Game: Session 3
I got twenty stripes with the cane today – which I deserved, really. I’d been caught climbing over the wall to get back into the school. It was a tough climb, too. It’s a good wall, with few handholds and fewer toeholds, and twenty feet tall. I’d taken off my sandals and tied them to my belt so I could use my toes; that helped a lot. But when I’d finally reached a point where I could put my hands on the top of the wall, I looked up to find Farouk, one of the school guards crouched down looking at me. “Hi,” he said.
“Uh, hi.”
“Need a hand getting up?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“We’re going to see the headmaster.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The headmaster was more annoyed that we’d bothered him than anything else. He told Farouk to give me twenty stripes and told me to get the hell out of his office.
So Farouk took me out to the whipping post, pulled my dress down to my waist, and tied my hands to the iron ring at the top of the post. It’s just a cane, a piece of rattan about the width of my little finger. If you get a whipping from the city guard, they use a bundle of rawhide cords. That tends to cut the skin where the cane (usually) just leaves welts. Farouk’s good at it and put all twenty on my back, spaced about an inch apart. I was sweating and breathing hard and hoarse from the screaming – it’s easier if you scream — by the time he was done, and I was glad to get some help walking to the baths.
It hurt a lot. Settling into a hot bath hurt. Wearing clothes hurt.
I liked it. The feeling I get when I lean back against something and set the welts off again is pretty much the same feeling I got when Orrin put her hands on my breasts. It’s a good thing I like to masturbate laying on my stomach. It might hurt too much to enjoy it if I were lying on my back.
I like that sort of pain, the caning, the bruises from training in the fighting arts or from just picking a fight with someone, but if I stub my toe I whine like a little girl. I didn’t like it much when that raider was smacking me around in the Dying Fields, either. Context matters, I guess.
There’s something really wrong with me.
I was climbing back over the wall because I snuck out of school out of uniform. Ragged black dress, worn leather belt, sandals, and a scarf wrapped around my head as a turban and veil. Pirin came to Sal and me and asked us for help. He needed some kind of special bag to carry his summoning stones in so they wouldn’t accidentally go off and summon something ugly. But he couldn’t get to the guy who made the bags – some thugs were giving him a hard time about being an orc. “We don’t like your kind here,” that sort of thing. (I get that sometimes, but it’s for being a witch.) So he wanted backup. A chance to hit people? Fabulous. I was in, but I thought it might not be a real good idea to carry a sword. There’s too much of a chance that people (like me!) could get dead when people start waving swords around. Sal’s been around some, he knows what I mean.
Okay, fine. Pirin is sort of a friend, even if he is a fucking idiot summoner. What the hell.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know why he just didn’t ask someone to go get it for him.
Anyway, Sal and I left before Pirin – some important person was leaving the school at the same time I was, so I sort of attached myself to his entourage. Some of the servants looked at me funny, but it got me past the guard at the gate. Sal got out through the side door that doesn’t open from the outside. We were going to meet Pirin at the town gates, so we headed off towards town.
Every time I go into town, it’s the same two guys on gate duty. If they ever gave a shit about their jobs, it was a long, long time ago. They’ve been there for at least four, five years, and they’re always arguing, and always throwing dice. They cheat. They cheat each other. They cheated the hell out of me until I started paying attention. They’re not exactly good cheats, it’s way obvious when they switch the straight dice for bricks or weights. Sal kept trying to pull me out of the game, but I was on a roll. I sandbagged the first bet, losing my knife, and then won my knife back and six silver dinari on top of it.
It’s not a game of chance when you do it right.
We were done with everything but the talking shit and pleading for a double-or-nothing throw when Pirin showed up. “Sorry, guys, but I got business. You’ll get me next time.” I gave them a big bright smile and they laughed at me. They think I’m cute.
The market we wanted was not in a good part of town. It doesn’t get much worse than that part of town, actually. It’s in what used to be a warehouse, with a wide balcony running around it at street level, with another level dug out underneath that. We wanted to go down. The smell is… well, if you stay away from the ’sewer quarter,’ you’ll be mostly okay.
On our way in, a kid of about eight stole one of the pouches Pirin wore on his belt. It was the one with his component stuff in it, not his money pouch. We tried telling him to put his money somewhere safer (I carry mine between my breasts, on a cord around my neck) but he didn’t want to listen. You’d think he’d know better.
So of course the thugs who’d been giving him problems found us. I don’t look like a threat when I don’t have a sword (though Felicitation sometimes makes people look at me funny). Sal stepped up and started in with the manly chest-bumping stuff and one of the thugs took a swing at him. So he stabbed the guy in the leg, getting him pretty good. The other one started at me, I reached down to pick up a handful of dust, and started chanting nonsense over it. Bright lad that he was, the guy figured he’d avoid whatever I was doing by hitting me until I shut up. He swung, I ducked it, and Sal sucker-punched him with the pommel of his dagger.
The guy fell to the ground like a sack of ground meat. That was about when the guards started showing up. Sal bolted for the exit and got arrested pretty quickly – Pirin and me took the opportunity to go do some shopping. Sal would be fine in jail for a little while, and we could bail him out later.
