Rift in the Races (75 page)

She sat up and leaned against the wall staring out of her cage, yet another cage like so many before. Vertical bars, horizontal bars, security glass or plasma field. What difference did it make? It was all a prison in the end. She realized in the context of such magnificent grief—for what else could it be called?—that only love mattered. All the rest was emptiness. She’d heard it before, knew it from books and songs, a thousand religious oratories … but Blue Fire knew it a thousand times more. A million times more. Blue Fire’s love was not a flickering thing like a candle that, while hot, will waver when someone opens a window on the other side of the room. Dim like the lights of a starship when a magician casts a spell. Snuff out like the life in the eyes of someone whose biology has failed. None of that. Blue Fire’s love was a sun. A black one. It was a lesson to be learned, a reef to be climbed upon when the tides of other emotions come in too high.

Orli found peace. For the first time in her life, all the way, from top to bottom of her body and soul, she found peace, real and exquisite peace in the experience of love and misery that Blue Fire revealed. Perspective and patience washed over her and the fear fell away. She breathed easily again. Her shoulders fell comfortably with the release of tension and torment. It was all gone.

She smiled for the first time in … she had no idea how long. There were greater sorrows and greater joys in the universe than this single moment in time, her tiny moment. Things that mattered more. So much more. And she had a new friend. A great friend. Someone to see through. Someone to see through her. Someone to see her through.

Which is why, when Thadius appeared the following day, for the first time actually deigning to speak to her since he’d locked her away, she had no venom to spit at him. No profanity. No hate. She only pitied him. She pitied his emptiness. The loneliness he felt was far worse than hers. She knew love. He knew only his own vacancy and need, frustrated by the very act of seeking it so incongruently. A blind navigator, guiding the ship of his life through all the wrong straits. And so he, too, was alone. An object to feel sorry for, even though she knew he would be cruel.

“Drink this,” he said reaching through her cage and placing a cup of wine on the upturned barrel that served as both table and stool.

She smiled as she rose and went to it. She knew by the glint in his eyes, the narrow angles of them darting to the liquid in the cup, the urgency of his breath and the way his hand shook some when he put it down, that he had put something in it besides the wine.

“This won’t make you happy,” she said, picking up the cup. She only absently wondered if it was poison.

“I dare say it shall,” he replied, standing to his full height. “At least for a time.”

She quaffed it all and placed the cup back down on the crate. She half expected to feel whatever effect it was going to have immediately. But she didn’t feel anything.

He pushed his face forward, peering in, staring at her as one does when anticipating some reaction or remark. There was none.

He waited.

She could smell alcohol on his breath. He looked tired too. Gray circles beneath his eyes.

“You look tired,” she said.

“So do you.” He was still watching her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, genuinely.

He drew back, and his face narrowed even more. He didn’t say anything for a while, but when she added nothing else, he could not help himself. “For what?”

“I just am. I hope one day you find what you need.”

He harrumphed and glared back at her with disgust. “Let me guess, you’ve had some spiritual epiphany in your solitude. How droll. Maybe in your next life you’ll come back as a priest.”

“Maybe.”

Silence filled the space for a long while. Orli returned to her mattress and sat down. Thadius looked momentarily hopeful, but she did not lie down.

She saw it and laughed. “Nope,” she said, guessing then at what was in the cup. “You still have to wait. I take it you’re not one for direct action in this sort of thing. I admit I would not have guessed that, given your capabilities in a fight. Or was that all a show?” The more she thought on it, the more she thought it might have been, some illusion for her benefit. A great charade.

He said nothing, only watched.

She absently toyed with a strand of her hair, pulling downward on it between forefinger and thumb. Not flirting. Not teasing. Simply habit. Something to fill the void.

After a time, he turned and stormed off with a mumbled curse. Orli watched him leave, bemused, unafraid. She wondered if whatever he’d drugged the wine with was helping her find this calm state, or at least helping her maintain it so long after the dissipation of the dream.

Thadius returned a while later—Orli had no means for telling time, and little enough use for it. He came close and once more stared through the bars. She waved and sent him another sympathetic smile across the cage. “Not yet,” she said.

He spun and stormed off again, the motion of it whipping his coattails in the air and sending a gust of wine-scented wind in at Orli. She smiled and used it to try and find Blue Fire again.

She drifted off, more daydream than dream, and, eventually, Blue Fire was there.

They were attacking her. Orli’s people were attacking her. She’d sent so many of her eggs to die.

Thadius’ voice woke her, his words thick and slurred with wine. “Look at her,” he accused, pointing through the bars. “Does that look like love to you?”

Orli recognized the man standing next to him. It was the sorcerer who’d come with Thadius to the auction in Murdoc Bay. The one who had helped Thadius rescue her, if that’s what he’d really done.

“How much of what I gave you did you put in?” the wizard asked, gazing in at her from his place alongside Thadius.

“All of it.”

The pale fellow shrugged. “The agent said it might take time.”

“How much time?”

“I already told you, ‘
time
.’ And more than a single dose.”

“Of course ‘more than a single dose.’ At that price, I expect it will probably be ten or fifty doses, won’t it?”

“Lord Thoroughgood, you know as well as I that this sort of magic rarely works, if ever. Why don’t you just drug her normally or clout her on the head and be done with it. The rest of this … well … this, just seems so pointless, don’t you think? And it certainly can’t justify the cost.”

“She’s my prize, Annison. And I want everything that comes with it. And if you ever look at me like that again, I’ll have you horsewhipped. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Thadius swung his gaze back toward Orli, still sitting patiently on the dirty mattress, leaning against the wall. There was no fear in her, at least none that was for him or for herself. She really just wanted to get back to her dream, to find out what was happening to Blue Fire. The absence of any emotion infuriated him.

