“Yeah. They trust me to open doors and stuff.”
“Trust you to be an idiot.” She shoved wallet and key into his hands. “Take this. Five seconds. You run up, say you found this in the hall, saw someone running off with the purse.”
“You can’t—”
“Listen to me. Steal what you want, but bring nothing to the warehouse until I say.”
A man’s voice from the upper hall: “Nick?” And again, nearer, “Nick? You here?”
Izza gaped. “You told them your real name?”
The fire left Nick’s eyes, and only the fear remained.
“Nick?” The waiter from before, dark hair and tuxedo and white gloves and towel, peered down the stairs, turned. “Who the hells is that?”
Sorry, she mouthed.
Nick nodded, and said, “Thanks.”
She hit him in the face as hard as she could, and ran.
He fell, sprawled across the stairs, the wallet still in his hand. Izza vaulted over the railing, landed unsteadily one level below, and lurched down. Behind her, she heard the waiter stumble over Nick’s body, curse, and shout, “Thief!”
She reached the ground floor in a blur. Probably some quick and easy exit through these service hallways, but she’d just as likely lose herself in a maze of dirty linen baskets and industrial dishwashers and boilers as find the out. Better to take the way she knew led to the street, which had the only drawback of walking her past about a dozen possible concerned bystanders, not to mention hotel staff.
Nothing for it.
She emerged from the hidden door onto the second-floor patio between Fabrice’s and Escalier, purse clutched tight to her chest. Left turn down the long hallway past reception to the entrance. Don’t run. People notice when you run. Keep smooth, keep cool, chin up, proud, a young woman who just had to get her purse to buy some dumb thing from the hotel shop. Breathe. Walk. Steady.
You just promised Cat you wouldn’t steal anymore. Promised her you wouldn’t get caught. You promised, and here you are, bearing a big fat neon-pink “arrest me” sign out of a luxury hotel. Because you couldn’t let an idiot take his own fall.
Nope. Bad line of thought.
She made it halfway down the hall to the front desks, a row of them, only one staffed and that by a woman with dark circles under her eyes and a steaming mug of coffee by her hand. The receptionist did not look up from her paperwork. Good. A few more meters to the street.
Behind her a door slammed, and she heard running footsteps. No cries, not yet, of course not. No sense alarming the guests. But she walked faster. Reached the doormen, two towering guys in flower-print shirts, necklaces of carved nuts, mountains of muscle topped with that same service sector smile. She nodded to the nearest one—don’t look down, don’t look down—beyond the arch of the front gate, carriages rolled along the street, open-air wagons bearing West Claw middle-management types on an evening bar crawl. Did they call it a bar roll when people drove you from place to place? A bearded partier stood to make a toast, but tripped and spilled his beer onto the woman beside him, and everyone laughed.
Freedom.
“Stop her!” came the cry from behind.
And the doorman looked down.
Saw the purse, which by itself didn’t mean anything, and the towel, and, more important, the frayed cuffs that stuck out from under the towel, and Izza’s legs, scarred and grimed, and her ragged sandals, which no guest of the Plaza would deign to wear.
He glanced up, smile faltering, and reached for her in slow motion.
Izza swept off the towel, threw it in his face, and ran into traffic.
A horse neighed and reared beside her; she ducked beneath pawing hooves, and dove through the gap between the party wagon and a golem cart. Cries of “Thief” from behind and “Stop!” mixed with street noise, with the roll of wheel and the jangle of tack and the laughter of the wagon’s drunks. Almost there, almost gone. An alley ahead gaped, a gullet to swallow her to safety.
Then the light struck her.
That was all, only light, no Craft to it, but the light was enough. Red and bright, like a poisoned sun. She knew this light, its color and texture, knew the sharp shadows it cast. She knew better than to look left, toward its source, but did anyway, couldn’t help herself. Ruby eyes shone from the apex of a towering stone statue made in mockery of a man. A massive head swiveled to face her. Rock ground rock. And beneath that gravel-grind, she heard a woman weep.
The Penitent took a step toward Izza. Inside, its prisoner screamed.
Try to help people, and look where it gets you.
