Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

4. Of Fate, Fortune, Mayhem, and Mystery

‘EVERY ONE OF YOU — duped fools!’

Pryn heard the barbarian accent across the echoing hall, saw his yellow hair, his close-set eyes. He grasped the rope that ran toward the ceiling beam, jerked it loose from where it was tied to the balcony’s rim, and went on shouting:

‘You think you have a Liberator before you? Can’t you hear the voice of a tyrant in the making? Before you sits a man whose every word and act is impelled by lusts as depraved as any in the nation, who would make a slave of all and anyone to satisfy them, calling such satisfaction freedom! If you can’t see what’s in front of you, then look behind you! Look at Small Sarg — Sarg the barbarian! A prince in my land, I came to yours a slave! The man you call “Liberator” bought me as a slave — and, true, he told me I was free; and, true, for three years we fought together against slavery throughout Nevèrÿon. But when he was finished with me, he sold me! Sold me as a slave! To traders on their way to the western desert — thinking that he would never see me again! But I have escaped! I have returned from slavery. And as I love my freedom, so I have sworn his death!’ Gripping the rope, wrapping it about one forearm and again about one leg, the barbarian was over the rail, in the air, swinging down. As he passed above the brazier, his sword, high in his free hand, flared with light.

Above Pryn, on the fur-covered seat, Gorgik pushed himself up, flung out a hand. Pryn saw the big foot slide on fur and threw herself to the hide as the barbarian on the rope hurtled — so slowly, it seemed. Was it the size of the hall…?

Then, so quickly, a man leapt from the gathering — most of whom, Pryn saw with her cheek pressed to the rug, were either crouching or staggering back.

Bound at the instep with leather bands, a bony foot struck the hide before Pryn’s face. She twisted her head to look up at a very thin blade coming out of a rough-out leather sheath, rising in a leather-bound fist.

The barbarian was suddenly in front of her, only this stranger in the way. Pryn heard body and body smack. Bodies grappled, falling at, or more likely on, the Liberator’s feet as Gorgik, grunting, tried to scramble aside.

The released rope dragged away across dirt.

The struggling men thumped, thrashing down the steps. A foot hit Pryn’s hip, which was when she looked again; so she didn’t see whose. The men rolled out on the dirty tiles.

Gorgik stood, his own blade finally drawn. Pryn scrambled up the furs to crouch by him.

At the steps’ foot, grunts and gasps and snarls: the barbarian and the man with the leather-bound hands and feet pummeled and bit and gouged at each other.

There was blood on the white hide.

Those who had rushed away rushed back.

Up from the grappling men, blood spurted — a crimson arch, half a meter high. Blood puddled the tile. The spurt fell. At the puddle’s edge, red wormed along a grouted crevice.

The barbarian was still, curled on his side like someone suddenly gone to sleep.

The other pushed himself up on all fours, head hanging. He went back to one knee. His shoulders were thin and brown. As well as his hands and feet, his knees and elbows were wrapped with leather. His black hair was long and in one place matted together — but by old dirt, Pryn realized, not blood. Breathing hard, he turned to grin at the throne.

And Pryn saw he had just one eye.

The pupil was black, wet; the white was deeply bloodshot. The eye looked ready to weep.

Momentarily Pryn thought he must have just lost the other; but the way the whole eyeless side of his face was sunken, with only the thin slash of a permanently sealed lid — the loss must have occurred years ago.

‘You’re safe, master!’ The little man laughed. The gaps and rots rimming his gum would have made the Badger’s mouth seem sound. He took big, gasping breaths. The muscles over his narrow chest looked strained to the tearing with them. ‘See, master? You’re safe!’ He grinned; he panted. The eye still seemed near tears. Looking about, he pointed at the barbarian’s sword, some feet away. ‘No harm from that now!’

The hilt of his own thin knife jutted awkwardly in the barbarian’s chest.

Somewhere off in firelight, the rope still swung, slowly.

‘Say — do you know me, master?’

Others moved up to crowd behind those already crowding.

‘Do you remember little Noyeed, from among the slaves at the obsidian mines…?’

The Liberator frowned.

