“Here you are,” he said, in Talbeg. “Hala’s Fell.”
They’d stopped in a small five-sided square with a fountain in the center, a faceless goddess, or perhaps an angel—they had those here, once. The air felt soft, and did not smell at all of salt or cinnamon. Vine-grown wicker arches crisscrossed the square, and cast patterns of shadow around fountain and angel alike. Beyond them, the sky seemed deeper than it did from her hotel window.
“Thank you,” she said, which did not seem enough. “How can I find the Hala family?”
“Ask around,” he answered.
She paid him, which did not seem enough either, and tipped well. If she wanted to be a good spy, she shouldn’t draw attention to herself; cabbies remembered a big tipper. But he had pedaled her uphill into a dream, so she paid him what she thought his service worth, even if the expense made her head swim for a second. She rested on the fountainside, one hand in the water, until color returned to her world.
Kai wandered through Hala’s Fell, feeling foolish and alone. The buildings looked indistinguishable, to her, from others in the local style: white plaster and squared roofs with small windows, functional for the climate. Decorations, where she found them, were geometric or natural—patterned flat mosaics of tiny tiles that bloomed three-dimensional forms from their walls, neon floral explosions that might have been graffiti or art. A woman in a high window sang a high song, accompanying herself on a banjo-adjacent instrument. Children joined in for the chorus. Someone cooked with preserved lemon and coriander and a hint of chile. This was a different city than the city of the Arms. Kai did not belong here.
Not that there were many Archipelagese anywhere in Agdel Lex, but downslope, in the foreigner districts, the mix of peoples reminded her of portside life back home. She hadn’t seen anyone since reaching Hala’s Fell who wasn’t Talbeg—hadn’t seen many people at all, in fact: a woman in a pencil skirt returning barefoot from work, carrying her heels over her shoulder; an old man whittling a piece of rosewood on a stoop; two kids beating a rug. They had their own lives. They were not here for her.
Of course they weren’t. If Fontaine ever came to Kavekana, and sobered up enough to wander upslope from the Godsdistrikt and the foreigner enclaves, she would feel the same—people she didn’t know, who spoke her language haltingly if at all, and cooked food she recognized from restaurants if that (and at best barely—most mainland Archipelagic food was sickly sweet Kova cuisine, since Kovans had a larger diaspora after the wars). Kai was a stranger here, not an enemy.
But she thought about the tower invisible behind these tall square rooftops, and the boulevards her rickshaw driver pedaled her around, beneath, or past, and the rubbery Rectifiers and the dead city, and it occurred to her that Kavekana and Agdel Lex had reason to feel differently about strangers.
Oh, hells. She could wander in circles, obsessing and second-guessing all night. But she didn’t have the time.
She marched back to the man carving rosewood and asked him, in Talbeg pitched as politely as she could manage (considering that she’d practiced the language back home with a street rat and sneak thief), “Excuse me. Could you tell me how to get to the Hala house? My name is Kai”—always name yourself, Izza’d stressed, it’s rude not to—“and I’m looking for Hala’Zeddig.”
The man folded his knife one-handed. He was carving, she saw, a mermaid. “What do you want?”
“She—” She rifled through her mental files; old Alikand had no hang-ups about same-sex relationships, but Iskar was a department store of weird taboos, and modern Agdel Lex was an alloy of those metals and a hundred others from across the Northern Gleb. Best not risk it. “She knows my sister, and I’m looking for her.”
“Of course,” the man said. “My name is Hala’Saim, and I can lead, if you follow me.”
She did, down the road and up an alley she had passed without recognizing it was a through street, to another road and then a cul de sac. The buildings here seemed older—the plaster more set, the wooden accents and ornaments more ornate. Lemon trees grew in the cul-de-sac’s center. Saim knocked three times on a door, then twice, then three times, waited for a moment, shrugged, knocked three times again, then twice, at which point the door opened and an old white-eyed woman frowned at him: “Saim, the finest watchmakers have not yet made an instrument so sensitive as to determine the length of your patience.”
“Aunt, astronomers have not yet invented a unit of measurement sufficiently vast to describe my joy at seeing you. I bring you a mermaid, and a guest.”
