by Victor Poole
"You cannot destroy me!" Beryl's now-fragmented voice cried. Her eyes went swiftly towards Ocher, and Ajalia saw that the witch was looking for the home she had, until lately, kept within Ocher's being. Ajalia mixed the lights, and the white surge of power crackled loudly between her hands. Delmar and Ocher's eyes were turned to Ajalia, transfixed by the power she held between her hands. She remembered that they had said they could not see the lights, and she wondered what, if anything, they saw or felt when she mixed the white lightning.
Ajalia saw Beryl realize that the slab of brackish red soul was gone from within Ocher, and just as the witch's fragmented shadow of a face twisted into a keening wail of indignation, Ajalia sent the whole bolt of crackling light into Rane's body.
Beryl's face exploded with a loud snap; a cloud of dark dust emanated out around Rane. Rane slid down the wall to the floor, his eyes wide and distressed, and Ajalia watched as the pieces of Beryl's soul bled, like dark blood, from within his body. She went to Rane, and held out her hand. Rane looked up at her. He looked shaken and afraid.
"Here," Ajalia said, wiggling her outstretched fingers. "Take my hand." Rane looked into her eyes; she saw that he was shocked by what had just happened. He reached up, and grasped Ajalia's arm. She pulled him to his feet, and led him to a chair. "Do you know what just happened?" Ajalia asked Rane. Delmar and Ocher were both staring openly at the man from Talbos; Ocher looked rather as though he were glad that his own experience had not resulted in such a dramatic confrontation.
"Did Beryl come out?" Rane asked. His voice was trembling. Ajalia nodded. "I thought I could hear her, a little," Rane said. Ajalia could see tears threatening to fill Rane's eyes. "She didn't used to be like that," he told Ajalia. Ajalia was not sure if she believed him.
LILY, THE WIFE OF TREE
"Now," Ajalia said, taking a deep breath, and sitting down on the edge of a table. She was very aware of the two dark slabs of soul that laid quietly in the room. "Beryl is not yet dead," Ajalia said. Ocher looked at Ajalia, and then at the slab. "Can you see that, now?" Ajalia asked Rane. She pointed at the piece of Beryl that she had taken out of his body. Rane followed the direction of her finger, and then started up from where he sat.
"Was that thing inside of me?" Rane asked, his voice hushed.
"You had three of them, about that size," Ajalia told him. She glanced at Ocher, and at Ocher's piece. "He only had the one," she told Rane, gesturing at Ocher.
Rane followed her eyes again, and looked at the place where Ocher's slice of dark red lay. Ajalia saw that Rane could see the second slab, and that he did not want to admit that he saw it.
"I think," Ajalia told them, "that you can all three see the lights, and the colors." She waved Delmar nearer; he wandered closer, and sat down in a chair. Ajalia went to the shelf. She wanted the heart stone, and when she looked at the shelf, she remembered that she had picked it up already. She looked around the room, and saw the darkened block of wood lying on a table near the chairs. There were three smalls tables in the room; on one was Ocher's slice of Beryl's soul. One of the remaining tables was near where Rane had sat; Ajalia remembered now that she had set the heart stone down on this table, when Isacar had said that Rane was one of Tree's front men. Ajalia carried the heart stone to the third table, and sat down on it.
"What is that?" Delmar asked sharply. His eyes were on the dirty block of wood. He had seen her hold it before, she thought, but his mind had been focused on other things.
"First," Ajalia said, "I want to have a long talk." Delmar opened his mouth to protest. "First," Ajalia repeated, "we are going to clear up all of the things. Then you can bring up new questions." Delmar frowned at her, but there was a smile in his eyes. Delmar's beard, Ajalia thought again, was quite wonderful. It had only been a few days since it had started to fill up Delmar's face, but already it was thick and even. Delmar's beard, Ajalia told herself complacently, was ten million times better than Ocher's big beard.
Ocher was still staring meditatively at the block of soul in front of him; he was gazing on it as one would gaze on a corpse.
