by Holly Lisle
And Jess, wearing on her left wrist the bracelet that attested that she was indeed eligible to attend the festival, a bracelet given to her by the Artis cousin who had attended the year before and who swore she would never go again, moved in the throng with those who truly had the right to pass beneath the golden arch. She wore a simple green sequined mask that covered her eyes, a headpiece that trailed a delicate line of feathers from her forehead over the top of her head and down her back, and a green one-piece suit covered with iridescent scales and meant to mimic body paint. No one spoke to her, but then, she realized no one spoke to anyone else, either. How strange, this crowd that murmured not a syllable, not a whisper, nor cracked a joke, nor spoke in anger at an elbow carelessly jabbed or toes clumsily trampled. In all her years since the Warrens, Jess could not remember any people who moved with such silence.
But she remembered well people who moved so silently within the Warrens, and she tasted a sharp, bitter burst of fear on her tongue as the tide of people moved her ever forward.
She had hoped to find Wraith and, disguised, to watch him. She did not want him to know that she had gone to the festival to spy on him; she was ashamed of her jealousy, ashamed of her need for him, ashamed of the painful hunger that she felt but hid because he never looked at her with anything but friendship and a kind of amused tolerance—and sometimes with regret. She was ashamed—but she feared that at the festival he would meet someone who caught his fancy. That he would dance with some woman who would see in him all the wonderful things Jess had seen in him first, and that Wraith, his head turned by a new face, a clever turn of phrase, a mind that challenged him in a way he found attractive, would leave, never to return. She did not know what she planned to do if she saw him dancing or talking with a stranger—but if she did not go she would be helpless to do anything.
She had not anticipated the number of people who would be attending the festival, though. Children’s festivals were small by comparison, though they had always felt quite large and busy to her—several hundred children gathered in one place, mostly free of adult supervision, had seemed to her a veritable throng. But each house held its own separate festival for children. There was only one for adults, and it was for every adult in the city, and from all appearances almost every adult in the city was attending.
How, in this impossible mass of humanity, could she hope to find Wraith?
She became aware of the steady, soft chiming of a bell from somewhere ahead of her. Then she saw a lovely golden arch above a doorway, and she realized that she neared her destination. As she moved toward the sound, the chiming became slightly louder, but remained pleasant. Abruptly, the cluster of people in front of her each lifted one arm, and she saw a tiny flicker of light dance around the bracelets that each wore on the wrists they presented to the arch. She did as she had seen them do, and felt a faint tickling along her skin. And then she was beyond the arch.
The crowd thinned out. The Polyphony Center, layered like a hive and sprawling for half a dozen furlongs in all directions, swallowed the people thronging in from the many corridors and channeled them in a hundred directions, and seemed always to have room for more. She found a place along the railing of a balcony, and stopped and simply stared. Though she had been to Polyphony, she had never entered the immense Hall of Triumphs, which was used only for the festival, and sometimes for the affairs of state.
She felt like she was standing inside the radiant heart of a faceted gemstone. The distant walls of the center, clear and seamless, spread before her the panorama of the illuminated sea, in which swam both the angels and the demons of the aquatic universe. All of them, drawn by the twisting, dancing sheets of colored lights, arced and curvetted, sometimes hidden in darkness only to be revealed again as the light spiraled around and caressed them. Hunter and hunted moved in weightless beauty—and if that vast domed wall had been the only decoration for the festival, Jess would have thought it enough. But nearer, fountains glittered and danced in the air, lit from within by fires of red or gold or green or silver or blue. The floor, worked in a rich stone mosaic of undersea designs, seemed in scale with the space in which she found herself—but it made the people moving across its lovely surface appear as inconsequential as insects. Perfumes of summer flowers, of meadows and leaves and rushing streams, filled a breeze that brushed against her skin. Between the mosaicked lanes, glades of grass surrounded by flowering trees held benches and tented pavilions, and formal gardens displayed flowers and shrubs and trees, and provided privacy within their mazy twists and turns for couples and groups, and swimming pools let humans dive and float and play as if they were denizens of the sea. She saw floating floors for dancing, and courts for eating, and things she could not identify.
“First time?” A hand brushed lightly across the little tail of feathers that she wore and settled on the bare skin of her back. She turned and looked up. The masked man who looked down at her had a pleasant smile and very pale, silvery eyes.
“I feel … rather lost,” she said.
He nodded and smiled again, encouragingly.
“I’m … well, not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing here. This doesn’t look anything like the …” She felt her cheeks heat up. “Like the children’s festivals I’ve been to.”
“Of course not. Adult activities would hardly be appropriate—or even enjoyable—for children. But …” He smiled again, broadly this time, and said, “I had friends meeting me, but I remember how confused I was my first festival. Why don’t you let me show you around a bit?”
“Is there any way to find someone specific?” she asked as they left the balcony and started down the spiraling ramp to the main floor.
“Sometimes. If the person you’re looking for has not requested privacy, you can locate him or her by asking your bracelet. Friends can find you in the same manner.”
