The Burning City (68 page)

Trading would be good here.

Whandall's travel nest was divided into two rooms. The inner was more ornate than most, as befitted a wealthy merchant prince. Willow worried about that, so the outer sides of Whandall's wagon boxes were scarred and unfinished, and the outer room was plain. In the inner room the wood was polished, rubbed with the shells of laq beetles until it shone. Two mirrors hung so that
they faced each other, making a magical display the children never tired of. Wool for his carpets came from highland sheep sheared after a hard winter, and his cushions were filled with wool and down. Outside was poverty, but inside the nest everything said “I can afford to ignore your inadequate offer.”

Dinner was locally bought chicken stewed with local vegetables. Between what the Toronexti took and what they'd sold here, there wasn't any more bison jerky or fruit. Whandall had just filled his bowl for a second helping when Stone came into the nest. “There's an old man wants to see you.”

“You should be specific,” Whandall said. “Kinless, Lordkin, Lordsman. Witness. Lord even. Not just man.”

“I can't tell,” Stone said patiently. “He has a knife.”

“Lordkin,” Whandall said. “Old?”

“A lot older than you, Father. No teeth, not much hair.”

“I'll come out.”

Old
described him. The Lordkin still stood erect and proud and wore his big Lordkin knife defiantly, but Whandall thought he'd better have sons with him if he wanted to walk far in Tep's Town.

Whandall held out his hand, Lordkin to Lordkin. They slapped palms. The old man's eyes twinkled. “Don't know me, do you, Whandall?”

Whandall frowned.

“Know anything about wine?”

“Alferth!”

“That's me.”

“Come in; have some tea,” Whandall said. He led him into the outer nest. No point in giving too much away—

Alferth looked around and laughed. “Tarnisos said you took a kinless wagon, and I heard you married a kinless. Now you live like one?” He grinned. “You must be rich.”

“I am,” Whandall admitted. “How is Tarnisos?”

“Dead. Most everyone you knew is dead, Whandall.”

Lordkin killed each other. Even men who lived here forgot.

“Something I've wondered about all these years,” Alferth said. “Tarnisos said you really were possessed by Yangin-Atep. Burned a torch right out of his hand! Was he lying?”

“No, I did that.” Whandall tried to remember that time. Alferth and the others beating a kinless man—Willow's father!—into something unidentifiable. The rage that filled his mind and flowed through his fingers… was gone. “I burned our way through the forest.”

“I always hoped it was true,” Alferth said. “Never happened to me. I mocked Yangin-Atep, pretended to be possessed when I wasn't.” He shrugged. ‘Too old now, I think. Why would Yangin-Atep be interested in an old man?”

He looks twenty years older than me
, Whandall thought.
But it can't be more than five.

“Hungry?” Whandall asked.

“Nearly always,” Alferth admitted.

Whandall clapped his hands. “Stone, please ask Burning Tower to bring dinner for my friend. Alferth, this is my son, Green Stone.”

Alferth stared.

Son
, Whandall thought. I
said son, and Alferth isn't kin.

Alferth came to himself and nodded greeting. He'd been studying Green Stone's ears. Of course he would. Well, the Lordkin could just damned well get used to it!

Burning Tower brought in a pot of stew. Alferth took a carved wooden cup from his belt and held it out. She filled it, not bothering to hide her curiosity about this strange man who sat as a friend in her father's nest.

“Things have not been good?” Whandall asked.

“Not good, not since the year we had two Burnings.”

“In one year?”

“Yeah. Nine years ago now. First Burning, that
was fun
, but the second was bad. We burned things we needed. That's when Peacegiven Square went, with half the city.”

“How did it start?”

Alferth shrugged. “I never did know, Whandall, because I never really believed in Yangin-Atep. But that time, that second Burning,
everyone
was possessed! They ran around pointing and fires roared up, and we all went damn near mad gathering. I went right into a fire and came out with an armload of burning bath towels! Took me half a year healing from the burns. I'll never have a beard again, this side. Pelzed smelled roasting meat and ran into a burning butcher shop and staggered out hugging a side of ox. His heart quit.”

“Lord Pelzed is dead, then?” Whandall wasn't much surprised.