‘No, you don’t remember me, master! I was an ugly, awkward, dirty boy. You were the foreman of our work gang, a slave like the rest of us — oh, yes!’ The little man looked about at the gawkers. ‘He was a slave, you know — my master. In the obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha mountains. I was a slave with him!’ The little man threw up his chin, grabbed the flesh of his neck with bloody, bound hands and pulled the skin taut. ‘See! I am free! I am free! I escaped the mines! My neck is bare! And he still wears his collar, in our name! Wears it for us all! But when he was a slave, when I was a slave — ’ Noyeed turned back, his wet eye blinking over his atrocious grin — ‘he saved my life! You saved my life, master! And I have saved yours! I’d save yours a hundred times and give mine in the bargain; I’ve never forgotten you, master! Never!’

Gorgik still frowned. ‘I…remember you, Noyeed. And I — ’ Gorgik stepped down a step. ‘I saved your…life?’

‘Aye, you saved me — so that I could go on to become Noyeed the runaway, Noyeed the scavenger, Noyeed the bandit — ’ He grimaced — ‘Noyeed the murderer!’ With a shrill laugh, he shook his head. ‘No, master, I’m not a good man!’ He got to his feet. ‘But you saved me — so that twenty-odd years later I could meet this barbarian dog, himself only just escaped from slavers in the west, hiding out in the caves of Makalata at the edge of the desert, skulking there among beggars, bones, and ashes, with his tales of treachery and betrayal, his plots for revenge and assassination! A madman, I tell you! A madman! He was going to assassinate my Gorgik, my master, the great and famous Gorgik, the Gorgik men and women speak of as the Liberator over all Nevèrÿon — the Gorgik without whom I never would have lived to make what little I have of my poor life!’ Noyeed turned to the throne. ‘I followed him, master! I followed him all the way across Nevèrÿon. I followed him here to the capital and finally to this subterranean hall! I tell you, half the time I couldn’t even believe his madness — that he would try to kill you! But when he made his move — ’ The little man scurried to the corpse, one hand touching the ground three times in the journey (Pryn thought of dismounting from a dragon), grasped his hilt, and tugged the blade free to raise it in torchlight — ‘I was here to make mine!’ He looked at Gorgik with his wet, black eye. ‘I was here for you, master, as you were for me — when I was a boy and we were both slaves in those cursed mines. Remember it?’

‘From what I remember,’ Gorgik said, ‘you might have more reason to hate me than to love me, Noyeed.’

‘Hate my master? Hate the man who saved me?’ Noyeed laughed again. ‘You are a great man now, master. Myself, I’m only a breath of freedom better than a slave. But I do not pretend to understand the jokes and jests of the great.’ He turned to the others. ‘My master jokes! But isn’t he a great man, my Liberator, my master, my Gorgik?’

The mumbling through the gathered men and women seemed more confusion than agreement. But it also seemed to serve the little man for corroboration. He grinned again, poking his blade-tip about for his sheath.

Men had crowded onto the steps, trying to see. One brushed Pryn’s arm. She glanced up to see the Western Wolf, at this point oblivious to her.

‘Shall I tell you how he saved my life?’ Noyeed looked back at Gorgik. ‘Shall I tell them, master?’

Gorgik came down another step, his frown — because of the scar, Pryn decided — particularly fierce. ‘Yes. You may tell them. Tell us all.’

