Babylon Steel (8 page)

“Idiots,” I said.

“True.”

“You tell the militia?”

“What’s point?” he said. “No head broken, why they care? You tell them about girl?”

“Not yet. I’m sorry, Kittack. I didn’t mean anything, you know? I didn’t know, about the stories.”

“S’okay.”

I stood up. “I got a few more people to talk to. You take care, all right?”

“You better tell Bitternut about girl. Otherwise he think you don’t love him no more.” He grinned, all teeth. “When you going to get smart?”

“Lay off, or I won’t let you in next time you come calling.”

“Then I waste away, turn into little shrivelled up lizard, you wear me for brooch.”

“Like you can’t get bouncy anywhere else. I like your new barmaid.”

He hissed a laugh. “No bouncy there. She cheek me, not know her place. Also she like girls. Also can break my arm. Too many tough women; what’s a poor guy to do?”

“You could visit the Twins, you might get a taste for it.”

He gave a theatrical shiver, his tail whipping over the stone. “Pain for fun? Not
this
lizard. You mammals are
weird
.”

TIRESANA

A
S WE APPROACHED,
with the lesser barges and the trade-boats scuttling out of our way, I caught my first glimpse of the great statues, hundreds of feet high. They were seated rigidly on their thrones, staring out across the desert. Hap-Canae, Meisheté, Aka-Tete, Shakanti, Rohikanta, Lohiria, Mihiria. Babaska. Eight statues, eight gods.

The statues were older than anyone remembered; they’d been made of some hard red stone that wore well, but even so, their faces were fading and blurring. Behind them, the walls stretched out to either side. “Is that Akran?” I asked. “I didn’t know it had walls.”

Hap-Canae smiled. “Oh, no, that’s not the city. That is just the temple.”

I gaped. How huge could it be?

“See how the people love their Avatars?” Hap-Canae said. “Now, it is very dusty. Here.” He whisked a scarf of fine white gauze about my head and face. “We will go in the side entrance; the precinct is sure to be crowded.”

We anchored at the jetty and I was led, shrouded like the dead, through an ancient side-gate, its thick carved wood silver with age.

I barely glimpsed the precinct before Hap-Canae ushered me inside, and up a set of stairs. All the servants were left behind.

I was slightly breathless by the time he finally paused at a window, looking down on the precinct, and I did likewise, and stood, gaping.

The walls were no deception. The Temple of All the Gods was the size of a town: the very courtyard was so huge the gods all had their own separate temples within it, lined up along the walls. One so white it hurt and all agleam inside with silver, one blood-red, one bright with gold, a gold sunburst mounted above the roof. I had never seen anything so astonishing, and only remembered to close my mouth when I breathed dust and started to cough.

“That,” Hap-Canae said, pointing, “is the temple of Babaska.”

It was of rich purplish stone, polished to a gleam. Inside I could see a statue, in white, ten feet high. Babaska. Hand on sword, her skirt kilted up and her hair bound back for fighting, smiling. There must have been a ceremony or a festival; the steps and altar were all draped in scarlet flowers, wilting now. I wondered what the festival had been and realised, nervously, how little I still knew about the ceremonies of the goddess I was supposed to serve.

The place was all a-bustle, priests of all sexes, acolytes and lay servants scurrying across its expanse like so many white-clad ants and disappearing into the cool shadows. Guards, very fine with their shields and spears polished bright, stood like statues.

“Come now,” Hap-Canae said, and led me on down the corridors, with their silent painted processions of offering-bearers and sacrifices.

We went down more steps into the great mass of buildings behind the main temples, opposite the front gates. In and further in, to what was known as the Inner Temple, the oldest part, from which the rest had grown out over the centuries. It lay within the greater temple like a hidden drawer in a jewellery box, a place to keep secrets.

“Hap-Canae,” someone said. “So, finally, you’ve made your choice?”

A woman with bone-white skin and silver hair that swept around her like a cloak was standing in the doorway ahead of us. She wore black gauze, through which her body showed like the moon through clouds; she was as tall as the Avatar Hap-Canae, and had the same devastating glow; and she frightened the life out of me.

