Blood of the City

by Robin D. Laws

  Khonderian turned onto a street of taverns. Tables spilled onto the streets, forcing those who wished to navigate the lane to wend between them. Brass emblems screwed to their tops identified the borderlines where those belonging to one establishment ended, and another's began. Luma had been here before. More intoxicating than the wines was the song of conviviality that swelled from the assembled drinkers, a drunken harmony only her senses could hear.

  Her quarry took a seat at an empty table. Other tipplers converged on it—then, seeing who he was, diverted to another. Khonderian was waiting for someone.

  Luma found a stool by a railing—the best compromise between seeing and not being seen. A stooped barmaid took her order for a half-jug of white. She settled in to watch Khonderian while seeming to hold her gaze elsewhere.

  For the first time, it struck Luma as odd that Khonderian, well established in a city whose notables proudly sported two if not three names, went by only one. Though presumably he had a given name, she could not recall it and had never heard anyone apply one to him. He was always simply Khonderian. For all she knew, maybe that was his given name, and it was his surname that had fallen away from him.

  Two flagons of ale appeared at Khonderian's table. He sipped absently from one of them.

  Distraction impinged on her. The citysong, usually jolly here, hummed with an undertone of disquiet.

  Two men, both in their middle years, sat down nearby, continuing a loud conversation. One had bits of clay beneath his fingernails. Small burns, likely from the spilled, molten metal of a jeweler's workshop, spotted the other's hands.

  "You're not telling me he won't make it?" boomed the potter.

  The jeweler waved for service. "I won't say he won't, as I fear to jinx him, but the barber says too much of him is crushed."

  "He can't afford the healing?"

  "Who can, these days?"

  Hoping to drown them out, Luma attuned herself to the citysong. But as the din of laughing drinkers rose, the jeweler and potter compensated, shouting all the louder.

  "The guild won't pitch in?"

  "Did I say the guild won't pitch in? It'll take a lot of healing, that's all I'm saying. The guild's only got so much coin. They'd sooner spend it to hire golem-fighters."

  Now Luma adjusted her position for better eavesdropping. This was beginning to sound like a possible job. If she brought word of it to Randred, and it came to something, it might earn her some credit with the others.

  "Hellknights?"

  "You don't hire Hellknights."

  "They hate disorder, don't they?"

  "I'm no expert on what Hellknights do and don't despise."

  "Smashing into a shop in broad daylight, fatally beating patrons and wounding the proprietor. Tell me that's not the very definition of disorder."

  "There was Hellknights down at the shop. Maybe they'll step in, maybe they won't."

  "How many times is this now?"

  "Fourth shop in three weeks. Six people dead. Couple more likely to go."

  "For the first time, I'm grateful pots ain't as valuable as gold and gems."

  "Your wit overwhelms me. I'd close up, but how do I earn a living?"

  "You wouldn't think golems would be hard to find," said the potter.

  "If that were true, wouldn't someone have found them, then?" asked the jeweler.

  "Renegade golems. What's the city coming to?"

  "What's the city coming to indeed? It's high time we set up more city guards."

  "You know what happens when the moneybelts hire more guards? The taxman comes around. And not to their doors, but to ours."

  Their words seemed to fade into the general din as a short-statured figure took a place opposite Khonderian, doffing a feathered, wide-brimmed hat. From behind it took a moment to tell if this new arrival was a gnome or a halfling. Gnome, she concluded. She noted olive skin, delicate fingers, and the disproportionately large head characteristic of gnomekind. Curly raven hair spilling from the hat betrayed the dull regularity of a dye job. As a gnome, he might be covering up an outlandish natural hair color—crimson, or even green. The fripperies of his garb supported that theory, announcing its wearer's strained effort to follow the tastes of local high society. Rich brocades adorned his velvet doublet. Frays marred its edges; grime ringed the cuffs of his flowing shirt.

