A Gathering Of Stones

10

Brann stepped from one storm into another. The slope outside the cave mouth was bare and stony; a knife-edged icewind swept across it, driving pellets of ice against Brann’s face and body. Jaril whimpered, ducked under the snapping ends of her cloak and pressed up against her.

Brann dropped into a crouch, put her mouth close to his ear. “Where’s the cave? We’ve got to get out of this.”

Jaril shivered, grew a thick coat of fur. He edged from the shelter of the cloak, waited until she was standing again, then trotted up the slope to a clump of scrub jemras, low crooked conifers with a strong cedary smell that blew around her as she got closer, powerful, suffocating. She plunged through them and into a damp darkness with a howl in it.

Once he was out of the wind, Jaril changed to the glow globe that was his base form and lit up a dull, dark chamber like a narrowmouth bottle. He hung in midair, quivering with indignation and cursing Maksim in buzzing mindspeak for sending them into this cold hell.

Brann ignored the voice in her head as she would a mosquito buzzing; she slid out of the shoulder straps and lowered the rucksack to the cave floor. Her cloak was wet through, she was cold to the bone. “Jay, in a minute give me some light out there. I have to get a fire started before

I perish…” She gasped and went skipping backward as a stack of wood clattered to the stone, followed by a whoosh and a flare of heat as a clutch of hot coals and burning sticks landed near the woodpile. She laughed. “Thanks, Maksi,” she called. She laughed again, her voice echoing and reechoing as Jaril darted to the fire and sank into it, quivering with pleasure as he bathed in the heat.

She bustled about, spreading mat and blankets, restacking the wood, organizing the coals and several sticks of wood into a larger fire. When she finished, she sighed with weariness and looked around. Jaril was gone. He couldn’t wait, she thought. Well, she’s his sister and night and day don’t matter underground. She rubbed her back, frowned. What do I do if he’s trapped like Yaro? Idiot boy! A few more hours and I could have gone with him. She dropped onto the mat and pulled a blanket around her to block off the drafts. Staring into the fire, she grew angrier with every minute lumbering past.

The glowsphere came speeding recklessly back. Jaril shifted to his bipedal form, flung himself at Brann, sobbing and trembling, cold for his kind and deep in shock. “She’s gone, Bramble, she’s not there any longer, she’s gone, she’s gone…”

II. Settsimaksimin

Kukurul, the World’s navel Settsimaksimin, alone and restless also: Jastouk, male courtesan

Vechakek, his minder

Todichi Yahzi, Maksim’s ex-secretary, now a mistreated slave.

Davindolillah, a boy who reminds Maksim of himself, of no other importance.

Assorted others.

Settsimaksimin yawned. He felt drained. It was brushing against the trap in the cave that did it, he thought. The block. Fool woman, lack-brained looby, ahhh, Thornlet, that thing is dangerous. He stomped about the rubble-strewn flat, uncertain what to do next; the fog was thickening to a slow dull rain and the night was colder; it was time to get out of this, but he was reluctant to leave. Fool man, me, he thought. He wrung some of the water from his braid, shaped a will-o and sent it bobbing along ahead of him to light the path so he wouldn’t break his neck as he went downhill to the Inn.

Jastouk would be at the Ardent Argent unless he’d got tired of waiting and gone trawling for a new companion. Gods, I’m tired. I don’t want to sleep. Sleep, hah! Bramble, you’re damn inconvenient, you and those devilkids of yours,.. fires die if you aren’t there to fan them…

He changed his clothes and took a chair up the Katt. He found Jastouk sitting sulkily alone, watching some uninspired dancers posturing with the flaccid conjurings produced by an equally uninspired firewitch. He coaxed the hetairo into better humor and carried him off to a semiprivate party at one of the casinos.

Company in his bed didn’t chase the dreams this time. Maksim woke sweating, his insides churning. He swore, dragging himself out of bed and doused his head with cold water.

Heavy-eyed and languorous, Jastouk stretched, laced his hands behind his head. “Bad night?” he murmured.

Maksim snapped the clasp off the end of his braid, tossed one of his brushes on the bed. “Brush my hair for me,” he said. He dropped into a chair, sighed with pleasure as the youth’s slim fingers worked the braid loose and began draw-mg the brush over the coarse gray strands. “You have good hands, Jasti.”

“Yours are more beautiful,” Jastouk said. His voice was a soft, drowsy burr, caressing the ear. “They hold power with grace.’

“Don’t do that.” The anger and worry lingering from the night made Maksi’s voice harsher than he’d meant it to be. “I don’t need flattery, Jasti. I don’t like it.”

