by Jo Clayton
Danny lifted his mug. “Here’s to the Arsuiders. To know ‘em…” he gulped down the last of the lukewarm grog, “… is to know ‘em.”
“Yeh.” Laux ran his tongue over his teeth, making his lips bulge. “Look here, Laz, you whistle up a good wind.” He grunted with impatience and stopped talking as Pweez came in to clear away the dishes; when the boy was gone, he went on. “Taught some manners to those top’sh off Ottvenutt shoals. First time I’ve got past without taking some damage. You say you’re a rambling man, no place you have to be, no one expecting you here or there. What I’m saying, if you don’t fancy taking a chance on that,” he flicked a hand toward the porthole, “why not stay on board? Say we can settle on what you get out of it.”
Danny Blue picked at a hangnail and thought about it. He was tempted. He didn’t know where he was going-except away. Away from the Chained God and his manipulations. Which did the god want him to do? Stay? Go? Enough to send a man biting his tail. His half-sire Daniel Akamarino had spent his life drifting from one place to another with no goals, no ambitions, his work the only center his life had. That kind of work wasn’t available here, that reality was a place Danny found himself wanting to visit, but it was out of reach and he wasn’t about to waste time yearning for what he couldn’t have. His other half-sire Ahzurdan never took one step without plotting out a hundred steps beyond, though for him too, work was justification, a reason for being. And that was gone too, not available. With the war going on in his head, Danny Blue couldn’t reach the degree of focus a sorceror needed for all but the most ordinary activities.
*Stay, fool,* Ahzurdan’s phasma said, *you won’t find a better place. Things will only get worse.*
*Don’t listen to that mushbrain,* Daniel’s phasma said, you and me, we’re going out of our skull shuttling around on this crackerbox. We can get along just fine on the ground.*
Danny Blue liked old Lio Laux, the M’darjin was close to being a friend. He liked the crew. But he agreed with his half-sire Daniel, he most definitely did not like living on the ship. He was cramped, uncomfortable, and bored most of the time.
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s a good offer, but Dirge Arsuid sounds interesting, it’s a place I’ve never been, I think I’ll take a look at it. How long you going to be in port?”
“In by noon, out by dark. I don’t overnight here ever.”
“That’s that then. See you round, I suppose. Maybe on my way back.”
9
Danny Blue followed the guide Laux had summoned for him, a boy, twelve or thirteen, sallow skin with a greenish tint, stiff spiky hair dyed in green and yellow squares, green paint on his eyelids, yellow triangles painted under each eye, lips carefully tinted green. Heavy round ceramic plugs swung in rhythm with the swing of his meager hips, hanging from flesh loops stretching down from his earlobes, green in the right, yellow in the left. He had ceramic armlets clamped above and below the elbow on his left arm; they were striped in green and yellow. He wore a glove on his right hand, snakeskin dyed a rich dark green. His left hand was bare, the nails painted blood red. On his feet he wore snakeskin slippers dyed to match the, glove. Instead of trousers he wore knitted hose, right leg green, left leg yellow, with a bright red codpiece and belt. To cover his torso he had a tight sleeve/ess green shirt with pointed yellow darts slashing downward diagonally, starting from his right shoulder, aiming toward his left hip. He strolled along as if he were going that way from choice and had no connection with the scruffy drab creature following him. His was a conservative dress for his kind, a simple walking-out costume. Warned on the ship to mind his manners, warned again before Laux turned him loose, Danny Blue managed not to stare at the show around him, but sometimes it was not so easy to keep his eyes straight ahead. As when a creation in feathers and gauze fluttered past, its species as uncertain as its outline. The boys he saw all had painted faces but no masks; every adult, male and female alike, wore halfmasks, stylized serpent snouts as if they adopted the insult in the old tale and made it something to flaunt. Laux said they carried viper poison in the rings they wore and could shoot it into someone with a special pressure of the hand. They usually refrained in the daylight, it was bad for business, but you didn’t want to push them much, their restraint was delicate as a spider’s thread.
