Blackdog (25 page)

A bell in a nearby tower tolled three times. People stopped talking and looked around before conversation resumed, in a more urgent buzz.

“What was that?”

“It didn't sound like an alarm.” Attavaia shrugged. “Anyway, I didn't have any better luck than you. We should have come six months ago, before he bribed the sept-chiefs. And I think someone tried to follow me.”

“I was followed for a while, too. Not by a good-looking man, sadly, but still…”

Attavaia dropped the skewer on the food-seller's brazier, sending up a puff of smoke, and handed back the crooked teacup, moving further from the brazier. “Was it a Serakallashi woman about our age?”

“And not even a good-looking one.”

“Enni!”

“Just trying to see if you can still smile.”

Attavaia ran her eye over the market crowd. Serakallashi, their cheeks tattooed with horses, some so strangely stylized it was hard to see that they were, until you knew. Strangers, tattooed and unmarked, mostly wearing calf-length coats, mostly the varied browns of camels and Red Desert dust. They were probably caravan-mercenaries or merchants’ guards, but they could just as easily be Tamghat's folk.

“Next time we come, we should dress like caravan-mercenaries, coat and boots, to make ourselves invisible. Maybe then someone will sell to us. We can say we're some merchant's retainers.”

The dark full skirts and the fringed shawls of mountain village women were ordinary and inoffensive. But mountain folk, and women in particular, did not often leave their valleys.

If they did, she would have known better how to pass unnoticed in the lowlands.

“The one following me was a Serakallashi woman,” Enneas confirmed. “Tall and skinny. A girl, really. But I shook her off somewhere on the caravanserai ridge.”

“She had a turquoise stud in the side of her nose?”

Enneas nodded.

“The same person who followed me, then.”

“That's not good. I went to the spring and said a prayer.” Enneas shrugged. “We'll see if Sera heard.”

“What did you pray for?” Attavaia asked, wondering if she ought to suggest they shouldn't be praying to other goddesses, even knowing their own was well out of earshot.

“A bit of friendly help, is all. Like maybe that the woman following me would stay lost till we were out of town.”

“Do you suppose Sera would listen? I haven't found the lowlanders over-friendly, so far.”

“Hells, look there.” Enneas twitched her head, directing Attavaia's eye across the market. Near where a Red Desert potter had laid out his bright wares on a contrasting black blanket, a half-dozen Grasslanders gathered, coming from two different directions, talking urgently among themselves. “Those aren't caravaneers.”

“Tamghat's.” Attavaia bit her lip. “At least one
noekar
—that woman with the cult-scarred cheeks? I've seen her in town. She's one of his vassals.”

“Looking for us?” Enneas's voice went shrill on the words. She swallowed. “That woman…he must have spies here.”

“Don't look, don't make any sudden moves to catch their eye.”

They were not the only ones made nervous. The potter scowled. A few Serakallashi who looked like someone's armed retainers themselves joined the Grasslanders, as if by prior arrangement. The potter began packing up, threading cord through the handles, fastening festoons of pots and jugs to the camel which knelt beside him, chewing its cud. The camel rose like a small, ungainly mountain, unfolding itself in a succession of jerks, and the potter led it away. As it passed in front of the mercenaries, screening them from sight, Attavaia looped her arm through Enneas's and headed for the nearest narrow street.

Though the crowd was thinning out, others were heading into the square as though anticipating something. A girl with a silk scarf over her head pushed past them, arguing with a slightly older woman in a cameleer's coat, who wore a sabre on a baldric.

“I just want to hear what Silly Siyd's going to say.”

“Your father'll have my head if things turn nasty and you're in it.”

“But it's important to know what…”

“Something's got them stirred up,” Enneas murmured. “Should we go back to find out what? Doesn't seem like it's anything to do with us after all.”

Attavaia was acutely aware of the weight bound around her middle, which made her look several months gone in pregnancy. The long roll, carefully sewn and padded, held several pounds of the best spiderweb turquoise.

“No,” she said. “We don't want to catch their eye. Remember my condition.”

“Heh, yes. It definitely gives a girl a glow, just like they say.”

“That's carrying all this extra weight in the lowland air.”