"We need to talk for a long time," Ajalia told the others. She felt a rumble in her stomach, and she wished that she had sent Isacar for food, before she had sent him after the dead Thief Lord's youngest son. Ajalia held the dirty block of wood by the edges; the grease on the block was slightly sticky under her fingers. She sighed. "Okay," she said. "So there are about fifteen things that have come up that need to be explained." She turned to Delmar, who was sitting and watching her patiently, his chin tucked in against his chest. "One," Ajalia said, "Delmar is the Thief Lord now."
"Yes, we've settled that," Delmar said with a smile. Ajalia grinned at him. She felt inordinately proud of Delmar. Delmar, she told herself, was quite her favorite person in the world.
"Two," Ajalia said, lifting her fingers, and touching them against her knee, "witches. Rane tells me," she said, turning a little to that man, "that when Simon first came to Slavithe, he was supposed to be doing one thing, and instead he wanted to kill witches. You said," she told Delmar, "that your father was running supplies. What do you say he was supposed to be doing?" she asked Rane. Rane looked up at her. His face looked somehow empty, and clean. His eyes were bigger, and brighter than they had been. Ajalia thought that he looked like an overgrown child.
"What Delmar said," Rane told her. "I told you the same thing," he said. "He was running supplies."
"Why did Slavithe need supplies?" Ajalia asked. Rane's voice was different now, as well as his face. He no longer sounded like a man who lived in a shadow, or like a spy. Ajalia realized, suddenly, that Rane had always sounded like a spy from an old story to her. Rane looked at Ocher, and then at Delmar. Ajalia had the sense that Rane was seeking permission to speak freely.
"The cities were in an alliance," Rane said, "in the old days, before Tree." He looked again at Delmar when he said the dead old Thief Lord's name; he looked nervous. "We worked together more closely, especially during the plagues," Rane said. "Things were different then."
"Tree said that things used to be awful," Ajalia said. "What did he mean?"
A knock sounded at the door. Ajalia swung to her feet, a snarl of annoyance rising to her lips. Always, she thought, just as she started to get to the bottom of things, something happened. She stalked to the door, and pushed aside the heavy shelf. She still held the heart stone in her hand. She opened the door, and peered outside.
Daniel, her lead boy from home, was standing outside the door with two other house boys. They all had steaming baskets in their hands.
"I heard you'd gone here," Daniel told her breathlessly, "and I thought you'd need some food."
Ajalia felt as though she were going to cry. She stared down at Daniel, and she thought that she had never liked anyone so much as she liked him just now.
"Thank you," she said. She opened the door a little more, and went out into the hall. "I can't let you in," she told the boys. "We're doing things." The boys looked up at her; they all looked very pleased with themselves. Ajalia dug into the pockets she had put into the waist of her pants, and drew out several silver beads that hung on a silken thread.
Daniel's eyes widened a little when he saw the silver.
"For being enterprising," Ajalia told him, and she gave him two beads on a length of the thread. She snapped the thread with the tiny knife she carried in her waist, and tied off the ends. Daniel took the silver beads; he was beaming. Ajalia took the baskets from the boys, and laid them on the floor inside Tree's rooms.
"Go home," Daniel told the other two boys, who shoved each other, and scrambled down the stairs. Ajalia heard wild shouts and laughter, when the two boys gained the street. "I have secrets to tell you," Daniel said. Ajalia put her face into the room, and told Delmar that there was food. He came and got the baskets, and carried them towards the others. Ajalia turned back to Daniel.
"I'm ready," she said. A warm glow of satisfaction and pride was bubbling in her chest; she ha
d not imagined that Daniel could be so perfect, and so helpful. She felt thoroughly cared for, just now, and loved. Daniel straightened up with importance; he glared soberly at the wall. Ajalia was reminded of the way he had given her a report, on the first day he had been in charge of the boys, after the Thief Lord had paid her a visit, and she smiled.
"I've heard about Nam," Daniel said. He glanced hurriedly at Ajalia, and then looked back at the wall. "Nam ran away from her farmer, and when he caught her, he beat her twice. Now she takes care of the goats, and is not allowed in the house. She stole," Daniel added in a confidential way, looking at Ajalia. "In the dragon temple," Daniel said, "Clare is teaching Ossa to read, and Sun complains that reading is too hard." Daniel glanced at Ajalia again, as if he were gauging her response to his words. "Sun is very lazy," he said, "but her hair is pretty." Ajalia nodded. "Ossa," Daniel went on, "is not as nice as she pretends to be. I saw her," he added, "tricking my boys into doing some of her work. She pretended to be helping them," Daniel said, "but she did not end up doing much work."