It was a city of silences and shadows, of walls and towers; it smelled like clove carnations; they grew in the walls, red and white carnations, they floated in the water, bobbing past him as he walked along the roughened tiles, red and white carnations with white orchids and a rose or two, swirling around the narrow black boats poling along the canals. Red and white. The whole city was red and white. Every wall was faced with glossy red and white tiles. Panels of red tiles, columns of white tiles. Patterns of cut tile, red and white swirling together, sweeping along in dizzying flows. Red and white, white and red. Except for the pointed roofs. Those were black tile, shiny black. It rained most days from two till four, thunderstorms that dumped an inch or more into the grooves that ran in spirals from the peaks and dropped into channels that fed the glossy black gargoyles; the rain water spewed from their mouths, arching out over the walkways to spatter into the canals.
The boy led Danny Blue past a water plaza.
There was a black tile fountain in the middle and lacy white footbridges arching to it from the corners of the square. There were seats round the fountain. Several Arsuiders sat there, in groups like flocks of extravagant birds, heads close, talking in whispers. They stopped talking when they saw Danny, watched him until he went round a corner. He didn’t look back, but he could feel the pressure of their whispers following him.
The Stranger’s Quarter, local name Estron Coor, was laid out near the heart of the City, not even the Ahzurdan phasma knew why. The Stranger’s Wall was a swath of murky red with black diamonds in a head-high line marching around the enclosure. The single door in that wall was iron thickly coated with a shiny black paint, nicked and bruised and smeared, the first dirt Danny Blue had seen in the city; the opening was narrow, a man only marginally bigger than average would have trouble squeezing through it.
The boy stopped before the door, his costume swearing at the wall; next to its heavy brooding solidity, he seemed more a concept than a living person, a player in some fantastical drama. He whistled a snatch of something, a complex tonerow sort of thing, stepped aside when he got a matching answer from the gatehouse perched over the entrance, no windows in it, only arrowslits with oiltraps in the base of the overhang. Danny Blue kept his face noncommittal but wasn’t liking this much at all. Lam said they barely tolerated outsiders in their midst; this tower underlined that and went beyond. Strangers were treated like disease germs, encysted, kept away from the rest of the organism.
The door creaked open, a sound that felt like a rusty knife twisting in the bone. No sneaking out of here, Danny thought. He went through the narrow opening into the Estron Coor. The boy was still watching when the door was maneuvered shut by a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys. Making sure I stay where I’m put. What a bunch. Danny Blue looked around.
There was an Inn, three stories high and tight against the Wall; from the look of the second story windows and other signs it was eight rooms long and barely one room thick. The third story was tucked in under toothy eaves with shuttered unglazed holes too small to qualify as windows. Next to the Inn were several miniature stores with living quarters above them, a cook shop, a grocery, a butchery, a miscellany. Across the canal from the Inn there was a ponderous godon with offices or something similar in part of the ground floor and a line of portals with chains and bars enough to suggest that behind them were rare and costly things. Next to the godon there was a sort of multi-purpose temple with seven flights of steps leading to seven archways, no two alike; ghosts in various stages of preservation drifted in and out of openings that made a sieve of the cylindrical tower emerging from the squat ground floor; they undulated past women with painted breasts who sat in those openings, they mi
ngled with the drifts of smoke from the incense which kept the air inside the walls smelling rich enough to eat. The Ahzurdan phasma sneered at the women. *Temple whores. Tempted, Danny?* The Daniel phasma muttered something Danny couldn’t hear, didn’t particularly want to hear.
All those buildings were fairly new and constructed of wood by someone with a fixation on sharp points; the eaves looked like the bottom jaws of sharks, there were spearheads or something similar jutting from the corner beams, edges sharp enough to split a thought. The window bars were no meek retiring rods; on the outside they had ranks of needles like the erectile spines of a hedgehog snake, and the needles had discolored points. Poison, Danny thought, sheeit.
There were people looking at him from the corners of their eyes, shoulders turned to him. A motley collection, scarce two alike though they were mostly men. They were standing around as if they had nothing more important on their minds than sneaking peeks at a new arrival; the whole place had a feeling of stagnation, constipation, though the water in the broad canal ran clear and clean with scattered flowers riding the wind ruffles, slipping in through one grating and out the other. One of the men sauntered away from a group, crossed the humpy bridge to the temple and went inside. A few women swathed in drab veils that covered them head to toe hurried from one store to another, trotted back to the Inn or climbed the stairs to the cramped quarters over one of the businesses.
