He drifted off into dreams that were confused and troubled; odd images of one of those sultry she-mrem from the joy-houses, turning into something that hissed. In the dreams he remembered thinking that this was faintly unfair ... the wards should have protected him. When he woke up, well after dark, he sat up cursing softly, and rubbed his head. He hated sleeping in the daytime. It always made him feel weak and scattered when he woke up. And on top of that he now had to deal with feelings left over from the dreams, of being watched, of something portentous and terrible about to happen, of an odd smell. All this faint and distant, for he couldn’t remember much of anything about the dreams themselves—but hanging over him nonetheless, like an old half-forgotten worry.
There was nothing to do about it, though, except consider himself warned. Lorin got dressed in his least disreputable clothes and headed off for the Councillory.
He went by a circuitous route and with several stops in several taverns, taking some bets, to give himself at least the beginnings of an alibi if he should prove to need one. This would also keep any questions from being asked as to why Lorin was out at night. The people who talked about such things—and there were many—would simply assume that his day had been bad, and so he was working late. There would be no further questions about that. It was generally understood that Lorin, like many another “tradesmrem” working on the edges of the law, was paying protection money to someone, either another criminal or some police official. Lorin smiled at the thought of that, thinking how it went much the other way. But he was hardly about to disabuse people of a misapprehension which could serve to protect him.
Quietly he slipped through the night, toward the parts of town that smelled better. The Councillory would be well guarded tonight, of course, but it was on one side of a very public square, a place full of traffic except in the dead of night, and the police or the city cohorts could hardly close the whole square down for what amounted to a party. There would be plenty of room to skulk about in, and plenty of places to watch from. And for the kind of watching he intended, Lorin did not have to be too close.
He found a shadowy doorway right across the square, and settled into it. No one was likely to bother him; the constables were concentrated on the far side of the square, about the bright lights of the Councillory. Lorin suspected that most of their minds weren’t too closely on their work, or their vigilance; they too were eager to catch a glimpse of the strangers, and the high doings going on inside. He pulled the dark cloak about him, watching them, and did a little preliminary feeling around.
This kind of “feeling” was always a tradeoff. Wizards, excepting the most powerful ones, had sharp limitations on how far they could “see” while still in the body, and how clearly. Each wizard’s “range” was a constant. The closer a wizard was to a situation he desired to divine, the better he could perceive what was happening, but he might also be in more danger there. The further away the wizard was, the harder it was to clearly sense what was going on, but the safer he was, as a rule.
Lorin tonight was pushing his personal range as close as he dared, consonant with good results. He needed to sense if there was indeed magic happening, and what kind ... but he also needed to walk away from the square afterwards. Reswen might be kindly disposed toward him, but Lorin seriously doubted he had ever told any of his staff that he had a tame wizard on the payroll ... and whether any other policemrem knew or not, it seemed unlikely that they would connect the Policemaster’s agent with the skulking mrem out in the square. At least not before morning—and annoying things could happen to one in a police cell between midnight and dawn, no matter how carefully Reswen worked to keep such things from happening. No, Lorin thought, I’ll watch out for myself first. If the information has to suffer a little, so be it....
He concentrated on being still, for a while. He suspected it would seem surprising to the untrained how hard it was to simply be perfectly motionless except for one’s breathing, but that stillness was vital to the stillness of the mind that would follow, and allow him to “hear” and “see” while still in the body. It would also make it that much less likely that any passing constable would notice him; even a chance shift from foot to foot could be fatal—Reswen’s constables were a sharp lot, by and large.
He did not close his eyes. That was for the rankest kind of amateur—or a wizard not standing in a public place where anyone might come up to him without warning. Lorin simply let his eyes go unfocused, let the view of the great square blur, and did as his father had taught him all that while ago. Simply allow yourself to see something else where the world is, his father had said. Most people refuse; most people spend their whole lives refusing. Just stop refusing, for this little while. Don’t strain, don’t push. There’s nothing you have to do. It’s all stopping doing.
So he stopped, and did nothing. Presently the square didn’t seem quite so dark. Not that there was actually light there: but he saw, or rather felt, the impression of light, and movement, and talk, and laughter. It was rather like peering in a lighted window from out of the dark. Everything was somewhat remote, but more immediate for the contrast of its brightness against the dark he looked in from.
Through the impression of light and riches, impressions of people moved. There were no images as such. But a bundle of something like light would pass by him, and Lorin would catch a brief burst of emotion from it, or a slow steady drone of thought, or the muffled sound of speech happening—less muffled if the person himself was speaking, more so if he was listening. Sometimes a word would come through clearly, as if a swathing, sound-deadening curtain had briefly parted, then closed down again. The curtain was never open for long, nor did the “gauze” enwrapping his mind’s eye clear for more than a moment or so. Nor was this his fault. It was simply that few minds could do anything with utter singlemindedness for more than a second or so without slipping.
