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Authors: Gaie Sebold

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy

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BOOK: Babylon Steel
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But we didn’t think, or look, beyond it. We were Tiresans. Tiresans didn’t look outwards. And Tiresans didn’t leave.

As well as Kyrl, there were two other guards. Radan was fiftyish, stocky and quiet. Had a wife he didn’t get on so well with, but still cared for; him travelling suited them both. Then there was Sesh. He was in his twenties, rangy and restless. A real storyteller; he could have made a living in the marketplace if he fancied. I fell for him, of course, but he wasn’t having any of it. He treated me like a younger sister – teased me half to death and threatened to bloody the nose of any man who looked at me in a way he didn’t like.

Kyrl was a little over fond of those dice. Ten days after she got her wages they were gone, though sometimes she won, then she’d buy everyone treats. It wasn’t the money she wanted, it was the game. Had a tongue sharper than her blade when the mood took her, but she always watched your back. Funny, too, in an acid sort of way. “If you need a six, you’ll probably get a three. Life’s mostly threes, but you got to play, or what’s the point?” She was always going to have her tarot read, but if she didn’t like what she heard – and she often didn’t – she’d ignore it.

They were my first real family.

Cold early morning, running through a rocky pass, raiders skittering out of the rocks like crabs. The guards up and cursing, a raider trying to crawl onto the wagon. I hit him with the kettle, hard as I could. Smashed his nose; I was startled at the blood, so much. But there was a satisfaction in it. Not in the blood, but because I’d helped. He toppled off the wagon and it gave the others time to deal with him.

Radan slapping me on the back and saying that if I was that good with a kettle maybe I should try a sword.

And, again, I said, “Yes, please.”

Radan tried to take it back at first; he was afraid I’d get hurt. But once he saw I wasn’t going to give up, he made it his business to teach me properly. I got used to being hauled out of the wagon in the cool of the day, given rags to wrap around my hands and worked until I could hardly stand. He was patient, Radan, but he wasn’t beyond slapping me with the flat of his blade if I did something stupid. The first time he did it I was shocked, because I thought he was my friend; I stared at him with tears starting in my eyes.

“You know why I did that, Ebi?” he said.

I shook my head.

“I did it because you make that mistake in a real fight and you’re likely to die. I’d rather have you bruised and alive. Yes?”

I got it.

I wondered, later, if I meant something to him – not as a lover, but as a child. He didn’t talk about his family much, but the little I heard, he’d only the one son, who he saw even less than he saw his wife. But at the time, I just took whatever training he was willing to give me, feeling ready to leap mountains whenever he said I’d done well.

Being on the road, we were seldom at a temple in time for the major ceremonies. But Kyrl always muttered a prayer to Hap-Canae before she shook the dice; the sun-god had jurisdiction over gold, and profit. Sesh had a fondness for Babaska, inevitably, since he spent a lot of time visiting whores, and Radan would stop now and then at one of Meisheté’s shrines, to leave a gift, and ask that she watch over his family.

I laid some of my few coins on Shakanti’s altar. Though it was Kyrl who’d got me away from the master, I thought I had better lay tribute, in case the goddess had had a hand in it too.

As we travelled I became a little, a very little, less ignorant, and discovered I had, for some things, a good memory. I heard a storyteller in one of the towns, telling some gaudy old tale of tricksy genies, of burning gems and green-haired crones and princesses locked in towers. (We had no princesses anymore – the last of the old royal line had died out years ago, perhaps of ruined pride, as the temples took control.)

The next day, Sesh was muttering to himself, trying to remember the story, to impress some girl, I’ve no doubt – I corrected him, and found I could remember it almost word for word.

It was the rhythm and the weft of the speech that did it. Conversations I could keep in my head only a little better than most; but anything with rhyme or rhythm, given it was short, I could recall pretty well after one hearing. Not that it aided me much with music; I sang like a frog.

One night we met up at an oasis with another caravan, and pooled food and stories. I ended up sitting at a fire with some men who teased and flattered and kept topping up my goblet with drink, and it was only because Kyrl had lost early that she wandered over and spotted them manoeuvring me away from the firelight, and me, drunk as all-get-out, innocently going with them.