Pirin went in to talk with the bag maker, and I found a dressmaker’s shop a little ways down from that. Ahmed the tailor was a skinny old guy with an explosion of white beard. He looked happy to get the business. I wasn’t looking for anything special, just a couple of dresses that weren’t as awful as the one I was wearing. There was a pretty saffron-red cotton that I liked, and Ahmed called his daughter Cinta out from the back. She smiled brightly and hugged me hello.
Cinta was maybe a little older than me and very pregnant in a way that made her glow with love for her baby. She’d be cute as hell anyway, but pregnant, she’s devastatingly beautiful. I’m trying not to think about that. I damn near bit through my lip while she was taking my measurements. At least she didn’t notice. I think.
Even if she did notice, she had other things on her mind. We were just getting started when a man wearing the braided cord of a city official came in.
“Good day, your honor,” Ahmed stammered. A judge, then.
“Hello, Ahmed. Ah, you have a customer. How nice,” the judge said, looking at me. He turned back to Ahmed and told him, “Your taxes are due.”
Poor Ahmed babbled about how he was poor, he didn’t have ten gold dinari. The judge walked over to Cinta and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. She looked uncomfortable, a little scared, but didn’t flinch away from him. “Maybe we could make arrangements to pay another way,” he purred.
“So, Ahmed!” I put a big fake smile on and went over to the tailor. “That dress I ordered, we agreed on ten gold dinari, right?” I handed him the pouch that had my gold in it and he almost fell over in his hurry to hand it to the judge. That worthy bounced the pouch in his hand, judging the weight.
“Overcharging the customers that much? No wonder you have no business.” He smiled, bright and predatory. “You’re paid up for the month. Next month it’s fifteen.” And the fucker laughed, tucking my coin pouch away in his robes.
Ahmed was saying something about how grateful he was and that he was going to make me ten dresses, beautiful dresses, but I just felt sick. “Does your daughter’s husband help here also?” I asked, trying to figure out a little more of what was going on.
“My daughter is not married,” he said slowly. I blushed. Duh.
“Oh.” It was dumb, and I hated it coming out of my mouth, but what was I going to say? “Is it…?” I didn’t really want to finish the question, but Cinta understood.
“Yes. He is the father.” Even though Cinta had gotten pregnant trying to keep her father out of the hands of the slavers, she still looked like she was in love with the baby growing in her. She breaks my heart. (She took me into the back after that and finished taking my measurements. My ears felt like they were going to burst into flames by the time she was done and let me put my clothes back on.)
I thought I’d have to come back for the dress, or have it delivered to the school, but Ahmed told me it wouldn’t take an hour. He has a construct, a mechanical seamstress, that sews the stitches for him. He just has to cut out the pattern and feed the cloth through the construct. It was pretty interesting, really. Cinta brought out ridiculously hot, very strong tea and little sesame-seed cookies while I was waiting. Ahmed chews on his beard when he’s concentrating. We didn’t talk much, but it was a nice sort of quiet with the sound of the construct and the muffled noises from outside the shop. When my dress was done, she hugged me and I kissed her on the cheek.
I really like her. I’d hate for her to be sold into slavery because her father couldn’t pay the taxes on his shop. Where’s he going to get fifteen gold dinari in a month? Where could I get that kind of money? (An unpleasant little voice in the back of my head tells me that it would probably be cheaper in the long run to buy her from the auctioneer. Ick.)
Later Sal told me about seeing the judge with my pouch back at the guard house. He and the men laughed about Cinta’s pregnancy; he said he’d probably have to do something to take care of it. I really hope something ugly happens to him. Maybe setting a spirit to whisper in his ear and give him bad dreams would be educational.
It’s not that the judge is skimming off the taxes he collects. Everybody does that. But this is too much. These shopkeepers might never see ten gold dinari together in a year. And they have to come up with it every month.
~`~
Archmage Ethan suggested we do some research on Master Lyshan, so we did. That was one very seriously vindictive guy. The book was actually a copy of his journal (copied from the original by a man who would later become Magister) from some two thousand years ago. In it, he detailed all the ways people had wrong him and what he did back to them.When I opened the book, it tried to say something to me, and I doubt it was asking after my health. I shrugged it off, and we started paging through it to take notes. He talked a lot about his contentions, mostly having to do with magic I didn’t do (he was a sorcerer. I’m a witch. Go figure.), but the last one, the Rite of the Tainted Coin, sounded just about perfect. The Tainted Coin makes its target/victim hideously ugly, and tells him why. And it only works on people who have bad motives for what they’re doing. Someone who’s deliberately cheating a customer, say, or taxing businesses into bankruptcy. It needed a lot of stuff, including a coin (the metal it’s minted from matters: platinum is best, gold next best, silver not so good, and copper useless) and three practitioners: a Psion, a sorcerer, and a channeler. Sal, Quin, and I fit in those slots pretty nicely. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could do it. Especially if we got some help from Vence. Sal wasn’t too enthusiastic aboutSo we went off to find him, notes (not the book – Kerun put that back on the shelves) in hand. He’d help us, he said, but he wanted us to earn the money for what we’d need by working for the town guard, who’d been asking for magical backup anyway.
