“Give the girl a break. Can’t you see she’s about to pass out?” one of the men scolded him. He fished a crumpled bill out of his pocket and pushed it across the counter at the barkeep. “Here. Give her something to eat.”
Eliza nearly wept with gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said to the man, her eyes flooding with tears.
“Hey now, no crying,” he said. He was in his sixties, or so he looked, with thinning hair and a face like an old potato. His mouth was only half full of teeth, but his eyes were kind beneath straggly brows. “I hope someone’ll buy me a meal, I ever get as hungry as you look.”
“So where you from?” asked the other man, a yellow-haired fellow with a nose that looked as if it had been broken several times, peering around his friend to get a good look at her. The barkeep had snatched the bill off the counter and disappeared into the back of the shack.
“Huir-Kosta,” she replied wearily. She fed them the same story of bandits and her long walk. They gaped at her and took long gulps of their drinks. A few minutes later the barkeep came out with a plate of bony fish, a big spoonful of cold rice, and a couple of tired-looking carrots. Eliza left only the bones of the fish on the plate, sucked dry. The men laughed, watching her eat, and even the barkeep warmed up to her and gave her a glass of cider. It warmed her belly and she began to feel sleepy. As she lifted the near-empty glass to her lips, the man who had paid for her meal said, “Hey, whassat?” He was pointing at her hand.
She put down the glass and put her hand flat on the counter, staring at it stupidly.
She couldn’t think of anything to say.
“She got something on her hand,” the man told the barkeep, who had come over to see what they were talking about. “Show us your hand!”
“No.” She pressed it to the table.
The potato-faced man’s eyes turned into slits and his mouth turned down in an ugly scowl. “I buy you a nice dinner and you won’t show me your hand!” he snarled.
“Show him your hand,” chimed in the barkeep menacingly.
Eliza got up off the stool and held her hand up. They all stared at the tattoo of the black bird.
“Whassat?” he asked, bewildered.
“Something we do in Huir-Kosta,” she said. “Thank you for dinner.”
“Weird girl,” said the potato-face, shaking his head and returning to his drink.
“Hang on there,” the yellow-haired one said, sliding off his stool and barring her way as she went for the door. “Hold up a moment. Stranger from out of town, how about you stay and drink with us a while?” He leered unpleasantly.
Eliza met his eyes. They were cold and watery.
“I’ve got to go,” she said clearly. She wasn’t afraid of the poor drunk, but if he tried anything she was reluctant to use Magic. If she worked a spell here, everybody all along the Noxoni would hear of her in no time. Something in her voice or her gaze warned him off, anyway. He shrugged and slouched back to his stool, muttering, “Suit yerself.”
The night was cold. She had nowhere to sleep and contemplated going back towards the hills to find Foss, but she was too tired to make the walk and her ankle was throbbing. She wandered down among the boats tied up to the wharf and climbed into one. A black cat shot out of a corner of the boat, hissing at her. Eliza stumbled backwards, startled. The cat arched its long back, tail lashing, and opened its mouth in a yowl. Its tongue was red as flame. For a moment, it did not look like a cat at all. An awful voice echoed in her bones: I am waiting for you, little one. You will bring me your beloved.
The cat was gone, but the black water lapping against the side of the boat reminded her of the river of death hurtling between the paws of the great panther. Eliza huddled in a corner of the boat, her heart still racing. She pulled a tangle of fishing net around her as if it were a blanket and tried to sleep.
~~~
She was woken before dawn by a sharp nudge in her side. A hairy face was scowling down at her.
“Outta my boat!”
She scrambled to her feet and got out, feeling how stiff and cold she was as she did so. She put a bit of weight gingerly on her hurt ankle. It was better than yesterday, at least.
“Any chance you can take a couple of passengers east?” she asked hopefully.
“I can take passengers anywhere they like if they can pay,” the hairy fellow shot back. Black teeth and pale eyes showed in his shaggy mane of a face. “Can you pay?”
“Yes,” she replied automatically, trying to think how.