No. Don’t accept this. Move, she commanded her legs, her body. Feet, fly. Don’t stand here. Don’t wait for them to come for you with the knives and hot irons. This isn’t fate. There’s no such thing. Go. Now!
Izza fled down the alley, and the Penitent followed her with earthquake strides.
11
The night wind outside the Rest cooled Kai’s brow and her world stop spinning. Tourists splashed in the ocean under the Penitents’ watchful gaze—tourists, or else pilgrims enjoying a night off. Islanders knew better than to swim this late. The sun watched the sea by day, but after dark monsters emerged. Mainlanders ignored local superstition and riptide warnings both to swim naked in the surf, and acted surprised when a gallowglass dragged one off to eat. Kept lifeguards in business, Kai supposed. Not to mention the men the Watch hired to dredge the harbor.
She hadn’t been thrown out of the Rest, she told herself. Not quite.
It made a difference.
She knew what she had heard in the pool, in the idol’s cry, in the poem. She thought she knew. Maybe the words had not come from the idol, but from her—heard in passing and projected into the idol’s mouth. How much did a person read in a day and ignore? Newspaper headlines and magazine quips and menu items and shop signs and graffiti and manuals and comic books and gossip columns and upbeat slogans sponge-printed on cafe walls, not to mention conversation overheard and misheard: small talk, street corner buskers’ music, and the small talk of cashiers.
Gods, but she was drunk.
She began the long climb home. Her family’s house was near—the ghostlight POHALA SHIPYARDS sign flickered over a West Claw pier a half mile’s walk down the shore—but she hadn’t wanted to see her mother in months, and didn’t now. Stupid body. Stupid spinning room. Stupid bouncers and stupid poet and stupid Mako and most of all stupid Kai.
She walked north and uphill. Her palm hurt from the cane. Trumpets and drums receded, and the tide of natives and rum-soaked visitors ebbed to leave her alone on the sidewalk. Driverless carriages rolled past. A large roan pulled a wagon packed with drunks up the slope: head down, shoulders and flanks rippling with strength. No wasted energy in those steps. Each move a single sweep of a calligrapher’s brush—only calligraphers did not have to fight to draw a line.
There were no horses on Kavekana before Iskari traders first arrived four centuries back. No need for horses, either. Kai’s sister always complained of the stench of horse dung in the streets, of the animals’ filth and of the laziness they invited, as if they hadn’t been a part of island life for four hundred years.
As the carriage passed Kai tipped an imaginary hat to the roan. Craftwork bound and directed the horse. Did it know it was born to a life of service? Did it know how its world was made?
The horse bowed to her in turn. She stood still, and told herself she’d imagined the pointed pause, the dip of head. Anything was possible. The wagon rolled on.
Tropical night folded her in thick warmth. She sweat beneath and through her linen suit. After two blocks Palmheart crossed Epiphyte, and the shoreside party gave way to cafes and food stalls and shuttered boutiques. A woman fried coconut milk curry under a palm frond awning while her children served bowls of the stuff to lined and haggard men who played dominoes on wicker tables. A kid, maybe fifteen, juggled mangoes beside a fruit stand. Six men and two women, thickened by middle age, wearing ragged short
s and stained multicolored shirts, sat on the sidewalk in front of a closed jewelry store, passing a bottle of palm wine.
The earth shook, and Kai heard screams and fast footsteps. A dark girl in torn clothes ran onto the street from an alley. She clutched a purse to her chest, bright pink leather, obviously not hers. Wide black eyes reflected torches and streetlights both. Kai watched the girl run past, and did not move to stop her or to help. No one did. It was too late for the girl already.
A Penitent stepped onto the road, an earthquake gone for a stroll. One drunk dropped the wine bottle, and milky liquid spilled into the gutter. The Penitent stood ten feet tall, a barrel-chested almost-human carved from stone. Gem eyes burned with inner fire. The street fell silent save for the fleeing girl’s footsteps, the sizzle of oil in the wok, and the Penitent’s muffled sobs. Kai watched.