The little man turned back to the others and drew another gulping breath. ‘I was not much below fourteen when I and some friends, playing near our village in the east, were taken by slavers. We fought, my friends and I — and I watched my nearest friend torn in three by two slavers who would slake their lusts on her body there. I saw my brother’s legs broken and his ribs cracked so that two stuck from the skin of his side — a day later they threw him, still breathing, down a cliff — I heard that. Him breathing. I didn’t see it. One of them had hit me in the face with the blunt end of a stick so hard the eyeball burst in my head — ’ He jabbed a thumb at his sunken socket. I walked with them three days completely blind. Only after that did the first shadows of sight return in my remaining eye. Somewhere in it a birthday passed that I did not speak of and neither did they. A week later, they sold me among an even dozen to the obsidian mines, where I was given over to one of the barracks where Gorgik here — ’ the thumb jabbed toward the Liberator — ‘was the slave foreman. Oh, he was a slave, yes! But he was a powerful one! Had we been working on the grounds of some great lord’s estate, and not in that stinking imperial pit, he would have worn the white collar-cover of the highest ranking slave — everyone said so! And he deserved it! But no such honors were given in that deadly hole. You see that scar on his face?’ Again the little man pointed; and Pryn wondered if this were a tale he’d told frequently at taverns and campfires across Nevèrÿon, or if it were a secret story, rehearsed silently and continually for one glorious recitation. ‘You see it? Didn’t he have it the first time I blinked my good eye clear of what stuck my lashes together, half out of my head with fever and weak from thirst, and saw him for the first time, standing above me, looking down at me where I lay on my foul straw? They told me later he had gotten it in a brawl among the slaves when a guard went after him with a pickax because he had tried to protect some boy from their torments — it was legend in the camp. All talked of it. Am I right, master?’

‘Was it, now?’ Gorgik snorted. ‘And I cannot even remember the boy’s name. Go on, Noyeed.’

‘He was kind to me, my master was. I was just a child, smaller than that girl — ’ which was a thumb at Pryn — ‘half blind, almost too sick to walk — though that didn’t stop them from working me. They sent me down in the hole anyway, to carry out scraps of rock through the mud and dark. A slave who did not go down into the mines received neither food — which perhaps I could have done without a day or two — nor water — which I needed to guzzle, constantly and continuously, for I always felt my skin was on fire over my bones. My master there, often he held my head while I drank — or while I threw up when I drank too much; or he would let me rest against the mine wall, looking stern at any man about to protest my indolence. And when, in the evening, back in the barracks, I would fall on my straw, too weak to fight for my supper and water, he would bring me food and a full gourd to drink from and sometimes would even sit and talk with me, joking to cheer me up, staying with me long enough so that no one came to steal my supper — making a little easier my steady slide toward a death that, even then, I only saw as an inevitable relief from the terror. I thought I would die.

‘So did they.

