People hurried past me, some pulling their hoods forward over their faces, others bowing their bare heads to the rain. A few paused to open their umbrellas, bright round spots against the gray and purple.
The rain captured me as it always did, even on the Ridge. When I was fighting, I never felt it. The only way to stay alive was to not even know it was there. But there was never a time when I could pretend water from the sky were a thing that happened every day.
I’d seen rain before. It rained on the steppe, sudden dark-moon downpours that burst into flash floods. This Laurean rain fell gently, pearling on my hair and cloak. I lifted my face and tasted the pure soft water.
The taste carried memories of how I’d first come to Laurea...
...running through the canyons that bordered the steppe, mile after mile of wind-eaten sandstone, with nothing but a knife and an old ghamel pack slung over one shoulder, stuffed with a stolen blanket and a few scraps of dried meat that didn’t last long...
...running until my legs could no longer hold me, never daring to look back, my breasts aching and finally drying up. Trapping small game when I was lucky and not too scared to stay in one place, once or twice beating off bandits...
...sleeping huddled under rock ledges while the ice-tipped winds howled through the canyons. Drinking myself sick at each new stream to ease the cramping in my belly.
...running, hiding, running. And then, one day, toward sundown, the sky half black with clouds, I came upon a little green valley with a stone hut and a trickle of wood smoke curling upward. Brush-sheep bleated from their pens and a dog barked. I could steal a sheep, but I wasn’t sure I had the strength to carry it away. And if the owner caught me, I’d have to fight again.
Fight? I could hardly stand. I hadn’t eaten in three days, and the cuts on my back had broken open again and gotten infected.
Just then the door swung open and someone in a long sheepskin coat came out and stood there, staring at me. My feet slipped from under me and I fell, the breath knocked out of me, fell and tumbled hard down the rocky slope. I lay there, too exhausted to care what happened next.
Beyond the hills, thunder rumbled. Moisture touched my face, cool as a blessing, trickling between my fever-parched lips. Smells arose around me — sweet grass, pungent herbs, the metallic stink of lightning.
I knew then that I was dead and the Mother had gathered me to her. She bent over me, her face shadowed in the dying light.
But it was a human face above mine, eyes buried in a mass of wrinkles, feathery gray hair braided loosely down her back. Gently she lifted me in her strong shepherd’s arms.
I whispered, “Where...am I?”
“Laurea,” she said. “You’re safe in Laurea.”
It seemed that half the city had gathered here in the plaza, rain or no. People moved out of the way when they saw my Ranger’s vest. I moved through the crowd, uneasy from the closeness of so many strangers. My fingers kept touching my knives — long-knife, forearm knife, belt buckle.
A canopied platform had been set up for the people too important to get wet, with more canvas stretched over a rectangular patch of earth. Some of the paving stones had been pried up and the plot lined with buckets of flowers. They’d bury Pateros where he fell and plant a tree on the place. It stood ready in its wooden pot, a well-shaped bronzewood that might live a hundred years or more. Longer than any of us would, that was sure.
On the Ridge, we burned our dead whenever we could, but on the steppe we had no extra wood. We placed the bodies of our Tribe up on great cairns of stone — funeral mounts, we called them — and offered them up to the father-god or Mother-of-us-all or whatever god bothered to answer our prayers. Actually, it was the bloodbats that came for them in the night, swooping down to suck the last precious drops of moisture. In the morning there would be only scraps of paper-dry skin and scattered bones.
I wiped the rain from my eyes.
Damn.
When I came to Laureal City that first time, I never thought of the past. This was my new life, my whole life. I had no other. Now wherever I turned I saw the steppe all over again, pulling me deeper into things better left buried.
But not for long. This morning I’d been given a packet of orders for Captain Derron. Tomorrow I would be gone from this city, back to the Ridge where danger was something I could kill. For today, I had time for Pateros’s funeral and that was all.
An old man stepped forward on the platform and lifted his hands for silence. The crowd settled down, and between the umbrellas in front of me, I caught glimpses of the people sitting up there out of the rain. A mass of gray Senate robes and the green of the Inner Council, the purple hoods draped over their shoulders.