Light burst from stone joints. The Penitent gathered its several tons’ bulk and leapt. It shrieked as it flew huge and horrible overhead, cry broken by its landing crash, three feet in front of the thief. Cobblestones splintered beneath graven feet. The girl skidded to a stop, scrambled back. A stone hand lashed out before she could flee, snared her around the waist, and lifted.
The girl’s bare feet kicked at empty air. The Penitent’s grip pressed her arms and the purse against her chest. She struggled to breathe. Kai heard a woman weep beneath the stone.
The Penitent turned, prisoner held in one hand, and strode off west, bearing the girl to justice, or anyway to punishment.
The cook fried on. The drunks retrieved their wine, and drank, and retold stale stories of their younger days when Kavekanese sailors had been prized from the Pax to the World Sea. Days past, but not past remembering.
Kai climbed away from drunks and dominoes and shop window mannequins.
The girl was young to be a thief. Too young, Kai hoped, for Penitence, but maybe not, if she had priors, or the victim pushed for vengeance, or the moon was in the wrong phase or the wind too heavy in the west.
Kai had jumped into the pool to save the drowning idol. To save Mara. She’d thrown herself on Ms. Kevarian’s sword for the Order’s sake. And in return, she had been thrust to the sidelines, even her sanity questioned. Why should she have risked herself for that girl?
Not that she could have helped, not wounded and weak, and anyway the cases weren’t at all alike. The idol was her business. (Though not really.) The girl was not. (Mankind is my business, didn’t someone say that once? Or else it drifted to her out of a mist of dream.) The idol was not at fault; the girl was. (What fault? She looked hungry. Could you blame a hungry person for stealing to eat?)
As she climbed, buildings receded from the road and trees advanced to compensate. Spreading palm fronds’ needled shadows crosshatched streetlamp light on the sidewalk. Right foot, cane, left. Breeze blew against her neck, and leaves scraped leaves above. Bay windows shone like Penitents’ eyes in a small pink house set back from the road. A backlit figure stood in one window, a shadow playing a fiddle. The music was faint and foreign, an air from northern Camlaan. Claude had said once that Camlaan fiddlers used a different mode for their songs than other Old World musicians. She had not asked him to explain, because the thought frightened her. Music, she’d always thought, was music. But if music was only a convention, if notes were games of symbol, then music could lie, like words, like numbers, like the Craft itself.
The island is our prison.
For Margot, maybe. Not for Kai. Born here, raised here, in one of the few places on the planet where she could be herself. Even if more mainlanders moved here every year. Even if traditional dress robes gave way to suits and ties. Even if only a handful of priests had remade their bodies in the pool since Kai, even if those who should know better met their transformation with silence and suspicion.
Poor fiddler. Kai left him, or her, standing at her (or his) window, playing the sad song he (or she) might not even hear as sad, and climbed on. In reverie she’d covered more distance than she thought: ten blocks left to home. She walked in triple time away from the music.
12
Edmond Margot stepped for the third time that evening into the spotlight, and tried to summon his voice.
Behind him on the stage, drums drummed low. A trumpet pealed one long, slow, high note, and sank to silence. The spotlight seared his eyes with dancing sparks. Faces hovered beyond the light, out there in the audience, watchers and waiters. He saw only suggestions of their presence: curve of cheek, jut of chin, black wells where eyes should be. In with the breath, then force it out.
Twice before he’d entered this burning light and each time recited old poems, picking at scabs and prying open scars for the crowd’s amusement. Each time they applauded. A woman even came to compliment him, to mock him.
Familiar, she had been, so familiar, a vision of vanished voices risen to taunt him with unanswerable questions.
His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. The room was hot, but his sweat was cold. Fear sweat, nerve sweat. Fine vintage.
Head up. Shoulders back. You may be broken, but don’t let them see you breaking. They knew his poems and liked them. Would applaud, even if he recited only his old lines from now ’til the world drowned.
Eve swayed toward him out of the shadows, all silk and slink and smile. He’d never seen her wear a low-cut dress, wondered again as ever on this island whether she really was a woman. Pressed the thought down, aside. Didn’t matter. His voice mattered, his voice long lost.
