The Burning City

by Jerry Pournelle

  Pelzed nodded grimly. “Go on.”

  Renwilds shrugged. “It was that powder, Lord. It summons invisible monsters.”

  “Uh huh. Why didn’t you chase the Maze Runners?”

  “Too fast, Lord, and we’d have had to get around Duddigract! So we were trying to figure what to do when Duddigract screamed again and fell down, babbling about how monsters were after him, and he curled up like he was going to sleep, only he never woke up.”

  “Where did he get it?” Pelzed demanded.

  “He wouldn’t tell us, Lord. Said he’d gathered it, but he wouldn’t say where.”

  Pelzed turned to Whandall. “Well?”

  Whandall told what he knew. “Lord, about a week ago some Black Lotus warriors caught me near the east border. There were too many to fight, so I let them gather a bag of powders I was taking to Morth. Maybe there was enough in there to do that to Duddigract. Or maybe they mixed the powders. But I don’t know how they got from Black Lotus to Duddigract!”

  “You didn’t tell me they gathered anything, Whandall. Just that they’d chased you.”

  “I was embarrassed, Lord.”

  Pelzed nodded thoughtfully. “I sent Duddigract to look into it,” he said. “He must have caught up with the Lotus warriors. And he never told me! Never told me!” Pelzed grew visibly angry, but not with Whandall. “It’s his own fault, then,” Pelzed said. “But Whandall, be careful with those powders.”

  “I will, Lord.”

  But there were always more powders, and friends were always ready to accept them. There was so much he could buy with foxglove.

  But some liked the stuff too much.

  One day three followed him home. Resalet came out with two uncles and chased them away.

  That evening Whandall was summoned to Resalet’s big northeast room on the second floor. Resalet eyed him critically. “Dargramnet says you’re smart,” Resalet said. “Or used to say it.”

  Whandall nodded. It had been a year since Mother’s Mother had recognized Whandall when she saw him. Now she sat by the window and talked of old days and old times to anyone who would listen. The stories were interesting, but she told the same ones over and over.

  “So if you’re smart, why are you acting like a fool?”

  Whandall thought for a moment, then took a handful of shells from his pouch and laid them on Resalet’s table.

  “Yes, bigger fools than you will pay,” Resalet said. “And if they think you keep that stuff here? They’ll come to take it. We’ll have to fight. We’ll lose people; there’ll be blood money. The Lords may get involved. We can’t fight Lordsmen!”

  “Lords don’t care about hemp,” Whandall said. “They keep hemp gum! In ebony boxes.”

  “Don’t show off for me, boy,” Resalet said. “I know you’ve been to Lordshills, and look what it got you! You came in beat up and useless, a lot more trouble than you were worth. Hadn’t been that Dargramnet likes you, we’d have thrown you out to the coyotes. I don’t know what the Lords do at home, but down here hemp trouble gets you Lordsmen. Enough Lordsmen and they tear your house down. This is Placehold! We’ve had Placehold longer than I’ve been alive, and we’re not going to lose it because of you.”

  Whandall tried to change the subject. “The Bull Pizzles sell hemp. Pelzed serves hemp tea.”

  “Pelzed is damn careful with his tea,” Resalet said. “And since when did Serpent’s Walk learn from Bull Pizzle?” He shook his fists violently. “And I don’t care if Serpent’s Walk sells hemp; we’re Placehold. Whandall, if you want to trade powders, do it somewhere else. Get your own house. Placehold doesn’t want the trouble. Do you understand me?”

  “Pelzed offered me a house in Dark Man’s Cup,” Whandall said. “Should I take it?”

  “If you like.”

  Whandall was startled to realize that Resalet meant it. Up to then it was just a boy talking to adults, but Resalet meant it. He really could be thrown out of Placehold.

  He thought about living alone. It might be fun. But the other boys his age who moved out of their households to live alone were mostly dead.