Some trick of machinery magnified the old man’s voice and sent it booming over the plaza. I listened for a few minutes but heard only words. The unbroken cycle of life, the great man living on in our noblest dreams, the strength of his legacy. Nothing but Laurean wishcrap. The old man gave way to another, and their words rustled like so many dead leaves. I would turn my back on them if I could, but I was here to honor Pateros.
Now the gaea-priests with their bald heads and multicolored robes came snaking along the cordoned-off pathways, singing and playing their flutes and drums. Their voices were like songbats in flight, one moment soaring together, the next moment breaking rank to weave and dart in amongst the other. They penetrated the crowd as if it were a labyrinth.
The people around me joined in the refrain, a simple melody, words that made no sense even as my lips silently shaped them:
“Ashes to ashes,
Roots to roots,
Let the circle be unbroken,
O Life, we’re one with Thee.”
Like I said, Laurean wishcrap.
The priests passed me, followed by six people carrying a railed pallet on their shoulders. They walked slowly, as if wading through honey. Montborne, his head bare in the rain, his face proud and stern like a hero’s, his uniform a torch of color. Esmelda...
My throat clenched at the sight of her, strong as a tree in her flowing green robe, like a Laurean image of the Mother. If Montborne’s face was a marble mask, hers was a mirror. Her eyes seemed to see everything and nothing. People murmured as she passed.
On the pallet lay a coffin wrapped in green silk, tied with ribbons of a dozen colors. As it went by, people threw flowers that slid off the silk to leave a trail of petals.
And tears. Around me, men and women began crying, some silently, others in strange, animal-sounding sobs. I could feel the calling in my bones — Now is the time to weep. But it had no power over me. My breath came easy behind my breasts, my heartbeat slow and regular. I stood here in honor, not in mourning.
You won’t even mourn for Aviyya? a voice sifted through my mind.
I have not offered her up to the bloodbats. Not yet.
Then it came to me that there was nothing left to me but the promises I made. The one I spoke out loud, to Pateros and Laurea. The one I made silently, in my heart.
Once I ran away to save my own life. Now what will I do to save hers?
At the plot of earth, they set down Pateros’s silk-wrapped coffin. Each pallet-bearer took a shovelful of damp soil and deposited it on the tarp the priests laid out. Soon the shovel passed to the Senators and other dignitaries, come down from their platform.
And now the shovel went to the crowd. How the priests managed it with so many, I don’t know, but there was something for each one of us to do, digging, lowering the coffin, burying it, planting the tree. By the time it was my turn, dirt completely covered the green silk. The man before me stood weeping for a moment, hands clasped in front of his body, and then moved on. I picked up a handful of flower petals, trampled and fragrant, and tossed them into the grave.
Words echoed in my head: “Father-god, receive him well.”
Ay, what was the use of it? Dead was dead. There was neither father-god nor Mother, only darkness and the leering demon, laughing at us all.
I lifted my face to the sweet Laurean rain. Laugh away, bastard god! It’s not over yet.
The gaea-priests climbed back on the platform for another round of wandering melodies and predictable dumbshit lyrics, composed a couple of centuries ago by someone with no sense of music. Now it was too late to do anything about it, the stuff was traditional. It went on too long, as everything official in Laurea did.
The shocky silence in the crowd seeped away. People around me first whispered to their neighbors and then spoke outright. A few of them shouldered their way toward the vendors, hawking food and drink on the edges of the plaza.
A vendor rolled his cooking cart, crying out apples and sausages. He had plenty of takers. Me, too, although I should have known better. The sausages were soy but steaming and spicy, wrapped in crispy fry-bread. I licked the juices from my fingers and continued making my way toward the platform. I didn’t like crowds but I had nothing better to do except wait. Even with the City Guards moving people aside, it was still too packed to push my way in. Eventually they would thin out and I’d be able to get through. Whether Esmelda would hear me out was another matter.
