[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  In the open-topped jitney, the ride from the spaceport through outer and central Sombrelír was breezy and pleasant. The warmth of the morning contrasted with the chilly atmosphere the cousins had grown used to on board the starliner, and the air was full of interesting smells.

  At the edge of the Old Quarter, the driver stopped. "No further," he said. "Foot and carriage only from here."

  Jens paid the fare—it came to more than Faral had expected, but not enough to cause distress—and the cousins got out of the jitney. One of the carriages the driver had referred to clattered by, drawn by two of some draft animal that Faral didn't recognize. The creatures had stubby horns and hooves the size of dinner plates, and he was glad when Jens ignored the carriage and set out into the Old Quarter on foot.

  They walked for some time through a maze of narrow streets and little square parks with bronze statues in them. The stone-and-plaster buildings of the Quarter were painted in bright pastel colors, and strange flowers grew in boxes along the sidewalks. The walks themselves were paved with black and white tiles in mosaic patterns. A wide watercourse ran through the heart of the area, and floating bridges connected the streets on either side.

  There were few enough people about that Faral felt less uncomfortable than he had in a long time. The crowding on the ship and in the spaceport had gotten on his nerves—he wondered if that was what had affected Jens, as well.

  They wandered at random for a while, looking at the shops, the inhabitants, and the other tourists, until Jens exclaimed, "Ah, there it is!"

  Faral looked where his cousin was pointing. Up ahead, in a shopwindow, a hand-lettered placard rested on a driftwood easel: THALBAN'S.

  "That looks like the place," agreed Faral, and the two of them entered.

  The lunchtime crush had ended at Bindweed & Blossom's. In a corner near the front, two country ladies in town from Duvize lingered over tisanes before resuming their shopping. Other than that, the shop was empty. Bindweed was changing the linen on the last of the vacant tables when the two boys came through the front door.

  Tourists, she thought at once. Up from the port. Old enough to be out loose on their own, but green as a pair of pressed-glass cuff links.

  One of the lads was tall and fair, with long yellow hair tied back in a neat queue; the other, darker one was stocky and muscular. In the old days, she could have pinpointed their world of origin at first glance—but the modern habit of dressing for travel in an abstract version of the basic Galcenian mode blurred most of the possible cues. A long way from home, that was for sure; they'd been souvenir-shopping in the Quarter already. The fair one carried a shopping bag emblazoned with Thalban's logo in flowing script.

  Money, too, she added to herself. Thalban dealt in high-quality goods, and they didn't come cheap.

  She picked up her datapad and went to take their order. It would be interesting to see what language they addressed her in. Standard Galcenian, she wagered with herself. But not like a native.

  The fair one spoke first. "Good day, Gentlelady."

  Bindweed smiled to herself—Galcenian, indeed, but with a faint, musical intonation that spoke of someplace else besides the Mother of Worlds. "Good day, Gentlesirs. What would you desire this fine noontide?"

  "A bit of food and drink, before we get back to our ship*" His voice was light and pleasant, without the edges that came with time and hardship. "If you could recommend?"

  "Of course," she said. "We have fresh-made parchants today, and sugared berry-root. Perhaps those, and a pot of immer-leaf tea?"

  He inclined his head in a gesture of gracious acquiescence that almost succeeded in looking unstudied. "That would be delightful."

  Khesatan, she decided, as she headed back into the kitchen with the order. Maybe second-generation expatriate. He's got some of the body language for it, and about half the accent. Not his buddy, though—I don't know where that one's from. If he'd said something, maybe then I could have placed him…

  Blossom caught her eye as soon as she came through the door. "Something's up," her partner said, and beckoned her over to the readout screen. "Take a look at this."

  "Look at that," Miza said.

  She leaned forward and used her light wand to circle a glyph on the work surface. The pattern she'd been following crystallized briefly, then cycled color from warm amber to deep purple. Eraasian-style display technology had taken her some getting used to when she first came to study with Huool—Artha used the standard Republic interfaces—but now that she'd learned its peculiarities, she found it handy and expressive.