And Archmage Ethan was already planning to do the Rite of the Tainted Coin for his own reasons. Vence told us we were late for something in one of the ritual rooms, so we hurried off for that. The ritual was really incredibly cool, actually. There were four students (the four members of what people keep calling the demon hunter’s club) standing at the four corners of a square. Four teachers (Ethan came in late) stood at the corners of another square offset from our. In the middle of it all was the biggest spider I have ever seen. It was enormous, hairy, spiteful, hateful, and it wanted us all real dead. It also couldn’t get out of whatever it was that contained it.
The ritual started with us facing outward, and the teachers moved in a circle around the four of us. They weren’t exactly walking, and the points of the square moved as they did. They moved a full circle around us, then a slot in the ceiling opened and let a shaft of light in to spear the poor fucker spider in it. Then Archmage Ethan did something (a negation effect – more sorcerer stuff), we turned around to face the spider, and magic started to flow from the room, through the teachers, and through us to braid together around the shaft of sunlight like some kind of demented maypole. Powerful magic like that feels really good. I can see how people can get addicted to it. It was a hell of a rush.
At the end of the ritual, there was a dead spider, no sunlight, all of us except Vence and Ethan collapsed on the floor, and an intricately carved staff of silvery-white wood. Very pretty. It’s Vence’s master’s staff. They didn’t tell us what it was before we got started because if he’d screwed up, it would’ve been pretty embarrassing.
But it all worked out. In a few minutes, we’d recovered enough to shamble off to bed. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I think I was asleep before my head touched the pillow.
~`~
Master Vence is now, well, a master. There was a sort-of party to celebrate it, and the four of us who’d been part of the staff making ritual were invited. No one else was, and somehow everybody knew about it in about three seconds.”Can I come with you?”"No, sorry.”
“How come? Come on, please?”
“The invitation said just me. You could talk to Master Vence, I guess. He’s the one doing the inviting.”
“Just let me go with you.”
“No.”
Or something like that. I don’t think my roommates are happy with me. I guess I was pretty short with them. I want to say that it was because I was tired and thinking about lots of other stuff, but I really just didn’t want to be bothered being nice to them about somebody else’s inviting me to a party. Not my party, I’m not in charge of the guest list, don’t pester me about it.
But it was a cool thing to go to. Archmage Ethan – dressed all in dark robes that covered everything, and a steel mask of someone androgynously beautiful – I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t been coming out of the school. He opened a portal and about a hundred people came through, all carrying staves, each one as different as the people who carried them. Two archmagi, a hundred masters, and us. I figured I’d do a lot of not talking.
Turned out that Master Vence wasn’t a master quite yet. He had to demonstrate mastery of three different aspects of magic first. He created (or summoned) a bar of steel and crushed and folded it into a greatsword with his bare hands. No fire, no hammer, no anvil, just the strength in his grip. Then he levitated all the plates and chargers and silverware, transmuted it to gold, and melted it into a puddle at his feet. Tendrils of gold reached up from the puddle, scoring an elaborate pattern into the metal. The point of the sword pricked his palm and blood flowed up to fill in the pattern; the gold followed after it. All the gold went into the sword, but it didn’t get any bigger. Master Vence looked really tired when he was done. One of the archmagi came and took it, but the two of them looked exactly alike and I couldn’t tell which one was Ethan.
Whoever it was, they put it in their robes and it disappeared. Or something. I don’t understand sorcery. Except during rituals, I don’t feel it, not the way I can feel witchcraft. Sometimes I get a brush of other channelers doing their thing, but their magic is coming across planes. Mine is from right here. I ask for my power, but I’m asking the world and everything in it. Theirs comes from someplace else entirely.
Me, I’m glad I’m a witch. But if I was a sorcerer, I’d probably be glad about that, too.
The head of the Master’s Order – not the Magister – was a guy called Esker. He gave a mercifully short speech about how there was no more pressing problem in the world than the Kesser/Sayd war. It’s of demonic origin, as it turned out. A Saydean summoner called up a demon called Steel (obviously not its actual name) in desperation when Kesser was invading. The summoner was killed before he could dismiss Steel, and the demon has fed (and fed off) the war ever since. The war cannot end until the demon has been banished from Shar.
It’s hard to imagine that this is coincidence. Though the gods may not interfere with us directly, they sometimes drop really big hints.
The tables were set again with new silver and we feasted. It was good food, too. Not the best ever, but pretty damn good.
I think when I sit for my master’s exam, I’ll do something with trees. It would be nice for the school to have a place like the tree nexus out in the high desert. Not the power source part of it – there’s about enough power here already – but the feeling of being warm and safe and loved. There are a lot of lonely scared kids here and there’s usually one who cries himself to sleep at night. Or herself.