We were a long time together on the Ridge before Avi told me who her mother was. “The only thing I ever wanted from her was my freedom,” she said. “And I had to take it, like a thief.”
Such pride, Avi had. “I’d never ask her for anything, not even if my life depended on it.”
Once I ran away to save my own life. I had no pride left now, not even the pride of cowardice, to beg this formidable old woman for her daughter’s life.
How did I know Avi was still alive? How did I know Esmelda could help? I only knew what I would have to live with if I didn’t try.
I must have some pride left, after all.
An undertone in the crowd caught my ear. Not their words, something else... I couldn’t hear the pattern, couldn’t feel what was going on and that made me twitchy. Earlier I thought it was just the closeness of so many strangers with no fighting room, but now something prowled the plaza like a shadow panther. I’d seen them hunt gazelle on the steppe, crouching and rippling like gusts of sand, closer and closer, then suddenly the gazelle was dead and carried half a mile away before it realized what had happened.
I didn’t trust this place, this vast and terrible place. Anything could happen here.
Damn.
Uniforms clustered thick around the platform, City Guards black and military bronze-and-red. Some looked too young to be soldiers, their faces too grim and too quick to show anger. They had none of the look of hard training. One kid in uniform shoved another in civilian clothing.
“I told you to stand back!”
“Who gave you the right?” the other kid snapped back, his fists up and ready. His body said, Come on, try me.
The nearest City Guard stepped between them. “Both of you, out of here.”
I stood beside him and together we watched the boys edge back into the crowd. I kept my hands in plain sight, resting on my belt. The guard was a good ten years older than me, a little soft around the edges and pumped up with working the crowd, but not above a friendly nod for a Ranger. I nodded back and jerked my head in the direction the kid in the uniform had disappeared.
“What’s that? Nursery recruits?”
“No, the new Pateros Brigade.” By his voice, he didn’t think much of it.
The rain let up enough so umbrellas were folded up and hoods shoved back. I heard a rumble in the crowd over toward the Starhall, like the shadow panther’s snarl. The Guard frowned, though he wouldn’t leave his post.
I couldn’t see anything from here. “What’s in the wind?”
He frowned harder. “Hard to say. There was some action by the western ferry last night, a bunch of those Brigade kids and some ramblers. Kids’d heard they might be norther spies and jumped them. Ramblers, they’re pretty tough. You bash them, they bash you back.”
“Standoff.”
He grunted. “Bashed heads all round.”
“Northers wouldn’t hire Laurean ramblers for any reason,” I pointed out.
“That’s what I would’ve said. I get along fine with anyone who stays on his own side of the border.” His eyes narrowed. “But now I think we trusted them too much.” He didn’t have to tell me who he meant by them.
I glanced toward the platform. “Any chance of getting me through?”
“Nope. What do you want?”
“To see Esmelda.”
He laughed. “Double not a chance.”
I waved, half-salute, and wove back into the crowd. Maybe if I got close enough, Montborne would clear me through the Guards. But then... How could I tell Esmelda about Avi with him there?
I came to a standstill, sweating and muttering curses. Quick short breaths, trying to calm down enough to think —
It happened suddenly, practically under my nose. Shouts and scuffling. Guards jumping up and pushing people aside. “What’s happening? What? Where?”
“Traitor!”
“They’ve caught a traitor!”
“Sold us out to the northers!”
The next instant everyone was screaming and running, nobody knew where — eyes wide, elbows and fists and folded umbrellas everywhere. The air stank of panic.
“Help! Help!”
“Out of here! I’ve got to get — ”
“Get him!”
“Traitor? Where?”
“TRAY — TOR!”
Then there were no more words, only deafening noise. Bodies slammed into me. I twisted away, staggered, and somehow kept my feet. There was no direction to this thing, no focus I could see. Nothing to draw a knife against.
I heard a high-pitched scream like a hamstrung brush-sheep, and remembered stories of them stampeding, trampling each other to bloody shreds. For the first time, I felt the clear danger in the crowd.