  As they conversed, the two proved a contrast in body language. The gnome flourished his arms, leaned back in his chair, and carried himself as if engaged in a friendly colloquy. He drained his flagon in a single go and gestured for another. Khonderian contained himself, hands folded on the table, avoided gesture, and barely moved his lips when he spoke. Any nearby movement fell under his subtle scrutiny.

  Luma counted out the distance between her stool and their table—too far to try to eavesdrop on his thoughts. If she moved closer, she'd move into his sphere of attention.

  Khonderian slid an object across the table. The gnome held it up to his ear: it was a purse, and he was theatrically listening to the clank of the coins inside. Khonderian's face twitched in mild amusement. Then he stood, gave the gnome an ironical half-bow, and departed, shoulders hunched.

  The gnome stayed seated, finishing his ale. Luma threaded through the tables toward him, taking a moment to commit his features to memory. Along with the big eyes and triangular chin typical of gnomes, she noted a curling, dandyish mustache, and a beauty mark to the right of his nose—possibly painted on.

  Pressing on, Luma called on the citysong, finding the notes in it that were the thoughts and feelings of the revelers around her. In their beery symphony, she isolated the instruments—the singular minds of each participant. As she wove toward the gnome, a rich and unusually complicated trilling grew insistent. Luma was sure it was him.

  She glanced ahead: though seeming to do no more than amble, Khonderian had already put the obstructing mass of tables behind him. If he turned down a side alley, she'd lose him.

  For a moment, as she squeezed past the gnome, a flash of his thoughts came to the fore. Luma was already well through the tables by the time she made retrospective sense of them. He'd been calculating how many roistering days Khonderian's purse would buy him. Near the end glimmered a consideration of the debt he'd racked up at his favorite drinking hole. Luma missed the conclusion, but somehow suspected that no coins would be headed the taverner's way.

  Luma dropped into the deceptive body language of the unseen pursuit. She moved with a timidity and uncertain purpose that hid where she was looking and how quickly she covered ground. In shadow, she picked up the pace; when she could not help but step into a pool of lantern light, she slowed. She held herself alert to other's gazes, while remaining herself unnoticed.

  She reached the end of the avenue; Khonderian was gone from sight. From a belt of pouches lashed around her waist she withdrew a hawk's feather, harvested from a nest hidden in a pillar of the Irespan bridge. Luma concentrated on the citysong, picking out the cries of Magnimar's birds: pigeons, warblers, crows, grackles and gulls. From this cacophony she plucked the shriek of the hawks that preyed on them. She went inside the hawks to borrow their keenness of vision. Swiveling her head at the intersection, she caught sight of Khonderian, crossing beneath a candlemaker's awning. He cut through an adjacent alley. Save for a huddled beggar or two, the street stood empty. Soft boots betraying neither shuffle nor squeak, she darted down the walkway, closing the distance between them.

  Ahead, halfway between her and her target, Luma spotted a flutter of movement from the lip of a recessed doorway. She moved to the alley's other side and pulled her sickle from her belt. As she passed, a hunched, black-clad man pressed himself against the door, hands held submissively up. A sap swung from his wrist. He opened his mouth to speak; Luma held a finger to her lip. The mugger nodded obediently as she passed by. Continuing on, she put a name to his lumpen face: Dunnam, sometimes called Dunnam the Codge. She'd run him down during the Danosko Gor disappearance; he hadn't been in on it directly, but had tru
ck with the culprits. Ulisa had kicked him across the room. Luma had held a dagger to this throat and plundered his terrified thoughts.

  Such were the advantages of the family reputation. Few who tangled with the Derexhi were eager to repeat the experience.

  Hitting the end of the alley, Khonderian turned to the left. Luma slowed her pace; when shadowing, edging too close to one's quarry could prove as disastrous as losing him. She stopped; his footfalls had ceased. Luma ducked into another doorway, like the one Dunnam had lurked in. She recalled the melody of the citysong on chill mornings, when fog pooled above the cobblestones. Her connection brought into being a cloud of mist; it swirled around her. For a touch of realism, she kicked at it, sending tendrils of fog out into the alley.