‘One night a bunch of miners in the dark came to my corner, held me down, and used my boy’s body like a woman’s, one after the other, now grunting, now biting my shoulder, now hissing threats of death should I cry out.’ (Leaning against the fur-covered arm of the throne, Pryn shifted her hip and wondered just how this little man thought a woman’s body was to be used.) ‘The next day, even the guards declared I was too far gone to go down into the pit. A day without food and water would probably have allowed me to put the second foot over the threshold of death where, clearly, I had already put the first. But Gorgik joked with the guards: “Oh, I think I can get another day or two of work from him. Give him an hour or so, and he’ll perk up.” Then he carried me into the hole himself, and throughout the day brought me water to drink, and for the rest left me alone. As for the others, well…clearly there was no reason to keep it from me. Now and then I would hear one of them talking within my hearing. Some that had abused me the night before, since I was not expected to last much longer, whispered to each other how they would be back that night to get what use they could of me — I tell you, if at the height of their lusts I had gone from live meat to dead, it wouldn’t have bothered them, till my actual corpse had got too cold to heat their night-labors. I knew that if what had been done to me the previous night were done to me again, by dawn I would be dead. But that evening, after supper, Gorgik brought a big-hipped man with a large nose, who wore clean blue wool, to my pallet — a eunuch of some noblewoman whose caravan had stopped for the night at the foot of the Falthas. She wanted a slave — for what reason I never knew. But Gorgik, as a foreman, had been asked to pick one out; and chose me — seeing clearly that any such change would have had to be for the better. The eunuch took me back to the lady’s tents and camels and provision wagons. It began to rain, I remember, while we walked. Twice, between the barracks and the caravan, I fell, and the eunuch, with many grunts of disgust, helped me to my feet. I remember standing alone among the tents, my eye closed, my head up, tasting the drops, feverish, more asleep than awake, and knowing — ’ the bright eye blinked — ‘as I knew you knew, master, that those who came to abuse me that night would find only my soiled straw, stained with the blood that had run between my legs from the night before and stinking of the urine I had spilled there because I was too frightened to crawl to the pee-trough.’ The little man, standing by the fallen barbarian, joggled the shoulder with his foot. ‘The noblewoman didn’t buy me. Why anyone might want such a sick and half-blind puppy as I was — why I should think anyone might, or why Gorgik there should think so…’ The little man blinked his eye. ‘Such is not really thinking; only the desire from desperation! Eventually the eunuch took me back to the mine. By now I was stopping every five or ten meters, my body blasted and shaken by a rasping cough, the snot flying, the mucus stringing my chin — I remember the eunuch, out of something between disgust and compassion, taking out his key and unlocking the hinge of my collar so I might breathe easier, though he left it around my neck. It was still dark and raining when I was brought back to the barracks. Nobody noticed that my collar was open. And the eunuch was quickly off to find a replacement. But I had been given one more night of life — for it was too late, now, for men who had to work the hours we worked to indulge such sport as had been planned. One more night of life — with death waiting ahead of it just as surely as it had before. But something had happened. Sick as I was, I had walked through damp fields, had passed by trees and looked at starlit mountains almost as a free man might look. Frequently the barracks were not secured on rainy nights — where might a slave go in his iron collar? But my collar was loose! I was exhausted, yet also feverishly awake. The guard was gone in the rain with the eunuch. I pushed to my knees and made my way to the door, refusing by main force to cough again, keeping my mouth wide or clenching my teeth by turns, gasping through my nose to suppress any sound that might give me away. The other slaves slept. I was outside the door — and fell in the mud. And crawled in the mud, I tell you now, with the pebbles cutting my knees and my hands. I know how weak I was; that night I crawled no more than a thousand feet from the mine encampment; and lay the day in the woods. Why they didn’t come looking for me, I don’t know. Perhaps they thought I was dead — perhaps the guards, hearing of the plan to abuse me as I had heard it myself, simply assumed I had died in the assault and my body been summarily disposed of. Such disposals were common enough in that place. Given my obvious destiny — death — perhaps they thought it better not to pursue me. Perhaps it was simply because I was no man and not much of a boy; or perhaps they were discouraged by a word from my master.’ Noyeed flashed another lopsided grin at Gorgik. ‘I know that toward evening I began to drag myself along again, starvation now joining my other ills. Still crawling, I finally reached a clearing, which, from the worn footpaths and the pattern of tent-post holes across the ground, I realized was the camp the caravan I had been to the previous night had, earlier that day, moved on from. Such a wealthy caravan as that leaves a wealth of garbage. That night I ate their garbage, slept in it, and woke to find myself rained on as I lay in it and slept again without moving; and, no doubt, ate more of it when I awoke. I left my collar in it. Somehow, even open, its stiff hinge had made it cling about my neck till I pulled it apart with my own hands. No doubt it’s still there, where I buried it, in that muddy refuse pit beside the caravan site at the base of the ragged Falthas. What I ate or where I slept over the next three nights, I don’t remember. The next I recall I was crouching in the dark outside a circle of firelight, blinking with my one eye at the conviviality of the travelers sitting about the flames, smelling the food they passed among them till I was sick with it. I did not dare enter. I was too frightened. On another night, I watched a band of slavers with their sorry wares make camp near a stream; and I asked myself if I were any better off than those chained and collared folk, who at least were being fed a double handful of oaten mush, spooned on the board laid down between their double line, their hands roped behind them, their chains clicking and clicking the plank as their heads bobbed, eating. And somehow my fever passed. I chewed my roots and, when one root made me sick, chewed no more like it. Somehow I sensed the ones that gave me nourishment and dug up more of the same. I ate beetles that scurried over logs before my dirty fingers. And when, on still another night, I walked into the firelit circle about still another gathering, whose camp and food preparations I had watched for hours till the sun had pulled all darkness down between the trees, I did not care if they were slavers or worse, so long as they would speak to me, look at me, beat me — even kill me.’ An incantatory delight had informed the little man’s tale till now. But here he drew his shoulders in, looked about nervously, as if he were suddenly struck with the amount of time he’d talked before this audience who’d just watched him kill. ‘The like of you fine folk would consider them worse. They would, master! They fed me. They beat me. They washed me. They made fun of me. They gave me a place to sleep. They joked with me, and they cursed me, and they set me hard — and, later, even dangerous — tasks. And though I ran away from them almost as long ago as I crawled away from the mine, they were the closest thing I ever had to a family, once I was snatched from my own. I follow their profession to this day — they were bandits!

