Babylon Steel (16 page)

By the time his mates came shoving out I had my sword drawn. So did they.

“Whatcha do that for?” No-Nails yelled, seeing his mate face-down at the foot of the wall. “Bitch!”

“You can walk away now,” I said. “No-one’s looking.”

Tattoo glanced from the unconscious man to his mate, but No-Nails was on his high horse and had no plans to get off until it was ridden. “Walk away?” he snarled, and charged at me, waving his blade like he was trying to attract my attention.

I
hate
fighting amateurs. You never know what the hells they’re going to do. I barely managed to get his feet out from under him without running him through – he practically threw himself on my point. Stupid boy. He hit the street hard; his sword flew from his hand, he winded himself, and he got a face full of something nasty. That distracted him long enough for me to lock Tattoo’s blade with my quillons, disarm him and get him in a grapple. “Are you going to be sensible,” I said into the ear I had his elbow wrapped round, “or do I have to knock you out while I deal with your friend?”

“Sensible,” he said, with some difficulty.

“Good.” I took his blade. Decent piece, seen some use. “Stand over there.”

I picked up No-Nails’ sword. He was getting up, his face streaked with filth and plain murder in his eyes. “Back off,” I said. “I am all out of patience.”

He stepped forward anyway. Honestly, it amazes me how some of them make it to adulthood.

“Come
on,”
his friend said.

No-Nails looked from me to his friend and saw no help anywhere. “That’s my sword. You can’t steal my sword!”

“This?” I held it up. “I sure as hells wouldn’t pay you for it.” It was junk, all fancy-work and no damn balance. “I’ll leave them both with the militia, shall I? You can pick them up at the barracks.”

I saw all the reasons he didn’t like that plan pass over No-Nails’ face.

“Listen, young man,” I said. “I am not having a good day. I have been very, very nice to you, but the strain is telling on me. Keep pushing. Give me an excuse to get unpleasant.
Please.”

I guess something showed in my face. I saw him swallow, and his friend, who had all the sense in that bunch, grabbed his arm. They started to walk away with undignified haste.

Their other friend, who’d actually been faking for the last few minutes, gave a theatrical groan; they realised they’d forgotten him, edged around me, and dragged him off between them.

I looked up and realised the windows of Gallock’s were full of faces. I went back in, to a scatter of applause.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Next time,
you
can fight the morons, all right? Gallock, can I have some soap and water, please.”

It duly arrived, followed by a plateful of food so vast I wasn’t sure whether to eat it or move into it. “On the house,” Gallock said. “Next time, too.”

“Any luck, I won’t have to earn it the same way next time.” I shook my head. “Must be the moons.”

Gallock slammed pans about. “Moons, no moons, always that kind around.”

“Yeah I know. Gallock, you got any security?” That sort might always be around, but customers ready to get involved weren’t.

Gallock shook hir head and glanced down at hir swelling belly. “Sometimes, you know, I think about old days. Not want to go back, me, but some things maybe not so bad.”

“Well, you wouldn’t get hassle from those idiots, I guess.”

“Those idiots, no. Other idiots, yes. Other tribes, most. Get you anything else, Babylon?”

“Coffee, please.”

Gallock slapped bacon into a pan with one hand, reached for rolls with the other, and for coffee with a third. The fourth rested on hir stomach. “Back home, things get bad with another tribe, is always the
dinan-bathai.
”

I swallowed a grimace along with my coffee. I only knew about the
dinan-bathai
ceremony because of an evening’s drinking with Glinchen one time. That was the
last
time I was ever going to try and keep up with
hir
intake – it was amazing I remembered anything at all from that night.

The Barraklé, as well as being hermaphroditic, have another oddity. If a child is kept virgin, and fed particular foods, they don’t grow like ordinary Barraklé. They become something else. It’s a bit like bees that only turn into queens if they get fed royal jelly. With the Barraklé they have to be virgin as well. There’s a lot of rubbish talked about the significance of virginity, but like a lot of things that get twisted into myth, sometimes it has a basis in fact.

It’s a great honour to be chosen as a
dinan-bathai
; much adulation and ceremony and the best of everything until it’s time for the transformation.