Jastouk laughed, a husky musical sound, his only answer to Maksim’s acerbities. He began humming one of the songs currently popular in Kurkurul as he drew the brush through and through the sheaf of hair. He was thin, with the peculiar beauty of the wasted; his bones had an elegance denied most flesh. He was neither learned nor especially clever, but had a sweetness of disposition that made such graces quite superfluous. Pliant and receptive, he responded to the needs and moods of his clients before they were even aware they were in a mood and he had a way of listening with eyes and body as well as ears that seduced them into thinking they meant more to him than they did. They were disturbed, even angry, when they chanced across him in company with a successor and found that he had trouble placing them. He was wildly expensive, though he never bothered about money, leaving that to his Minder, a Henerman named Vechakek, who set his fees and collected them with minimal courtesy. Jastouk had a very few favored lovers that he never forgot; despite Vechakek’s scolding he’d cut short whatever relationship he was in at the time and go with them, whether they could afford his fees or not. Maksim was one of these. Jastouk adored the huge man, he was awed by the thought of being lover to a Sorceror Prime; there were only four of them in all the world. But even Maksim had to court him and give him the attention he craved; there were too many others clamoring for his favors and he had too strong “a need for continual reassuring to linger long where he was ignored. ne-glected and gnored. He was indolent but had almost no patience with his lovers, even the most passionate; when Brann’s demands on Maksim’s time and energies interfered with his courting, Jastouk was exasperated to the point of withdrawing, but when the interference was done, he was content to let Maksim’s ardor warm him into an ardor of his own; this morning he was pleased with himself, settling happily into the old relationship. He brushed Maksim’s long hair, every touch of his hands a caress; he sang his lazy songs and used his own tranquillity to smooth away the aches and itches in Maksim’s souls.

When they left the Inn, the sun was high, shining with a watery autumnal warmth. Content with each other’s company, they moved along the winding lane, dead leaves dropping about them, blowing about their feet, lending a gently melancholy air to the day. Maksim had the sense of something winding down, a time of transition between what was and what will be. It was a pleasant feeling for the most part, with scratchy places to remind him that nothing is permanent, that contentment has to be cherished, but abandoned before it, got overripe. He plucked a lingering plum from a cluster of browning leaves, tossed it to a jikjik nosing among the roots. There were no real seasons this far south, but fruit trees and flowering trees went into a partial dormancy and shed part of their leaves in the fall, the beginning of the dry season, and stretched bare limbs among the sparse holdouts left on whippy green twigs until the rains came again.

“When you were busy with your friend,” brown eyes soft as melted chocolate slid lazily toward Maksim, moved away again, the chocolate cream voice was slow and uninflected, making no overt comment on Maksim’s neglect of him, though that did lie quite visible beneath the calm, “I was rather moped, missing you, Maksi, so I went to see the Pem Kundae perform. Do you know them?”

“No.” Maksim yawned. “Sorry, I’m not too bright today. Who are they and what do they do?” He wasn’t much interested in Jastouk’s chatter, but he was willing to listen.

The hetairo noted his mental absence; it made him unhappy. He stopped talking.

Maksim pulled himself together; he needed company; he needed sex and more sex to drown out and drive away things clamoring at him. Drugs were impossible; a sorceror of his rank would have to be suicidal to strip away his defenses so thoroughly. He needed Brann. He was furious at the changers for calling her away like that. He missed her already; time and time again when he saw some absurdity, he turned to share it with her, but she wasn’t there. Instead of Braun, he had Jastouk, pliant and loving, but oh so blank above the neck. I’m not going to have him, if I keep letting my mind wander. He set himself to listen with more attention. “Are they some kind of players?”

Jastouk smiled, slid his fingers along Maksim’s arm, took his hand. “Oh yes. Quite marvelous, Maksi. They do a bit of everything, dance, sing, mime, juggle, but that’s only gilding. What they mainly do is improvise little poems. You shout out some topic or other and two or three of them will make up rhyming couplets until there’s a whole poem finished for you. And the most amazing thing is, they do it in at least half a dozen languages. Delicious wordplay, I swear it, Maksi. Multilingual puns. You’d like them, I’m sure; it’s the kind of thing you enjoy.” He hesitated, not quite certain how his next comment would be taken. “I’ve heard you and your friend play the same kind of game.’

“Ah. I shall have to see them. Tonight, Jasti?”

“It would have to be, this is their last performance here. I bespoke tickets, Maksi, do you mind? They’re very popular, you know. I had to pull all sorts of strings to get these seats. They’re a gold apiece, is that too much? They’re really worth it.”

“No doubt they are.” Maksim cleared his throat; he regretted the sarcastic tone of the words; he knew Jastouk wouldn’t like it. “I’m looking forward to seeing them perform.”