  Khonderian came back to peer around. Luma was sure she hadn't done anything to alert him. But then, he was an experienced watcher. He might be reacting from a well-honed instinct, or with the aid of the magical charms and gewgaws a man of his resources inevitably carried.

  Ready to draw his sword, Khonderian took several steps back down into the alley. His head made a choppy series of contained, near-imperceptible movements as he took the scene in, detail by detail. The spill of fog across the street caught his notice for a moment. He then broke and went on his way, faster than before.

  He hadn't seen her, but now traveled as if shaking off pursuit. As he made his way back to the Capital District, he made periodic, abrupt stops, meant to expose anyone on his trail. A less able shadow might have been caught out. Luma, with her knack for people and the way they flowed through the city, studied his walk and the giveaways hidden within it. Soon she could predict his stops, perhaps even before he had quite decided to make them.

  Without this rhythmic anticipation of Khonderian's moves, she might have been unprepared for the angle at which he jaunted across the Way of Arches. She lost sight of him amid the white, spanning monuments lining the avenue—but not of the shadow he threw against them. Scurrying across, she found herself surrounded by trees. He'd ducked into the park west of the Founders' Archive. Swaying branches, caught in lantern light from the avenue, cast confusing shadows. Luma slipped from tree to tree, pausing with her back against each trunk. Were she the pursued in this situation, this is where she would come suddenly at her pursuer, knives out.

  No attack came. Now deep in the park, she'd realized that she'd let herself get turned around. Reaching into the part of the citysong that was all angles and planes, she found north, and oriented herself.

  Khonderian had shaken her off. But a map of Magnimar's streets, more accurate than any sold in a cartographer's shop, ran through Luma as surely as her veins and arteries. She called the area to mind, envisioning the park and the streets that bordered it. As if seeing a red line tracking a hypothetical Khonderian's progress through the map, she imagined the best route back to his most likely destination—the Pediment, from whence he had come.

  The most obvious route would be exactly the one a savvy man like Khonderian would never take. On the other hand, few mortal minds could plot a genuinely unpredictable route between two fixed points. People liked to get where they were going efficiently, an instinct they broke only with concentrated effort. Habit led them to well-trod routes and kept them from the unfamiliar. Khonderian, unless somehow blessed with superhuman intelligence, would pick one of the two second-shortest paths to his destination, and think himself quite clever for it.

  The red line through the map in Luma's head faded. Two new lines appeared, branching through the park: a green one snaking directly east, and a blue one that arrived at its destination after a confusing circuit south. The lines filled in, moving at speed to the Pediment. Which would he choose?

  Several times on his way to the street of taverns, Luma had seen Khonderian favor the roundabout route over the straight. He might give this up now that he'd reached his home ground, but Luma deemed it unlikely. People tended to stick with one habit of movement, changing it only when a new condition intervened. Khonderian had trained himself to walk a crooked path, and Luma should anticipate accordingly.

  The green line on Luma's imagined map faded, leaving only the blue.

  Khonderian loomed back into view on Settlement Street. A muck-encrusted scrounger hailed him. Luma looked for a hiding spot, anticipating a second meeting, like that with the gnome. Khonderian waved at the man and swept on by.

  Luma trailed Khonderian all the way to the Pediment. To her disappointment, he slipped inside without further incident. She staked it out from across the street for a few more hours before heading home, gaining no more intelligence to take back to her siblings.

  Chapter Five

  Gnome Trail

  Arrus sat fletching an arrow in the squad room, a deteriorating wooden chair creaking beneath him. His afternoon's handiwork lay stacked in a neat pile on the room's great table. A few discarded shafts formed a smaller, disarranged stack on the other end of the table, as if exiled for their imperfections. He plucked a goose feather from a pile, checking to see if the dyeing process had damaged it. Arrus's taste in arrow feather colors had recently changed, from red to violet.

  "Why didn't you follow the gnome?" he asked Luma.

  She had neither been offered a seat, nor taken one. "You told me to follow Khonderian."