“Let’s see the money. I want thirty lyrs a day if I’m taking two.”
“I cannay pay with money,” said Eliza. “But I can pay with fish.”
He scoffed. “How’s that?”
Her confidence grew. She had eaten and slept. This would work.
“Take me out and I’ll show you.”
He was just curious enough that he consented. She could see hundreds of little boats pushing out onto the dark water already, to begin their long day competing for whatever meager fish the river had to offer, which was fewer every year.
“I’m Eliza,” she told the man.
“Brouton,” he replied gruffly. She sat at the bow of the boat and concentrated on what was below. She murmured under her breath, drawing the fish she could feel down there into his net. The will of a fish was a slippery but feeble thing and it was easy to assert her own over it. Within minutes, his net was full. He stared at her with slow-dawning astonishment.
“You’re a witch,” he said fearfully, making no move to drawn his net in.
“If you want to call it that,” said Eliza. This was risky but she didn’t know what else to do. “I dinnay mean you harm, but I will Curse you if you speak a word of this. I want you to wait for me at the wharf until I come back with my friend. Then I want you to take us as far as you can east. I can promise you netfuls like that all along the way. You can stop to sell where you like.”
Brouton nodded, his eyes afraid and his mouth hanging open. He took her back to the wharf and she got out. “Nary a word to anyone,” she reminded him sternly. The last thing they needed was a witch-hunt drawing attention to their whereabouts. She walked back to the edge of the floodplains and found Foss where she had left him, in among the trees.
“You look well,” he said. “You have eaten. Good. Your foot?”
“Not too bad,” she said, thinking that he did not look quite so well. “I found a fellow who’ll take us by boat.”
“Won’t the train be faster?”
“Yes, but we’ve no money and everybody will be able to see you on the train. You cannay just walk around Di Shang. People willnay know what you are, they’ll be terrified, and word will get back to the Mancers right away. This way is easier. You can keep low in the boat, aye, and he’ll accept payment in fish. I just have to enchant them into his net.”
“Very clever.” Foss rose and they crossed the rice fields together. Eliza felt horribly self-conscious; even from a distance Foss was glowing and huge. Surely anyone out and about would spot him from a long way off and know he was not human. The woman from the farmhouse from the previous night was feeding chickens in her yard and saw them pass. She stood staring for a minute and then ran back indoors.
“Quick,” said Eliza. The wharf was deserted, all the fishermen already out on the water, except for Brouton, who was waiting in his boat with his big hands dangling between his knees. When he saw Foss his eyes widened. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Eliza and Foss climbed into the boat. She threw one of the nets around Foss’s shoulders, to take the glare out of his robe, and he folded his big body down into the bottom of the boat, where he would be less visible.
“Not taking that!” Brouton whispered.
“Yes, you are,” said Eliza firmly. She briefly considered telling him that Foss was a Mancer, but that would require too much explanation and he probably wouldn’t believe her. “I promise you it will be worth it. Come on. East.”
Brouton obeyed fearful
ly, starting up the engine. They chugged along the broad muddy river. Foss peered out over the gunwales, curious to see the world. Farms and dirty fishing villages were scattered along the riverbank. Small children ran up and down with barking dogs. Eliza thought back on her own girlhood, so solitary before Holburg, never included in these gangs. If she had felt like an outsider then, she could never have imagined she would come to seem so strange to the world outside, with her dagger and her tattooed palms.
“Their lives seem very hard,” Foss commented.
“Not like the north,” sneered Brouton, then seemed to remember who he was talking to and shut his mouth. That was all he said all day. Whenever they passed a village with a market he began to shoot Eliza sidelong glances. She filled his nets with fish and he stopped to sell them to a fishmonger. Each time he returned with a tortured grin on his face, pockets jangling with coins.
The river wended its way southeast and then northeast, growing deeper and narrower as they went. The fields on either side became richer and greener, with forest stretching off in the north and low mountains thick with cedars to the south. It was an overcast day, with low rumblings of thunder, but thankfully it did not rain. They slept in the boat and the next morning Eliza made her way into the town to buy bread for breakfast while Foss stayed hidden in the boat.