~`~
My roommates are still pissy about Master Vence’s party, but they’ll be rid of me for a few days. Sal, Quin, and me all have duty with the guard. Not that we’re getting out of classes. One of the staff is going with us as tutor and chaperone. The thing about Acolyte Telfor is that he’s dead. His clothes look just as solid as mine, so it can be hard to tell he’s a ghost just by looking, but he goes invisible in sunlight, and the clothes are upright and moving around without anyone inside them. Creepy, but that’s better than when he forgets where you are and walks through you.But he’s nice, even if he is pretty distant most of the time. We could have gotten Father Iyr.The guys at the gate asked if I had time for a quick game, but Telfor shook his head no. It doesn’t matter, they’ll still be there playing dice until the walls crumble around their ears. I can find them any time.
Telfor led us to a not very nice neighborhood. It looks a lot like what I remember of my great-aunt’s neighborhood in Sayd-the-city, only drier and without the plants. You can grow more than olives and almonds in Sayd-the-city, it’s wet there. Here, these people can only barely afford water to keep themselves alive. Gardening is not a big hobby here.
The house we’re staying in was nice once, but that was a few hundred years ago. Now it’s just like all the others except bigger and less occupied. (Maybe it was haunted? Telfor told us it was the Sheik’s desert villa back when he was alive. He could have hung around to keep squatters out.) It looks like someone has used it as a hideaway, there are candles and sort of fresh food and water in one of the rooms.
There’s dust everywhere, rotted places in the upper floors, and the windows probably did have glass in them, back when Telfor was alive. Putting glass back in probably isn’t a good idea, but we could at least replace the shutters. There’s no furniture. We’ve got a lot of cleaning to do. Telfor says he’s going to teach me a cantrip for summoning a minor air spirit to do dusting and sweeping, and to teach Quin how to make the brooms do the sweeping themselves. So that ought to go faster than it looks right now.
But we’ve got duty with the guard before we do any cleaning. The captain should be here any time now.
~`~
No wonder the guard drink. Fourteen hours with them, and I already hate it. And I hate myself a little more than this morning. When it wasn’t boring as eight miles of flat sand, it was way too interesting.We started off when Captain Xahal came to get us from Telfor’s house. Quin was still sleeping, so Sal threw a bucket of water on her to wake her up. I don’t know if she’s spent too much time as a cat or if she’s just kind of delusional, but she bitched for two hours solid until she was finally dry. An hour into it, I was about ready to cut her throat to get her to shut up. An hour after that I was seriously considering cutting mine. I should remember to talk with Sal about that. No water.At the guard house, we got the tunics, belts (with special secret knot that I did my best to memorize), and short spears that marked us as members of the guard. They assigned us to the fourth district which contains both Telfor’s house and the warehouse market. Not the best assignment the guard can offer. It’s the poorest district in town, with all the crime and stuff that goes with being poor. Rich people might have more money, but poor people are easier to rob.
We’re not exactly trained for this kind of work, and we’re younger than most of them. It didn’t help much in making a good impression, but they weren’t ugly to us. We even got breakfast with the rest of them. And they have this… stuff. It’s not coffee, but it wakes you up the way a whole pot of coffee would if you could drink it all at once. It tastes pretty evil, but it’s almost as good as sleep.
Breakfast we got from street vendors. We didn’t pay them and they didn’t ask. When I asked one of the cart vendors (he fried bits of meat and beans wrapped in dough that were incredibly good once they cooled off enough to eat safely), he explained that if the guards didn’t get food when they came by, they’d stop coming by. And nobody wanted that to happen.
We’ve got some new vocabulary: riverwalk, just wandering around the district and being visible. Pounding the bell is when we get a tip on something and run like hell to get there in time to do something useful. A fisherman is a guy who sells stolen goods. The FNG is the fucking new guy. That’s us. The MFWIC (pronounced ‘mifwick’) is the captain, the head motherfucker what in charge. The corporal is not ’sir,’ he works for a living.
We were just walk – make that riverwalking around the district when a scrawny boy about eight years old ran past us with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. Behind us, we heard a man shouting “Thief! That kid stole my bread!”
Corporal Amnik snapped his fingers and pointed at one of his men. The guy the Amnik pointed at threw his spear at the kid, catching him in the hip. His bread went into the dirt as he fell. I have to give the kid credit for being tough, he didn’t scream until Amnik caught up to where he was and yanked the spear out. Amnik dragged the still-bleeding kid back to the baker – he had a nasty smirk on his face. The baker was looking forward to seeing the kid punished.
“Is this the boy who stole your bread?” asked Amnik. (Of course the bread in question had disappeared in about three heartbeats.)
“That’s him.”
Corporal Amnik was done with the baker and ignored everything else the guy had to say. The terrified kid had his attention. “The law says we cut the right hand off a thief.”
One of the guard held the kid down with his hand splayed on the baker’s counter (”You’re going to get blood all over my shop!” screamed the baker. “Shut up,” suggested the guard holding the kid.) while Amnik drew his sword. The sword went up, the sword came down, and the kid screamed again and pissed himself. Amnik hadn’t actually cut the kid’s hand off, just nicked him a bit and gouged the baker’s counter pretty good.