Ajalia nodded. "These are very helpful secrets," she told him, and she meant it.
"Denai is keeping secrets about something important," Daniel went on, "and Isaac told me that he followed him once, and found him meeting with an old lady."
"What did she look like?" Ajalia asked, thinking of Ullar.
"She was very skinny," Daniel said, "and tall, and her hair looked like mud." Not Ullar, Ajalia reflected. "The old lady lived in a nice house," Daniel added. He looked at Ajalia. "Isaac couldn't go inside, so he didn't hear what they said." Ajalia nodded. Daniel shifted his feet a little, and glanced at the door. "Are you doing magic in there?" he asked her in a whisper. Ajalia looked at Daniel; she could not see the opalescent light that had been around the little girl's head and shoulders. Daniel, to her, looked turquoise and green inside; his colors and lights were bright and cheerful, but she could find no sign of a white brand.
"We are doing important things," Ajalia hedged. Daniel could not keep the disappointment out of his eyes.
"That means magic," he said. "I don't get to know about magic," he told Ajalia wistfully. "My father said I was born wrong, and they won't talk to me about it." Ajalia studied Daniel.
"Do the other boys know about magic?" she asked.
"Some of them," Daniel said. "Cross is the oldest one who gets to. He'll start going to lessons next year."
"What lessons?" Ajalia asked.
"To learn how to use magic," Daniel said. "The boys get together to practice in the market, but none of them know how to do anything yet. They can't even make sparks." Ajalia looked at Daniel, and thought about the boys she had collected from the debts she'd taken from Gevad. Many of Gevad's servants had been adults, and as Ajalia had no interest in cultivating the personalities of grown men and women, she had arranged for these people to work out their debts in reasonable payments. She had found, when she had begun to disentangle Gevad's estate, that many of the servants' debts, though large, were not so enormous that they could not be paid off in a reasonable amount of time. But the conditions of work in the quarries, and the demands by the debtors for what constituted timely and full payment, prevented most of the servants from ever gaining freedom. Even those servants who resided in the city, and who worked in the stalls or eateries that scattered the market streets, were unable to make anything more than token payments on their debts.
Ajalia, with the able assistance of Card, had begun to establish schemes of repayment for the servants who had once belonged to Gevad, and who now, on paper, belonged to her. She had changed the terms of repayment, and sometimes she had reduced the total amount of debt, depending on the circumstances of the servant, and their ability to repay. Some of the debts she had reframed as debts of labor, and created plans whereby a servant could work their way free by laboring for Card in their spare time. A few of the servants had been all entangled with each other, and in these circumstances, Ajalia had created a kind of symbiotic system, where the servants all committed to work for her, but the effect was that they earned each other out of debt. One such place had been a small bakery, where the owner's wife had been taken into bondage when her elderly father had died, and been found to owe great debts. Since debt fell to the heirs, and since the woman was already married, the lender had placed a lien against the bakery, which the wife owned jointly with her husband. When Ajalia met the couple, they had been struggling to pay regular installments on the debt.
The baker and his wife had had two servants working in their bakery. They had taken on the debts of these two long before the wife's father had died, and made payments on the debts in exchange for the servants' labor. Ajalia discovered that both of these servants belonged to her, and she made a deal, both with the baker and his wife, and with the lender who had taken a lien on the house. By miraculous good fortune, and through some investigation, Ajalia had learned that the lender was related to one of her little boys; the boy was a nephew to the lender, and his parents had moved into the quarries to work, and sold the boy's life, to clear their debts. Ajalia exchanged the boy outright to the lender, in exchange for the removal of the lien on the bakery, and then she had made a deal with the married couple. Every day that their two servants worked in the bakery, Ajalia forgave a small part of the baker's wife's debt. In exchange for this, the baker and his wife set aside a portion of the bakery's profit, and paid this to Ajalia to clear their two servants of debt, so that the servants would be released from bondage when the debt was paid in full. Ajalia had found that many employers, when they paid the debts of their servants in order to buy their labor, merely became the new lenders, and demanded repayment from the servants themselves. Because they employed the servants, and controlled their wages, repayment often proved impossible, and the servants were perpetually in bondage until they died, when their debt passed down to their children. Under Ajalia's scheme, if the baker and his wife were honest and diligent, all three, the wife, and their two servants, would be free and clear of debt within a year. Ajalia hoped, when this happened, that the baker and his wife would continue to employ the two servants, and pay them actual wages, but if they did not, the two servants would be free to find honest pay elsewhere.