  "Whatever our big fish was looking for," she said, "he just found himself a seller. In my opinion, of course."

  Huool came to look over her shoulder, and clicked his beak in approbation. "Very perceptive, young one. And what is being sought, I think we will soon learn."

  "I didn't spot that."

  "See here," said the Roti. He tapped another of the changing glyphs with a taloned forefinger. "The magnitude of the ripples makes discovery nearly certain."

  Miza looked at the glyph more closely. "Now I've got it. We're talking extreme volatility—what should I do?"

  "Continue to watch," Huool said. "And if the ripples from this affair threaten to touch our establishment, pray inform me at once."

  He left to take his place in the front gallery for the afternoon shopping trade.

  Miza stayed at her desk and watched the fluid information-shapes come and go on its work surface. Drawing her finger across the desktop's input area, she engaged its "record" mode. She still had her final exams to worry about when she returned to Artha, and it made sense to preserve the transactions of the next few hours for study and review.

  Then she checked the timeline again. Huool had been right: the crossing would be soon.

  Faral wasn't sure why his cousin had picked an Old Quarter tea shop as the best place to have lunch before returning to Bright-Wind-Rising. True, Thalban's Handcrafted Arts and Musicks occupied quarters across the square, and Jens had been looking for that establishment since first hearing of it on board ship—and if he thought that a carved bone fipple-flute and a set of bluestone counting-beads would make perfect souvenirs for his aunt and uncle back on Maraghai, then Faral wasn't going to argue with him—but just the same…

  "Parchants and berry-root—are you serious?" he asked Jens under his breath. "The plate probably comes with a doily under it, too."

  "I certainly hope so," said Jens. "The experience wouldn't be complete otherwise."

  Faral sighed. "Is there some reason you're being difficult, foster-brother, or is this only a ploy to keep from getting bored? Because I remember what happened the last time you decided you didn't want to get bored."

  His cousin abandoned his Khesatan manner for a few seconds and grinned at him. "It worked, didn't it? We weren't bored."

  "Yes, but—"

  "Ssh. Here's the food now."

  And, indeed, a second woman—this one in a cook's apron over a neat white shirt and plain black trousers—was coming out of the kitchen with a loaded tray as Jens spoke. The tray held a steaming crystal pot of ruddy liquid, a cut-glass dish full of greenish cubes dusted with coarse sugar, and a porcelain platter with a pile of small round things under a white napkin. Faral couldn't tell if there was a doily under the platter or not.

  He wondered if the cook was Bindweed or Blossom. The other woman, the one who'd taken their order, was up at the other occupied table with her datapad—settling a bill, it looked like. The cook drew closer, smiling.

  Then, without warning, her posture shifted and she heaved the tray full of hot tea and pastries straight at their table. Faral threw himself sideways off his chair as the heavy crystal pot flew toward him. He thought he saw Jens ducking in the other direction, but he didn't have a chance to look. Immer-leaf tea splashed in all directions as the pot flew past where his head had been, and parchant buns pattered down like hailstones.

  The cook was still moving, bringing up one foot in
a kick that knocked the table over completely. He recognized the move—it was a common one in the hand-to hand he'd learned growing up back home—but where did a sweet little old gentlelady pastry cook learn something like that? Porcelain crashed and broke into splinters, silverware crashed and slid and clattered, and somewhere close behind him a man shouted in surprise and pain.

  Faral took a chance on glancing up from the floor, and saw a man in tea-soaked blue and white livery clawing at his scalded face. In the next moment, a heavy blaster fired close by, its distinctive zing echoing through the shop. Then another blaster fired near at hand—once, twice, three times— the crimson energy bolts taking the scalded man in the chest and head as he fell.

  "Get on your feet, boys," said the cook, who had somehow acquired a blaster in the few seconds that had passed since she'd stopped needing to hold on to the tray. "We have to get the two of you out of here."

  She snapped off a quick shot through the milk-glass of the right-hand front shop window, where a shadow had moved. The glass curled away, leaving a neat round hole, and the shadow dropped suddenly down. Then she shifted her grip on the blaster and drew back her arm to throw it.