“Sure—hey, Whandall, your brother is Lord of Serpent's Walk now.”

“Shastern?”

Alferth's face wrinkled. “Shastern? Oh, him, naw, he's been dead what, fifteen years? No, the old one, Lord Wanshig, he's Lord of Serpent's Walk now. Matter of fact that's why I'm here—be sure it's really you.”

And see how the land lies
, Whandall thought. “Tell my brother—tell Lord Wanshig I'm delighted. And I would like to see him again, here or anywhere he'd like.”

Alferth's face twisted into a grin. “Thought you would be.” He looked around the plain boxes. He leaned close and dropped his voice. “I could help you find a better place to feed him.”

Whandall stood. “Let me try first,” he said. He pushed aside a tall
man's height of boxes that turned out to be nailed together, and led Alferth into the inner nest.

“Yangin-Atep's eyes! You do live fancy,” he said. “So those stories are all true—you went off and got rich!”

“There's a lot more,” Whandall said. He gestured eastward. “Out there. I can bring more in. Except I can't.”

“Hmm?”

“Toronexti. They took a lot of what we brought. They'll take more going out.” Testing, Whandall said, “I'd kill them all if I could.” Alferth had felt that way once.

“Thought of it myself,” Alferth said. “I hired Toronexti to guard Lord Quintana's grapes and move his wine that he put in my charge. They let some Lordkin gather one of our wagons,
just
what they was supposed to stop, and two of them dead and the rest screaming
at me.
That was you and Freethspat, wasn't it, Whandall?”

“Sure.”

“And we all took our lumps, Quintana and the Toronexti and me, and let it go. But, you know, strong as they were supposed to be, they shouldn't let go so easily. I should have known. But I kept my Toronexti guards, and paid them high out of what I was getting, and when that
wave
of gatherers came out of Tep's Town, they ran. They let that mob into the vineyards and the vats. Some of 'em were in the mob! Quintana had a price on my head for a year, and he never spoke to me again. Sure I'd like to kill the Toronexti, but you can't fight Lords.”

“Lords protect Toronexti?
Which
Toronexti?”

“All. Whandall, everyone knows that. They
collect
for the Lords. Well, maybe you don't know it,” Alferth conceded. “But everyone who ever tried to make anything of himself knows it. If you nose around their territory, the Lords take a big interest in you.”

“Toronexti have a
territory?
Is this something everyone knows too? We only knew—”

Alferth held out his empty cup. Whandall clapped and waited for Burning Tower to fill the cup again. He said, “We only knew about the Deerpiss and the gatehouse. We never knew where they lived.”

Alferth said, “They don't talk. But I
knew
they had a territory. They
must.
They hide their faces. The leathers they always wear, that must hide a band mark. There
had
to be a way to hurt them. What else could I think about while I hid? I asked around, and I thought. Then the search got hotter and I had to stop looking. I had to leave Serpent's Walk. I live on the beach at Sea Cliffs, and nobody knows anything there.”

“That sounds—”

“But before they shut me down, I learned some. Foot of Granite Knob. That's theirs.”

“Them?
Alferth, no. The Wolverines don't live near the Deerpiss.”

“I'd bet my patch of dry sand on it, against the rest of this stew.”

Not a heavy bet. Whandall thought back. He'd never been on Wolverine turf. Children were told to avoid it. It was over toward the forest, backed up against a chaparral-covered granite hill, not isolated but easily defended, near two hours' walk from the Deerpiss. No one ever went there uninvited, and there weren't many invitations.

You saw Wolverines raiding, but rarely, and in big packs. Funny, nobody ever wondered… nobody but a merchant
would
ever wonder how bands that big could gather enough to share. Like they did it just to fight, just for practice….

Wolverine territory. “You're pretty near guessing,” Whandall said.

“Whandall, do you remember those crazies who could
read?
At your party they got too much of your powder—”

“Got into a graveyard. Heads full of ghosts. Pelzed traded them to the Wolverines for a wagonload of oranges. That used to
itch
at me. How did he get anyone to take them at all?”

A slow grin, four teeth in it. Alferth asked, “Why would Wolverines want readers too crazy to remember secrets?”