“But what are we going to do?” Enneas asked. “I even asked about scrap iron at a forge. They nearly set the dogs on me.”

“Do without,” Attavaia said. “Cut bamboo in the lower valleys, do what we can with that. When the time comes we should have a little warning. We can reforge or recast tools, if the villagers will give them up.”

“If,” said Enneas gloomily. She freed her arm from Attavaia's, sliding a hand into the folds of her skirt, through the ripped seam to reach the long dagger strapped to her thigh. “There's the woman who was following me, the thin one with the hooked nose.”

“I see her.”

She was the same one Attavaia had noticed a time or two, sauntering behind, talking to those with whom she had just spoken. The Serakallashi woman was dressed like the caravan-mercenaries, her coat striped in dun and white, with a cotton scarf loose about her neck and a square felt hat in the Marakander style over her swinging braids. No sword or sabre, but undoubtedly a knife or two in those pockets. She strolled their way, suddenly unavoidable.

“Enni, isn't it?” she asked with tensely false cheer. “And ‘Vaia? Let's go.”

“Where?” Attavaia demanded.

The woman turned a thin smile on her. “To meet someone who might have what you're looking to buy, but you've got to come right now.”

Attavaia and Enneas eyed one another, while the woman rocked on her heels.

“Now,” she repeated, a bit less cheerfully, her gaze straying over their shoulders. “Because, you know, there are Sevani guards, men belonging to one of the Lake-Lord's lapdogs, out looking for a pair of mountain women right now. They think Tamghat's people might be interested in them, ‘specially as they were talking to merchants about buying spearheads and the like. Tamghat's people are playing bodyguards for Siyd Rostvadim at the moment but I expect they'll take an interest once the great announcement is over with, whatever it is.”

“What great announcement?”

“Didn't you hear the bell? The chiefs are going to speak. But since there's been no council meeting, it'll just be the chiefs of the town septs, and probably just Silly Siyd Rostvadim. Going to listen might conceivably be a more valuable use of my time, but others think different, so stop wasting it and come on. Unless you want to talk to the Lake-Lord's people instead.”

She turned and walked off, swift and purposeful.

Attavaia waited for no more than a heartbeat before following, Enneas at her side.

The Serakallashi led them through a succession of narrow alleys, twisting between the high, blind walls of the houses. They emerged onto a lane only slightly wider, encountering a caravan moving out, the camels piled with burdens that nearly blocked the street. The dull tin bells clanked and dust rose from the huge padding feet, choking. Their guide threw a fold of her scarf over her mouth and nose, weaving through the tall beasts that plodded five or six together behind a rider.

Heart in mouth, Attavaia hesitated. She had become a competent rider of the little mountain ponies over the past couple of years, and as a novice had taken her turn with the lay-sisters who managed the temple's herd of yaks, but even the yearling heifers scared her once their horns began to grow. Which was ridiculous in a warrior, a sister of Attalissa, the leader of the free temple. Ridiculous, to fear mere animals minding their own business, grass-eaters, when she had faced humans intent on killing.

These camels were taller than a tall man at the shoulder, as tall as the bulls of the giant wild yaks, and long…they just took up so much
space.
They seemed to float in the dust they raised, demons riding dry waves of smoke. They wore halters with a rope threading them together, and a thin rein to a carved wooden peg in the side of one nostril, far too fragile a control, she thought, for all those pounds of muscle. Enneas, a hand gripping her shoulder, seemed to feel the same. She squeaked as one turned its head to stare down at them, giving a horrible sort of gurgling groan.

“Don't act like a silly girl,” Attavaia muttered, and did as the Serakallashi had done, striding in front of a ridden camel, towing Enneas with her. The beast, or its rider, didn't slow or turn aside, serene in its massive right. They scrambled.

The woman was waiting for them, nervously backed into a doorway further along the street.

“I thought you weren't coming,” she said reprovingly as they joined her. “Don't tell me the camels scared you.”

“So?” asked Enneas.

“You use those bloody great black cows up there, and you're scared of camels? I've seen the skull of one of those things. If you told me it was a demon I'd believe you.” Her smile was honest, this time. “Tell me you're village women and I won't, though. You act like townsfolk. Come on.”

Enneas muttered under her breath, “Do we look like farmers?”

