by Paula Guran
They followed, laughing and joking too loudly among themselves. Weapons and armor rattled behind her. Not quite chasing, not quite leaving her alone.
The towers of the Old Wall rose amid buildings a few blocks to her east. If she could get there before the deserters jumped her, she might have a chance. Once past those crumbling landmarks, she would be in a much more densely populated and notably less wealthy area. In the Dancing Mistress’ experience, aid was far more likely from those who had nothing than from those who held everything in their hands. The rich did not see anyone but their own glittering kind, while the poor understood what it meant to lose everything.
“Oi, catkin,” one of the guards shouted. “Give us a lick, then.”
Their pace quickened.
Once more colors threatened to flow. Her claws twitched in their sheathes. She would not do this. The people did not hunt, especially not in the cities of men. Walking alone, the gestalt of the hunt had no use, and when fighting by herself against half a dozen men, the subtle power it gave meant nothing.
They would have her down, hamstrings cut, and be at their rape before she could tear out one throat.
Speed was all she had left. Every yard closer they came was a measure of that advantage lost. The Dancing Mistress broke into a dead run. The guards followed like dogs on a wounded beggar, shouting in earnest, hup-hup-hupping in their battle language.
Still the street was empty.
She cut across the pavers, heading for Shrike Alley, which would take her to the Old Wall and the Broken Gate. There was no one, no one. How could she have been so stupid?
Fast as she was, at least one of the men behind her was a real sprinter. She could hear him gaining, somehow even chuckling as he ran. The Dancing Mistress lengthened her stride, but his spear butt reached from behind to tangle her ankles and she went down to a head-numbing crack against the cobbles.
The guard stood above her, grinning through several days of dark beard and the sharp scent of man sweat. “Never had me one of you before,” he said, dropping away his sword belt.
She kicked up, hard, but he just jumped away laughing. His friends were right behind him with blades drawn and spears ready. Seven on one, she thought despairing. She would fight, but they would only break her all the faster for it.
The first man collapsed, stunned, his trousers caught around his knees. A second yelled and spun around. The Dancing Mistress needed nothing more than that to spur her to her opportunity.
There was small, small distance between dance and violence. Controlled motion, prodigious strength, and endless hours of practice fueled both arts. She stepped through a graceful series of spins, letting the edges of the hunt back in as her clawed kicks took two more of the guards behind the knees.
The shaman was on the other side of them, grinning broadly as he fought with an already-blooded yatagan. His movements held a shimmer edge that was far too familiar.
He gambled on me joining the counter-attack, she thought. It did not matter why. They made common cause in the moment, and tore another man’s hip from its socket. The last three deserters scrambled away before turning to run hell for leather down the street.
The Dancing Mistress had never thought to see a human who could take on even the smallest aspect of the hunt. “I should have expected more of you.” Her rescuer’s voice was scarcely shuddering from the effort of battle.
She kept her own voice hard, saying in the tongue of the people, “This does not bind us with water.”
“We are already bound. Think on what I have asked.” He nodded, then strode purposeful away among the silent houses of the rich.
Shaking, the Dancing Mistress trotted toward the Old Wall, away from the groaning, weeping men.
She made her way to the Dockmarket. That area was quiet as well, given that the harbor was as empty as it ever had been in the decades since the Year of Ice. Still, there were some humans about. Though the booths were shuttered and the alleys quiet as the Temple Quarter, the taverns stayed open. The breweries of Copper Downs had operated through flood, fire, pestilence and famine for more years than anyone had bothered to count. Political turmoil and a shortage of the shipping trade were hardly going to stop people from drinking.
There was a place off the alley known as Middleknife (or the Second Finger, depending on who you asked) behind a narrow door. It was as nameless as the people it served—mostly her folk, truth be told, but also a scattering of others who did not pass without a sidewise cast of human eyes elsewhere in Copper Downs. Many races had come out of the countries that rose skyward to the north in order to live in the shadows of the human polities along the Stone Coast.
The Dancing Mistress had always scorned solaces such as this. Still, she needed to be among her people tonight. There few enough places for that, none of them part of her daily life.
She slipped inside with a clench riding hard in her gut.
No smoke of tabac or hennep roiled within. No dice clattered, no darts flew. Only a dozen or so of the people in quiet ones, twos, and threes. They sat at tables topped by deep stoneware bowls in which forlorn lilies spun slowly, sipping pale liquid the consistency of pine sap from tiny cups that matched the great bowls. The place smelled of water, rock and trees.
Much like where she had been born.
She also saw a very narrow-bodied blue man in pangolin-skin armor alone at a table, crouched in a chair with his knees folded nearly to his chin. Though he did not look to weigh eight stone, she thought he must be seven feet tall at the least. There were even a few people who might have been human.
The barkeep, one of her people, glanced briefly at her. He then took a longer look before nodding slightly, a gesture they had all picked up in the city. She read it well enough.
