Skeen's Leap (7 page)

She walked along the dusty road, strolling through a warm golden morning, leading a neat little jennet, a genuine beast, one that wouldn't shed its skin and turn into a hostile Min. This beast was expendable as was everything it carried, part of her disguise as an Aggitj extra earning her living as a wandering peddler. Sussaa had overcome his distaste sufficiently to supervise the bleaching and dyeing of her hair until it was the color of moonsilver. She was wearing loose leather trousers that came to midleg, her own boots, a loose white shirt like those the chalapeer had been wearing, a long narrow vest ending at mid thigh, closed in the front with more lacing. She was moving away from a grove south of the city. Telka was perched somewhere in there with Skeen's backpack and the pouch of jewelry she refused to hand over before she got hold of her sister. No doubt she suspected Skeen would go in one gate and out another, scampering for the Gate, leaving the Min without their jewelry and their woman. I stay bought, she told them, but they wouldn't listen.

Sister. There was something they weren't saying about that. Skirrik or not, Timka was Telka's equal at shifting. No one had actually said so, in fact no one she talked with said much at all about Timka, that was interesting in itself; talk or not she got the strong impression Timka was Telka's equal in just about everything but ambition. So how come she was a slave? How come she was
still
a slave? Skeen couldn't imagine Telka enduring that state for a day, let alone a couple of years. Maybe Timka just got bored with all that stomach burning about lost land and took off. Djabo's hairy tail, it's not my problem. What she does after I fetch her out is up to her.

She started whistling as she walked along, sauntering contentedly toward the city. She couldn't sing worth a shit, but she could whistle. Little bird, Tibo that baster called her in one of his more drunken moments. Little—when she was a head and a half taller than him—ah well, it was nice to be cuddled and pampered a little. She was enjoying herself today, well-fed and well-rested, keyed up for the danger ahead but not imminent, her body humming like that sweet ship Tibo that baster choused her out of.

She always felt good when she was physically active. The long flights between worlds left her itchy and irritable and off her stride. One of the reasons she took up with partners. Sex was an exercise that didn't necessarily need much space and used up a lot of energy and continued to be interesting after a lot of repetition. She liked her men wiry and little with lots of stamina, jutting buttocks, knobby knees, small feet, small hands. And an intangible something else. Could call it imagination, if you wanted to be kind, slipperiness and a total lack of morals if you wanted to be snarky. Getting off with Picarefy, worms eat his poky arse. Five years with him, five years! May his liver rise up and choke him, may all his teeth fall out and boils afflict his butt. My taste in men is appalling. Death wish, that's what it is. She grimaced and went back to whistling, grimaced again when she heard what she was whistling and remembered where she learned that song. Tibo you little baster, why do I miss you so much, why does it still hurt like hell.…

She reached the Land Gate of Dum Besar around mid-afternoon. Tired, covered with dust, nothing about her to attract attention, even the fact that she was female concealed by the clothes she wore, she eased past the heat-dazed guards without being noticed. Eased past a Skirrik too, on guard at the Gate to sniff out uppish Min. Squatting beside the Gate on his powerful hinder legs, compound eyes glittering in the long light of the descending sun, green and brown chitin polished and waxed, set with patterns of jet, that semiprecious stone highly prized by the seventh Wave males. Feathery antennas—white—the color marking him as adolescent and virgin, still earning the jet for his marriage price, his senses at their keenest. He paid her no attention as far as she could tell, too busy grooming his antennas with the spurs at the back of his fore-wrists.

Skeen grinned and strolled into the littered streets, the jennet ambling lazily behind; she wrinkled her nose at the stench, signs were the Pallah had forgotten whatever they knew about sewers. The streets were narrow and twisty, houses several stories high, built oddly upside down so that the upper stories extended beyond the lower in a series of steps, the top stories so close a child could hop from one window to another, something she saw several times. Beggars crouched in corners, beside stairs, anywhere they could find a bit of shelter, displaying their injuries and deformities, shaking their begging clackers in a continual clamor that only ceased when someone dropped coins in a begging bowl, or a shop owner paid his cadre of beggars for their silence and their services keeping off others of their kind.