As she walked through the town the villagers stopped in their tracks and stared at her. That was nothing unusual in itself but she noticed ravens hopping along the tin rooftops and began to get the uneasy sense that something was wrong.
In the bakery, she saw a newspaper lying open on the greasy counter and her heart nearly stopped. There was a very accurate sketch of her and of Foss. She snatched up the paper and read the caption: If you see these two dangerous Tian Xia worlders, report immediately. Do not approach them. Substantial reward is offered.
She looked around her in horror. The baker was squinting at her nervously. The few patrons who had been in the bakery were edging out the door. Of course they had already been reported.
“Bread,” she said. The baker handed her a loaf. She didn’t pay and he didn’t ask her to. She took the newspaper as well and hurried back to the docks, still going easy on her ankle. Foss was lying in the bottom of the boat but Brouton was gone.
“The Mancers know where we are,” said Eliza. “Or they will soon, aye. We’re in the paper, like criminals.”
“We are criminals, Eliza,” said Foss wearily, looking up. “We’ve stolen a great treasure from the Mancer Citadel.”
His face looked faded, his skin fragile and crumpled like an autumn leaf.
“Are you all right?” She asked, taken aback by his appearance.
“I am fine, Eliza.”
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”
She jumped in the boat and started the engine.
“Now we’re stealing a boat,” said Foss sadly.
“I know, aye, I feel badly too,” said Eliza, steering it out into the river and revving the engine to full throttle. “It’s a horrible thing to do when he’s gotten us this far but I have a feeling he’s nay helping us anymore and we just cannay get caught.”
“We will not be safe for long on the river.”
“I know. Keep down.”
Eliza maneuvered them out into the thick of the fishing boats, hoping that nobody was looking at her too closely. She made her way slowly to the other side of the river. A man was getting out of a truck, putting his keys in his pocket and heading into a tobacconist’s shop set on the little wharf. She docked the boat awkwardly while a raven dove down and plucked the man’s keys from his pocket.
“Eliza Tok!” gasped Foss, shocked.
“The truck,” she said in a low voice, scrambling out of the boat. “Before anyone sees you.”
Foss hunched low and scuttled after her towards the truck. They scrambled inside and the raven dropped the keys in Eliza’s lap. She started it up and drove off before the poor man had come back with his cigarettes.
“Terrible! Terrible! We are boat thieves and car thieves on top of everything else! You’ve seen how poor the people here are. What will the man do without his truck? Or good Brouton without his boat?”
“We’re running for our lives, Foss. I can’t think of a nice way of doing this,” said Eliza. She followed the narrow gravel road out to a paved road that ran in a straight line with forest on either side. She gunned the engine and they roared eastward.
“I hope the gas lasts,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “Why dinnay we have any money? It’s been so long since I needed money.”
Foss was much too big for the truck. He had to bend over, his long arms folded on the dashboard and his head hunched low. “I didn’t know you could drive,” he said.
“My da used to let me, sometimes, when I was a kid. We travelled a lot, aye. Lots of wide empty roads like this one.”
Indeed, the whole day felt like a flashback to her early life. Run-down towns and people who were just scraping by. The underbelly of the glorious Republic. She’d been on the run from the Mancers then, too, though she hadn’t known it at the time.
A dark cloud was following them from the west, making the day seem later than it was. They passed only a few other cars on the drive to Elmount and ate the bread as they drove, but Eliza was soon hungry again.
“Can you make Illusion money?” she asked Foss.
“It would fall apart as soon as somebody touched it,” he replied, his head bowed nearly to his knees, which were pressed up uncomfortably against the dash.
“Back to begging,” she muttered.