“Figure it out,” he spat at the magician. “You swore to me you could pull it off. And now the whole gods-be-damned thing is starting to come undone.”

Chapter 58

“K
eep starin’ at me like that, son, and I’ll have yer teeth fer ivory chips,” said Ilbei. The steel in his words glinted in his eyes as much as it did from the bright arcs of the pickaxe he wore on his back. The bouncer, eyeing him up and down as he spoke, nodded and stepped aside, allowing him entry.

The Harlot’s Pocket was not a tavern for cowards or fools, and even the proprietor, lawless ruffian that he was, did not want any more attention than he already got. Senseless murders only brought more investigations and more bribes to pay. Little enough of the Queen’s reach fingered its way down this far, but when bodies stacked up too high, eventually complaints drew inquiries and the local aristocracy had to make a show of discipline. Murdoc Bay might be an oasis of freedom and “unrestricted enterprise” as the pirates liked to say, but nobody who did well in the South Mark was foolish enough not to recognize the nature of the tacit agreements that underpinned this kind of environment.

Ilbei, however, was no fresh-dropped foal, and he’d been in places like this often enough that his natural ease made it clear to anyone watching him arrive that he was not a target to be chosen lightly. For the sort of folk who frequent such places, that was cover charge enough.

He moved through the crowd and slid onto a barstool, pointing at the ale keg on the back counter with a gesture of his shaggy chin. The barkeep nodded and went to work as Ilbei looked around.

He couldn’t see the Queen’s assassin anywhere in the room, but he hadn’t expected that he would. The elf was known well enough across Kurr to make his appearance counterproductive for the task at hand, though only his appearance—everything else about him was perfect for the task. Ilbei knew he was in the room. Somewhere.

Ilbei scanned the crowd with his gaze, taking in the general sense of them, sailors mainly, pirates probably to the last man of those, but a fair number of teamster types and a handful of mercenaries too. A rough crowd, and definitely the sort he was looking for.

The barkeep set a pint of frothing ale in front of him but did not take his hand off the cup. “I’ll see the color of your coin, friend,” he said, pointing with his eyes through the bar in the general direction of where he reckoned Ilbei’s purse was.

Several patrons in the bar followed that gaze as well.

Ilbei placed the copper coins he already had in hand on the counter. “Shiny as Luria’s lips,” he said, as he pulled the cup from the barkeep’s grip.

The barkeep nodded and flashed a stingy smile.

The onlookers looked away.

Ilbei drank his ale slowly, making a careful show not to look around over much. Only when shouts broke out would he turn, casually, and pretend to watch. In those moments, which were frequent enough, he hid his scrutiny of the room behind bored-seeming spectatorship.

The approach was subtle enough, and eventually it worked, for seeing him sitting there alone, conspicuous but not, eventually drew a moth to the flame of possibility.

“Hello, friend,” said a lean young man, barely old enough to have begun the downy growth of a beard. It grew in reddish patches along his jaw and chin and seemed in its mangy sparseness intended to hide the lumpy acne that boiled upon the youngster’s carbuncular face. “Only one reason a man comes here alone.”

Ilbei made a point of turning to acknowledge the youth slowly and far more scornfully than was real. “Is there now?” He turned back to his ale and took another drink. “I got no love fer lads, so piss off.”

The young man laughed. “There’s fair enough places for that, true, but you know what I mean.” He sat down on the stool next to Ilbei, but made no move to order a drink.

Ilbei continued to work on his pint.

“I can help you find it,” said the youth. “It’s my specialty.” He broke out each syllable of the last word in a way that made it sound stretched and significant in his mouth.

Ilbei turned to him and showed him a granite gaze. “And just what is it,
boy
, that ya think I’m looking fer?”

“A woman.” The boy studied Ilbei hunched as he was, took in the broad shoulders and thick arms. He snorted at the pick, though. “Or maybe something only marginally female.”

Ilbei had to force himself not to look up. He stared purposefully through the dark liquid to the bottom of his pint.

But the young man knew his job well enough, and he saw something in the tension of Ilbei’s neck and back and in the way his breathing changed.

His voice dropped to barely audible. “A woman, then.” He laughed, but it was more a long wheeze. “I can get you any kind you like. The nastiest, the fattest, the youngest you please.”

Ilbei took another swig of ale, finishing it off. He shoved the empty mug forward so as to be sure the barkeep would see. The man acknowledged it with a nod.

“Too tame for you, eh, old man? Well, how about something more exotic? How about a centaur mare? Ever done one of them?”

Ilbei’s expression was half contempt, half curiosity and entirely genuine. He turned to the crater-faced young man with one eyebrow raised and a mouth shaped by disgust, though he said nothing.

“A centaur then?” The boy wheezed again, mistaking the look—or pretending to be dumb. Hard to say in a place like the Harlot’s Pocket. “You are a man with exotic tastes for sure. But a pricey one that is. They don’t come through but once or twice a year, and last one we seen was male, almost two months ago. A female is going to cost you.”

Ilbei shook his head, curiosity gone, leaving only disgust. The boy’s trained eye read it better then.

“A satyr, then. Or a witch? We’ve got some of the old-world types come through sometimes. No words, just animal power. The wild ones. They blind ‘em good first, no need to worry none.”

Ilbei took his refilled cup from the barkeep and pushed another of the copper coins toward the inside edge of the bar.

“How about a harpy then? That kinky enough for you? We’ll clean her up real good.”

Ilbei turned back to him and once more stared him in the eyes. “I don’t need no animals, no freaks or no maimed witches neither.”