If they survive (they don’t always), they turn into a warrior, of sorts. A muscular, damn near indestructible thing, sterile and almost mindless, but extremely effective at killing anything they’re told to.

They don’t live long. Usually just long enough to wipe out most of whatever village the tribe has a grudge against. Then either they die from the after-effects of their transformation, or their own tribe has to kill them before they turn on their makers.

A great honour, indeed.

TIRESANA

“W
HY US
?” J
ONAT
said, scowling, her dark brows drawn like bows. As an old woman, she’d be hawk-faced. She was sprawled on the cushions in the window like a cat in the sun, looking down at the courtyard. I could hear the swish-swish of the brushes from below. “They sweep, they wash, they cook, but not us. Fighting and fornication, that’s all we do. What’s different about us?”

Meisheté, who was watching that day, turned her head, eyes flaring with irritation in their dark surrounds, but before she could speak, her protégé, Velance, stepped in. “We’re Chosen,” she said, as though it were too obvious to mention. Velance didn’t take to the seduction so well, either; she did it, but always with a slight but noticeable air of impatience, as though there were better things to be getting on with. She was much the same with the fighting. Efficient, but no love for it.

“Chosen for what, though?” said Jonat, turning her ring on her finger. Aka-Tete had given it to her; it had her initials carved in the gold. She wore it all the time, never took it off even to sleep.

“To be High Priestesses of Babaska, idiot,” Velance said.

“So why isn’t Babaska choosing us herself? Why are the other Avatars choosing us for her?”

“You have been told. The Avatar Babaska has important matters to attend to,” Meisheté said. “More important than running about after a bunch of foolish girls.”

Unlike you, then,
I thought, but didn’t dare say. I wished Jonat wouldn’t ask such questions; they made me uncomfortable in my skin, made me think of a few questions of my own that I would rather not have been troubled with. Where
was
Babaska? Didn’t she
care
who got Chosen for her? If I were her, I wouldn’t want someone like Shakanti choosing my priestesses for me. She might not lie, but in her hands the truth was a poison blade.

“All the same, I don’t understand why we aren’t getting training in temple administration,” Jonat said. “I’ve seen the High Priestess of Babaska here, she’s always busy. There are hundreds of people in a big temple precinct like this, they all have to be told what to do, so why...”

“Every temple is different,” Meisheté said. “There is no point you being taught how to administer one temple when you will be sent to another.”

“Surely the ceremonies and rituals are the same everywhere?” Jonat said.

“If you want to find out,” Meisheté said, “you will concentrate on your studies and cease asking foolish questions. If you fail you leave in disgrace. Is that what you wish?” She had a way of speaking that could make everyone cringe and flush and feel six years old.

“Can’t we hire someone else to do all that?” I said. “Who wants to do all that boring administration anyway?”

“We all know how
you’d
rather spend your time, Ebi,” Velance said. “A priestess does have duties outside the bedroom, you know.”

“Never mind,” Jonat said, and turned back to stare out of the window again. She was looking for Aka-Tete; she always was.

Renavir, Shakanti’s Chosen one, was so quiet, and small, and thin, you hardly even knew she was there. She often sat half wrapped in the curtains, or with cushions piled over her and clutched in her arms until there was almost nothing visible but her little face with its pointed chin and too-big, pale blue eyes, with their solemn stare. She had a scarf that Shakanti had given her, a strip of silvery gossamer that reminded me of the Avatar’s hair, and she wore it wrapped around her arm. It got torn and bloody during fight training, and she would clean it as gently as if it were a hurt kitten, and mend it with tiny, obsessive stitches. She was doing it now.

“We have to be broken to be made new,” she said, without raising her eyes from her sewing. “But most of you will just get broken.”

She often said things like that – sometimes pure nonsense, sometimes not. She’d got worse recently, perhaps from spending too much time with Shakanti. We knew things weren’t right with her, but we didn’t know what to do, so we didn’t do anything. And I stopped listening then, because I’d been summoned to Hap-Canae.