She found the hostel Telka told her about, close to one of the riverside walls, a small dingy place with a smell to it Skeen recognized instantly, a den similar to those she hung about in after she escaped from the labor pool. Kind recognized kind. She relaxed in one way and tightened in another, knowing from long experience just how little she could trust her kind.

She stabled the jennet and dumped her saddlebags and her packs in the room the clerk directed her to; he gave her a key for it and she locked the door behind her with no faith at all in the efficacy of that lock. If she lost her key, she could whistle the thing open. Whistle? A sigh might be enough.

Having dusted herself off, she went downstairs, hesitated a moment as she walked through the tavern. Dark and smelly, just what she liked, but there was no time for that now, not until she looked over the ground.

She left the hostel and began roving through the streets, ambling with apparent aimlessness toward the quarter where the wealthier folk lived, taking in the increase in house size and the size of the plots those houses occupied. Hard-eyed loiterers grew thicker on the scene, walking the tops of the walls, sitting in casual knots on benches outside the elaborate gates, eyeing her with increasing disfavor as the crowds in the streets thinned out and the garden walls grew higher and more imposing, the air fresher, the day quieter as it passed into the night. She slouched along, relaxed and unconcerned, with the invincible gawk of a sightseer determined to stick her nose everywhere. She located the house of Klikay the Poet (youngest and reputed to be the most useless of the brothers of the Byglave, the man and family who with a play of modesty told the Casach of Dum Besar how to govern the city and the domain). No one pays much attention to the Poet, Telka said. They don't guard him with any care because no one with the slightest pretense of a working mind would waste their time trying to kill or kidnap him.

There was a wall. Shabby. The plaster, insipid frescoes, covering the red brick was cracking and flaking away. She wrinkled her nose at the clumsy ugly scenes in dull pastel colors. No great loss if it all came off. Maybe he was a good poet, but his taste in art was gruesome. Probably spikes or broken glass on the top of that wall; she couldn't tell from where she stood, but it didn't matter. She could climb that wall easily enough using one of several trees growing out over it; from the look of the thing she wouldn't have to worry about leaving marks for guards to notice. Flet had sent one of her followers on several high flights over the city to give Skeen some idea about how the house was arranged, but once she was inside she was on her own. No Min except Timka had been inside that structure so the layout was anyone's guess. She didn't like going in blind but, Djabo's twitchy nose, no fancy traps in this jerkwater place. No sniffer alarms, no sorting ears or any of the thousand other things she'd had to neutralize or outwit before. She strolled on, scolding herself for her tendency to think she could walk in and out as if she was calling on the man. Carelessness like that could do her in faster than a fancy trap. You don't know this stinking world, woman. You don't know where the pitfalls are or what they are. Shapechangers, hah! What else is this place going to spring on you? Wizards shaking death rattles in your face? Witches yammering in the night? Tickled by the absurdities her imagination threw up, she walked along chuckling to herself, moving back into more plebeian realms, working her way next to the wall, walking along it, checking out possible escape routes.

The gates were closed at sunset, watched by Skirrik and squads of local guards. Herds of hungry massits were loosed on the parapet to discourage anyone stupid enough to try climbing over the wall; they'd strip this fool to the bone in less than a breath and a half. Telka said they had a special hatred of Min and a mass mind so powerful it overwhelmed the subtle control the Min exercised on most beasts. Thanks to Strazhha the V'duluvit she had something she thought might deal with that little problem, but she wasn't looking forward to using it.

Up close to the wall, the houses were elbow to elbow, narrow, hardly a room wide, each house jammed with people, with those who lived all the time in the city, with transients from all over, traders, tramp artisans, farmers, peasants, younger sons looking for adventure or work (which one depended on their family's wealth and status or lack of it). She started moving toward the market, passing through more visitors—rivermen off the boats that sailed up and down the Rekkah and the smaller Rioti, land traders with their stolid stumpy beasts, hordes of gawkers come to stare, come to buy or sell, come to complain about something, come as pilgrims to pay homage at the temple that was the tallest structure inside the walls. Lines of Blackrobes winding through the buyers and sellers in the market, solemn-faced children censing them and every one around with a pungent incense.

