Northlight (2 page)

“Where else?”

“Cheap or good?” he asked, looking right at me for the first time. His eyes flickered over my Ranger's vest, half-hidden under my cloak, and the long-knife strapped to my thigh. “Never mind. God help anyone who tries to cheat
you.
”

“Which god?”

“Any one you like. They're none of mine, I'm Laurea-bred.”

Who would I pray to, anyway? The father-god, whose secret name is death for any woman to pronounce? Mother-of-us-all? I'd sworn by her, though she never answered me. The demon god of chance — ay! there was one worth praying to...if I were the praying kind.

The stableman scratched the stubble on his chin. “All the big places are likely just as full, but if you don't mind the feathers, Ryder's got a stall or two extra. He runs a barnfowl yard. The feathers go to the bedding factory and the meat for sausages. The yard gets pretty bloody then, but it should be all right now. The priest comes the first of the month to give the blessing and Ryder cleans up good afterward.”

It wasn't the death-stink I minded so much as the priests with their light and harmony shit. I'd seen the thrills they got from all that blood. They could sprinkle it on the ground and mumble their prayers to make it holy, but what difference did that make? They were all the same, priests everywhere.

I rubbed the mare down slowly, stroke after stroke, leaning my weight into the leather-backed brush. Trail dust and sweat crystals billowed into the air and clung to my face, my hands and clothes. The mare was slow to settle. She smelled the old blood out in the yard and every few moments she lifted her nose from the hay rack, jaw slack, ears pricked. Then she sighed, rubbed her whiskery nose across my shoulder, and chewed again. She finished the best of the hay, knocked over the empty grain bucket, and began to doze. I put away the brushes and closed up the barn.

The holding coops were on the far side of the yard, but still I found little piles of feathers everywhere — between the wood slats of the box stall, in the corners of the tack room. Bits of fluff too light for any broom. You can never get rid of them or hold on to them. Breathe on them and they're gone.

Out in the yard, the air had a bitter edge. I drew my wool cloak around me and pulled the saddlebags across my shoulders.

A cobbled street led toward the lights at the center of the city and there I found the inn the stableman recommended, two rambling stories of weather-stained board siding, warm and well lit. I stepped over the threshold, from wooden steps to unglazed tile. The entryway led down a step and under an arch to the common room. The arch bore the usual carvings — flowers, birds, mythical insects with broad, bright wings, here painted in blue and yellow. A hum of voices reached me, along with the smell of ale and bread and maybe bean stew. I hated beans but my mouth watered anyway.

In the common room, someone chanted a bardic to the beat of a drum. I never could understand them, long-winded things stuffed with fancy words.
How Gaea Slew Teknos. How Man Stole Sorrow from the Ahtoms. The Triumph of the Cosmick Pod.

Opposite the common room sat a clerk's desk and staircase. As usual, sleeping rooms were upstairs and tub rooms along the corridor behind the office. Laureans were as crazy for baths as they were for bardics. You couldn't find a house here without solar pipes across the roof. I remembered the first time I sank up to my ears in the hot springs near Darmaforge. All that water — Mother-of-us-all, so
much
water — and just to get me clean. Aviyya used to tease me about it.

The warmth of the common room seeped through my cloak. Standing in the entryway, I wondered if I could stay awake long enough to both eat and bathe. I started toward the clerk's desk and then stopped, caught by a ripple of music.

The bardic chanter, another man and a woman in the bright woolens favored by Laureans sat on a raised platform holding lap harps and a small drum. They settled into a melody, the drum marking the beat and the men's voices weaving in and out of the woman's clear soprano. First they performed a courting tune, followed by a jig-dance that had me and everyone else stamping our feet.

Then an old, old song:

“Harth now dons her robe of glee

Flow'rs and trees embrace her.

We go forth in harmony,

Children of one Mother.

For as we this glory see,

All the sacred season,

Reason learns the heart's decree

And hearts are led by reason.”

Led by reason.
I shivered. The lighted room seemed dim and far away. The saddlebags slipped from my shoulders to lie in a lump on my feet.