‘I admit it!

‘I’m proud of it!

‘To be a bandit is better than to be a slave!

‘Ah, master, my memory muddies much of this. But what I recall clearly through it all is you! You, master! You were the one who carried me up and down from the pit when I was too sick to walk. You were the one who sent me out of the slave pen with the noblewoman’s eunuch the night the others would have set upon me and killed me with their lusts.’ The little man looked down at the corpse; Pryn could see a sheepish grin pulling through the hard muscles of his face. ‘Treachery? Betrayal? The things this dog accused you of, even if you had done them, are nothing so special. Believe me, I’ve done my share of both! If all of us who’d done so had to die for it this day, there’d be few left in Nevèrÿon, either at the High Court or at the pit.’

One woman and several of the men chose to laugh at that, which made the little man look up, grinning.

‘I remember you in the mines, Noyeed,’ Gorgik said. ‘I remember holding your head while you drank, and carrying your small, hot body against me down into the hole. No doubt I shooed a few miners away who thought to put the rations of a dying boy to better use than you might. Such was my nature then; it’s much the same now. Tell me, Noyeed, do you remember the seven men who came to your straw that night and covered your body with theirs; and who — yes — whispered of coming to you again? There were seven — four common pit-slaves, a foreman, and two guards among them. Do you recall?’

The little man’s face twisted; he shook his head. ‘I’ve cursed my memory a thousand times — remember them? Remember their faces? Oh, no, it was too dark! Their voices? It was all grunts and whispers, while my ears rang with fever. If you could name me one, I’d kill him as quickly as I killed this dog!’

Gorgik snorted. ‘To be sure.’

Noyeed laughed again. ‘Master, you gave me life! You sent me from the mines to have that taste of freedom that returned to me the possibility of life in the midst of death! That’s why you must live!’ Turning, he spat on the corpse. ‘That’s why this barbarian dog had to die!’

‘Don’t dishonor his body.’ Gorgik came down the last step and put his hand on Noyeed’s shoulder, much as he had done with Pryn when they’d first entered the hall. ‘I remember you, Noyeed; and I remember all you tell of. Perhaps I remember it better than you. You’ve proved yourself a friend. But that man, dead on the tile, was also a friend — once. Had his friendship not been so great, his hatred might have been much less.’

From the back of the crowd a man cried: ‘What’s up there? What’s that up there on the — ’

People about Pryn turned.

On another balcony, a man stood with a short spear in his hand. His spear arm drew back —

Noyeed grabbed the Liberator’s wrist. ‘Master, it’s the dead dog’s allies! He told me he might have more with him! But I didn’t believe him, especially once he attacked you without any — ’

The spear sailed through the air.

Again Pryn flung herself away, rolled over down shallow steps, came up on her knees, and pushed to her feet amidst confusion. Weapons were out all about her. She looked up to see a dozen strangers running down the far steps, weapons waving, on the other side of the water — to meet another dozen, from among those gathered in the hall, who were running up.

Someone staggered against her; Pryn looked to see the Red Badger. He was opening and closing his mouth, reaching behind his back for — she saw it as he turned — a spear haft that jutted off center between his shoulders. He staggered three steps forward and fell across the dead barbarian, beard striking the tile, to twist his head at a preposterous angle while blood rolled out over his lower lip.

Pryn ran past.

Two men struggling at the culvert edge fell in and splattered her — though she was not near them. Three others swung down on ropes, two on one, one on another. Some of the invaders, surging up on the lower balconies, just jumped. Pryn saw one near her grab a fleeing woman, who turned, shrieking in his arms, to beat against his face, still shrieking, and, while she was beating, did something with her knee, hard, between his legs, so that he gasped, let her go, and doubled forward, staggered backwards — till he hit the brazier! He stood up, screaming. It cut through the shouts and calls. He toppled forward, shoulder and buttock raw. The flesh still seared to the metal smoked and bubbled and blackened.

Gorgik, with his wide knife in one hand and a sword in the other, turned to hack before him, hacked again behind.