  "Bindweed!" she shouted. "Catch!"

  Well, that settles the question of which one is which, Faral thought, as the cook tossed the blaster across the room to her partner. The other woman plucked it from midair as it whirled past her, fired a quick bolt at an unseen target outside the door, then dropped and rolled. She came up kneeling on the other side of the doorway, half-covered by the frame, with the blaster gripped two-handed before her.

  "Got you covered!" she called back to Blossom. "Go!"

  Faral scrambled to his feet—Jens was already up off the floor, he saw with relief—and let Blossom steer them both toward the back of the shop.

  "They'll have the alley covered," she said. "But maybe… come on!"

  They were in the kitchen now, and she was pushing a button underneath the counter. The stove swung aside, and Faral saw that there was a trapdoor set into the tiles beneath. Blossom grabbed the recessed handle and pulled the door upward, revealing a circular, brick-lined shaft. A vertical ladder of rusty iron extended downward into darkness along one side of the tunnel.

  "Get inside," said Blossom. "Go."

  From the front room the blaster sounded again—a group of two shots, then a burst of three. Blossom grabbed a hand torch from its charging bracket on the kitchen wall and started down the ladder herself without bothering to wait.

  Faral went in after her, with Jens so close behind him that his cousin's boot soles were on the rung above his head. As soon as Jens's head was below the level of the kitchen floor, the trap fell. Except for the glow of Blossom's hand torch, down in the shaft below them, they were wrapped in darkness.

  The ladder ended in a horizontal passage. A stream of water ran through the tunnel ankle-deep, and the air was thick and foul. Based on the smell, Faral was glad that in the limited light he couldn't see what the water looked like.

  "Come on," said Blossom, stepping down into the malodorous stream. She began moving away from them, her feet splashing in the foul water as she went, and he had no choice but to follow her. "There's a chance they won't figure out right away where we're heading."

  They waded on in silence for a while. The way was slippery underfoot, with half the stone covered by flowing water and the rest of it coated with mud and slime. When Faral put a hand on the tunnel wall to steady himself, his palm came away smeared with something viscous and unnameable. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his right boot had a leak in it—his sock was beginning to squish. The thought failed to cheer him.

  He drew a deep breath—regretted it when the thick miasma in the tunnel made him cough and wheeze—and said, "Who exactly is 'they'?"

  "The people who were shooting at you, of course."

  "Ah." That was Jens, bringing up the rear. From the sound of his voice, he didn't like the stink of the tunnel either. "Those people. Tell me, Gentlelady Blossom, if you possibly can—what in the name of hell is going on?"

  "Bindweed and I object in principle to customers getting killed in our shop," she said. "It's bad for business."

  Chapter IV.

  Ophel

  « ^ »

  In the back room at Huool Galleries, Miza watched the info-glyphs on her desktop shift and transform themselves as the situation changed. Bidding intensity at the Atelier Provéc had plummeted; at the same time, a disconcerting ripple of excitement and anxiety had begun to manifest itself nearby. She waited long enough to make sure that the ripple was genuine and not an artifact of the graphing process, then tapped the comm link to the outer office. "Gentlesir Huool, I think you ought to see this."

  Most people, Faral suspected, would have lost track by now of how long and how far they had been slogging through the tunnels of Sombrelír's waste-disposal system. Most people, on the other hand, hadn't been brought up in the unmarked forests of Maraghai. For his own part, he had a good idea of both the time and the distance—he could retrace the route later at street level if he had to—but he didn't think the knowledge was going to prove useful anytime soon.

  Blossom halted, finally, at the point where another iron ladder, identical to the one in the kitchen of the tea shop, led up toward the arched ceiling of the tunnel. She directed the beam of light from her hand torch upward at what looked to Faral like the bottom side of a trapdoor.

  "There," she said. "We should be safe now."