Led by reason.
Maybe here in Laureal City. But out on Kratera Ridge, there was no University to be the safeguard of all learning, no Guardian, no Senate. Only a handful of Rangers between these rich fields and the hungry north.

Led by reason.
Not me, and not here.

The performers packed up their instruments and left the dais for a drink with their friends. I headed for the clerk's office. A hollow-eyed man looked half asleep behind the desk.
How could he serve me?
he asked.

“A room and a meal, meat if you've got it.”

“No, magistra, we keep to the old ways here.”

“Beans then, and plenty of bread but none of that yak-piss you call ale. What's the charge for a bath?”

“No charge, magistra, it comes with the room.”

Ah yes, I sighed, this is Laureal City.

I left nothing in my room except a pile of dirty clothes. Bags, boots, and knives all came with me. The big wooden tub was set halfway into the tiled floor, with a shallow step outside and an inside ledge for sitting. It would probably hold four or five people if they were friendly. Hand-painted tiles in flowery designs decorated the floor and wood-paneled walls. I hung the pink cotton robe the inn supplied on a wooden peg.

Despite the illusion of safety, I double-checked the bar and hinges of the door. There were no windows, only a pair of narrow ventilation grilles that ran the length of opposing walls, and they were only about six inches high. I kept my long-knife right where I could reach it.

The steaming water smelled herbal and astringent. I sighed and lowered myself inch by inch. The heat turned my skin red, except for the whitened knife scars. Straight and clean-edged — hands, arms, shoulders, chest, thighs. One fool's cut low on my ribs. Behind my back, where I couldn't see them, knotted ridges twisted like threadworms, strips of skin that had neither feeling nor memory.

I should add that to my list of things that scare me. Remembering.

Remembering Aviyya's fingers, light and quick. Her indrawn breath. We weren't lovers yet, when we took leave together at Darmaforge. I didn't know why I let her talk me into the steaming rock pools in the hills above the public bath house. I told myself afterwards it was curiosity. I told myself it was the dark, only one moon and all those stars. The truth was, we'd been in three skirmishes that week and something in the still being alive, the hours and moments of fighting back to back with her, had left me half crazy and hungry in ways I couldn't name. And there was something in Avi — a wildness, a secretness, a loneliness, Mother only knows. But it was hard to look right at her. I turned away, fumbling for the lantern, and she touched me.

“Ahhh, Kardith...”

I fled into the shadows. I couldn't face her, couldn't show her my back again. Her eyes — the color of rain, the color of steel — were wide and dark. It was my own soul I saw in her eyes. Her throat moved, jerking up and down. No words, only that whisper, as weightless and persistent as a feather.

“You forget I'm not Laurean,” I said slowly, searching for words. “On the steppe, to the east, we call ourselves the Tribes.”

I don't remember what else I told her — learning knife-forms with my step-father, wrestling and laughing in the alkali dust with my half-brothers, the water-plague that took them all. All except me. The endless, formless days lost in a fog of ghostweed and endurance while that old ghamel the priests whored me off to dreamed himself into permanent oblivion. And the son whose father I must never name — no! I didn't tell her that. I don't remember what else I couldn't say, the years and deeds I had no words for, only that it didn't matter.

Mother-of-us-all, take away those memories. How she cried for me, me who never cries.

I must think only of what I have come to do, of the man I must find.

I lay in the tub, the back of my head resting on the wooden
rim, staring up at the grille on the far wall. Biting my lip. Gripping the hilt of my long-knife until my fingers cramped. Hearing my blood race through my ears.

Out, I had to get out of the water. It was the heat making me think crazy.

I wouldn't get out. Not until my mind was clear of everything but my purpose here. Tonight I would sharpen my knives to steady my nerve. Tomorrow I would find him, Pateros, the Guardian of Laurea. Then,
then,
it would be safe to remember.

