Last First Snow (2 page)

The skeleton shook his head. “What was her problem with our proposal?”

“Protesters? Letter-writing campaigns? Does any of that sound familiar?”

“Outrageous.”

Not the King in Red's voice. Batac's. Elayne briefly considered gutting the man, and decided against it. In her experience spraying a Court hallway with blood and other humors was rarely a good idea. That one time in Iskar had been a special case. “These letters have no place here.” Batac's face and voice flushed with anger. If Elayne did not know better she'd have sworn some petty god built the man for committee meetings and neighborhood politics. “The mob that sent them doesn't have any position, any goal beyond clogging the streets to keep decent folk away from work.”

“So you both knew about this.”

Kopil held up his hands. “It's a protest, Elayne. Since when have those been a problem? We ripped out divine wards every day in the God Wars. These people have no Craftsmen or Craftswomen. They're a job for law enforcement.”

“Does the judge want us to invite every kid with a bad haircut off the Skittersill streets into Court?” Tan Batac fumed. “This is a vendetta. She wants to humiliate me in front of my partners.”

Batac wasn't done, but Elayne did not wait for him to finish. “Follow me.” The Court of Craft was too public for this conversation. A few Craftsmen seated under the front hall's murals seemed suspiciously engrossed by their newspapers. A skeleton in a pencil skirt appeared to be arguing with a green-skinned woman—but neither had spoken in the last minute, and both had adjusted position so they could see the King in Red. Ears everywhere. Even when the ears were merely metaphorical, as in the skeletons' case.

She led Batac and Kopil through smoked-glass revolving doors, out of the Court's elemental chill into the heat of Dresediel Lex. Industry and the fumes of fourteen million people hazed the city's dry blue skies. Pyramids jutted from the earth, manmade mountains mocking the crystal knives of skyspires suspended upside down in air above, and the modern land-bound towers of glass and steel below. An airbus passed overhead, and the city's faceless Wardens flew by on their Couatl mounts. More Wardens stood guard outside the Court, humans with heads and faces covered by silver cauls. They bore ceremonial pikes to signify danger to those who didn't know the Wardens themselves were weapons.

Elayne hailed a cab. She did not spare a glance for the Wardens or the city. The city she knew, and she would never permit the Wardens to see that they unnerved her. Their masks predated her work in Alt Coulumb, predated the Blacksuits and Alexander Denovo's more misguided hobbies, but still she preferred to see the faces and know the names of potential obstacles.

A Craftswoman could do a great deal once she knew her enemy's name.

Batac and Kopil joined her in the cab's green velvet stomach. She told the horse to bring them to RKC's offices, closed the door and windows, and nodded, satisfied, as the carriage lurched to motion. They sat across from her, the businessman and the skeleton who once was mortal.

She closed her eyes, found her center, and opened her eyes again. “Cafal has to justify her actions to the judiciary, and a few months back the judiciary decided to be more careful with civil protest. They're spread thin. Last winter there was an outbreak in Alt Selene, and they won't risk the same here.”

The skeleton nodded. The crimson sparks of his eyes dimmed in thought.

“I don't understand,” Batac said. “The protesters have no Craftsmen. What threat do they pose?”

The King in Red answered for her: “They can break the world.”

“Oh,” Batac said. “If it's a little thing like that.”

The carriage jolted over a bump in the cobblestones. Batac was a merchant, not a magus; Elayne spent a juddering minute considering how to frame the issue in layman's terms. “Belief shapes the world. Dreams have mass.”

“Of course.”

“We want to rewrite the Skittersill—to replace the gods' laws with our own.”

“That's the idea.”

“But these protesters resist us. Their vision wrestles with ours, and the struggle warps and weakens reality. Things from beyond push through. The Court thinks these people are determined enough that trying to overrule their objections would tear a hole in space, and let demons in.”

“Five months of mediation. A year before that recruiting my partners. And now we go back to the conference table until we satisfy a gang of zealots?”

“Not exactly,” Elayne said. “We don't need to satisfy them if there's no ‘them' to satisfy. If these people are inconsistent—if we face not one movement but a thousand nuisances—then the Court's power can overwhelm them all, bit by bit. Of course, if we do that, we might trade magical conflict for physical. Either way, I need to know more. I should have known more from the beginning. From here on out, no secrets.” That last she addressed to the King in Red. “Agreed?”