I pushed my way past the Guards and on to the platform, just as if I were sent there to help. From even this little height, I saw them, east of the platform — the knot of struggling bodies, maybe a few people fallen, Guards and Pateros kids striking out with their batons, others with bare fists. Everyone else was trying to get out of the plaza.
I glanced back. The Senators and Inner Council people looked frightened. The gaea-priests called for calm. Montborne had gone off to one side, giving orders to his officers.
He gestured to the dignitaries. “My people will escort you back to the Starhall.”
“My place is here — ” began the head priest.
“It’s too dangerous, Markus,” Montborne said. “The crowd is unpredictable and dangerous. My men and Orelia’s are trained to handle situations like this.”
“But — ”
“Just go.” He shoved the priest down the steps at the back of the platform and into the arms of two uniformed men. The Senators filed down, glancing around them anxiously. Montborne spotted me and motioned me over.
I took the arm of the nearest, a woman in Inner Council green. The same red-haired woman who’d tried to save Pateros. Her face looked chalky, her eyes wide. I helped her down the steps.
A hand, fingers thin but sinewy, touched my arm. I looked down into Esmelda’s gray eyes. I saw a strange expression in them, a hardness like granite but also a questioning, as if she almost recognized me. Me or the Ranger’s vest?
Her chin moved imperceptibly toward the mob below. “My son’s down there.” Her voice was grim and low.
The boy with rainwater eyes and Avi’s black hair...
Then she would owe me, this formidable old woman. Then she would have to listen to me. I nodded, got her down the steps, and blended back into the throng.
This time I saw the crowd for what it was, an enemy with no real weapons and no brains to speak of, only the weight and number of its bodies. Only its flash-flood shifts in mood and direction.
I’d learned a trick on the Ridge, how to focus my will as if it were a physical thing. I saw an invisible spear-point, my body at its base, one hand stretched in front of me with the outside edge like a knife chop. I moved rapidly through the milling people. They drew apart for me. A stick swung at me at head-height, not a Guard’s baton but a thick length of wood. I slipped past and it didn’t even touch me.
A knot of bodies lay at my feet, curled up and screaming, a few lying flat, others bending over them crying, calling for help in voices that couldn’t be heard above the racket. More men and women on their feet, pushing their way toward the nearest street.
A boy, a boy with rainwater eyes...
He wasn’t down, not in this bunch. Quickly I searched the others before they surged away. The crowd, the many-headed enemy, shifted direction. It moved toward the center of the plaza. Behind me, up against the base of the platform, I heard more screams and curses. I ignored them. Over by the grave site, I saw another struggle. Instinct drew me toward it. Once or twice, some head-blind fool barreled into me. I bruised a few ribs and twisted a few shoulders keeping free.
A man in rambler’s coveralls, who reminded me a little of Westifer at his worst, had squared off with a red-faced boy in the Brigade uniform. People scrambled out of their way, leaving a little open space. Swinging a homemade baton, the kid screamed the man was a spy and a traitor. A fighting madness ran all through him that no words could cool.
The rambler roared like a cornered bull elk and bunched his shoulders. A knife slipped down the back of his sleeve. The hilt smacked into his cupped palm, the blade tight along his forearm so the kid couldn’t see it.
I shoved through the throng just as the rambler, his back to me, drew back for a killing sweep. The kid was wide open, throat and belly, no sense of what was coming, all blind devil-dare with his friends shouting him on.
I sprinted for the rambler and kick-stomped the back of one knee. It broke his stance long enough for me to land a knife-hand chop to the nerves in his forearm. His fingers jerked open. I slid my hand down his wrist and twisted the knife away. The next moment, the three Brigade kids rushed him.
Then I was fighting for my own skin, the rambler’s buddy after me with a long curved knife, a sword, really. The rambler’s knife was badly balanced, but I had no time to change it for one of mine. I spun and landed a side kick in one kid’s solar plexus. Mother, he had a knife, too, and no sense of how to use it. But in these close quarters —
The rambler somehow got another knife and held it horizontal, backhand grip, blade level with my throat. Crazy in his eyes.