  Coscartin wasn’t dead. Coscartin had half a dozen other young men living with him, and that many women, and some kind of arrangement with Pelzed. The stuff he dealt in was supposed to come from the Water Devils.

  “I’d rather stay here.”

  “Then give up the powder,” Resalet said. “Give it up right out loud. Give away all your stock. Make sure everyone knows you won’t have more.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I tell you—”

  “Yes, I understood that,” Whandall said. “I mean—what do I tell them?”

  Resalet chuckled with the first sign of amusement since Whandall had come into his room. “Tell them you had a vision from Yangin-Atep.”

  “No one will believe that!”

  “Then tell them anything you want, but you bring more of that stuff here, you’re going out.”

  They told stories about Whandall’s party for years. He brought out everything, white powders and yellow foxglove leaves and brown gum. He parceled it out with care. Wanshig found some hemp. Tras Preetror wrote two songs and told stories, but as the night went on his speech became an endless stream of babbling.

  Shealos managed to finesse three times his share of the brown poppy gum. Whandall let him do it: he was a noisy whiner when thwarted. Shealos went to sleep in a corner, where the Forigaft brothers must have found him.

  No one was seriously hurt.

  There would never be another party like it. But it left ripples….

  Two young Lordkin ended up in the river, unhurt but stinking.

  Three girls became pregnant.

  Shealos didn’t wake until sunset the next day, in the middle of an intersection, stripped naked and painted with the wrong band signs and a short written message.

  A blank wall in the kinless house Whandall had taken over for the party bore more words, written inside a pattern made from ten local band signs… kind of pretty, really, but any band would take it as a killing insult.

  More messages were found scrawled in bright red paint on the long wall around Dead Town on the day after Whandall’s party. Dead Town was where folk were buried if no family claimed them. Nobody painted band signs in Dead Town: all factions were welcome there.

  Pelzed was asked to summon the Forigaft brothers.

  These four brothers had somehow learned to read. It made them arrogant. The brothers painted messages on any clean surface. You couldn’t tell what they said, not even by asking one of them, because they would lie. The night of Whandall’s party they must have gone crazy on the powders. Whandall remembered their antics, howling and gymnastics and… wait now, he’d seen them doing that to his wall, and he’d laughed like a loon. He didn’t remember seeing them leave.

  The brothers were scattered about Serpent’s Walk and Peacegiven Square. They were easy to spot. They mumbled to themselves. They shouted foul and cryptic threats and accusations into the faces of passersby. Two brothers tried to write something on Renwilds’s burly belly, using yellow paint and their fingers. Renwilds let them finish, then knocked them both senseless.

  They were all crazy as loons. Pelzed fed them for two weeks, then somehow traded them to the Wolverines, who lived below Granite Knob, for a wagonload of oranges.

  Whandall copied some of their marks off a wall and brought them to Morth.

  “‘I was not Lordkin! Zincfinder tattooed my corpse!’” Morth read. “‘Search the sand at Sea Cliffs for the treasure I died for.’ ‘She hid my knife!’” He looked up. “Your Dead Town must have its share of murder victims. When your mad readers were spraying the graveyard, the ghosts wrote messages on their minds. Justice carries its own manna.”

  Sometimes Whandall regretted his decision. He could have been living in a household of sycophants and women, like Coscartin….

  Coscartin and all his household were killed by rivals unknown, half a year after Whandall’s pa
rty.

  CHAPTER

  20

  When Wanshig reached fifteen he began working with Alferth. Alferth was a tax taker, which gave him avenues into kinless commerce. One afternoon Wanshig pulled Whandall away from his friends, back to the courtyard of the Placehold house.

  “Taste this,” Wanshig said. “Just a sip.”

  It was a small clay flask. The fluid inside had a fire in it. Whandall almost choked. “What—”

  “Wine.”

  “Oh. I know about wine.”

  That made Wanshig laugh. “Well, you’re clever in spots, little brother, and you know how to keep your mouth shut. Can you think of a way to make the kinless bring this stuff in to sell?”

