Strangers (16 page)

One day during this period, he was witness to a very strange thing, something he wouldn’t really understand until weeks later.

He and Liraun were on their way back home from a Council meeting. As a Mother of Shasine, Liraun now rated a carriage, pulled by one of the sad-faced centipedes, and a driver who was on call at any hour of the day or night—Farber was allowed to ride in the coach only through Liraun’s special intervention, and received many primly disapproving looks every time he stepped in or out of it. This evening they were almost back to the Row when something broke the tomb-like silence that was the norm in Old City at this hour of the night: an eerie, wailing blast from some sort of musical instrument, a horn, perhaps, or a flute. Again it sounded, discordant and desolate, the sort of sound a lost soul might make while sinking down to Hell. Under it came a drum: harsh, clattering, with a crazy rhythm that staggered back and forth like a drunken man.

Liraun had sat bolt upright at the first note of the “horn,” and Farber could feel her quivering with tension or fear beside him in the darkness. Now—at the sound of the drum—she swayed and put her hands to her throat in horror. “An
opeinad
!” she whispered. For a second she sat as still as stone, but then—just as Farber was opening his mouth to ask her what the matter was—she sprang to her feet and pounded on the back of the driver’s seat to attract his attention. “The
opeinad
! Find it! Follow the sound!”

The driver turned around to stare at her, his face disapproving and apprehensive. “But Mother, you know I can’t do that . . .”

“Do what I say!” Liraun snarled. “Find it. Now!”

Shrugging and muttering, the driver turned the coach and headed back the way they had come. Farber reached up to pull Liraun back down in the seat, but she shrugged him off and remained standing, holding on to the back of the driver’s seat. “Liraun—” he started to say, but at the same time she leaned forward and shouted “Faster!” at the driver. Without turning around, the driver said, “But Mother—” in a choken sullen voice; Liraun hit him savagely in the back with the flat of her hand and screamed “Faster! Cold People shrivel you if you don’t go
faster
!” That was enough for the driver—no one wanted to have ill luck wished on him by a Mother of Shasine. Hissing, he prodded the centipede with a long sharp pole. The centipede mooed plaintively, shook itself, and began to flow forward at twice its previous speed, rippling over the ruts and bumps in the road.

Unfortunately, the carriage didn’t have the centipede’s multiple suspension system: it bounced and jolted wildly, while Farber yelled for Liraun to sit down and she ignored him; Farber could barely keep his seat, but Liraun kept her balance easily, shifting her weight with each jolt as though she were riding a surfboard—she was staring intently ahead of her into the darkness, something about the set of her head and neck evocative of her anxiety and tension. At last there was a light: torches ahead, somewhere down the slope, bobbing like a train of moving red jewels. “They’re headed for the Square of the Benediction,” Liraun shouted, above the clatter of the wheels. “That way! Head them off!” She pounded on the back of the driver’s seat. “Faster!” Obediently, the driver swerved the carriage into the alley Liraun had indicated, almost tipping them over in the process; they plummeted down a steep incline, blue sparks shooting from the brakes as the driver tried to slow the carriage up enough to keep it from over-running the centipede. Bewildered and ignored in the midst of all this commotion, Farber hung onto his seat and clenched his teeth, trying not to think about how hard they would hit the stone street if the carriage went over.

Bobbing and swerving, they careened out into the Square of the Benediction.

Liraun had timed it well. The square was still empty, but they could hear the horn calling nearby, and the staccato clatter of the drums, and, under it, a sound like that a large and angry bee might make: a concerted and ominous hum.

The carriage screeched to a halt, the brakes throwing sparks three feet in the air, and had not yet stopped rolling before Liraun sprang out of it, heading for the center of the square. Farber vaulted out after her, calling her name, terrified that she would injure herself. But in spite of her pregnancy she was running like a deer, and she was nearly twenty yards ahead of him when the other woman bolted into the square.