Unhurried, giving those side-eyes a bland mask to look at, Danny Blue strolled for the Inn, wondering rather seriously how much it was going to cost him. He had an assemblage of coins, a very mixed lot, some left over from Daniel’s first days, in Cheonea, some from Ahzurdan’s hoard, some he’d found scattered about the starship. Though it wasn’t much when he piled it up, it was enough to cushion him until he decided how to make some more-as long as he was quick about it. He pushed through the door.
The room inside was small and smoky, lit by a brace of sooty lamps. There was a staircase vanishing around a sharp corner, swallowed by shadows as sooty as the lamps and in the corner opposite it was an L-shaped counter with barely enough room for the youth dozing behind it. Danny woke him up, talked him out of a room and went to it to think about things.
In the middle of thinking, he fell asleep.
10
He woke, startled out of sleep so suddenly he sat up confused, slammed his head into something hard and cold. He swore, moved more cautiously. He was in a stone cage, granite by the look of it, squat, heavy, ugly. It sat inside a pentacle in a domed room without windows or any apparent doorways. No one about. He ran his hands over the stone, there wasn’t a crack in it, not even where stone joined stone. “No doors in this thing, how’d they get us in here?”
*C’vee mir,* Ahzurdan phasma said, detached appraisal in his insect voice.
Danny was briefly amused, as he suspected he was meant to be. “What’s that?” he said aloud.
*Cage. Meant to hold magic wielders. Us.*
“Not good, you mean?”
*Not good.
“What’s going on?”
*I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.*
“You don’t know?”
*Like Lio Laux, I’ve avoided this place. There was no reason to seek it out. They don’t welcome stray sorcerors here, no matter how high the rank.*
“They don’t welcome stray anybody. Any law against unregistered sorcerors?”
*None that I know of.*
“Gods, I haven’t been here long enough to bruise a rule, let alone break one. What do they think I did? Spit in their canal?”
*There’ll be something. Unless Arfon intervenes.*
“I think we can forget about that. This cage carved out or patterned?”
*You mean, can I unmake it.*
“Yeh.”
*I can’t. You can.*
“What a hope.” Both his sires had learned whatever they needed to learn as easily as breathing; Danny Blue had assumed he could relearn Ahzurdan’s sorcery in much the same way. After all, he didn’t have to do the original work, only shift the WORDS and gestures to match his new psyche. Two problems with that. First, he wasn’t given the time he needed; he’d spent the past ten years in an artificial coma. Second, he kept slamming into Daniel Akamarino’s bone-deep disbelief in magic. In short, he discovered the truth in the aphorism: Sorcery requires will and the proper application of will requires belief. In those first months after the battle with Settsimaksimin when Danny was confined within the starship body of the Chained God, before the god caught him plotting, he’d worked harder than he could remember in either of his lives to rebuild a full range of WORD, IMAGE and gesture, though it was like fighting a tiderace to overcome the Daniel phasma’s resistance, his unconscious rejection-and the Ahzurdan phasma’s jealousy. Danny recovered some small confidence in his skills, though he was frustratingly unable to move among the realities, his half-sire clutched that ability to his insubstantial chest and wouldn’t let Danny near it. Danny got far enough along to contrive a way of shorting out of the shipbrain, but the god woke up and time ran out on him. The Ahzurdan phasma might harbor illusions of competence; Danny Blue knew better. His hold on fire and wind was deft enough; he could play what games he wanted with the unTalented, but until he could make free with his realities again, put him against a fumble-fingered apprentice and he’d go down smoking. The phasma was right, he could dissolve that cage, he knew that after some tentative exploration, but he couldn’t do it without making such a noise that the cage-maker would come running. Annoyed at the waste of his work, no doubt he’d impose a nastier sort of coercion. Best leave things as they were and see what happened.
