Crystal Heat

7

A drone from Digby was waiting for her when she reached the ship, but she didn’t access the data inside until she was well away from Pillory and ’splitting for Spotchalls.

Digby was sitting behind the desk again, wearing the face she’d seen when he set her to work. “A bit of information has come into my hands, Shadow, which you might find interesting and perhaps even useful. Word has come from Marrat’s Market that the Broker Jingko iKan has on offer a Taalav crystal. Guaranteed genuine and not stolen. Seems clear to me this is the smuggler’s payoff and he’s getting his money out of it as fast as possible. I want to remind you of the strictures of this search. You’re to be invisible to the Kliu. I leave it to you to figure out how.”

Shadith watched the image dissolve as the message erased itself from the ship’s memory. “Complications. So I’m supposed to get past OverSec without letting anyone know I’m looking for that smuggler. Cover? Spla! Can’t sneak in and disguise won’t do it. OverSec took that template of me when I went into Sunflower Labs. Said it would be erased. Not likely.

Cover… cover… a job that’ll be plausible and get me in without airing the Kliu connection. Lee? No. If she were hunting something, she’d do it herself. Swarda would do, but he and his crew are on a run out to the Hevardee. Aslan’s Mama. Yes. She owes me. Doesn’t like me all that much, but she likes feeling obligated even less. I need to talk to her first, though. Droom. That’s another month of traveling while the trail freezes on me, but with Digby’s strictures… Shayss!”

Sighing, she called up the destination code of the Hegger Combine and fed them into the router, then dealt with the disorientation as the ship phased into the new course and ’splitted for Droom.

5. I Forgot What Home Was Like

Lylunda crawled from the sludge of the ocean called the Haundi Zetin, wriggled through the tangle of baifruit vines and into the clump of tall, thin rynzues with their woody braided stems and the dusky black heat-collector nodules on the spray of branches at the top. Half an hour ago she’d brought her ship down through a foaming red light, Ekilore’s sullen fire filtered through an abundance of cloud fleece as the sun rose above the horizon; they were dry clouds because the rainy season was still two months off. She’d settled it in the tangled mass of vines and trees on the largest island in a spray of islands that ran parallel to the coast, covered it with camou cloth and left it with a low-level shield in place, a smuggler’s special.

On her feet again, she looked back at Nameless Island, only one end of it visible past the tangle of vines and the droop of the rynzu branches.

They were all nameless islands. Behilarr notion-why bother identifying something so useless? The Zeal was a soup of poisons infested with eels that were mostly mouth and vast schools of small, black swimmers that could strip flesh from bone in seconds.

All of these died when they ate Behilarr flesh, but the Behilarr died as well, ending as vomited chunks on the ocean floor. She was only half Behilarr. She grinned at the thought; maybe she’d only half-poison the fish.

No one went boating for pleasure in the waters round here and swimming was a skill only the very rich with their pools of filtered water could afford to learn. Her ship would be safe out there until she came back for it, though she didn’t look forward to the long dangerous swim to reach it.

In the strengthening light of the steamy dawn, she slipped off the impeller harness and laid it on the ground, unclipped her dita sac, took out the can of cleanser and the packet of blancafilm, and began the long process of cleaning and stowing her aegis suit and all the appurtenances that let her come safely through the hazards of the ZeOn.

By the time she reached the coast road, most of the morning was gone and she wasn’t quite so pleased with herself for finding a perfect place to stow her ship. The burlap sack she’d used to conceal her offworld gear was a hot wet spot on her back, the rough weave rubbing a rash through her blouse and T-shirt. Smuggler on the brain, she thought. I probably could have parked the ship in the tie-down at the transfer station and come in legit. And saved myself a lot of trouble…

She started walking along the edge of the unpaved road, a line of dirt beaten hard by the hooves of cattle driven from the nearby arranxes, the estates of the Highborn Behilarr, to the feed lots and slaughtering houses outside Haundi Zurgile. Zurg. Where she was born. Hutsarte had only been colonized a little more than a hundred years ago, and. Behilarr were slow to spend money on things like roads even though floats did need fairly level ground to operate efficiently.

Dream on, Luna, if you came in legit, your name would be on the list. How long would it take a hired snoop to find you then?

Her ankle turned as her foot slipped into a rut. Arms waving, she found her balance again but winced as she took the next step. “Jaink! I think I sprained the thing.”

She settled herself on a clump of irratzy, the curly leaves and rubbery stems of the fern grass poking at her through the cloth of the long skirt she’d pulled over the underpants she’d worn beneath the aegis suit. The road curved here and a stand of prickle pipes with their twining side growths and spongy foliage blocked the wind and the fine white dust that wind blew like heat clouds along the ruts.

For several moments she just sat, pulling her knees up, folding her arms on them, resting her head on her arms while she wondered if this homecoming business was worth the pain it was going to bring her. Then she sighed, turned back the hem of her skirt, and prodded at the ankle. She was wearing low-heeled boots she didn’t want to take off because she’d never get them back on again. With stingworms, pincer mites, and the other small biters that Hutsarte grew in the millions, walking barefoot wasn’t a good idea.

Barefoot. Every summer when she was a subteen she’d spent a lot of time in a local clinic, waiting for a purge to expel one parasite or another from her system. Jaink only knew what passengers she was picking up right now, just by sitting on this patch of fern grass.