  "I understand that." Finding the feather unsuitable, Arrus added it to the cast-offs. "What I'm asking is why you didn't show greater initiative. Obviously the gnome was the greater unknown. And doubtless lived somewhere easier to sneak into than the Pediment."

  "If you want me to use my judgment, you have to tell me what's going on. What I'm looking for."

  "What we are always looking for. Malfeasance. The unusual. The gnome should have stood out to you as a blinding beacon of the second. And likely the first."

  Luma stifled a sigh. "And if I'd followed him, and left Khonderian to go gods-know-where, would you not now be upbraiding me for that?"

  Arrus stood. "You think this is a scolding?"

  "What am I meant to take it for?"

  He sorted through the unused feathers, tossing aside one, then another. "We need better from you, Luma."

  "I did what you asked."

  "You are Derexhi. You must do more than is asked." Arrus returned his attention to his arrows.

  Luma felt a familiar, betraying sensation rise through her. Her skin burned; she knew she'd gone as red as a cock's comb. Her chin wobbled. She forced it straight, but by then Arrus had seen the loss of composure.

  Contempt flitted across his face.

  She left, ducking into the empty library. She banged her fists into her thighs. Again. She'd done it again. No wonder they despised her. Or regarded her with their various individual mixtures of pity and indifference. In the field, she feared no one.

  Well, that wasn't quite the way to put it. She controlled and used her fear. Shaped it, to make herself seem hard. Fed on it, to propel her into danger with sickle outstretched. Luma's intense acquaintanceship with her fear alerted her to trouble. It gave her insight into the fears of others, which she exploited when leaning on targets and witnesses.

  It was only at home, with them, that her defenses crumbled, that paralysis gripped her, that her tongue forbade her from fully defending herself.

  She might be the eldest, but when the first of the half-siblings arrived, they'd closed ranks. They made themselves the true children of Randred, and Luma the footnote. Even as they lay in their cradles, long before they could speak, Luma felt their hostility. Maybe it was her elven blood they sensed. When she picked one up, no matter which twin it was, Arrus or Iskola, the howling started. And then the other one joined in, too. They possessed that link that sometimes grows between twins. If she tried to play with Arrus in the nursery when Iskola was out on the lawn, the one's furious keening would trigger the other's. With their mother, with Randred, they were as angelic as babes are supposed to be. Whenever she crept near, they transformed themselves into squalling furies.

  As soon
as they could talk, they learned to slight her with their words. As their brothers and sisters arrived, spaced close together by their mother's clockwork fertility, they took command and walled her off. They trained the others to see Luma as they did: The interloper. The odd duck. The not-quite-them.

  They'd sharpened their claws on her. Sped themselves to adulthood by keeping her a child.

  Worst of all, Randred had never seen it. Hiding it required little effort. He did not want to see.

  No, that wasn't the worst of all.

  The worst of all was that she loved them, each and every unyielding one of them, because they were her family, and she had no other.

  It was like a pinched nerve which, whenever struck, sent shocks of pain through the body. Any slight, no matter how minor, or how reflexively given, returned her to this childish helplessness. Sent the snot running from her nose and the tears gushing down her stupid face. Reminded her of every other slight.

  She had to stop blaming them. It was her fault for letting them get to her.

  But there was the matter of the squad. The family depended on it. Until Randred's talk with Iskola, she hadn't realized quite how much. And if whatever lay between them interfered with their missions, Randred had to be made to understand. Better to have an air-clearing row than to wind up with one of them lying dead after a raid because they'd lost their trust in one another.

  Her father would ask her why she hadn't spoken up, and she'd have no answer. She should have done this years ago.

  It would get worse before it improved, but she had to finally speak up. Maybe it would give her the kick in the ass she needed to overcome this.

  Maybe they'd sort it out, all of them, and remember they were all Derexhi, aligned together against the world.

  And if that happened, she'd find out why she was chasing Khonderian, and what the gnome meant, and whom their client might be.