Pryn dashed across the wooden bridge as another man swung down on a rope. As he came off, she nearly collided with the Wolf, who, with his sword, was fighting off an assailant who kept making feints with a vicious-bladed pike.

Was it because she saw the third man coming? She grabbed the pike’s end and yanked. (The man wielding it had not even seen her.) The Western Wolf leapt forward and thrust. The pike came loose in Pryn’s hands. She turned with it to see fragments: a raging face shouting at her, a raised sword falling toward her, a sandaled foot stamping dirt below her, a fire-lit buckle holding a scabbard to a hairy thigh. Hard as she could, Pryn thrust the pike’s blunt end low into the belly she thought, rather than saw, was someplace among them all. Jarred to the shoulders, she watched the details become a single man, gasping, reeling along the water’s edge, dropping his sword, falling back — she heard the man’s head crack rock. (One man? She’d been sure it was at least five!) He rolled over the edge. Water sheeted away on both sides, then clapped over him.

The Wolf still stood, blinking in surprise.

Pryn turned to strike another intruder, who staggered up, unseeing. She hit hard, and then was off the bridge and bringing the pike down on the head of a man who had another man down, while another tried to tug him off —

Something smacked Pryn’s flank. Burning, stinging, it sent her falling, made her lose vision — though she didn’t drop the pike. When she could see, what she saw was a man, blind with blood from a gash across the eyes, swinging his wide blade, now left, now right, with shoulder-wrenching fury. She was on the ground, trying to get up on one knee. For a moment she wondered if the man had simply severed her — but she felt her side (while the knuckles of her fist, still grasping the pike, rubbed rock); there was no blood, no cut. The raging man swung above her, stepped over her leg — which she jerked back. He was holding the sword so that the blade had connected with the flat, rather than the edge. Until it had struck her nearly senseless, she hadn’t even seen him…! Pryn was up again, running. She dodged one man who hadn’t seen her, then another who had. As she neared the wall, she saw, on the balcony, practically above her, two men climbing to leap — now they were falling with drawn swords.

It wasn’t fear that made her do it. Rather it was a vague, glittering anger. It all happened with astonishing clarity and rapidity, within the generalized pain that she felt not as a sensation in her side, but rather as a prickling enclosing her entire body. She swung her pike up against the short sword of the falling man so that it swung back into his face — not flat-sided, either.

As he landed, she brought the pike up over his head and down against the back of his neck. He pitched forward onto the blade that had already gotten caught under his chin. (The other shouted as he landed, because he’d twisted his ankle.) The first man bubbled red from ear and nose, the blade-tip up under his jaw, somewhere in his brain. With the pike ahead of her, Pryn rushed up the stairs and pushed through the hangings. Only when she was in the anteroom with the benches did she realize she had been holding the pike with its metal point toward her own stomach. At any stumble or fall she could have gutted herself as surely as she had…murdered the invader at the stairs’ foot with the sword in his head.

Slowing only to right the pike, she dashed into the dark. Clambering around the piled sacks, she hurried into the high-roofed tunnel. Had there been this many turnings? The pike’s point scraped the corridor’s wet walls. Three times the pole jammed at a too-narrow bend. She tripped on rising steps. With darkness and the word ‘murder’ filling her mind, anger threatened to spill over into terror.

Then, between one breath and the next — pain!

For a moment she thought it was new. But it was the one in her side. It had been there, yes. But now it was not all about her. It was in one place the size of a hand and clutched her flank incredibly. The end of each breath was a dull horror to get through. She lay the awkward pole down and stumbled through darkness, hurting too much really to fear. Had a rib cracked? One hand on wet stone, with the other she felt her side — too sore, really, to touch. Suppose, she thought, there are branches and turn-offs here in which I shall be lost forever? Mercifully the pain made it impossible for her to dwell on labyrinthine possibilities. She walked, wondering if she might have to lie down. I have ridden a dragon, she thought. She whispered, ‘I have murdered a man…’ She corrected herself: ‘Maybe murdered several.’ Distressingly little to it when you were on the murdering side — though this pain was a mortal reminder how chancy it was, in such business, that one didn’t end up on the other.