That was the first time I saw the Avatar Shakanti. She looked at me as though wondering if I were ever likely to become worth her notice, then shrugged, and turned away into the room.

It was a cool white room with a blue tiled floor. There, seated on the benches or lounging on cushions on the floor, I saw the other girls. “These are your rivals,” the Avatar Hap-Canae said.

“Rivals?”

“Why, yes.” He laughed, that rich gold laugh, his hand resting on my shoulder. The Avatar Shakanti glared at him. “You would like to be a High Priestess of Babaska in a temple like this, would you not, rather than some miserable province, where the temple is of dried mud?”

I could hear the laughter still bubbling under his voice, but I didn’t understand it, not then.

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
CALENTINE HAS ALWAYS
been a city of mixtures. It’s a
planar conjunction,
for the All’s sake
.
We link to seven planes permanently, and new portals pop open every now and then, more of them during Twomoon. Some of them only spit out a handful of wanderers before they close again. In some unfortunate cases, all we get is, well, bits; some portals close fast.

Scalentine is a city surrounded by a few miles of farmland and forest, but after that, there’s... nothing. A wall of air. Sometimes you see things in it, patterns, swirling, sometimes... other things. Watching it for too long can be addictive, and doesn’t tend to be healthy.

We’re a small plane; a sort of bubble caught between portals. Some say the whole plane is no natural thing, but something built. But who built it, or for what purpose, well, there are as many theories as there are students of the Arcane, not to mention people who’ve had a few too many drinks.

And there are those who think Scalentine was made for
them,
and no-one else should be allowed in.

But we get people from everywhere
.
Planes, and worlds within planes, and races within worlds, and tribes within races. We have Fey and humans, fauns and Ikinchli. We have people with tusks, people with fur, we have Barraklé and Edleskasin and even Monishish or Dra-ay from the Perindi Empire. Hells, there are at least thirty known races within the Perindi Empire alone, and half of them seem to end up here.

No-one knows who the original builders of the city were, or what they looked like. If there
were
builders. The city feels so alive, sometimes I think it just set itself here, and waited for people to start arriving, to fill its lungs with breath and its veins with blood.

I headed to the Hall of Mirrors. It looked spectacular, as always. Its dome is a fine framework of black-painted iron, lacing together panes of multicoloured glass; by day it’s pretty enough, but at night, with all the light spilling out, it looks like a giant coloured lantern. (If you’re of a cynical turn, of course, it’s more reminiscent of one of those deep-ocean fish I’ve heard of, that uses pretty lights to lure its prey).

The smell of expensive perfumes, the subdued notes of a small orchestra, and the discreet murmur of a great deal of money changing hands greeted me as I went in, and looked up, like I always do. I had a drunken conversation with a friend once who suggested the panes of glass are in a mystic pattern which hypnotises people into spending money. We had just been on a bit of a spree, admittedly, but I think he was wrong. Although the first thing I saw when I dropped my gaze was Bannerman’s, and his window display got me, like it always does, dammit.

I told myself I wasn’t here to shop, but I did go over for one quick look. Okay, there wasn’t anything there I actually needed, but it was all so shiny. And I was pretty sure the centrepiece was a Gillalune. Elegant, gorgeous, just the thing for day or evening wear... but I really, really didn’t need another sword, and I couldn’t afford a Gillalune anyway. I was still there, trying not to drool too obviously, when I heard my name being called.

“Hey, Chief,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He strolled over, saw what I was looking at, and whistled. “Splashing out?”

“That wouldn’t be a splash, that would be a flood.”

We both looked at the window for a bit longer, and Bitternut sighed. “Beautiful.”

“You think it’s a Gillalune?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said. “Look at that wave-pattern on the blade. Bet it sings like a bird.”

“Yep. You got time for spice tea? I need to talk to you about something.”

He gave a quick glance around. “Looks quiet enough, so long as we stay on the square, but I can’t stop long.”

We settled ourselves at the only café where we could both fit our legs under the table.

“So how are you?” I said.

“Crazed. Carnival opened last night.”

“Ah.”