Crouching down, the corporal spoke to the kid in a low voice. “I’m going to let you go this time,” he said. “I don’t like mutilating children for stealing food. But if I catch you stealing again, the hand comes off. You got that?”
The kid nodded so fast I thought his head might fall off. “Good.”
“You want me to fix that?” I asked, meaning the kid’s spear wound.
“Yeah.”
So I did. He’s not all the way fixed but his wound is closed and clean and will heal okay on its own. If he doesn’t open it again somehow and get it infected. And if he manages to eat enough to feed a body that’s trying to fix itself.
Amnik was an okay guy, a mix of mercy and brutality, and he tried to do the job right. I kind of wish I’d known him longer.
We went back to the guard house for the first break. I had another cup of that evil not-coffee stuff and a couple of bowls of stewed rabbit and couscous. It wasn’t the best food I’ve ever had, but it was filling and had lots of olives in it. I’m always hungry these days. Maybe some of it’s feeding the magic – I’ve been casting a lot lately – but I’m also growing. (So is Felicitation.) Even my new uniform doesn’t fit me quite right. The sleeves on my tunic are about an inch too short, and the trousers are even shorter. The guard tunic is way too big for me – it was made for a grown man, not a not-quite-grown teenage girl. On me, it comes down past my knees, and I have to roll the sleeves up to be able to do anything. I look like a kid pretending to be a guard. When I take the scarf off my head, I look like a boy.
I don’t mind that, really, the looking like a boy part. I like being a girl just fine, but it’s fun to play with the way people see me.
After the break, we went to the warehouse market. Just before we got there, Amnik stopped us. “All right. We’ve got three shops to do. You know the drill.”
Everybody screwed up their expressions to look mean, but knowing them a little, I thought they were pretty uncomfortable with what they – we – were about to do. Gods know I was.
The first shop was a thread spinning and dyeing shop run by a man and his wife. He looked scared half to death and told us he only had six gold dinari this month, that was all he had, please to be merciful. Amnik looked tired. He asked us if we could find out if there was any more gold in here.
“I can,” I told him, sounding pretty damn tired myself. I sat down, crossing my legs, and mumbled the words that helped me reach the trance for a Knowing, and let my mind drift. A whisper of consciousness suggested that gold smelled like greed and fear and lust, and to follow the scent. Obviously there was some in the pouch the shopkeeper – I can’t remember the poor bitch’s name – was offering to Amnik. Quin had a little more, she still had the gold Ethan had given us when we went west with the Northsail guys.
But the smell was strongest under the floor. Letting go of the trance, I went back to myself and stood up. The place where the gold smell had been strongest was only a few steps away. I drew a cross in the dust on the floor with the toe of my sandal. “There’s more here.”
The corporal broke up the floorboards and found a much bigger pouch hidden under there. When he dumped it out on the shop counter, it looked like there was thirty-four, thirty-five gold dinari worth of coins there. At least thirty were gold, with some silver mixed in.
“Poor Bitch,” Amnik said, sighing, “You and your wife are hereby placed under arrest for tax evasion. Your shop and everything in it is forfeit, and you will be sold into slavery.”
Poor Bitch didn’t say a word as the men cuffed him, but his wife struggled until she got a spear butt across the back of her head. Two of the guards left with Poor Bitch and his wife, taking them back to the guard house. Amnik gathered up all the coins while the rest of his men ransacked the place, taking everything that looked valuable. I picked up a hairpin and a small bottle with some blue liquid in it. I couldn’t help thinking about this happening to Cinta and Ahmed when next month came and they didn’t have anything close to fifteen gold dinari.
Our next stop was actually the shop where Pirin had gone in to get the bag for his summoning stones. “This guy owes twenty gold dinari – last month he had a note from the judge. This month, the judge told me he hadn’t given the guy any note, and to collect for last month. So we’re going to get it, okay?”
Inside the shop was a middle-aged Halfor man, obviously waiting for us with each hand on the butt of a pistol. Halfor are pretty much always carrying the things.
Digression: A little while before I was taken away to school, I met one named Faha back in Sayd-the-city. I’d been running away from a bunch of older kids throwing rocks at my head when I ran smack into him. I fell down, he didn’t. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was obviously older, and when he saw the kids chasing me, he pulled out both pistols (there was one holstered on each hip) and pointed them at them. They stopped.
“If it’s throwin’ things you’re after, I’m after playin’ too,” he said cheerfully. The street was quiet enough that the clicking as he thumbed back the hammers on his pistols could be heard absolutely clear. They didn’t like me a bit, but they didn’t want to get shot more than they wanted to beat the crap out of me. They left, and the Halfor guy put his guns away and helped me up.
“Kids suck, huh?” he asked me. I sniffled back about a gallon of snot and nodded. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up. Your mom will shit if she sees you like this.”
“My mom’s dead,” I mumbled.
He couldn’t understand me. “What?”
“My mom’s dead!” I yelled at him.
“Aw, fuck. I’m sorry.”