The horse veered around a traffic accident. Through the green velvet curtains, Elayne could not tell who was hurt and who at fault. She saw a black shadow of wreckage and heard screams, and men weeping.

As they passed the wreck, Batac lifted the curtain with one finger and peered out, blinking against the pure light or what he saw. He released the curtain, and falling velvet blocked light and tragedy alike.

“Agreed,” Kopil said.

Tan Batac nodded. “Fine.”

Not a ringing endorsement, but it would serve. “Send me what you know about these people,” Elayne said. “Tomorrow, I'll go.”

 

2

The next day before dawn Elayne hailed a driverless carriage and rode south to the Skittersill, to Chakal Square.

Glass towers and hulking repurposed pyramids gave way to squat strip malls, palm trees, and tiny bungalows. Optera buzzed and airbuses floated through a bluing sky. Road signs advertised sandwich shops, carriage mechanics, pawnbrokers, and lawn care. A few tall art deco posters of the King in Red, pasted in storefront windows, urged citizens to beware of fires.

Near the Skittersill the buildings changed again—adobe and plaster gave way to clapboard row houses painted in pastel green and pink. Streets narrowed and sidewalks widened; uneven cobblestones pitched the carriage from side to side. At last she dismounted, paid the fare from her expense account, and continued on foot.

Two blocks away she heard the protest. Not shouts, not chants, not so early—just movement. How many bodies? Hundreds if not thousands, breathing, rolling in sleep or grumbling to new unsteady wakefulness. Mumbled conversation melded to a rush of surf. Mixed together, all tongues sounded the same. She smelled bread frying, and eggs, and mostly she smelled people.

Then Bloodletter's Street crossed Crow, and Chakal Square opened to the south and east.

Chakal Square was not a square per se: a deep rectangle rather, five hundred feet long and three hundred wide, with a fountain in the center dedicated to Chakal himself—a Quechal deity killed early in the God Wars, a casualty in the southern Oxulhat skirmishes. Defaced, the statue, and dead, the god, but the name endured, attached to a stone expanse between wooden buildings, an open-air market most days, a space for festivals and concerts. Red King Consolidated's local office brooded to the east.

People thronged Chakal Square. Camp stove smoke curled above circled tents. Flags and protest signs in Kathic and Low Quechal studded the crowd near the fountain where a ramshackle stage stood. No one had taken the stage yet. Speeches would come later.

A loose line of mostly men sat or stood around the crowd's edge, facing out. They bore no weapons Elayne could see, and many dozed, but they maintained a ragged sentry air.

Elayne looked both ways down empty Crow, and crossed the road. The guard in front of her was sleeping, but a handful of others shook themselves alert and ran to intercept her, assembling into a loose arc. A thick young man with a broken, crooked-set nose spoke first. “You don't belong here.”

“I do not,” she said. “I am a messenger.”

“You look like a Craftswoman.”

She remembered that tone of voice—an echo of the time before the Wars, before her Wars anyway, when she'd still been weak, when at age twelve she fled from men with torches and pitchforks and hid from them in a muddy pond, breathing through a reed while leeches gorged on her blood. Memories only, the past long past yet present. Since that night of torches and pitchforks and teeth, she'd learned the ways of power. She had nothing to fear from this broken-nosed child or from the crowd at his back. “My name is Elayne Kevarian. The King in Red has sent me to speak with your leaders.”

“To arrest them.”

“To talk.”

“Crafty talk has chains in it.”

“Not this time. I've come to hear your demands.”

“Demands,” Broken-Nose said, and from his tone Elayne thought this might be a short meeting after all. “Here's a demand. Go back and tell your boss—”

“Tay!” A woman's voice. Broken-Nose turned. The one who'd spoken ran over from farther down the sentry line. The guards shifted stance as she approached. Embarrassed, maybe. “What's going on here?”

Broken-Nose—Tay?—pointed to Elayne. “She says the King in Red sent her.”

Elayne examined the new arrival—short hair, loose sweater, broad stance. Promising. “I am Elayne Kevarian.” She produced a business card. “From Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao. I've been retained by the King in Red and Tan Batac in the matter of the Skittersill warding project. I'm here to meet with your leaders.”