  *Such an air of confidence,* Jens muttered to Faral in Trade-talk—the Maraghaite pidgin of Galcenian and the Forest Speech. *I love it.*

  Blossom paid no attention. She started up the ladder, climbing briskly for a woman of her years who had just spent half an hour wading through chilly, ankle-deep water. At the top, she knocked on the trapdoor with the butt of her hand torch, waited a few seconds, then knocked again. It wasn't long before Faral heard a heavy sliding sound, like a piece of furniture being shoved aside. A crack of bright yellow light appeared among the shadows overhead.

  "Come on," said Blossom as the trapdoor opened the rest of the way. She climbed through the opening and vanished from sight. With a shrug, Faral started up after her.

  The glyphs on the desktop had stabilized. Miza wasn't certain what they portended, and she suspected that Huool didn't know either.

  The Rod clicked his beak and ruffed up his neck feathers. "Disturbing. If I did not know better, I would swear—"

  A sharp rapping noise interrupted him. Miza stared about, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Huool's hearing was keener than hers: by the time the rapping came a second time, he was shoving at a stack of crates in the far corner. Miza left her desk and went to help him.

  Together they shifted the boxes away from a section of tiled flooring that appeared, at first glance, to be no different from all the rest. On closer inspection, Miza spotted the hair-thin lines that marked off a hidden door. Huool bent and pressed a taloned finger against what looked like—but obviously wasn't—a flawed spot in the tiles, and the trapdoor lifted and turned.

  A nasty, sewer-reek odor billowed out of the opening, followed by a reed-thin, grey-haired woman in white shirt, black trousers, and a proper Ophelan-style apron and cap. The shirt and apron were mud-stained and streaked with rust.

  "Huool, you old pirate," the woman said. "Are you glad to see me?"

  Huool cluttered with amusement. "Speaking as one pirate to another, Gentlelady, I certainly am. What can I do for you today?"

  "Got a couple of lads here with me that need to get off-planet fast."

  As she spoke, a dark-haired young man stuck his head up above the flooring, paused for a moment, then clambered the rest of the way out. A moment later another youth followed, this one taller than the first and as fair as the other was dark, with long yellow hair tied back from a lean, intelligent face. Both of the young men, like the woman, were smeared with sewer muck and rust—though Miza suspected that given a chance to wash thems
elves and change their dirt-stained jackets and trousers for less bedraggled clothing, they would clean up to something entirely presentable.

  Huool chittered again. "I see you won the bidding."

  "We didn't even know there was an auction going on," the woman said. "Not until the bill collectors showed up, anyhow. Three, maybe more, from the Green Sun gang."

  "Not cheap talent," Huool said. "But… it appears… not terribly talented talent. Or perhaps merely outclassed."

  "It's good to learn we haven't lost our touch," said the woman modestly. She turned to the pair of young men. "Who knew that the two of you would be coming to the shop?"

  The fair one shrugged. The gesture had a casual grace to it that Miza thought might be Khesatan; his voice, when he spoke, confirmed her suspicions. "Since we hadn't planned on it beforehand… no one, I suppose."

  "No." The other youth shook his head, frowning. He had a solid look to him that Miza approved of, and his manner was free of airs and affectations. She couldn't place his accent at all as he said to his fellow, "We didn't plan on Gentlelady Blossom's tea shop, true enough. But you spent half the morning asking for directions to that music store right across the square. Thalban's, or whatever it was called. And it came recommended."

  The woman called Blossom glanced at him sharply. "Recommended by whom?"

  "A fellow on board Bright-Wind-Rising. We were talking about things to do while the ship was in port."

  "Have you got a name on him?"

  "No. He was an ordinary-looking guy—dark hair, plain clothes. A bit older than Jens and me."

  "Where was he from?" Blossom demanded. "What kind of business? When did he board?"

  The two youths looked at one another. Miza could see the suspicion—a bit belated, she commented to herself; we've definitely got a pair of sheltered innocents here—making itself visible in their eyes.

  "He didn't happen to mention it," the fair-haired one said after a moment or two. Miza got the impression that he was choosing his words with considerable care. Maybe Blossom hadn't brought in a matched pair of innocents, after all. "And we didn't speak with him for all that long."