“’s’okay,” I told him, shrugging.
“Naw, it’s not.” He took my hand and led me off to one of the fountains that dotted Sayd-the-city, cleaning off the blood and snot and dirt with his handkerchief. It was pretty much ruined by the time he was done. “Wait here,” he told me, and left, coming back a few minutes later with a shaved ice and pomegranate syrup. I couldn’t remember anything that tasted so good and started sniffling again after the first bite.
“You okay, kid?”
“Yeah.” Sniff. “I’m okay.”
“How come those brats were after you?”
I didn’t want to say anything. He was being nice to me, and I didn’t want to stop. But he was actually worried about me, so I told him. “’cause my dad was a demon.”
“Oh. So that’s what the half-breed shit was about.” I nodded again and dripped tears into my ice. “How’d they know?” he asked.
“My aunt told their moms.”
“Ulthos on a stick. That sucks, kid.” He thought about that for a little while, and told me, “Tell you what. Any time you want to get away from all that bullshit, you come by my place. You can hang with me. C’mon, I’ll show you where it’s at.”
I hung out there a lot until they came to take me to school. Anyway, back to the present, and the Halfor guy not quite pointing guns at us.
“Your taxes are due,” Amnik told him. “Ten for this month, and ten more for last month.”
“I’ve got a note.”
“‘The judge already told me he didn’t give you a note.”
“It’s not from the judge.”
Amnik sighed. “Let’s see it.”
Smirking, the Halfor reached into his shirt and pulled out a folded document. Sure enough, it said that he didn’t have to pay taxes. It could be argued that he didn’t have to pay taxes ever. And it was signed and sealed by the sheik’s governor of this godsforsaken province. The corporal sighed again. “Fine.”
“Do you know a guy named Faha?” I asked.
“Huh?” That was Corporal Amnik.
The Halfor narrowed his eyes at me, suspicious. “Why d’you wanna know?”
“’cause I knew Faha back when. Just curious.”
“He’s not trying to move in on my territory, is he?”
“Far as I know, he’s still back in Sayd-the-city.”
He relaxed. “Okay.” There was a pause. “You all need anything else?”
“I guess not.”
“You’ll be going then.”
“Yeah.” We split. Turns out, if they can’t collect the taxes due, the guards themselves have to come up with the uncollected taxes. We had enough with the coin found under Poor Bitch’s floor to pay the taxes the Halfor didn’t, but sometimes the guards had to dig into their own pockets to come up with it.
The third guy we visited (a shoe and sandal maker) didn’t give us any trouble. We got our ten dinari (where the hell are they getting this kind of money?) and left the shop. Once out in the sort of open again, Amnik looked scared and pulled a folded sheet of parchment out of his tunic. He unfolded it to show a sketch of a man. “This is Luxom,” he explained. “There’s a standing warrant for his arrest. He’s known to frequent a drinking hole around here, so we’re going to go see if he’s there.”
All of the actual guards looked scared too now. Quin and I just looked confused, but Sal looked he knew the name.
In the back of the warehouse market, behind the badly-dug latrines, there’s a set of steps leading further down. There’s a sign over the archway at the bottom of the stairs showing a human ribcage dripping blood. It’s a public house called, imaginatively enough, the Bleeding Rib. Amnik went first, and as soon as he walked in the place, it went absolutely dead silent. There wasn’t even so much as the clunk of a mug on a wooden table. Nothing. Not such a good sign.
Corporal Amnik split us up into two groups – four of the guards in one group, the three of us and the next senior man with the corporal. Every eye in the place watched us as we walked – slowly, hands away from weapons – through the bar. Nobody volunteered any information, of course. It seemed to take forever, but the corporal finally stopped by one table. There was a man sitting at it who looked exactly like the drawing except that the drawing was clean-shaven, and he had a beard. He was the guy we were looking for, and everybody knew it.
“Are you the man known as Luxom?”
“Nope.”
“You do look a lot like the sketch attached with the warrant for his arrest.”
“Ain’t me,” the guy said, sounding bored. He looked at the sketch dangling from the corporal’s hand. “See? This guy can’t be me. I’ve got a beard. He don’t.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Besides. You ain’t looking for Luxom.”
“I’m not?”
“Nope. Guys who go looking for Luxom, they end up dead. You don’t want to end up dead, do ya?”
“Not really.”
“Told ya.” The man who wasn’t Luxom pulled a couple of platinum coins out of his pouch and tucked them into the breast pocket of the corporal’s tunic. “Now why don’t you and your—” his eyes took in me, Sal, and Quin, and narrowed just a bit. “—men go and have a nice drink somewhere that ain’t here.”
It wasn’t a request. We left anyway. When we finally got back outside to the street, everyone started to relax some. I felt exhausted, like I’d just run a mile through loose dry sand. “I could use a drink,” I offered, when I could make my voice work again.
“Yeah.” That was pretty much everybody else, all at the same time. So we went to go find a pub that we weren’t likely to end up dead in. When we got there, Corporal Amnik ordered drinks for the eight of us. His face twisted up with disgust at himself, and pulled out the coins he’d gotten from the man who wasn’t Luxom. And just to be sure, he bit the coin to check it.