Ajalia had directed Daniel to give much of his custom to this particular bakery; she suspected that the three baskets Daniel and the other boys had brought had come from this baker and his wife. She had told Daniel to make sure to always pay full price; she suspected that the baker's wife would attempt to reduce the cost of her goods, when she saw Ajalia's boys coming in.
"Come with me," Ajalia told Daniel. She put the silver beads away in a pocket, and replaced the tiny knife she kept for sewing, and cutting very small things. She pushed the door open, and went in with the boy. Delmar stood up when she came in, and held out a basket.
"Eat food," he told her, and she smiled at the tone he used. He was like a fierce mother hen; she saw that he had saved a large pile of food for her, and she pictured to herself the way Delmar would have glared protectively over the food, at Rane and Ocher, and guarded her portion.
"I like you," she told Delmar, who sniffed, and sat down again.
"What's he doing here?" Ocher asked, his hands full of bread. He gestured to Daniel, who stood unapologetically near Ajalia.
"I'm in charge of her servants," Daniel said to Ocher, who frowned little. Rane grinned at Ajalia.
"Thanks for the food," Rane told the boy.
"You're welcome," Daniel said with dignity. Ajalia sat down, and put the heart stone, which she still carried, between her knees. She had tucked it under her arm, when she had given the silver beads to Daniel. "Where did you get a heart stone?" Daniel asked Ajalia.
"How do you know about that," she asked him, "if you don't know about magic?" Daniel's face wrinkled up.
"Heart stones aren't magic," he said. "They're gross. My aunt has one, and it smells bad."
Ajalia turned towards Daniel, and looked deeply at the boy. She went and picked
up her knife, which she had dropped on the floor earlier, and held it up in front of Daniel.
"What do you see?" she asked him. The lights were not quite as bright, but the white lightning sparks still chased each other over the surface of the blade. Ajalia thought that she must have drawn out some of the power in the knife, when she had made the white blade of light. Daniel was looking at the blade.
"You made blue and gold together into that white stuff," Daniel said, pointing at the blade. Ajalia smiled widely. She, too, could see the faint gleams of the blue from the sky, and the gold she had drawn from the earth. She looked around at Delmar, who was watching the boy avidly.
"He can see colors," Ocher said in disbelief.
"Like I can," Ajalia said. She felt thoroughly triumphant. "If I can see lights," Ajalia said, "and Daniel can, then I think people sense them in different ways."
"He doesn't have the white brand," Rane said, staring at the boy. "He can't use the powers, if he can see them."
"Why not?" Ajalia asked.
"Because," Rane said, and he hesitated, his eyes moving to Ajalia's face.
"Because he'll become like a witch?" Ajalia asked. Rane nodded. He no longer looked at Daniel.
"I'm not evil!" Daniel said indignantly. "And anyway, my father said I wasn't bad. He said I was just born wrong, and it isn't my fault."
"What do you mean, born wrong?" Ajalia asked Daniel. She was looking at the boy's insides again, and at the heavy swirls of turquoise light. Daniel's light, she found, complemented her own warm lights extremely well. The tones matched. She looked at Delmar, and saw that his were in a similar tone. She looked around at Ocher, and at Rane. Ocher's inner colors were a different shade of blue to Delmar's; Ocher's colors were slightly acidic, or they appeared so to Ajalia. There was too much yellow tint, she thought, in his lights. His soul felt biting to her, and harsh. Rane was a deeper tone than Delmar's, but his colors shared the same soothing, jewel-like sheen as the young Thief Lord's.