The woman's deep brown eyes weighed her. “How do we know you won't cause trouble? Last few days, folks have come into the camp just to start fights.”

“I have no interest in starting fights. I hope to prevent them.”

“We won't bow to you,” Tay said, but the woman held out one hand, palm down, and he closed his mouth. Didn't relax, though. Held his muscles tense for battle or a blow. “Chel, we don't have to listen—”

“She look like one of Batac's axe-bearers to you?”

“She looks dangerous.”

“She is dangerous. But she might be for real.” Chel turned back to Elayne. “Are you?”

And this was the Craft that could not be learned: to answer plainly and honestly, to seem as if you spoke the truth, especially when you did. “Yes.”

“No weapons?”

She opened her briefcase to show them the documents inside, and the few pens clipped into leather loops. Charms and tools, instruments of high Craft, were absent. She'd removed them this morning against just such an eventuality. No sense frightening the locals.

“Who do you want to see?”

“Anyone,” Elayne said, “with the authority and will to talk.”

Chel looked from her, to Tay, to the others gathered. At last, she nodded. “Come with me.”

“Thank you,” Elayne said when they had left the guards behind but had not yet reached the main body of the camp.

“For what? Tay wouldn't have started anything. Just acts tough when he's excited.”

“If he would not have started anything, why did you run over to stop him?”

“It's been a long few days,” Chel said, which was and was not an answer.

“Aren't sentries a bit exclusive for a populist movement?”

“We've had trouble. Burned food stores, fights. Folks that started the fights, nobody knew them—Batac's thugs.”

“A serious accusation.”

“Bosses did the same during the dockworker's strike. Got a lot of my friends arrested. Those of us who lived through that, we thought maybe we could calm things down, or scrap if scrapping's needed.” She sounded proud. “So we stand guard.”

“You're a dockhand?”

“Born and raised. About half the Skittersill works the Longsands port, or has family there.”

“And your employers gave you leave to come protest?”

A heavy silence followed her question, which was all the answer Elayne needed. “I guess you're not from around here,” Chel said.

“I lived in DL briefly awhile back. I'm a guest now.”

“Maybe you didn't hear about the strike, then. This was last winter. We faced pay cuts, unsafe working conditions, long hours. People died. We took to the picket line. Turns out strikes against you people don't work out so well.”

Elayne recognized that tone of voice—heavy and matter-of-fact as a rock chained around an ankle. She'd spoken that way, once, when she was younger than this woman. Come to think, she'd had the same walk: hands in pockets, bent forward as if against heavy wind.

“We didn't take leave,” Chel continued. “Things have been hard since the strike. We read the broadsheets, same as everyone. If this deal goes through and our rent goes up, we won't be able to live here anymore. Moving costs. Traveling to work costs. Worse if you have a family. This was the best bad choice. You know how that goes, maybe.”

“I do,” Elayne said, though she hadn't planned to say anything. “What do you mean, broadsheets?”

Chel plucked a piece of newsprint from the ground. The headline ran: “Cabal Plans District's Death,” over caricatures of the King in Red and Tan Batac. Elayne read the first few lines of the article, folded the sheet, and passed it back to Chel. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw more copies pasted to the sides of tents. No bylines anywhere she could see, nor any printer's mark.

The camp woke around them. Eyes emerged from sleeping bags, peered out of tents, glanced up from bowls of breakfast porridge. Some of those gazes confronted Elayne, some assessed, some merely noted her passage and dismissed her. She heard whispers, most in Low Quechal, which she did not know well enough to suss out, but some in common Kathic.

“Foreigner,” they said, which didn't bother her, and “Iskari,” which was wrong.

“Craftswoman,” she heard as well, over and over, from women stretching, from men crouched to warm themselves at fires, from children (there were children here, a few) who stopped their game of ullamal to follow her. Others followed, too. They gathered in her wake, a sluggish V of rebel geese: a gnarled man covered with scars who might have fought in the Wars himself, on the wrong side. A pregnant woman, leading her husband by the hand. A trio of muscular bare-chested men, triplets maybe; she could tell them apart only by the different bruises.