Attavaia thumped her with an elbow.

“Ah, right. We do.”

The Serakallashi led them down another twisting alley and out through another moving caravan, or maybe it was the same one. Once it had passed, Attavaia blinked grit from her eyes and saw that they were on the caravanserai ridge, where the large compounds, which contained hostel and stabling and warehouses and corrals all within a single inward-facing square, lay at odd angles to one another, making the one broad street twist and bend like a storm-snapped tree.

“Here.” With a quick look around, the woman tugged them down another alley, this one so narrow Attavaia thought a man's shoulders might brush either side. Another look, up and down, and their guide unlocked a narrow wooden door with a heavy key. “Back door,” she explained. “Inside.”

Hand on her own dagger within her skirt, Attavaia led the way into a dark, musty-smelling space. Enneas and the Serakallashi followed, and the guide locked and barred the door behind them. It was a small room or a corridor, but her eyes were too blinded by the change from light to darkness to make out any details. The woman pulled aside a red striped curtain in another narrow doorway.

“The sisters,” she said, announcing them to someone unseen. A snigger. “They're afraid of camels.”

“Don't be rude, ‘Rusha. Show them in.”

The woman waved them through. They emerged blinking into a room lit by a deep window high in the wall, a long horizontal slit. It was a pleasant room with thick Pirakuli carpets on the floor and fat cushions to sit on, a brass pot of tea and a tray of cakes on a low table in the midst of the semicircle of cushions. Two older Serakallashi men sat cradling small cups in their hands, with the air of people delaying the start of some business.

“Sit, Sisters,” said one of the men, who had the same thin face and hooked nose as the woman. “’Rusha, water for our guests.”

’Rusha—his daughter?—waved them to cushions and went away, returning after a few moments looking damp and dust-free herself, coat and scarf discarded to reveal black cotton trousers and clean white caftan, not a cameleer's garb. Attavaia took note; the coat did hide what a person was. ‘Rusha bore a basin of water and soft towels.

They washed in silence, took seats amid the cushions. If these Serakallashi were allies of Tamghat's, it was already too late.

’Rusha poured tea and offered it to them, thick and murky, milk already in it, or perhaps it had been brewed that way. Attavaia sipped cautiously. Spices she couldn't name. And the men just watched her.

“Why were you following us?” she asked ‘Rusha. Direct, but friendly, she hoped.

’Rusha looked up at the ceiling. “At first, only because someone felt we should know that one of Tamghat's folk was trying to find swords. We wondered why. Swords, iron…things the Lord of the Lake takes too great an interest in, that are none of his business in Serakallash.”

“I thought your sept-chiefs had agreed to collect a toll on most goods going through here. Some portion of the goods.”

“The chiefs of the Rostvadim and the Sevani,” the thin-faced man interrupted. “They've got no right to think they speak for all the septs or all Serakallash. Or for the merchants whose goods they're pilfering.”

“The Rostvadim and Sevani are two of the three septs whose strength is in the town,” the other man explained.

“We're not interested in Tamghat's tolls,” Attavaia said carefully. “We're—”

“Sisters,” ‘Rusha interrupted. “We should stop trying to avoid saying anything…incriminating. We're all here, we can all see one another's faces, we're all damned. You want weapons, you're not the Lake-Lord's folk, and you're lucky I found you again when I did, because the Sevani chiefs had sent their retainers to capture a pair of mountain women, thinking Tamghat's vassal, who's come down to nursemaid Siyd, might be interested in these mountain women buying weapons. The whole town has probably seen through your pitiful disguise by now. You're priestesses of Attalissa and you're trying to rearm what's left of your order, yes?”

“We're just—” Enneas began.

“Yes,” Attavaia said.

“Good. They're idiots, the ones who thought this morning that you might be mercenaries or conscripts of his, searching for smugglers. You're not half arrogant enough.”

“Look who's talking,” murmured the thin-faced man. ‘Rusha ignored him, as of long custom.

“We might be willing to help.”

“Help how?”

The older man, a wealthy one to judge by the patterned weave of his caftan, which had the sheen of silk blended in it, silenced ‘Rusha with a raised finger.

“What do you need?” he asked. “Swords? Bows? Horses? Grain? Meat? Warriors?”