She got me away, and next day explained, while I groaned and held my head, why it was a bad idea for a fifteen-year-old girl to get drunk with strangers. I was ready for experience, but no-one needs that sort of introduction.

The next trip out I was able to return the favour, when someone took badly to losing to Kyrl and decided to wait in an alley with a knife. I was the sober one, this time. I didn’t kill him, but I put him off.

I learned how to tell a slimy merchant from an honest one, at least some of the time, how to replace a broken wheel and how to doctor a sandmule. They’re mostly tough as boiled leather, but those great folding ears that they wrap around their heads during sandstorms are prone to mites and rips, and they’ll eat anything. Sometimes to their regret, not to mention that of the poor sod who has to try and get a potion down the bloody animal to cleanse its stomach.

We saw some sights. The whistling desert where the wind sings in the dunes like a lost soul, melancholy but not frightening; at night, lying in the wagon and listening, you could almost swear you heard words in the sound. The Ghata Mai, a huddle of pillars of pinkish sandstone. Kyrl told me they were said to be the ghosts of some desert tribesmen who’d raped one of Shakanti’s priestesses and been turned to stone by Shakanti in vengeance.

Once we were waiting for a ferry when we saw a boat attacked by two messehwhy, the great river-dwelling lizards that are one of Tiresana’s less appealing features. One of the two men aboard, wearing nothing but short linen trousers, got pitched into the river; we thought he was done, but he came up riding one beast’s neck, his arms clamped around its jaw. The other, sweating in his armour, was still trying to turn the boat, and fell, and the other beast bit right through him, armour and all. I wondered, after, what it made of such a thing; like trying to eat a thick-skinned fruit, I suppose.

I spoke with the survivor – he’d been hauled off the beast and onto the ferry, which was too big even for them to bite. He was fairly drunk by then, half celebrating that he’d survived, and half mourning for his friend, but he told me how to jab at a messeh’s eyes, and how their jaws, although they could crush stone when closing, were weak the other way

if you could hold them shut, they couldn’t have you. “Mind you,” he said, grinning, “once you’ve grabbed its jaw, come there’s no help to hand, you have to work out what to do after that, unless you’re going to ride the thing until you both die of old age. And they live a long time.” Then he remembered his friend, and got melancholy again.

As we travelled, I realised that not all the stories about the old days were people gilding the past. The desert
had
grown. Sometimes we passed a place with roof peaks showing forlorn above the sand, where a village had been swallowed alive. Sesh told me that there were whole towns buried under the dunes; his parents had lived in one, clinging on until the desert was knocking on their doors. Such places always left me cold, thinking of rooms that had been full of people and voices, choked now with silent sand.

I ended up staying with the caravans for two years.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

 

T
HE EVENING LOST
its grey-blue sheen and turned into a carnival of lights. The soft glow of the streetlights, a flare of witchfire, the distinctive lanterns of every kind of shop, chop-house, tavern, theatre... even in the less lively areas, what with two moons on a clear night and the portals lighting up the horizon, the city rarely gets truly dark.

I couldn’t get Fain out of my head. If I didn’t know better I’d think he had a charisma glamour on him, but he didn’t need one.

I’d encountered charisma glamours – actors use them a lot if they can afford it, and so do some of the more expensive whores – and to me they always have that slight artificiality, a sort of tang of metal. I don’t like them. I think they distance you from whoever you’re with, and that’s not what my business is about.

Though, of course, for some in my profession, anything that helps them keep their distance, whether it’s glamours, drink, or narcotics like cloud, is the only way to survive. They’re in the wrong job, of course, but they don’t always have a choice about it. Some have to do it for money, some get dragged in. That was only one of the things that might happen to Enthemmerlee.

I just hoped she was brighter than I’d been at her age.

Near the square, the city is at its most beautiful. Great sweeping boulevards, surrounded by tiny winding streets barely wide enough for two riders to pass each other. The old Church of the Glorification, deep green picked out in gold and bronze; the Sleeping Garden with its statues and pale, night-scented flowers, glowing moths dipping and fluttering among them; expensive little shops like dragons’ caves of treasure; jewellery and fine weaponry, gowns and crystal and alchemical instruments gleaming in the lamplight.