I wore the long-knife in its thigh sheath and the leather vest with the Ranger insignia. In one of the vest pockets, I carried the folded single-edged knife I used for eating, skinning small game, camp work. A careful search would find two more knives, one in my boot top and the other in a forearm sheath. Maybe, if the searcher knew what he was doing, the one in the hollow belt buckle. Maybe not.

After a breakfast of fruit and ripened cheese, and an easy round with the buckle knife to remind my hands of the heft and reach of a short, flat blade, I felt fit and awake. My shirt was clean, the worst of the trail dust scrubbed from my boots.

The saddlebags stayed in my room along with the cloak. The packet of papers from Captain Derron — accounts, reports, Mother knows what — I weighed in my hand as I stepped into the morning sunshine and headed for the central square. Such a little thing, but enough to make my presence here official. All I had to do to follow orders was hand it to General Montborne.

But it was Montborne who gave the command — no searching past our patrol limits, no forays into norther territory, no retaliation for raids. It was Montborne who set the penalty for insubordination at the loss of a hand. It was Montborne who drove me here.

So many flowers grow in Laureal City that the women wear them fresh in their hair. Everywhere I looked, I saw gardens, strips of blossoming herbs, borders around fountains and benches, pots crowded together on window ledges. Courtyards with vine-covered arches. Trees and more trees.

The market stands were piled high with fruit and vegetables, grains and dried beans, cheese and yogurt, a dozen kinds of freshly-baked bread, fish from the rivers. People milled around, buying and selling, calling out their wares, pressing against each other, all going in different directions. They moved out of the way when they spotted my Ranger's vest. A countrywoman with a tanned face said, “Free samples to you, magistra,” and handed me a plum from her cart. I bit into it and the tart juice squirted over my tongue.

Past the market lay the merchant district, row after row of shops selling everything from spices and cloth to ceramics to books and musical instruments, even children's toys. I paused to admire a display window of metals, wonderfully crafted knives set with semi-precious stones, belt buckles, bits and spurs, medician's tools I didn't recognize. All with their little square approval certificates from the gaea-priests.

The plaza's paving stones were light gray and so closely placed that not even a weed pushed through the hairline cracks. The plaza reminded me of the steppe, vast and flat and white with the bitter dust that nothing escaped.

Terrible things happened in places like this. Lives were taken and then given back again.

I'd been inside the Starhall before, seen in its ancient heart, the chamber lined in faded tapestries and wood carved with symbols no one knew any more. Here Pateros took my hands in his, according to ancient custom, and here I repeated the oath after him. Each word I said burned through me, over and over, until I was sure nothing remained of who I once was.

I was wrong about that, but for all those years when I was a Ranger first and only, I had no idea how wrong I was.

The Senate building faced the Starhall across the plaza as if they were born enemies. It was big — three stories — and flat-sided except for the balconies and columns along the front, all glittery pink stone. The Senate met in the Great Hall and important people had offices inside. No one lived there.

The military wing stretched from the Senate building along the north edge of the plaza, two stories with a thin band of carved letters between them. I couldn't read them the first time I was here; Avi told me later what they said.

“It is better to plant a single seed than conquer a world.”

And if Montborne believed that, then I was a flame-addled twitterbat.

Inside the wide wooden doors was a foyer of sorts, a desk with an alert-looking officer. When I was last in Laureal City, the Rangers answered directly to the Guardian. Since the raids — the Brassa War they called it — Montborne commanded. I'd never been inside this building before and these people didn't know me.

To his credit, Captain Derron had prepared me well — what I was to do, the passes and how to use them.

“Promise me, Kardith,” he'd said. It was the night before I left and we were sitting together in his office at the fort, drinking the last of his excellent barley-ale. The weather was cold, as nights are on the Ridge. “Promise me you won't go off on any expeditions of your own and I'll believe you.”

I clamped my mouth shut. Anything I said, I said as a Ranger. “I'll go right to Laureal City.”

“And give the papers to Montborne.”

“Yes.”

“There may be a reply or orders to bring back. If not, take a few days, rest, enjoy the city. Cool off.” He paused. “Let go.”