The pain passed some rib-crunching peak and at last began to subside. Once she leaned against the wall, taking very small breaths. Murder and labyrinthine possibilities became confused in her thought. What was it the tale-teller had said about the girl who’d killed so many people she’d begun to act oddly? Once more Pryn walked, thinking: I’m looking for something in all this darkness. What am I looking for? Again an image came: The tale-teller’s masked friend with her twin blades. Am I this frightened? she wondered. Why I am telling such tales? Well, perhaps tales were better than the hacked, drowned, and skewered carnage behind her — which is when Pryn was suddenly seized with the conviction that she was being followed.

Her own breath roared in the darkness — she couldn’t hold it more than three steps before it came squeaking and wheezing out. Her feet sent loose stones clicking, and in the echo she was sure she heard steps behind her, stumbling as she stumbled, stepping as she stepped. On the rock there was a beating — one of her pursuers pounded his sword hilt against the wall as he came on…

Staggering from the low entrance onto the cistern’s floor, she nearly fell. Gray light dropped between the overhead logs.

My heart! she thought as she turned to grasp the iron staple. It’s my own heart! And the pursuers were only her echo…She climbed — and wouldn’t think about the dullness pulsing in her side. When she was half a dozen rungs up, she paused. The pounding continued. But she could feel, in the flesh between her thumb and forefinger gripping the tarry bar — she could feel her heart; and it was beating far faster than the pounding, which she realized now was a real noise, echoing.

Someone was chanting, too, only she couldn’t make out the words. She climbed again. Her head came up between birch logs. She took another painful breath and turned to look about.

Across the cistern, just beyond the wall, Pryn saw a barbarian girl bouncing a ball; other children watched. Now that Pryn’s head was above the wall, the sound was stripped of echo. The pounding was the ball’s rhythmic thack, thack, thack…and the chant, the girl’s shrill rhyme:

Another girl — maybe nine, maybe ten — glanced at Pryn, but seemed to find nothing special in a plump, bushy-headed youngster climbing out of a cistern. She turned back:

On warning the ball slammed into the corner of the cistern wall to go soaring. Children went prancing and jumping below it, straining to catch. One small boy kept calling, ‘It’s my turn now! My turn! No, it’s my turn!’

Sun down, summer evening lingered in the tangled streets. Stopping now and again to flex her arm or touch her ribs. Pryn wandered through one, then another alley; minutes later she walked out onto the empty, red brick square. In the center was a human-high stone, from which a water jet fell to a natural basin.

She’d almost reached the fountain when she realized this was the Old Market. Stalls and awnings had come down for the day; the vendors had carried off their trays, rolled away their barrows. Portable counters had been moved out, the refuse swept up, and the square cleared for night. The sky above the western roofs, coppery pink, was streaked with silver clouds. Some became near-black when they reached the eastern blue. Pryn stopped at the rock. Bending over the foaming basin, she had to hold the edge, realizing how sore her ribs still were. So were her shoulders — the strength to batter about her with the pike was more than you used to rein a lizard. As her face fell to the water, the sky’s reflection broke up and darkened with her own.

Where am I going? she thought. What am I looking for?

She splashed her cheeks, drank from her cupped palms, rubbed wet thumbs on her eyes, then walked on across the square toward the bridge.

There, at any rate, activity seemed almost as great as it had earlier. The loiterers’ faces were mostly new, but their colorful, ragged clothes, their curious painted eyes were the same. Walking, she tried not to show nervousness or hurt, to find the effort moved her along more quickly when she wanted to look leisurely, made her look away when a painted eye glanced.

When the ringed hand grabbed her shoulder, Pryn caught her breath, turning, tried to push away —

‘Well, you’re back!’ With their bright freight, the dirty fingers held. The other hand — as dirty, but ringless — grappled Pryn’s hair. ‘So you found he didn’t want you after all. Anyone here could have told you that! Don’t fight me, girl, or I’ll break your teeth with one smack and your eardrum with another — and still make you work the bridge for me!’ Over his naked chest, she saw for the first time many little cuts, small scars, scratches…

She hit at him, because she was angry again — and did not hit as hard as she might, because she was surprised and sore and, yes, exhausted. He jerked her hair. Handsome features slid about on one another with the effort. She blinked to see his hand falling to slap her. Over his shoulder, onlookers moved away as others stepped up.