Amnik immediately started choking, his eyes bugging out and his tongue turning purple-black and sticking out of his mouth. I touched a hand to him to see if I could figure out what was going on – obviously some kind of poison – and found that his throat had already swollen shut. There was not a damned thing I could do for him. I got a bar rag from the publican and picked up that coin and the one still in his pocket and put them away in a sleeve. They were incredibly dangerous, but I should be able to get rid of the poison.
It takes more than five minutes for a man to die from asphyxiation like that. His face was black by the time he finally stopped kicking.
We weren’t really in the mood for drinking just then – everyone was pretty spooked, including the publican. So we gathered up Corporal Amnik’s body and went back to the guard house. When we got there, a judge – the same one I met at Ahmed and Cinta’s dress shop – was interrogating the poor bitch threadseller and his wife, the only occupants of the big cell at the guard house.
“Where did you get the money? It’s not a difficult question.” A pained look washed across the judge’s face – like a teacher facing a not-very-bright student. “And why did you hold back from us?”
Poor Bitch mumbled something unintelligible.
“Answer—” The judge broke off when he noticed us carrying Corporal Amnik’s body. “What happened to him?”
“Poison, your honor.”
I pulled the poisoned coins out from my sleeve and showed them. “He bit one to test it and it made his throat swell shut,” I explained.
“Damn.” The judge closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “He’ll have to go to the Bathhouse, then. You there,” he said to the next most senior man. “You’ve just been promoted to corporal.”
I don’t remember exactly what order the next few things happened in. I was pretty shook up by Amnik’s death (another one you couldn’t save! useless girl taunts the voice in the back of my head) and what came next. The judge went back to interrogating Poor Bitch – he was actually very good at it – and finally got him to say that a person called Otaan had given him the money. The judge tried asking more about this Otaan individual when his wife bugged right the fuck out and dropped the nice human woman disguise. Poor Bitch’s wife was a godsdamned bog hag, and she broke out of her manacles and kicked Poor Bitch in the back of the head. I have no idea what had forced or enticed her to leave her bog. The desert isn’t such a great place for them.
I’m pretty sure he was dead then, but a couple of the guards ran into the cell to try to get her off him. Bad idea. They were down in a matter of heartbeats, but one of them wasn’t dead yet. I slammed the door shut. Pulled the knife from my belt and cut my hand (deeper than I meant, but the more blood, the better) to draw a blood ward across the front of the cell. Virgin blood works great for this sort of thing. I might have to borrow Quin’s when mine doesn’t qualify any more.
The hag was pissed and threatened all of us with bloody painful messy death. I wasn’t too impressed – the harpies in the desert were way better at the cursing. Besides, she didn’t try my ward more than once.
Sal picked up a crossbow from the weapons rack and got ready to shoot the thing and ‘this is a super bad idea’ alarm bells went off in the back of my head. “Don’t break my ward,” I told him. I still don’t know what I was thinking, or why it felt like such a bad idea. After a bit I realized my ward would hold only until sunset, and it would be a good idea to make sure the thing was dead by then. So Sal shot at her. Too damned fast, she pulled the guard she was holding up and used him as a shield. The crossbow bolt went into his forehead up to the flights. The guards got the long spears out and hacked her into pieces with them. It didn’t take long.
I think Sal left about then and flew back – he can turn himself into a condor which was kind of neat – to school to get Father Iyr. I do not know how they got back so quickly, but I would give much to know how he did the instant travel thing. We gave him a short version of what’d happened, and showed him the coins.
He put one of them in his mouth and sucked on it like it was candy. “Tangy,” he said. “Iocaine powder. (Or something. I didn’t catch the exact name.) Very fast, very lethal, and very rare. Your corporal had no chance.” Then he sucked the other coin clean and tucked them both away in a pouch. I tried not to look too irritated by that. And he left, doing that disappearing thing again.
I wanted to talk with the judge, but he had something to do, and we had to get the bodies to the Bathhouse and pick up some new recruits from the academy. So I made an arrangement to talk with him later.
We said goodbye to Corporal Amnik, Farouk, and Mahmoud and got out of the Bathhouse as fast as was proper. It’s very not nice in there. Then we went over to the first district where the academy was to collect the new guys. I thought we wouldn’t be the FNGs any more, but we still are. Even though the new guys are new, they’ve been through the academy and we haven’t.
Our shift was pretty much over by the time we finished all that so we went back to the guard house, took off our tunics, and put up our spears.
When we got to Acolyte Telfor’s house, Pirin and Elian were there cleaning up. They grumbled at us for being late and making them late for their shift. Quin said something that made Elian walk over and slap her, and she hit him but good. A bruise bloomed dark on his face almost instantly. I don’t think anyone’s hit him before, ever. She told him that if he hit any woman again, ever, she’d hit him back for them. I’d be pissed if she did that with me. I can take care of my own hitting back, thanks.
Besides, we’re not really women. We’re wielders. Different rules apply.