She pulled the skirt down and tucked her feet under her when she heard the hum of a float, the first in several hours. It was a hiccuping hum, as if the lifters were ready to scatter their parts to the, four winds. When it came round the stand of prickle pipes, she saw a small battered vehicle that looked old enough to be one of the firstdowns. The driver matched it, his face a mask of wrinkles, his, clan sign so faded she couldn’t read it. He was one of those rambling peddlers who moved from arranx to arranx, selling items and occasionally buying handwork to resell in Zurg.

He saw her and brought the juddering float to a gentle stop, twisted his body around, and called back, “Shouldna sit there, neska. Some mean biters wud soon be chewing your sweet little poto. What’s wrong? You not feeling good?”

“Give my ankle a turn, jun.”

“You aiming for Zurg? Hoy! twanghead question that. Where else would you be going? Want a ride?” He grinned at her, showing a good set of yellow fangs. “Got all my teeth still, but I don’t bite.”

She pushed onto her feet, winced at the twinge in her ankle, bent, and picked up the gunny sack. “‘Preciate it, jun,” she said and limped around to the rider’s side.

“You make it all right?”

“Give me a minute.” She tossed the sack into the cargo bin, pulled herself up, and settled onto the grubby seat. “Drop me at the Izar Gate if you don’t mind.”

The old man tapped and pushed and jiggled the controls, and after a while the float coughed and lifted onto its airpad; he started it wheezing forward, then leaned back, one hand on the joystick. “You a working girl? Izar, I mean, that’s why I ask.”

“Nah, just visiting kin.” She drew her sleeve across her face, grimacing at the smear of mud on the cloth. “Been gone a while. Anything I should look out for?”

“Thought I hadn’t seen you round. You wanna keep your head down. The Ezkop is on a purification rage, he’s got Mazkum and Jazkum in High Zurg wearing out their knees and burning their silks. He’s threatening to harrow the Izar next in the name of Jaink and Virtue. Ever been through one of those?”

The float whined and labored as it began climbing the long slope to the top of the gorge where the River Jostun ran down to join the sea.

Lylunda shivered. “When I was little. My mother was scourged. How likely are Duk and Dukerri to allow that?”

“The Ezkop Garap has the ear of the Dukina and the Mazkum ladies. They don’t like it when the Jazkum go slipping round to Izar to sample the housewares, but they can’t say it. Now they got a chance to use their claws. If I had kin in the Izar, I’d slip them away somewhere till the rain sends the Maz and Jaz out to the hills?’

“I’ll think about it. Thanks.” She wiped her face again, then sat forward tensely as he took the last bend around the huge clump of ancient rynzues that marked the end of the bridge over the Jostun. After fifteen years away, this would be her first sight of Haundi Zurgile.

The city was on the far side of the gorge where the Jostun ran, rising up the slopes of a dead volcano whose dark gray summit she could see beyond the rynzues; the higher you lived in Zurg, the classier you were, the more money and power you controlled. The Izar was on the flat land around the base of the mountain, the folk there breathing in the air of the feedlots and slaughterhouses as well as the factories and the hot air wafted over from the landing field a few kilometers off. As, the float hummed and choked up the approach to the wide bridge, she could see the red tile roofs of the tenements poking over the whitewashed walls that shut the Izar away from the rest of the city, beyond them the painted ’crete of the Low City like the colored filling between the layers of a torte, and above all these the black and gold citadels of the Jazkum who ruled the place.

Her father lived up there still, a Jaz of the Jazkum with a Maz wife and a High Family, all of whom re-fused to know about her and her mother the whore. Her mother died before she reached her fortieth year, brought down by a fever that a gray-market antibiotic couldn’t cope with. The old anger came back as the float hummed and coughed across the bridge, a fury not diminished by the fifteen years that had passed since the day she found her mother cold and still, her bed stained by her body fluids. To get access to good medicine and good care you.had to be sealed to one of the Seven Clans; brought in by birth, adoption, or purchase; your name writ in the Temple register; your body marked as Jaink’s own by the clan sign tattooed in the center of your brow. Most of the people in the Izar hadn’t a hope of any of these things.

Lekat-that was what the Behilarr called them. Mongrels. A collective name for a heterogeneous swarm of entertainers, exiles, and half-breeds, a mix of Cousins from a hundred worlds: thieves; fugitives from contract labor gangs; smugglers and arms dealers who’d made elsewhere too hot for them; crewmen and women so drunk or drugged their ships went on without them; embezzlers; dethroned dictators fleeing war crime tribunals; lost souls yearning for something they couldn’t name who ran out of money before they found whatever it was and others who had reason to cut loose from their former lives; misfits of every kind there was. They were free to come and squat in the Izar, they were free to do those jobs the Behilarr considered beneath them, they were also free to starve, to harbor such diseases as they brought with them, free to pass them around as far as they would go among the others in the Izar, free to steal from each other, rape, plunder and kill each other. Free as long as they didn’t discommode the Marked Pure among the Behilarr.

Except when the Ezkop, the High Priest of the Temple, or the Sorginz, the Priestess of Groves and Peaks, except when that holy pair fell into one of their frenzies of purification, except for those harrowing times, the Behilarr tolerated the Lekat and by their very contempt protected them. As they’d protect her now, once she was lost in the Izar.

The old man stopped before an open arch in the high white wall; black Behilarr glyphs painted above it spelled out TZAR. “I’m not asking questions,” he said. “But don’t forget what I told you.”

She summoned a grin, leaned over, and kissed his leathery cheek. “And best you disremember me, my friend. Jaink smile on your and yours.”