Lorin leaned there against the doorway, and seemed to himself no longer to be outside. Rather, he was standing against a doorway in the gilded richness of the Councillory. The gilt had a vague bloom laid all over it, as if of age or distance, and every light seemed to be seen through some suddenly risen fog from off the river. The shifting shapes of light drifted past him, and he watched them and looked at their colors.
The colors were always indicative; they were among a wizard’s first and most important studies. Sometimes, in mrem of powerful enough personality, they would show even about one’s normal body, which in less emphatic mrem tended to drown the nonphysical body out as daylight drowns out stars. But when one was “unfocused” in this manner, they showed. There were endless different combinations, and even in any one given person the colors would shift with a rainbow’s unpredictability from moment to moment as his perception of himself, or his mood, shifted. But there were always general tendencies visible in a person, ones that took no time to perceive, as their emotional counterparts and correspondences would have done. The muddy colors of hunger, greed, rage, pain, scaling up through the clearer hues of interest and determination, and from them through the brighter (and rarer) shades of delight, commitment, compassion, love—Lorin knew them all of old, and like many other wizards, preferred not to look for them too often. Fair seemings so often covered the bitter truth, and any given group of mrem perceived in this way tended to shade unhappily down toward the darker colors. Here or there might be a brief beacon of some bright emotion, but in all there was the tendency toward the darkness.
An important part of the art, though, was to keep one’s own emotions and reactions out of the seeing; they could too often contaminate the perception of everything one was trying to discover. And the colors of magic, which were several, were delicate things in most mrem not actually doing magic at the moment. One’s own emotions could drown them out. So Lorin kept his own feelings at bay, and looked around the room, his arms folded, as light and shadow swirled around him.
There were knots of avarice, several of the
m: The bilious yellow of it swirled and mingled with the various greens of jealousy, envy, and pride. Merchants, Lorin thought. Several of them bulked large—the width of one’s bundle of light told something about one’s bodily size, though the manifestation could on occasion be misleading—and there was little to choose between the Easterners and some few of them whom Lorin recognized as Niauhu by a snatch of dialogue here or the brief sight of their clothing somewhere else.
It was not all as bad as among the merchants, though—all busy at seeing how much information they could extort from one another while giving as little as possible back. There was much genuine merriment going around, and a great deal of curiosity, and the soft colors of sheer satisfaction as nearly everyone ate and drank happily of what was undoubtedly a noble spread. Even food had its colors when it was fresh, and the vegetables in particular lay there still glowing somewhat, pleased in their mindless way that they had been chosen to be eaten. The consciousness—if that was the word for it—was fading, but it would last them unbroken until they were in someone’s stomach.
Lorin smiled a little at his own folly—he could rarely afford to have that innocent pleasure of a happy vegetable in the house, or rather, people in the market would have noticed that his budget was suddenly large enough to get a nonessential like vegetables, and so he eschewed them and stuck to plain dried meat, good enough for him and his neighbors. He turned his attention back to the mrem gathered in the room. There was someone he particularly wanted to look at: the priest.
He found him, immediately, exuding all the colors of good humor and none of those of magic. He was drunk—his colors had that sort of florid look that too much wine or drug tended to produce, an outsweeping tendency. Normally that should have made a tendency toward magic more visible, not less. Yet none of the normal shades evinced themselves, none at all, and Lorin wondered whether anything he had seen during his soulwalk had been correct at all.
He watched the priest for quite a while, and outside of various perceptions of cunning, false joviality, and mild irritation, nothing further was evident about him that made him interesting to Lorin at all. It was a puzzle. Finally he turned away to watch some of the others.
There were a couple of them exhibiting most clearly the colors of sheer lust: colors as hard to ignore as a fire set in the middle of one’s living room rug. Lorin looked carefully at one of them, a slender shape, and concentrated briefly to see if he could get a glimpse of him or her. Her, it turned out: a quick image of a slender shape in silks, gone again. But an Easterner, and the other party was Niauhu; his colors showed hunger of a kind that had nothing to do with the body, and a huge pride—and almost none of the clear upper-level colors that indicated anything to be proud of, such as intelligence or virtue. Some sodden old fool, probably ... Lorin narrowed his “eyes,” looking more closely at the lust-ridden creature. One of the Councillors, it was. The name eluded him, but he had seen the hobbling old mrem at several public functions before this. It would be easy enough to get a name, if Reswen was interested in him.