He gave me a ring, too. Perhaps he had noticed Jonat’s. He found it in the treasury: he spent a fair bit of time there. He preferred it to the library, though he occasionally browsed there, among the crumbling scrolls with their browning ink. I thought him a scholar, and as I found scholarship hard myself, it only added to his glory in my eyes.

“A ring of Babaska,” he said, handing it to me. “Hush! Don’t tell the others, they’ll be jealous.”

It was a heavy, gold seal-ring, its flat, dark red stone carved with a sword and a lotus that still stood out clear and perfect, though the writing that had been engraved along the band was worn away to almost nothing by who knows how many years.

“Aren’t you pleased?” he said. “I thought you would like to have something that was connected to her, something none of the others will have.”

“Of course! It’s beautiful.”

It was actually a strange, heavy, solid thing, but once I put it on, I found it pleasing. Having something connected with Babaska was gratifying, though it seemed, somehow, underhand to get it this way. I felt there should have been ceremony attached, to receiving something of hers, rather than have it simply lying around in the treasury and passed on to me so casually.

It suggested to me that Hap-Canae was ashamed of me, or was unsure of my worth. Grateful, uncertain, desperate for approval, I put myself out even more to please him. I was terrified of losing him. And although I hardly realised it myself, I was lonely; I missed Radan and Sesh and Kyrl; I even missed the other kitchen servants. We girls couldn’t be friends – apart from the fact that we were never allowed to be alone together, we swam in rivalry like ornamental carp swim in a pond.

Hap-Canae was all I had.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
WATCHED THE
café crowd. Now the drama was over, they were providing their own: practicing songs, declaiming speeches, topping each others’ stories, having highly melodramatic fallings-out and reconciliations, sometimes both within the space of a cup of coffee. A couple of Ikinchli, a probably human sort with a great shock of black hair and a... something (greenish fur like damp moss and what appeared to be two noses, but one – or both – could have been his dick for all I knew; not everyone keeps them in the same place) were playing some game with counters and little clay figures. The black haired one was moaning about having to go in lockup – yes, he was a were. Not all weres need locking up during Twomoon, but those who do get themselves sorted or face the consequences. If you’re caught tearing out someone’s throat in Change, the militia are likely to use the silver first and pretty much ignore the asking questions part.

One lad with vast brown eyes and horn-buds caught my eye – I glanced under the table and, yes, furry legs and little hooves. I adore fauns. Always want to pick them up and cuddle them. He was talking about his latest conquest, waving his hands around.
“
Ooh, and he’s taking me to the Lodestone, darling, can you imagine?”

“We are moving up in the world,” said one of his companions: a tiny, crop-headed Fey, one of the few I’d actually seen with wings, rainbow-tinted translucent things as fragile as soap-bubbles. “Don’t forget your old friends, will you? Bring us some leftovers.”

“Oh, sweetie, if I’m going to the Lodestone there aren’t going to be any
leftovers.
”

“I don’t know where you put it all,” said the third member of the party, a chunky little redhead who reminded me of Previous, and who was looking down mournfully at his rounded belly. “Honestly, I don’t eat as much as you two, how come you never get fat?”

“It’s the dancing, honey,” the faun said. “You need a part that has you leaping all over the stage. Oh, have you seen the new dancer in the Red Smoke Revue? I didn’t even know what she does was
possible
unless you were half lamia and half shameless!”

“You’re talking about someone
else
being shameless?” The Fey said, shivering her wings with mock indignation. “Who goes for every
single
part that might mean taking his clothes off in front of an audience? Is it me? No? Why, I believe it’s you.”

The faun shrugged prettily. “I get them, don’t I?”

“I don’t,” said the redhead, but the other two were too busy sparring to notice. He might have that little belly, but he also had the hollowed look of someone who’d lost too much weight in a hurry, and I’d already clocked him stuffing a stale roll left behind by another customer into his pouch. Acting. Tough business.

But I didn’t need another doorman, and he didn’t strike me as the type who’d fancy the upstairs work. Unlike the faun, who might, but who’d be far more trouble than he was ever going to be worth. Fauns may be cute, but when it comes to the business, I know who won’t suit. I also know a city-sized ego when I see one.