Eve drew near enough to whisper through her smile. “Do you have one more in you?”
“No,” he said through tight dry lips. “But I’ll do it anyway.”
Her nod was all the grace in the world, and when she rounded away from him to the stage’s edge, he followed her body with his eyes. Fear had helped him find his voice before fear and pain honed away his lesser elements until he became a single sound. Where could he find that fear again? In the spotlight. In the heat. In standing blank minded onstage. In the sway of Eve’s hip.
“Back again by popular demand,” Eve announced, her voice big, one arm raised like a torchbearer, “for the third time tonight, let’s hear it for Edmond Margot!”
Applause. He stepped forward, and the spotlight followed him to the edge of the stage. Eve vanished into the wings.
He opened his mouth. Opened his heart.
Nothing.
His scuffed leather shoes jutted over the edge of the stage. Below, the spotlight lit bare sand.
Inhale, deeply.
He closed his eyes.
Nothing new in his mind, nothing new in the whole vast world.
He sighed, summoned another old poem—strange that a poem written two months back could count as old already—
And screamed.
The world tilted sideways. His throat closed, strangling his cry. He hovered weightless before the stage. Images axed through his skull: a surging twisting cobbled street. A Penitent’s great stone hand held him, crushing out his breath. A squat watch station in West Claw, a smeared reflection in a dark window, a girl’s face that was also his. Breath ragged in his ears.
And underneath that breath, that fear … Underneath, he heard the voice of fire. The voice of the long nights of his soul. The voice that was not his, but spoke to him.
But tonight the voice bore no poetry, offered no divine inspiration, no holy dread. A word sliced bleeding letters into his mindflesh.
Help.
Then he hit the ground.
Awareness returned slowly. Torches blazed. A weight pressed against his shoulders. He realized after a second’s confusion that the weight was his own head. He breathed through heavy lips and a swollen nose. Eve crouched over him, shaking him by the lapels of his coat. “Margot? Edmond? Say something.” Behind her a circle of concerned faces and staring eyes limned the board roof of the Rest. He sat up so fast he hit Eve’s forehead with his own. His mouth was full of sand, more sand sweat-plastered to the right side of his face. He hurt. Running one hand down
his body he found new rips in the shirt, blissfully hidden by jacket and vest. Eve pointed to someone out of his field of vision and snapped a finger. A waiter thrust a glass of water into Margot’s face. He took it, swished a mouthful in his mouth, spit onto the sand, coughed, and this time drank.
“Are you okay?” Eve again.
“I have to go,” he said, and lurched to his feet.
She held out a hand to stop him. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I will.” He laughed when he realized what he was about to say. “I must find my Lady.”
She reached for his arm, but he pulled back. No one else tried to stop him as he forced through the staring crowd, away from the spotlight and the man-shaped depression in the sand where he’d fallen, out into the dark, questing. Eve watched him go. He glanced back over his shoulder once, when he reached the edge of the torchlight. She stood still, a vision in black—then waved the audience back to their seats. On with the show.
Margot stumbled into the night. His ankle hurt, but still he walked, drawn like a filing to a magnet by the voice he’d lost.
13
A waist-high bamboo fence surrounded Kai’s yard. Across the quarter-acre of grass and behind a row of palm trees stood her bungalow, pink walled and slope roofed, a clever investment in a criminal real estate auction; after a few years’ occupancy and regular cleaning, it no longer stank of weed. A dog barked down the street. A carriage rolled past, bearing passengers to revelry and the shore.
She opened the gate and stepped inside. Wards prickled over her skin, recognizing her. She swayed up the steps and leaned against the wall as she searched her purse for her keys and unlocked the door. After a slow count of ten she pushed herself off the wall, turned the knob, and lurched into her dark living room. She swung the door shut behind her, dropped her keys in the wood bowl on the table by the entrance, set her hand on the table, sagged.
Thorns scraped her wrist. She screamed and lashed out with the cane, hitting the wall. Dizzy, and without the cane’s support, she crashed back into the door. Her hand flailed for balance and struck the coatrack, which toppled onto her. She fell in an avalanche of jackets and old hats.
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