Wild Magic

WILD MAGIC

Reyna’s lips twitched. “Let me tell you, girl, there’s been a lot of times I wished you couldn’t do that.”

She giggled. “I know. But it is handy, isn’t it?”

“Point of view, daughter, it’s all in your point of view.”

“Veils, veils. No slaves. Veils, veils. MOD DES TY. No slaves. Veils, veils. PURE I TY. No slaves. Veils, veils.” The Cheoshim youths marching along Verakay Lane howled the words as if they were curses, stamped their boot heels to the beat of their chant; they called themselves STRIKERS because they were striking sparks for the Forge Fire and what they burned was sin. They came surging at Faan the minute they saw her walking alone. What they meant to do with her, she wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to wait and find out.

She leapt into a wynd between two tenements, ran around another corner and another (the howls followed her, louder and louder), then chased Ailiki up the side of a mudbrick house. When she reached the top of the wall, she jumped, swung over the shaky splitwood fence onto the flat roof. Ignoring the startled, indignant woman tending a tiny patch of herbs, she ran across the roof, went over the fence on the far side and half-fell, half-climbed to the dry dusty ground below. She scooted around behind the house next door, turned into another wynd and ran along behind a warehouse fronting on the River. Behind her the chant of the STRIKERS died away as they nosed about trying to find her again, then moved off in the wrong direction.

She reached the end of the warehouse and walked down the wynd, stepped over the legs of a sleeping mulehead, grimaced at the avid circle of denge beetles gorging at the pool of vomit beside him, trying to suck it up before the sun drew all the moisture from it. She pulled her hand across her sweaty brow, wiped it on her skirt, sighed. Running in this heat was an idiotic idea.

She stopped when she reached the Gatt Road, stood in the wynd mouth and frowned at the trickle of traffic moving along it toward the Sokajarua. The sun throbbed in a heat-whitened sky, the River was down another five spans, and the gatts were nearly deserted; she could count three ships where five years ago there’d been thirty. She wiped at her face again; her mouth was dry, her throat sore.