A Gathering Of Stones

9

Danny Blue followed the guide Laux had summoned for him, a boy, twelve or thirteen, sallow skin with a greenish tint, stiff spiky hair dyed in green and yellow squares, green paint on his eyelids, yellow triangles painted under each eye, lips carefully tinted green. Heavy round ceramic plugs swung in rhythm with the swing of his meager hips, hanging from flesh loops stretching down from his earlobes, green in the right, yellow in the left. He had ceramic armlets clamped above and below the elbow on his left arm; they were striped in green and yellow. He wore a glove on his right hand, snakeskin dyed a rich dark green. His left hand was bare, the nails painted blood red. On his feet he wore snakeskin slippers dyed to match the, glove. Instead of trousers he wore knitted hose, right leg green, left leg yellow, with a bright red codpiece and belt. To cover his torso he had a tight sleeve/ess green shirt with pointed yellow darts slashing downward diagonally, starting from his right shoulder, aiming toward his left hip. He strolled along as if he were going that way from choice and had no connection with the scruffy drab creature following him. His was a conservative dress for his kind, a simple walking-out costume. Warned on the ship to mind his manners, warned again before Laux turned him loose, Danny Blue managed not to stare at the show around him, but sometimes it was not so easy to keep his eyes straight ahead. As when a creation in feathers and gauze fluttered past, its species as uncertain as its outline. The boys he saw all had painted faces but no masks; every adult, male and female alike, wore halfmasks, stylized serpent snouts as if they adopted the insult in the old tale and made it something to flaunt. Laux said they carried viper poison in the rings they wore and could shoot it into someone with a special pressure of the hand. They usually refrained in the daylight, it was bad for business, but you didn’t want to push them much, their restraint was delicate as a spider’s thread.

It was a city of silences and shadows, of walls and towers; it smelled like clove carnations; they grew in the walls, red and white carnations, they floated in the water, bobbing past him as he walked along the roughened tiles, red and white carnations with white orchids and a rose or two, swirling around the narrow black boats poling along the canals. Red and white. The whole city was red and white. Every wall was faced with glossy red and white tiles. Panels of red tiles, columns of white tiles. Patterns of cut tile, red and white swirling together, sweeping along in dizzying flows. Red and white, white and red. Except for the pointed roofs. Those were black tile, shiny black. It rained most days from two till four, thunderstorms that dumped an inch or more into the grooves that ran in spirals from the peaks and dropped into channels that fed the glossy black gargoyles; the rain water spewed from their mouths, arching out over the walkways to spatter into the canals.

The boy led Danny Blue past a water plaza.

There was a black tile fountain in the middle and lacy white footbridges arching to it from the corners of the square. There were seats round the fountain. Several Arsuiders sat there, in groups like flocks of extravagant birds, heads close, talking in whispers. They stopped talking when they saw Danny, watched him until he went round a corner. He didn’t look back, but he could feel the pressure of their whispers following him.

The Stranger’s Quarter, local name Estron Coor, was laid out near the heart of the City, not even the Ahzurdan phasma knew why. The Stranger’s Wall was a swath of murky red with black diamonds in a head-high line marching around the enclosure. The single door in that wall was iron thickly coated with a shiny black paint, nicked and bruised and smeared, the first dirt Danny Blue had seen in the city; the opening was narrow, a man only marginally bigger than average would have trouble squeezing through it.

The boy stopped before the door, his costume swearing at the wall; next to its heavy brooding solidity, he seemed more a concept than a living person, a player in some fantastical drama. He whistled a snatch of something, a complex tonerow sort of thing, stepped aside when he got a matching answer from the gatehouse perched over the entrance, no windows in it, only arrowslits with oiltraps in the base of the overhang. Danny Blue kept his face noncommittal but wasn’t liking this much at all. Lam said they barely tolerated outsiders in their midst; this tower underlined that and went beyond. Strangers were treated like disease germs, encysted, kept away from the rest of the organism.

The door creaked open, a sound that felt like a rusty knife twisting in the bone. No sneaking out of here, Danny thought. He went through the narrow opening into the Estron Coor. The boy was still watching when the door was maneuvered shut by a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys. Making sure I stay where I’m put. What a bunch. Danny Blue looked around.

There was an Inn, three stories high and tight against the Wall; from the look of the second story windows and other signs it was eight rooms long and barely one room thick. The third story was tucked in under toothy eaves with shuttered unglazed holes too small to qualify as windows. Next to the Inn were several miniature stores with living quarters above them, a cook shop, a grocery, a butchery, a miscellany. Across the canal from the Inn there was a ponderous godon with offices or something similar in part of the ground floor and a line of portals with chains and bars enough to suggest that behind them were rare and costly things. Next to the godon there was a sort of multi-purpose temple with seven flights of steps leading to seven archways, no two alike; ghosts in various stages of preservation drifted in and out of openings that made a sieve of the cylindrical tower emerging from the squat ground floor; they undulated past women with painted breasts who sat in those openings, they mingled with the drifts of smoke from the incense which kept the air inside the walls smelling rich enough to eat. The Ahzurdan phasma sneered at the women. *Temple whores. Tempted, Danny?* The Daniel phasma muttered something Danny couldn’t hear, didn’t particularly want to hear.

All those buildings were fairly new and constructed of wood by someone with a fixation on sharp points; the eaves looked like the bottom jaws of sharks, there were spearheads or something similar jutting from the corner beams, edges sharp enough to split a thought. The window bars were no meek retiring rods; on the outside they had ranks of needles like the erectile spines of a hedgehog snake, and the needles had discolored points. Poison, Danny thought, sheeit.

There were people looking at him from the corners of their eyes, shoulders turned to him. A motley collection, scarce two alike though they were mostly men. They were standing around as if they had nothing more important on their minds than sneaking peeks at a new arrival; the whole place had a feeling of stagnation, constipation, though the water in the broad canal ran clear and clean with scattered flowers riding the wind ruffles, slipping in through one grating and out the other. One of the men sauntered away from a group, crossed the humpy bridge to the temple and went inside. A few women swathed in drab veils that covered them head to toe hurried from one store to another, trotted back to the Inn or climbed the stairs to the cramped quarters over one of the businesses.

Unhurried, giving those side-eyes a bland mask to look at, Danny Blue strolled for the Inn, wondering rather seriously how much it was going to cost him. He had an assemblage of coins, a very mixed lot, some left over from Daniel’s first days_, in Cheonea, some from Ahzurdan’s hoard, some he’d found scattered about the starship. Though it wasn’t much when he piled it up, it was enough to cushion him until he decided how to make some more-as long as he was quick about it. He pushed through the door.

The room inside was small and smoky, lit by a brace of sooty lamps. There was a staircase vanishing around a sharp corner, swallowed by shadows as sooty as the lamps and in the corner opposite it was an L-shaped counter with barely enough room for the youth dozing behind it. Danny woke him up, talked him out of a room and went to it to think about things.

In the middle of thinking, he fell asleep.