Between any two of her people there was a scent, of soul and body, that once exchanged could not easily be forgotten. Much could be read there, in a language which did not admit of lies. This one was not sib-close, nor enemy-distant, but she saw the path of trust.
“You work in the Factor’s Quarter,” he said in Petraean.
“I did,” she admitted. She’d trained slave girls and the forgotten younger daughters of rising houses. Sometimes they were one and the same. “Before all things fell just lately.” And therein lay her story, the scent the shaman had been tracking.
“In any case, welcome.” He brought out a wooden plate, as tradition dictated turned by someone’s hand on a foot-powered lathe. There he spilled dried flower petals from a watered silk sack, three colors of sugar, and a trickle from a tiny cut-crystal decanter. Their hands crossed, brushing together as each of them dragged a petal through sugar and lifewater.
The Dancing Mistress touched sweetness to her lips and smiled sadly. This was what the traditional feast of welcome had degenerated into, here in the labyrinthine streets of Copper Downs. Even so, they were now opened to each other for a moment.
The barkeep nodded again then brushed his fingers across hers, releasing them both. “You are of Copper Downs, but you are not one of my regulars. What brings you here? The need for a scent of home?”
“A water matter.” She sighed. “A difficult one, I am afraid.”
He stiffened, the fur of his neck bristling slightly as his scent strengthened. “Whom?”
“A man. A human man. Not of the Stone Coast.” She shifted languages. “He spoke our tongue.”
“He knew of water matters?”
“It was he who named this business. He was looking for the . . .agent . . . behind the Duke’s fall.” She paused, choosing her words carefully against revealing too much of her complicity in the Duke’s death. “This is not my soul path. I do not bind power, nor do I loose it. But the thread came to me all the same. And this one knows far too much of us.” Her voice dipped. “I even glimpsed the hunt within him.”
“I do not accuse you of an untruth, but that has never been. I would not have thought to have seen it.” The barkeep looked past her shoulder, as one of the people ofte
n did when seeking to avoid embarrassment. “There is a rumor that one of us was the undoing of the late Duke. Is that what this water matter follows?”
“In a sense, yes,” the Dancing Mistress admitted. “But I was never in the palace,” she added in Petraean.
“Of course not.” He thought a moment. “Do you seek aid in this? Or is this your fate to follow alone?”
“I do not yet see my fate. I do not think this is it.” She sighed, another human gesture. “I doubt my ability to handle this well, and I fear the consequences of failure.”
“Abide then at the empty table near the hearth. Someone will come.” He dipped into a slow bow straight from the high meadows of their birth. “I will see to it.”
The Dancing Mistress stared into the cold fireplace. There were no ashes, though there was sufficient soot blackening the bricks to testify to regular use in colder months. The darkness before her brought the man in the shadows very much to mind.
He’d offered to spare the city much suffering. She knew that the Duke’s loosened power was like lightning looking for a path to the ground. Her hope, shared with Federo and the others who had conspired with her, had been to weather that storm until the ancient bonds relaxed. If the city was lucky, it would vanish like mist on a summer morning. Then her people’s centuries-long part in the madness of the Duke’s tyranny would be over.
The shaman had other ideas about that power, but even so he had not set himself up as her enemy. Except he knew too much. He knew their tongue, their ways, the hunt.
He was a threat to her kind. Anything he did in Copper Downs would seem to be the work of her people to the priests and the wizard-engineers who infested this city like lice. He might as well slit all their throats one by one.
I arranged to kill a Duke so that we might reclaim our power, she thought. What is one more man? She knew the answer to that: no more than another, then another, until her soul path was slick with blood.
Once more the hunt pulled at her, bending the light at the edges of her vision. Long ago in the high meadows when her people foraged or fought, they could slip their thoughts and deeds together. A hunt was a group working as neither one nor another but all together, as termites will hollow out a tree or ants ford a river. What one heard, all heard; what another touched, all felt. Deep into the hunt, leaderless and conjoined, there was none to call a halt to slaughter, none to direct their steps, and so with the power of their mesh-mind the people could become like a fire in the forest.
They had given it up long ago, save in most extreme need. There was too much violence at their command, too much power. She had never heard of the hunt being cried within the walls of a human city. If these pasty, pale folk even suspected what her kind could do when stirred to mortal effort, they would be lucky to be only driven from the gates.
Her claws slipped free again. Her blood thrummed in her veins. The Dancing Mistress was afraid of what this man had stirred her to. And how could he not know of the hunt and what might happen?
He must know, she realized. He’d just counted on finding the power first. That man took chances, just as he’d attacked her assailants from behind, counting on her to rise and join into the fight. He gambled with lives, hers and his.
Interrupting her thought, one of the people sat down next to her. A stoneware cup was quickly placed before him. Moments later a woman of the people sat across. She briefly met the Dancing Mistress’ eyes, then studied the lilies wilting in the stoneware bowl. Another soon came to fill their table. More cups followed.
So they were four. She took a sip of wine fermented from the flowers and fir sap of the high meadows.
The woman spoke, finally. She had scent of cinnamon about her. “You are said to bear a water matter which has a claim upon all the people.”