Then something happened.

Sliding features locked.

The hand halted, inches from Pryn’s flinching jaw.

A muscle quivered in his cheek. An eyelid twitched, lowered…His mouth, half open, began a creaking noise like an old hinge, or maybe someone trying to suck air through a constricted throat.

Fingers in her hair loosened.

Pryn jerked her head away.

Nynx began to sag; and Pryn saw, behind him, gray eyes below a thatch of cream-yellow.

Nynx fell, his hand pulling from Pryn’s other shoulder, where it had momentarily and limply caught, to flop on the bridge, soiled fingers opening as if stone and metal were too heavy to hold in a fist.

Pryn looked at the blade the pale-haired woman gripped.

‘Stupid…’ the young woman said, a little hoarsely.

Pryn blinked.

‘…dead,’ the woman added. ‘Yes.’ She grimaced. ‘All right. Come with me.’

Pryn was about to protest. But the woman barked at the onlookers, ‘Why are you gawking? It’s only a corpse! There’re six more like it, rotting in the river. Just throw this one on top!’ She gave a high, breathy laugh and took Pryn’s upper arm in her very strong fingers. ‘Let’s go, I said.’ Pryn went, because — well, she was frightened and also because she had gone rather numb. If my rescuer had been a black-haired woman with a rag mask and a double-bladed sword, Pryn thought as they left the bridge and crossed to an alley’s narrow entrance, I wouldn’t protest…The gaunt, pale-haired murderess — but hadn’t Pryn also murdered less than an hour back? — was not more than three years older than Pryn, for all her sunken eyes and tightly muscled frame. As one murderess led the other around another cistern, Pryn managed to ask, ‘What…what do you want?’

‘To take you to my mistress.’ The fingers stayed painfully tight. ‘I waited for you three hours — though I thought I’d get to you before you got yourself in trouble with someone like that!’

Waited for me…?’ Pryn tried to work her arm free; the grip hurt, and her side was still sore. ‘There? But why there…?’

‘Same reason as that bridge louse.’ The high, hoarse laugh. ‘I knew you’d be along the same way he did. You’re an ignorant mountain girl in this strange and terrible city — where else could you have come?’

Pryn started to say that she did know writing — a good bit of it, too. But the blond-white murderess released her arm and gave her a little push ahead to hurry her. ‘Please,’ Pryn said. ‘Please, can’t you tell me where you’re taking me?’

‘I told you. To my mistress. She has taken an interest in you. She wants to further your career.’

The little woman was ahead of Pryn again, loping off down an even darker alley. There was nothing for Pryn to do but follow. ‘Who is your mistress?’ Pryn asked. ‘What does she do? What does she want me for?’ She tried to remember the people who had been with this strange creature when the Fox’s horse had almost run into them on the street that morning.

‘My mistress is a merchant woman — very clever. Very powerful. She likes to amass wealth and influence events — does a lot of both.’ The young woman put the point of her knife, which she had not re-sheathed, into her mouth to pick at something between her teeth. That she had not wiped the blade since the stabbing was, suddenly for Pryn amidst all the day’s violence, the most coldly perverse thing she’d seen.

‘And you…?’ Pryn asked. Chills cascaded her back, made the skin of her thighs pull in. If it was fear, she’d never felt this particular sort before. She had no idea what to do with it; so she tried to go on as though she weren’t feeling anything. ‘Who are you? What do you do…?’

The alley opened out. A covered cart with a single horse stood in the shadow of an arch.

‘Me?’ The woman took down the horse’s reins. ‘My mistress calls me the Wild Ini. Her secretary calls me the Silver Viper. (Her name is Radiant Jade, but that’s because she’s a barbarian!) You’ll probably find your own name for me — if we know each other long enough. What do I do?’ The breathy laugh. ‘I do what I like. And I like to kill people. A lot!’ Then she pushed Pryn up the short ladder at the cart’s side, while Pryn, with aching flank and bruised arm, reached for balance into the darkness among the cart’s maroon hangings.