayed away. Best if she could just lose him some way.
A long file of women came walking toward her, baskets on their heads; they were laughing and talking, walking with willow grace. Beyond them there were several handcarts and a tractor pulling a line of flats trundling along at a crawl beside the carts. Other flats and handcarts and oxcarts were coming from behind her. When the women got close enough, if she broke away suddenly, cut around them, didn’t get run over by a tractor, with a reasonable amount of luck she could get lost before the guard made up his mind what he was going to do. She risked a glance at him, stopped walking, her mouth hanging open.
The guard was sinking to his knees, folding down with a surprised look melting from his face. A small gray-green figure in a gray-green shipsuit had him by the elbows and was easing him down so that he didn’t bounce.
She looked at him and remembered. Z’ Toyff! Kikun. He hissed at her, flickered his long fingers impatiently, gesturing at her to get on, let him deal with this.
Right, Li’l Liz.
She swung round and strolled off, the incident immediately wiped from her mind along with Kikun.
##
She moved through a double dogleg, found herself in the kind of place she hadn’t seen before, a green space, grass and trees and a small fountain in the middle and behind that a graceful columned structure that was the antithesis of every other building in the city, open and airy, white marble with insets of colored stones in repeating patterns like those in the cloth the women wore. Three women were dancing on the grass, three women drummers squatted beside the fountain, along with a flute player and a woman crouched over an angular stringed instrument, plucking at it with a metal pick like a teardrop. A ninth woman sat cross-legged beside the walkway, murmuring blessings as passersby dropped coins in the wooden bowl in front of her. When Rose got close enough, she saw that the woman was blind. There were terrible scars on her face and one hand was mutilated, three quarters cut away, with only the little finger and a stub of thumb remaining.
The blind woman lifted her head as Rose walked past. “I am smelling blood,” she cried out. “I am smelling danger. A demon is walking among us.”
Embarrassed and annoyed, Rose walked faster, muttering to herself. Very impolite. Commenting on visitors to their faces. What about a little friendly hypocrisy, haah? She walked quickly on, constrained to a steady pace because she didn’t want to look like she was running, though she would have run if anyone had done more than stare at her. Everyone around stared at her. Blind bitch, what right had she got, saying things like that. You want demons, lady, look closer to home, haah!
A few doglegs on she stopped, sniffed. Sea air all right, where… ah! that way. Now, Rose, find a place you can go to ground. Then we’ll see, we’ll see…
11
Autumn Rose stood on the walkway and examined the house. Another white card in another brass and glass case.
ROOMS
TWENTY KURIES THE NIGHT
ONE PERA THE WEEK
The Rumach was as shabby as the rest she’d looked at, so far, with worn, weathered shakes on the upper floors and salt stains on the shutters, but there was a vigorous vine growing about the door with trumpet-shaped crimson blooms nodding in the brisk wind off the, water behind her, water glittering between two warehouses on the far side of a space that was more like a street than any she’d seen in this place, its form dictated by the water’s edge one line of buildings away.
She considered the Rumach. The flowers were nice, the touch of color appealed to her, it was the first she’d seen on the outside of any house. She curled her toes inside her boots. There was a burning on her heel where a blister had burst, she knew it had, she could feel skin moving with each step. Goerta b’rite, if this Rumacha is marginally less a sleaze than the other oof’narcs I’ve talked to so far, this’ll do.
She climbed the short flight of stairs, tugged at the stag-hoof that served both as bellpull and signifier.
The woman who opened the door was tall and lean, with a cloud of tightly curled white hair and a face carved from dark chocolate. Offworlder and female. Rose sighed with relief. “I’d like one of those rooms you’re advertising,” she said, “I’ll be here several weeks.”
12
Rose shut and locked the door, tossed the key on the bed, shrugged out of the backpack and dropped it on the floor next to a large overstuffed chair with a blue throw on it sewn from the silky cloth she’d seen in the clothing of many of the women. She yawned, threw herself into the chair and sat a moment running her hands along and along the padded arms, relishing the cling and slide of the brilliantly colored material. Then she bent, jerked off her boots, tossed them aside and scrubbed her feet back and forth on the rug, braided from more of that cloth, green and red and purple and bright blue. The room was shabby and well used, but clean and comfortable and pleasant on the eyes, furnished by someone who had a love for color and the strength of personality to force order out of exuberance.
There was a saggy double bed with crisp white sheets and a pile of quilts. A table beside the bed with a lamp and a blotter and stylus, a ladderback chair pushed in under it. Next to the table was the room’s only window, deeply recessed with a cushioned window seat built atop a chest. Kikun was sitting there, nested, among the pillows.
Rose gasped, blinked. “Hello, Li’l Liz,” she said finally. “Um… can’t you fix it so you don’t do this to me every time? I could drop dead with a heart attack.”
The folds of skin on Kikun’s face shook with silent laughter.
Rose unlatched her belt, pulled it from around her, tossed it on the bed with the key. “I picked up ten emas, two hundred peras and a handful of kuries for the junk I brought off the ship. How much did you get?”
“I haven’t counted it yet. Let’s see.” He dumped his sac on the cushion, began arranging the coins. “Hmm. One hundred coppers to one silver, one hundred silvers to one gold, right?”
“What kephalos set the assayer to.”
He swept the coins back into the sac, announced the total. “Fifty emas, three hundred peras and about a hundred kuries. And a handful of offworld coins, no telling what they’re worth, I don’t recognize any of them.”
She yawned. “Z’ Toyff, I’m tired. Hungry, too, but I don’t feel like moving.”
“Trailfood in your pack.”
“I know. I’ll dig it out in a moment. Kuna, you going to be all right here? This doesn’t look to be a good world for outsiders and you’re more outside than most.”