“Really?” She was startled.
“Certainly. Your bracelet was spelled with information about you before it was sent to you. It isn’t merely a bracelet, or your ticket to the event. It also tells anyone who cares to look that you are safe and well— and, if you don’t mind being found, where to find you.”
Which meant that she was parading around as Sharawn Artis, a deception that was going to get her into real trouble if someone came looking for the real Sharawn Artis.
“How do you keep people from finding you?”
The corner of her companion’s mouth twitched just a bit, and through his mask she could see his eyes narrow. “You simply tell the bracelet, ‘Give me privacy.’ When you don’t want to be private anymore, you tell it, ‘Make me public.’ It will do what you want. The instructions did come in the package,” he added.
“I don’t remember seeing them there.”
“All first-year attendees get them.”
Which explained it. Sharawn wouldn’t have been coming for her first year, but for her second. “I didn’t see them,” she murmured.
They reached the main floor, and her guide said, “So what would you like to do first? Dance? Have something to eat? Try out one of the vision booths? Go to a park?”
“I don’t know. Aren’t you going to tell me your name?” she asked. To her right, a booth selling sparkling festival necklaces and headdresses glittered at her so temptingly that she looked away from her guide for a moment. And then, to the left of the path they’d taken, a pair of tadaka dancers returned from their break and they erupted into incredible, heel-pounding, sword-swinging gyrations as a trio of decalyre players bowed out music that sounded to Jess like standing in the middle of war itself.
Her guide hurried her forward, shaking his head. “Too loud to think,” he said, and aimed her away from the booths and demonstrations, down a quieter path. “Did you read any of the information that came with your bracelet?”
“Nothing came in my package but the bracelet,” she said.
“They get sloppier every year.” He looked a bit exasperated. “Here are the rules, little feathered fis
h. You don’t ask names. You don’t try to find out names. If you want to find your friends you can, but you cannot find out the identity of a stranger unless the stranger gives it to you, or unless a crime is committed. Anonymity is a part of the joy of the festival. Here you can be anyone, do anything within the bounds of law, experience pleasures forbidden elsewhere without the repercussions of public censure, and for one week be free from consequences, free from burdens, free from everything except the thrill of the moment. If you have fantasies, here you can act them out with one partner or a dozen; anything you have ever dreamed you can make real for this small span of days. Anything you want, here you can have.”
Jess looked at the stranger, startled. She had fantasies of taking vows with Wraith someday, of becoming a brilliant, acclaimed metachord player for one of the symphonic interpretation packagers, of having a grand house in Oel Artis Travia that she could call her own, of having children … but somehow those did not sound like the sort of fantasies this man was talking about.
Then they reached the end of the narrow path they’d been following, and her guide gave her a gentle push to the left, through a pretty gate of shimmering magical vines and ruby flowers, and into a writhing cluster of naked and half-naked bodies that made her gorge rise. Men and women, men and men, women and women, in pairs, in clusters—her hands knotted into fists and she twisted away from the hand her guide rested on her bare back.
She had envisioned a grand showplace for the arts and sciences, a refined and magnificent display of all the highest and best of human achievement. After all, this was … And instead she was entering into a parade of magic-drunk debauchery. Magic-drunk debauchery that her guide—who, from the lines at the corners of his mouth and the coarseness of the skin on the back of his hands, was old enough to have fathered her and a whole raft of older siblings—apparently intended to partake in it with her.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. But more than anything, she wanted to find Wraith.
“I think I’ll be on my way,” she said, and her erstwhile companion frowned.
“It’s customary to spend time with the people you talk to.”
“I did spend time with you,” she said. “But my friends will be waiting on me.”
“I don’t know how they could be, since you had not even the beginning of an idea of how to find them when you came here.”
“No doubt they will be looking for me, too—and this isn’t their first year. But”—she bowed with polite and distant formality—“as I have already made plans for this festival, I will thank you for your time and let you be getting on to yours.” She turned her back on him and walked resolutely away, holding her breath the whole time and praying that he would not follow.
She moved at a fast pace, in and out of the little side lanes, through big pavilions, and across artificial glades that would have been quite lovely if they had not also been filled with squirming, moaning, gasping humans engaged in activities she did not wish to see.
Finally, near a busy food court, she stopped and caught her breath. That pervert had given her a scare. She realized she was not protected by being a child, because here she had disguised herself as an adult, and she carried identification that proclaimed her an adult. Things she did not want could happen to her here, and she would have no one to whom to run for help. Wraith didn’t know she was here. Solander didn’t know she was here. No one would be looking for her, and even if someone did look for her, she couldn’t be found because her identification proclaimed that she was someone other than who she said she was.
But if this was no place for her, it was no place for Wraith, either. He didn’t belong here. She didn’t want him going off with some masked woman to do …
Her mind balked at the images it conjured, and in desperation she turned to her bracelet. “Help me find Wraith,” she said.
The bracelet did nothing.