She left Foss and the truck in the woods and walked into Elmount, which was marked out by the huge lighthouse on the bluff, fallen into disrepair along with the rest of the city. People sat at the little cafes along the waterfront eating sandwiches. Eliza was able to scavenge leftovers until she was more or less satisfied. A wind had set up and the grey sea was peaked with whitecaps. The few people left in the streets were holding their hats on and hurrying home. Shops began to close up early. There must be a storm warning out, she thought, and saw that indeed the tidal wave gates were being drawn across the harbor.
She went into a shop and borrowed a pen from the shopkeeper. He didn’t seem to recognize her, so she assumed he hadn’t looked at the newspaper. She was not so strange in Elmount; all kinds of people passed through this town. She turned over the newspaper clipping she had stolen and scrawled over the pictures of her and Foss: Call off the Thanatosi and I will return the Gehemmis. She gave the pen back to the shopkeeper, thanked him, and went outside. A raven was waiting for her, perched on a trash can.
“Take it to Kyreth,” she said, rolling up the newspaper clipping. The raven took it with one agile claw and took off into the darkening, stormy sky. If Foss was right and the Thanatosi could not be called off then it was pointless, but worth a try even so. Kyreth was powerful, resourceful, and might find a way Foss had not seen. At least she had something to bargain with now. But it was only a useful bargaining tool if she could be sure she was out of their reach, and that meant getting to Tian Xia and getting help.
She went back for Foss when it grew dark. With no money, and Foss’s strange appearance as well, there was no way to get tickets for one of the boats out to the archipelago. It was a matter of stealing or hiring another private boat when the storm subsided. The fishermen here were more prosperous, for Ebele’s Ocean was still full of fish; they might be harder to buy off with what meager enchantments she could offer.
Foss was glad to see the last of the truck. They made their way up the bluff to the abandoned lighthouse. The air smelled of the coming rain and it seemed as good a place as any to spend the night. The rusted door was open and they climbed up the steps to the top of the lighthouse. It was entirely black but for the dim glow of Foss’s eyes. They lay themselves down on the floor and Eliza wrapped her coat around herself for warmth. The rain came then, a great thundering rush of it.
“Just in time,” Eliza
said, laughing with relief.
A flash of lightning illuminated the room and they saw that they were not alone.
Chapter
~10~
“We’ve got to say something,” said Nell. “Honestly! I cannay eat another apricot.”
“I know. And it’s horrible being trapped in this body,” Charlie grumbled. “I think being human for so long is starting to make me sick, aye.”
“It’s nay being human, Charlie! It’s eating nothing but apricots for days!”
“I dinnay want to be rude.”
“I know, lah, but we could be here for…I dinnay know, weeks, I spose. Eliza will come for us once she’s sorted everything out and we’ll be orange in the face. We’ll have turned into mushy little apricots ourselves!”
“Really?” Charlie looked alarmed.
“No, but we’re going to get seriously ill if we dinnay eat something else, lah.”
“I’ll bring it up when we go out today.”
“Good. Thanks, Charlie.”
They were being terribly polite to each other and had not spoken again of the argument they’d had the first night or the strangeness between them that had lasted over a year. Every day Charlie went out into the apricot orchards to pick the golden fruit with Emin and Mala. The apricots were then sent off by morappus to the Faery City. Nell stayed behind poring over her cream-coloured folder, memorizing formulas and equations and arcane terminology.
A bit light-headed, her stomach grumbling, Nell climbed a spiraling staircase up to Emin’s “library.” He had told her proudly that he had books on every topic imaginable and she had almost hoped that she would find something useful for her studies. The room itself was usually large and circular, with bookshelves lining the walls and tall windows between them. However, it was clearly a recent and unfinished Illusion. Nothing in it seemed to keep its shape for long. Whenever she took one of the books from the bookshelves and opened it, it turned immediately into something else. She found herself alternately holding a large, hissing raccoon, a diamond-studded tennis racquet, and a big brass kettle before she gave up on the books altogether. The whole tower began to tilt dramatically as the day wore on, the desk where she sat changing size and shape, and sometimes the ceiling began to sag or the walls bulged in a way that Nell found most alarming.
Bone, Fog, Ash & Star Page 11