  They shared the bottle unequally. “Outside Tep’s Town there are taverns,” Wanshig said.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Tellers,” Wanshig said. “And do you remember Marila? She was a Water Devil, and she listened at home. Stories of other lands. And of the docks.”

  “And what are these taverns?” Whandall asked.

  Wanshig smiled dreamily. “Gathering places. For men, or even men and women together, to drink wine, be together with friends, celebrate. There are wine shops everywhere but here. Why not Tep’s Town?”

  But wine was doing a slow burn inside Whandall. “Yangin-Atep’s fire,” he pronounced. “Magic?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wine felt good. Whee, Whandall thought, and he felt words bubbling to his partly numb lips. Resalet ran away, he thought. He left my father to die. Things he didn’t want to say to any Placeholder, ever. Lordkin don’t work for anyone.

  Shig said, “I don’t work for Alferth. I work with him.”

  He’d said it out loud! Whandall slapped his hand across his mouth. He tried to say—

  “No, little brother. You have to work with. Otherwise you’re all alone,” Wanshig said. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. It runs the other way too. Some Lordkin work. Some kinless take things.”

  “—said what?”

  “Kinless loses his work, what can he do? Got to have food. Blanket. Shoes. He gathers them. We’d kill him, sure—he doesn’t have the right—but why would anyone catch him? Something’s missing, nobody asks who gathered it. Never mind that, little brother. Why don’t the kinless keep wine shops?”

  “Wine shops? If it feels this good?” Whandall gestured widely; Wanshig ducked. “Someone wants wine, just smash in the door! If it’s too strong, go for help. If the winetender tries… we beat on him, kill him, maybe. Kinless would be crazy to keep this stuff around.”

  “Taverns, then. Make them sell drinks one at a time.”

  Whandall, with wine buzzing in his ears and his blood, could feel what was wrong with that. Kinless and barbarians might drink wine and keep their selfcontrol. In the Burning City men would drink; then unguarded words would bubble through their lips and they would fight. No tavern would survive.

  Shig said, “The most we ever get here, someone pops up on a street corner with maybe eight of these little flasks. When they’re gone, he’s gone. He’s not there long enough to be robbed.”

  “Where’s he get it?”

  “The flasker? Lords and kinless get some wine through the docks, from Torov and Condigeo. If the rest of us find out, we take it, of course, so they give some to the Water Devils. And there’s another place.”

  They wobbled as they stood, and Wanshig led him north. Whandall’s head cleared quickly. The wine was gone. There hadn’t been much, just enough for two.

  The houses north of Tep’s Town ended at the forest. Wanshig led off northwestward. Whandall was sober now and full of questions, but Wanshig only smiled.

  Here the forest withdrew from the city, leaving a delta of meadow, the Wedge, with a slow stream, the Deerpiss, meandering down its center. Whandall had known of the Wedge all his life, and only began to wonder as Wanshig led him up the stream. Why hadn’t the meadow filled with houses?

  Where the Wedge converged to a point, a two-story stone house straddled the stream like a blockage in a funnel. On either side the road would be wide enough for wagons, but gates blocked both sides.

  Two men emerged from a second-story door. One started down the ladder.

  Whandall had seen Lordsmen’s armor and lumbermen’s leathers. Both men wore what lumbermen would wear, like what the boy Whandall himself had worn. Both men were masked in what might have been lumbermen’s leathers, but were not.

  Wanshig ran at the rightward gate. Whandall followed at speed. Wanshig climbed the gate like a monkey, with Whandall right behind him. Lordkin didn’t ask permission; they went where they would.

  The two armored men scrambled to the ground and lifted weapons. They carried… not quite severs. Hafts ended in straight blades sharpened on both sides.

  Whandall didn’t hear what words Wanshig spoke, but the men stepped aside, glancing incuriously at Whandall as he dropped to the ground. They were climbing back up as Wanshig led off along the stream. The forest had closed in at the banks.

  Now out of earshot, Whandall asked, “What was that place?”