She frowned. “Help me find Gellas Tomersin,” she whispered to it, thinking perhaps it could not understand what she wanted and had to go strictly by what she said. Wraith always went by the name Gellas with anyone who didn’t know who he really was. So perhaps the bracelet had been spelled to recognize just his name.
But it still did nothing.
“Help me find Solander Artis.”
Again, nothing. Maybe, she thought, the bracelet would only work for its rightful owner. Or maybe he had already found a woman, or several, and had requested privacy. Her stomach churned at the thought.
She turned in a single slow circle, looking at the massed humanity all around her—humanity still pouring in through the gates all around the center in steady streams—and her eyes filled with tears. How could she ever hope to find Wraith in the middle of all of this without any help? She would never approach someone, never make herself beholden for a favor, never voluntarily speak to anyone in this place again. The lesson taught to her by the predatory stranger had not been wasted.
She closed her eyes, took one deep, steadying breath, and chose a direction at random. She might not find him. But she didn’t intend to just give up and go home without a fight.
“He told my mother he only had one thing to finish and then the two of them would be on their way,” Solander said.
He and Wraith had found the library—unoccupied by anyone because the festival was in progress—to be a perfect spot for keeping watch on Rone Artis’s workroom door. He was still in there—they couldn’t hear anything, but no one ever could. They had, however, seen him go in, and they had not yet seen him come out, and they had sworn they would not move until he was gone and they had taken their chance to look at what he had in there.
“How long have we been sitting here?” Solander said after a while.
Wraith pulled out his little pocket clock, a gift from Jess some months earlier, and said, “Four hours, twenty-three minutes. Some odd seconds. The time is naught-twenty by Work.”
“That all? It feels later.”
“I wish we’d brought food with us.”
“Yes. Or at least we could have eaten something before we hid in here. Who knew he was going to camp in his workroom today of all days?” Solander leaned heavily against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “We’re missing the festival for this. I’m dying to know what goes on at one.”
“Your parents haven’t told you anything?”
“Of course they told me something. They told me the same damned thing every adult tells every child who asks. ‘The joy of festival is discovering each one on your own. I wouldn’t think of taking that joy away from you.’” He sighed. “We could do this tomorrow, Wraith. Go to the the festival now, leave when we’re sure both my parents are there, and come back here to do this.”
Wraith just looked at him.
“No, eh?”
“No. We were going to go to the festival first, but you suggested that we take care of this instead, so that it wouldn’t be hanging over our heads during the festival. You didn’t want to worry about it. So I’ll find out whatever I can, and then we’ll go have some fun.”
“I was afraid you were going to—” Solander froze, shoved a finger to his lips in warning, and flattened himself back from the fractionally opened door. Wraith, watching him, froze, too. He could hear a voice murmuring something, and then a door opening, and then the door closing. A long pause. More murmuring. And then footsteps striking the floor briskly, sharply, moving away toward the living quarters of the house.
Solander held his frozen pose even after neither of them could hear the footsteps anymore.
Wraith, in fact, was the first to move. He took a step toward the door, and Solander winced.
Wraith shrugged in question.
“I don’t want to go through with this,” Solander whispered.
“All you have to do is stand in front of the door and tap on it if you hear anyone coming.”
“I know—but we could get in such trouble….”
“I have to know.”
Solander looked almost defeate
d. “Fine,” he said at last. “You’re determined to do this. I think there may be other ways … but it’s your skin if you get caught.”
“I know that.”
They crossed the hall. Wraith would never admit to Solander how scared he was. He knew—or at least was almost certain—that whatever magic Rone Artis had left in place would have no effect on him. But he couldn’t be sure that it would fail entirely. What if a spell were set not just to destroy anyone who tried to enter uninvited, but also to let Rone know who the unauthorized intruder had been? He might go in, find whatever he needed, and come out to discover Wraith’s father and a whole crew of guards standing over him in the middle of the night, ready to ship him off to work in the mines for the rest of his natural existence. He dreaded getting caught—but he had to understand where he came from. He had to understand the meaning of the Warrens, for he was sure they had a meaning, and he was equally sure it was not trivial.
His hand hovered over the door’s handle, and Solander whispered, “Still not too late to change your mind.”
Wraith grasped the handle firmly and opened the door. He could see, in the dimly lit interior, one long table covered with an unimaginable tangle of books and papers and magical paraphernalia, a couple of chairs scattered around, a desk, and shelves that lined the room from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall, all so full of books and manuscripts that they sagged in the middle like swaybacked horses. In spite of the size of the room—and it was quite large—it managed to give the impression of being cluttered and overcrowded and tended by frenzied rats.
From all the way across the hall, Solander said, “That is the messiest place I have ever seen in my life.” Wraith could tell that was as close as Solander was going to go, too, by the way he stood—as if at any second he might simply turn and flee.
“Finding anything in there is going to be a real trick.” Wraith didn’t wait for Solander to suggest yet again that they just go on to the festival and skip this spying attempt; instead he clenched his hands into fists, straightened his back, and stepped into the workroom.