They turned into the Ihman Katt and strolled toward the harbor. The broad street was crowded with porters and merchants coming up from the wharves, with other strollers, visitors who meant to sample the pleasures of Kukurul before getting down to serious buying and selling; a few like Maksim and Jastouk were heading for the cafй Sidday Lir and noon tea or a light lunch and lighter gossip.

A line of slaves on a neck coffle came shuffling along the Katt. Maksim’s eyes grazed over them. He started to look away as soon as he realized what they were, then he saw the being at the tail of the line, separate from the others, tugged along on a lease like some bad-tempered dog. It was Todichi Yahzi, his once-amanuensis.

Maksim felt a jolt to his belly. Guilt flooded through him, choked him. He’d dismissed the little creature from his mind so completely he hadn’t thought of him once during the past ten years. Gods of time and fate, he thought, not an instant’s thought. Nothing! He’d snatched the kwitur from his home reality, used him and discarded him with as little consideration as any of the kings he so despised. He couldn’t even comfort himself with the notion that he’d assumed Yahzi had got home; the trigger he’d left with the kwitur only worked if he, Maksim, died. He hadn’t assumed anything because he hadn’t bothered to remember the being who’d spent almost every waking hour with him for nearly twenty years. He saw the collar on Todichi Yahzi’s neck, the chain that tethered him to the whipmaster’s belt. He saw the lumps and weals that clubs and whips had laid on his almost-friend’s hide; he saw the hunched, cringing shuffle, the sudden blaze of rage in the deep set dull eyes as they met his. Todichi’s body read like a book of shame, but despite the abuse he’d suffered, he was as alert, intelligent and intransigent as he’d been when he lived in the Citadel.

After that brief involuntary lurch, Maksim walked on. He knew Jastouk had noted his reaction and would be wondering why such a commonplace sight as a string of slaves would bother him so much. That couldn’t be helped. He looked around. They were passing a tiny temple dedicated to Pindatung the god of thieves and pickpockets, a scruffy gray-mouse sort of god with a closet-sized niche for a temple. He stopped. “Jasti, go ahead and get us a table. I’ll want tea, berries, and cream. I’ll be along in a minute.”

Jastouk touched Maksim’s shoulder. For a moment he seemed about to offer what help he could give, but in the end opted for tact. “Don’t be long, hmm?”

“I won’t. It’s something I’d forgotten that I’ve got to take care of. Only be a few minutes. Don’t fuss, luv.”

Jastouk pressed his lips together; he didn’t like it when Maksim either deliberately or unconsciously echoed Brann’s manner of speech, but he said nothing.

Ruefully aware of offending, quite aware of where the offense lay, Maksim watched the hetairo saunter off. Shaking his head, he slipped into the templet and settled onto the tattered cushions scattered across a wallbench. He slid his hand into his robe and took out his farseeing mirror. He’d made it to keep watch on Brann so he could help her if she needed him, but he had a more urgent use for it now. It was an oval of polished obsidian in a plaited ring of Brann’s hair, white as a spider’s web and as delicate. The cable it hung from he’d twisted from a strand of his own hair. He breathed on it, rubbed his cuff over it, sat holding it for several moments. What he was going to do was a very minor magic; there was even a good chance that the Guardians hired by the Managers wouldn’t notice it. If they did, he might be booted out of Kukurul and forbidden to return. He scrubbed his hand across his face. He was sweating and angry at himself, angry at Todichi Yahzi for showing up and making him feel a lout, angry at Fate in all her presentations including Tungjii Luck.

Impatiently he pushed such considerations aside and bent over the mirror, his lips moving in a subvocal chant. He set the slave coffle into the image field, along with the agent and his whipmaster, followed the shuffling string to the Auction House on the edge of the Great Market and into the slavepens behind it. He pointed the mirror at the agent and followed him into the office of his employer, watched and listened as the agent made his report, the slaver made his arrangements for the sale of the string. Three days on. Maksim let the mirror drop, canceling the spell on it, and spent a moment longer wondering if he should bid for himself or employ an agent. Shaking his head, he stood and slipped the mirror back beneath his robes. He thrust two fingers into his belt purse, fished out a coin and tossed it in the bowl beneath the crude statue of the little gray god. “In thanks for the use of your premises,” he murmured and went out.

He stood a moment looking down the Ihman Katt toward the cafd Sidday Lir where Jastouk waited for him. I am sadly diminished, he thought. From tyrant and demiurge I have descended to merely lover and bought-love at that. Poor old Todich. There’s nothing grand in hating a little man. He started walking, chuckling to himself at the image the words evoked.