Carnival’s a portal. There are seven permanent or near-permanent portals. Four are fixed ones that always open onto the same planes. Portal Bealach is the biggest, our main trade route. It links to a spot on the border between the Perindi Empire and the Flame Republic (lot of work for the Diplomatic section). Portal Eventide links to the Fey lands; Throat Portal links to a plane that seems to be mostly ice, darkness, and brutally ferocious beasts, but also contains several powerful if not very appealing countries (more diplomacy); and Portal Spirita, which is an anomaly – it’s a permanent portal, but the plane on the other side changes. Very little comes through Spirita, and what does is strange. Stranger, that is, than what comes through the others. Lunatic travellers, self-proclaimed saviours, victims of obscure curses and scholars of lost tongues.

The other portals seem to open up almost at random, but they all have a feel, or a mood, if you like. There’s Crowns, through which we get generals without their armies, weapons-makers, runaway heirs to distant thrones, royal retinues, escaped slaves (that’s where Flower came through), wandering bureaucrats, occasional legions that walked into a mist somewhere and turned up here. There’s Nightwind, not far from where we were sitting. Through Nightwind come refugees from horrors: lost souls, sick gods whose powers have gone, lone wanderers from dying planes. The haunting and the haunted.

And through Carnival we can get
anything.
Any time. With the other unfixed portals there’s apparently some sort of pattern about when they open and what plane they link to (not to me, but then I don’t study the Arcane; I just live with it). But not Carnival. No wizard, alchemist, or Doctor of Obscure Magicks has ever worked out why it decides to open, or when, or for how long, or what plane it might be connected to when it does, but whatever comes through is pretty certain to be, well, colourful.

Sometimes literally. We had streams of tiny, rainbow-coloured birds no bigger than my thumb come through once; thousands of them, for about two hours. They flew all over the city. Oddest thing, they were completely silent. Not a twitter or cheep. Most of them died within hours, littering the streets with sad limp little heaps of bright feathers. I’ve heard rumours that a few survive in the houses of the very rich. I wonder about them, sometimes, and what it was like where they came from, and why they never sang.

“What’d we get this time?” I asked.

“A bunch of six-foot, four-armed...
things.
Look like insects, unless it’s some kind of fancy armour, and carrying something we thought was weaponry but could be cutlery for all I know. Anyway it got confiscated, which they didn’t like. Eighteen ornery green pack-animals with blue teeth, which they don’t mind using” – he rolled up his sleeve to show me the bruise – “and a gold teapot. That came through on its own, half an hour after everything else.” He grinned. “’Course, we had a rookie, went straight for it. Should have seen him jump when the whole room yelled ‘
Don’t rub that!
’”

I laughed, although it wasn’t funny last time someone released a genie here. They’re not exactly gods, but some of them have a fair amount of oomph, more than most beings of power do when they get here. Scalentine has some kind of damping effect on magic; it’s why Laney can only do minor spells. I’ve always wondered, with genies, if it’s something to do with coming through in a container; being sealed up keeps it preserved, like jam.

Jam doesn’t usually come leaping out of the jar threatening to rend all and sundry to splinters, though. Still, if I’d been stuck in a pot for a couple of centuries I reckon I’d be a bit peeved, too. They ended up calling me in to help calm him down, which was... interesting. Fun, too, but he took a
lot
of calming. I had to take the next two days off.

“So,” the Chief said, “we’ve got a couple wizards checking it over.”

“Busy night.”

“That wasn’t even all of it.”

“Seriously? What else?”

“Got a call to a Barraklé pie-shop. Newcomers, you know? Only just bought the place. Some idiot painted slogans, broke their windows and tried to set a fire spell. Don’t know who he bought it off, but we caught him because he was sitting on the pavement staring at the place where his fingers used to be.”

“How terribly sad.”

“Isn’t it? I mean, there he was, innocently trying to set fire to a shop that still had people in it, and he loses his fingers. Felt for him no end.”

“Human?”

“Yep.”

“Sometimes I’m ashamed to be the same race.”

The Chief shrugged. “Why should you be? Idiots come in all species. I think someone from every race in Scalentine’s been hauled into the Barracks since I joined.”