Runner (2 page)

“Was there anything else?” Telvas demanded. “Anything unusual about his body or the way that he moved?”

Rebo thought back to the meeting that had taken place more than two years before. Unlike the present encounter it had been brief. But there had been something distinctive about the other brother's movements. “Yes, your brother had a pronounced limp.”

“Ah,” Telvas replied thoughtfully. “So he still has the leg . . . I know this conversation must seem strange to you, but suffice it to say that my brother and I had what you might call a business disagreement, which culminated in an injury to his leg. I had assumed that the medicos would remove it.

“So, tell me, Citizen Rebo,” the merchant said, forming a steeple with his fingers. “What was your impression of my brother? I haven't seen him in many years. Is he a nice man?”

Rebo summoned up a picture of a man with hard eyes, slightly overripe lips, and freshly powdered skin. A man who looked like he'd been a killer once, but currently considered himself to be above that sort of thing, and hoped to leave the previous him behind. But did it make sense to say that?
No,
the runner thought to himself, and was about to lie when Telvas produced three gold cronos and pushed them across the desk. It was a gratuity, and a generous one,
which would make a nice addition to the account that Rebo maintained with the runner's guild. “Take them,” the merchant ordered, “and put them in your pocket.
Then
give me your answer—and not the one you think I want to hear.”

Rebo slid the coins off into a palm, felt their reassuring weight, and stashed them in one of the many pockets that lined the inside of his jacket. With that accomplished the runner looked straight into the other man's eyes. “I think your brother is an extremely dangerous man.”

The merchant nodded soberly. “So, that being the case, would
you
open the box?”

Rebo looked down at the seemingly innocent box and back up again. “No, sir. I wouldn't.”

“But what if it contains a peace offering?” the other man insisted. “What then? I feel bad about what happened to my brother's leg and would like to make it up to him.”

The runner shrugged. “Your brother didn't strike me as a man who makes peace offerings, but the choice is yours.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Telvas replied. “Thank you for delivering the box. And thank you for the advice. Feva will see you to the gate.”

Rebo stood. “Is there a rear entrance?”

Telvas nodded understandingly. “Yes, there is. Tell Feva, and she will take you there.”

Rebo withdrew after that, discovered that Feva had appeared in the hall, and glanced back over his shoulder as she closed the door. The box remained on the surface of the desk, and Telvas continued to stare at it.

The runner slipped out through the back gate ten minutes later, was pleased when none of the watchmen stationed there showed the least bit of interest in him, and started down the street. Rebo had walked about a hundred feet, and was just about to cross a street, when he heard a dull
thump
and looked back in time to see a puff of smoke shoot out of a window. The study? Yes, he thought so. There were cries of alarm, followed by hysterical screams, and Rebo knew that Telvas was dead.

The runner paused to take a long slow look around. Was there
another
runner lurking in the area? A man or woman hired to confirm the merchant's death and carry a message back to his brother? There wasn't any sign of one, but that didn't mean much, so Rebo sauntered away. It was a nice day, a profitable day, but one that left him with an unfathomable question: How could such an apparently smart man be so stupid?

Even though Lanni Norr was a stranger to the city, the
marketplace was easy to find. First, because at least half of the traffic flowing into Seros was headed there, and second, because once the sensitive drew close enough she could smell the rich amalgam of spices, fried food, and angen feces that scented the air around it.

Then, as she entered the market, even more senses came into play. There were racks of colorful fabrics, bins filled with vegetables, tables covered with jewelry, booths hung with amulets, racks of handmade clothing, piles of woven baskets, bags filled with white nuts, reels of hand-twisted rope, trays loaded with fragrant candles, display boards covered with wicked-looking knives and so much more that one couldn't hope to see all of it in a single day. And there were sounds, too. The rumble of a thousand haggling voices was punctuated by the squawks, snorts, and squeals of caged angens, the incessant shouts of vendors who never stopped hawking their wares, the ring of hammers on metal, the wail of a lost child, and occasional snatches of music.

But there was more,
much
more, for Norr at least, who
unlike 99 percent of the people swirling about her could see the separate energy fields that each individual emitted, catch glimpses of the discarnate spirits who flitted through the area intent on errands of their own, and was constantly buffeted by waves of projected emotion. Not because she sought to experience such things, but because her ancestors had been genetically engineered to pick up on other people's emotions, manipulate small objects from a distance, heal the sick, and communicate with the dead.

As Norr made her way through the market, she was exposed to continual bursts of love, hate, greed, fear, lust, and happiness as those about her wrestled with what fellow sensitives referred to as the holy trinity: money, sex, and power—the basic drives behind most human activity, including hers. Because it took money to survive, which was why the sensitive had been forced to emerge from hiding and make the long, uncomfortable trek into Seros.

So, unpleasant though the task was, Norr wandered the long, tight aisles until she spotted the sign she'd been looking for. Most of the city's population were functionally illiterate, so a large replica of a quill had been hung over the booth, and therefore over the scribe who sat on a stool beneath it.

Like most of his ilk, the bespectacled clerk was a member of the so called A-strain, meaning the 80 percent of humans also referred to as norms. Most had black hair, olive-colored skin, and long, slender bodies. There were exceptions, of course, genetic throwbacks to the days hundreds of thousands of years before, when people came in a rainbow of colors. Such individuals were rare however.

