Wild Magic

› › ‹ ‹

An hour before moonset there was a small confusion at the heavy velvet drapes concealing the door as half a dozen newcomers pushed through, five of them Cheoshim youths, their black spiky hair cut short, predatory eagerness in their faces. The sixth was a few years older, a sleekly muscled Mal.

Descending the stairs for the fifth time, Reyna stopped to watch the Mal, thinking he was very like Dawa, had the same kind of bones and blaze to him, although he had a finer polish than Dawa ever acquired. His hair was disciplined into a heavy braid that hung in a club down his back; he wore Cheoshim warrior leathers with careless ease and moved with the quiet, liquid grace Panote the Doorkeeper showed on one of his better days.

He let the others scatter without him and stood by the drapes, looking around, his face expressionless.

Reyna came down the last steps and drifted to one of the seats pushed up against the front wall. He was tired and feeling battered but he couldn’t leave yet; the Bee-house Salagaum were hired till the EndDrum went, none of them would get their fee if any of them left early.

Pay was becoming a problem these days. The Salagaum of Bairroa Pill had to deal with increasing interference from the secular City Shindas, bribes going up and their fees going down. And there was nowhere they could troll for new clients. The Joyhouses that had been exclusively Salagaum had been harassed, then shut down by these officials-the Maulapam sent word it had to be done and it was done. At the Manassoa Order’s urging, the Shinda Board had passed clothing laws that banned Salagaum robes on the street and solicitation laws that were supposed to drive from the city prostitutes of all ages and sexes, but were applied only to adult Salagaum; the children-for-rent and the female habatrizes were mostly ignored.

The young Mal dropped onto the bench beside Reyna Hayaka and sat with impassive face watching the guests labor to have fun: couples swaying in body to body hugs meant to be dancing, feet scraping over the floor, hands rubbing flesh and cloth; bhaggan smokers sitting and holding hands in reeling, babbling rings about a bubbling waterpipe; pepepo drinkers hopping alone to music they alone seemed to hear, habatrizes and the other Salagaum going up and down stairs with and without companions, parts of them, a section of face, a hand, an arm, a breast, a thigh, passing through spots of light, the rest lost in the shifting swaying clots of shadow. There were whispers all around, voices drifting in and out of the desultory tump-zing from the drums and daroud.

“It’s all very dreary,” the Mal said suddenly.

Reyna blinked. He didn’t feel like talking, but he was being paid to respond. “I suppose so,” he said. “It’s late.”

“Why do people do this?”

“Huh?”

“You don’t seem to be enjoying it.”

Alarmed, Reyna willed a smile to his face, touched the man’s forearm with his fingertips. The muscle was tight under the skin and there was a film of sweat that his fingers slid on. The man… no, he was more like a young boy on his first date… he was nervous; that pretended disdain was his attempt at controlling a situation where he didn’t know the rules or have the kind of edge he usually enjoyed. Reyna had seen it before, a hundred times and a hundred more, but never in an adult as old as this; even those boys the Mal brought with him had more ease about them.

He shook off his weariness and got back to work. “Oh diyo,” he said, “but you know how it goes. An evening has its ebbs and flows and sometimes there’s a need for quiet and sometimes there’s a need to shout. You know.” He stilled his fingers, let them build small pools of warmth on the young man’s arm.

“That is true.” The Mal smiled.

“The quiet times can be good times, though they’re best when they’re shared.”

“Shared.”

“Mmmh.” Reyna lifted his hand, laid it on the silk that covered his thigh, bowed his head so the supple braids fell gleaming between him and the Mal. “You’re a visitor to Bthrroa Pili?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I haven’t seen you before. I’d remember you. You have a presence, I don’t know, I can’t describe it, but it’s there. Diyo, I’d remember you.”

The Mal fidgeted, flattered but nervous. He didn’t seem accustomed to compliments. “We’ve been on a Punish Raid. Into the Jinocaburs. It just happened that we returned to Fadogur this way.”

“Ah. I’ve heard stories. What is it like? What is it really like?” Reyna straightened, thrust his hand beneath the braids,, lifted them back behind his shoulder, settled them with a flirt of his head. “Hmm?”

The Mal sat stiffly, hands on knees, staring at the dark figures out on the floor, though Reyna had the feeling he wasn’t seeing them. After a few moments of silence he began talking, hesitantly at first as if he had trouble putting words together into coherent phrases.

Control, Reyna thought as he listened with the skill that courting strangers had given him. That’s it. He hasn’t opened himself to anyone for… years… probably. Abey’s Sting, I hate this… blood and pain and death… punishment raid, diyo oh diyo, he’s trying to justify the killing… he knows, surely he knows

… this is a blooding raid for those Cheoshim boys… him, too, I think… virgin in several senses…

As he talked, the Mal relaxed and warmed to Reyna who gentled him along, flattered him with soft exclamations and most of all listened with an intensity that shut the two of them into a small world of their own.

We were working from target to target, he said, along the border between the western flanks of the Jinocaburs and the Land. The last hit, it was on the tenth day we were over there, it was a mountain village, a cluster of stone houses built around a sheep barn. The barn was empty when we got there. It was just on sun-up, though that was hard to tell with all the mist hanging about, we’d been riding since moonset, running on rumor and the claims of our guide.

The men and older boys were gone, the women said they were out with the sheep. But they wouldn’t say where. They were lying, of course. It was a bandit pesthole, what we’d come to get. We put the headman’s wife in one of the houses and threw everything we could find that would burn in with her. Then we lit it. She was an old hag of a woman, had hands like nuts on strings. They still wouldn’t tell us where the men had gone, how we could find them. Stubborn. And stupid. We killed the weak ones and the old and the babies. They were useless. Worthless. Except as a message to the men. Strangled the guide, gutless fool, couldn’t even bring off a betrayal. The healthiest women we fetched back with us, turned them over to the Cheoshim Commander here in Bairroa Pili. Just got in last night.

He was detached, serene as he described it all-as if it had happened to someone else. Reyna murmured and urged him on, this was his profession and he was good at it, though there were times when he let the braids fall between them to hide his face as anger turned sour in his mouth.