This woman was running too, but she staggered and reeled as she ran, and it was obvious that she was on her last legs. Even as he watched, she tripped and went down, tumbling over and over, coming to a stop face down. She didn’t try to get up again, but lay sprawled out against the pavement, her shoulders heaving as she breathed in stertorous gasps. Behind her, the
opeinad
spilled out of an alley mouth into the square. To Farber, they looked like something out of an old Frankenstein movie: two or three dozen men waving torches and carrying improvised weapons, clubs, paving stones, pieces of pipe, one
twizan
ceremoniously brandishing something that looked absurdly like a giant set of pinking shears. It should have been funny, ludicrous, but it wasn’t—the faces of the men were grim and fierce, their bared fangs glittered evilly, their eyes were hard as flint, and Farber thought that they were the most terrifying sight he had ever seen. They saw the woman, howled with rage and glee, and threw themselves forward.

Liraun ran to meet them.

She passed the other woman, ran a few feet farther on toward the oncoming mob, stopped, threw her arms wide, and waited, motionless, like a spread-armed statue, like King Canute trying to turn back an alien tide.

To Farber, running hard to catch up, cold fear like a fist in his belly, it looked for a long moment like the mob was not going to stop, like it would roll right over Liraun, trampling her, to get at the other woman. But almost imperceptibly the mob slowed, slowed, and then came to a restless, surging halt a few feet from Liraun, like a comber arrested on its way in to the beach.

They eyed each other in silence, Liraun and the hundred-handed, hundred-headed crowd.

Then Liraun, arms still outstretched, said: “This hunt is over. Go home.”

The crowd surged restlessly, humming that ominous razor-edged hum, and then one of its voices said “The
opein
!” and another voice said “What about the
opein
?” and another said “Let us have her! She is an
opein
!” They started forward again.

Liraun took another step forward, raising her arms higher, holding the mob, seeming to press them back as though she were radiating a wall of invisible force. “
Opein
or not,” Liraun shouted, “you shall not have her! She is mine now, and the
opeinad
is over. Go home!” Her voice was hard, icy, filled with chill authority. The crowd also heard that authority, and reluctantly, against their own wills, they began to respond to it, one or two men at the back of the mob turning hesitantly to walk away. Behind Liraun, the woman sat up.

That was a mistake. The mob howled at the sight of her face, and one young man at its leading edge darted forward, trying to get around Liraun. Hissing, Liraun snatched the man’s torch away from him and beat him fiercely over the head with it. As he fell, rolling and slapping at the sparks in his hair, Liraun whirled the torch around and around her head, so that it blazed up as brightly as a comet, and screamed “Get out! People Under the Sea, hear what I say! Get out!
Now!
”

And she hurled the torch at the crowd.

That broke them. They poured back out of the square, some unabashedly running, some trudging dispiritedly with their heads bowed, but none stopping or turning back.

Liraun stood looking after them, standing straight as a ramrod, her face passionate and fierce. Farber watched her in awe, almost afraid of her, seeing in this furious Valkyrie no trace of the Liraun he thought he knew.

The other woman got painfully to her feet, Liraun making no attempt to help her. Her face was streaked with dirt and sweat and blood, her hair wildly tangled, a bruise—probably from a thrown rock—purpling half her face and already beginning to swell. In spite of her dishevelment, Farber realized, with a shock, that he recognized her. She was named Tamarane, and she was the wife of Lord Vrome (his actual title was
hyrithákumenäe
, “Hereditary Holder of Land-Titles, in Escrow, for a Sub-Sept of Which He Is Elder”), who has bloodline connections of some kind to Genawen’s sept. He had met them at Genawen’s house a few times, and had heard some talk about her—she had failed to conceive at two
weiunids
now, and was thought to be sterile.

Liraun and Tamarane eyed each other, much as Liraun and the mob had a few moments before, and there was a similar kind of hostility and tension in the air between them.

At last, Tamarane managed a crooked smile through her bruised and bleeding face. “Well, Mother,” she said in a husky, ironic voice. “Thank you for my life.”

“I should have let them have you,” Liraun said bitterly. “I should have let them have you. Only I couldn’t somehow—” She swayed suddenly, no longer fierce, looking instead gray and tired and drawn. Farber put out a hand to steady her.