She accepted the carving. “Your knife work leaves something to be desired.” But the carving man grinned when she said that, and Kai suspected that from this woman, that counted as a compliment. “Who have you brought?”
“Ah,” Kai said, surprised by the force of those clouded eyes. This woman wasn’t Mako, she told herself. She probably wasn’t even a god. But she had a habit of authority. “My name is Kai Pohala. I’m looking for your, I guess, daughter?”
“Pohala.” The name had weight in the old woman’s mouth. Above, the sky deepened to the color of a fresh plum.
“Your daughter Zeddig knows my sister, Ley.”
“You may call me Aman,” the old woman said. “Please come inside.”
Chapter Twenty-six
LEY SWANNED INTO THE Iron Band apothecary, hips swishing, chin high, every inch a furious Zurish crime-world aristocrat. Ley was so deep into character that Zeddig, following, slipped deeper into her own, less complicated ruse: walking as if she held invisible suitcases, faking surly, glaring at the wall hangings with open contempt. (That part she didn’t have to fake. They were imitation Imperial floating world prints, with an inauthentic color palette, and a pouting tits-out pose on the models she’d only ever seen in erotic art from north of the Shield Sea.)
Ley arrived at the counter like a warship arrived in a foreign port, and rapped her fingertips against the unvarnished wood. The apothecary’s apprentice seemed occupied by a hallucination that involved punching flying fruit. When Ley cleared her throat, he fell back into his chair, and shook himself awake. “Anatoly sent me,” Ley said, in a thick Zurish accent, each syllable lubricated with scorn. “He requires fifty grams of aged ground dragonheart. Presently.”
“Ah,” the apprentice said, living up to Zeddig’s estimation of him. “We only, I mean, that is, ah, sorry. It’s, um. We only have, er.” He gaped at Ley, shook his head, staggered out from behind the counter, flipped the sign on the door to closed. “That . . . I mean, if we had any, which, like, obviously we don’t, because you’re talking military grade here, we’d only have it by special arrangement, right? Like, there’d be a list, and I’d know if you were on the list, and you’re, um.” The next word took effort, but he managed to say it. “Not?”
“I am not on list,” Ley said, “nor is Anatoly. It is not good for Anatoly to be on . . . lists. But he has made an arrangement with your master, and compensation has been settled. Is it not so?”
“Yes, I mean, no? I don’t, um.” His eyes darted, and Zeddig wondered if he was still suffering the fruit hallucination. “I can’t help you. Anatoly, maybe he can, um, come himself? Or we could wait until my boss gets back?”
“Our schedule does not permit delay,” Ley said. “And do you expect Anatoly would enter such an establishment? You deal with me, or you deal with Nadezhda.” Zeddig recognized her cue to look threatening, and turned from the least biologically improbable of the wall hangings, moving as a ponderous unit, as if her shoulders and hips were a fused bulk of muscle. She gave him the look she wanted to give Ley.
“Fine,” the clerk squeaked. “Fine!” He raised his hands more, and bowed his head. “Okay. Just a second.” He retreated behind the counter, donned heavy rubber gloves, opened a door that hadn’t existed seconds before, and withdrew a lead-lined box. Inside, nestled in packing immaterial, lay a small bottle of reddish sand. The clerk set up a balance and weights, lifted the bottle using tongs, and poured a precise amount
into a velvet bag until it hung even with the weights. Sweat rolled down his forehead. “There it is,” he said, quickly, when the scales evened out. “Now, I don’t know what you planned to pay—”
“Not payment,” Ley said. “Forgiveness of a debt. This is a start.” She took the bag, and walked out of the store. Zeddig followed, flipping the closed sign to open before she left.
Two blocks down, she noticed Ley was grinning.
“You scared that kid half to death.”
“He deserved it.”
“They’ll sack him. If he’s lucky.”
“Ah, he’ll be fine. That store owner does have an enormous debt to Anatoly, and Anatoly does need dragonheart powder—”
“Wait a second. Anatoly’s real?”
“Of course he’s real, Z. If you want to conjure, you need names to conjure with.”