Anyway, Pirin and Elian left for guard duty. I was tired – fucking exhausted, more like – and figured now would be a good time to practice the air-sprite calling cantrip that Telfor taught me. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it worked much better than I expected. Sort of. An air spirit did in fact arrive, bound to perform a task, but this was a serious storm-spirit, almost an elemental, and it was Not Happy.
“What is the task?” it demanded.
“I wanted help in cleaning the dust out of this house.”
“It will be done.”
The air spirit turned into a fucking cyclone and used that to suck all the dust out of the entire house and up the chimney, almost taking the three of us with it. It also sucked out most of the air. When it stopped and the air rushed back in, Quin wasn’t prepared for it and it blew out her eardrums. I was able to fix that for her, but it was some scary.
I really, really, really hope tomorrow isn’t as exciting as today was. I don’t know if I could survive it. Right now I just want to curl up with Felicitation (with cinta with cinta with cinta murmurs the voice) and sleep for a week. Morning’s going to come entirely too early.
~`~
I talked with the judge. I told him that it was purely coincidence that I’d been in Ahmed’s shop that day, and he seemed to believe me. Which is good, ’cause it’s true. There’s a lot more going on than I knew about – there’s a lot of gold turning up in the warehouse market, and nobody knows where it’s coming from or where it’s going. The judge is trying to put some pressure on that by taking the gold out in the form of taxes. He’s only recently started, so it hasn’t had a lot of effect yet, but I can very much understand his concern.He asked me about what I’d done to find the gold under Poor Dead Bitch’s floor. Could I do it again? Did I have to be there to be able to?Yes, I could do it again. I didn’t have to be in the market to do it – I could do it from right there in his office.
So he asked me to do some Knowings for him, Seeing if certain things were where they were supposed to be, describing other things in detail, stuff like that. He was testing me. Of course he was testing me. In his place, I’d test me too. But it seemed like he got to trust that I could Know accurately and that I’d tell him what I Knew.
I’d done some Knowings for myself earlier. I wanted to see if Ahmed was hiding gold anywhere in his shop. There was some in the back of the shop where he and Cinta slept, but the gold there was a set of gold sewing needles that were clearly much loved. Not what I was looking for. Just beyond the edge of my focus was something big though – there was a lot of gold somewhere near Ahmed’s shop, but I couldn’t narrow it down any more than that.
The second knowing was… The paranoid voice wanted to know if Cinta was actually human or another disguised bog hag or something horrible. I felt guilty for thinking it, and for giving in and checking, but…
I was too narrow in my focus when I was Knowing her. Instead of Cinta, I touched her baby, just brushing against its young, growing mind. For a few moments I could feel its emotions: warm, dark, safe. And for a moment it became aware of me, of what I was doing, and responded somehow. I pulled back and it went back to sleep. Moving my awareness, I looked at Cinta and was caught in the love she had for her baby. It didn’t matter how it had happened or who the father was, she loved it completely and utterly and unconditionally.
I came out of my trance to find myself weeping. Not crying, weeping. I curled up around myself, around the rage and despair and the loneliness and the godsdamned fucking emptiness that was all there was in the middle of me. I wanted so badly to love someone that much. For someone to love me that much.
I still want it. And I want her. There’s a place in my soul that she just seems to fit into. I want her to be safe, to be happy, to be healthy, to be able to raise her child into a strong woman or man. (I don’t know if the baby is a boy or a girl, I didn’t look.). I want to just be with her so I can be whole. When I think about her, I can see us kissing, but not more than that – not until the baby comes, anyway.
Is this what love feels like? It hurts terribly and I never, ever want it to stop.
I told the judge about the gold near the dress shop and the lack of it actually within the shop, and he told me that he’d reduce their taxes to what they were before all this gold mess started. He really is just trying to find out what’s going on with the gold, not to tax them all into poverty and the slave auctions. And he wants me to tell Ahmed about his taxes soon, and for him to keep his mouth shut about it.
I feel good about that. It’s been like I’ve fallen into a moral sewer since the judge walked into Ahmed’s dress shop and I managed to do something genuinely good anyway. The traitor optimist part of my mind keeps giving me visions of a very grateful Cinta, but the more realistic parts of me know it’s not likely to happen. Most women like men, just as most men like women. Those of us who like the same sex (or both) are not exactly rare, but not common either.
I’ve been rehearsing this in my head. The Ahmed’s taxes part is easy. I can do that. But Cinta… I have to find out what she wants. I don’t think I could get the judge to marry her if he didn’t want to, but I could probably ask him not to if she doesn’t want that. Does she want him for a husband? I need to know, and I’m terrified of what will happen when I find out.
Whatever it turns out to be, it’s probably not going to be like my fantasies. But still. Dear Twins above, I want to kiss her. To feel her small soft warm hands in mine. I want to hear her tell me she loves me.
Crying again, damn it. I have to stop this – it’s not making just me miserable. Felicitation feels what’s going on and it has her really upset that she can’t make it stop. Maybe I’ll feel better if I eat something and get some sleep.