But as I moved south into the district called King of Stone, I left all that behind. Fewer lamps, the streets even more narrow, rats and worse than rats shuffling and scratching in the alleys. I kept a hand on my hilt and my eyes open.

From the dank mouth of an alley I caught a glimmer of light. Something in the darkness was breathing heavily. I turned fast, and caught a powerful whiff of perfume mixed with alcohol fumes.

“Babylon-baba! Where you been to?”

“Glinchen?”

Glinchen swayed out of the shadows, clapping one set of hands and reaching out with the other pair, jangling a dozen bangles. Several embroidered silk shawls draped massive shoulders, thick black and scarlet curls tumbled, vast cleavage acted as a display shelf for row upon row of glittering beads.

Glinchen is one of the freelancers, and a Barraklé. Not unlike a human above the waist, not dissimilar to a sort of giant furry caterpillar below, with four arms, four breasts and more than enough of other things as well, apparently. Barraklé are hermaphroditic.

Which in Glinchen’s case is the least of hir problems.

I allowed myself to be drawn into a squashy hug.

“Glinchen, what are you doing down here? This isn’t a good beat.”

Glinchen shrugged, causing a cleavage earthquake. “Girl needs a change of scene, sometimes.”

“No-one needs this scene,” I said, hopping out of the way of a trickle of sewage that chose that moment to appear from a side street and aim for my boots.

“So what you down here for, honeysweet? Not your beat, neither.”

“I need to talk to some people. There’s a girl who’s disappeared.” I got the picture out and moved under a guttering lantern some shopkeeper had hung out. “She was at the Hall of Mirrors, with her family. Ask around, will you?”

Glinchen peered at the picture. “Sounds like she in trouble, poor little honeychick. Hokay, I ask.”

“You heard about the girl in Ropemaker’s Row?”

“Yes, I hear. Bastards.”

“You be careful, all right?”

Glinchen sniffed. “Hah. Don’t worry about Glinchen, sweetie.” Ze waved a hand at the rolls of flesh under the gowns and shawls. “Anyone try that with Glinchen, I just squaaaash him.” Ze laughed again and undulated off down the alley, waving. “You be good, Babylon.”

I shook my head and made for the Break of Dawn.

It crouched in its alley like a sick toad, dingy yellow light just about managing to crawl through the windows. I didn’t go in through the front; there’s a dartboard on the back of the door. I ducked in through the back.

Carefully.

The place was fairly quiet: a few figures murmuring in corners, a card game or two. I looked around, and spotted a comatose figure in a ragged brown robe. Mokraine. Good, I needed to talk to him. His familiar, unfortunately, was with him; it never left.

Imagine a cold fog mixed with the soil of an unmourned grave, pressed into the shape of a large dog crossed with a three-legged toad. It had three blood-coloured eyes in a triangle above the place where its mouth would be, if it had one. I feel about that familiar almost the way I feel about beetles.

I could sense eyes on me, from under hoods, from people who were apparently concentrating on their cards, from the corners where it didn’t look as though anyone was sitting. Bodesh, the landlord, looked up at me, nodded, and had a glass of Devantish golden on the bar by the time I got there.

Golden’s my favourite spirit. The cheap stuff strips skin off your throat, but Devantish isn’t cheap. Or common. I don’t come in here that often, but I reckon if it’d been a century since I last walked into the Break, Bodesh’d remember what I drank.

“Thanks. And another, please.”

He nodded. Whatever Bodesh is, he’s the only one of it I’ve ever met. He’s thin and bald, with skin like glossy red leather. He has eyes like dark mirrors, and always looks sick, but that may just be his face. He probably wouldn’t tell me anything; he doesn’t talk about what he hears. If he did, he’d be dead in an hour. He’s not one of my customers either; where he gets his jollies, I have no idea. Rumour has it he sleeps with his gold, like a dragon.

“Heard there were some ructions in the Hall of Mirrors today,” I said.

Bodesh shrugged. “Too rich for my blood.”

“Girl disappeared, too.” I showed him the portrait.

BOOK: Babylon Steel
11.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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