Skeen spent the narrow remnant of the day in the market, buying a few things that would be useful when she went over the wall—a large unworked hide, thick and supple, nicely tanned, several large iron nails and a wooden mallet, a few other odds and ends. She carried the leather rolled over her shoulder as she continued wandering among the tables and booths and heaps, excited by just about everything she saw around her. Everything crafted by hand. Swords, knives, mail shirts and other specimens of the smith's art. Bows of several sorts, arrow points (heavy multi-tanged hunting arrows meant for big game or armed men to small knobs meant to bring down birds). Reels of thread. Gold and silver wire. Papers of needles, papers of pins. Swaths of lace, ribbons. Wooden objects, from simple bowls to elaborate carvings. Glass mirrors and polished bronze mirrors. Lamps of horn and parchment, of glass and silver, the metalwork as fine as she'd seen anywhere, the silver inlaid with a delicate gold tracery in marvelous intricate whorls and webbing. Leather goods, saddles, harness, gloves, hats, boots, belts. A Rooner's dream, a whole world to be plundered, a world no one could reach but her—well, almost no one. Not that these were ruins. But Rooners are flexible, (oh yes we are, we take our artifacts where we find them). She thought about old Yeoch. Someone might finally believe him. Ah well, I can take care of that later, haul him here, maybe, and dump him, he might like to see his Sessi again. She grinned at the thought.

She nosed out a cookshop, got some meat pies and a mug of cider. When she finished eating, she went back to the room, stretched out on the bed and settled herself to sleep until it was time to go for the woman.

Skeen went over the wall three hours after midnight.

Flet and her fliers had mapped the routes the werehounds took as they prowled the city streets and tied their rounds to moon positions so Skeen could judge time by glancing at the sky. She couldn't complain about the back-up; the Min went all out for her once the bargain was struck. In spite of that her trek to the Poet's house was harrowing at times. She could hear howls a short distance away, once a chopped-off scream as a transient stupid enough to sleep in the street died under the jaws of werehounds. Worse than saayungkas, much worse. She shivered at the thought of deadly, intelligent beasts roaming the streets only a breath away from her, the senses and ferocity of the animals whose shapes they wore, the intelligence of a man directing that ferocity. But they had their patterns and ran them with a bored precision.

One guard on the wall, asleep in his shelter by the gate. More a porter than a guard despite his mail shirt and crossbow. His snores announced his presence a dozen meters away.

There were iron spikes and broken glass atop the wall. The spikes had once been sharpened to knife edges, now they were dulled by rust and long neglect; the glass had eroded to abrasive dust. She set the padded grapple on the spikes with a quiet ta-thunk, went up the rope with a few scrapes of boot soles against plaster, a rain of broken plaster to the pavement which she ignored, the sounds lost in the snores of the gateguard.

She ghosted through the garden alert for traps or prowling werebeasts but it was deserted; a wandering breeze rustled grass and leaves and rattled windows. She slipped the latch on a window and boosted herself inside, feeling as light-hearted as a kid trashing an obnoxious neighbor. It was impossible to treat this with any kind of care though she did keep telling herself not to underestimate them. He won't be guarded, Telka said, but this was ridiculous.

A large empty room filled with pale gray light from the waxing moon. She prowled about, flashing a pinlight over any bit of shadow that seemed interesting. She slipped several small carvings and other bibelots into her shoulder bag, then went cautiously out the door.

After exploring a few more of the groundfloor rooms, she decided the bedrooms were upstairs somewhere and the woman was most likely in the Poet's bed. Telka said so, and she should know. Plenty more things down here she could pick up, but she had other business tonight. She left the tempting public rooms and started up the graceful free-floating spiral ramp that led to the next floor.

On the second floor she went more cautiously. The Poet had a family, though the Min knew little about them. So they said. Doesn't pay to be too mistrustful … they wanted Timka out of this place, the air in the court stank of it. She'd half expected the Synarc to add that she should kill the woman if she couldn't get her clear, but they didn't. Just as well, be a cold day on Vatra before she killed for hire.