“Forigaft.”

“Right.”

The brothers Forigaft. Egon was the youngest, sold to the Wolverines and now clerk to the Toronexti! I owe you, Alferth. “Have an orange? Show your belly some variety.”

“Yeah!”

“Does my brother live in Pelzed's old house?” Whandall asked.

“He let Pelzed's women keep it,” Alferth said. “Lord Wanshig lives in that big stone place you come from. I think his lady Wess didn't want to move.”

Wess. Whandall felt a twinge in his loins. Wess was alive. She'd be the first lady of the Placehold. Alferth wouldn't know about that.

They talked until well after dark. When Alferth left, Whandall noticed that four young Lordkin were waiting under a torch. He merged with them; they doused the torch and all merged into the shadows.

Then one of the shadows became Lurk.

Lurk glided in almost supernatural silence, but slowly, sideways and twisted over. One arm was swollen into a red pillow streaked with purple. Whandall knew those marks. He didn't touch them. He set him down on a burlap sheet and sent for Morth.

Morth looked ancient, worse than Alferth. He came leaning heavily on Sandry's arm. The wizard examined Nothing Was Seen without touching the boy. He muttered words in a language none of them knew. They watched, fearing to interrupt.

Morth snarled, “I sold ointments for plant poisons for near thirty years! Now I'll have to make more on the spot! Clerk Sandry, I need
any
breed of belladonna. Tomato, bell pepper, potato, chilis—”

Sandry was slow to react… as if he weren't used to taking orders. Then, “At once, Sage.”

They could hear him speaking rapidly to someone outside. Morth moved them out of the nest. Under the awning outside he tended a firepot, set water to boiling, added chipped dried roots and some leaves from the forest, soaked a clean shirt. “Wash yourself, if you can stay awake. What were you doing in the chaparral, boy?”

Lurk looked to Whandall.
Speak in front of the wizard?
Whandall said, “Go ahead.”

“Whandall set me to watch the tax men.” Lurk's voice was slurred. “A wagon came out of those low woods, a tiny wagon with a tiny pony driving it. I tried to follow it home. They went straight into the woods. There was just a trace of path. I
know
that wagon was wider than I am, and
it
got through, but it wasn't trying to hide too.” He scrubbed his arm, tenderly. “When my arm swelled up I was deep in the woods and getting dizzy. Here, something scratched me here too before I could get out.” Three puffy parallel lines along his hip. “I swear it
reached out.”

“Wash that too, idiot!” the wizard snarled. “Get your clothes
off
We'll have to bury them.”

Whandall said, “They reach. You remember what I told you going through the forest? It's the same stuff. It
wants
to kill you. You were smart not to go in very far.”

“Lucky, too,” Lurk said. “But I lost them.” He sounded disgusted.

Sandry was back with a double handful of bell peppers. Morth went to work.

“They were carrying a big pile of stuff, that stack Morth was looking at in their gatehouse,” Lurk said. “They loaded it in that wagon, and maybe ten of them went with it, like it was the most valuable thing they had.”

“What did they do with it?” Whandall asked.

“Don't know. I told you. Got away.” Lurk's voice was fading fast.

“What do you think they were doing, Clerk Sandry?” Whandall asked.

Sandry's face was a mask to match Whandall's trading face. “No idea, sir. None at all.”

“I see.” Whandall turned back to Lurk and said, softly, “Maybe I found them at the other end.”

Lurk looked less puzzled than dizzy. But Whandall was making maps in his head. Do it on parchment later, check it out….

No one had ever walked it, really, but it must be near two hours from Alferth's grape fields down the Deerpiss and across to Wolverine turf… by the streets. Those streets curved around a knob of hill covered with chaparral thickening to dwarf forest. But as the crow flies—

How could he have seen Staxir's armor and Kreeg Miller's leathers and never made the connection?
They go into the woods. Kinless woodsmen can do that, and so can I. The Toronexti have to, to move what they take!

“Which way did they go?” Whandall asked. “Show me on a map.” He called for lamps and parchment.

While they waited, Morth wrapped paste-covered cloths around puffy red blotches on Nothing Was Seen's arm and lower belly. “And drink this.”