  “Guardhouse,” Wanshig said. “After our fathers took Tep’s Town, we made the kinless build that across our path. The path is gone, but the Toronexti are still here. They let anyone through, but they take part of what they’re carrying. It’s custom. These days they guard something else too.”

  “The path. I could tell Morth—” He bit it off, eons late. Was it the wine, this long after? “I have to see him, Shig. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything stupid.”

  Wanshig seemed unsurprised. “How did he kill Pothefit?”

  “I haven’t asked yet.”

  “Don’t ask. But find out.”

  Where the stream bent to the right, Wanshig walked straight into the forest.

  The tall straight spikes must be young redwoods. Mature redwoods had been felled here; huge stumps remained. Wanshig led them a careful crooked path around morningstar plants, nettles, spear grass, red-and-green clumps of touch-me. Whandall was ready to snatch him to safety, but his older brother had learned.

  They’d traveled a couple of hundred paces before the trees opened out. Here were croplands, a wide expanse of vines planted in straight rows. Kinless men and women were at work. There were Lordkin about too.

  Wanshig and Whandall watched from their bellies. Wanshig said, “The Lords get some of their wine here, but of course they need somebody to protect it. That’s where Alferth comes in. He got the Toronexti to do it. He leaves them half.”

  “What kind of half?”

  “He cheats a little. They cheat a little.” Wanshig began creeping backward. “I wanted you to know. If you’ve got any ideas—”

  “Do we really want more wine in Tep’s Town?”

  “We do if it’s ours”

  But wine makes us kill, Whandall thought, and mostly we kill each other. Lords drink wine without problems. Kinless can handle it. We teach kinless to control themselves. Barbarians learn or die. With us, though…

  He said, “What we were drinking, did it come from here?”

  “Right,” said Wanshig.

  “What the lookers give us, is it—”

  “Better. Smoother.”

  “It’s not the best, I bet.” Wanshig glared, and Whandall said, “Lookers know we don’t know the difference, so they buy cheap. Some barbarian somewhere knows how to make better than we’ve got. We should find him and talk him into working for us.”

  Wanshig shrugged his eyebrows. Talk? Barbarians brought in wealth. The Lords would spit fire if a barbarian was kidnapped. Alferth wouldn’t dare.

  But better wine would be better for the city than more wine, Whandall thought.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Resalet had told him to avoid the magician and give up all his plants and powders. Whandall hadn’t seen Morth in just under a year. The boy Seshmarl had grown older. Had he come to look too dangerous?

  Two kinless customers lo
oked at him nervously. The magician flickered a smile at him, then finished serving them. When they had left, the magician said, “Seshmarl! Tell me a story!”

  Information for information. “If you follow the Deerpiss north out of the city, you get to a meadow, then a guardhouse with masked and armored men. They’ll take some of what you’re carrying. What they’re guarding is the old path where my people cut their way through the forest to the Valley of Smokes. But don’t go there, right? Just look.”

  “You have been busy,” Morth said.

  Whandall smiled.

  “Is the path still open?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What if I want to leave Tep’s Town?”

  “The docks—”

  “I can’t go near the sea. I tried going south once, but it’s all marshes.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Nobody goes that way.”

  “Seshmarl, the forest—”

  “Not through the forest. Been two hundred years. The woods grow back. There’s poison plants and lordkiss and morningstars and hemp and foxglove.” He didn’t intend to speak of the vineyard.

  “Curse! And a guardhouse too?”

  “You face them, you’d better have a story. But don’t you have some spell for finding paths?”

  The magician didn’t answer. He told a story instead. “The fire god lost many battles. Sydon drowned his worshippers in Atlantis. Zoosh used the lightning against him in Attica, and is said to hold him in torment. Wotan and the ice giants battled him in the north, and again they torment him still. In many places the Firebringer bears a great wound in his side. Here too, I think. Your people must have fled Zoosh’s people. You Lordkin may well be the last worshippers of Yangin-Atep.”