Crystal Heat

1

Shadith strolled along Hutsartes Star Street, past doss houses and taverns, beggars and street performers in a thousand shapes and colors with varying degrees of skill in whatever it was they did. The street was wide (one of the aspects of being on a newish colony world with plenty of room to spread), the center strip given to loaders trundling lumpishly along, heavy with cargo containers. The air was steamy, sweat beading on her arms and never drying, just getting stickier. And it stank.

– She breathed in the sickly sweet aroma of rotting meat, rotting vegetation, the sour effluvia of inadequate plumbing, over it all the iodine bite of the wind from the sea, even though the water was several miles off and at least a mile lower in elevation.

Amazing, she thought. Live for a few months in ships and transfer stations and you forget how saturated in bodily sensation a world can be. Hm, maybe a song in that…

Playing with rhymes and images, threading automatically through a crowd of hawkers, players, and crewfolk of the sort who milled about every Star Street she’d seen, she nearly crashed into a man who stepped from an alley in front of her.

“Hey, watch where you going.”

“Sorry.” She started to circle round him, but his hand clamped on her wrist and stopped her. “I wouldn’t do that,” she said mildly as she turned to face him.

He dropped her arm as if it were hot. “I know you,” he said.

“What?”

“Shadow’s your name, isn’t it? I heard you sing. Nightfair. Bogmak. Maahhhh nanna! How you do that?”

She backed off a step. His words weren’t slurred and he stood straight enough, but the liquid gleam of his greenish eyes most likely came out of a bottle and he carried the stink from the contents of that bottle in a fine mist around him. “The singing was me, the rest was someone else. We broke up a while back.”

“Huhn. Too bad. Yah hai, come along and have a drink on me.”

“Why not.” Might as well use this one to start spreading her cover story. “Where? I just got here and don’t know places yet. You know my name. What’s yours?’

“Meddlyr Trych. Cargo master on the Free Trader Timik. Just got here, you said?”

“Off the worldship that left yesterday. I was riding standby and working my keep, singing this ’n that. They unstood me. Some Muck from the High City up there wanted space for his bodyservant.”

“Still singing, then?”

“What I do.”

He walked beside her without talking for several steps. She glanced at him again, but she was sure she didn’t know him, he was just one of the crowd at the Nightfair and anyway that was over five years ago. He was an inch or two taller than she was, a compact man, not lean but no excess fat on him. His head was shaved and densely tattooed in patterns she recognized as luck signs, blue lines on the bright amber of his skin, the framework filled in with crimson, emerald, and gold. There were intricate fate knots between the middle two knuckles of his fingers and no doubt more needle paintings were covered by his shipsuit. His ears were pointed and flicked nervously as he walked and the pupils of his eyes were almond shaped rather than round. Meddlyr Trych. A Cousin, she thought. Wonder what part of the Diaspora produced his branch?

He pushed open a door and stood aside to let her precede him through it into the dimly lit room beyond, then escorted her to a table by the wall. “And what would you be having, Shadow? This trip I’m trying out a brandy they distill from some kind of local fruit, I don’t know what it’s called. It’s smooth and tasty and warms you up lovely.”

“Sounds good. I’ll go for that.”

He brought back two bell glasses with half an inch of a dark reddish-gold fluid puddled in the bottom.

She took a small sip, rolled it on her tongue, and smiled. “I like it.”

“Me, too. So. You lookin’ or movin’ on?”

“Looking. Till I build up my stash a bit and can talk my way onto a ship heading the direction I want to go.”

He tilted the glass, watched the brandy slide, then slip back, leaving a faint film on the curve of the bell. “I always wanted to tell you what it meant, that time you played your harp and wove dreams for me. Well, you and your partner. Didn’t have time then, don’t have words now. Except there was a hole in my heart, and after you sang it was gone.”

“I’d say you weren’t so bad with the words.”

“Ah, you should hear my cousin. Now there’s a man who can string word with word to make the stones themselves weep with the glory of it.”

“Mayhap I’ll come by his way some time if you don’t mind telling me what world it is.”

“Ah. Parcoshry is the name of that poor place and it is out beyond the Saber Worlds. A long and lonely way from here.”

She lifted the glass. “To traveling, Meddlyr Trych. To finding what lies beyond the next star.”

“To Home, Shadow Singer. Wherever that may be.” Though she only sipped at the brandy, he drained his glass. His eyes went blank for a moment, then he was grinning at her. “Ol’ Tank…” He stopped, stared past her as he ran his tongue around his teeth. “Ol’ Tank,” he went on, speaking with slow care. “He owns this place. The Tank, he calls it. He is not a man of words. He fired the last act. They were good, but two of them were Dusters and sometimes they just did not show. Even if you can’t do the dreams any more, you sing good. I come here a lot. I could tell him you sing good. If you want.”

“Why not. Got to work somewhere.”