“What happens when he comes for his powder?”
“Violence, likely. Soon enough, though, he’ll discover that even though I currently resemble one of his associates—”
“You’re impersonating a specific mobster. Have you lost your mind?”
“I modeled the mask on that of another ’clave, Anatoly’s home country rivals who don’t, so far as he knows, have a presence in the Gleb. So! Anatoly shifts his attentions homeward, life in the Zurish underworld becomes exciting, and Agdel Lex endures a brief respite. In the future, if he wants powdered dragonheart, he may seek a different channel. There’s an off chance you may enter the conversation, in which case you could claim to have been earning a few thaums as hired muscle—but our drug-addled young friend will find it difficult to give a precise description.”
Zeddig realized she was smiling with half her mouth. She covered that smile with a frown, and a shake of her head.
“What?”
“It’s too complicated, is what. What if Anatoly’s angrier than you think? What if he doesn’t blame his rival?”
“He’d be stupid not to. People expect problems that fit contexts they understand. Anatoly expects his enemies, so he’ll see them; he doesn’t expect us. I hope they won’t blame the apothecary. Even if his choice in wall hangings leaves something to be desired. Frozen yogurt? This place has great toppings.”
They stopped in. Ley covered a pineapple frozen yogurt in marshmallow topping and graham crackers. Zeddig stuck with fruit and sour. After, they walked down toward the beach as yogurt melted in their paper cups.
“You have something on your mind,” Zeddig said. “Tell me.”
“It’s not important.”
“I could use some of that right now.”
“My sister,” Ley said, then cut herself off.
“Go ahead.”
“My sister hates this stuff. She has a thing about how these stores pop up everywhere back home, three on a block. At least they used to.” Ley never talked much about home, even when they were together. Zeddig was surprised by the pain she heard. “Tasty, though.” The Shield Sea stretched north, pierced by the Altus Spire; the sea smelled of seaweed and fish and salt and green, but the spire, Zeddig imagined, would have no smell at all. The first time they’d walked this beach together, there had been no spire, no promise of the stars—just two women side by side, hand in hand. Their hands were occupied, now, not to mention sticky. “I can’t, Z.”
“I didn’t ask you anything.”
“You are. You want me to talk. I wish I could. But I don’t want you hurt.”
“You brought me into this damn thing.” There wasn’t any weight in the curse—the word only there to pad a rhythm, like a wave after a wave.
“You’re doing a job for me. I’m paying you. When they come looking, that’s all they need to know. They might not believe it at first, but they will, in the end. When they ask, tell them you hated me for leaving, tell them my voice sounded like the world’s sharpest nails on the world’s grittiest chalkboard, tell them I was paper cuts and lime, but you stuck with it because I paid you.”
“I did hate you,” Zeddig said, “for leaving. I still do, a little.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I hope they’ll believe you.”
“You think this is important.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not telling me, because if we’re caught—”
“I can’t let them take you.”
“You’re not keeping me in the dark because I might try to stop you?”
“Zeddig,” she said. “No. I don’t—I hope you wouldn’t. I don’t think you would.”
She sounded lonely, uncertain, more naked than Zeddig had ever known her. Zeddig wondered if she could only talk this way because she wore the mask.
“I love you,” Zeddig said, meaning, fine, I’ll let it drop, meaning, I don’t like this but I will go with you, meaning, I hear you, meaning, for the sake of any gods you care to name let yourself break for once, let yourself crack, let yourself bleed, don’t stand there so damn silent and stubborn—meaning, beneath all the rest, I love you, and knowing those words would only complicate things between them.
But some things needed complication.
“Thank you,” Ley said, as the sun set.
Chapter Twenty-seven
AMAN LED KAI DOWN a dark hall past a flight of stairs, through a door that might have been invisible in the shadows, or might have sidled into existence as the old woman reached for the knob.
They emerged into a narrow courtyard. Ivy climbed high white walls, and the sun’s last light glinted off a black-and-white mosaic under the green. Soft air embraced her, and the sky seemed so close Kai could have reached into the deepening purple and plucked stars free. Aman set her feet carefully on the world. She moved differently from Mako, Kai’s blind friend back home—more intent, more certain, more comfortable with her degree of sight. But she recognized Kai by her voice.