I pivoted and raised my knife for a down-stab, moving slow so he would see it, would react and be drawn away from my real target — the man with the curved sword. I lunged sideways, past his reach as I reversed my stroke. Curved-sword saw it too late and jumped back. My knife-tip ripped open the side of his thigh. A heartbeat later, I reversed again, same arc, other blade edge, slashing for his hamstrings. He jumped away again, blood drenching his coverall leg, and stumbled up against the edge of the crowd. A young woman in full skirts screamed as he landed on top of her. Two Brigade kids, knives raised, dove for him.
“Behind you!” someone shouted.
My body moved before I could think. I swerved to one side and pivoted around, one hand up in guard, the other holding the knife low by my leg. I sank slowly, gathering strength from the earth. My thighs tingled, ready to explode.
It was the rambler again, one shoulder cut open, coverall sleeve in strips. His eyes met mine, reading me. Breathing hard, his chest heaving. He was no fool and he’d seen blood before. He’d seen death. But he’d never seen me. Never seen the steppe knife-forms, honed by Brassaford and all those years on the Ridge.
The tip of his knife wavered. His eyes darkened, searching for a way to back out. There was a brief, sudden quieting of the crowd.
I forced myself to think. Not feel, not act — think. Pateros or Montborne or even Derron back on the Ridge would have found something to say — ”I’m not your enemy” or “Let’s all back off” — and then this whole damned showdown would be over.
The moment passed before I could wet my lips. Screams and cries rang out behind me. The rambler’s eyes went wide and white. The knife disappeared back into his coveralls. Cursing, he pushed past me. I turned just as he hauled a Brigade kid off the tangle of bodies.
On the ground, Curved-sword rolled to his side, moaning. A wound bubbled from his upper thigh, up near his groin. The rambler knelt above him. His hands dripped with the bright, copper-stinking blood.
I dropped the knife and shoved him aside. Grabbed a scarf from a shock-eyed woman clambering to her feet. Wadded it over the spurting blood and leaned on it with all my weight.
Someone shrieked for the medicians. The scarf was already slippery under my hands. A sickening quiet settled over the crowd. People watched me with drawn, horrified faces.
Mother, let it be a nick and not cut through. I saw a man once cut like this and live, but it was a small artery in his shoulder.
The medicians couldn’t save Pateros — what can they do for this poor fool?
Just beyond Curved-sword’s outstretched arm, I noticed a black-haired boy on his knees, cradling a young woman in his arms. Dark brown curls spilled out beneath her orange kerchief. Her face was white except for wine-dark lips and the ashy smudges beneath her closed eyes. There was blood everywhere, but I couldn’t tell whose.
The boy looked up with eyes of rainwater and steel, so like Avi’s and yet not like. Except for a bruise on one cheekbone, he looked soft and pale, as if he’d never faced anything harder than how to open a book. Even so, the light in those eyes was as hungry as any I’d ever seen.
“Your mother sent me,” I said.
He couldn’t hear my voice above the crowd but he understood me well enough. His face, locked in ice one moment, turned fluidly expressive the next, but so tangled I couldn’t read it. I could only imagine what Avi would have said in the same situation.
Now the City Guardsmen came pelting through. I got to my feet and smelled the shift in the crowd. Someone said, “Medician’s station this way.” People helped the injured to their feet and Guards cleared them a path. They carried the bleeding man, keeping pressure on the cut.
The boy — Esmelda’s son, Avi’s brother — tried to pick up the girl. He had no idea how to lift her. I could have slung her across my shoulders like a dead gazelle, but something held me back.
A medician, older man, bent over her, shook his head, covered her face with another woman’s fringed shawl. The boy stood up. He watched as two women from the crowd lifted the girl and carried her off, then turned, scanning the platform. His mouth twisted, his eyes dry as the steppe, and again I couldn’t read him.
I jerked my head toward the Starhall. His eyes narrowed — good, he’d understood. He took a quick breath, gathering himself, and walked away from me.