Tamarane’s face changed, too. “Liraun—” she said, or started to say, concern in her voice now, and a certain rueful tenderness. But Liraun cut her off with a wave of her hand. “There is nothing I want to hear from you,” Liraun said coldly. “There is nothing you can say to anyone anymore. You forfeited that privilege.” The carriage came up then, and with Farber’s help, Liraun climbed into it. She would not look at Tamarane again.

Farber’s last glimpse of the scene, as the carriage clattered away, was of Tamarane, standing alone in the center of the square, looking after them, grinning a complex, bitter, and ironic grin through her broken face as she fell away behind into the darkness and obscurity of the night.

Liraun refused to say anything about this incident at all, but the next day at work Farber’s shiftmates were full of gossip about it. It had been discovered—how, Farber did not know—that Tamarane was not really sterile at all; that instead she had been taking a
drug that inhibited fertility
(the Cian shuddered in incredulous horror as they related this, and it struck Farber that the word “contraceptive” wasn’t even a part of their vocabulary)—said
drug-that-inhibits-fertility
having been smuggled up at enormous expense from distant lands to the south. Thus the
opeinad
: obviously only an
opein
, or a woman who had been possessed by an
opein
, could do such a monstrous thing, and it was best to crush it and her out of existence before the
opein
could contaminate anyone else. All of Farber’s workmates were puzzled by Liraun’s interference with the
opeinad
, but they didn’t censure her for it or—now that the heat of the moment was past—even question her actions: after all, she was “One Who Has Been Translated to Harmony,” and as such her decisions were divinely motivated and by definition correct, no matter how incomprehensible they might seem to mere untransmogrified creatures like themselves—annoyingly, they included Farber in this classification and didn’t even bother to question him about the motivations for Liraun’s behavior, naturally assuming he was too lowly to understand them.

The affair of Tamarane was far from over, however. Already, two foreign river-traders, suspected of duplicity in bringing the
drug-that-inhibits-fertility
north to Shasine, had been taken into custody, and Tamarane herself had disappeared into Sloptown, the warren of foreign commonhouses and hostels on the Vandermont edge of the Aome waterfront. No one would hurt her, since a Mother of Shasine had thrown a cloak of protection over her, but at the same time it was obvious that she could not remain in Aei for long—no one would serve her, shelter her, or sell to her, except possibly a few foreign merchants of dubious sensibilities, and once Liraun’s term as a Mother was over and her protection was therefore withdrawn, the
opeinad
would start its hunt for Tamarane all over again. There was much speculation about what Tamarane would do then. There was even more speculation about whether Lord Vrome himself had had complicity in his wife’s crime. Whether he had known about it or not; he was nevertheless in deep disgrace.

Later that day, Farber took the cable car back up to Old City, and had just stepped out onto the Esplanade, making his way through the afternoon crowds on the Terrace, when his attention was caught by the sudden and insistent ringing of a triangle or gong. He looked up. There was a man on the roof of one of the tall buildings that bordered on the edge of the Esplanade, six stories up, standing with his hands clasped behind his head. A few steps behind him was a servitor with a bronze gong and a hammer. The servitor beat the gong, over and over again, until the brassy waves of sound washed back and forth across the Terrace, and everyone was looking up. Satisfied that all eyes were upon him, the man unclasped his hands, touched them to his chest, and bowed. Then he stepped to the edge of the roof, raised his arms like a diver going off the high board, and threw himself out into space.

The man seemed to hang in the air above Farber for a long time, arms outstretched to either side, hair floating in the wind, face serene, and then, suddenly moving very quickly, he plunged down and past, having calculated his leap to take him past the outer edge of the Esplanade. He plummeted down through the gulfs of air toward the New City, down the sheer three-hundred-foot drop toward the roofs of Brundane, dwindling, becoming a manikin the size of a fingernail paring, a dot, a speck, disappearing from sight entirely, swallowed by distance and death.

Farber had recognized him.

It was Lord Vrome.

Or perhaps one should say, it had been Lord Vrome.

· · ·

A week or two later, at dusk, Farber was making his way through one of the narrow, high-walled, winding alleys in the interior of Old City when he came face to face with a man coming the other way. A fugitive ray of wine-colored sunlight, falling down a shaft past dust and old black stone, illuminated the man’s face.