*Be ready, the Ahzurdan phasma said, tension sharpening his gnat’s voice. *If there is a challenge, you need to be prepared. Search my memories. Now!*
Danny Blue paid no attention to his half-sire’s agitation; there simply wasn’t time to acquire skills he didn’t already have. He floated his fingertips across the stone, seeking to
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read the status of the sorceror who made it, and tasted the air around him to pick up ghost images of past events in this unlovely chamber, a psychometric survey that even the Daniel phasma believed in since it mimicked the activity of electronic sniffers.
From the air he got: Images of dark-robed men, of menacing faces looming over him. A fog of fear and cringing, rage, outrage and helplessness swirling about him. Voices booming words that never quite took specific shape. A sense of death and desolation and dissolution. Trials without defense where the verdict was given before the questions were asked.
From the cage, the c’vee mu, he got: Arrogance and malevolence, prissiness and paranoia. And a name. Braspa Pawbool.
There was a burst of insect laughter from the Ahzurdan phasma. Too Boo,* he squealed. *Poo the Boob, he couldn’t scratch his way out of a spiderweb. * A moment’s silence; Danny waited. But he can talk, Danny, oh can he talk, I remember once he talked me into… mmh, never mind that. I can see how he tickled the Brin Ystaffel into hiring him. He’s a water man, Danny. Fire makes him piss his pants. If it comes to a crunch, throw some salamandri at him and see if we can snap out of here before Arfon interferes.*
“I can’t touch the realities, you forgot? Even if I could, we’re inside this pentacle; I throw a salamander, it bounces back on me and whoosh, we’re all gone.”
The Ahzurdan phasma refused to hear what he didn’t want to know. He ignored the first part of the statement. *A pentacle of Poo’s making. Cobwebs. Breathe on it and it breaks. *
Danny Blue worked his body around until he was lying on his stomach. He reached through the cage, edged his fingertips to the nearest of the glimmering lines.
A nip, pain in his hand, like putting his finger in a live socket-the image slipped in from the Daniel phasma who was watching with cool skepticism. It wasn’t as bad as his memories forecasted. He touched it again, let the pain flow round him and slip away without bite or afterbite. He tasted it, savored the flavors, g
ot to know it, learned the WORD to dismiss it, translated that WORD into his own framework. He drew his hand back. “Yes,” he said aloud. “One-two and it’s through.”
*Yessqs.*
The satisfied vibrato tickled through Danny, made him smile. He crossed his arms, dropped his head onto his forearm and settled himself to wait for events to unfold. After half an hour when nothing happened, nothing changed, he slept.
11
There was a portentous knocking, the butt of a staff pounding on the wood of the dais with the five throne-chairs. The chairs were filled now with black hooded figures, velvet halfmasks reinforcing the shadows from the hoods; the men wore heavy jeweled chains with jeweled pendants that caught what light there was and broke it into particolored glitters, they wore silks and velvets subtly draping about their hidden forms, richly tactile, magnificently sweet to the eye. A sixth man stood with staff in hand, robed and hooded too, but more simply, with plainer stuffs and a plainer chain. The six of them had slipped in while Danny Blue dozed and arranged themselves in dignified poses; now they waited for the drama to begin, waited in a silence as portentous, as theatrical, as essentially hollow as that knocking-a reaction Danny shared with the Daniel phasma who saw it was the sort of idiocy that disgusted him in the by-the-book, spit-and-polish conformity he had to put up with whenever he shipped on carriers like the Golden Lines. Danny Blue sat up warily, folded his legs and waited. What he saw was far tawdrier than the images he’d evoked; the phantom impressions of past trials were realer than the reality. The Ahzurdan phasma was annoyed with Danny and Daniel both and irritated by the figures in the chairs. In the days before he got tangled in the plots swirling about the Drinker of Souls, he cultivated such men and found a validation in their acceptance; they acknowledged his power as he paid homage to theirs, tacitly, placidly, both sides blessed by the certainty of their superiority. But the recognition, the certainty were missing now and he resented that. They should have known. If they were the real powers of Dirge Arsuid, they should have seen the power he had, or rather, the power possessed by the body he dwelt in. They should have given Danny the honor he deserved even if he was too stupid to demand it.