This specimen sported a bowl cut, a pair of thick hand-ground lenses that were perched on the very tip of his nose, and radiated smug superiority. His aura flickered and
morphed into something like apprehension as Norr approached the counter. Because even though the young woman with the pack, the long wooden staff, and the knee-high boots looked innocent enough, she had the large dark eyes, high cheekbones, and narrow face of a sensitive. A breed that the scribe, like many others, had reason to fear. Not because of a personal experience with one, but because they were said to read minds, and the wordsmith had things to hide. Like his tendency to mentally undress almost every woman he encountered. In fact he had already stripped Norr, noting that her breasts were too small for his taste, when she arrived in front of his counter. The clerk swallowed the lump that threatened to fill his throat and struggled to speak. “Yes?” he croaked. “Can I help you?”

Norr
couldn't
read minds, but she could sense the emotions that surrounded the man and was willing to take advantage of them. “You are a very naughty man,” she said experimentally, and knew she had scored when the scribe's face turned bright red.

“I-I-I'm sorry,” the wordsmith stuttered. “I didn't mean anything by it.”

“Good,” Norr replied soothingly. “Apology accepted. Perhaps you can help me.”

“I'll certainly try,” the clerk replied eagerly, pleased to get off the hook so easily. “What do you need? A letter perhaps?”

“No,” Norr replied deliberately. “I could write that myself. What I need is some advertising.”

“Ah,” the scribe responded happily, “a flyer should do it! I'll write one up, send it over to the guild's workshop, and you'll have five hundred copies by noon tomorrow. The press is broken again, but the apprentices can copy it by hand. The practice will do them good.”

“Thanks,” Norr said cautiously. “But how much would that cost?”

“Oh, about a hundred and fifty gunars,” the wordsmith replied airily, “but well worth the price.”

“Perhaps,” Norr said agreeably, conscious of the fact that she had only a hundred gunars in her purse. “However I'm looking for something a bit more economical.”

The bright red money lust that surrounded the scribe flickered and started to fade. “Yes, well, I suppose we could use graffiti instead. For seventy-five gunars our specialists could paint one-line messages onto two hundred and fifty highly visible walls throughout the city.”

Norr looked surprised. “You mean people pay for that stuff?”

“Of course,” the wordsmith said matter-of-factly. “We run into freelancers from time to time, or lose messages when a citizen slaps a fresh coat of paint over our work, but it doesn't take long for them to see the error of their ways. Especially after a couple of heavies drop by to say ‘hello.' ”

“Okay,” Norr agreed reluctantly. “Two hundred and fifty locations sounds good. But how many words to a line?”

“Ten,” the scribe replied succinctly.

“I need more,” Norr insisted, as she counted them in her head. “Seventeen to be precise.”

“That's going to cost you five gunars,” the clerk warned primly.

“Not necessarily,” the sensitive countered as she leaned forward. “Remember that apology? What if your superiors were aware of what you've been up to?”

The clerk's supervisor happened to be a woman, and he could imagine what would happen if she knew that he had undressed her hundreds of times. There were worse
assignments than the market,
much
worse, and he had no desire to receive one. Ink-stained fingers reached for a hand-sharpened quill, which the scribe dipped into a disreputable-looking bottle, and held poised above a blank sheet of paper. “Okay, seventeen. What are they?”

Norr looked off into space as she recited them. “Come see the famous sensitive Lanni Norr communicate with the dead Friday at eight, in the actor's guild.”

“That's eighteen words.”

“Okay,” Norr said nonchalantly. “Make it eighteen then.”

The scribe's pen made a scritching sound as he transferred the words to a piece of tan parchment. The sensitive noticed that each letter was formed with the perfection of an ancient printing machine and marveled at how precise the man was. It was evident that he enjoyed his work because as he wrote the color of his aura changed from red to a harmonious blue. “That will be seventy-five gunars,” the wordsmith said as he blotted the paper. “Payable in advance.”

“I'll give you forty up front, and the rest when the messages actually appear,” Norr replied.

The scribe swore under his breath. “All right . . . But a heavy will show up Friday to collect, so you'd better be ready to pay.”

“I will be,” Norr replied confidently and counted gunars out onto the surface of the counter. “By the way, this will be a demonstration of psychic phenomena rather than some sort of show. I think you should come.”

“Thank you,” the wordsmith answered politely. “But I'm busy that night.”

“Okay,” Norr said as she prepared to leave. “But your wife is there by your side. She says that her death wasn't the least bit painful, she's happy on the spirit plane, and you should stop grieving for her.”

No one knew about the true extent to which the scribe missed his wife, and he hadn't mentioned her death to the young woman, so how did she know? Tears welled up in the clerk's eyes, and he used a tattered sleeve to wipe them away. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask Norr what his wife looked like now, but the sensitive was gone.

Because the monastery had been built hundreds of years
before, back when Seros was little more than a settlement, it occupied a piece of prime real estate atop one of the hills marking the city's eastern boundary. The complex was surrounded by high walls, which the brotherhood said had been built to keep ignorance at bay, but had practical value as well, for hardly a month passed without an attempt to break in and steal the gold that was rumored to be kept there. There wasn't any gold, of course, but the monastery did contain some precious artifacts, which was one of the reasons why the Dib Wa (iron men) patrolled the walls. The other reason, the person each of the warriors was sworn to protect with his life, threw a door open and bounded onto the surface of a large flat roof.

The guards smiled indulgently as the ten-year-old boy ran in circles, waved his arms, and sent a flock of white wings flapping into the air. It was a daily ritual and one of the few unstructured moments of the youngster's day. He wore a pillbox-shaped red hat like those favored by the adult members of his sect, a matching knee-length jacket, and black trousers. And, because Tra Lee was widely believed to be the reincarnated spirit of Nom Maa, a much-revered teacher who had entered the spirit realms a dozen years earlier, all the Dib Wa bowed. Not to the boy, but to the man they believed he would become, and the role that “the Divine Wind” was destined to play in the future.