“Like your sister’s.” The old woman sat in a wicker chair beside a glass-topped table upon which she’d spread a chess board, mid-game. “You bite words the same way. You share intonation, rhythm. Do you play chess?”
“Never well.”
Aman poured tea.
Kai examined the position. “Who are you playing?”
“A person six hundred years dead.” Aman took a book from the pocket of her long sweater: a battered Zurish paperback, bold strange letters Kai could pronounce but not interpret, and an improbably foreshortened chessboard. “A person lacking figure, subtlety, or grace. Chess was not a game of principle, then, but of tricks and flourishes. Games change, even if the rules do not: their place in culture, their form of play, the language of their players. Modern chess is played by different people, in different ways, than its counterpart six centuries past, and victory and defeat have different meanings.”
“I want to find my sister,” Kai said. The tea filled her with licorice and mint and longing. “I heard she was close to Zeddig—your granddaughter?”
“They love one another,” Aman said.
Kai blinked. “I heard they broke up.”
“They fought, and they stopped sleeping together, and living together. Love lasts longer than either party to that love might want.” Aman pondered the chessboard queen with her fingertips. “You told me your real name. Thank you. But if you tried to lie, I would have known.”
“By my voice, you said.”
“Not only that.” The old woman let the white queen settle on her white square. “Ley,” and Kai had not expected the shock of hearing her sister’s name in Aman’s mouth, “has your same habit of knowledge. She knew what she had to know, and pursued that knowledge fiercely. Have you ever owned a beagle?” She framed the word in italics, the way tourists overpronounced Kavekanese words for palm liquor or dance hall.
“Only the one in the comic strips.”
Aman’s laugh was rich and wet. “When I was younger, I knew a man who had a beagle, and the man and the dog were the same kind of fool. A beagle scents a deer, and the dog must give chase—without thought to home or safety. You come t
o my house, and you ask after your sister, because that is what you decided to ask, and you give no thought to other questions. I tell you, you are safe here. This is my house. I am Hala Archivist, and keep my treasures well. What else would you like to ask?”
“That chess book,” Kai said. “How can you read it?”
“Since it is not printed in dots?” Aman flipped pages in the book without glancing down. “I do not see Agdel Lex. I barely see you. But the book belongs to my city, and so I see it. Ask me another question.”
Kai crossed her legs. “We passed through a door to get here. Did the door exist before you reached for it?”
“Inhale.”
She did: cedar smoke, roasting lamb, cardamom, dust, and the promise of rain.
“Is this the air of Agdel Lex you are breathing now?”
“No,” she said. “It’s too . . . wet.”
Aman refilled her own tea. “No city is one city, as no one mind is altogether and only itself. A woman is many women, a man is many men, a city is many cities—not in sequence, but all at once. In Alikand Gerhardt broke the world, and the Iskari only saved what they knew how to see. Your forebears cut us, and we bled.”
“Not my forebears. They weren’t part of this.”
“Your forebears of spirit,” Aman said. “Gerhardt, forever dying in the center of the Wound—his Craft made you possible.”
“I’m no Craftswoman,” Kai said. “I’m no child of his.”
Aman spread her hands. “As I said. One woman is many women.”
“So we’re not in Agdel Lex. But we’re not in the dead city, either.”
Aman’s laugh now was colder, and made Kai wonder what she had seen, and where, and how deeply it scarred her. She pictured Aman, younger, stronger, staring upon the city’s frozen husk. “The Hala mansion in the dead city burned and froze long ago. Our vaults, our archives—sayings of prophets, diaries of Blood-mad soldiers, scripture that came west from the Shining Empire before the Golden Horde, records of births and deaths, dreams saved for future generations, diagrams of structures we cannot build with current tools—they perished, and monsters nest among their ruins. My daughter went there once, and would have died there, paralyzed and devoured from within by wasp-brood, had not your sister saved her. No,” she said, “this is not the dead city.”
The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence Page 17