“Yes,” said the Dancing Mistress quietly. “This thing tears at my heart, but there is a catamount among us.”
“I would not question your judgment.” It was the taller of the men, who smelled of sage and tree bark. “But I would know this threat.”
She gave him a long slow look. To raise the pursuit she meant to bring to bear, she must tell them the truth. Yet any word of her involvement in the Duke’s death could mean her own.
Still, there was far more at stake than her small life.
“There is a man. A human man,” she amended. “He knows our ways better than do many of our own. He pursues a great evil. If he succeeds, the return of the Duke will be upon us all. If he fails, the price may well be laid at our door.”
She went on to explain in as much detail as she could, laying out the events of the day and her conclusions from it.
For a while, there was silence. The four of them sipped their wine and dipped into the same stream of thoughts. It was a gestalt, edging toward the mesh-mind of the hunt. It was the way her people prepared themselves for deep violence.
“And once again, death brings death.” That was the shorter of the men, the fourth in their hunt, whom she already thought of as “the glumper” for the small noises he made in his throat as he sipped at the wine. “If we send this shaman to follow his duke, who’s to say there will not be more to follow him.”
Sage-man spoke up, in Petraean now. “This is so soon. The Duke is yet freshly dead. He did not expect to pass. There cannot already be a great conspiracy to return him to life and power.”
“I do not know it for a conspiracy,” said the Dancing Mistress. “He stalks me, seeing me for the bait to call this power back. That does not mean he has sung for my life, but I cannot think he will scruple to claim it in his pursuit.” She flashed to the uneasy memory of the man laying into her attackers, grinning over the bloody blade of his yatagan. He played some game that ran neither along nor against her soul path, crosswise as it might otherwise be.
Still, they all knew, as everyone of the people did, that the Duke of Copper Downs had stolen their magic, generations past. There were stories and more stories, details that varied in every telling, but since that time the numbers and power of her people—never great to start with—had diminished, while the Duke had whiled away centuries on his throne.
That someone was hunting power through the Dancing Mistress now, so soon after the Duke’s fall, meant old, old trouble returning. The man being a high country shaman with too much knowledge of their kind was only a seal on that trouble.
The cinnamon-woman broke the renewed silence. “You have the right of it. If we stop the Duke’s man now, we may crush the seed before the strangler vine has a chance to grow.”
The glumper stared up from the cup of wine clutched his hands. “Crushing is not our way.”
“Not now.” The cinnamon-woman looked around, catching their eyes. “Once . . . ”
“Once we were warriors,” said the Dancing Mistress. “We called storms from the high crags.” They all knew those stories, too. “If we cry the hunt now, we will spare lives.”
“And what do we give up in following your plan?” asked the glumper. “The old ways are gone for good reason.”
The Dancing Mistress felt anger rising within her, a core of fire beneath the cool sense of purpose she’d hewn to all her life. “They are gone because of what the Duke took from us.”
He gave her a long stare. “Did you ever think we might have given our power away with a purpose?”
Even in argument, the mesh-mind was knitting together, the edges of the room gleaming and sharpening. The Dancing Mistress set down her cup. “It is time,” she said in their language. “We will find this shaman and stop his scheming, before he drags all of us down into darkness.”
The moon glowed faintly through the low clouds, but the shadows outflanked the light at every turn. Torches burned at compound gates while lamps hung at intersections and in the squares. The nighttime streets of Copper Downs were streaked with smears of heat and scent.
The hunt slid through the evening like a single animal with four bodies. Her vision was complex, edges gleaming sharp at all distances and
ranges. Odors told stories she could never read on her own, about the passage of time and the sweat of fear, passion, even the flat, watery smell of ennui. The very feel of the air on her skin as she ran had been magnified fourfold. She saw every door, every hiding place, every mule or person they passed, in terms of force and danger and claws moving close to the speed of thought.
The sheer power of the hunt was frightening in its intoxication.
They slipped through the city like a killing wind, heading toward the Ivory Quarter and the black gate through which she’d passed before. She’d never run so fast, so effortlessly, with such purpose.
Why had her people not stayed like this always? she wondered. All the logic of civilization aside, surely this was what they’d been made for.
It seemed only moments before they’d crossed the city to the old ochre walls of the compound, now glowing in the moonlight. The ancient stucco seemed to suck the life of the world into itself, though the trees beyond and above the wall practically shouted to her expanded sensorium.
Three times in as many minutes they circled around the shadowed walls, and found no sign of the shaman’s black gate. Not even a significant crack where it might have stood.
There was power aplenty in the world, but it was not generally spent so freely as this man had done. Opening that gate was the magical equivalent of a parlor trick: flashy, showy, a splash of self such as a child with a paintpot might make. But costly, very costly. The greatest power lay in subtlety, misdirection, the recondite support and extension of natural processes.
It was here, she thought, and the hunt took her meaning from the flick of her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the stand of her fur. They believed her. She knew that just as they’d known her meaning.