Lorin glanced around at that thought and saw what he thought he would. He had rarely looked at Reswen in this manner, but he knew him well enough from having worked with him this long to recognize him from his colors: a methodical sort of arrangement of them, colors that held unusually steadily in one hue or another—no flickering from thought to thought, but a slow steady certainty on one issue before moving to another. Yet all the same, a lively intelligence, and a humor, glowing through the more somber colors—someone who saw no reason not to enjoy himself at his work. He was enjoying himself now. That sheaf of colors stood close to another, by a pillar, and the two of them lanced intertwining light at one another—conversation, barbed, searching, and merry by turns. For a while Lorin just gazed at this for the sheer pleasure of it. The colors of wit were a treat to watch, as tendrils of colored fire touched, interlaced, flinched back, knotted, strove, twined. Lorin smiled to himself a little, there in the shadows. Another of the Policemaster’s conquests, he thought. Though not his blue-eyed problem—
He thought about that for a second, then turned his attention briefly back to the she who showed the colors of lust so clearly. She was leading the poor Council-mrem on visibly. Lorin could see it, as she strolled casually away from him across the room, but her hunger for him trailed hot pulsing blood-colored tendrils behind her, toward him; they clung, caressed, drew, and he lurched tipsily after her—
Lorin frowned, then smoothed his annoyance away. There was something there he needed to find out about—some taste, some tang— He bent his attention fully on the she, concentrated on brushing the cobwebs away. Was she the magic-worker he was looking for? There were magics of that kind—Lorin “narrowed” his eyes, held her in the center of his attention, paid no attention to the Councillor who came bumbling after her. The colors of her grew clearer, sharper. Lust, swirling. Other motivations, submerged, hidden even from her—The pleasures of control. A murky pleasure at the helplessness of the other’s desire. Anticipation, buried for the moment, of what would follow later. Lorin looked deeper. Fear, fear that she would not do well, that someone she worked for would be displeased. Rebellion. The someone was—
And then he touched it, and Lorin flinched away as if he had touched a stove. Heat, the odd smell, a sense of watching, the leftovers from his dreams—all there. His magic-worker was not this she-mrem after all; it was working through her, though. And doubtless it knew it had been touched. He jerked his consciousness out of there, wobbled out of his doorway, and headed for the nearest street that led out of the square. He almost ran afoul of a troop of constables on the way out, hurrying past them like someone who had had a bad scare, not stopping to answer their hail. Oh, go away! he willed them, and finally they did, heading off toward the square.
Oh, bad, it was bad. His dreams, his soulwalk, these Easterners, all connected. And he had not found out what Reswen needed to know. But there were worse worries. Almost he could feel the tendrils of disembodied attention following him out of that room, across the square, down the street, fastening to his shoulder blades, digging into him like claws—
Lorin moaned and ran home, to the wards, and safety ... for the moment.
•
Krruth was one of those mrem who had never really given up being fully nocturnal, so that Reswen wasn’t particularly surprised to find him calling around to the office first thing in the morning, looking fresh and pleased with himself. Reswen wished he could have said the same. He had had a little more wine than he had really needed, last night, and had forgotten to take the usual prehangover remedy before collapsing on his couch. As a result, his head and mouth felt rather as if they were suffering from a case of ingrown fur.
“Nice evening last night, sir,” Krruth said after closing the office door, and standing down from attention. It was more a statement than a question.
“Yes,” Reswen said, rubbing his head, “and I suspect the rumors are flying. Which is what I had in mind.”
“Just as you say, sir.” Was that the slightest flicker of humor? But it was hard to tell anything from Krruth’s lean dark face.
“Yes, just as I say. What happened in there last night?”
“Well, sir, I suspect you know about Aiewa and Deshahl going off together.”
“I doubt there’s anyone in the city who doesn’t. She didn’t waste her time.”
“No indeed. Straight back to Haven they went.”
“And?”
Krruth smiled a little. “Apparently the rumors of Aiewa’s senility are premature. Or the lady’s skill is considerable.”
“Yes, I’m sure the staff had a good time,” Reswen said.
He had no objection to his operatives enjoying the things they saw and heard, as long as they didn’t get so interested in them that they forgot details, or why they were watching in the first place. “But I take it nothing else of note occurred.”
“Aiewa told her nothing of import, and she asked him nothing,” said Krruth. “We will of course keep watching the situation. We simply hope that Aiewa doesn’t conceive the bright idea of taking her back to his house in future. It would be nerve-racking to have to try to set up the same kind of listening system, and his servants are unfortunately of the unbribable old-retainer sort.”
Reswen flicked his ears back in annoyance. “Anyone can be bribed. Set the butler up somehow, if it comes to that and you have to. But I doubt he’ll risk the public onus of such an open liaison with a foreigner, and an Easterner at that.”
“He made no attempt to hide it last night,” Krruth said.
“True enough. But that was once, and he looked befuddled. He had been hitting the wine....”
“He wasn’t drunk when he came back, sir. Would have been hard to be drunk, in my opinion, and, ah, function the way he did.”
“Well, keep an eye on him. What else?”
“Nothing of note. The priest was up later than anyone else ... stayed till they closed the Councillory down, talking to all the councillors. Didn’t miss a one. Stayed up late even after he got back to Haven, drinking and telling lewd jokes.” Krruth looked slightly disapproving. “These priests of fertility cults,” he said, “I tell you, sir, they have filthy mouths.”
Exiled: Keeper of the City Page 11
